The Benefits of Applied Math

This week's article summary is Applied Math Education Can Make Americans More Numerically Literate, and it’s written by a college science professor who bemoans her students lack of mathematical confidence and reasoning skills.

It’s a follow-up to a recent summary on the importance of math in elementary school.

Her worries extend beyond her classroom: due to math illiteracy, many adults are ignorant about personal finances and blindly believe politicians and others who spout exaggerated statistics without providing any evidence.

She encourages elementary schools to do a better job teaching math, including real-life applications so kids can see the connections between math and real-life.

As mentioned in the earlier summary, Trinity is in the vanguard of enhanced math instruction in elementary school. Over the past number of years, we’ve all seen our students and teachers gain much more confidence and comfort in math.

Joe

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As American elementary schoolchildren head back to school, one subject just might be the most dreaded of all—mathematics. 

A distaste for arithmetic, calculations, and numbers in general starts young in America, where it's socially acceptable to claim to "hate math" or simply "be bad with numbers." 

By the time U.S. students hit middle school, our educational system has already failed them. American 15-year-olds score far below their peers from other countries in mathematical literacy. 

I will meet many of these students a few years later in my college classroom, where they will react with dismay at encountering calculus-based modeling in biology class, a subject which, in their prior experience, was virtually a math-free zone. While math is a key tool of modern biology—allowing us to predict how diseases spread or calculate the sustainability of our food supply—it's usually avoided in introductory classes, where it's viewed as "too complicated.” 

The American educational system is failing to prepare its citizens to face mathematical challenges with confidence.

This "math anxiety" has serious social and political consequences. 

In personal finance, Americans typically struggle to scale expenditures with income. 

More dangerously, innumerate people may become data-avoidant, assessing risk and quality of arguments based on "gut feelings" rather than numerical facts.

In contrast, math and statistics classes provide us with the logic frameworks we need to assess risk and link the magnitudes of cause and effect, making us better decision makers. There's still a role for experts and pundits, who help us make sense of a complex world. But as an American voting public, we should strive for better mathematical reasoning skills to supplement these expert analyses.

Educators have shown that it's possible to build strong math skills from Day 1 by investing more time on mathematical reasoning in our elementary school classrooms. 

And for those who remember math as boring or recall struggling to learn something wholly disconnected from daily life, there's a solution—applied math, which grounds math concepts in real-world examples.

These examples can start early. When our research team visits second-grade classrooms, we use "helpful" and "harmful" relationships between animals and humans to introduce number lines with positive and negative values. 

Similarly, elementary school educators have shown time and again that music lessons improve student math scores by introducing students to this note-based arithmetic. The same concepts apply for little girls curious about engineering and little boys helping parents measure ingredients in the kitchen.

Even after we've left the classroom, let's challenge ourselves to stop flinching away from numbers or blindly trusting (or mistrusting) those reciting them. When hearing a number or statistic, let's adopt a "stop and study" approach, asking what's being argued, by whom, using what rationale. 

Mathematical reasoning gives us a core, common set of facts that we can interpret together. By building math skills—in the classroom and in adulthood—we can be part of an American public that prides itself in mathematical exceptionalism, not mathematical avoidance.

 

Explicitly Teaching Reading Comprehension

This week's article summary is Reading Comprehension Loses Out in the Classroom, and it's a follow up to last week's summary.

When I taught middle school humanities (language arts and history/social), one of my principal academic objective was to get my students to form, substantiate, and express (orally and in writing) their opinions.

For most humanities teachers the vehicles used to accomplish the above goals are reading novels, short stories, textbooks, and primary sources. Usually teachers ask their students to complete their reading assignments at home, and then the classroom is used to assess, deepen, and expand their understanding of the material they read.

I always thought that through class discussions I could assess if my students were successfully comprehending their reading assignments. But, as you’ll see in the article below, I should have included more direct reading in my classroom.

Reading comprehension has remained an elusive goal in education. We know how important it is but struggle teaching and assessing it.

It’s critical to learn to decode words, develop an extensive vocabulary, and possess extensive background knowledge. Yet these skills don’t necessarily mean a student is effective at reading comprehension.

The article below recommends more direct reading in class – both by students themselves and from read alouds from their teachers. Thid should be followed from a class discussion of open-ended questions.

As I read the article, I kept thinking of two questions to repeatedly ask students about what they’re reading: What is the reading selection telling you? How do you know this?

Classroom reading is a staple of most elementary school teachers’ pedagogy. Yet, in addition to being entertaining for children, classroom reading is also a great opportunity to see if they are developing reading comprehension skills.

Joe

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Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didn’t.

Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Although the research on reading comprehension continues, there’s evidence for a collection of teaching approaches, from building vocabulary and background knowledge to leading classroom discussions and encouraging children to check for understanding as they read. 

This should mean substantial progress toward fixing a problem that was identified decades ago. But hardly any of these evidence-based practices have filtered into the classroom.

“It’s a little bit discouraging,” said Philip Capin of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. “What we often see in classrooms is devoid of high-quality strategy instruction or knowledge-building instruction.

Capin is referring to a host of comprehension strategies, such as checking yourself for understanding after reading a paragraph, identifying the author’s main point, or summarizing what you have just read.

Teachers spend limited time reading texts with children. The dearth of reading is especially pronounced in science classes where teachers tended to prefer PowerPoint slides over texts. More time is spent on reading comprehension instruction in reading or English class, but it was still just 23 percent of instructional time. Still, that is a big improvement over the original 1978 study, which documented that only 1 percent of instructional time was spent on reading comprehension.

A survey of middle school teachers published in 2021 echoes these observational findings that very little reading is taking place in classrooms. Seventy percent of science teachers said they spent less than 6 minutes on texts a day, or less than 30 minutes a week. Only 50 percent of social studies teachers said they spent more time reading in classrooms.

Capin said his team found that reading instruction was more focused on word reading skills, what educators call “decoding.” Researchers noticed that teachers were also building students’ knowledge, especially in science and social studies classes. But this knowledge building was mostly divorced from engaging students in text comprehension. 

Classroom researchers observed “low-level” reading instruction in which a teacher asks a question and students respond with a one-word answer. Teachers tended to confirm whether student responses were “right” or “wrong.” Capin said that only 18 percent of teacher responses elaborated on or developed students’ ideas. 

Capin said teachers tended to lecture rather than encourage students to talk about what they understand or think. Teachers often read the text aloud, asked a question and then answered the question themselves when students didn’t answer it correctly. He said that leading a discussion might help students better understand the text. 

Capin said teachers also often ask generic comprehension questions, such as “What is the main point?” without considering whether the questions are appropriate for the reading passage at hand. For example, in fiction, the author’s main point is not nearly as important as identifying the main characters and their goals.

Some teachers are leading reading discussions in their classrooms. Capin said he visited one such classroom a few weeks ago. But he thinks good comprehension instruction isn’t commonplace because it’s much harder than teaching foundational reading skills. Teachers have to fill in gaps in students’ skills and background knowledge so that everyone can engage. Teacher training programs don’t put enough emphasis on evidence-based methods, and researchers aren’t good at telling educators about these methods.

Interest in the science of reading has been exploding around the country over the past five years, especially since a podcast, “Sold a Story,” highlighted the need for more phonics instruction. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another 50 years for comprehension to get better.

 

Rethinking Reading

This week's article summary is Rethinking Reading.

As you’ll see, more and more elementary schools are implementing Science of Reading curricula, e.g., Fundations, with their specific focus on strengthening word reading.

As we all know intuitively and through experience, strengthening student reading comprehension goes far beyond the ability to break down and read individual words. Quoting the article, ‘reading comprehension is one of the most complex activities, and our ability to do so is dependent upon a wide range of knowledge and skills.’

A recent research study from an earlier summary notes that ‘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.’

The five components of reading (phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension) can erroneously be considered and taught as independent skills rather than in an integrated fashion befitting the complexity and gamut of reading comprehension. 

I am thankful that under the guidance of Marsha Harris we have made available this school year more content-rich reading materials to support student development of content-specific vocabulary and knowledge, as word reading is but one aspect of being a strong reader.

Joe

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How can this be?” This was the response of principal Jane Avery when she saw her school’s most recent third-grade reading scores. Three years ago, she worked with her primary grade teachers to adopt and implement a new reading curriculum based on the “science of reading” with systematic and explicit instruction in phonics. Ms. Avery expected that the curriculum would lead to greatly improved scores on the state reading exam. She was shocked to see only a small improvement.

Ms. Avery is not alone in her expectations. Many others have seen the recent emphasis on the science of reading as the answer to America’s “reading crisis.”

Researchers have made significant progress in our understanding of how children learn to read, and this work is having an impact on classroom instruction. Much of the emphasis has been on developing word reading accuracy and fluency through explicit instruction in phonics. Word reading is critical to reading achievement, but reading involves much more than recognizing the words on the page. Students must also comprehend what they read. 

Research within the science of reading has investigated what is involved in comprehension and how children learn to understand what they read. Some of the findings from this research have been incorporated into educational practice, but not all that is known from research has been implemented in the classroom. 

Many educators view comprehension as a component of reading and one of the pillars of reading instruction. This view is an outgrowth of the report from the National Reading Panel (NRP) that separates reading into alphabetics, fluency, and comprehension. In the report, alphabetics was further divided into phonological awareness and phonics, and comprehension was divided into vocabulary and text comprehension. Over time, these components, along with fluency, became known as the big five or the five pillars of reading instruction. 

Today, much of reading instruction in the United States is guided by this component model of reading.

One limitation is that it can give the impression that the five components are independent and can be taught individually. In practice, the components are generally best taught together in an integrated fashion. That is, phonological awareness is best taught in the context of phonics, and vocabulary in the context of comprehending a text.

A more significant limitation is that including comprehension (and vocabulary) along with other components gives the impression that comprehension is skill based and similar in complexity and malleability to the other components. The model also implies that like phonics, comprehension can be explicitly taught, and once acquired, can be applied to all texts. 

In recent years there have been significant advancements in the science of how to teach and assess comprehension that are beginning to impact educational practices. At the forefront is the movement toward providing integrated comprehension and knowledge instruction within content-rich literacy curricula.

The focus on knowledge is important because of the critical role it plays in comprehension. Knowledge lays the foundation for building our understanding of text and provides an anchor for holding new information in memory. But despite the importance of knowledge, it has typically been neglected in comprehension instruction, which has focused primarily on teaching domain-general reading strategies and general vocabulary. 

Researchers who have recognized the importance of knowledge have begun to examine the effectiveness of content-rich literacy instruction in the classroom. Systematic reviews of this research show that content-rich literacy programs successfully increase vocabulary and content knowledge, as well as performance on standardized tests of reading comprehension. 

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.”