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.

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. 

 

Classroom Changes Regarding Student Cellphones

This week's article summary is Why I Changed My Mind About Cellphones in the Classroom.

As we talked about in preplanning, elementary schools really haven’t had to deal much with student personal devices, except perhaps the increase of younger kids having smartwatches.

The article was written by a high school teacher who for the previous fifteen years had been bullish on how technology would transform education and student learning.

Fifteen years ago many schools went all-in regarding technology in the classroom, including becoming one-to-one schools. My wife’s school (a stand-alone high school) opted to be a BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) school,  because it didn’t want the expense of or its technology department’s personnel bandwidth to support student technology. You can imagine how disastrous this decision was. Classrooms became a technology free-for-all, and teachers struggled with cheating and fair use issues.

Like the advent of any new technology, most of us were hypnotized by the boundless potential of technology in schools but neglected to consider what the adverse consequences could be—a 21st Century Pandora’s Box.

This past summer the pendulum dramatically swung with many schools, especially middle and high schools, banning the use of student personal devices during the school day.

A number of us a few weeks before preplanning  watched the documentaries Childhood 2.0 and Anxious Nation. Many of us (and a lot of our parents) also read the hugely popular book The Anxious Generation.

The gist of all three is that over-use of technology for elementary and middle school children is damaging to their social-emotional development.

As I discussed in preplanning, Trinity has always emphasized the importance of face-to-face collaborative, cooperative classroom activities, as the process of learning is a social endeavor.  While technology is used in the classroom, we used it in age-appropriate ways as one of many instructional tools.

All of us recognize the use of and access to technology will continue to escalate.

It’s up to us as educators to help kids use technology as one tool for learning while making sure they don’t become overly dependent on it.

Joe

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More than a decade ago, I attended a workshop about technology tools in schools. Speakers discussed how new technology would transform classrooms. One memorable speaker extolled cellphones as a “powerful computer in the students’ pockets” that could revolutionize classroom learning.

“These kids could have incredibly powerful computers in their pockets,” I thought. “Why shouldn’t they use this amazing tool to take photos, videos, create, research—more than I can imagine!” We just needed to address teachers’ reticence to tech and students’ inequitable access.

So my writing partner, Shara Peters, and I wrote an essay for Education Week where we quoted the speaker in: “The Powerful Computer in Your Pocket,” and talked about bringing smartphones to the classroom.

To give our past selves the benefit of the doubt, our optimistic vision may have been possible at that moment. Phones and the internet are so different now from what they were then. Social media was younger, comprised of posts of people you knew. AI-generated images were toddlers. Siri was a newborn.

In recent years, I have thought a lot about this article. I hear the phrase “powerful computer in your pocket,” and it doesn’t feel good. I now believe smartphones should just not be in classrooms.

At the schools where Shara and I are administrators, students are no longer allowed to use their phones. We are not alone. As I write this reassessment of my past ideas, Los Angeles public schools have recently banned cellphones in classrooms starting in the 2025 school year, and New York City schools are considering similar action. At least seven states have now enacted restrictions on student cellphone use in school, with other statewide action in the works.

At my middle school, we came to the decision to keep phones out of classrooms two years ago, based on emerging research, as well as personal experience watching students’ attention pulled away from their peers, from their work, and from their teachers.

When I championed smartphones in the classrooms in 2013, the education world was at the height of pro-tech in classrooms.

Everything was shiny and tech-focused. But in the years since, a renewed focus on hands-on learning has offered a different model.

I wouldn’t say that you can’t get joy from a computer or from one of those “computers in your pocket.” I mean, we’ve all watched one of those videos that makes you laugh till you cry or seen an impressive one made by a student. And for all our concerns about the mental health toll of social media use, many students have found a support system in online communities on their devices—communities that are important outlets for them.

But pound for pound, there is something joyful, personal, and, dare I say, truly soulful, about touching things in the world as they play, build, and create rather than only doing so through a screen. There is time enough for them to learn to transform the world again through technology in ways we can only imagine.

I don’t regret that Shara and I wrote the essay. What works in education changes with time and research, and we need to be flexible in response. What would be a problem is if I were still saying the kids had powerful computers in their pockets and I thought it would be great if middle schoolers were Snapchatting each other in the bathroom during passing periods. Back in 2013, Shara and I didn’t know then what we know now about the incessant demands of a cellphone and how just having a phone near you can be a learning distraction.

We understand better now how technology affects people, and how we interact with it in an education setting needs to reflect our knowledge of its effects on the brain. Kids making music and movies on their devices is great. We need to find a way to harness that creative potential and continue to access the depths of information available online. We also need to be thoughtful about our students’ use of AI (and our own).

But we also need to balance those features with the human need to interact with others, reflect, touch (real) grass, use cardboard and paper, cut with scissors, interact directly with the world, employ physicality, and activate the self and soul. We can’t monitor how screens are used at home, but leaving the phones outside the classroom allows for some balance for kids.

We need to find a way to make this balance happen. Technology is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean it has to take over in every circumstance, including and especially in schools. Our kids’ brains just aren’t always ready for the fire hose of information that comes through their phones. When determining that correct balance, we could do with a bit more joy, resilience, a whole-child thinking. We don’t throw out the tech, the tools—we teach the skills and help them to create that balance for themselves.

But does that mean students should have a powerful computer in their pockets while they are in classrooms? Apologies to my 2013 self, it does not.

Developing Self-Regulation

This week's article summary is 19 Ways to Help Students Self-Regulate.

A number of years ago I listened to an education report on NPR that stated that the three most critical indicators of children’s future success are their IQ, their parents’ socio-economic level, and their self-control. The report further stated that for the most part self-control is the only factor that’s changeable.

Think about that!

As we’re growing up, our IQ and parents’ income are pretty much set. Depending on the luck of the draw, we might have a higher or lower IQ and grow up in wealthier or poorer families.

So, for many of us, our greatest chance for future success is to develop strong self-control.

As elementary school teachers, we are charged with developing in our students foundational habits, attitudes, and skills, including executive function skills like self-control and self-regulation.

Self-regulation helps us in many ways.

It helps us form and sustain interpersonal relationships. It helps us be fair, take turns, listen to others.

It helps us focus and attend to our jobs and responsibilities. It helps us defer gratification.

It’s a crucial skill, and, most importantly, it can be developed in all of us.

But its development take time and effort: we all needed to be taught to control our selfish, impetuous instincts. We needed role models (adults and peers). We needed time to practice and develop our self-control. And we needed constant reminders and reinforcement.

The examples below are some ways to help kids learn about the importance of self-control and scaffolding for those who need extra support.

Ultimately, self-control is about learning to be aware and in control of our emotions, including anger and frustration, not being ruled by them.

We teach kids who have varying levels of IQ and different family backgrounds, yet our goal for all our students is to develop strong self-control and self-regulation.

Joe

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School is all about giving students the skills they need to succeed. That certainly applies to reading, writing, and math, but equally important is self-regulation. 

Thinking about behavior objectively—as a skill to be taught rather than simply as good or bad—is immensely helpful in a teacher’s ability to guide children in learning to control their behavior.

There are a variety of proactive steps that can help keep students composed. Regularly checking in with kids—and building relationships with them—can increase their sense of safety in the classroom and give them an opportunity to share how they’re feeling. Plus, sticking to routines and simplifying your classroom expectations can decrease the risk of outbursts born from frustration or confusion.

But even with these proactive practices in place, young students with still-developing brains can struggle to control their own reactions. Here are some teacher-tested strategies that can help endow elementary students with the essential, lifelong skill of self-regulation.

Develop emotional vocabulary: To understand and discuss their emotions, kids need a wider emotional vocabulary.  Ask students to perform “feeling brainstorms,” in which they’re tasked to “think of 20 types of happy or sad.” As they generate more words and share them among each other, it’s more likely that they’ll begin to use more precise words to describe their own emotions in the future—like “anxious,” “excited,” or “satisfied.” Once students have a healthy emotional vocabulary, tools like mood meters, emotion wheels, and mood scales can help them track how their emotions change day-to-day.

Chat it out with a stuffed animal: If students are feeling stressed, they may need to talk through their feelings—but it’s not always necessary that a human be the one listening. When students are given stuffed animals to care for and chat with teachers often notice a calm in many students that they had not seen before.

Create a peace corner: A number of classrooms have a designated “peace corner”—a space for kids who need to self-regulate, filled with a bean bag chair, sensory toys, stuffed animals, and charts describing calming breathing and counting exercises. Students choose when to go to the corner, and their teacher sets a five-minute timer, but the student can request more time if needed.

Use choice time: Free choice time, when structured well, can help students learn self-regulatory skills. Kids can go to various areas of the classroom during free time (like “blocks” or “dramatic play”), and if that area is at capacity, they can put their name on a waiting list. Students can ask their teacher to set a timer for when they’ll be allowed to switch into the area— and having that visual of the time getting less and less allows them to develop their patience.

Measure the size of a problem: To many young kids, every problem can feel huge, and therefore deserving of a huge reaction. Teachers can help students put things into perspective. For example, teachers can have students rate problems—like “Someone took your pencil” and “A family member is in the hospital”—on a scale of 1 to 5 and reflect on what the appropriate response to each might be. Calibrating responses throughout the year can help students in the moment think, ‘I can take a second, then I can react appropriately.’”

Use picture books: Picture books can help kids learn about emotions and how to deal with them. Books like Big Feelings, which “identifies and addresses the intense emotions that children sometimes experience when attempting to work collaboratively.”

Morning check-ins: Quick check-ins at the beginning of the day can help students reflect on what they’re feeling. Ask students to share one “rose” (something they’re excited about) and one “thorn” (something they’re worried or upset about). Ask students to describe how they’re feeling in a single word. They might start with words like “good” or “bad,” but with more development of their emotional vocabulary, they might progress to “anxious” or “serene.”

Picture your peaceful place: A moment of mindful meditation can help kids regulate themselves. When kids are overcome by their feelings, asking them to close their eyes and “visualize a moment or place that makes them feel the most peaceful,” like a specific room in their house or playing with a particular toy. Picturing every detail—every sound, every smell—can help calm students who are “feeling high levels of emotionality.”

Relaxing body movements: Stretching, bending, and balancing exercises provide sensory input that can help regulate strong emotions. During a transition period in class, for example, ask students to stand straight, then “use your right arm to help you bend your left knee toward your shoulder, and hold this position for five seconds,” before repeating it with the left arm and right knee. Asking students to clench and release the muscles in their hands and faces can have a similar effect.

Write down your values: Taking time to reflect on and write down your core values, improves self-esteem, executive function, and inhibitory control. Write down “10 things that define who you are and make you special.” Ask students to reflect on the “anchors” in their life that stabilize them—people they care about and trust, calming places, or pets. Students can return to this list of anchors—to add to it, or just read over it—whenever they’re feeling overwhelmed.

Leverage the power of nature: Connecting kids with the natural world has wide-ranging mental benefits, including less overall stress.

Positive self-talk: Students’ stress often derives from feeling like they’re not good enough—or simply unable to accomplish a given task. Teaching them to develop the habit of positive self-talk in the face of challenges can help. Tell your students that when they have a negative thought about themselves, they can replace it with an affirmation, like “I can totally do this!” or “I can feel proud that I’m trying my best!”

Simple breathing exercises: Breathing exercises have a calming effect, making them a great tool for self-regulation. Ask students to breathe in through your nose slowly for 4 seconds, hold, then breathe out through your mouth slowly for 6 seconds. Put one hand on their stomach and one hand in front of their nose: As they breathe in, they feel their stomach expand, and as they breathe out, they feel warm air hit their hand. Prompt students to “exhale away” any negative thoughts they might be feeling.

Sensory brain breaks: Quick brain breaks focused on sensory activities allow students to process what they’ve learned and reduce stress. Here are some examples:

• Name Scribbles: Have students write their name four times with their dominant hand and four times with the other hand. Afterward, discuss how it felt; which was more difficult? Why?
• The Junk Bag: Create a bag full of junk drawer items—shoelaces, markers, a can opener, etc. Pick an item from the bag and ask students to come up with two ways the object could be used outside of its intended purpose. They can write or draw their answers.

Calming sounds: Teachers can use a variety of effective sounds in their classroom—rain sticks, bells, chimes, peaceful music.

Express emotions with art: Artistic activities can help kids process and express emotions, as well as create a sense of safety and comfort, reducing stress.

Self-regulating games: Many games require players to exhibit restraint, which can help kids develop discipline over their bodies and brains. For example, games like Red Light, Green Light and Freeze “require participants to exert self-control.

Create time to discuss: Even if you feel like you’ve given your students all the tools they need to self-regulate, some kids are bound to have difficulties. In those cases, it’s helpful to make time to chat with students one-on-one. Kids need objective, nonjudgmental feedback in order to improve their behavior. When a problem arises, find a calm time to discuss what went wrong, why, and how it can be handled differently next time.