Technology and Distractability

This week’s article summary is Smart Phones Don't Make Us Dumb by Daniel Willingham. 

Both our professional and personal lives are surrounded by the ubiquity of technology. 

There are benefits and detriments in any new technology.

As a veteran (sounds better than old) educator, I have seen schools go from no-tech to low-tech to high-tech.

The same is true for my personal life: I now do the majority of my reading on an iPad, use my big screen TV to stream Netflix and Amazon Prime movies, and at night keep (perhaps foolishly) my smart phone next to my bed.

While instant access to information is great, as the article states, it’s the availability of something more enticing and interesting that distracts us--and our students.

Using an iPad to read, I have found that if a book, article, etc. doesn’t catch my attention quickly, I move onto something else.

The article closes by reminding us as educators to make sure we create no-tech times for our students so they have the opportunity to reflect.

At three different times in my life—as a student, teacher, and administrator—I attended and worked in a Quaker school where we had a weekly Quaker meeting of silent mediation. The 18^th century Meeting House was plain and austere (wooden benches with no cushions) to minimize distractions. I learned to meditate (albeit in a hyper manner befitting my age and personality) and reflect on who I was, what I wanted to become, the good and bad decisions I made, etc.

Reading this article was a reminder to me that while technology is a positive in so many ways, we all need to find the time for no-tech activities. 

Maybe I’ll start by not having the iPhone by my bed at night.

Joe

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We all hear the often-voiced concern that electronic devices are destroying people’s attention spans.

This sounds logical, given the quick-quick style of links, apps, and games, but people today are just as able to maintain focus and keep several things in mind as people 50 years ago.

A true rewiring of brain circuitry takes place over evolutionary time, not because of a smartphone.

So why did 90% of teachers say (in a 2012 Pew survey) that students can’t pay attention the way they could a few years ago? Why does it feel like our attention spans are shrinking?

It may be that digital devices have not left us unable to pay attention, but have made us unwilling to do so.

The digital world carries the promise of amusement that is constant, immediate, and limitless. If a YouTube video isn’t funny in the first 10 seconds, why watch it? The Internet hasn’t shortened my attention span, but it has fixed a persistent thought in the back of my mind: Isn’t there something better to do than what I’m doing?

Another way of framing the problem is that we’re always on high alert. One experiment found that people do worse at paying attention when a cellphone is merely sitting within view. Another experiment in a driving simulator found that people were more likely to hit a pedestrian when their cellphone rang, even if they’d decided in advance they wouldn’t answer it.

Neuroscientists have identified two systems of attention and associated thought. One is directed outward, as when you scroll through your e-mail or play Candy Crush. The other is directed inward, as when you daydream, plan what you’ll do tomorrow, or reflect on the past.

Digital activities direct us outward, and since the two modes toggle with each other (when one is on, the other is off), spending lots of time with devices means we spend less time reflecting.

The trick is balancing the two modes of thought – making time for deeper thinking by putting our devices in another room, but also knowing when it’s time for more outward-directed activities and tuning in the wider world.

Prepping for Preschool

This week’s article summary is The Talking Cure from The New Yorker.

Last week I referenced the NPR report that the three most important variables in a child’s success in school are 1) IQ, 2) self-control/self-discipline, and 3) parents’ socioeconomic status.

This week's article covers the research that has been done re: parent socioeconomic status, a young child’s exposure to vocabulary and sentence syntax, and their impact on success in school.

Certainly there are larger sociological issues at play here, yet the article is interesting in that our students entering preschool at Trinity have more than likely had a myriad of experiences and opportunities which set them up favorably for success in school.

Joe

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Research has shown that the poorer parents are, the less they talk to their children, and this disparity affects children when they begin school.

The original studies were done in the 1980s, when the University of Kansas analyzed verbal interactions in professional, middle-class, and low-income families with children who were just learning language.

There were many similarities among the families. Parents all showed affection, disciplined their children, and tried to teach them good manners, but the social-class differences in the number of words children heard each hour were dramatic: 2,150 in professional families, 1,250 in middle-class families, and 620 in poor families.

With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies grew and the higher the children’s I.Q. test scores were at age 3 and later.

More-affluent parents used a wider range of nouns, modifiers, and past-tense verbs, and more of the conversations were initiated by children.

Families that talk a lot also talk about more different things. They use more grammatical variety in their sentences and more sophisticated vocabulary and produce more utterances in connected chains.

These parents ask their children a lot of questions and have fun answering children’s “Why?” questions.

There’s also a difference in the ratio of statements from parents that are affirming and positive (Yes, it is a bunny!) versus corrective and critical (Stop that!): 32 to 5 per hour in professional homes, 12 to 7 in working-class homes, 5 to 11 in low-income homes.

Poor nutrition, chaotic living conditions, no preschool also influence poor students’ literacy deficits.

There is also variation within each social-class group, for example, some wealthy families have low word counts.

The quality of spoken words is as important as quantity. It’s important that parent and child are both paying attention to and talking about the same thing – a cement mixer on the street, a picture in a book – and the ensuing conversation and gestures are fluid and continue over time.

Though cultural factors may well explain why some low-income parents talk relatively little with their toddlers, the most obvious explanation is poverty itself. When daily life is stressful and uncertain and dispiriting, it can be difficult to summon up the patience and the playfulness for an open-ended conversation with a small, persistent, possibly whiny child.

In addition, poorer families may be unconsciously preparing their children for jobs and lives in which they won’t have much power and autonomy – hence the high value on discipline and respect for parental authority.

The 2003 study Unequal Childhoods found that middle-class families mostly practiced “concerted cultivation” – adults engaging children in lots of back-and-forth conversation, with the verbal jousting giving kids intellectual confidence.

Working-class and poor families, on the other hand, tend to take an “accomplishment of natural growth” approach – children’s lives are less customized, discipline consists of directives and sometimes threats of physical punishment, and there is less talk and less drawing out of children’s opinions.

The middle-class approach takes a lot of parents’ time, and some sibling interactions are mean-spirited. The study found that poor and working-class children were more polite to adults, less whiny, more competent, and more independent. Still, middle-class families’ approach prepared their children better for success in school and professional careers. It taught children to debate, extemporize, and advocate for themselves, and it helped them develop the vocabulary that tends to reap academic rewards.

Another variable is parents’ educational background. Asking dinner-table questions like, “Hey, did you hear the blue whales are making a comeback off California?” or “Oh, they just discovered a new dinosaur” spring from more years in school and college, but also from a different mode of inquiry that’s more in synch with the way teachers talk – more abstract, better informed, more inquisitive. Education helps you learn how to make yourself clear to people who are outside your point of view.

Personality Qualities Trump Intelligence

This week's article summary is Two Personal Qualities More Vital To Success Than IQ

A few years ago I heard a report on NPR that listed the three determinants of academic success: IQ, parents' socioeconomic status (both of which for the most part remain consistent during a child's education), and self-control (which is by far the most malleable of the three). This report came on the heels of the book How Children Succeed which highlighted the importance of fostering grit and a growth-mindset in schools.

The article below adds a new variable in achieving academic success: being open to experience. 

In may ways this is simply a re-naming of growth mindset, yet I it's important for teachers to help parents see that while their child's IQ is important, maximizing a child's academic potential is about developing their personal qualities.

Joe

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There are two trainable personal qualities which predict success four times more than intelligence:

Being open to experience and being conscientious are four times more important than intelligence in predicting academic success, a new research review finds.

People who are open to experience are more likely to be imaginative, sensitive to their feelings, intellectually curious and seekers of variety.

Conscientious people, meanwhile, are disciplined, dutiful and good at planning ahead.
Dr. Arthur Poropat, the study’s author, thinks the current emphasis on intelligence is misplaced:

“With respect to learning, personality is more useful than intelligence for guiding both students and teachers. In practical terms, the amount of effort students are prepared to put in, and where that effort is focused, is at least as important as whether the students are smart. And a student with the most helpful personality will score a full grade higher than an average student in this regard.”

The review, which is published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences, included data from tens of thousands of students.

“Intelligence tests,” Dr. Poropat explains, “have always been closely linked with education and grades and therefore relied upon to predict who would do well. The impact of personality on study is genuinely surprising for educational researchers, and for anyone who thinks they did well at school because they are ‘smart’.”

The good news is that conscientiousness and openness to experience are trainable.


“Personality does change, and some educators have trained aspects of students’ conscientiousness and openness, leading to greater learning capacity. By contrast, there is little evidence that intelligence can be ‘taught’, despite the popularity of brain-training apps.”

Three Important Questions to Ask Your Teenager

This week’s article summary is The Three Most Important Questions You Can Ask Your Teenager

A lot of adults today don't help focus and direct kids to what’s truly important in life, i.e., according to the article, “good health, solid values, meaningful work, positive relationships, and selfless service”.

Rather adults reinforce more superficial and even selfish goals and outcomes.

For many kids today school and outside activities are a list of "To Do" items to check off in the competition to build a resume and  to be accepted to a prestigious school. How will this activity make me more marketable in college admission? 

And many of us—as the adult in our kids’ lives—support this mindset rather than helping kids, as a voice of reason and experience, to see the bigger picture of learning and life.

The sad result as the article attests is too man kids today are sad, disillusioned, depressed.

While this article focuses on teens, our elementary school students are not immune to this pressure of superficial achievement, and it is our responsibility to help them see the deeper meaning in their actions and relationships--especially as we begin a new year.

Joe

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There is a paradox about millennials: On the one hand, they tend to be confident, technologically connected, environmentally aware, committed to helping the disadvantaged, and open to diversity and change. 

On the other hand, many millennials are beset with insecurity, anxiety, unhappiness, aimlessness, and despair. 

One theory from the book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life says that too many young people have been conditioned to think that the reason for getting good grades is to impress admissions officers and employers, the purpose of community service is to fill out one’s resume, playing sports is to get recruited for a college team, and studying art and music is to look smart and well-rounded. 

The result is that too many students fall apart in college because they cannot conceive of the fact that hard work and learning are positive outcomes in and of themselves. They have no sense of who they are or what is important in their lives. In our efforts to push our kids ahead, we have forgotten to ask why pushing ahead is important in the first place.

What is to be done? We know that lasting happiness springs from good health, solid values, meaningful work, multiple positive relationships, and selfless service. We need to get young people to focus on three questions:

Who tells us who we are? Not the Internet, TV, movies, social media, and advertising, which judge us on what we wear, what we buy, how thin or buff we are, and our number of Facebook “likes.” It’s about how hard we work, how curious we are, and how much we are willing to make a positive difference to others and to our world in distress. Our children need to learn that they are important not for reasons of appearance but for reasons of substance.

Where do we want to go with our lives? Focusing only on getting into a good college and landing a high-status job will lead to frustration, anger, and loneliness. What young people need is to find their passion and get into a career that pays them for doing what they love. We all know we are in the right jobs when how long we work at something is driven by interest and not only about earning a paycheck. 

How do we want to get there? Having a worthwhile end in sight will greatly influence the means for getting there. Kids cheat in school because they think grades are more important than what they learn. They take short-cuts because they believe the longer, harder path has no value or because they are afraid of stumbling or of being seen as someone who stumbles. They are mean or cruel or uncaring often because they do not like themselves. Real success comes when you can look at your life and say, ‘I have done my best to make a positive difference in the lives of others and the world we live in.’

Stress and How to Manage It

This week’s article summary is How Successful People Squash Stress (in Forbes).

The article is timely for us personally: while we all look forward to the holidays, they can also be very stressful.

I also liked the article from a professional perspective: while a little stress is good and helps us learn and is good for the brain, we as teachers need to know ways to manage stress—whether in how to better work with colleagues, partner with parents, or help students be successful.

The article lists 11 tips for better managing stress. See how many you use—and for those you haven’t tried, try them over the holidays.

Thanks again for all you do for Trinity!

Joe

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We all know that living under stressful conditions has serious physical and emotional consequences. So why do we have so much trouble taking action to reduce our stress levels and improve our lives?

Intense stress actually reduces the volume of gray matter in the areas of the brain responsible for self-control. As you lose self-control, you lose your ability to cope with stress. It becomes harder for you to keep yourself out of stressful situations, and you’re more likely to create them for yourself (such as by overreacting to people).

Dwindling self-control is particularly scary when you consider that stress affects physiological functions in the brain, contributing to chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes.

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. 90% of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions in times of stress in order to remain calm and in control.

The tricky thing about stress is that it’s an absolutely necessary emotion. Our brains are wired such that it’s difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of this emotional state.

A UC Berkeley study reveals an upside to experiencing moderate levels of stress. But it also reinforces how important it is to keep stress under control. The study found that the onset of stress entices the brain into growing new cells responsible for improved memory. However, this effect is only seen when stress is intermittent. As soon as the stress continues beyond a few moments into a prolonged state, it suppresses the brain’s ability to develop new cells.

Intermittent stressful events actually increase your performance by keeping the brain more alert, and most top performers have well-honed coping strategies that they employ under stressful circumstances to lower their stress levels and ensure that the stress they experience is not prolonged. This keeps their performance up and the negative effects of stress to a minimum.

Implementing healthy stress-relieving techniques won’t just improve your performance—it can train your brain to handle stress more effectively and decrease the likelihood of ill effects.

As simple as some of these strategies may seem, they are difficult to implement when your mind is clouded with stress. Force yourself to attempt them the next time your head is spinning, and your efforts will pay dividends to your health and performance.

They Say No: Research conducted at the University of California in San Francisco shows that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression. Saying no is indeed a major challenge for most people. When it’s time to say no, emotionally intelligent people avoid phrases like “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.” Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them.

They Appreciate What They Have: Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the “right” thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California, Davis found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood, energy, and physical wellbeing.

They Avoid Asking “What If?”: “What if?” statements throw fuel on the fire of stress and worry. Things can go in a million different directions, and the more time you spend worrying about the possibilities, the less time you’ll spend focusing on taking action that will calm you down and keep your stress under control. Successful people know that asking “what if? will only take them to a place they don’t want—or need—to go.

They Disconnect: Given the importance of keeping stress intermittent, it’s easy to see how taking regular time off the grid can help keep your stress under control. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even turning off your phone gives your body a break from a constant source of stress. If detaching yourself from work-related communication on weekday evenings is too big a challenge, then how about the weekend?

They Limit Their Caffeine Intake: Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyperaroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior.

They Sleep: Sleep is vital to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present. Stressful projects often make you feel as if you have no time to sleep, but taking the time to get a decent night’s sleep is often the one thing keeping you from getting things under control.

They Exercise: Getting your body moving for as little as 10 minutes releases GABA, a neurotransmitter that reduces stress by soothing you and helping you stay in control of your emotions. Exercise is one of the first things busy people let fall by the wayside when they are stressed and under a lot of pressure.

They Don’t Hold Grudges: The negative emotions that come with holding onto a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event involved sends your body into fight-or-flight mode. When a threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when a threat is ancient history, holding onto that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. Holding onto a grudge means you’re holding onto stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs.

They Don’t Die in the Fight: Emotionally intelligent people know how important it is to live to fight another day. In conflict, unchecked emotion makes you dig your heels in and fight the kind of battle that can leave you severely damaged and stressed. When you read and respond to your emotions effectively, you’re able to choose your battles wisely and only stand your ground when the time is right.

They Practice Mindfulness: Mindfulness is a simple, research-supported form of meditation that is an effective way to gain control of unruly thoughts and behaviors. People who practice mindfulness are more focused, even when they are not meditating. It is an excellent technique to help reduce stress because it allows you to reduce the feeling of being out of control. Essentially, mindfulness helps you stop jumping from one thought to the next, which gives you laser-sharp focus and keeps you from ruminating on negative thoughts.

They Squash Negative Self-Talk: A big, final step in managing stress involves stopping negative self-talk in its tracks. The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. When you find yourself believing the negative and pessimistic things your inner voice says, it’s time to stop and write them down. Literally stop what you’re doing and write down what you’re thinking. Once you’ve taken a moment to slow down the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear-headed in evaluating their veracity.