7 Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs

This week's article summary is The 7 Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs.

At a parent education meeting earlier this month, I used the 7 skills listed below (from Ellen Galinsky’s Mind in the Making) as an example of how we shape our students’ academic and character foundation needed for subsequent success in school and beyond.

 

As the article explains, these 7 skills constitute the many different qualities needed for successful executive functioning: habits and skills that help us manage our thoughts, actions, and emotions to achieve our goals.

 

What I like about this list of skills is it encompasses both the self (interpersonal) and relationships with others (intrapersonal). It’s these EQ habits and skills that complement and support our IQ (intelligence) to help us be happy and successful.

 

As I discussed with parents at that meeting, schools can often overly fixate on content knowledge and overlook that students’ social-emotional development requires as much time and attention and instruction and practice as academic work.

 

Especially as we are about a third of the way into the school year, ask yourself to what extent your students are developing and exhibiting these skills.

 

Joe

 

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What can teachers and parents do to strengthen critical executive function skills in children? These aren’t skills that children just pick up.

Executive function refers to the processes that involve managing thoughts, actions, and emotions to achieve goals. The skills make it possible to consider alternative perspectives and respond to changing circumstances (cognitive flexibility), to keep information in one’s mind so it can be used (working memory), and to resist automatic and impulsive behavior (inhibitory control) so one can engage in goal-directed reasoning and problem solving.

Why are they so important? Higher executive function skills have been linked to success in school and life—health and wealth in adulthood—and have been shown to be even more important than IQ for future success. While science tells us that developing these skills is critical in the youngest years, they can be developed throughout life: it’s never too late!

Focus and Self-Control: Children need this skill to achieve goals, especially in a world filled with distractions and information overload. This includes paying attention, exercising self-control, remembering the rules and thinking flexibility.

 

Perspective Taking: This involves understanding what others think and feel, and forms the basis for children’s understanding of the intentions of parents, teachers and friends. Children with this skill are less likely to get involved in conflicts.

 

Communicating: Much more than understanding language, reading, writing and speaking, communicating is the skill of determining what one wants to communicate and realizing how it will be understood by others. It is the skill teachers and employers feel is most lacking today.

 

Making Connections: This Life Skill is at the heart of learning: figuring out what’s the same, what’s different, and sorting them into categories. Making unusual connections is at the core of creativity and moves children beyond knowing information to using information well.

 

Critical Thinking: This skill helps children analyze and evaluate information to guide their beliefs, decisions and actions. Children need critical thinking to make sense of the world around them and to solve problems.

 

Taking on Challenges: Children who take on challenges instead of avoiding or simply coping with them achieve better in school and in life.

 

Self-Directed, Engaged Learning: By setting goals and strategies for learning, children become attuned and better prepared to change as the world changes. This helps children foster their innate curiosity to learn, and helps them realize their potential.

Is Any Feedback Effective

This week's article summary is The Danger With Giving Students Feedback.

In the course of my career in education one area that has grown exponentially is feedback—to students, to/from colleagues, to presenters, to/from direct reports. (Back when I began teaching there was very little feedback. I still remember the words of my middle school principal the year I started teaching: “Joe, if the next time we meet is in June, you’ve had a successful first year.” Nothing formative, just summative.)

As a kid, I never really felt much benefit from feedback. If I had to get it, I obviously preferred positive to negative. Yet, I found the positive didn’t help me get better beyond feeling good and the negative didn’t motivate me to try harder.

As you’ll see in the article below from Alfie Kohn (who’s the ultimate intrinsic motivation, anti-authoritarian gadfly of education, hence I only heed the spirit of what he writes) that there’s little research that shows feedback helps us grow and learn.

So if feedback from an expert (and we teachers are experts) doesn’t lead to greater learning, what does

The most important motivator is our own desire to learn. When we’re motivated to learn something, almost nothing will stop us. Especially today with YouTube, the basics of everything are a click away—from how to throw a sinker in baseball, to re-tiling a bathroom floor, to learning how to play guitar.

How do we know if we are getting better? Through self-evaluation. We are great at assessing progress (personal improvement) and achievement (how we fare against an objective standard). 

Do we need the advice and guidance of experts? Yes, but it’s really only effective when we seek it. Being assessed constantly by a superior does little to motivate or improve. However, when we ask an expert for advice—often a specific question about how to do something—we are more likely to utilize the tip.

Ultimately the key to learning, improving, mastering is self-reflection, evaluation, and ongoing trial and error. As the earlier article stated, teachers need to empower our students to be the most important contributor to their learning. 

I know it’s ingrained in us as teachers to be assessing at all times, and I do believe that the increase in formative assessment has been a plus in schools. Yet Kohn’s article is a reminder about how critical to learning our relationship to and support of our students is to their learning than telling them how well or poorly they’re doing. Or as the article’s last sentence says: “I was concentrating so hard on perfecting my feedback that I forgot to focus on my kids!”

 Joe

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A lot of people make a living by offering advice about how teachers should give feedback to students—or how administrators should give feedback to teachers. 

Unfortunately, a body of compelling theory and research raises troubling questions about much of that advice. It turns out that hearing how well we’ve done (typically from someone in a position of power) often doesn’t lead us to improve.

When feedback is contaminated with evaluation (“Here’s what I think about what you did. ... "), it tends to become not only less effective but often downright damaging—both to future performance and to recipients’ interest in whatever they were doing.

For decades, studies have shown that praising people when they succeed can be just as counterproductive as criticizing them when they fail. Nor does it help to tweak the phrasing or to praise one thing rather than another (for example, effort rather than ability) because the problem rests with the experience of being judged. 

In the 1980s, researcher Ruth Butler found that students often became more intrigued by a task when they received simple comments about what they had done, whereas praise “did not even maintain initial interest at its baseline level.” More recently, two Vanderbilt University researchers reported that students, particularly those who were reasonably proficient, did worse at math if they had previously received praise for succeeding.

What is true of the judgment inherent in praise is also true of the judgment inherent in grades. A series of meta-analyses published in 2020 by Duke University researchers showed that substantive feedback without any grade attached was preferable for promoting both motivation and achievement. In fact, getting a grade was more damaging to motivation than receiving no feedback at all, particularly for struggling students.

If good grades are just as destructive as bad grades, incidentally, it may be because the most striking feature of a positive evaluation isn’t that it’s positive but that it’s an evaluation. (One psychologist remarked that kids would come to find it unpleasant even to watch TV if they were regularly evaluated for how well they did it.) 

But the central point here applies to adults as well as children, which is why teachers often bristle at having an administrator sit in judgment of them. What’s remarkable is that some of these teachers may not think twice about subjecting their students to a constant stream of evaluations.

Why do evaluations backfire? First, because they, like other rewards, are typically experienced as controlling—and people don’t like to be controlled. Second, to receive a pat on the head (an A or a “Good job!”) for doing a task well serves to devalue that task; it’s been reframed as just a prerequisite for receiving a reward. Finally, evaluation creates pressure to keep up the good work, which, in turn, leads to risk avoidance. If the point is to perform well, better to stick with what one is likely to succeed at—a posture not exactly conducive to learning or growth.

Feedback is better than evaluation, but that doesn’t mean it’s always constructive. In fact, the most comprehensive review of the research, comprising more than 600 experimental comparisons, found that even pure feedback often has a negative effect on performance. And even when the effect is positive, its impact may be small, and any learning that results may be shallow.

So what determines whether, and to what extent, feedback will help?

• Hearing that you succeeded at a task, not surprisingly, is more apt to strengthen interest than hearing that you didn’t. (The supposed benefits of failure are wildly overrated.)
• Sometimes it’s obvious whether your efforts paid off: Either the seed you planted sprouted, or it didn’t; either readers are surprised by your ending, or they aren’t. Such feedback is less likely to reduce interest than when someone tells you how well you did, which pulls you out of the learning experience. Students are then less engaged with what they’re doing and more concerned with how well someone thinks they’re doing it.
• Feedback is most likely to backfire when it’s given publicly or in comparison with other people. Contrary to a widespread American myth, competition tends to undermine intrinsic motivation and achievement—for winners as well as losers.
• Feedback works best when it’s just one step in a learning process rather than a final judgment, although even the formative kind isn’t always beneficial (particularly if it’s based on a test).
• It matters not only how but why feedback is given. If the rationale is experienced as manipulative (to meet someone else’s standards), it may be damaging. The ideal scenario is for information to be offered at the recipient’s request. In general, effective teachers and managers do a lot more asking than telling: “How can I help?” “What do you need to know?

A final caveat: Even research suggesting that certain feedback can be useful turns out to be less reassuring than it appears because of dubious assumptions about what “useful” means. As Lorrie Shepard at the University of Colorado noticed, most studies of feedback “are based on behaviorist assumptions. Typically the outcome measures are narrowly defined [and] feedback consists of reporting right and wrong answers.” Thus, even if feedback “works,” it may do so only on tasks of questionable value, such as cramming forgettable facts into short-term memory.

With feedback, then, as with so much else in education, paying too much attention to perfecting a method distracts us from reflecting on our goal. And the goal should concern not only the quality of learning but the experience of the learner. Hence, educator Cris Tovani’s evocative confession: “I was concentrating so hard on ... trying to perfect the feedback ... [that] I forgot to focus on the kids.”

The Five Virtues of a Good Writer

This week's article summary is The Five Virtues of a Good Writer, and it is a follow-up to last week's summary in which I reminisced about my high school years learning—or more accurately not learning—how to write well.

This article identifies five components of good writing. For me, these components are more applicable to us as adults than our students, as the most important goals we should have for our elementary school students are to foster their enthusiasm and confidence as writers. Yes, we begin to introduce these components to our students, particularly in our upper elementary grades, yet true understanding and application of them doesn’t begin to coalesce until our students are in middle, high school, or even later.

Hence, as all of us at Trinity have writing responsibilities from progress reports to written communication to students, colleagues, and parents, keeping these components at the forefront of the writing process can be very helpful.

As I read the article, what impacted me the most was the need for a clear purpose before writing. I wrote progress reports for over 30 years, and I often struggled writing about the students who fell within the meaty part of the bell curve. The all-star performers and chronic strugglers were easy for me to write about because I knew where they shined or needed to improve. It was the middle kids whose description (strengths, challenges, needs/next steps) eluded me. But as the summary below points out, I didn’t have a clear purpose of what I wanted to write about them because I hadn’t thought carefully and deeply enough about them before I started to write about them. Instead, I would just begin writing and hoped the right words would follow. Those progress reports were often uninspired and ineffective because they didn’t capture the uniqueness of the child.

Stephen King is his book On Writing, advises to “write with the door closed (for you), then rewrite with the door open (for others).” Once you have your purpose, writing–at least the rough draft—becomes much easier.

The other four components of writing (although I also like the article’s sixth one: rhythm) come into play during the editing and revising processes. It’s through revision that our ideas are reorganized and more clearly expressed so others can easily follow and understand.

Like any skill—and writing ultimately is a skill—writing requires constant practice. Even as we write simple emails to colleagues, we should keep these five components in mind and strive to further hone our writing.

Joe

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The great journalist and author Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993) offered the following excellent advice to writers:

“The reader who seeks to write well and think well should aim first at the essential qualities—coherence, clarity, precision, simplicity, and brevity. Euphony (pleasant to the ears) and rhythm are of course also desirable, but they are like the final rubbing on a fine piece of furniture—finishing touches justified only if the piece has been soundly made. The apprentice writer should try to acquire these Five Virtues by vigilant abstention from the Five Vices of Incoherence, Obscurity, Vagueness, Pedantry, and Circumlocution.”

Here are a few of my own thoughts on these writing virtues and corresponding vices.

Coherence (as opposed to Incoherence) is the quality of forming a unified, integrated whole. For a writing piece to have coherence, it must have a clear purpose, and every constituent part of it must contribute toward that purpose. Long digressions and non sequiturs can make a piece incoherent.

Clarity (as opposed to Obscurity) in writing is about being easily understood by the reader. A writer who wants to be understood must think in terms, not only of expression (sharing one’s thoughts) but exposition (sharing ideas intelligibly). Often attaining greater clarity in exposition goes hand-in-hand with attaining greater clarity in your own understanding of the topic. For a piece to be clear, it must flow well: both narratively and logically. Each passage must advance the story and/or argument of the piece in a way that naturally follows what came before it. A piece that is disjointed and “jumps around” too much will confuse the reader. Clear writing must also be complete. It must not omit any points that are necessary for the reader to understand what you’re saying. Missing context will obscure your message. Unfamiliar, un-introduced jargon will also make your presentation opaque to the reader. Remember that the reader does not share all your knowledge. Be wary of presuming that a necessary connection will “go without saying.”

Precision (as opposed to Vagueness) in writing is about being exact and specific in conveying your meaning. Attaining precision is often a matter of “playing around” with a sentence to find just the right wording and phrasing to accurately get your meaning across.

Simplicity (as opposed to Pedantry) in writing is about limiting your exposition only to the essential. Writers with extensive knowledge of their subject are often tempted to over-share arcane details that would overload the reader. Don’t try to cram a comprehensive education of your subject into one piece. Shoot for the realistic aim of providing your reader an important lesson that is simple enough to be fully digested in one sitting.

Brevity (as opposed to Circumlocution) in writing is about getting your meaning across in as few words as necessary. (But no fewer. Brevity in excess can result in vagueness and obscurity.) Often one’s first stab at a sentence will be needlessly wordy and thus unwieldy to the reader. See what you can do to cut, compress, and recombine your wording to make your sentence more concise and elegant. Prune any sentences that don’t “carry their weight”: that don’t contribute enough value to your presentation to justify the additional work they demand from the reader. Sometimes this can mean cutting whole sections. You have to be willing to “kill your darlings” as William Faulkner put it.

Feedback That Empowers Students

This week's article summary is Feedback That Empowers Students.

Think back to when you were in high school nervously awaiting your English teacher to hand back the essay you wrote. 

Once the teacher returned the graded paper to you, you probably flipped to the end--skipping over the teacher’s corrections and comments, usually written in blood red ink--and jumped right to the grade he/she wrote. 

If the grade was B or better, you then might have looked at the teacher’s written comments, expecting there’d be more praise than suggestions for improvement (which to most of us means criticism)—after all, only a masochist prefers criticism to praise.

However, if the grade was below a B--if you were like me--you crumbled the essay into a tight wad and threw it in the classroom waste basket when the teacher wasn’t looking. As someone who received a lot of grades below B on essays, my defense rationale was that the teacher didn’t like or understand me. (Every student knows the story that Einstein failed  a math in middle school.)

Similarly, when I was an English teacher, I was discouraged when my students did the same thing to me when they got back their papers that I had critiqued so diligently. For them, it was basically an either/or dichotomy where good writers got praise and satisfaction while poor writers sunk deeper and deeper into the belief that they would never get my approval and were destined to never write well.

Schools and English classes have gotten better with tools that help students write like laptop computers (which make revising and editing much less painful) and rubrics (where students have a better understanding of the components of their assignment like a persuasive essay).

Still, as an adult whose job involves a lot of writing, I wish I had begun to hone my writing skills back when I was in school rather than learning on the job what good writing entails. As a student, I was loath to revise my rough drafts; today, I embrace that my initial draft is nothing more than a rough sketch or outline that will take much thought and revision on my part.

What you’ll see in the article below is how important it is for teachers to guide their students to be more empowered and to understand how much influence they have in their own learning. I sought my teacher’s approval in the grade he/she gave me when I should have focused more on his/her comments to further my development as a writer. I just didn’t feel empowered as a student, and most students struggle with their confidence throughout the inevitable ups and downs of their school years. 

Another article I read over the summer on ‘resilience in the classroom’ stated that the purpose of school is to help students learn, practice, and reflect. 

When I was a kid, I only thought school was for learning,  yet now I know that it’s through practice and reflection that we learn.

Joe

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Feedback can be a powerful process that greatly impacts student learning when it affirms students’ identities as learners, is clear and direct, and considers the individual attributes of each student.

Here’s an example. A student receives the following feedback from her teacher:

• Strength: You clearly state your claim, The women’s rights movement began with the suffrage movement but it’s not over yet, and provided a list of recent events, such as the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team’s court case, to support your thinking.
• Need: Include the counterclaim and how you would respond. What would someone say if they disagreed with you? Where would they find fault with your supporting evidence?
• Next Steps: Work with your writing partner to talk through the Claim, Support, Question protocol. Do some more research to address the questions that you and your partner generate, and add this information to your essay.

This feedback moves beyond what students often receive in response to their work—statements such as “Great job!” “Shows improvement.” “Add evidence.” The more comprehensive feedback can empower students because it’s individualized to the student; leverages students’ assets, interests, and learning preferences; and builds students’ confidence in themselves. Let’s unpack the above example to see how to accomplish this.

Strengths: Identify what students can do in relation to the learning target, regardless of whether they’ve achieved mastery. The feedback in our example is based on the following learning target and success criteria for the student: I can write an argument by doing the following: stating a claim, providing supporting reasons and relevant evidence, addressing counterclaims

When a teacher identifies what students can do, it communicates the belief that all students are learners and can achieve high expectations. Students know what to repeat in future assignments and, most important, develop confidence in themselves.

Needs: Identify where a student is in relationship to the learning target. The language the teacher uses in identifying needs can affect how students receive the feedback. In our feedback example, the teacher states the need—Include the counterclaim and how you would respond—and then provides some questions to prompt student thinking. 

Direct and honest feedback helps students understand that feedback is affirmation that the student can reach the goal. When feedback is cushioned or vague, a student may interpret it to mean that the teacher doesn’t believe in the student’s capability.

Next Steps: These directly correlate with the identified needs and provide suggestions on how students can move forward. Too often, students are given feedback but don’t know how to address it. The teacher supports student independence and self-regulation by describing actions that the student can take on their own to strengthen their work. In our example of feedback, the teacher reminds the student to use a thinking routine that has been repeatedly used in class—to identify possible counterclaims and provide stronger evidence to support their reasoning.

Next steps should also consider the individual attributes of the student. For example, if the teacher knows a student is an artist, suggesting that the student use sketch noting before writing might be a good next step. Students who use oral language to process information might benefit from peer discussion, as mentioned in the example, before writing.

The Amount, Timing, and Format: These can influence how a student receives the feedback and their willingness to act on it. Some students need less feedback more often, while other students prefer to have the time to process and apply the feedback. Feedback can be verbal or written and offered privately or in small groups. The same process for providing feedback will not work for everyone. If a teacher is unsure as to what strategy might work best for the student, the teacher can conference with the student and discuss different strategies. This builds the trust that underlies the successful feedback relationship.

The feedback that students receive from their teachers serves as models for students to engage in peer feedback and self-assessment. When students use the same process with their peers and then apply it to themselves, they’re truly empowered. Students, like their teachers, must have clearly articulated learning targets and a protocol, such as the strengths, needs, and next steps. They must also reflect on the feedback process. Questions such as “How did feedback from your classmate help you revise your work?” “What did you learn from examining your classmate’s work that will help you in revising your own?” and “How did you revise your work after completing your self-assessment?” all help students see the value of the feedback process.

Empowering students through feedback begins with teacher feedback that identifies what the student can do, clearly states areas of needs, and considers the individual attributes of each student in providing next steps. When students receive quality feedback from their teachers, they are primed to engage in peer feedback and self-assessment, and empowered to be self-regulated, independent learners.