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.   

How Schools Smother Curiosity

This week's article summary is How Schools Smother Curiosity.

At our Admissions Open Houses, I share with prospective parents the 4 Cs we stress at Trinity:

• Cognition -- the fancy word for academic development
• Character -- ethical/moral and organization/executive function skills, habits, and attitudes
• Confidence -- which we build in students slowly over time 
• Curiosity – innate in young children, yet sadly can be extinguished as early as 2nd grade

As you’ll read in the article below, furthering curiosity in students is too often lacking in schools. With un-engaging, low level, rote assignments, school often becomes a mundane chore for kids to endure rather than an exciting adventure of exploration, discovery, and possibilities.

For Trinity, maintaining a child’s innate curiosity is one of our hallmarks.

We employ many teaching strategies to spark our students’ curiosity:

• Asking them to reflect on their learning
• Challenging them to find multiple solutions to a problem
• Working collaboratively and cooperatively in groups with other students
• Asking open-ended questions
• Giving students options and choices in class
• Soliciting feedback from students about what interests them
• Providing age-appropriate assignments and activities that are engaging and relevant to children

It’s important that we never take for granted how unique we are in developing a strong foundation of continued curiosity.  It’s why we proudly say that we create life-long learners.

Joe

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When Susan Engel, a psychologist at Williams College, decided to spend a few months observing suburban elementary schools, she had a specific goal in mind: to study variations in rates of children’s curiosity. Which kids asked lots of questions? Which classrooms tended to encourage that? But Engel discovered that it was almost impossible to make valid comparisons because “there was such an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms we visited.”

What she kept encountering—during that project and since—were children who had learned not to bother wondering. If a classmate did volunteer a fascinated observation (“A bird flew right into my house!”) or a question (“Why would it do that?”), the teacher would offer a perfunctory response and then direct the child back to the planned lesson.

For more than half a century, researchers have studied our desire to explore just for the sake of exploring, our itch to make sense of the unexpected. The educator Seymour Sarason argued that education should be dedicated to stimulating the “intellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling.” Or at least try to avoid killing it.

Curiosity is valuable in its own right—and not just for children. It’s a passport to a richer, more fulfilling life. But it also contributes to academic achievement.

Left to their own devices, children will seek answers to the questions that bubble up in them. But adults can help—less by providing answers than by reframing and building on those questions. They can call attention to connections between what different kids are asking. They can assist a community of learners in finding resources and thinking more deeply as they explore.

How, specifically, should teachers nurture curiosity?

• Not just by welcoming students’ questions when they diverge from the curriculum but by rethinking the curriculum itself to address the topics that intrigue students. That includes questions to which the teacher doesn’t know the answer—and, indeed, questions that don’t have a single right answer.
• By “priming the pump” when necessary: suggesting questions or offering information that piques students’ curiosity about things they haven’t yet considered.
• By being curious themselves. A study confirmed that “the teacher’s own behavior has a powerful effect on a child’s disposition to explore.”
• By being keen to learn how each student’s mind works. Outstanding teachers tend to do more listening than talking, in part because, the more intensely interested a teacher is in a kid’s thinking, the more interested the kid becomes in her own thinking.
• By providing students with what psychological theorists call “autonomy support"—encouraging a sense of self-determination—which has been shown to heighten both intrinsic motivation (a concept that’s similar to curiosity) and the quality of learning.

Alas, these recommendations for teachers often run smack into structural constraints: an inflexible schedule that doesn’t leave time for exploration; a principal who insists on quiet, orderly classrooms; a central office that imposes a standardized curriculum; a school board that cares more about test scores than about meaningful learning.

Other traditional practices have a similar effect. Among the most reliable extinguishers of the flame of curiosity are mandatory homework (making students work a second shift after school), grades (which signal that success matters more than learning), a preoccupation with rigor (which often elicits anxiety, smothering curiosity), and the use of additional rewards or punishments to enforce this regimen.

Much of the problem comes from construing learning as a list of facts to be memorized or discrete skills to be practiced. This premise tends to promote teacher-centered direct instruction, which is often scripted or otherwise tightly controlled.

A group of University of California, Berkeley researchers found that when young children were shown exactly how to do something, they subsequently engaged in less exploration on their own than those who had received no explicit direction.

What Susan Engel discovered to her dismay in the early grades—a diminished desire to find out—only gets worse as kids make their way through traditional schools. Often, we don’t notice—either because, as Engel warns, we assume it’s enough for a teacher to be a nice, caring person or because we’re falsely reassured by high-achieving (albeit joyless) students. As education professor Lillian Weber once put it, too many kids start out as exclamation points and question marks, but leave school as plain periods.

Sure, everyone says curiosity is a lovely thing. But are we willing to oppose the traditional practices and policies that fail to nurture and even actively discourage it?

 

Fostering Healthy Conflict

This week’s article summary is Fostering Healthy Conflict.

Teaming is an integral aspect of teaching today.

If you’ve been in education as long as I, you remember what teaching was like before teaming: one teacher alone in a classroom. Yes, teachers in the Faculty Room or in after-school faculty meetings might share a little about their craft, yet overall teaching was a very independent existence. I learned more by trial-and-error than by mentorship.

As I mentioned in preplanning, there are many benefits to team teaching and being on a team: more ideas and perspectives shared, greater willingness to experiment and pilot new ideas, more support and feedback, closer relationships, and better productivity.

Yet, there are potential pitfalls as well: personal agendas, power dynamics, tension (overt, covert), distrust, passive/aggressive behavior, lack of follow through and accountability.

Patrick Lencioni in his classic book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team writes that the foundation of effective teaming is trust.

A vital aspect of trust is the willingness to be honest with team members. However, many of us shy away from honesty for fear that we will hurt the feelings of others.

The brief article below provides some sentence stems to help encourage healthy skepticism and disagreement in team meetings.

In our personal and professional lives, we know and work with some people who have excellent bedside manners. They have the ability to push and disagree in a non-threatening, respectful manner. They have natural empathy and can put themselves in the place of others.

Others, however, can overly blunt and confrontational. These people need support and scaffolding to help them work effectively with others.

One of the qualities of a high-functioning team is the ability to productively disagree. The article below helps provide some guidance for those teams that struggle with this and consequently aren’t maximizing their potential.

 Joe

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If educators are to have the kinds of conversations necessary to meet the needs of every child, then we’re going to have to learn how to navigate conflict.

Not angry, personalized, win/lose conflict, but healthy exchanges where colleagues wrestle with ideas, ask questions, demonstrate curiosity, change their minds, and keep students at the center.

How can we build the skills necessary for productive conflict?

One way is using sentence stems that lead the conversation in the right direction. Some examples:

Can you elaborate on your thinking, because I’m not sure I understand?

I have some concerns about that suggestion. Could you explain it more?

I want to push back on that idea. I’ve noticed ___ and would like to suggest ___.

I hear what you’re saying, but have you considered ___?

Can you help me understand why you believe that? My experience has led me to a different conclusion, but I want to understand your perspective.

I disagree with you about that, but I want to hear your thoughts.

It would help me get behind that idea if I could hear more about ___.

I agree with several points you made, but I want to challenge you on this idea. 

I have a request to make. Are you open to hearing it?

Is Lecture Good Pedagogy?

This week's article summary is Been To a Good Lecture?

My previous school was very progressive: it emphasized the process of learning over the final product; gave students ample voice and choice over what they learned, when they learned it, and how they demonstrated their understanding of it; and employed active, experiential, problem-based activities.

I arrived at the school with much more experience in and familiarity with traditional teaching: lecture, textbooks, note-taking, tests, and research papers. Anything I had done that could be considered progressive was accidental and more a result of an intuitive sense that kids learn better when engaged in what they’re learning.

So in my first year as Middle School Director, I spent as much time as I could observing classes to see progressive teaching in action.

Of all the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers I observed, by far the most popular was the school’s eighth grade history teacher: the kids loved her, worked and laughed hard in her class, and learned much content. Whenever I visited her classroom, I was equally mesmerized by her narrative tales about American history.

The problem: all she did every day was sit in the front of the classroom and talk. She was the classic sage on the stage. Her typical class was 97% teacher talk, 3% student-to-teacher talk, 0% student-to-student talk.

Imagine my surprise: a funky, progressive school with its most popular and effective teacher violating every precept of John Dewey’s child-centered pedagogy upon which the school had been founded in 1922.

Just from observing her in the classroom I learned a lot about teaching:

• One teaching method does not fit all teachers
• Essential to student learning is teacher engagement with their students, not the pedagogy the teacher employs
• To optimize learning, teachers first need to earn the trust of their students by creating an emotionally safe and comfortable classroom
• All of us, including kids, love to learn from hearing stories

So, is lecture bad pedagogy? Is hands-on learning preferable?

It all depends on the teacher.

Joe

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It’s hard to avoid telling students things that we think they need to know. Thus, the lecture.

Unfortunately, evidence suggests lectures are not a useful way to improve learning. In fact, the effect size of lectures is negative. Three meta-analyses of lectures have focused on a comparison between a lecture and active learning or innovative teaching—and the lectures fare worse.

But we’ve been to good lectures. We’ve been challenged and entertained by a lecturer. Our curiosity has been piqued and our critical thinking has been provoked by someone standing in front of the room sharing information. Thus, there must be some good that can come from a lecture.

So, perhaps this is a case of a false dichotomy. Maybe lectures, done well, can be active and innovative.

What students don’t need is an information dump. Simply regurgitating information students could have read or watched on video doesn’t constitute a good lecture.

Students benefit from the following characteristics in lectures:

Presentation Skills:

• Is knowledgeable, current, and accurate in the subject
• Uses relevant and meaningful examples
• Verbally fluent in public speaking

Mode of Lecture:

• Paces lecture so students can take notes
• Provides summaries during the lecture

Motivation:

• Arouses curiosity and interest in audience

Social Equity:

• Uses inclusive examples
• Uses non-biased language

Modeling:

• Shows enthusiasm for topic and audience

 Critical Thinking:

• Encourages independence in learning
• Challenges audience’s views to prompt critical reasoning

 Cognitive Processes:

• Clearly structures the lecture
• Builds on audience’s knowledge
• Pauses for students to consolidate their thinking

Effective lecturers model expert thinking, tell compelling stories that illuminate concepts, and share experiences that provide context and insight.

Accessibility and interactivity are key to effective presentations of information. By accessibility, we mean that the content must be relevant to students, understandable to them, and designed to build on existing knowledge while stretching them to consider new ideas.

The interactive nature of the lecture is equally important. It is designed with motivation in mind and considers students’ learning needs, such as posing questions, pausing for notetaking, and providing ­opportunities for reflection.

Time—including both pace and length—is another important aspect of a good lecture. A pace of about 100 words per minute generates higher levels of comprehension, and students perceive the information to be more valuable, compared to more typical speaking rates of 150 to 200 words per minute.

For length, the focus should be on the ways students are asked to recall and retrieve information: When lectures are interspersed with opportunities to practice and apply information, interact with peers, and retrieve information from their minds, the overall length of time spent in the lecture is less ­relevant.

Good lecturers often asks the audience to interact with the material by making annotations and asking questions. They speak for brief amounts of time, then pause to allow the audience to discuss the content with one another in small groups and collaboratively generate ideas about an idea or concept.

While there are both good and bad examples of lectures, it’s unlikely that lectures will be eliminated from the educational landscape. So, we need to focus on how to improve these learning experiences. Importantly, lectures should be integrated into other learning experiences in class. Lectures can be effective as part of the gradual release of responsibility, with other instructional experiences planned as part of the overall lesson for students.

By viewing lectures as one component of learning, not the sole way of learning, we can build students’ capacity to pay attention and receive information in this format. Emphasizing interactivity, pacing, and frequent opportunities for retrieval and practice can change the effectiveness of lectures.

Has the Novel Become Obsolete in Schools?

This week's article summary is Students Are Reading Fewer Books in English Class, and it’s a continuation of previous summaries about middle, high school, and college students lacking basic literacy skills.

As you’ll see in the article, today’s middle and high school English teachers rarely if at all assign full-length novels to their students due to the pressure of high-stakes standardized testing and the need to cover an overly-broad curriculum.

While short reading passages from famous novels may help teachers cover their course’s curriculum, it unfortunately isn’t helping students fully develop their literacy/reading skills. I like reading snippets of books and short stories, but there are critical reading (and executive function) skills you develop, use, and practice when reading a novel from beginning to end.

The current data is stark: few kids today read proficiently or for pleasure--although if you’re not competent in whatever area, why would you focus on it during your free time?

I am a member of a dying breed: a reader of books. I’m the lone member of my family who reads books. I typically have two or three books going at once. Most weekends I spend idle time browsing the shelves of bookstores; my favorite is Half-Price Books in Decatur, near Emory University where the customers are as interesting and diverse as the used books for sale. Whenever I’ve moved to a new city, one of the first things I did was get a local library card. Every year I look forward to Jill asking  me to preview an array of books for the upcoming faculty/staff summer learning options; in fact, she gave me my first preview read earlier this week.

As we live in an age of distraction and instant gratification, I recognize that our attention spans have shortened—even an avid reader like me now prefers short paragraphs and chapters.

Yet, I still see the need and value in students reading complete novels, not just short passages. Some of my favorites from high school and college were The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Crime and Punishment, Animal Farm, Frankenstein, and The Martian Chronicles.

I’m skeptical if the novel will ever regain its popularity, yet for the sake of our students’ critical thinking skills and focus/attention, we need to keep the novel alive in middle and high schools!

Joe

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Chris Stanislawski didn’t read much in his middle school English classes, but it never felt necessary. Students were given detailed chapter summaries for every novel they discussed, and teachers often played audio of the books during class. Much of the reading material was either abridged books or online texts and printouts.

“When you’re given a summary of the book telling you what you’re about to read, it ruins the whole story for you,” said Chris, 14. “What’s the point of actually reading?”

In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests, and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world.

The emphasis on shorter, digital texts does not sit well with everyone.

Deep reading is essential to strengthen circuits in the brain tied to critical thinking skills, background knowledge — and, most of all, empathy, said Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA.

“We must give our young an opportunity to understand who others are, not through little snapshots, but through immersion into the lives and thoughts and feelings of others,” Wolf said.

There’s little data on how many books are assigned by schools. But in general, students are reading less. Federal data from last year shows only 14% of young teens say they read for fun daily, compared with 27% in 2012.

Teachers say the trend stems from standardized testing and the influence of education technology. Digital platforms can deliver a complete English curriculum, with thousands of short passages aligned to state standards — all without having to assign an actual book.

“If schools are judged by their test scores, how are they going to improve their test scores? They’re going to mirror the test as much as possible,” said Karl Ubelhoer, a middle school teacher in Tabernacle, New Jersey.

For some students, it’s a struggle to read at all. Only a third of fourth and eighth graders reached reading proficiency in the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, down significantly from 2019.

Leah van Belle, executive director of the Detroit literacy coalition, said when her son read “Peter Pan” in late elementary school, it was too hard for most kids in the class. She laments that Detroit feels like “a book desert.” Her son’s school doesn’t even have a library.

Still, she said it makes sense for English classes to focus on shorter texts. “As an adult, if I want to learn about a topic and research it, be it personal or professional, I’m using interactive digital text to do that,” she said.

Even in well-resourced schools, one thing is always in short supply: time.

Terri White, a teacher at South Windsor High School in Connecticut, no longer makes her honors ninth-grade English class read all of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” She assigns about a third of the book and a synopsis of the rest. They have to move on quickly because of pressure for teachers to cram more into the curriculum, she said. “I maintain rigor. But I’m more about helping students become stronger and more critical readers, writers and thinkers, while taking their social-emotional well-being into account,” she said.

In the long run, the synopsis approach harms students’ critical thinking skills, said Alden Jones, a literature professor at Emerson College in Boston. She assigns fewer books than she once did and gives more quizzes to make sure students do the reading.

Will Higgins, an English teacher at Dartmouth High School in Massachusetts, said he still believes in teaching the classics, but demands on students’ time have made it necessary to cut back. “We haven’t given up on ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ We haven’t given up on ‘Hamlet’ or ‘The Great Gatsby,’″ Higgins said.

 

His school has had success encouraging reading through student-directed book clubs, where small groups pick a book and discuss it together.  “It’s funny,” he said. “Many students are saying that it’s the first time in a long time they’ve read a full book.” 

 

 

 

Reading Struggles in High School

 This week's article summary is Older Students Need Help with Basic Reading, and it’s a follow-up to an earlier summary on how college freshmen today struggle with academics.

A number elementary schools, including Trinity, have implemented Science of Reading programs and formative assessments to identify areas where early remediation is needed.

While many of our current students will reap the benefits of enriched early literacy development, many current middle and high school students will continue to struggle due to poor literacy skills, from phonetics (sounds of language), orthnographics (spelling), semantics (word meaning and general knowledge), and syntax (arrangement of words and phrases in a sentence).

I am bullish about the literacy foundation we are building in our students, including the additions we’ve made this year to strengthen their content knowledge, a critical factor for reading comprehension.

Yet there’s a generation of older students who will never reach their academic potential due to poor basic literacy skills.

Joe

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Helping students learn to read is usually the job of early elementary educators.

But teachers of older children—who report that nearly half of their students have difficulty reading—say they need more training in this area, too.

The survey from the RAND Corporation included 1,500 teachers in grades 3-8. Teachers in these grades reported that 44 percent of their students always or nearly always faced challenges reading the content in their classes. Ninety-seven percent of teachers said they modified their instruction to support struggling readers at least once a week.

The results come on the heels of previous RAND survey that found many secondary teachers still work with students on foundational reading skills like sounding out words and spelling.

As states have pushed school districts to adopt evidence-based practices in early elementary reading instruction, a movement known as the “science of reading,” these two reports suggest they might also have to fill in knowledge gaps for teachers of older students.

“K-3 is when we expect that most students learn these skills,” said Anna Shapiro, policy researcher at RAND. “But we’re at a point where we have older kids in some grades that are still developing these skills.”

Reading problems for older students can have disastrous ripple effects across the school day. In these older grades, it’s not only English/language arts classes that require strong reading skills, but social studies, science, and math. In the RAND survey, teachers of subjects other than ELA said their students spent about half of class time reading and writing.

But teachers of older students usually don’t receive training on addressing the kinds of foundational reading difficulties that can hamper students’ access to more complex text. And there often isn’t time to remediate basic skills when teachers are working with their students toward higher-level concepts.

The reasons why older students struggle with reading can also be more complex and layered than they are for younger children.

“There’s no ceiling to learning to read,” Shapiro said. “As soon as a child has mastered the foundational skills that they need to look at a word and decode it, the higher-order reading skills that students continue to develop just get more and more complex as students get older. For a student who has gotten to 4th, 5th, 6th grade and is still struggling with those foundational skills, it is making it harder for them to access that higher-order literacy skill development that we hope students are achieving.”

“We feel like the national literacy discussion has still almost exclusively focused on young readers,” said Christina Cover, a special education teacher and literacy coordinator. “We know that shift to reading to learn—that doesn’t happen for kids who are still struggling.”

To help students make that shift, teachers say they need more resources. More one-on-one help for students was particularly popular: 48 percent of middle school teachers said they had a moderate or major need for reading specialists, while 45 percent identified a moderate or major need for tutors.

“It might be that teachers are thinking, ‘I need somebody else’s help, I don’t have the training or the expertise that I need to do this,’” Shapiro said.

Teachers also wanted more training: Two in 5 teachers surveyed held at least one misconception about how children learn to read, such as agreeing with the statement that “most students will learn to read on their own if given the proper books and time to read them.”

Shapiro stressed that training and resources for teachers in older grades should be age-appropriate for their students. “When we’re thinking about policy changes, … we’re not suggesting that you should throw all the 3-8 teachers in the reading class that the K-2 teachers take in their teacher preparation,” she said.

For example, research shows that intervention targeting multiple skills at once--such as fluency and comprehension—can have higher positive effects for older students than single-skill practice.

Students who have gone from grade to grade without seeing much progress tend to develop avoidance strategies for reading.