Learnings, however wise Corno, L. (2020, June 24). Learnings, however wise. Acquired Wisdom Series, S. Nieto, F. Erickson & P. Winne (Eds.). Education Review, 27. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v27.2975 Learnings, However Wise Lyn Corno I wrote this chapter during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. How coincidental it is to be writing a reflective memoir at a time when it is hard to avoid reflecting. I had not thought I could tackle this project until well into the year, but sequestration at a rented house in South Carolina gave me time and so the pages multiplied in a different way. With this said, what is omitted is often the most important material for reflection - the emotional moments of childhood and the feelings that come with each turn of event. This is to be an account of things I may have learned, however “wise,” for graduate students or others who would have careers in education and psychology, so it lacks a colorful narrative. The chapter is organized as much by experience as chronology, with six key sections. Readers can find one- sentence lessons signaled by underlined material located at the start of some paragraphs within each key section. Why and How Educational Research I was an Arizona girl, born near the Grand Canyon, where my father had his first teaching job, and raised in Tempe just a short walk from Arizona State University. I was ready to leave home as soon as I finished college. As a child, my grandmother took me on bus trips to California, where beaches and flowering tree gardens lured me away from desert landscapes and endless days of sun. First grade photo, Broadmoor School, Tempe, AZ My parents appreciated my independent streak and, after helping me set up a studio apartment in Seal Beach, California, near my first job, my mother boarded a plane home and left me to it. I had a BA in English from Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 2 Arizona State University, with a minor in psychology as well as a secondary teaching certificate, but I was not yet ready for the classroom. Fortunately, I also had as my closest friend the multi-talented Katherine Baker, whose father, Robert, was then co- directing a federal laboratory for educational research and development called the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL). Katherine, who attended Stanford University, and I made a pact during our college years to live and work in the same city after graduation. Rather boldly, we asked her father if he would help us find positions as junior editors with a publisher in Boston where he happened to have connections. Editing seemed a good compromise between business for Katherine and teaching for me. Katherine’s marriage upon graduating upended these plans, but she told her father at her wedding that he was “still responsible for Lyn.” A social network is everything. I was afraid to move as far away as Boston by myself and anyway, I remained drawn to California. In the summer of 1972, Bob Baker arranged for me to interview with his co-director, Dick Schutz, at SWRL’s offices in Los Alamitos. I began working there that fall as a research assistant under the direction of Edys Quellmalz, whose team was developing the upper levels of the SWRL reading program. We were targeting critical reading and literary criticism skills in grades 4-6 with an array of materials – a fully packaged instructional system. My English major was a good fit. I wrote instructional content for this program, helped design assessments, piloted materials, and observed classrooms during program implementation and evaluation. Edys was a wonderful supervisor and mentor; she taught me more than I could have imagined needing to know. Probably because she was not terribly older than I at the time, and we both liked wine and wordplay, we became friends. She introduced me to faculty she knew in the educational research community at the University of California, Los Angeles, including Eva Baker and Merle Wittrock, who sponsored her doctoral work. I became good at behaving confidently around people of intellectual stature, even if I did not really feel such confidence myself. Edys encouraged me when I showed interest in an advanced degree, and wrote letters of recommendation when I applied to combined MA/PhD programs throughout the state. In 1973, after being admitted to a few doctoral programs in educational psychology in California, I had a fortuitous interview with Dick Snow in the Stanford School of Education. My salary at SWRL was commensurate with teaching salaries back then, but it was paid out over 12 months instead of 9. I was, to say the least, on a tight budget for graduate school and looking for financial assistance. Snow told me that unlike other programs to which I had been admitted, Psychological Studies at Stanford could offer a half-time research assistantship at the Stanford Center for Research and Development in Teaching (SCRDT; now the Center for Educational Research at Stanford, or CERAS). That appointment covered quarterly tuition along with a small stipend, enough to live on in a shared apartment off campus for the duration of my graduate work. Little did I know I had pulled the brass ring. In the fall of 1974, I packed a U-Haul trailer and drove it behind my car to Palo Alto, where I moved in temporarily with Katherine Baker and her husband until I found an apartment. I began classes that term after being placed with Nate Gage as my academic advisor, and Nate brought me into his program as one of his research assistants. Nate knew Bob Baker and shared that Bob’s letter of recommendation from SWRL had influenced his offer. Stanford School of Education – Psychological Studies Joining a research team can jumpstart a publication cycle. The years in graduate school at Stanford flew by. Nate Gage was a gifted scholar who excelled as a model of Learnings, however wise 3 academic discipline and intellectual life. He was also a lovely human being, and he and his wife Maggie cared for his doctoral students as if we were family. The days and nights were packed - between the two a.m. vigils at the computer center where we awaited printouts sent from terminals in the SCRDT building, to the myriad meetings with Gage’s research team (which included at that time Ron Marx, Penelope Peterson, Dale Schunk, and Phil Winne, among others), to the conferences we began attending as a way to disseminate results of our research. The Gage program team forged relationships, many lasting to this day; it was Phil Winne who invited me to write this chapter. At the Fountain at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium circa 1975 By 1978 I was named Assistant Center Director for CERAS, working under then- director Bob Calfee to help manage and administer our contract research projects. I was also completing my dissertation, using data from Gage’s program under the supervision of Dick Snow. The Program on Teacher Effectiveness, funded by the National Institute of Education, allowed me to piggyback my own questions onto its larger project. A great value in this opportunity was the possibility for multiple publications, addressing different research questions, in different journals. For the dissertation, I worked with Snow to design a complex aptitude- treatment interaction (ATI) experiment testing a six-week course of instruction that parents completed at home with their third graders as a substitute for reading homework. I wrote the instruction using a model I had learned at SWRL, and chose the focus based on coursework I was taking at the time on learning from teaching. Snow pushed for testing in an ATI study to allow estimation of different effects for students with different aptitude profiles. The instruction, delivered as lessons we called “tricks for doing well in school,” was designed to promote students’ adaptive learning by illustrating for them (a) how teachers organize material for learning (by using memory support strategies such as stating learning goals, marking important points, summarizing, and reviewing), and (b) how students can help themselves to succeed in school by participating actively (by answering when called on, volunteering, and sharing their ideas). Each of these targeted “tricks” was shown by earlier research to be productive for academic learning (we dubbed the resulting program the Learning Skills Program or LSP). Students were taught one memory or participation skill per lesson, by reading text and responding to embedded questions with a parent or guardian at home. The LSP’s effects were assessed in a randomized experiment in 33 classrooms with over 400 third grade students as part of Gage’s teaching effectiveness program. Results showed significantly more knowledge of the learning skills for students who completed the most lessons (compared to controls), which then resulted in significantly increased standardized reading comprehension and vocabulary scores. Using first generation hierarchical multivariate regression modeling analyses, we adjusted for student aptitude and nested Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 4 context effects as well as variations in teacher behavior. I recall expressing concern about my fledgling capabilities with these new advanced statistics. Always encouraging, Snow told me not to worry – “You are better than you think.” Results showed stronger positive influences for classes with students of lower average ability. I took from this effort the implication that it seemed important to demystify classroom learning skills and strategies for students who might not pick them up vicariously. I thought, “There has to be a screenplay for classroom learning that everyone can read.” In the end I wrote and published five papers using data from this study and others from the Gage program, some of which were single-authored. The more recent writing I have done on adaptive teaching really grew from this work; see, for a more recent example, https://bold.expert/envisioning-an-ideal- classroom-for-addressing-cultural- heterogeneity/. There are advantages to being on a search committee as a student. At around this same time, in 1977, the School of Education Dean Arthur Coladarci asked me to serve as the student member of a new faculty search committee. That committee sought to hire an assistant professor who could teach courses usually instructed by both Dick Snow and Bob Calfee while they went on successive upcoming sabbaticals over five years. The appointment was non-tenure line, and in the department of Psychological Studies from which I was about to graduate, so I had recently taken these courses and felt prepared to contribute productively to the search. During the search I had a chance to attend all committee meetings and to observe the presentations of short-listed candidates. Experiencing this process as a participant was invaluable for my own upcoming job search, but it also proved advantageous in a way I never expected. Following the final candidate’s presentation, the committee decided that it was not yet ready to make an appointment, and asked if I would like to apply for the position myself. Once I realized this was a carpe diem moment, I was able to prepare a presentation based on my dissertation data, and delivered it to the search committee. The appointment began the following fall, and I held that position for the five years it required while looking for a tenure-line position elsewhere. A Beginning Scholar “Create a line of empirical investigation for yourself.” That is what Dick Snow told me when I became a junior faculty member at Stanford. He also said, “Don’t write a book too soon.” So, during that period as Assistant Professor at Stanford, from 1978- 1983, I wrote three research grants and began a program of investigation on what we then called self-regulated learning. (I never did write a book on my own, but never say never; the point is, perhaps I overthought that second piece of advice.) The genesis of the term self-regulated learning for this program was an outgrowth of reading and coursework I had as a student from faculty such as Albert Bandura and Bob Calfee, among others. Bandura was a professor in the Stanford Psychology Department, just beginning to articulate the cognitive aspects of social learning theory. Bob Calfee, on the faculty in the School of Education, was writing about attention control processes in young children, and how they explained success and failure in reading. He introduced me to Bernie Weiner’s work on attribution theory. Walter Mischel was also at Stanford in psychology, and his marshmallow experiments had a lot to say about self-control strategies. In a course on There has to be a screenplay for classroom learning that everyone can read. https://bold.expert/envisioning-an-ideal-classroom-for-addressing-cultural-heterogeneity/ https://bold.expert/envisioning-an-ideal-classroom-for-addressing-cultural-heterogeneity/ https://bold.expert/envisioning-an-ideal-classroom-for-addressing-cultural-heterogeneity/ Learnings, however wise 5 child development, I found John Flavell’s writing on metacognition. Dick Snow had me reading theory and research on motivation being conducted by I/O (industrial/organizational) psychologists in training settings, given his early roots in I/O. At one conference, I met I/O psychologist, Ruth Kanfer, and learned about her work with military populations. She and Phil Ackerman were adapting a model of self-regulation. It was developed by Ruth’s father, Frank Kanfer, with his colleague Paul Karoly for clinical treatment of depression and other psychological disorders. Gavriel (Gabi) Salomon was at Stanford on leave from the University of Haifa; he and I discussed his ideas on interactions between media, cognition, and learning. The personal computer was just beginning to be available; Gabi introduced me to writing by Seymour Papert on learning as tinkering. I read the work of Donald Meichenbaum on cognitive- behavioral interventions and self- monitoring, and Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on human cognitive biases. Herb Simon had just received a Nobel Prize for his theory of decision making in organizations, and satisficing became another way for me to think about students’ work habits. In addition to these various learnings I met Mary Rohrkemper (now McCaslin) at a small conference on teaching we hosted at Stanford in the early eighties. Mary was on the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park at that time, developing ideas at the intersection of education and clinical psychology with an eye for nuance in teacher-student relationships and how to capture affect, such as shame, methodologically. One of her goals was to bring a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective into the clinical-educational mix. Mary was writing about students’ inner speech, which I saw as closely akin to what Mischel observed in young children trying to delay gratification. It seemed to me that no one was integrating these different bodies of literature and yet there was a cognitive revolution going on that cut across it all, reshaping older theories of motivation in information processing terms. What began as work conversations prompting good ideas spawned an enduring friendship. Mary McCaslin is one of a few professional women I share my life with now, as I have for many years, and at every important turn. This was an exciting atmosphere for a young scholar just starting out and thinking about what to study. Another influence was a study conducted with Nick Stayrook and Phil Winne from the program on teacher effectiveness; we published this research in the Journal of Teacher Education in 1978. Our data showed that student learning only benefited from certain hypothetically important teaching moves if students understood and thought about what their teacher was asking of them. So, for example, teacher “wait-time” mattered if students actually used the wait-time to process the material being discussed in a way that made it meaningful. This was a “mediating process” model. It seemed reasonable to hypothesize that students needed to pay attention, to probe and elaborate on material given from both the teacher and the learning tasks – as Snow often said, “to fill the gaps in incomplete instruction.” Successful students were actively self- regulating their thoughts and behavior, and transforming material to retain it. Strikingly, struggling students often seemed quite motivated to do better; they would say they cared and that they tried, but their ways of processing information were halting and disorganized and they did not ask the kinds of questions their teachers would want them It seemed to me that no one was integrating these different bodies of literature and yet there was a cognitive revolution going on that cut across it all, reshaping older theories of motivation in information processing terms. Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 6 to ask. To return to the screenplay metaphor used previously, it seemed likely that low achievers needed to see scenarios for successful learning in school and then to experience them. I wrote a small research grant in the spring of 1982 with a title reversing the vernacular phrase from George Herbert, “Where there’s a way there’s a will: Self-regulating the low achieving student.” With that grant, funded by the California State Department of Education, a small team used a guided modeling approach to teach self-regulation skills to low achieving high school students in the Oakland Public Schools. At about this same time, Ellen Mandinach was a student a few years behind me at Stanford. She was developing a dissertation around one of the first cognitively challenging video games, called WUMPUS, requiring strategic planning knowledge and problem-solving competence. Lee Cronbach was supervising Ellen’s dissertation, and I was a member of her dissertation committee. Ellen created an elegant ATI study to look at the responses of students who played the game under different levels of training and game formats. She analyzed data by aptitude and gender in relation to game performance outcomes, and traced the players’ thoughts about their efforts in interviews and questionnaires. We included in her study some hypotheses I had worked up about different levels of self-regulation in the gaming environment. We studied four approaches to the game: Was the player being a relatively passive (recipient) learner, plodding through the game without self-correcting and not attending to the training; or was the player an active (self-regulated) learner, taking in the training but then extending it to play the game actively on their own? Alternatively, was the player somewhere in between – either garnering all the help possible from training while showing little interest in pushing further (a resource manager), or avoiding attention to the external cues of training in preference for a deep dive into the game (a task-focused learner)? We used game logs and moves to categorize students according to these four “levels” of self-regulation in learning and correlated them with students’ interest in the game, their performance attributions, outcomes, gender, and cognitive ability scores. Ellen had a solid battery of aptitude and outcome assessments. Gamers with higher levels of self-regulation – those displaying both selective attention to the rules and training as well as making efforts to play actively and recover from errors - were generally more productive players, displaying both foresight and follow- through. The loop was reinforcing; earning points improved their game. For us back then this was all heady stuff; we thought we were onto something. If our generation could help students to help themselves learn, we thought that would be a contribution with real impact. As a capstone for our efforts, we drew on a variety of sources and wrote up some of Ellen’s results for an integrative review on cognitive engagement in classrooms, producing a theoretical paper on how classroom instruction might develop self- regulated learners through strategy-based participant modeling. We submitted the paper to the journal, Educational Psychologist, which published it in 1983. That article remains one of the most cited of my career, and it is high on Ellen’s list as well (see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user= zNs_CTwAAAAJ&hl=en). Phil Winne (who by then was at Simon Fraser University in Canada) was writing about self-regulated learning from a strictly cognitive perspective at precisely the same If our generation could help students to help themselves learn, we thought that would be a contribution with real impact. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zNs_CTwAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zNs_CTwAAAAJ&hl=en Learnings, however wise 7 time; ultimately, Phil focused on self- regulation in studying. Then, when Bandura’s early work on self-efficacy developed by extension into a broader theory of self-regulation and social cognition, a wave of empirical research on self-regulation in and of learning followed that continues today. One reflection of this is the popular special interest group in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) on Studying and Self-Regulated Learning (see https://ssrlsig.org/awards- opportunities-digests-media/ssrl-times- magazine/ for more detail). One part of the story that deserves attention in its own right, but must wait for another time, has to do with the importance of a partnership forged between a professor and a student on work they both value deeply, because that can create a relationship that endures across decades, as it has for Ellen and me. Then There was Teachers College and a Family In the summer of 1981 I got a phone call at home on a Saturday from Larry Cremin, the President of Teachers College, Columbia University (TC). Cremin was spending a year at the Center for Advanced Research at Stanford writing a new book. After clarifying awkwardly that it was indeed Larry Cremin on the phone and not my colleague Denis Philips who liked pranks, I heard Cremin say that TC had opened a tenure- line faculty position at the associate level, looking to replace retiring professor Arno Bellack. Cremin said he had asked Nate Gage to recommend anyone who might be a good fit for this position and Nate suggested speaking with me. So, I flew to New York City to interview at TC as well as for another open position at the Graduate School of the City University of New York (CUNY). A good workplace provides variety. At each university, I did the requisite job presentation on self-regulated learning, meeting Barry Zimmerman in the CUNY interviews. Zimmerman was an early proponent of social cognitive theory, and we began a dialog that lasted for many years after. Apart from this shared interest with Zimmerman at CUNY, the TC position seemed to offer more variety for me. By the fall of 1982, I was repainting walls in a rented apartment on the Upper West side of Manhattan, just a convenient bus ride up Amsterdam Avenue to the historic halls of Teachers College, where oil portraits of former TC presidents hung in gilded frames, and faculty were served coffee and croissants from a silver tea service before their monthly meetings. This was in stark contrast to my experience at Stanford, where your life was in your hands when dodging bicycles between buildings and some male colleagues attended faculty meetings in knee-length shorts. TC offered me a dual appointment across two academic departments, then named Curriculum and Teaching (C&T) and Educational Psychology (EP), where I could gain colleagues of both stripes, advising masters and doctoral students studying for both the EdD and the PhD (TC offers only graduate education). In addition, because my own degree from Stanford was a PhD with a formal cognate in psychology, that qualified me to advise students “across the street” (which meant students in Columbia University’s Department of Psychology). The C&T department at TC included faculty such as Harry Passow and Ann Lieberman, Teachers College, Columbia University https://ssrlsig.org/awards-opportunities-digests-media/ssrl-times-magazine/ https://ssrlsig.org/awards-opportunities-digests-media/ssrl-times-magazine/ https://ssrlsig.org/awards-opportunities-digests-media/ssrl-times-magazine/ Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 8 as well as another new professor named Karen Zumwalt who shared my interest in research on teaching. The EP department included Joanna Williams, Deanna Kuhn, John Black, and Ernst Rothkopf – all of whom I got to know and work with over the years. I was on the dissertation examination committee for Dan Schwartz (now Dean of the School of Education at Stanford), who was a doctoral student of John Black’s. In Columbia University’s psychology department, I met faculty such as Carol Dweck and Walter Mischel, and sat on dissertation examination committees for some of the psychology PhD students. I do not list these people to drop names, but rather to illustrate that options can come from connecting with a range of faculty with different backgrounds and research programs at a given institution. The other opportunity that TC allowed was for me was a chance to hone an entirely different set of skills. Although I was fulltime faculty at TC, I spent my first few summers working as a consultant back in California. Prior to leaving Stanford, I secured an arrangement to work in this capacity with a computer company called Amdahl located in what later came to be called Silicon Valley. Amdahl had a sizable group of systems engineers who were training new employees as well as clients on the software platforms that ran their mainframe machines. A friend in the training group said they needed help designing courses with embedded assessments. After meeting Dave Radack, the head of the education group at Amdahl, I had a consulting contract. Instead of summer teaching in New York, I stayed in an Amdahl-rented apartment and worked fulltime at their offices to help the engineers with products and write related white papers (one was co- authored with Ed Haertel; we conducted a study to establish predictive validity for a fluid ability test the education group wanted to use as a screening device for new employees). This summer consulting literally allowed me to remain on the faculty at TC during those first few years, since my take home salary was two thirds of the cost of rent for my apartment in Manhattan! It is possible to marry, raise children, and have success as a professor. I just would not say that doing so means “having it all.” In the first summer working for Amdahl, a college friend named Cristina Morgan had a dinner party at her home and introduced me to the wonderful man from South Carolina who was to become my husband. Bill Herbert had just joined Cristina’s company in New York, but they sent him to their home office in San Francisco to learn the “corporate culture.” Over drinks at lunch one day, Cristina invited Bill to dinner and she told me, “If you’re smart you’ll show up.” After that dinner at Cristina’s, Bill and I began seeing one another right away; we were engaged to marry by December of that same year. I planned the wedding the next summer from Amdahl and we married in the Stanford Church in August of 1984. Following the wedding and our move together back to New York City, I engaged at TC fully, returning to California only occasionally. Recently I looked back at my wedding photos and marveled at seeing so many Stanford colleagues I now touch base with only at AERA meetings or on social media. At TC I became responsible for many masters and doctoral students and participated in several research projects. The normal teaching load was three courses each semester and one in summer. I spoke annually to students in the Columbia Law School about how to teach. I wrote research articles for publication and chapters for edited volumes. I became active in professional organizations such as AERA and Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association (APA), helping to design conference programs and completing terms for different elected offices. I served on grant review panels for institutions such as the U.S. National Science Foundation and did academic program reviews at research universities. Learnings, however wise 9 During this time, Bill and I moved from Manhattan to the suburbs of Connecticut to begin a family. I received tenure at TC in 1985, and our son, William Fairfax (“Fax”), was born in 1987. Our daughter, Leigh Carter, was born in 1989. I recall attending AERA the spring before our daughter was born when a male friend from another university, Leigh Burstein, asked if we were “naming her after him.” I laughed and told him we were going to call her Carter. Fax and Carter are my abiding joys, but I was able to manage having them and hold a fulltime faculty position by the graces of some advance planning and the childcare expertise of a loving marvel named Vesta Bailey, who came to our home four days a week and helped me. I know fully how fortunate I was to have children beginning at the age of 37 and for all of us to have met Vesta at that point in our lives. I discovered that it is more fun to bring up young children if you are able to play with them and Vesta allowed me to do that. My beloved friend Liz Sullivan and her two girls who almost cohabited with our children enhanced our lives further. Fax was born at the end of an academic year so we were home together the first few months; Carter was born just prior to a year’s sabbatical. I used both time periods following the children’s births to complete articles I was looking to have published and to work on student dissertations. One publication I wrote then was about how to encourage students to take personal responsibility for schoolwork. I was invited to present a paper on this topic at that year’s AERA in a symposium on motivation. To explain one strategy that students can use to keep themselves focused on tasks, I offered as a metaphor some lyrics from Disney’s “Mary Poppins” – if you have “a song” you can “move the job along.” The session organizer subsequently arranged for a journal to publish a special issue based on this session, including all of the presented papers except for mine. I sensed her feeling I had moved too far into kiddie land, but I wrote the paper up anyway and it appeared in the Elementary School Journal in 1992. To this day I think of that as one of the more interesting papers I have published because it has some appeal for a wider audience. From 1993-1995, I chaired the Visiting Panel on Research at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), having served on that panel for six years prior. The ETS Visiting Panel for R&D was then led by the psychometric giant Sam Messick; other panel members included David Berliner, Jaqueline Jordan Irvine, Alan Lesgold, and Dick Snow. We met twice annually at the Chauncey Conference Center in Princeton to learn about ETS research programs, advising as we could but always returning renewed. From a family standpoint, it was good for me to take those trips, as then I had to leave the young ones and the dog to Bill. At that point they had to be wrenched away from my person (yes, I was overprotective, which was really just a way to hide vulnerabilities), so Bill got his wish to be primary caregiver now and then and he filled that role beautifully every time. In 1992, I was asked to be editor for the (then new) Teaching, Learning, and Human Development section of the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ). Long a believer in the value of collaboration, I asked two other TC professors to co-edit with me before saying yes. We thought ourselves a well-balanced team – myself (educational psychology), Gary Natriello (sociology of education) and Jim Borland (special education), and so we co-edited that section for its three-year term. “Once an editor, always an editor.” That is what I heard from an English professor who was ruthless with a red pen back in my college days. It is partly a power grab to do editorial work – no doubt about that, especially when one is bold enough to use a red pen. Maybe that is what appealed to me and my friend Katherine Baker back when we asked her father for help on an editing career path. Despite the appeal, when I found that university professors do a good deal of copy editing on student dissertations, Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 10 I felt conflicted about how much was too much and what was the proper editorial tone to take. I also recall telling Dick Snow that I wished technology allowed us to just “say our comments aloud and have them miraculously appear on the page.” His response was, “It will happen.” Meanwhile, those dissertations were good practice for when voice technology finally became an option. One big lesson I learned from this AERJ experience processing manuscripts as editor is that it felt a lot better to do copy edits and write rejection letters when I took time to provide the sort of feedback that I myself would appreciate. I was also promoted in 1993 to Full Professor. Although I had a lot to handle, it came with earned rewards; I was made a Fellow of APA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the American Psychological Society (APS), which were wonderful honors to receive at that point. But having it all – no – my life then was definitely overscheduled. Aspects of daily life can become interesting topics for research. One summer, probably in 1994, when we went on a beach vacation in South Carolina with four other families and 10 small children, one of the mothers lamented that she “felt like her whole life was third-grade homework.” That got me thinking about the topic of homework again. In the early 1980s at Stanford I had sponsored a dissertation focused on the feedback that teachers give students on homework. Maria Cardelle-Elawar used a rigorous experimental design to demonstrate positive effects on mathematics achievement for teacher feedback that was targeted and constructive. But looking at extant research a decade later, it seemed studies like this were uncommon. According to the review monograph by Harris Cooper written in 1989, there was little systematic research on homework as assigned by teachers in the elementary grades, despite its being an education topic about which people held strident opinions. As well, I discovered that articles on homework appeared annually in the popular press just prior to the start of each school year, typically discussing advantages and foibles, and generally revisiting many of the same old saws. One of my TC doctoral students needed a dissertation topic, so Jianzhong Xu and I began discussing how he might do a careful qualitative study of the social-emotional dynamics surrounding third grade homework. Xu (as he prefers to be called) ended up conducting stimulated recall interviews with parents and their third graders after observing and videotaping homework sessions with six families. He then wrote case studies using the video and other data sources. Results clearly illustrated that homework can be an emotional minefield for some families, often beginning in these early grades. The cases uncovered a number of ways that parents helped their children to cope and manage the homework situation; for example, clearing a workspace of distractions, doing homework at the same time each day, breaking assignments into smaller parts, building in some rewards, and so on. Some home environments afforded these opportunities readily, while in others there were challenges. Jianzhong Xu’s early case study research was published in 1998, but he went on to extend his sampling and address some of the more pressing ancillary questions. Over the years he has developed a portfolio on the topic of homework to which he still adds strong refereed articles from reputable journals with astounding regularity (see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user= VgHRjYMAAAAJ&hl=en). Xu has One big lesson I learned… as editor is that it felt a lot better to do copy edits and write rejection letters when I took time to provide the sort of feedback that I myself would appreciate. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VgHRjYMAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VgHRjYMAAAAJ&hl=en Learnings, however wise 11 exceeded the publication roster I had in my own career and I marvel at his productivity. Early in Xu’s career, he and I published a few of those papers on homework together. For a while I was approached by television producers and popular media writers seeking a research perspective on the topic. For example, in 1998, I did an interview on the “Today Show” with Matt Lauer, and shortly after helped the producers of “The Oprah Show” generate questions for an on-camera interview with Harris Cooper. I stepped back from media interviews after Time magazine came to our local elementary school at the principal’s invitation (and my request). They said they wanted a back-to-school cover story on homework with reference to real research and actual students and parents. But the writers spun the researcher’s notes to suggest that parents in our local school did homework for their children rather than assist them in productive ways. The principal suggested afterwards that I “keep a low profile” and that was enough media exposure for me. There may be another lesson here about engaging with media, but I leave that for readers to discover for themselves. Despite this, the research on homework proved an exceedingly fine fit for a working mother of two. One paper solicited by Tom Good for a special issue he edited for the Educational Researcher in 1996 allowed me to explain why homework was a “complicated thing.” Another paper written awhile later in 2004 with Xu entitled, “Homework as the Job of Childhood,” is now my most accessed article on www.academia.edu. Professionally Engaged on Land Southwest of Boston In 1995, my husband took a job at a new firm and we moved to a rural town southwest of Boston with a small lake called Farm Pond, some farms, and in the time before climate change, lots of snow. Sherborn also has one of the best public school systems in the state of Massachusetts. We had two small children and did not want to split our family by living and working in separate locales. Bill grew up on a farm, so hence the interest in a semi- rural community. Home in Sherborn, MA in April, 2013 In order to retain my appointment as Full Professor at TC, I had to be willing to commute to New York City weekly for teaching and there was no flexibility; nor was there online education at that time. As I was deciding if this was something I could do, I took unpaid leave for two years and then returned to TC in the summer of 1997 with my kids to teach summer school. The children attended the Hollingsworth Science Camp at TC while I taught a course and reengaged with students. We stayed on campus in an apartment kindly loaned to us by Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. The course I taught that summer was called “Principles of Teaching,” introducing students to theories of teaching that lead to practical strategies and applications. I co-taught the course with my former doctoral student, Judi Randi, who produced a beautifully written dissertation in l996 on teachers as innovators. In 1997, Judi and I co-authored a chapter based on her dissertation research http://www.academia.edu/ Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 12 for an international handbook edited by Biddle, Good, and Goodson with multiple language translations, so we had stayed in touch. That summer team teaching led to discussing how Judi’s work with practicing teachers could relate to theory and research on adaptive teaching covered in our syllabus. This began another lifelong work partnership – as co-authors on publications focused on adaptive teaching, on shared research projects, and in long advisory (reciprocal) emails. Judi Randi has had a full and interesting faculty career – from her early experience as a secondary Latin teacher to helping engineering students learn to write in a college-wide initiative on technical communication at the University of New Haven, Connecticut. In her most recent appointment there, Judi directs a program that promotes faculty mentoring of undergraduate research (for some papers co- authored with Randi on adaptive teaching, see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user= bbk3OxQAAAAJ&hl=en). Ultimately, I made the decision not to return to TC fulltime and resigned my professorship in 1997. People did express shock – I cannot say the number of times I answered the question with, “Yes, I ‘gave up’ a tenured full professorship at an Ivy League University.” There is no doubt I was privileged by having a husband with a secure job, but if I was not going to regret my choice, I knew well enough that I would need to find other ways to remain active professionally. I felt prepared initially to take on some writing projects, as well as more active roles in professional organizations. Try to weave a fresh perspective into your work. Preparation for the writing projects began early in the 1990s, while still at TC, when I began reading research clips that Dick Snow sent me from overseas. He was a special liaison to the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) for a time in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany. He reviewed and advised ONR on funded projects and when he came across research he thought relevant to the interests of former students or colleagues, he sent the papers along. Snow introduced me to theory developed by Heinz Heckhausen and Julius Kuhl on the topic of volition. I found this work fascinating. These German psychologists were doing for the ancient construct of volition what Bandura, Weiner, and others had done for motivation; namely, recasting volition in information processing terms. The world was saying goodbye to vague conceptions of volition as “strength of will” or “willpower” to understand instead what it meant to be purposively striving, both cognitively and behaviorally. Could this new volition theory enhance empirical studies of self-regulated learning? I started writing about this with a 1989 chapter called “Self-Regulated Learning: A Volitional Analysis” for Zimmerman and Schunk’s first volume on self-regulated learning. In 1993, the Educational Researcher published another paper, “The Best-Laid Plans: Modern Conceptions of Volition and Educational Research.” I sponsored a few student dissertations on the topic, so we had some data to report; for example, LaVergne Trawick conducted a study to expand the volitional resources of urban community college students. In addition, I invited Julius Kuhl to visit TC when he came to New York one year. It seemed important for me to better understand Kuhl’s densely theoretical psychology. Since that time, I have found other work by social psychologists such as Peter Gollwitzer and The world was saying goodbye to vague conceptions of volition as “strength of will” or “willpower” to understand instead what it meant to be purposively striving, both cognitively and behaviorally. Could this new volition theory enhance studies of self-regulated learning? https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bbk3OxQAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bbk3OxQAAAAJ&hl=en Learnings, however wise 13 Gabrielle Oettingen useful for articles and book chapters and when I had the time to write, I was able to take these ideas further. In 2000, I edited a two-part special issue on the topic of volition for the International Journal of Educational Research. By then I was away from TC and writing from home. But this scholarly writing is, in part, what kept me busy and productive for almost a decade between 1995 and 2004. I continue to think this work important: It weaves together concepts that are old and new; it bridges scientific psychology across the continents of Europe and North America; it explains connections and distinguishes theories of motivation and volition; it has practical applications for teaching and learning. By rejecting the idea of willpower, it is easy to see that “action control processes” take a person from wishes, wants and intentions to buckle down and persist on tasks. Action control helps a person to implement plans, assuming the presence of motivators such as goals and intentions. The role of volition is to aid in prioritizing some goals relative to others, and to focus concentration. Focus helps a person manage in the face of external and internal distractions (both ambient and self- generated “noise” or demands). Volitional control is a kind of purposive diligence that applies to more than a few daily problems or tasks that present obstacles or impediments, including doing homework; but also managing a household, keeping a budget, or handling a health crisis, to give just a few examples. Since the early 1990s, I have tried to articulate how process theories of volition play a role in academic contexts, not intending to replace motivation theory, but to augment it. Work by Roy Baumeister takes up similar ideas in a different domain, using what he calls a strength model of self- control to understand the functions of cognitive-behavioral interventions in clinical psychology. Other psychologists, such as Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman formulated indicators of what they call “grit,” an idea closely akin to the personality factor of conscientiousness. The lines of research on these related constructs examine their relationships to performance in education and other endeavors. In educational research we define the concept of volition as a quality of human functioning that takes a student from commitment to follow-through in academic tasks. The observable hallmarks are avoiding procrastination, implementing intentions, and persisting in the face of difficulty. To the extent that volition helps a student to accomplish school tasks, it seems important for success in academic learning and beyond. This modern understanding of volition connects to self-regulated learning because key processes in both cases include managing resources, and protecting and maintaining attention to goals. I have been asked, if self-regulation is the bridge between theories of motivation and volition, then why do we need to articulate those theories? Why not pursue good questions about self-regulation instead? The answer, for me, is that if understanding the value of new concepts means losing the long history that spawned them, then one day a new generation will surely go backward. There is an elegant symmetry to the concepts of motivation and volition – so alike and yet so different – that has a place in both theory and practice. I have found in my own teaching that students appreciate this symmetrical history almost as art. Volitional control is evidenced in ways that students manage tasks strategically, cope with obstacles and distractions, focus attention, and channel emotions to accomplish their academic goals. In learning situations, these processes can be measured …if understanding the value of new concepts means losing the long history that spawned them, then one day a new generation will surely go backward. Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 14 reliably in children and adults by observations of work being completed, structured interviews, targeted self-reports, work samples, and performance tasks such as studying. Over time purposeful regulation of cognition and emotion transforms into implicit, automatic work habits that reduce the need for constant oversight. Adaptive deployment of volition as cultivated work habits comes easier for some students than for others. Predisposing orientations that have been identified as helpful in learning contexts include general cognitive/intellectual ability (because attunement and task focus is required by ability tests), action and goal orientation, self-discipline, and a belief that personal efforts will lead to success, particularly following failure. Students with orientations different from these can still develop productive academic work habits through experiences that exercise volitional control. Verifiably strong work habits underlie a work ethic that then affects continued motivation, even in tasks beyond school. Other motivation processes, such as expectations for success and its validation, or a goal to get the most from the material as well as a good grade, can benefit from goal protection and persistence. These motivators, in turn, reinforce volition. Flexible and moderate volitional control - helping students to be responsible workers who know how to get things done, but not overly compulsive about their schoolwork – is a reasonable target for educators. To promote development of student work habits, teachers can provide opportunities for practicing effective learning and resource management routines in regular classroom tasks with constructive feedback. Teachers and parents can enlist competent peers as models for productive work habits and focused inner speech. They can design collaborative problem-solving activities requiring strategy knowledge in students and active attention to goals. To develop academic work habits, learners need both an intellectual understanding of the subprocesses of volition and guided practice in using new strategies and techniques. This often takes an extended period of time. In addition to academic articles and book chapters I have published reviewing these claims (see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user= 1A-Me1EAAAAJ&hl=en), practical aspects of these ideas are discussed in a special issue of the Teachers College Record that I guest edited back in 2004 on work habits – again, while working from home. Working from home takes volition too, as we are all learning during this COVID-19 crisis. Some of the most meaningful projects cannot be anticipated. After our family moved to Massachusetts, sometime in 1996, I learned that Dick Snow was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. As the community around him absorbed this news, we each experienced our own form of sadness. It is not possible to convey fully the emotions surrounding the significance of all I learned from Dick Snow, or to explain the level of effort that this man put into my professional growth, but a search counting his name in this document ought to be telling. I wanted to do whatever I could to help, so I was thankful when Dick asked me to pinch hit for him at a small conference in England called the Spearman Seminar during the summer of 1997. An interesting volume on the relationship between intelligence and personality (edited by Janet Collis and Sam Messick) grew out of this meeting on the beautiful coast in Plymouth. Dick edited the copy of this chapter for me. My role model and mentor thus proved also Flexible and moderate volitional control – helping students to be responsible workers who know how to get things done, but not overly compulsive about their schoolwork – is a reasonable target for educators. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1A-Me1EAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1A-Me1EAAAAJ&hl=en Learnings, however wise 15 to be a model of volition – demonstrating how to muster resources to cope with cancer while staying focused on professional goals. A small group of Snow’s former students and close colleagues banded together to assist him on a book he hoped to finish – a magnum opus on the topic of aptitude that he had been writing for some time. At a visit with Dick one day, Lee Cronbach agreed to see the book through to publication. Cronbach then enlisted, in addition to me, Haggai Kupermintz, David Lohman, Ellen Mandinach, Ann Porteus, and Joan Talbert (who was also Dick’s wife), to guide this project to completion. By the time we began the Snow volume, most of the collaboration could be done through email. With Cronbach as incisive lead editor, we made a productive team. Cronbach could crack the whip but since we all worked independently, it was a bet on self-regulation for the follow-through. When Dick passed away in late 1997, Cronbach took hold and shaped the first three chapters of the book. In one of two meetings on campus at Stanford, the project team agreed on a title of Remaking the Concept of Aptitude: Extending the Legacy of Richard E. Snow. Several of us each took on different remaining chapters as lead authors, and we all agreed to read and comment on one another’s writing – again, with Cronbach there to gather it up. The Snow legacy book as we came to call it was an arduous undertaking, spanning years, with literally hundreds of multipage emails written among us, not to mention the 35-40-page chapters themselves. Cronbach gave his all to this effort and after we tried in vain to gain publisher acceptance for “The Stanford Aptitude Seminar” as author, the book was published in 2002 with an alphabetical author ordering that by happenstance put Corno first. In the end Cronbach was his own biggest critic and never felt that what we accomplished reached the level of what Snow would or could have done on his own. There was, Cronbach felt, too much guesswork about what Snow meant or intended or might have said if he were with us and heard our discussions. Some members of the team felt similarly, but I had high hopes that this work would be widely embraced as a new model for how to think about a critically important concept in more productive ways – practically, professionally, and from the perspective of sound psychological science. Published by Taylor&Francis/Routledge in 2002 Two close colleagues, Jim Pellegrino and Mary McCaslin, taught from the book around the time it appeared. They had doctoral students in educational psychology read it in their courses on human abilities and spent time discussing it in class. Both reported back that the key threads were difficult to discern from the density of the text and that some chapters might best stand alone. Even students at this level, precisely the book’s intended audience, did not take it for the “word” we hoped it might be. As this project ended I saved all the emails and notes – hoping one day to go back to them and revisit the experience. Regardless of the appraisals, I learned as much or more from this project than any in my career about how to write and work Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 16 productively on a team. Cronbach called me “agreeable” (a personality characteristic we wrote only briefly about in the book), so perhaps that is why I found the effort so valuable while others of us felt less positive about their own experience. In hindsight, I think I was agreeable then in part because I was not holding a fulltime faculty job during my involvement with the project, and because I chose to view the experience of working closely with Lee Cronbach in the twilight of his own career as an honor. Also, the project forced me to strengthen my own writing, seeing weaknesses that LJC (his comments appeared in scary margin notes as LJC) so aptly pointed out. The project’s ending rewrote a few of our best-laid plans, but I found another part of me buried in the new ones. I did not revisit those saved notes until I was asked to speak at an AERA memorial session for Lee J. Cronbach, following his own passing not many years later. I was one of perhaps four speakers at that session, a surprise as much to me as to anyone else. Prior to that time almost no one would have expected Corno to be commemorating Cronbach; every other speaker was his close colleague or former student. Here was yet another gift from this legacy project. The notes that I was able to share quite well reflected LJC, I believe – the scholar, mentor, and friend to Dick Snow. Professional organizations afford many opportunities. In 1997, I was invited by Harry Passow to stand for election to the Board of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE). Harry had chaired this board for some years, and they met twice annually in Chicago to arrange editors and authors for its Yearbook series. I ended up serving on that board and then chairing it as well in 2002, remaining ex-officio until 2006. I met important colleagues such as Susan Fuhrman and Mark Smylie, who became Editor for the Society after the passing of its longtime Editor, Ken Rehage. Susan of course later served over a decade as President of Teachers College. I edited the NSSE Yearbook’s Centennial Volume, published in 2001. Our board successfully moved the NSSE offices from the University of Chicago campus, to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) when Mark Smylie took over as Editor for the Society. A doctoral student at UIC, Debra Miretzky, helped to make this happen. Deb is a phenomenal writer and editor with a thoughtful dedication to everything she does; Mark had enlisted her to be his assistant. Her sense of history and its importance helped these scholarly yearbooks to remain with us beyond the expiration of the society itself. Although our board kept the NSSE Yearbooks in print awhile longer, in my view Deb Miretzky deserves more credit for this than anyone else. In 2000, I was invited to be editor of the Educational Psychologist (EP). Again, it seemed most productive for me to do this work collaboratively, so I asked Phil Winne if he would be my co-editor. At this point all the editing could be done online, which is how Phil and I edited EP for the next five years. During that time, I also became more active in the committees and leadership of Division 15, the arm of APA that publishes EP. In 2005, I was elected president of Division 15; I then served a three-year term as incoming president, president, and past president, until 2008. The experience as president of a professional organization gave me a chance to lead a group of dedicated research psychologists focused on education. We set some new standards and policies for the organization, which was then transitioning from fax to email correspondence and needed a repository for its institutional memory. We created a database of members to move toward a Division website. We updated documents showing committees, The project’s ending rewrote a few of our best-laid plans, but I found another part of me buried in the new ones. Learnings, however wise 17 the cycles of their members, and their leadership. We initiated an online newsletter to notify members about Division events, opportunities, and activities. We planned a small conference, held elections, appointed new journal editors, drew up publishing contracts, and met at AERA and again at APA. One year, the Executive Committee even came to my home outside Boston for a two-day intensive retreat. They spread out and filled the bedrooms at night while we ate homemade soups and met for hours during the day. We took walks in the woods and drank coffee and then wine… It was one way to pull the group together without spending Division money on travel, but it was also a springboard for launching new ideas. APA’s Division 15 Executive Board Members in Sherborn, MA, 2007, clockwise from left – Nancy Perry, Barbara Hofer, Christopher Wolters (standing), Eric Anderman, Jenifer Husman, Ellen Mandinach, Michael Martinez, John-Marshall Reeve, Lyn Corno I recall the day I gave my outgoing presidential address at the Division’s APA meeting in San Francisco. It was entitled “On Teaching Adaptively,” and in it I tried to link together many of the research foci I have discussed in this chapter – demystifying classroom teaching so all students can learn, the importance of self- regulation in learning, what it means to have volitional control, and how teachers can build student aptitude for learning in and beyond classrooms. Ellen Mandinach was assisting with PowerPoint slides on the dais. I was a few slides into the talk when I looked up and saw an elderly Nate Gage moving down the center aisle with a cane and the assistance of a health care aide. They took seats near the front while I choked back tears, amazed that it could matter enough to a man who did so much for me when I was a student to come up to the city from Stanford and hear my address. Nate told me afterwards that he learned a lot in listening and that I had made him proud. It is hard to put value on a moment like that but his caring validation was definitely a high point in my career. A culminating experience from that time for me was to be named co-editor for the Third Handbook of Educational Psychology, which I took on with Eric Anderman, who followed me as Division President. Eric and I completed that volume in 2016 after many emails with an outstanding list of editorial advisors, authors, and reviewers who were willing to join the effort and contribute. This Handbook brings good revenue into the Division annually, as have the volumes preceding and following it. These handbooks are a feature of APA’s Division 15 that others hope to emulate. The writing projects and professional organization activities were important to keeping me connected and contributing after I moved from TC, but it has to be said that none of these efforts “paid the bills.” So, when the children got older and gained independence I started to look for compensated work that might stretch into the foreseeable future. I did a few consulting jobs and reviews for research panels. I had some royalties from publications as well, but nothing with steady income until around the turn of the century when a good opportunity appeared once again. Consider some endeavors a long-term investment. Sometime in the year 2000, I got a call from Gary Natriello who had been the executive editor for the scholarly journal published at Teachers College since 1995. The Teachers College Record (TCR) offers readers conceptual, historical, and Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 18 integrative articles on education and has been in publication for over 100 years, one of the first academic journals in education. TCR presents incisive scholarship across the topic range, and was edited previously by TC faculty scholars such as Jonas Soltis and Ellen Lagemann. With Gary Natriello at its helm in 2000, TCR was about to become one of the more innovative journals in education as well. Gary explained that he needed a content editor to manage the flow of submissions from internal review to editorial decision. He said he was now accepting empirical articles as well as conceptual papers, and instituting a peer review process similar to the one we had when we co-edited AERJ. He wanted a seasoned editor willing to do the work online as his intent was to build out one of the first editorial management platforms in academic publishing, and to accompany that with a novel online presence. He asked me to help him do this work on a salary, I agreed, and until June of 2019, I had not looked back. The editing became more than just editing because Gary Natriello works in multiple dimensions. TC’s president Arthur Levine had challenged Gary to make the journal profitable or close it down. Initially we contracted for TCR with a large external publisher but when, in a few years, we saw overpricing and inefficiencies, Gary found a way to publish TCR in-house, using an outside compositor/printer. With over 100 years of history tied up in this eponymous publication, Gary was determined to make the journal thrive. We began to tinker with the types and prices of subscriptions, doing what was needed to keep the library batch subscribers happy. We published 14 issues annually rather than 4, including regular and special topic issues developed by guest editors, and gave libraries a discounted price. We built out the editorial board from a small group to over 50 well known scholars across the spectrum of education. We experimented with additional co-editors, which in the long run did not work so well, so we adapted and went back to sharing the editorial work ourselves. With the assistance of Mark Smylie and Deb Miretzky at UIC, we managed to relocate the home of the NSSE Yearbooks once more – this time, to Teachers College, and we began to publish them subsequently as part of TCR. Because the Yearbooks provide content of interest to education practitioners who might not read the more research-oriented TCR, this merging of two historically important publications in education expanded our audience. In 2004, Gary became director of the Gottesman Libraries at TC. In that capacity, he founded and directed a new library unit called the EdLab, which focused on innovation, learning, and technology. EdLab staff were often TC students with expertise and interest in these areas, and many did double duty as staff for TCR. The idea was to wrap all of these things together in a thematic way around a new notion of a library for the 21st century. I joined the EdLab as well to advise on research teams and projects. From 2005 to 2019, while running the EdLab, Gary oversaw more than a dozen research grants intended to provide a new generation of knowledge services to support research on and for learning and teaching. One outcome was the addition of “The Voice” – short video interviews with authors of articles being published – to the TCR website. The Voice was a hit - authors said they enjoyed the opportunity to summarize their work in this way and we got similarly positive feedback from online readers of the journal. Another innovation under the aegis of the EdLab was development of the New Learning Times in 2012. This daily online mobile publication provided reviews of advancements in the education sector such as “apps” for teaching and learning. The largest project at the EdLab was the design and development of the Smith Learning Theater, for which a floor of the Gottesman library was fully renovated to Learnings, however wise 19 create a technologically sophisticated venue that could support an array of options for clients in and outside the College doing and studying learning, teaching, and academic publishing (see https://library.tc.columbia.edu/p/smith- learning-theater). Gary managed the buildout of this venue with painstaking attention to detail. The Smith Learning Theater was completed in 2017, and has since been the setting for many conferences and events. It is hard to overstate the scope and value of innovation like this – just seeing eyes open wide when people walk into the space and how they interact when experiencing first- hand what cutting edge technology in education can offer – truly, the first event I attended in the new Learning Theater was one of the most fascinating of my career. Spend time in that sort of environment and it is hard not to be affected by it. One could say the same for my nearly 20-year run with TCR and then the EdLab; this was a long- term investment in my own learning experience as much as it was in my career. Dare I use the cliché that all things change? I did a Google search on the EdLab, and it is now embedded within the website for the Gottesman Libraries. I looked for Lyn Corno and noticed I am listed as Former Staff Member (https://edlab.tc.columbia.edu/people/759- Lyn-Corno). Gary Natriello is no longer directing the TC libraries, or the EdLab, and TCR has had a new Executive Editor since the summer of 2019, who is Professor Michelle Knight-Manuel. I agreed to work with Michelle and our exceptionally talented managing director, Hui Soo Chae, to edit TCR through 2020, in the transition to a new platform and staff. Michelle will put her own stamp on TCR as she ushers it forward. Having spent a good portion of my career as an editor of journals and books, I would be remiss not to offer some thoughts on academic publishing that might be of use to readers of this chapter. Curiously, I have found that editing is work that flows (to use the term from Csikszentmihalyi) – for me it comes naturally, the time flies when I am editing, and afterwards not only do I feel good about how I spent the day, I am generally rewarded when the efforts are shared. If I edit a paper I am co-authoring, the other authors usually appreciate the copy work. If I am the content editor for a journal, submitters are grateful for letters offering constructive criticism regardless of the editorial decision. If I am editing a volume, communicating with multiple chapter authors, advisors, and reviewers at once, keeping up the management tasks and timeline while politely nudging is literally what makes the whole project work. Editors have some content knowledge to share. There are so many lessons one picks up in editing it is hard to know where to begin. The years of closely reading submissions followed by multiple interchanges with authors have to yield something akin to “content knowledge” for editing… So here, from my desk to yours, are some nuggets I have internalized. These are written specific to observed errors and expectations in journal article editing, but many apply to book chapters as well: • Journal editors are looking for a fit with their publication, so prospective authors would be wise to read pretty widely across that journal before submitting a paper. • Journals provide publication guidelines that they expect prospective authors to read and follow before submitting a paper. • Most journal editors are happy to share what percentage of submitted papers make it all the way to For me, now is the time to raise critical questions that might serve the next generation, by connecting back to some deep human values in a socially cohesive way. https://library.tc.columbia.edu/p/smith-learning-theater https://library.tc.columbia.edu/p/smith-learning-theater https://edlab.tc.columbia.edu/people/759-Lyn-Corno https://edlab.tc.columbia.edu/people/759-Lyn-Corno Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 20 acceptance and the average time from submission to decision. • It is okay to write a journal editor before submitting a paper to determine potential interest. • A journal editor’s best friends are the members of its editorial board and field reviewers; they are invited with care. • Editors and authors are equally appreciative of thoughtfully critical peer reviews. • Responsible peer reviewers for refereed journals return comments by the due date given. • Editors remember authors who trust them to do their job and then respond gracefully, whatever the outcome. • Authors should expect to cycle through the review process two or three times before receiving an editorial decision. • If a paper cycles through a few times and still receives a rejection, it helps to try seeing the review process as a learning experience. • A good journal editor gives prospective authors a clear explanation for why a paper is rejected, directing them elsewhere if another journal might welcome a revised version. • A good journal editor looks for opportunities to support the work of beginning scholars and those from underrepresented groups. • If a revision is requested, authors owe reviewers a thoughtful response in return for their time spent reading and commenting on a paper. • At TCR, we put together suggestions for prospective authors and reviewers (www.tcrecord.org). Look under the tabs marked “Writer’s Guide” and “For the Record” for information and tips on all aspects of academic writing – from how to write good field reviews, to more specific writing tips for authors. One article is for young authors seeking to publish that includes advice gleaned from the years that Gary and I co-edited TCR. To a Sailing Town and Calmer Days In September of 2017, Bill and I sold our home outside Boston where we raised our children and moved to a small village on the south coast of Massachusetts looking out to the Elizabeth Islands across Buzzard’s Bay. A few years prior, Bill had left his position as Director of Research for a small investment firm in Manhattan, to which he had been reverse commuting for several years. Yes, I might have returned to professing at TC when Bill began traveling back to New York, but at that point I was at retirement age anyway and several TC faculty members of my generation were already taking early retirement. So together Bill and I made the decision to work from home indefinitely – on any number of projects we so choose. At a certain point, your time will be your own. Recently, I was asked to serve as a section editor for a new, large online encyclopedia of education. Having just completed a handbook I was not ready to start another big project, so I agreed to write a topical entry instead and suggested an editorial team I knew would exceed expectations if willing. That entry entitled, “Aptitude,” brought me back almost full circle with respect to topics for investigation. I hope my analysis of the concept dispels some older, normative conceptions unfortunately linked to inequitable education and testing policies. We really just skirted these issues in the legacy book for Snow. For me, now is the time to raise critical questions that might serve the next generation, by connecting back to some deep human values in a socially cohesive way. Both Bill and I embrace an intellectual life, so the idea of endless days spent in online research and writing has appeal. We both have paper files we have longed to http://www.tcrecord.org/ Learnings, however wise 21 reopen – to mine for nuggets we might write about, to just cherish, or to toss - with fewer excuses now than before for why not. We both have held loving memorials for our parents who have passed away. We are cheering on our children, both of whom are recently engaged to marry. We know how very fortunate we are and that makes us all the more grateful for our lives and our loves and our time however spent. Bill has thrown himself into learning to sail. He hopes to spend summer Wednesdays on a boat as part of a club racing team. We have friends on the board of a nearby independent middle school, The Nativity Preparatory School, that provides tuition-free education for boys from low- income families. Bill goes there on Monday evenings to mentor a student – a three-year commitment he made that he thoroughly enjoys. He tells me when he comes home that he gets more out of these mentor nights than he thinks his student does. We joined the local natural resource trust, a nonprofit that supports open land, trails, gardens, and estuaries where Bill helps to cut brush. We are members of a research and education center for the environment just two miles from our new home. We helped our daughter, Carter, find a beach vacation community near us late last year. When she and her fiancé, Todd Rabideau, bought a house there, I became general contractor (an interesting role requiring significant foresight and follow-through – or choose your term – motivation and volition) to see to renovations and make it a home. Carter and Todd are there as I write – working from home during COVID-19 while their offices in New York City are under mandatory close. It is a good thing we moved to a locale near water because our son, Fax, ever the fisherman, comes to stay for a couple of weeks each year to see what he can catch. His fiancée, Melany Roberts, is a remarkable partner who actually (to my shocked horror) accompanies him on night fishing runs. In April of this year (2020), I was to complete a second six-year term on the ETS Visiting Panel for Research. Ida Lawrence, the current Vice President for R&D, had invited me to join her panel for another term in 2014. This year the meetings at ETS were canceled of course, and so I returned home from that South Carolina rental earlier than planned, but not without many of these pages, as well as some treasures from the beach signifying hope. It is dark in the world at this moment with the pandemic as backdrop. It seems strange to end this memoir about a professional career with such an observation. But I cannot resist including the thought, as I have been increasingly unsettled and humbled by the news of each passing day. Upon reflection, it seems evident that I have not had anything like a conventional career in educational research and psychology. In the present moment all of life seems atypical. Perhaps then it is fitting that this is a different sort of “acquired wisdom” chapter, ending with one more lesson about the need to be ready for anything to come your way. I do hope that the paragraph headings I have Left to right, Bill Herbert, Lyn Corno Herbert, Fax Herbert, Melany Roberts (Fax’s fiancée), Carter Herbert, Todd Rabideau (Carter’s fiancé) Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 22 underscored are thoughts that some readers may find useful in their own life decisions, and yet I know enough cognitive psychology to understand my own stories as patterns that only I could have made meaningful. To reiterate the first lesson, for me a social network really is everything. At no point over some 50 years has that not been the case, and that lesson has become more important with each new decade. I do not think I was particularly proactive in finding professional outlets. Rather, I was given remarkable opportunities through the years and I was someone who tended not to decline them. Having then said “yes,” as my mother used to say, “When Lyn says she will do something, it will get done.” Is it an insight to say now that choosing to study self-regulation and volition was partly a path to understand myself and a mind that can be its own distraction? Finally, I should explain that between my decision to write this as reflective narrative, and the career twists or turns the effort recalled, it did not feel right to add a list of scholarly references at the end of this chapter. Instead, I hope I have provided sufficient information and links at various points in the text about key publications for any curious, self-regulated readers to find them by and by. It might take some volitional control. Beach on Pawley’s Island, SC, and sharks’ teeth found there, March, 2020 Author Note: Heartfelt thanks for editorial comments to Debra Miretzky, Mary McCaslin, Gary Natriello, Judi Randi, and Phil Winne. Learnings, however wise 23 About Acquired Wisdom This collection began with an invitation to one of the inaugural editors, Sigmund Tobias, from Norman Shapiro a former colleague at the City College of New York (CCNY). Shapiro invited retired CCNY faculty members to prepare manuscripts describing what they learned during their College careers that could be of value to new appointees and former colleagues. It seemed to us that a project describing the experiences of internationally known and distinguished researchers in Educational Psychology and Educational Research would be of benefit to many colleagues, especially younger ones entering those disciplines. We decided to include senior scholars in the fields of adult learning and training because , although often neglected by educational researchers, their work is quite relevant to our fields and graduate students could find productive and gainful positions in that area. Junior faculty and grad students in Educational Psychology, Educational Research, and related disciplines, could learn much from the experiences of senior researchers. Doctoral students are exposed to courses or seminars about history of the discipline as well as the field’s overarching purposes and its important contributors. . A second audience for this project include the practitioners and researchers in disciplines represented by the chapter authors. This audience could learn from the experiences of eminent researchers – how their experiences shaped their work, and what they see as their major contributions – and readers might relate their own work to that of the scholars. Authors were advised that they were free to organize their chapters as they saw fit, provided that their manuscripts contained these elements: 1) their perceived major contributions to the discipline, 2) major lessons learned during their careers, 3) their opinions about the personal and 4) situational factors (institutions and other affiliations, colleagues, advisors, and advisees) that stimulated their significant work. We hope that the contributions of distinguished researchers receive the wide readership they deserve and serves as a resource to the future practitioners and researchers in these fields. Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 24 Acquired Wisdom Series Editors Frederick Erickson University of California at Los Angeles Sonia Nieto University of Massachusetts, Amhurst Phil Winne Simon Fraser University Inaugural Editors Sigmund Tobias, State University of New York at Albany J. D. Fletcher, Institute for Defense Analyses David Berliner, Arizona State University Advisory Board Members Gustavo Fischman, Arizona State University Arthur C. Graesser III, Memphis State University Teresa L. McCarty, University of California Los Angeles Kevin Welner, University of Colorado Boulder Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas is supported by the Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Review, it is distributed for non- commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. 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