The Importance of Math in Elementary School

This week's article summary is Kindergarten Math is Often Too Basic, which bemoans the math curriculum in most schools.

As you read the article, note how different Trinity is in terms of what we teach in math, how we teach it, and what we expect of our students.

Even though we are not a standardized-test-drive school, our annual ERB results indicate strong student foundation in math skills and concepts.

Our overarching philosophy of teaching math is that conceptual understanding leads to automaticity and fluency, which is the opposite of most other schools that believe that skill and repetition will lead to conceptual understanding.

Activities like Number Talks, subitizing, and asking students to solve math problems in multiple ways help them see that math is fluid and multi-dimensional.

Thanks to the oversight and coordination of Jill and Kerry, Trinity’s math program from Early Learners through sixth grade enables our students to understand math at a deeper level.

With this strong foundation, they are truly set up to thrive in math after they leave Trinity!

Joe 

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Kindergarten may be math’s most important year — it lays the groundwork for understanding the relationship between number and quantity and helps develop number sense, and how numbers relate to each other.

But too often teachers spend that crucial year reinforcing basic information students may already know. Many kindergarteners learn early on how to count and recognize basic shapes — two areas that make up the majority of kindergarten math content. Though basic math content is crucial for students who begin school with little math knowledge, a growing body of research argues more comprehensive kindergarten math instruction that moves beyond counting could help more students become successful in math later on.

For a variety of reasons, kindergarten often misses the mark: math takes a backseat to literacy, teachers are often unprepared to teach it, and appropriate curriculum, if it exists at all, can be scattershot, overly repetitive — or both.

Deep thought is important, even in the earliest grades. Kindergarten math proficiency is especially predictive of future academic success. Students’ number competence in kindergarten — which includes the ability to understand number quantities, their relationships to each other, and the ability to join and separate sets of numbers, like 4 and 2 making 6 — presage mathematical achievement in later grades, with greater number competence leading to higher math achievement.

But the math content commonly found in kindergarten — such as counting the days on a calendar — is often embedded within a curriculum in which the teaching of mathematics is secondary to other learning goals. Learning experiences in which mathematics is a supplementary activity rather than the primary focus are less effective in building student math skills than if math is the main goal.

Breaking numbers apart and putting them back together and understanding how numbers relate to each other does more to help develop kindergarteners’ mathematical thinking than counting alone. Students should move from using concrete objects to model problems, to using representations of those objects and then to numbers in the abstract — like understanding that the number 3 is a symbol for three objects.

One reason for redundancy in kindergarten math may be that classrooms lack cohesive materials that progress students through skills in an orderly way. Only  36 percent of elementary schools use high-quality instructional materials.

Some worry that increasing time spent on academic subjects like math, and pushing kindergarten students beyond the basics of numbers and counting, will be viewed as unpleasant “work” that takes away from play-based learning and is just not appropriate for 5- and 6-year-olds, some of whom are still learning how to hold a pencil. Kindergarteners can be taught more advanced content and are ready to learn it. But it should be taught using practices shown to work for young children, including small group work, hands-on work with objects such as blocks that illustrate math concepts, and learning through play.

Mathematician John Mighton, the founder of the curriculum JUMP Math, said it’s a mistake to believe that evidence-based instructional practices must be laborious and dull to be effective. He has called on adults to think more like children to make more engaging math lessons.

“Children love repetition, exploring small variations on a theme and incrementally harder challenges much more than adults do,” he wrote — all practices supported by evidence to increase learning.

Simple lessons, when done well, can teach complex ideas and get children excited.

“People say kids don’t have the attention,” to learn more advanced concepts, he said, but he strongly believes that children have more math ability than adults give them credit for. Getting students working together, successfully tackling a series of challenges that build on each other, can create a kind of collective effervescence — a feeling of mutual energy and harmony that occurs when people work toward a common goal.

 

6 Ways to Capture Students' Attention

This week's article summary is 6 Ways to Capture Students' Attention.

During pre-planning, I talked about how students need to know they’re safe and cared for in the classroom. That’s why over the first few weeks of school teachers devote much time to setting class norms and routines. Once students become familiar with these practices, they can focus on school work and learning.

The challenge for teachers is that while there’s comfort for all of us in routine and predictability, our brains need periodic jump starts to maintain attention.

So, teachers have the seemingly contradictory challenge to be predictable on the one hand and unexpected on the other.

Just as we all find the sweet spot intersection of cherish/prepare and nurture/challenge, teachers must do the same for routine/novelty.

The article below provides some helpful hints to maintain and stimulate student attention within an organized, predictable, well-run classroom.

Most of us have utilized most or all of these techniques. Still, the article is a reminder that even though we have set up a classroom for learning with our patterns and routines, we need to ensure that we keep student on their toes so their focus and attention remain alert.

Joe

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The brain evolved to promote survival. 

Every second, millions of bits of sensory information from the receptors of the eyes, ears, internal organs, skin, and muscles make their way to the brain’s attention entry gate, but only about 1 percent of it enters consciousness. 

In the wild, an organism is well-served by an attention system that gives priority to things that are unexpected, changing, and different from the usual: Any perceived source of danger is prioritized. However, in the absence of threat, attention is directed to any changes in an animal’s or human’s environment. 

Although survival in the wild isn’t much of a priority for most humans today, our brains still attend to perceived threat and change. If students feel physically and psychologically unsafe in a school or a classroom, they’re less likely to focus their attention on the lesson. In the absence of perceived threat, our brains are particularly receptive to what’s new, curious, or unexpected. 

In school, the students’ brains are always attending… just not always on the topics we’re teaching! When students aren’t attentive to a lesson or a textbook, their brain isn’t giving priority entry to the teacher’s voice or words on the page, but to other more interesting or distracting sights, feelings, and thoughts.

In order to capitalize on the brain’s selectivity, here are six practical and proven attention-getters you can use at the start of a new unit or lesson.

SURPRISE STUDENTS: Since the brain is attracted to novelty, do something unusual or unexpected to arouse curiosity and open the brain’s attention filter. Examples: Wear something unique, bring in an unusual object, or play a song when students enter the room to promote curiosity, hence focus. Tell students that there’s a link between your clothes, the object, or the words in the song and something in the lesson. Invite them to guess what it is.

PRESENT ODD FACTS, ANOMALIES, OR DISCREPANT EVENTS: The brain is fundamentally a pattern-making organ. Constructing patterns enables humans to make sense of the world. However, when an established or expected pattern is broken, the brain is immediately aroused. Example: A science teacher blows up a balloon, then slowly pierces one end with a sharpened wooden cooking skewer. To the amazement of students, the teacher pushes the skewer through the opposite side of the balloon without bursting it.

INVITE STUDENTS’ PREDICTIONS: The ability to make sound predictions is fundamental to survival, and the brain rewards successful prediction through its release of dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to make predictions about the relationship of the curious sensory input or other novelty to the lesson. When this happens, students will seek information to help them make correct predictions and remain attentive as their brains seek to find out if their predictions are correct. Examples: In a science lesson for first graders, ask children to predict which objects will float and which will sink in a tub of water.

POSE A PROVOCATIVE (HOOK) QUESTION: A stimulating question can be an “itch” in students’ brains that they’ll want to scratch. Can what you eat prevent zits? Is aging a disease? What superpower would you want? The best hook questions are open-ended. They’re meant to stimulate thinking and discussion and to open the door to further exploration. Give students a reasonable amount of quiet thinking time before they answer. Have them do a quick write about their thoughts and/or engage in a think-pair-share with another student. After this personal engagement, learners are likely to be more attentive to your teaching on the related topic.

CITE A CURRENT EVENT OR ISSUE RELEVANT TO STUDENTS: Students often have opinions about current events or controversial issues in their school, town, state, etc., and these can be used to spark engagement. Example: For a unit on persuasive writing, a middle school teacher shows a newspaper article about a school board proposal in another district that would require students to wear uniforms. Students then discuss the pros and cons, state their position, and even switch sides to try to better understand different perspectives and develop rebuttals, all as an opening to the unit on persuasion.

USE HUMOR: Humor is a guaranteed dopamine booster and can serve as a great attention hook. Example: A sixth-grade mathematics teacher begins a unit on ratio and proportion by presenting funny caricatures of celebrities. She asks students to describe why the pictures are funny, and they note that various physical features (e.g., eyes, nose, ears, head) of the characters are greatly exaggerated. Then, the teacher shows da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to illustrate idealized proportions of the human body. 

HOOK AND HOLD ATTENTION: We recommend that you rotate your attention-getting techniques to avoid being predictable. The intent of using the techniques described above is to hook student attention, but the intent isn’t simply to gain immediate attention for the moment. The longer-term goal is to hold that attention over time. There are numerous ways to capitalize on initial attention by employing active-learning strategies, including the use of authentic tasks and projects, inquiry-oriented instruction, cooperative learning, Socratic seminars, simulations and role-plays, and design thinking (e.g., using makerspaces, where students can create tangible products), and allowing students appropriate “voice and choice” options in assignments and performance tasks.

Do the President's Executive Orders for Schools Have Any Impact on Trinity?

This week's article summary is today's lead story in Education Week's daily update: What's in Trump's New Executive Orders on Indoctrination and School Choice.

I felt that this article was a perfect springboard for reminding us how little local, state, and federal governments influence Trinity.

 

First and most important, Trinity is an private-independent school. 

 

As such, we do not take any funds from any government, including the federal government. Why? Because once a school begins accepting funds from any government program, agency, or department, that school will have to follow government stipulations, which often includes required standardized testing.

 

We do obey government health and safety laws, regulations, and guidelines, but all other aspects our school operations are based on our compliance with SAIS standards and best practices for private-independent schools. 

 

So, by being private and independent, we get to a) choose the students we best serve, b) how and what we teach, and c) the ways we measure the progress and learning of our students.

 

So the big take-away from reading the article below is Trinity does not need to worry about any presidential executive order.

 

As I have only worked in private-independent schools, I accept the bias I have for how we operate and function—think, for example, how independent schools were able to deal with the Covid pandemic.  Yet even with my bias, I firmly believe that educational matters should be left to the experts (we teachers), not local, state, or federal politicians.

 

In particular, Trump’s recent executive order wants to eliminate ‘radical indoctrination’ around issues of diversity, including race and gender identity. 

 

You can read in the article the specific details about how the order defines these issues, but what’s most important to me is how Trinity deals with diversity.

 

First,  as a mission-driven school, Trinity is about inclusion. We can’t properly serve all of our applicants and occasionally need to counsel out some students for academic or behavioral reasons, yet we are a school that celebrates the individuality of all members of our community – race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, etc. One of our stated goals/outcomes is to develop in our students a strong, confident sense of self.

 

Equally importantly, we help our students develop and demonstrate care and concern for others. We guide our students to welcome and include others, to see how others are similar and different from them, to learn to work cooperatively with others.

 

In age-appropriate ways befitting an elementary school, we explore topics and issues thatt the executive order brands as controversial. While we often make abstract concepts concrete and tangible for our students, they begin to see that the world is complex and  imperfect, particularly around areas of diversity. 

 

With such a polarized culture outside of schools, it takes courage to teach today.

 

While it may seem that all schools are being attacked and challenged, rest assured Trinity will continue to do what’s right for our students, as we have always done!

 

Joe

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In the 10 days since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, he has set a dizzying pace for his second term and is endeavoring to make his mark on the nation’s schools, despite laws limiting the federal government’s K-12 reach.

His most direct efforts to dive into education came Wednesday, when the president issued two executive orders, directing federal agencies to determine how to expand school choice and develop a strategy to end what he considers ’radical indoctrination’ in schools. 

Both orders put federal dollars on the line to hammer home his agenda. With existing law, though, the White House has no bearing on curriculum, and no unilateral ability to pull back funding from individual schools or federal education programs.

Regardless, the administration is moving aggressively in ways that differ from Trump’s first term, said Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina who specializes in constitutional law and public education.

“This seems like a situation in which they know they don’t have the power, but they seem to be more aggressive, and trying to push power where they may very well not have,” he said.

“Part of what we have, to be honest, are executive orders that are putting what would normally be private conversations on public display; there’s a certain amount of shock and awe to that, because you just don’t normally do that,” Black said.

Here’s a closer look at these two executive orders, and their implications.

What does this order do?

It mandates that administration official develop plans to eliminate federal funds or schools that Trump says indoctrinate kids based on “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.” 

The order also reinstates Trump’s 1776 Commission, which the president created in his first term to promote “patriotic education,” but was disbanded by former President Joe Biden.

What does Trump consider “radical indoctrination,” and is it happening in schools?

Trump’s executive order identifies “discriminatory equity ideology” and “gender ideology” as two examples of “indoctrination” happening in schools.

The order defines “discriminatory equity ideology” as “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” Examples of this, according to the order, would be saying that members of a race, color, sex, or national origin are morally or inherently superior, while another is “racist, sexist, or oppressive.”

Citing an executive order from Trump’s first day in office that made  federal policy to recognize only two sexes, it defines gender ideology as replacing “the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.” It asserts that students are being “made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.

Though Trump and other Republicans—in state legislatures, in school board meetings, and in the Capitol—have repeatedly alleged that schools are using critical race theory to indoctrinate students to believe the United States is a racist nation, there’s little evidence this is happening on a wide scale.

An EDWeek Research Center Survey found in 2021 that just 8 percent of teachers said they had taught or even discussed critical race theory with their K-12 students. A study released this month found that high school students confirm that most schools aren’t teaching a one-sided portrayal of the nation’s politics and history, and that their teachers grapple with how to discuss controversial topics in class. And a sweeping report last year from the American Historical Association found teachers mostly said they try to develop students’ historical thinking skills—teaching them how to think, not what to think.

Meanwhile, roughly 3 percent of high school students identify as transgender, and 2 percent are questioning their gender identity, and these students face high rates of bullying and symptoms of depression. Researchers and advocates say schools are a vital piece of the puzzle for improving those mental health outcomes and supporting students.

Does this order immediately cut funding to schools?

No, this order does not immediately cut funding. It directs several federal agencies—the Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services departments—to develop a strategy with recommendations and a plan for eliminating federal funding to schools that are “discriminatory” based on its definition of “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.”

Over the next three months, agencies must identify funding sources and streams, including grants and contracts, that go toward K-12 curriculum, instruction, and activities, as well as teacher education, certification, and training that support what the administration considers indoctrination and social transitioning. The agencies must then identify a process to prevent the distribution of rescind awards for those funds.

The Education Department, its secretary, and the federal government have no authority over curriculum matters. Within the last decade, Congress tightened up this very language to make clear that the states are fully in control of curriculum and academic standards, Black said.

What does the order do?

The executive order directs a number of federal agencies to look into their ability to use funds they oversee to allow families to attend private schools--including religious schools—and charter schools. Under the order, agency heads have to report back in the coming months on the options they have for doing that and their plans for implementing those options for families starting next fall.

 

Boys Need Strong Relationships with Their Teachers to Thrive

This week's article summary is Boys Want a Strong Relationship with Their Teachers.

From my teachers point of view, I was a decent student: worked hard enough (more to keep up rather to excel), typically paid attention in class, wasn’t overly disruptive, and displayed appropriate respect for my teachers.

While I got along well with most of my teachers, there were some I didn’t like -- those that didn’t seem to notice or understand me. Consequently I didn’t demonstrate the above behaviors in their classes. I was more surly, distractible, and unmotivated. Not surprisingly, I didn’t do well in their classes.

I blamed those teachers for my poor performance, and they most likely thought I was a lost cause as a student.

The article below confirms what I’ve mentioned in many faculty meetings: to excel, students need strong relationships with their teachers and classrooms of care, trust, routines, and high expectations.

The challenge for many teachers is that it is easier to have a better relationship with organized, well-behaved, obedient children.

And, as most girl students fall into this category, a lot of teachers prefer them to boys, who can be more of a burden in the classroom.

As the article further explores, teachers often believe the stereotype that the typical male student is a ‘feral beast that needs to be controlled.’

A blindspot for many teachers is that boys are less educable and less motivated to learn than girls.

The advice from the article is that teachers need to understand that all their students are relationship-based. Teachers often need to work extra hard to connect and relate to their male students.

As some boys also may fall into the trap of acting like the negative stereotype of them as students, teachers have to keep trying to reach them and inspire them to focus on learning, not on being the class clown.

In my case as a student, it’s the chicken or egg conundrum: did some of my teachers assume I was a hopeless case as a male student or did I come onto their class with an attitude?

The article lists a number of ways for teachers to strengthen their relationships with students.

Yes, boys and girls typically act differently in class and it’s often easier to prefer girls and their meticulousness and politeness in the classroom, But boys, even those who act out and appear indifferent to learning, need to be seen, understood, and believed in by their teacher(s) if they are to thrive academically.

Joe

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For 17-year-old Warren Coates, a teacher who’s taken the time to build a relationship with him is highly motivating. “When there’s a teacher that I have a relationship with, I—100 percent—try harder in class,” said Warren, a senior at Smyrna High School in central Delaware.

More than a dozen other boys interviewed by Education Week also strongly agreed that their performance in class depended on their relationship with the teacher. So, too, did over 1,000 male middle and high school students from six countries, including the United States, and various backgrounds who participated in a study on the subject.

Despite the well-established body of research on the importance of student-teacher relationships, there has been less focus on how boys, specifically, relate to their teachers, who are predominately female. The overwhelming affirmation from boys that positive relationships with teachers matter to their academic motivation and success has come as a surprise to some—even those who study boys for a living.

“Why didn’t we know that boys were so clear that they need that relationship with their teachers?” asked Michael C. Reichert, co-author of the aforementioned study and executive director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania. 

The answer is somewhat complicated. But it’s worth examining as it’s the first step toward breaking down barriers to establishing these connections—which, ultimately, prove beneficial to both students and teachers.

After all, boys on a whole are not reaching their full potential in school, data show. Stronger relationships with their teachers could be key to their success.

In order to build strong relationships, though, teachers first must recognize boys’ need to connect.

“The reason we’re surprised to find that boys are relational learners is the fog of stereotypes: We expect boys to be the independent, non-relational creatures that stereotypes would paint them as,” said Reichert, “And of course they’re not.”

Boys are expected to act emotionally stoic and physically tough, said Yvonne Skipper, a lecturer at University of Glasgow’s school of education whose research findings suggest that adolescent boys feel extreme pressure to conform to gender stereotypes.

An EdWeek Research Center survey of a nationally representative sample of K-12 teachers found that teachers generally consider boys to be less motivated than girls by a wide range of factors, including a desire to please the teacher.

“Many of my male students seem to dislike school,” one survey respondent wrote. Another said that girls “have time and again proved to me to be superior leaders, more motivated, and dedicated than many of their male counterparts.”

When teachers harbor stereotypes or negative perceptions of the boys in their classes, they may be less likely to develop positive relationships with those students, said Reichert.

“We get pushback from teachers because many have always regarded boys as feral beasts that need to be dominated and controlled,” Reichert said.

He suggests this perception is in part to blame for the disproportionately high discipline rates among boys, which begin in preschool and continue through high school.

Establishing and maintaining positive relationships with students takes work, especially when boys appear to resist teachers’ efforts to connect. But certain teacher behaviors can inspire even seemingly disengaged male students to engage in learning.

Reichert named eight best practices for teachers to build strong relationships with students, especially boys:

• Reach out often
• Demonstrate mastery of their subjects
• Maintain high standards
• Engage with a student’s personal interest or talent
• Find a common interest
• Point out a common characteristic with a student
• Respond to defiance with restraint
• Be vulnerable about their own learning challenges

Despite teachers’ best efforts, boys may not always respond to these gestures, Reichert said. But he urges teachers to maintain the role of relationship manager with students—regulating their own emotional reactions and maintaining their commitment to reaching boys by continuing to invite them to be partners in learning.

Brandon Mollett, academic dean at Boys’ Latin School of Maryland, an all-boys K-12 private school in Baltimore, agrees. “You can’t bring frustration, you can’t bring disappointment and emotional aspects to your work when you’re a teacher,” he said. “You have these emotions, because it’s an emotional profession. But as a professional you have to do your best to manage that, and to see the best in each one of these students.”

Male teachers, especially those who teach elementary students, tend to see strong student relationships as an important part of their profession. In a 2021 study that surveyed male elementary school teachers, respondents overwhelmingly reported that relationships with their students were central to their work

But teachers needn’t be the same gender or race as their students to form strong bonds, insists Reichert. Any teacher can connect with boys. “When teachers are encouraged to see the good in kids, and when you provide a complementary system where there’s more parts that are positive than negative, you build trust. And relationships are founded on trust,” he said. “I think that’s often a missing piece at schools.”

 

The Most Important Education Studies of 2024

This week's article summary is The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2024.

Every year the website Edutopia posts an article on the most impactful educational studies of the past year.

While some of these research studies debunk long-held educational beliefs (the subject of a recent summary), the majority of the studies affirm long-held best practices in the classrooms.

Below you’ll see validation of the following:

• While teachers want to challenge and push students, their students must experience concrete success in the classroom in order to maintain their confidence and engagement. For most of us, our confidence in learning new material is fragile.
• Spending time in class explaining how and why students answered incorrectly on assignments helps students better learn classroom content. This is further proof that most of us prefer to think concretely, not abstractly.
• AI helps students complete school work but thus far does not help students learn new material. As AI continues to evolve, teachers will need to figure out how to use it as a tool for their students yet ensure it’s not a crutch to avoid doing school work.
• Inattention contagion in a classroom is a real danger for any teacher. Keeping the inevitable class clown in check is vital!
• The Science of Reading is taking hold in more and more elementary school classrooms, but that shouldn’t squeeze out teachers bringing to life the magic and excitement of literacy. We all benefit from being read to and reading complete novels.

Joe

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A Simple Tactic for Warm Demanders: We tend to measure academic success by the big wins: Passing a test with flying colors, for example, or earning top grades in a demanding course. But it’s the small wins that motivate students to keep going amid the inevitable academic struggles. Third and sixth graders were given 10 difficult math problems to solve, with half receiving an additional five problems that were appreciably easier—allowing students to experience a few bouts of success through the tangle of tough questions. Despite grappling with the same number of difficult problems, the students who were also given a handful of easy ones were twice as likely to look forward to solving another set of challenging problems. They were also twice as likely to rate the activity as enjoyable.

Winning the Battle For Student Attention: Researchers recruited students and gave them a special mission: Take their assigned seats in a lecture hall and quietly sabotage the attention of classmates by slouching, looking bored, and failing to take notes. Like dominoes, students sitting next to malingerers began to lose focus—formerly attentive students struggled to pay attention, wrote about half as many pages of notes, and scored nine points lower on a follow-up quiz. “Inattention contagion,” the researchers explained, “is an ecologically valid phenomenon” and “may be particularly contagious” when students are seated next to inattentive peers. Not every lesson lights up the room—there will be boredom. Your best chance to keep misbehavior and inattention at bay starts with thoughtful preparation: Make students accountable by co-creating classroom norms, set up clear classroom rules for transitions, audit your lesson instructions for clarity, design, and consider strategic placement of chatty or daydreamy kids to keep everyone on task.

AI Vaporizes Long-Term Learning: Proponents of AI chatbots in educational settings say the tools can assist in activities like brainstorming—or help students get started on tough math problems. But many teachers say their students lack the skills to improve upon what AI produces, or the maturity and self-awareness to know where the work of AI ends and their own responsibility begins. In a study, ninth, 10th, and 11th graders attended a brief math lesson, then practiced solving related problems in preparation for a quiz. Some students relied on traditional methods—sifting through their notes and textbooks to find possible answers—while others had access to a basic version of ChatGPT. Students using the basic and tutor GPTs scored higher on quizzes but when later asked to  retrieve the information their scores significantly dropped.

Take Your Students Outside: Schools have gradually reduced the amount of time students spend outside, As a result, today’s young scientists-in-training may learn about molting earthworms or flower pollination without ever studying the organisms in the wild. But outdoor activities like nature journaling—drawing trees and jotting down observations as they shed leaves, keeping a “moon journal” to track lunar phases are cost-effective antidotes to our estrangement from nature, and can be aligned with state standards in subjects as diverse as art, science, social studies, and English.

Learning to Love Academic Mistakes: Nobody likes making mistakes; students often come to fear them. But when teachers is a recent study spent time focusing on their students’ mathematical errors and engaging in collaborative discussions about common mistakes of logic or computation, teaching efficacy improved dramatically. Researchers observed hundreds of eighth graders studying for a high-stakes algebra exam. Some students prepared for the big test by attending eight sessions of explicit math instruction; others spent the same amount of time in teacher-led sessions devoted to learning from answers students got wrong. While both groups of students improved their final exam scores by about the same amount, teachers in the “learning from errors” group had invested only half the time. What made learning from errors so effective? Researchers hypothesized that teachers who dove “into the nature” of errors and worked collaboratively with students to determine “how to avert them in future” reaped the benefits of more student engagement and personal relevance.  Embracing mistakes alters the climate of the classroom, deepens relationships, and improves student motivation.

Covid’s Long Tail: Years after the pandemic’s peak, nearly 80 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers reported that newly arriving students were performing worse than their pre-pandemic peers, and faced steep deficits in emotional regulation and literacy. For early childhood teachers, that could mean more focus on classroom routines and student self-regulation.

A Modest Mental Health Turnaround: For nearly a decade, the erosion of teen mental health showed no signs of slowing. As the years ticked by, more and more students struggled with despair, turbulent thoughts, and suicide—enough to force the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare a national emergency. But the latest CDC data suggests that we may finally be reaching a turning point. After a prolonged rise in the percentage of students feeling persistently sad or hopeless—peaking at 42 percent in 2021, that number modestly ticked back down to 40 percent in 2023.

The ‘Science of Reading’ Meets Real Children: Foundational reading skills like phonemic awareness play a crucial role in helping students learn how to read, but not every child needs the same amount of help. A recent study discovered an “optimal cumulative dosage” of 10.2 hours, a finding that held for students at risk for reading disabilities, while cautioning that “our findings should not be used to dictate an oversimplified prescription regarding dosage.” More isn’t always better—and overemphasizing parts of any reading program can result in a suboptimal allocation of time for promoting reading achievement. “The science of reading is not settled,” the prominent scholars of literacy Robert Tierney and P. David Pearson wrote in a recent report, noting that “phonics-first approaches were lively and controversial matters” as far back as the 1960s. In the decades since, claims of a reading crisis have routinely surfaced in an effort to “justify a purging of past practices.” But phonics is just one crucial piece of the reading puzzle—which must eventually be applied to authentic reading materials such as books and short stories, as “a regular part of the reading diet” that involves more advanced skills like comprehension, prediction, vocabulary, and sustained attention. 

 

People Are Nicer Than We Think

This week's article summary discusses recommendations from the book Humankind: A Hopeful History.

The book’s premise is that most of us have the pessimistic view that humans are innately greedy and selfish.

I remember being a college freshman in Government 101 discussing one particular sentence from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “The life of man is nasty, brutish, and short.” After having read in middle and high school Machiavelli’s The Prince and Goldings’ Lord of the Flies, I had developed a pretty dim view of human nature: given the chance, we humans will resort to selfishness, run amok, and break any rule/law that doesn’t benefit us. Think of the popular series Yellowjackets – take away civilization and law and order, and anarchy and violence reigns, even with a high school soccer team. Or as author Jack London concluded, civilization keeps us from living under the law of club and fang.

While it’s more of an academic, philosophical debate about whether people are innately good or evil, the problem is many of us carry this negative view into our real world interactions with others. We assume others are out to take advantage of us and are motivated by greed. Our only chance to survive is to be equally selfish.

Humankind: A Hopeful History - along with Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - provides evidence and examples that humans are not genetically predisposed to be cruel and selfish. Rather by nature we are kind, cooperative, and compassionate. At the end of the book, the author Rutger Bregman lists 10 things we can do to avoid being cynical and distrusting of others. These 10 things are the subject of the article below.

So as we settle back into the routine of school and try to hold on to our New Year’s resolutions, let’s follow the advice of Rutger Bregman and see the world through a more positive and optimistic lens!

Joe

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In the epilogue of his book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman gives advice on how to apply his thesis – that humans are basically good – in a world that embraces the opposite view.

“For ages,” he says, “we’ve assumed that people are selfish, that we’re beasts, or worse. For ages, we’ve believed civilization is a flimsy veneer that will crack at the merest provocation.” He argues that this is simply not true – including in a chapter on the true story that contradicts Lord of the Flies: when 14 teenage boys were stranded on an island in the middle of the Pacific, they cooperated, solved problems, and were healthy and happy when they were rescued 16 months later.

Bregman’s advice for pushing back against the negative narrative:

When in doubt, assume the best: Communication is tricky, he says. “You say something that gets taken the wrong way, or someone looks at you funny, or nasty comments get passed through the grapevine.” Negativity bias kicks in, and you assume the worst. Far better, says Bregman, and far more realistic, is to give people the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time, this pays off.

Think in win-win scenarios: Many companies, schools, and other institutions are organized around the idea that it’s in our nature to be locked in win-lose competition. “In truth,” says Bregman, “this works precisely the other way around. The best deals are those where everybody wins.” Doing good is not only good, but it feels good because of the way we’re built.

Ask more questions: The Golden Rule comes in two flavors, says Bregman: the positive injunction (Treat others as you wish to be treated) and the negative (Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you). But both versions fall short, he believes, because we’re not that skilled at empathy – sensing what other people want – and making assumptions robs others of their voice. It’s better to ask them, listen carefully, and be guided by what they say.

Temper your empathy, train your compassion: What Bregman calls the Platinum Rule calls for compassion versus empathy. What’s the difference? Empathy is feeling with people who are suffering – I feel your pain – putting yourself in their shoes. The problem is that it’s exhausting and unproductive. Compassion is feeling for others, recognizing their distress, and then deciding how to help. “Unlike empathy, compassion doesn’t sap our energy,” says Bregman. “That’s because compassion is simultaneously more controlled, remote, and constructive. It’s not about sharing another person’s distress, but it does help you to recognize it and then act.”

Try to understand the other, even if you don’t get where they’re coming from: “When we use our intellect to try to understand someone,” says Bregman, “this activates the prefrontal cortex, an area located just behind the forehead that’s exceptionally large in humans.” Yes, people have foibles and rational analysis doesn’t always work, especially when we don’t see eye to eye with someone. But using our intellect mostly works better than relying on our gut. “Understanding the other at a rational level is a skill,” he says. “It’s a muscle we can train.”

Love your own as others love their own: “Humans are limited creatures,” says Bregman. “We care more about those who are like us, who share the same language or appearance or background… Distance lets us rant at strangers on the Internet. Distance helps soldiers bypass their aversion to violence… As humans, we differentiate. We play favorites and care more about our own. That’s nothing to be ashamed of – it makes us human. But we must also understand that those others, those distant strangers, also have families they love. That they are every bit as human as we are.”

Avoid TV news and social media: They are the biggest sources of distance among people, says Bregman, skewing our view of the world by generalizing people into groups and zooming in on the bad apples with the media’s negativity bias and manipulative algorithms. His rule of thumb: steer clear of television news and push notifications and read a more-nuanced Sunday newspaper and in-depth feature writing. “Disengage from your screen and meet real people in the flesh,” he says. “Think as carefully about what information you feed your mind as you do about the food you feed your body.”

Don’t punch people you disagree with: It may feel good to lash out at bigotry, says Bregman, or lapse into cynicism: “What’s the point of recycling, paying taxes, and donating to charities when others shirk their duty? If you’re tempted by such thoughts, remember that cynicism is just another word for laziness. It’s an excuse not to take responsibility.”

Don’t be ashamed to do good: “To extend that hand you need one thing above all,” says Bregman. “Courage. Because you may well be branded a bleeding heart or a show-off.” It feels safer to keep a low profile and make excuses or fabricate selfish motives: Just keeping busy. I didn’t need the money anyway. It will look good on my résumé. But this approach isn’t helpful, he believes: “When you disguise yourself as a egotist, you reinforce other people’s cynical assumptions about human nature. Worse, by cloaking your good deeds, you place them in quarantine, where they can’t serve as an example for others.

Be realistic: Bregman hopes his book has changed the meaning of that word. He believes a realistic view of humankind is that “people are deeply inclined to be good to one another.” His closing exhortation: “Be realistic. Be courageous. Be true to your nature and offer your trust. Do good in broad daylight, and don’t be ashamed of your generosity. You may be dismissed as gullible and naive at first. But remember, what’s naïve today may be common sense tomorrow. It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.” 

Zombie Learning Theories

This week's article summary is Attack of the Zombie Learning Theories.

Every year there are a number of education articles published that debunk ideas about the process of learning that nevertheless remain popular with many teachers.

The most important take-away from these articles is everyone learns the same way -- meaning new information getting stored in long-term memory and being readily available to recall and use.

New information presented to us (optimally via many senses) first needs to connect (be encoded) with prior knowledge to have any chance of sticking in our brain. Then, in order to be permanently placed in long-term memory, this new information must be retrieved from our brain many times, ideally in spaced out time periods. (This is why cramming the night before a big test rarely works.) Without retrieval practice, our brain rejects this new information which then gets dumped when we sleep.

While the human brain has different sections that serve different purposes, e.g., our prefrontal cortex is where executive function skills are located, our entire brain works in unison all the time (much like the different parts of a car engine), which is why multi-sensory presentation of new information is advantageous for learning as it stimulates more than one section of our brain.

While we live in an age of distraction, multitasking remains an ineffective way to work and learn. We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we can multi-task, but that usually involves one chore that’s in our muscle memory, like driving or exercising.

Check to see which if any of the Zombie Theories below you may have thought are valid.

Joe

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You probably know that zombies have a fondness for brains. What you may not know is that zombies also like theories about how the brain works. Zombie Learning Theories are ideas about how we learn that have been killed (i.e., thoroughly debunked by research), yet still roam our classrooms. These misconceptions make it harder for students to learn since they counteract the reality of the learning process.

Let’s meet some of the most common learning zombies so we can recognize them for what they are when they appear.  

Zombie #1: Learning Styles: Have you ever heard someone say they’re a kinesthetic or auditory learner? That’s this zombie at work. While the theory that students have specific learning styles has long been debunked, it still haunts many classrooms and lecture halls. It’s true that we have individual preferences for learning activities, but our brains are not wired differently to learn better from one style or another. Even education researcher Howard Gardner (whose theory of multiple intelligences contributed to the creation of this zombie) has stated that grouping students by learning styles is not a helpful practice.

Zombie #2: Left Brain vs. Right Brain: This zombie says that we have two sides of our brain, and one is more dominant. Those who use the right side of their brain are more creative, while those who use the left side of their brain are more analytical. A related zombie theory is that we only use 10 percent of our brains. None of this matches up with neuroscience. Humans use 100 percent of their brains all the time. And, while each part of the brain does play a different role, our level of creativity or analytical thinking are not determined by this division of labor. Whether you’re an artist or an engineer (or a little bit of both), your brain will look and behave very much the same. And if you want to develop creative or analytical thinking skills, practice is likely the key!  

Zombie #3: Fill Your Brain: This zombie says that our brain is like an empty bucket you have to fill with information. It uses words like “put this into your brain” or sometimes compares the brain to a hard drive or filing cabinet where you store things. The truth is that the brain doesn’t work like a storage container where you drop bits of information. Instead, our knowledge grows by making connections to things we already know. A better analogy might be to compare the brain to a strip of velcro where new things stick if they have enough hooks to build a connection.  

Zombie #4: 10,000 Hour Rule: This zombie says that if you practice something for 10,000 hours, you will become an expert at it. Malcolm Gladwell generalized this number in his book Outliers, and the zombie was born. In reality, there’s no hourly threshold where practice automatically confers expertise. While practice is certainly important, it’s effective practice that matters most. If you spend 10,000 or even 10 hours practicing the wrong skills, it will not lead you to become an expert.   

Zombie #5: Intense Specialization Is Required for Expertise: This zombie says that you develop expertise by focusing on one skill for as long as possible. It seems intuitive enough; spending more time, with less distraction, on one thing should certainly give you a leg up. But this zombie is friends with the Gladwell zombie, and both of them need to be put to rest. It’s true that sometimes people who hyperfocus on one skill become recognized experts in that area. But more often than not, it’s those who have generalized and explored a variety of interests who rise to the top. Developing a range of skills and knowledge is what allows us to innovate, pivot when needed, and find overall success, even in highly specialized fields.  

Zombie #6: Multitasking: This zombie often brags about its ability to focus on multiple tasks at once–something it calls multitasking. However, this zombie theory has been dead for a long time. In short, human brains are not able to focus on multiple things at one time. What is actually happening is that our brain is quickly switching from one task to another, but still only focusing on one of them at any given moment. And there’s a real productivity cost with each of the “switches” that makes it harder for our brains to provide focus and attention to any one of the tasks. From a productivity standpoint, it is far better to focus on one activity for a longer amount of time and reduce the amount of switching between activities that our brains have to do.  

Zombie #7: Boys and Girls Excel at Learning Different Things: This zombie insists that boys are naturally able to learn certain things more easily than girls and vice versa. In reality, brain development is attributed to environmental and social influences. So, while not accurate from a physiological standpoint, this zombie theory often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we think boys can’t learn something as well as girls (and therefore don’t expect them to be able to), in the long run their abilities may be reduced. But not because of any cognitive deficiency. Cultural assumptions and practices surrounding boys vs. girls have been shown to have a larger impact on learning than physiology itself. 

Zombie #8: Experts Make the Best Teachers: This zombie says that the greatest experts are naturally the best choice for teaching novices. Unfortunately, research shows that individuals who have developed extensive expertise in a subject over many years may be so removed from their novice days that they struggle to recall the challenges a new learner might experience. In addition, deep experts with a natural gift for a skill or domain may be unable to relate to ever feeling challenged if a skill came to them naturally. Expertise is important in teaching, but someone who has recently attained a skill might actually be more effective at teaching a novice than someone who mastered it long ago. Long-time expert teachers should consider pairing up with more recent learners to understand best approaches for teaching concepts.  

Zombie #9: Recalling What We’ve Learned Is Easy: Intelligence requires being able to recall the information we need at the right time. But this zombie fools us into believing that everything we’ve ever learned is ready and waiting for us to retrieve. This, unfortunately, isn’t the case. Our brains remember far more than we often give them credit for. (Think how an old photo or a particular smell can bring back very detailed but long “forgotten” memories that weren’t actually forgotten at all.) But retrieving the substance of something we’ve learned is a difficult task for the human brain. Retrieval of knowledge requires deliberate practice. As we think about teaching, we may need to balance the amount of time we spend presenting new information with the amount of time we help students develop strategies for retrieving the key information they’ve learned when and where they need it.