Monday, September 21, 2015

Overparenting


The article interviews writers of two new books: Jessica Lahey, the author of The Gift of Failure, is a teacher and Julie Lythcott-Haims, the author of How to Raise an Adult, worked at Stanford.

Whether it’s middle school (Lahey’s focus) or college (Lythcott-Haims’ focus), many kids today are given less and less opportunity from their overly-protective parents to make—and learn from—mistakes. 

A few years ago, child psychologist and independent school consultant, Robert Evans, wrote that it used to be that parents expected schools to prepare their children for life’s bumpy road, while now most parents expect the school to clear all the bumpy patches of life’s rough road to ensure children have a smooth, steady, unending line of continuous successes.

Particularly in light of Carol Dweck’s work, it’s clear to most of us that a growth mindset emanates  from learning how to deal with and bounce back from failure/disappointment—in other words, to become ‘resilient’ and ‘persistent’, one needs challenges, frustrations, failures, etc. 

One of my toughest experiences as a parent was watching one of my kids pitch in a high school baseball game. In Little League and Middle School, he had been a solid pitcher because he could consistently throw strikes, and most of the batters he faced really couldn’t hit very well. By high school, pitchers can’t just throw strikes but need to learn to add movement, change of velocity, etc. to be effective. Anyway, he was pitching to a very good hitting team, and while he threw strikes, he gave up hit after hit after hit without getting a anyone out.  

My wife and I sat in the stands—embarrassed for him but also, to be honest, embarrassed for ourselves.  As we saw his lower lip quiver—the first sign of tears—we looked around for someone to blame—mostly the coach for keeping him in the game and humiliating him. 

Finally, the coach took him out of the game—and my son sat down forlornly on the far end of the bench. As a teacher and coach myself, I barely resisted confronting the coach about how he had destroyed my son’s confidence in his abilities and ruined baseball—his favorite sport—forever. 

After the game, as we drove home (my wife and I not knowing how to talk to him about the game and his epic fall from grace), he began talking to us: 

“Man, I got rocked today. I did what I always do but that didn’t work. I’ve tried to throw the ball harder but I just can’t. Plus, I have no movement on my pitches. I almost lost it on the mound but coach finally took me out. He thanked me for trying my best and for continuing to pitch even though I was getting hit hard—a lot of our better pitchers have pitched a lot innings this week and coach said I helped the team even though I got hit so hard. I guess I’ll keep trying to pitch, but I’m really not sure I will be able to at this level. I’ve played second base and I like that position too.”

My wife (also a teacher) and I looked at each other, proud of our son, but also glad we had kept silent and let him figure out what to do. 

That growth mindset attitude might not have resulted if he hadn’t “gotten rocked” in that game and problem-solved on his own—with my wife and me, due to our initial nervousness of how that experience had warped him for life, being quiet sounding boards for him. 

(FYI, my son did ‘retire’ from pitching in a mutual decision between the coach and him—which from an objective standpoint was patently obvious. He ultimately became a solid—though by no means great—high school second baseman.)

Joe

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Have you ever done your children's homework for them? Have you driven to school to drop off an assignment that they forgot? Have you done a college student's laundry? What about coming along to your child’s first job interview?

These examples are drawn from two new books — How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims and The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey.

Parents are "too worried about their children's future achievements to allow them to work through the obstacles in their path" (Lahey) and "students who seemed increasingly reliant on their parents in ways that felt, simply, off" (Lythcott-Haims).

Below is a conversation with the authors:

What is the core of what's happening with kids and parents today?

Lahey: Kids are anxious, afraid and risk-averse because parents are more focused on keeping their children safe, content and happy in the moment than on parenting for competence. Furthermore, we as a society so obsessed with learning as a product — grades, scores and other evidence of academic and athletic success — that we have sacrificed learning in favor of these false idols.

Lythcott-Haims: We parents are overprotecting, overdirecting and doing a lot of hand-holding, ostensibly in furtherance of kids' safety — physical, emotional — and security — emotional, academic, reputational, professional, financial. Our kids becomes chronologically adult but still expect us to tell them what to do and how to do it, and are bewildered by the prospect of having to fend for themselves as an actual independent human.

Lahey: We really need to stop looking to our kids for validation. They are not extensions of us, nor indicators of our performance, and it's unfair to saddle them with that responsibility.

How are schools playing into this dynamic?

Lahey: Teachers complain about parents, but we helped create this frenzy.
One mother told me she was willing to step back, but felt like she could not because the standards have moved for what constitutes an A on a science project. Teachers have come to accept that parents interfere and co-opt school projects, and have begun to take that for granted when grading.
Lythcott-Haims: The other way in which high schools in particular play into the dynamic is during the college admission process, where they feel judged based on the brand names of the colleges their seniors get into, and their incentive is to brag about that.

Can parents help reverse the tide when it comes to their kids' experience in school?

Lahey: Watch what happens when you go to a teacher and say, "I'd like to give my child some increased autonomy this year, so I won't be meddling in his homework and I'd like for you to hold him accountable for the consequences of his mistakes." You will have an admirer for life.

And what can schools do differently to promote a culture of independence and achievement?

Lahey: Schools and parents need to stop blaming each other, and work together to show children that we value learning. We can talk about the importance of education all we want, but our kids are too smart to fall for that hypocrisy. As long as we continue to worship grades over learning, scores over intellectual bravery and testable facts over the application of knowledge, kids will never believe us when we tell them that learning is valuable in and of itself.

Lythcott-Haims: Some schools are taking a proactive approach to this problem by trying to normalize struggle, such as the "Resilience Project" at Stanford that shows videos of professors, students and alumni talking about their own failures.

What are the worst-case scenarios here? What's so bad about a little coddling before our kids hit the cold, cruel world?

Lythcott-Haims: I'm all for love between parent and child from now until forever. What I'm concerned about is when coddling means a kid doesn't acquire the skills they're going to need out in the real world.

Lahey: Just last week, I was sitting in a Department of Motor Vehicles a mother fill out her 17-year-old daughter's application for her, asking for vital information such as height and weight, while her daughter texted on her phone.

I get the sense from reading the reactions to your books that parents want to find a way out of this but they don't always know how — and you both have shared that you feel that you yourselves have been implicated in this kind of "overparenting" at times. What do you tell other parents?

Lythcott-Haims: Three things parents can do right away:1. Stop saying "we" when you mean your kid. "We" aren't on the travel soccer team, "we" aren't doing the science project and "we" aren't applying to college. These are their efforts and achievements. We need to go get our own hobbies to brag about. 2. Stop arguing with all of the adults in our kids' lives. If there's an issue that needs to be raised with these folks, we do best for our kids in the long run if we've taught them how to raise concerns on their own. 3. Stop doing their homework. Teachers end up not knowing what their students actually know, it's highly unethical, and worst of all it teaches kids, "Hey kid, you're not actually capable of doing any of this on your own."



Friday, September 18, 2015

How to Empower Students

This week’s article summary is entitled Empowering Youth Voice Through SEL

I read the article over the summer but its current pertinence comes from our faculty discussions the past two weeks, specifically how we empower students in their learning. 

Although we have been looking at each of our focus areas as separate, independent entities, the reality, as the article attests, is that the areas of academic excellence, character development, cherishing childhood, deep learning, and student empowerment are interrelated.

The article’s focus is how social-emptional learning (SEL) supports student empowerment, yet it’s evident how high expectations, developmental appropriateness, emphasis of process in concert with final product, joyful learning, etc. also contribute to our students becoming well-prepared, well-adjusted, self-assured adolescents and young adults.

Clearly great schools and great teachers combine and mix these educational ingredients to create a wonderful and magical melange for their students!

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

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In my work in New Jersey schools, I discovered many of the most empowered and vibrant schools had been touched by Patrick Fennell's work. So I thought an interview with him might allow me to learn about and more widely share his magic.

What do you mean by empowerment? My definition of empowerment is "to lead others to lead themselves." True empowerment is the belief that people, and more specifically our youth, have the ability to implement positive change in their own lives and the lives of others, and contribute to something larger than themselves.

How do we foster empowerment? By creating a safe and supportive environment that facilitates students' being aware of consequences to make responsible decisions, enhance their skills and abilities, and widen their interests in order for them to act on their own behalf.

Can you share a little bit of your compelling personal story and your approach to empowerment? I was a very shy child. In eighth grade, I was asked to mentor a third grade student at our school. The time that we spent working on projects may have assisted him, but it truly helped me to open up and recognize some of my own strengths. I began working in a bank in my junior year of college. They recognized my ability to connect well with people and advanced me quickly through their management training program. Eventually, I was trained to facilitate workshops to develop the skills of teambuilding, communication, goal setting, and problem solving. I spent six years at the bank and seven years as a director of operations for an international fast food chain where I saw many people who were unsuccessfully trying to figure out who they were, what they wanted, and how to get there. I realized that there was something more that I could be doing. So I left corporate America to assist young people with the same skills I facilitated for bank employees. I founded Empowerment Solutions in 2004. We focus on building positive culture and climate, and creating communities of learning. More and more people and schools are beginning to understand what SEL and character education is and why it is important.

Can you recommend something that teachers can do in their classrooms today to begin empowering their students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels? The key to empowering students begins with the lens through which we view the students that we teach. If we see our students as unique, resourceful, intelligent, imaginative, and able, we become more willing to promote student-centered learning by providing opportunities to use their gifts, talents, and abilities, and develop their voices that will allow them to flourish today and in the future. Ultimately, it is through the development of mutually beneficial relationships with empowered peers and adults that positive contributions derive.

Implicit in your point is the need to rebalance the educational process. The most powerful student/teacher relationships are mutually beneficial -- a place where we listen to each other, learn from one another, and grow together.

Can you share your most important Youth Empowerment Actions?

  • Incorporate SEL into the curriculum in all subjects and levels of instruction.
  • It may seem too simple to be true, but ask them what they need! After the blank stares and the "I don't knows" subside, they begin to recognize that they do have a voice and that it is valued. It is also important to teach them how to appropriately express thoughts, opinions, and feelings in a manner that is respectful of themselves and others.
  • Focus on engaging and facilitating discussions and activities as opposed to directing and dictating them.
  • Provide opportunities to incorporate student choice into lessons, based on their interests, to promote discovery, critical thinking, and a true sense of being supported.
  • Give groups of three the responsibility and ownership of introducing new topics. Ask students to share what they know about a new topic before teaching it. Rotate the groups regularly.
  • Encourage and reward "being" in addition to "doing." Help youth focus on who they are on the inside.
  • Create projects that use varied gifts, talents, abilities, and perspectives to contribute to the whole.
  • Model an environment of respect (for others' thoughts, opinions, and values) and one that is fun and enthusiastic.
  • Get low. When a student is struggling with their work, physically position yourself at eye level as opposed to standing over them.
  • Don't be afraid to ask hard questions or admit that you don't know. Allow students' needs to outweigh our fears.

Friday, September 11, 2015

Art of Questioning

This week’s article summary is How to Make Your Questions Essential 

The term “essential question” comes from the work of Grant Wiggins. 

In his article below he outlines the criteria of essential questions, which stimulate student inquiry, discourse, and deeper thought. 

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I moved from teaching history from a content to an “essential question” focus—where my students used the content of history to debate questions like  "Are humans innately selfish or selfless’, "Is the study of history about the study of mankind’s continuous progress?", "Is democracy the best form of government?”. 

These were the questions I pondered and debated as a history teacher, and if I found these question intriguing, open-ended, and deep, chances were my students would too. 

There article below provides lots of examples of questions from various grades and disciplines often posed in class and suggestions how to reshape them to generate much more student discussion and debate and higher-level thinking. (I especially liked the “non-essential” question Crustaceans: What's up with them?)

Fostering student thought certainly has its share of ‘art', yet, as the article attests, there is a clear structure, process, and  ‘science’ to designing questions that foster interest and engagement.

In addition, here’s a link to the article 25 Question Stems Framed Around Bloom's Taxonomy which contains a quick and easy reference to various action verbs and sentence structures in all of Bloom’s Taxonomy levels.

Have a great weekend!

Joe

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What makes a question essential?

Essential questions foster the kinds of inquiries, discussions, and reflections that help learners find meaning in their learning and achieve deeper thought and better quality in their work.

Essential questions meet the following criteria:
·      They stimulate ongoing thinking and inquiry
·      They're arguable, with multiple plausible answers
·      They raise further questions
·      They spark discussion and debate
·      They demand evidence and reasoning because varying answers exist
·      They point to big ideas and pressing issues
·      They fruitfully recur throughout the unit or year
·      The answers proposed are tentative and may change in light of new experiences and deepening understanding

Often in classrooms, question are convergent, designed to support content acquisition. They either point toward the one official "right" answer, or they elicit mere lists and thus no further inquiry.

Below are some tips for designing “essential" questions.
How well does the draft question meet the criteria?
Writers of essential questions need to develop the discipline of pausing to deliberately self-assess their question against specific criteria. Look at the first non-example: How do good readers use strategies to understand text? The question is leading; it merely aims to remind students of the answer. It asks for recall, not inquiry. A better question might be, Which strategy should I use when I don't understand what I'm reading? By putting the question this way, the student must think about all possible moves and determine which to use in each "stuck" situation. The research on effective instruction in comprehension strategies shows that asking students to generalize their answers helps them become self-regulated learners because generalizations facilitate transfer.

If the question is too convergent, how can I phrase it to invite inquiry and argument? If the question is factual, what question on the same topic is worth arguing about?

Arguments involve unsettled issues of understanding or application—not settled knowledge and skill. We typically find debates not in the content itself but in discussions of its value, importance, or applicability. For example, there's no argument about how to kick a soccer ball, but there are endless debates over when to shoot, pass, or dribble. Here's a question in Language Arts: What is proper punctuation, and why is it important? There's little argument about the first half of the question, and the second half seems likely to limit, rather than expand, inquiry. We can revise the punctuation question to read, When is proper punctuation mandatory, and when is it optional? We can easily prompt debate by looking at poems and social media messages that are not "properly" punctuated and at unfortunate punctuation errors in more formal writing to deepen the inquiry and lead to important general understandings. Rephrase a draft question using sentence stems like, To what extent … ?, In what contexts … ?, How important was … ?, and so on. By doing so, you can turn a humdrum question—such as, Why is World War I important?—into something vastly improved: How important was World War I in shaping the modern world?

Is the question merely engaging? Or will pursuing it lead to the topic's big ideas?

To engage students, some teachers frame an essential question that goes off on a tangent. But a good question has to be more than just intriguing. The best essential questions take you to the core issues and insights of a topic. Our longtime favorite engaging, but tangential, question is, Crustaceans: What's up with them? It's certainly open ended, and it could go in a million directions. But it's unlikely to uncover rigorous, in-depth learning in biology. On the other hand, What good is a bug? more easily leads to deep inquiries into ecology, agriculture, health, and so on. In math, here's a common question: Where do we find examples of ____ in the real world? This question means well, but it leads to the world of things, not to the world of ideas; it will yield only a list of factual answers. There's no inquiry into mathematics. A teacher we worked with wanted to ask, Where in the world do we find examples of similar triangles? After listening to the above argument, he quickly came up with this edited version: How much and in what ways would we most miss similar figures if they didn't exist? Not only is this a more intriguing and arguable question, but it also goes deep into math, opening up an exploration of other geometries besides the familiar Euclidean one.

Is the question general enough to use across other units? Or is it bound too narrowly to just this topic or text?

We want a question that rewards us for revisiting it. Here's a question, based on a reading of one of the stories in Frog and Toad series: How do Frog and Toad act like friends? By revising the question to this—Who is a true friend?—we can connect to varied texts and to personal experience. In addition to making us question the question—What do we mean by true friend?—this revised query recurs over and over throughout our lives, in history and psychology as well as in literature. The genius of Frog and Toad is that sometimes they don't act like friends, which deepens the inquiry. Here's another example showing the virtue of a more general focus. The question, Why did we fight in Vietnam, and was it worth it? sets a more helpful agenda for a history course when we revise it to read, Why have we gone to war? When was it wise, and when was it foolish?

Does the question get at what's odd, counterintuitive, or easily misunderstood? Or is it a predictable question with mundane and relatively superficial answers?

Here are some common questions: What's the difference between fiction and nonfiction? What's a theory in science? What is history? What can numbers help us do? These questions don't lead us very far. They call attention to key ideas, but they don't promote in-depth inquiry. By contrast, successful questions do just the opposite: They highlight apparent paradoxes or counterintuitive investigations. When is fiction revealing, and when is it a lie? If history is the story told by the winners, what stories aren't we hearing? What can't the language of numbers communicate? Misconceptions are a rich resource for such questions.

Am I looking for questions in all the wrong places?

By committing to essential questions as a framing approach, you're planning for inquiry and argument as a priority outcome. Looking only at the content you wish students to acquire is not the optimal way to come up with good questions.To aim for understanding is to aim for three kinds of learning: acquisition, meaning making, and transfer.  A unit on mean, median, and mode asking to just learn to manipulate those three concepts won't develop understanding. The interesting and arguable aspects of those concepts lie in how to best use them—and avoid misusing them. So this question heads in the wrong direction: When do we use mean, median, and mode? Rather, focus on the significance and applicability of the ideas: What's the fairest way to calculate grades? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each measure of tendency? When are measures of central tendency most abused, and how can we defend against such abuses?

The Bottom Line
High-level inquiries and questioning yield some of the greatest gains possible on conventional tests of achievement as well as better student engagement. Getting the questions right takes discipline, skill, and artfulness. But it's well worth the effort to ensure that students tackle inquiries that are important, intriguing, and revealing.


Friday, September 4, 2015

Student Empowerment


It’s a quick primer into the ideas of Harvard education professor Tony Wagner who has been  challenging schools for over a decade to focus more on the needs of today’s Information Age where knowledge is a ubiquitous commodity only a click away on an iPhone. (Who played in an won the 1948 World Series: Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Braves.)

At our first faculty meeting this year—and at both back-to-school nights—I talked about the historic tension in schools between Knowledge Acquisition and Student Empowerment: while most of us were educated with Knowledge Acquisition being the primary goal, today schools are trying to allow more time for student empowerment.

Especially with Trinity being an elementary school, we develop in our students both knowledge (proficiency in essential skills as well as exposure to a wide base of general knowledge) and empowerment (voice and choice, intrinsic motivation, imaginative problem solvers). 

Wagner is clearly a proponent of schools fostering empowerment in their students because today’s world is less about what you know than what you can do with what you know.  He is especially critical of high schools which all too often lean heavily toward Knowledge Acquisition, e.g., a litany of lists in an 11th grade American history course. (I actually had history teacher who made me memorize all the federal program acronyms of the New Deal—I still cringe when I think about the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)!)

The article, which also has a link to one of his talks to teachers, lists qualities teachers demonstrate who inspire students as young learners: qualities like developing student intrinsic motivation and confidence and encouraging students to create not simply consume information.

The key for all of us as elementary school teachers is to make sure we are providing a healthy balance of both knowledge and empowerment in our students, and recognizing that they are not mutually exclusive—in fact, knowledge acquisition and student empowerment are complementary—as next week’s article summary on the art of questioning will attest.

Enjoy the holiday weekend!

Joe

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Harvard education specialist Tony Wagner has been advocating that we reinvent the education system to promote innovation for years.

He’s clear that content should no longer be at the center of school.

Instead, he says a teacher’s main job should be to help students develop key skills necessary for when they leave school.

He contends there are seven essential things young people need to be successful lifelong learners:

Formulate good questions

Communicate in groups and lead by influence

Be agile and adaptable

Take initiative and be entrepreneurial

Effective written and oral communication skills

Know how to access and analyze information

Be creative and imaginative

Wagner worries that unless the U.S. starts focusing on cultivating these skills, the nation will no longer produce innovative people who drive job growth.

He interviewed dozens of innovative young people and asked them about their experiences in school. One third of those he interviewed couldn’t name one teacher who had impacted them. The other two thirds named teachers, who upon further investigation, were outliers in their schools. Their teaching styles and approaches were at odds with the dominant school culture.

Wagner found that all of these tremendously influential teachers ran classrooms that emphasized the following:

Interdisciplinary learning

Real team collaboration

Risk taking

Creating learning as opposed to consuming knowledge

Cultivated intrinsic motivation in students.

These teachers made room for playful exploration and student passions in the classroom, helping their students to develop the purpose that drives them.