Adulting Classes?

This week’s article summary from NPR is Adulting School Teaches Young Adults Grown-Up Skills.

Last week’s article summary focused on how young adults often are not emotionally or experientially equipped to handle the ups and downs and mundane to-dos of post-college life. 

The result is Adulting Classes.

Adulting classes help millennials learn life skills and habits that they haven’t yet developed—like changing a tire, setting up and following a monthly budget, cooking, and ironing.

While in many ways it is sad that young adults need formal instruction in these everyday essentials, the consequence of living in a fast-food/to-go/if-it’s-broken-buy-a-new-one world is many of us didn’t need and weren’t required to learn life skills in our teens and early 20s. (I'm a baby boomer not a millennial, yet I also was ill equipped to live on my own after college, although living off campus as a junior and senior forced me to develop some important life skills.)

Although I’m sure some of you will react to the article with a “give me a break" snort, classes that teach adult life skills (including some important ones like financial literacy) are our new reality. 

Joe

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Transitioning to adulthood isn't new, but there is a more modern way to describe it: adulting.

Get your car's oil changed? That's adulting. Cook dinner instead of order takeout? That's adulting.

And now a new school called the Adulting School is dedicated to teaching skills like these to fledgling adults so they can become successful grown-ups.

Attendees can learn skills like how to network as a pro or how to fold a fitted sheet.

Carly Bouchard, 29, sat among a couple of dozen young adults hoping to uncover their true financial self.

"I'm a financial cripple," Bouchard said.

Although she went to business school, Bouchard said, she now needs the Adulting School.

"I'm still a dolt," she said. "Not an 'A-dult' — a dolt — when it comes to my finances."

Adrienne Abramowitz, 25, watched a demonstration on proper folding and then grabbed a fitted sheet as her friend Emily Rice, 26, coached.

"You put it together, and then you pinch it," Abramowitz said.

But after a futile attempt, they called for help.

Despite the fun vibe, the goal behind the school is serious.

Founder Rachel Weinstein got the idea from her work as a psychotherapist. She noticed many of her clients struggled with the transition to adulthood. Things like paying bills on time and choosing a career were difficult for them.

"You know, when you see 10 people feeling like they're the only one, and they're all struggling with the same thing, you think, let's get these people together so they can learn this stuff and not feel so isolated and ashamed," Weinstein said.

Managing money is a common source of stress for the school's attendees.

They tend to be millennials and women. Lindsay Rowe Scala, 32, said she is trying to figure out how to save for the future and pay off school debt.

"In job interviews, they're always asking 'Where do you want to see yourself in five years?' " she said. "And I never know how to answer that because I'm always thinking on how to survive today and next week and what's coming up."

Holly Swyers, an associate professor of anthropology who has researched adulthood, said this stress goes back generations. She said part of the problem is that classes that teach life skills, like home economics, aren't emphasized and there is no dedicated place to learn adult skills.

"We go through this age-graded system, and it tells us just do this and you'll be fine," Swyers says. "And then you graduate from high school or from college, and suddenly, there's no more rules about, if you just do this step, that's what comes next."

The Adulting School has drawn criticism for its perceived coddling. But Swyers said the school deserves kudos for addressing a real problem.

As adults navigate from dependence to independence, Swyers said she would like to see more proactive approaches in helping them accomplish their transition.

Preparing Students Emotionally as Well as Cognitively

This week’s article summary is Today's Students May be Unprepared Emotionally.

About five or six  years ago I heard a report on NPR that the three primary indicators of future student success were cognitive ability (IQ), parents’ economics status, and self control. Of those three, the only one that was malleable and teachable is self control.

This was a major ‘a-ha’ moment for me as a teacher. Throughout my teaching career,  I had tried to foster whole-child (cognitive, physical, social emotional) development in my students, yet I still placed IQ at the top of the list for why kids succeed in school and life. 

The NPR report followed by Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character radically changed my view of education where today I know that while IQ matters, emotional intelligence (EI) matters more.

The article below focuses on how much pressure and stress students (especially high schoolers) are under and how little we all—parents, schools, society in general—do to help them develop a healthy perspective on life and achievement within today's expectation of  a 4.0 GPA, 1600 SAT scores, and a plethora of extracurricular activities. 

While students today run themselves ragged trying to check off all the boxes above in competition to get into the most prestigious college/university possible, the result is often a child emotionally unprepared to deal with college let alone a global workplace. They’ve focused so much on external achievement while neglecting to develop their sense of self.

Getting As is achievable, but doing the following is a mystery to many students: finding work/play balance in life, embracing the ambiguities/grayness of America and the world at large, productively working with others who have different experiences and beliefs. 

As the article below attests, we aren’t doing enough to help today’s students develop their EI.

Joe

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Regardless of all the honors classes and A.P. courses they took in high school, or the science, technology and engineering classes they cram into their college curriculum, students today will not be fully prepared to compete in an increasingly global business environment.

The problem — and the solution — is not intellectual. It’s emotional.

American teenagers are in psychological trouble. For the first time, college students today are facing more stress than their parents, according to a recent report by the American Psychological Association.

The evidence is all around us. American teenagers attempt suicide more often than youths in most other countries, and they are among the world leaders in violence, binge drinking, marijuana use, obesity and unhappiness.

A  recent survey  found that more than half of college students experienced overwhelming anxiety and about a third felt deep depression during the academic year.

How can they learn and thrive if they do not have the skills to handle their emotions or feel safe and supported enough to talk about them?

Emotions drive learning, decision-making, creativity, relationships and health. Mastering the skills of emotional intelligence paves the way for greater well-being, better relationships and overall effectiveness — for college students, for students from kindergarten through high school and for the adults who surround them, including educators and parents. The Nobel laureate James J. Heckman has written that teaching “noncognitive” skills, including recognizing and regulating emotions, would be a cost-effective way to increase work force productivity and quality.

Teaching emotional intelligence — or what’s more broadly referred to as social and emotional learning — to children and adults has proven effective—-and sorely needed.

Given that, it’s frustrating that policies to mandate and finance evidence-based approaches to social and emotional learning are slow to come. A few states, including Illinois and Alaska, have acted on their own. Leaders in Washington and across the nation need to listen to youth and work to change education to equip America’s youth to be competitive for the global century well under way. Our future — and our children’s future — depend on it.

Our PISA Scores in Math

This week’s article summary from The Hechinger Report is U.S. Ranks Near the Bottom in Math.

Some of you may have heard that PISA scores (an international test administered every three years to 10th graders) for the U.S. dropped in math this year.

Although the drop is troubling, there is optimism in that some schools in the U.S.—like Trinity—have begun to teach math differently, and perhaps we’ll see the PISA scores rise in the coming years.

The article talks about how high performing PISA countries teach math, e.g., focusing on fewer topics but studying them in greater depth, ensuring mastery of one topic at a time before moving to the next topic.

As the work of Jo Boaler at Stanford attests (and many of you have become familiar with her research and subsequent recommendations), math requires flexible thinking—something that many American kids struggle in, which is especially evident on PISA questions requiring multi-steps and creative thinking and problem solving.

American kids are often proficient in one-step computation because this has been the prevailing pedagogy of math for decades. However, research is showing that true conceptual understanding and the ability to approach and solve a problem in multiple ways leads to better confidence and performance in math. Hence the reason we have begin having ‘math talks’ with our kids.

I’m optimistic that this new pedagogical approach will lead to better quantitative results for American students. 

Joe

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The math achievement of American high school students in 2015 fell for the second time in a row on a major international benchmark, pushing the United States down to the bottom half of 72 nations around the world who participate in the international test, known as the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA.  

Among the 35 industrialized nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. now ranks 31st.

Both reading and science scores were steady, with U.S. students scoring near the international average in both subjects.

The 2015 PISA results showed that students across the board, from bottom to middle to top performers, were doing worse in math. It wasn’t just one segment of students who brought the national average down.

The weak math performance echoed the results of a second national exam, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), on which 4th and 8th graders also posted lower math scores on the 2015 test.

The PISA test is administered every three years around the world to measure what 15-year-old students know in math, reading and science. In the United States, it’s primarily taken by 10th graders. The U.S. has never been a strong performer globally, but has generally scored near the average since the test began in 2000.  In 2012 math scores deteriorated a few points. Now, with the 2015 results in, it’s a clear downward trend.

Math has always been the most difficult subject for American students. Even students in Massachusetts, one of the top performing states in the nation, do no better than average globally.

Higher performing nations structure their math curriculum differently, teaching fewer topics, but in greater depth. They also teach math topics in a sequential order, asking students to master one topic at a time, rather than cycling back to the same concept year after year.

Students are often good at answering the first layer of a problem in the United States, but as soon as students have to go deeper and answer the more complex parts of a problem, they have difficulties.

The timing of these results comes just a few years after the Common Core standards were adopted in most U.S. states. It’s still “too early to judge” if they’re working.

The Common Core concept is quite well aligned with many high performing education systems.

There are two silver linings for the United States. In science, the achievement gap between rich and poor is closing, albeit not by enough yet to raise the overall score of the whole nation.

And second, even though only a small portion of U.S. students hit the most advanced level on the science test, the country is large enough that it still produces 300,000 high-performing 15-year olds in the subject. Among the four regions in China that currently participate in the PISA test (Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu and Guangdong), a higher percentage of test-takers hit the advanced level, but that still produces fewer top science students — roughly 180,000.

The U.S. actually improved its rankings in reading and science, because other nations did worse and slipped in status. Among the 60 nations and regions that took the PISA test in both 2012 and 2015, the U.S. ranked 15th in reading and 18th in science, up three notches in each subject.One of the nations that slipped considerably was Finland, which had been a beacon to education reformers for its strong results in previous years.

Singapore regained its top slot. It had been temporarily dethroned by Shanghai, an elite, wealthy region in China, where the scores were extraordinarily high during the previous testing cycle. But now that Shanghai’s scores are combined with three other Chinese regions, mainland China has slipped to sixth place.

The Importance of Self-Evaluation

This week’s article summary from the New York Times is The Secret Ingredient for Success.

Although the article is about how a chef became a restaurant magnate through self-examination of what was and wasn’t working in his first restaurant, it resonated for me because it confirms the importance of giving our students ample opportunities to develop and practice self-assessment and reflection--in areas such as My Learning and student-led conferences.

The article—and soon to be a full book—shows the importance of self-awareness and critical examination in success. The authors of the article interviewed successful people in business, sports, etc. and found that while talent, persistence, and luck are obvious factors in eventual success, so is the ability to look at oneself.

The article talks about the difference between ‘single and double loop learning’ with the latter including the ability to look inward and critically examine one’s own decisions, missteps, biases, etc.  rather than only looking (and blaming) outward factors to become more successful in any endeavor.

I like seeing real-life and research-based affirmation of what Trinity believes and practices!

Joe

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What does self-awareness have to do with a restaurant empire?

David Chang’s experience is instructive.

Mr. Chang is an internationally renowned, award-winning Korean-American chef with eight restaurants from Toronto to Sydney. He says he worked himself to the bone to realize his dream — to own a humble noodle bar.

He spent years cooking in some of New York City’s best restaurants, apprenticed in different noodle shops in Japan and then, finally, worked in his tiny restaurant.

Mr. Chang could barely pay himself a salary. He had trouble keeping staff. And he was miserably stressed.

He recalls a low moment when he went with his staff on a night off to eat burgers at a restaurant that was everything his wasn’t — packed, critically acclaimed, and financially successful. He could cook better than they did, so why was his restaurant failing?

Mr. Chang could have blamed someone else for his troubles, or worked harder, or he could have made minor tweaks to the menu. Instead he looked inward and subjected himself to brutal self-assessment.

Was the humble noodle bar of his dreams economically viable? Sure, a traditional noodle dish had its charm but wouldn’t work as the mainstay of a restaurant.

Mr. Chang changed course. Rather than worry about what a noodle bar should serve, he stalked the produce at the greenmarket for inspiration. Then he went back to the kitchen and invented recipes, crowding the menu with wild combinations of dishes. What happened next Mr. Chang still considers “kind of ridiculous” — the crowds came, rave reviews piled up, and awards followed.

During the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School began to research what happens to organizations and people, like Mr. Chang, when they find obstacles in their paths.

Professor Argyris called the most common response single loop learning — an insular mental process in which we consider possible external or technical reasons for obstacles.

Vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we — like Mr. Chang — question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases, and deeply held assumptions.

This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals.

In interviews we did with high achievers for a book, we expected to hear that talent, persistence, dedication and luck played crucial roles in their success. Surprisingly, however, self-awareness played an equally strong role.

The successful people we spoke with — in business, entertainment, sports and the arts — all had similar responses when faced with obstacles: they subjected themselves to merciless self-examination that prompted reinvention of their goals and the methods by which they endeavored to achieve them.

No one’s idea of a good time is to take a brutal assessment of their animating assumptions and to acknowledge that those may have contributed to their failure. It’s easy to find pat ways to explain why the world has not adequately rewarded our efforts.

But what we learned from conversation with high achievers is that challenging our assumptions, objectives, at times even our goals, may sometimes push us further than we thought possible. Ask David Chang, who never imagined that sweetbreads and duck sausage rice cakes with kohlrabi and mint would find their way beside his humble noodle dishes — and make him a star.

The Long-Term Benefits of Preschool

This week’s article summary is a recent report on NPR entitled A Lesson for Preschools: When It's Done Right, The Benefits Last.

How important are the preschool years? Elementary years? Middle school years? High school years?

When private-independent school tuitions continue to rise faster than the rate of inflation, it is no longer automatic that families commit to a preschool-12th grade (alpha—omega) independent-private school experience (be it in one or multiple schools).

Parents add up tuition costs through the years (including the cost of a college education) and are left with sticker shock.

As a result, many families today are evaluating and assessing the value and impact of different years of schooling and where they feel their tuition dollars will be best invested.

Some are very happy for their child to attend a local public elementary school and then move to private for middle and high school, while others look to a private elementary education with its foundational formation of habits, skills, and attitudes  and then to public high schools for their vast opportunities, offerings, and courses.

At Trinity, we obviously believe in the investment in the early years of education (early childhood and elementary) in that they form a strong cognitive and social-emotional base for subsequent success and happiness in school and life. 

The article below highlights the long-term benefits of 'high-quality' preschool programs that foster, among other qualities,  "lots of open-ended play and student-directed learning.”

Last week article summary stressed the importance of reading for future success.

This week is how important the preschool years are.

And Trinity’s Early Learners and PreK is as good as it gets!

Joe

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Is preschool worth it?

We know that most pre-kindergarten programs do a good job of improving ' specific skills like phonics and counting, as well as broader social and emotional behaviors, by the time students enter kindergarten.

A recent study looking at more than 20,000 students in a state-funded Virginia preschool program found that kids made large improvements in their alphabet recognition skills.

So the next big question to follow is, Do these benefits last?

New research out of North Carolina says yes, they do. The study found that early childhood programs in that state resulted in higher test scores, a lower chance of being held back in a grade, and a fewer number of children with special education placements.

The key to future success is the quality of the preschool program. Experts cite several key elements in "high-quality" preschool:

• Small class sizes
• Student-directed learning
• Lots of open-ended play.

Researchers have warned that outcomes are short-lived when those elements are not present.

Fostering a Love of Reading

This week’s article summary is Increasing Student Reading Time Improves Comprehension.

As most of us know, there is a strong correlation between the amount of time we read and our working vocabulary. 

This article shows how dramatically different a high school senior’s exposure to vocabulary can be when increasing reading time during her/his school years by as little as 15 minutes per day.

As elementary school teachers, we understand the importance and power of reading, yet this article was sobering to me in that most children in America today average a scant 15 minutes of reading per day (including reading they do at school).

As the article attests, this has long-term implications on breadth of vocabulary, reading comprehension ability, and one’s overall knowledge base—even in a high-tech world, a solid knowledge base is advantageous for subsequent learning.

While the article provides a lot of facts and statistics (for example, high school senior reading levels woefully prepare kids for the mammoth jump to college-level textbooks) an additional key to me is the importance of teachers fostering the joy of reading in children, young adults, and high schoolers.

Although I didn’t become an avid reader until college, I was fortunate in that my parents read to me when I was young, my two schools (one public and one private) gave me plenty of latitude in reading what I liked (sports books, magazines, mysteries), and I became a humanities teacher. 

I always felt as a middle school humanities teacher that perhaps my most important goal was to excite my students about reading. I had a younger colleague who team taught 8th grade English with me. He spent many class periods ignoring our planned curriculum, preferring to stand in front of our students and vividly recount the characters, plots, and themes of books he was reading for pure pleasure. At first, I was annoyed at him; he was taking so much time away from our real curriculum and many of the books he talked about had adult themes that clearly weren’t appropriate for 8th graders. 

Yet over time, I saw how engrossed and enamored our students were by him: not solely about the books but by his unbridled enthusiasm for reading. He was--as last week’s article summary discussed--a ‘truly charismatic adult’ and was a role model for our 8th graders about how exciting and rewarding pleasure reading could be. 

We ultimately managed to find the time to read and discuss our assigned books, yet our students much more enjoyed our open discussion time to share about the books they were now reading independently at home. Also, like last week’s article summary, our students were appropriately empowered in browsing in book stores and choosing their own books.

I’m sure those students—who are now in their 40s—can trace their love of reading to him and still remember him fondly!

Joe

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The majority of students spend fewer than 15 minutes per day reading, and increasing their daily reading time to 30 minutes can improve comprehension and boost student achievement, according to a new study.

The annual What Kids Are Reading report (abut 10 million kids and over 30,000 schools) examines students' overall reading, nonfiction reading and reading across the curriculum, and it analyses the data to identify reading habits that can support student achievement.

54% of students read for less than 15 minutes per day, and between kindergarten and grade 12 those students will be exposed to approximately 1.5 million words.

On the other end of the spectrum, 18% of students read for more than 30 minutes per day, and consequently are exposed to approximately 13.7 million words throughout their K–12 schooling.

That difference of more than 12 million words can affect student achievement. However, when students increase the number of minutes they read per day, their comprehension also improves.

While high-performing students read a lot, students who struggle initially but then begin to dedicate significant time to reading with high understanding can experience accelerated growth during the school year, and thus start to narrow achievement gaps.

The report also found that by the time students finish high school, they typically read books with at a middle school reading level, yet first year college textbooks have an average reading level well beyond a high school reading level, presenting a significant jump in difficulty when students move on to higher education.

The report recommends gently encouraging students to read at more difficult levels, while providing instructional supports to help them improve their reading comprehension at higher reading levels.

Other key findings from the report:

• Girls read an average of 3.7 million words between kindergarten and grade 12
• Boys read just over 3 million words  (23% less than girls)
• Nonfiction materials represent less than one third of kids' overall reading, despite recommendations that elementary and middle school students read about 50% nonfiction, increasing to 70% by the end of high school
• Only 19% of grade 12 students read books that surpass a grade 9 reading level.

Empowering Your Students to Be Resilient, Caring, and Compassionate

This week’s article summary is How to Develop Mindsets for Compassion and Caring in Students.

Developing resilience in students is a popular goal in many schools today, as more and more research illustrates that effort and emotional intelligence (EQ) are perhaps more important than IQ in subsequent success, achievement, and happiness. 

The article resonated with me because it connected resilience development in students (and the author also include care and compassion as vital habits and attitudes for kids) to the classroom climate qualities we as teachers create.

Robert Brooks (some of you may be familiar with his book, Raising Resilient Children) feels an essential quality in any classroom is appropriate empowerment in students. His research shows that care, compassion, and resilience in students all begin with them believing and experiencing that they make and are making a difference in their lives, in their schools, and in their classrooms.

Brooks points out that often when we become frustrated with our students’ behavior, attitude, and/or academic performance, many of us opt for a more controlling classroom, which doesn’t foster student empowerment and rarely improves student performance.

Brooks talks about how seemingly small things—like a morning hello and smile—can have both short and long-term benefits on students.

Brooks knows how difficult teaching is, but his article is a reminder, especially as we begin the second half of the school year,  of how much impact we have and how much we matter and make a difference in the lives and future of our children.

Joe

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Early in his career Dr. Robert Brooks became the principal of a school in a locked-door unit at a psychiatric hospital for children who were severely disturbed and whose behavior showed their turmoil. Within the first few months, Brooks felt demoralized and dreaded work each day.

“I had a very negative mindset,” Brooks said. Brooks is now a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. He has spent his career researching how to help develop resilience in children and adults.

Brooks’ experiences gave him insight and empathy for how difficult teaching can be. When faced with so many challenging students, he felt like nothing he or his staff did would make a difference for how much kids learned or their behavior. 

“What I realized is when you feel you are losing control in a classroom, you become more controlling,” Brooks said. But as he and his staff tried to make their students do exactly as they said, they only behaved worse and learned less.

Brooks tries to remember how he felt in his lowest moments. But he has found that often discouraged educators respond to his message about helping students to develop mindsets for caring and compassion when they hear about the research.

The common denominator among kids who overcome great hardship to succeed is the presence of a “charismatic adult” in their lives, an adult from whom children gather strength. And most often that person is a teacher.

“Everything you do in the classroom can have a major impact on a child’s life, not only in the classroom but later, too,” Brooks said.

He stressed that teachers can have meaningful impact with even small gestures of kindness, dignity, and respect for students. Greeting students by name at the door and smiling are two easy things that students themselves identified as making a big difference in creating a welcoming environment. Spending a little time getting to know kids individually also goes a long way.

At the psychiatric hospital, Brooks began to notice some important practices that made the most difference for school climate, student motivation, and the staff’s ability to build relationships with students. 

“One key ingredient I found is that students will feel more motivated if they have some say over what happens in the classroom,” Brooks said.

Another major finding: “Kids will be more caring and compassionate and resilient in those environments where they feel they are making a difference,” Brooks said.

Sometimes teachers push back against this idea, wondering why students who haven’t finished their own work should be given jobs helping others. Brooks responds that every student should feel like he or she is contributing to the class, and when that type of environment is fostered, motivation flourishes. “Caring leads to resilience,” Brooks said.

Brooks also began to realize that part of the reason he had been so negative about his students was a tendency to focus on their deficits. He began to look for their strengths instead, what he calls “islands of competence.”

“If you just focus on what’s wrong with kids and you don’t spend as much time on what their strengths or beauty are, kids know that,” he said. It’s hard for a child to have a resilient mindset when he believes everyone thinks he’s bad.

Teachers often complain about a lack of student motivation, but Brooks cautions educators not to jump to conclusions about students. No student wants to fail; humans have a natural “drive for effectiveness,” and the unmotivated affect some students show may really be “avoidance motivation.”

“It’s not that they’re not motivated,” Brooks said, “they’re just not motivated to do what we would like them to do.” Instead, they put all their energy into avoiding work that might lead them to fail, or that they don’t find relevant to their lives. There are lots of reasons kids might be motivated to avoid, but calling them lazy or lacking in perseverance or grit is not likely to improve attitudes.

“Once you say a kid is unmotivated or doesn’t care, you’re already reflecting a mindset in which you’re blaming the child, whether you mean to or not,” Brooks said. It’s far more productive to ask questions about why a student might be avoiding work. Getting rid of the accusatory stance will actually free educators to think more creatively about how to help students find purpose, make them feel like they belong, and help them see their own strengths.

Brooks acknowledges that this is not easy work. Some students take a long time to warm up to adults, often pushing a potential ally away just when it seems like progress is being made. And it’s very difficult for teachers not to take behavior personally, to continue reaching out and finding student strengths. Brooks recommends a few activities to help teacher develop “stress hardiness” and ward against burnout.

Reflecting on why they became teachers in the first place can be an effective way to gain perspective. Try  to reflect on the qualities of your favorite teachers.  Would your own students describe you the same way? 

Resilience in teachers is just as important as it is in students. Teachers who are less stressed are able to see changes in the school as inevitable. They seek opportunities to learn from change, rather than seeing it only as a challenge. Resilient people also tend not to blame other people or themselves when things go wrong. Instead, they look for proactive ways to improve the situation.

“Resilient people basically look at what they have control over and they don’t waste time on what they don’t,” Brooks said. So, for example, a teacher has no control over how prepared students are when they enter her classroom, or what kind of experiences they’ve had at home. But she can control how she interacts with those students, so she focuses there.

“It’s not easy to change mindsets,” Brooks admits, but he’s optimistic about the power such a shift can have on school culture, and on educators’ ability to grow mindsets of caring and compassion in their students. “One of the most important things you can do is model compassion,” he said. “Do you model caring? Do you make every child feel they belong in the classroom?”

He laments what he views as a false dichotomy between social and emotional skills and academics in classrooms. He often hears from teachers that the strategies he advocates take time away from academics, but he firmly believes students won’t learn without attention to these issues. Increasingly, schools and districts are agreeing with him, putting more emphasis on non-academic skills for school and life success.

“You have to have a sense of meaning or purpose because if that’s not there we’re going to have kids who say that achievement and GPA is more important than compassion and caring,” Brooks said.

That may already be happening. One national survey of youth across the country found that they valued their own personal achievement above caring for others and they believed that their parents did, too. Brooks hopes that if every educator and parent focuses on helping students develop mindsets for caring, they can reverse that trend.