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.

The Benefits of Underparenting

This week's article summary is Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often, and it's a follow-up to last week's summary on free-range parenting.

I mentioned last week that free-range parenting suffers from poor branding.

This week’s summary posits another name for parents who want their children to develop self-efficacy: underparenting.

While there are many benefits (listed below) to kids from underparenting, there are also huge benefits for parents. The trend today is to overschedule kids with activities (typically adult-run) outside of school, While not intentional, a competition arises: which parent can  provide their child with a better cornucopia of after-school opportunities?

The article below harkens back to the time of hunter-gatherers when kids were not the center of their parents’ attention and more on the periphery. The lessons children learned back then came from their observation of the adult world.

By not over-scheduling children, parents send their children the message that they trust their children to manage their lives and entertain and amuse themselves. How to cope with boredom is an important lesson everyone needs to learn—constant stimulation and attention can stymy a child’s social-emotional development and make them overly egocentric.

The author also makes the point that overscheduling kids inadvertently makes them more reliant on technology.

 Whether we call it free-range parenting, underparenting, or some more positive name, I am hopeful that the prevalent parenting style of over supervising and overscheduling children will begin to abate—to the benefit of children and their parents.

 Joe

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I recently spoke with an anthropologist named Barry Hewlett who studies child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. He explained to me that children in those societies spend lots of time with their parents — they tag along throughout the day and often help with tasks like foraging — but they are rarely the main object of their parents’ attention. Sometimes bored, sometimes engaged, these kids spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.

Parents in contemporary industrialized societies often take the opposite approach. In the precious time when we’re not working, we place our children at the center of our attention, consciously engaging and entertaining them. We drive them around to sports practice and music lessons, where they are observed and monitored by adults, rather than the other way around. We value “quality time” over quantity of time.

This intensive, often frantic style of parenting requires a lot more effort than the style Professor Hewlett described. I found myself thinking about those hunter-gatherers last month when I read the advisory from the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warning that many parents are stressed to their breaking point. There are plenty of reasons for this worrisome state of affairs.

One is that we don’t ignore our children often enough.

The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised.

Of course, just because a parenting style is ancient doesn’t make it good. But human beings have spent about 90 percent of our collective time on Earth as hunter-gatherers, and our brains and bodies evolved and adapted to suit that lifestyle. Hunter-gatherer cultures tell us something important about how children are primed to learn.

A parenting style that took its cue from those hunter-gatherers would insist that one of the best things parents can do — for ourselves as well as for our children — is to go about our own lives and tote our children along. You might call it mindful underparenting.

Children learn not only from direct instruction, but also from watching and modeling what other people around them do, whether it’s foraging for berries, changing a tire, or unwinding with friends after a long day of work. From a young age, that kind of observation begins to equip children for adulthood.

More important, following adults around gives children the tremendous gift of learning to tolerate boredom, which fosters patience, resourcefulness, and creativity. The research tells us that the mind gets busy when it is left alone to do its own thing — in particular, it tends to think about other people’s minds. If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied.

An excellent way to bore children is to take them to an older relative’s house and force them to listen to a long adult conversation about family members they don’t know. Quotidian excursions to the post office or the bank can create valuable opportunities for boredom, too.

Leaving kids’ screens at home on such trips can deepen the useful tedium. It also forces parents to build up their tolerance to their child’s fussiness, an essential component of underparenting. Parents too often feel the need to engage their children in “fun” activities to tempt them away from screens. But by teaching children to crave constant external stimulation and entertainment, intensive parenting can actually worsen screen dependence.

To be sure, when kids are upset, in danger, or require guidance, parents can and should swoop in to help. But that is precisely the point: It is only by ignoring our children much of the time that we conserve the energy necessary to give them our full attention when they actually need it.

In recent years there has been a lot of hand-wringing about so-called helicopter parents and their hopelessly coddled children. But we rarely talk about what parents ought to do instead. In an ideal world, we would set children loose to roam free outdoors, unsupervised. As a small-town Ohio kid in the 1990s, I spent hours with my brothers playing in the creek behind our house, with plenty of time to get good and bored. When that sort of “free range” experience is not an option, however, mindful underparenting is the next best thing.

This approach can take the form of bringing children with you not just on boring errands, but also when you work, socialize, or exercise. I was at my gym the other day when a father came in with his 4-year-old son. The two of them took turns working out with a trainer teaching them martial arts moves. When it wasn’t his turn, the 4-year-old scrambled around the gym and, when he got tired, lay on his belly on the mat and watched his father practice kicks. Observing the boy, his big eyes taking in a ton of social information, I thought about all the parents who say that they have no time to exercise because they’re too busy with their kids.

Underparenting requires structural change, and not just the obvious changes that we think of as parental stress-relievers, such as family leave and paid child care. It also requires that as a society, we build back our tolerance for children in public spaces, as annoying and distracting as they can be, and create safe environments where lightly supervised kids can roam freely. In a society that treated children as a public good, we would keep a collective eye on all our kids — which would free us of the need to hover over our own.

Becoming a Free-Range Parent

This week's article summary is A Conversation with a Free-Range Parenting Pioneer, and it's a follow-up to an earlier summary on helping students develop self-efficacy.

To me, Free Parenting suffers from poor brand naming—the term implies parents being overly lax with their kids.

Most parents conceptually understand the importance of children having unsupervised opportunities make decisions, to solve disputes with peers, and to figure out how to entertain themselves without adults or technology.

Yet parents also worry about the potential dangers of the world. Jonathan Haidt in his popular book Anxious Nation bemoans that parents give their kids too much freedom online but not enough in real life.

Throughout the country, schools have been tightening their technology policies to limit or ban student-owned devices at school. Yet for the most part, schools and parents have ignored Haidt’s other major recommendation: letting kids play with other kids without adult supervision.

Parents today are fearful of what could happen to their child in real life even though Haidt reminds us that the world today is actually very safe for kids. I fault the 24-hour a day news cycle for this: highlighting the dangers and violence of the world is good for ratings but adversely skews our world view.

While technology plays a role in the rise of loneliness, anxiety, and depression in kids, I also feel children’s lack of unsupervised play time is a critical factor as well. The positives of giving kids opportunities to do things by and for themselves include building self-confidence, self-efficacy, and independence.

I have a vivid memory of one particular night when I was eight. I was in my pajamas watching TV in the living room. My dad’s car wouldn’t start at his office, so he called my mom and asked her to come pick him up (a commute of 15 minutes each way). My mom told me to put on a coat and jump in the car to pick up my dad. I asked if I could stay home by myself as it was only going to be a half hour alone in the house. Somehow I convinced her and she let my stay by myself for the first time.

It was pitch black outside and after about 10 minutes I was scared. I had the TV to keep me company but I heard all sorts of noises inside and outside the house. Thirty minutes felt like an eternity. My parents finally got home, and I remember being nonchalant about being by myself for 30 minutes. But, as this memory is deeply etched in my brain, it clearly had an impact on me. I had accomplished something and felt more confident for it.

I know it’s difficult for parents today to be less hovering over their kids, yet as the article recommends, they can start by doing little things to give their kids opportunities to build their confidence.

Joe

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Lenore Skenazy was once reviled as the worst mom in America for letting her 9-year-old son Izzy take the subway by himself.

The newspaper columnist has since become a champion of the “free-range kids” parenting style and helped spark a national movement, Let Grow, which encourages parents to gradually give their children the kind of small freedoms they were allowed as children, such as walking to school or to the park.

Skenazy recently took a few moments to chat about what she sees as the serious developmental impacts of curtailing the natural impulse for free play and how we went from a country where it was normal for children to ride the bus to a nation where parents try to manage all aspects of their child’s schedule.

Amid the deepening youth mental health crisis, Skenazy suggests that free play is a serious matter for human development. She suggests that coddling our kids may limit their cognitive potential, holding them back from peak educational experiences, pointing to research showing a link between lower independence and higher anxiety. Independence, she says, is the key to developing happy, well-adjusted children.

Do you think that giving kids more independence can help fight anxiety? 

We’ve taken out opportunities for kids to practice becoming independent. You were allowed to play outside as kids, weren’t you? We were allowed to have free time after school. Kids today aren’t. You were allowed to be unsupervised sometimes, and our kids aren’t. This has resulted in a massive downturn in child mental health, We need to give them back some independence and free play

Why do kids need time interacting with their peers face to face?

You want kids to be off their phones, learning how to interact, learning how to make things happen, learning how to deal with frustration because you can’t all be first. And also learning empathy, the older kids helping the younger kids and learning a little bit of maturity, because the little kids don’t want to look like babies. These cool older kids, you need to have them interacting like humans. Playing. That’s how they have always interacted and that’s how they make friends. We’re worried about loneliness. How do kids make friends? They make friends because they play with them. This is the way kids used to spend their entire childhoods.

How do you convince parents to let their children do the things they took for granted?

There’s something called the Let Grow Experience. It’s a homework assignment that teachers give their students, and it says, go home and do something new on your own without your parents. They could do anything from making pancakes to walking to school to walking the dog or using a sharp knife. 

Does that help parents feel empowered as well as kids? Does it give all of us more agency?

The reason we love this project so much is that once your kid goes and does something on their own, parents are generally so excited and so thrilled that that rewires you. You are excited to send them out again. And then the kid gets rewired because, instead of my mom loves me, but she doesn’t think I can go to the store, she knows I’ll screw it up, or I’m too shy or whatever. Then the kid says, wait, no, my mom believes in me. I can do this. And knowing that somebody believes in you turns out to be the greatest gift to a kid’s psyche because, sometimes, somebody has to believe in you for you to believe in yourself.

How do you feel about the proliferation of ed-tech in the classroom? A lot of schools are deeply invested in ed-tech as a way to make kids smarter. This is the opposite of that. Is it hard to make an argument for the relationship between free play and intellectual development?

It’s really easy to make the argument. It doesn’t necessarily land, but the argument is this: The brain comes ready to be wired, right? How do you learn to deal with somebody who’s annoying? How do you learn to come up with an idea? How do you learn to innovate? How do you learn to solve a problem? You have to do all these things to learn how. People love solving problems and love coming up with ideas and love playing. Ed-tech did not get us to this place in human history.

The rub is that taking the screens away is a really hard thing to do. 

You can’t just take the screens away and leave them staring at blank walls. But if you have become the entertainment center, you’ve goofed. The world is actually more entertaining than the phones because you can smell it, taste it, feel it. So you just have to give them back the real world. Take away the phone and open the door.

How to Be More Optimistic

This week's article summary is  How Learned Optimism Can Improve Your Life.

I used to have a fixed mindset that people from birth fell into two categories: those who by nature were optimistic and those who were inevitably prone to pessimism. Your outlook on life was based on the luck of your gene pool.

I considered myself lucky that I inherited the positivity gene from my parents. In nearly all situations I see the proverbial glass as half full, not half empty.

But as you’ll see in the article below, even if you inherited the negativity gene from your parents and view the glass as half empty, you can train yourself to be more positive and optimistic.

Just as Carol Dweck pioneered the importance of  developing a Growth Mindset, Learned Optimism was developed by psychologist Martin Seligman. People like me naturally see the positive, but others can also see the best through the practice of Learned Optimism. It’s all about one’s attitude and the way we handle misfortune.

We all know life is far from perfect and filled with disappointments (which I’m constantly reminded of as a New York Jets fan).

But like the ancient Greek/Roman philosophy of stoicism and the precepts of Buddhism, Learned Optimism advises us to accept and manage both the highs and lows that befall all of us.

Optimists don’t have better luck than pessimists; they just cope better with setbacks.

As you’ll see in the article, there are many benefits having an optimistic outlook, in particular stronger physical and mental well-being.

So, as we leave the back-to-school honeymoon period of a school year and your students begin to struggle and you get tired and frustrated, this article is an apt reminder to maintain your natural or learned positivity and find the good in all and everything!

 Joe

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When it comes to how you view the world and your everyday experiences, you probably fall into one of two categories: optimist or pessimist.

For people with pessimistic tendencies, or a “glass half-empty” mindset, it can feel like second nature to talk down to yourself and expect the worst in each situation. There’s a way to break out of that negative self-talk and teach yourself how to become more optimistic—this concept is known as “learned optimism,” and it was developed by psychologist Martin Seligman. Learned optimism involves recognizing and challenging negative thoughts to develop a more positive outlook.

The concept is rooted in the belief that anyone can switch their mindset, no matter how pessimistic they are to begin with. Optimism is one way to achieve resilience so that you're not stuck in a rut and you're able to flexibly navigate a situation. Just a glimmer, a micro-experience of optimism, can have profound and transformative outcomes.

“Learned optimism is a core mindset of resilience and well-being that helps people to approach challenges and navigate adversity,” says Karen Reivich, from the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center.

The term “learned optimism" was coined by Seligman, who’s widely considered the father of positive psychology. This branch of psychology that explores the many tools, techniques, and skills that allow people to thrive. During his earlier clinical studies on learned helplessness—which is the belief that you have no control over negative situations or life events—Seligman found that people who are more resilient and optimistic are better able to resist feeling helpless and apathetic in the face of adversity.

“Seligman wrote: “One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.” He argued that, through resilience-building strategies, anyone can learn to break out of a pessimistic, powerless mindset and become more optimistic. The word ‘learned’ emphasizes that we can all develop, practice, and strengthen this perspective.

When a person starts to believe that they have no power over what happens to them, they begin to feel helpless and unmotivated to take action. In turn, this may contribute to the onset of several psychological disorders—such as depression and anxiety--and can lead to a vicious cycle of continually giving up, avoiding certain situations, and having little to no motivation to take care of yourself and make positive changes.

“Learned optimism is the opposite of that,” says Reivich. “It's developing a belief system of agency—the belief that you can affect change in your life and you can bring about better outcomes.” For example, a person experiencing learned helplessness will likely give up after failing or repeatedly struggling to succeed at a particular task, whereas a person practicing learned optimism won’t blame themselves for the failure and would likely keep trying until they succeed.

There are a number of benefits associated with having an optimistic mindset. Among the many advantages of practicing optimism is better mental health. “People who have a more optimistic mindset tend to be happier and have greater life satisfaction,” says Reivich.

People who are more optimistic also experience better physical health outcomes, such as having less pain, fewer complications after surgery, and shorter hospital stays. Optimists have a lower chance of developing infections, cancer, and diseases as well. This is likely because optimistic people tend to have better coping skills when dealing with major stressors and setbacks. As a result, they usually engage in activities that promote good health.

Developing Inner Efficacy in Students

This week's article summary is about inner efficacy.

The author defines inner efficacy as an individual’s belief in his/her capacity to do what it takes to meet his/her goals.

It’s about having a Growth Mindset, a strong work ethic, and the confidence in one’s ability to rise above obstacles and challenges.

As I read the article, what stood out to me was the difference inner efficacy and self-esteem, which is often the misguided belief how great someone is without any evidence of achievement.

Too much self-esteem can lead to a Fixed Mindset (if it doesn’t come easy, just give up) and to entitlement (I deserve this because of who I am).

As an educator and parent, I have been influenced by the adage (articulated by many educational pundits) that adults shouldn’t do anything for kids that kids can do themselves--in other words, give kids every opportunity to develop inner efficacy and self-assurance through their actions.

So, as we settle into the routines of school, check yourself to ensure you’re creating a classroom that fosters inner efficacy in your students.

Joe

 

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As a psychologist, I’ve spent nearly 20 years studying how to care for and raise good humans. The overlooked skill I always tell new parents to teach is inner efficacy. Inner efficacy is an individual’s belief in their own capacity to do what it takes to meet their goals. Self-esteem might say, “I’m amazing!” but inner efficacy says, “I have what it takes to figure this out and achieve what I set out to.”

Kids with a strong sense of inner efficacy are more likely to challenge themselves and put in the effort. Rather than blaming external circumstances or some immutable lack of talent for their failures, they’ll focus on factors that are within their control.

Research shows that kids gain inner efficacy from four sources:

The Experience of Getting Things Right: For this to happen, kids have to be challenged at the right level. Pushing them into educational experiences they’re not ready for can be counterproductive. Whenever they worry about not being able to do something, you can promote a growth mindset by telling them: “You’re not there, yet.”

Watching Others Get It Right: It’s important that kids see others they consider similar to themselves in at least some specifics (like age, race or ethnicity, gender identity, interests) achieving similar goals.

Reminders That They Have a History of Getting Things Right: The stories we tell ourselves about the past create our sense of competence about the future. Studies show that people who lean into optimism, have a growth mindset, and believe in themselves often don’t have such different past experiences than their pessimistic peers. They just remember successes more vividly than failures.

A Sense of Calm in Their Bodies: If children feel stressed, queasy, or anxious when faced with challenges, it can be difficult to perform without taking care of that physiological response first. Teaching our kids self-soothing practices like mindful breathing will go a long way to help them become competent at whatever they focus on.

How to help kids build inner efficacy:

Encourage Them to Try at Something They’re Not Immediately Good At: Instead of saying “Practice makes perfect,” because we know that’s not always true — and we’re not actually looking for perfection — remind your child that “Effort makes evolution.”

Clarify to Correct: Don’t just mark mistakes with a red pen and say, “Wrong again, pal.” Instead, try restating, rephrasing, changing the question, clarifying directions, and going over previously learned skills.

Praise with Specificity When It’s Earned: When we say “Good job!” it’s got be sincere and specific. Tell kids when you recognize their real effort, persistence, creativity, independence, and competence. You don’t have to completely erase “good job” from your vocabulary. Just add a bit more detail, like, “Good job applying that chess opening you just learned.”

Point Out Strategy: Help kids draw the line between the action and the achievement. If your child does a good job writing an essay they’ve outlined, for example, you can say, “I noticed you made an outline. I bet that’s one reason you did so well.” Or, alternatively, you might need to say, “I noticed you didn’t do an outline. It can be really tough to write an essay when you don’t have an outline. Let’s try writing one together.”

When kids understand that their failures aren’t due to permanent limitations, there’s an opening for future achievement.

Helping Students to Disagree Respectfully

This week's article summary is How Teachers Can Build Civility as a Classroom Norm.

Learning how to respectfully disagree is becoming an obsolete skill.

Our reliance on technology has made us more polarized and less open to opposing viewpoints. Think of how brazen people are online versus in person.

And when we use technology for news, entertainment, or social media, we get constant validation of our views because the apps we use, wanting us to stay on their site, provide us with options that match our previous choices. Pandora, Netflix, and Flipboard know me better than my wife!

Yesterday’s TTW included a letter to parents about how Trinity will handle the upcoming presidential election. Not that long ago schools looked forward to presidential elections, typically having all-school student voting and presidential debates in class. It was a fun way to have kids learn about the elements of democracy, including the right to vote. It didn’t matter which candidate won the school vote (or the actual election for that matter); it was more about learning about how our government operated.

Now, however, classroom discussions about politics run the risk of enflaming either side.

The article below refers to our current age as a time of outrage culture where two sides of an issue (like those in the upcoming presidential election) can’t stomach the other side and abhor ideas different from theirs.

For us as an elementary school, we’re lucky that our students are usually respectful and caring toward one another. We stress sharing and caring as a school value.

But as I read this article, I recognized that we need to be even more overt with our students in explaining and practicing how to disagree respectfully. Part of our character foundation building is getting kids to see that not everyone thinks alike. While our kids are at a developmental age in which they assume everyone lives the same kind of life they do, we help them see difference through collaborative learning as well as through windows and doors.

As our kids move into middle/upper school and college, they will need the skills to navigate a complex, varied, and ambiguous world. Let’s hope that in the not too distant future we can begin to be more civil and inquisitive towards others and difference.

 Joe

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At their best, classroom conversations can engage students, build communication and critical-thinking skills, and help students connect learning to their lives.

But so-called “outrage culture"—in which students react collectively in disproportionate and intensely negative ways during disagreements—can derail attempts to have substantive conversations about divisive or challenging topics.

Michael McQueen, a psychologist and the author of Mindstuck: Mastering the Art of Changing Minds, spoke with Education Week about ways educators can help defuse overreactions and outrage culture among students.

Why do we react so negatively when someone disagrees or we are told we are wrong?

The challenge is that our instinctive minds respond to psychological threats the same way they do physical threats. This response to physical threats has kept us alive for millennia: A tiger jumps out, you run, you stay alive. That’s been great for us as a species. The challenge is that when our instinctive minds are confronted with ideas, information, perspectives, data that are confronting, uncomfortable, or unfamiliar, we respond in the same way.

But we don’t go into fight and flight. We go into denial or defensiveness.

These dynamics so often play out for all of us as humans, but particularly with young people who still don’t have complete development of that frontal part of their brain, which is where the more reasoned, measured, linear part of our thinking apparatus lives.

How can teachers establish structures for more difficult conversations with their students?

Life is complex and nuanced. For teachers, one of the most important things they can do is build the skill of intellectual curiosity and humility in young people.

One of the precursors is that sense of psychological safety—that if I acknowledge that I don’t know the answer, that I hadn’t thought this through, that there are things I doubt—that I’m safe enough to do that. I think teachers modeling this stuff is incredibly helpful. So a teacher may say, “You know what, this text we’re going to study—personally, I find this a really confronting text, but we’ll stick with that, and that will be OK.”

A lot of schools are trying to add specific instruction in social-emotional skills to their curriculum. Do you think that’s the best approach?

The tricky thing is often those lessons become principles in a vacuum. And so there’s not that connection between what I’m learning in math class and English and geography and the politics embedded in geography and history and how that plays into ideology. 

Ideally, you want to arm students with not just a set of skills but a lens through which they see the world. And I think the best way to do that is to give them that lens to hold up every time they’re looking at any number of different topics or subject areas, rather than just describing a set of principles or ideas. Each time you teach subject-matter content, there are micro-moments where you get the chance to model some of these principles and ideas of civil disagreements and intellectual curiosity and ask the questions that allow young people to think differently, to see those nuanced perspectives. If you separate it out as a class in its own right, it can all very quickly become ideas that make sense but don’t apply to something the students are living and seeing every day.

How can a teacher de-escalate a challenging conversation that has spiraled out of control?

We often assume that when someone doesn’t agree with us that there’s a knowledge gap; if we can just educate them better or give them more information or better data, they’ll see the light and they’ll change their perspective. That’s so often not the reality. And in fact the challenging thing is, coming to agreement is often about how do we address the things that are causing the other person to be stubborn, rather than trying to pile on more information or logic in a way that leaves them no option but to change their perspective.

There’re practical things you can do in that moment. First is not respond in kind from an emotional standpoint. Sometimes, we assume that we need to match someone’s emotional intensity if we’re going to have a robust conversation. But actually the best thing that a teacher can do is stay incredibly calm and listen through, not listen to, what they’re saying, to find what’s going on that’s triggered this incredibly strong response, this defensiveness, or this defiance. People who are listened to are more likely to listen.