Gratitude

This week’s article summary is about gratitude and how to foster it in your classroom, particularly through student journaling.

While this article is especially appropriate with Thanksgiving next week, it’s important for us to help our students be appreciative on a daily basis for the little things.

I wish all of you a wonderful and happy Thanksgiving Break. I am very thankful to be a part of the Trinity community and for all you do for our kids!

Joe

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Would you like to improve the culture in your classroom and your life?

Try gratitude.

Gratitude has empowered me to teach more effectively, appreciate my individual students, grow in my profession, and enjoy life.

Utilizing gratitude, I am able to model one of the most important lessons in life, having a positive attitude, especially about the aspects of life that challenge me.

To get started in your classroom with gratitude, I recommend actually writing your own gratitude list for a few weeks and feeling its power. Then you can share your example and start the activity with your students. You might start your gratitude journal with being thankful for being alive, for having food to eat and clothes to wear. If you can think about something related to teaching that you're grateful for, that's even more powerful.

My students start every day by writing five gratitudes. I show the students an example or let them see this form:

1. Thanks for ___________________________.
2. Thanks for ___________________________.
3. Thanks for ___________________________.

Once a week, we go around the class and share our favorite gratitude. I am always encouraged and pleasantly surprised by what my students share. I get to learn about things going on in their lives that I might not hear about otherwise. This helps build a positive culture in our classroom.

In addition, I suggest that the students should be specific. For example, instead of writing, "Thank you for lunch," I would write, "Thank you for the tomatoes and lettuce in my salad and for the cool, sweet iced tea with friends," or "Thank you for the nutritious lunch made by loving hands."

Gratitude seems to work like a muscle, and the physical action of writing a gratitude list helps develop "gratitude muscles." A recent study published in School Psychology Review, showed that those who are the least grateful seem to gain the most from making this effort. That is good news to those us who may find it hard to start a gratitude list.

Sometimes I really challenge the students by asking if they can be thankful for homework or chores. This challenge enables them to see what is good about homework -- that it helps them learn and prepares them for school and life.

Another gratitude activities to try in your classroom is writing down gratitudes on sticky notes and putting them on our classroom door, so that we have a positive reminder every time we enter and leave the room. Students will even take this idea home and post gratitudes on sticky notes around their homes, reminding them to stay grateful.
Recent research supports the idea that gratitude improves the lives of students and adults. It illustrates how:

Keeping a gratitude journal on a daily basis helps students achieve the following:

• Higher grades
• Higher goals
• More satisfaction with relationships, life, and school
• Less materialism
• More willingness to give back.

For adults, keeping a gratitude journal enables people to:

• Be more optimistic
• Experience more social satisfaction
• Exercise more often
• Have less envy and depression
• Have fewer physical complaints
• Sleep better.

I see these positive changes in my students. One of them saved her allowance and bought gratitude journals for her family. Her mom was in nursing school and very stressed. At the dinner table, they would share their gratitudes for the day and grow as a family. The mom came to me and thanked me for teaching gratitude to her daughter and helping her family. She said it helped her get through nursing school.

Overcoming Gender Stereotypes in Elementary School

This week’s article summary is The Making of a Man: Rethinking and Challenging Stereotypes  

The article begins with the ways gender-nonconforming or transgender students are teased and bullied, especially in middle and high school.

The article’s main purpose, however, is to remind us—as elementary teachers—that we need to guide our students to avoid succumbing to traditional gender stereotyping that still dominates our society today.

A few years ago in a school in-service presentation, a psychologist who specialized in transgender teens explained how gender should not be viewed as an either/or, zero/sum, masculine/feminine paradigm but rather as a continuum in four areas: biological, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. 

All of us fall somewhere on the continuum and often in different places in the different categories, e.g., you may be a male biologically yet you may identify as and express yourself to the world as female. 

Mainstream society lags behind research. Our students are bombarded with images and messages that reinforce the stereotypic view of gender. (Whenever I wear a pink shirt, I invariably get comments from young kids—and adults—that pink is a girl’s color.)

The picture books listed below run the gamut and even push societal limits—I am not sure most elementary schools are understanding and compassionate enough yet regarding gender to read the last book with kids.

Still, as the article states we need to help our kids “be able to see themselves in the literature they read, especially those who demonstrate multiple masculinities or femininities, or who demonstrate gender variance.”

Joe

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Experts estimate that one in 500 children is gender nonconforming or transgender. Although schools are places where respect for diversity is fostered, especially for children with disabilities, gender diversity is rarely valued.

Children can find themselves in hostile environments where bullying and teasing from peers and adults are the norm. Students are can be verbally and physically harassed and report that school personnel typically do not intervene on their behalf.

Most literature read in elementary classrooms reinforces conventional gender norms. Gender stereotypes in books amplify and perpetuate biased attitudes and behaviors. Females in children’s books commonly are described as ‘beautiful, frightened, worthy, sweet, weak, and scared,’ while male characters are represented as ‘big, horrible, fierce, great, terrible, furious, brave, and proud.’

Fortunately, this is changing for girls, with a number of books depicting multiple femininities with characters who cross the traditional gender line, excelling in sports, fighting in battles, showing courage, assertiveness and leadership, and sometimes identifying closely with boys.

While multiple masculinities are depicted in an increasing number of young adult novels, there are fewer such books for younger children. William’s Doll (Zolotow, 1972) and Oliver Button Is a Sissy (dePaola, 1979) are two early examples of books in which not all boys are strong, tough, aggressive sports lovers.

Below are five picture books that facilitate primary-grade discussions about gender stereotyping, gender role development, and accepting individual differences. It is essential that children be able to see themselves in the literature they read, especially those who demonstrate multiple masculinities or femininities, or who demonstrate gender variance.

The Only Boy in Ballet Class (Gruska, 2007) – Tucker loves to dance and his feet never stop moving. He’s teased in school but not in ballet class. Then he’s roped into playing in a championship football game and is terrified. When the ball lands in his hands, he uses all his dance skills to help win the game.

The Boy Who Cried Fabulous (Newman, 2004) – Roger has trouble making it home from school because, much to his parents’ annoyance, he finds everything to be “fabulous.” He solves the problem by expanding his vocabulary to include wonderful, glorious, magical, and luscious.

My Princess Boy (Kilodavis, 2011) – This book is written by the mother of a young boy who loves to dress up like a princess but is hurt by the way people stare and laugh at him. The story encourages children to be more accepting of those who are different from them.

10,000 Dresses (Ewert, 2008) – Bailey dreams about dresses every night and tells his family how much he would like one of those dresses. His mother, father, and brother are repulsed – Boys don’t wear dresses! – but he tells them he doesn’t feel like a boy. He meets Laurel and they work together to design and make beautiful dresses.

Be Who You Are! (Carr, 2010) – Nick has always viewed himself as a girl; he feels as though he has a girl’s brain and enjoys wearing dresses. His parents accept this and repeatedly tell him, “Be who you are!” He joins a play group with other gender-nonconforming children, tells his parents he doesn’t want to be a boy anymore, and changes his name to Hope.

While the need is great, there are significant challenges to bringing such literature into elementary classrooms. Stereotypical views on gender and masculinity are deeply ingrained, and censorship of this literature is widely accepted. To even begin to help children rethink their views and learn the value of challenging their own stereotypes will take considerable work on the part of sensitive and understanding teachers and administrators. There is, obviously, no quick fix to changing stereotypical attitudes, and parents, of course, must be given the option of having their children excused from these literature discussions.

In addition, it’s important to plan carefully when using such books in classrooms. There are several strategies, including brainstorming stereotypes up front using sentence stems (Girls like to…, Boys wear…), putting together a semantic gender and character analysis chart after reading the books, and pairing these books with picture books in which strong female characters cross gender lines.

Benefits of Student-Led Conferences

This week's article summary is from a Mindshift blog entitled Why Students Should Take the Lead in Parent-Teacher Conferences. 

Trinity has been doing student-led conferences in UED for a number of years now.

Still kids, teachers, and parents need support and guidance in the whys and hows of conferences with kids. 

For Trinity, the macro goal is to empower students in their learning and to support them in their assessment of their work and effort.

Not just including but giving kids a lead role in a conference helps students feel more in control of their learning and respected for their performance, progress, attitude, and even metacognition!

Joe

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A particularly vivid example of putting students in the driver’s seat of their own education is the way they handle what traditional schools refer to as parent-teacher conferences.

At these time-honored encounters, it’s not uncommon for students to stay home while the adults discuss their progress or lack thereof.

But at some schools the meetings are often turned into student-led conferences, with students presenting their schoolwork, while their teachers, having helped them prepare, sit across the table, or even off to the side.

The triad then sits together to review and discuss the work and the student’s progress. The message, once again, is that the students are responsible for their own success.

While a students’ first impulse is to tear through folders to find every best thing that they have done to show their parents, teachers should encourages students to reflect on the connection between the effort they have made and the quality of their work. One possibility is to have them choose three examples that help them tell their parents a deeper story: one that shows they have recognized both a personal strength and an area in which they are struggling. Most students have never thought about their learning in this way. Nor have most of their parents.

Many parents need some time to adjust to the new format. Often a parent just wants to ask about how their child is doing, or how they are behaving. Sometimes a teacher may need to nudge the conversation back to let the child lead.

Eventually most parents come to realize that report cards don’t tell them anything very useful, and over time, they begin to set a higher bar for their students at these conferences.