Benefits of Handwriting

This week’s article summary is Why Handwriting is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age

As our dependence on technology increases, many ask the logical question about whether or not elementary schools should continue devoting classtime to the formal teaching of handwriting and cursive.

The article below shares research that connects the importance of handwriting practice with brain development.

Some of you may have read articles over the past year or so of college students benefitting (in terms of their final grades) from handwriting notes in class rather than typing them on their laptops (also confirmed in the article below) or of emerging readers benefitting from reading hard copy books versus digital ones.

Despite our increasing dependence on technology, the need remains to learn handwriting and to develop fine-motor finger skills and coordination.

Who knows, maybe someday old-fashioned letter writing will become vogue again!

Joe

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Do children in a keyboard world need to learn old-fashioned handwriting?

There is a growing body of research on what the normally developing brain learns by forming letters on the page, in printed or manuscript format as well as in cursive.

Executive function and language development: A 2016 article in the Journal of Learning Disabilities found that for grade 4-9 students writing letters and words is helpful to brain development. Handwriting – forming letters – engages the mind, and that can help children pay attention to written language.

Better grades in school: In an article in The Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Laura Dinehart (Florida International University) said there could be two reasons for this: first, neatly written student work is more pleasant for teachers to read, and second, children who struggle with writing may be devoting so much attention to the mechanics of writing that content suffers.

The link between cognitive and motor brain processes: Handwriting is a complex task coordinating cognitive, motor, and neuromuscular processes. We use motor parts of the brain, motor planning, motor control, but what’s very critical is a region of our brain where the visual and language come together, the fusiform gyrus, where visual stimuli actually become letters and written words. Children have to see letters in their “mind’s eye” to produce them on the page, and brain imaging reveals that learning to write letters activates this area of the brain.

Messy is okay: Karin James (Indiana University) says of primary-grade beginners, “The letters they produce themselves are very messy and variable, and that’s actually good for how children learn things. That seems to be one big benefit of handwriting.”

Cursive: One study suggests that teaching cursive writing starting around grade 4 improves spelling and composing, perhaps because the connecting strokes help students make connections between letters and words.

Classroom note-taking: Dinehart says that studies comparing keyboarding to hand-written notes in college classrooms show that “students who are writing on a keyboard are less likely to remember and do well on the content than if writing it by hand.”

Touch-typing: Learning the keyboard and being able to type without looking takes advantage of cross-communicating fibers in the brain. There’s the additional brain-stimulation advantage of using both hands, whereas handwriting uses only one.

This may be another case where we should be careful that the lure of the digital world doesn’t take away significant experiences that can have real impacts on children’s rapidly developing brains. Mastering handwriting, messy letters and all, is a way of making written language your own, in some profound ways. To develop “hybrid writers,” these are the best steps:

• Teach manuscript writing in the primary grades for its links to reading and word recognition
• Introduce cursive around grade 3 for spelling and composing
• Teach touch-typing in the late elementary grades for speedy and brain-efficient writing

Fake It Til You Make It

This week’s article summary from the Harvard Business Review is How to Fake It If You're Not Feeling Confident.

If you’re like most other people in their professional career, you have periodic feelings of self-doubt.

This especially true when you get a promotion either in a new place or in the same company/school.

For me a huge jump in job responsibilities was the transition from classroom teacher to division director.

I got to my new school in early July when only a few administrators and no teachers were around. The only guidance I received was from the unfriendly Business Manager whose only comment to me was that the summer work day ended at 4:00 and that I shouldn’t try sneak out early because she was watching—quite a welcome to my new school!

I sat at my new desk in the middle school wing far away from the few staff members working in July and asked myself: “OK, I got this job but what do I do now?  Am I even up to the task of doing this job?” 

When we all begin new jobs with different responsibilities, we inevitably question our ability to be successful. Most of us, however, through hard work, reflection, and experience (which includes making mistakes and errors) gain confidence and competence.

While the term fake it til you make it refers more to how you present yourself to others, the article below focuses on how to maintain personal self-confidence as you learn and adjust to your new job and new responsibilities—in essence, embracing a growth mindset a la Carol Dweck.

There are connections for our students here too.

Joe

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Sometimes you feel like you’re in over your head. Perhaps you got a big promotion or are leading a new, high-profile initiative but you worry that you don’t have the right skills or experience to succeed.

How do you “fake it ‘til you make it”? And are there risks to that approach? 

Feeling anxious about a new professional challenge is natural. In fact, imposter syndrome — the creeping fear that others will discover you aren’t as smart, capable, or creative as they think you are — is a lot more common than you might guess. Most people feel like a fraud from time to time.

The key is to trick yourself out of the state of self-doubt. Faking it ‘til you make it is not about pretending to have skills you don’t; it’s about pretending to yourself that you’re confident so you can work hard and get the job done.

Here are some ways to go about it.

Frame it as an opportunity: The more you focus on what’s scary about the new team you’re leading or the project you’re steering, the more intimidated you’ll feel. Instead, frame the challenge not as a threat but as an opportunity to do something new and different.

Think incrementally: If you approach a new position or responsibility with the goal of killing it right off the bat, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Rather than setting a grandiose objective, make small, incremental improvements in your performance. Think of these steps as the opposite of a New Year’s resolution. For instance, you might say to yourself, “In today’s meeting, I’m going to make sure everyone on the team feels heard.”

Watch and learn: When you’re developing your personal management style, you should observe how others lead. One role model will not suffice. It’s helpful to be exposed to many different styles. Watch how these people influence others, use humor, and come across as charismatic and self-assured. Also take note of their verbal tactics — when they use silence, how they pose questions, and how they intervene.

Be bold in your body language: One surefire way to come across as self-confident when you’re feeling insecure is to use body language that makes you feel bold and victorious. Your aim is to make yourself feel more powerful psychologically. Take long strides. Sit up straight. Walk with your chest held high. And don’t slouch. When you “carry yourself in a way that conveys power, poise, and healthy pride, you feel more self-assured and others perceive you that way. You feel less guarded, more optimistic, more focused on goals, and more likely to take a stand.

Heed red flags: If you’re so overwhelmed that every day nearly brings on a panic attack, faking it may be inadvisable. The goal is to step outside of your comfort zone, not to set yourself up for failure or a breakdown. When you are in serious fight-or-flight mode, it’s very hard to get yourself out of it. So if you have deep-seated concerns that the challenge you’re being presented with is too much too soon, or is unrealistic given the time frame and resources at your disposal, it’s important to speak up.

Constructivism and Prior Knowledge

This week’s article summary is Text Prep.

I subscribe to the progressive tenet of constructivism—the belief that we learn best when we’re empowered to figure out ‘stuff' on our own. 

To me, true learning includes giving our brains ample freedom and time to discern the meaning and importance of a piece of knowledge, to appropriate categorize and store it, and to be able to recall, use, and apply it in multiple ways and contexts.

The conundrum for a constructivist, however, is that learning new material/content is greatly aided by our brain’s prior knowledge—and our classrooms are filled with students who have vastly different amounts of background knowledge.

The article below contains some suggestions/hints for how teachers can support ‘front loading’ background knowledge while still giving kids the time to construct understanding of new content in their own unique manner.

Joe

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Background knowledge is a make-or-break variable in students’ reading comprehension, or to quote literacy expert David Pearson “Knowledge begets comprehension begets knowledge.”

The problem is that in any given classroom, there’s wide variation in students’ prior knowledge.

That’s why frontloading is an important teacher strategy with complex texts. Frontloading provides much-needed scaffolding for students who come to our classrooms lacking access to academic knowledge in their out-of-school lives.

Frontloading should not be a foretelling of what the text says before students read; that’s the reader’s job to figure out. Instead, it builds a bridge between students’ existing knowledge and what’s required to make meaning of the text.

Below are three approaches:

Author references: Nonfiction writers often include quick references connecting new material with prior knowledge, assuming the reader will understand them. When students don’t, it’s tempting for them to glide over such references without thoughtful pauses to integrate the new with the known. Teachers need to draw attention to these references, but if they do so in an all-class discussion in which only a few knowledgeable students participate, the majority of students won’t make the connections. Far better to get have students turn and talk with a classmate to discuss what they understand before diving into a difficult text. The teacher might have students do a quick-write (A science word I connect to volcanoes is ___ because ___, or A common mistake when balancing equations is ___, so it’s important to ___) and then discuss them with partners or post them on sticky notes. Or students might construct knowledge maps, generating terms associated with a central concept in the text, for example, in a unit on the French Revolution, the word aristocracy could be linked to elites, ancient Greeks, inherited wealth.

Pooling students’ knowledge: The teacher can get small groups of students sharing what they know by posing a thought-provoking statement or question, for example, in a culinary arts class, asking students to create a T-chart on whether organic foods are healthier than non-organic foods. A variation on that activity is presenting 4-6 arguable statements on the topic (for example, If you eat too much, your stomach could burst) and asking students to gather evidence pro and con and debating the merits.

Predicting through vocabulary knowledge: Before students read a text, the teacher presents several challenging words they’ll encounter and asks teams of students to examine and speculate about them. Rather than merely telling students definitions of difficult vocabulary, this process engages students in exploring the possible relationships among the words, sharing current knowledge about known terms, and predicting possible meanings. Students can also be asked to divide the words into new, domain-specific, and known words, or pair words that are closely associated with one another. The teacher might also give students a list of challenging words in the order in which they appear in the text and have students write a predictive paragraph using all the words in sequence. 

Failure or Mistake?

This week’s article summary from the Washington Post is Why Have So Many Accepted the Idea That kids Need to Fail More.

The article focuses  on the difference between using the word failure versus mistake in the classroom. 

As I read the article I found myself in the camp that prefers the word mistake to failure as kids might interpret failure as a hopeless negative, rather than as an incremental step toward accomplishment and success.

Regardless of which word you prefer to use in your classroom, we all want progress and learning for and from our students. 

When it’s all said and done, it is less about the words we use and more about the classroom climate we create that encourages and supports students to see failure or mistakes as opportunities and inevitable parts of the learning process.

Joe

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Is it important to allow students to fail in class — or not to fail? How much should teachers allow kids to struggle before helping them solve a problem or understand a concept? These may seem like simple questions, but the answers are complex.

A Texas high school teacher wrote in her blog that she has a large quote on the wall above the whiteboard that says, “In this class, failure is not an option. It’s a requirement.” As she blogged,  "As my students started to learn that first day, I have this quote hanging in my classroom, not because I have a desire to see any of my students fail the class, but as a constant reminder of the powerful learning that occurs when people have to (or are given the opportunity to) struggle through challenging material and fail a few times along the way."

A California teacher has a different take, writing that there is a big difference between failing and making mistakes and that it is important for teachers to help students understand the difference. He wrote: "Failure for a student, I would suggest, is the experience of not making progress towards their key hopes and dreams. One of the many jobs we teachers have, then, is to help them see that challenges they might face are just mistakes, which the dictionary defines as 'an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.' Mistakes are things that students can fix — with support — in a reasonable amount of time and without an unreasonable amount of effort."

Measuring Student Social Emotional Growth

This week’s article summary from NPR is To Measure What Tests Can't, Some Schools Turn to Surveys and it is a follow-up to the a summary a few weeks ago about the importance of fostering emotional intelligence in students. 

The article below is how some schools—particularly large public school districts—are efforting to assess student social-emotional development.

While built into the DNA of independent-private schools is a deep commitment to developing students cognitively and social-emotionally, most never tried to formalize exactly what Emotional Intelligence (EI) is or what specific skills and habits are most important for student success and happiness. 

Certainly the recent work and research of Carol Dweck, Paul Tough, and Angela Duckworth on growth mindset, grit, and perseverance have brought social-emotional skills and habits to the forefront of schools, and even independent-private ones are now looking at howe to measure and assess them. 

There are myriad challenges to assessing social-emotional skills and habits, yet clearly as more schools emphasize social-emotional growth, EI will become more and more prevalent in progress reports and other assessments, like personal reflection/self-evaluation.

Joe

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A growing number of schools have begun using surveys to measure important social and emotional goals for schools and students — qualities like grit, growth mindset, and student engagement.

A group of districts in California is getting ready to incorporate this kind of survey data into their accountability systems this spring. 

These districts drew up a School Quality Improvement System that relied 60% on traditional academics, and 40% on "social-emotional and culture-climate" factors.

Researchers are becoming increasingly convinced that students' attitudes about learning, their ability to control themselves, and persevere and their proficiency in working well with others account for more than half the picture of their long-term success.

They created a framework with four attributes:

• Growth mindset: the belief that working hard and persisting will help you improve at anything, and that abilities are not fixed at birth
• Self-efficacy: sense of confidence that you are capable of achieving what you set out to do
• Self-management: productive habits such as organization and delaying gratification.
• Social awareness: ability to work in a diverse group, to recognize sources of support, and to have empathy for others

Recent research shows that the student surveys, combined with teacher reports, can meaningfully predict outcomes such as GPA, test scores, attendance and suspensions.

Other schools believe these non-academic qualities are important, and they are looking for ways to track their progress.

Letting Boys Be Physically Active Benefits Their Reading Development

This week’s article summary is Boys Who Sit Still Have a Harder Time Learning to Read.

Last week’s article summary focused on things we can do in the classroom to support girls—this week’s focus is on boys.

Most of us believe—as parents and/or as teachers—that boys and girls by and large learn and behave in class differently.

The study in the article below found a positive correlation between boys’ reading progress in first grade and ample opportunities to be physically active in school. Conversely, when boys had a lot of sedentary work in the classroom, they showed less progress in reading.

Sedentary activities for girls, however, did not negatively affect their reading progress.

This is disturbing as so many elementary schools in trying to be more academically rigorous and score well on high-stakes standardized tests demand more and more seat work from their students.

One of our many advantages at Trinity is that our success is not measured by high-stakes testing. Yes, our students take standardized tests, yet that is one of many ways we assess our students and ourselves. Thus, we don’t feel the pressure to teach to the test and to move away from classroom pedagogies we know foster student learning—like cooperative learning and frequent recess.

As a school that strives to develop the whole child, being physical, having recess, and getting to move around in the classroom a lot are all important ways in which we strengthen academic and cognitive development—and, as the article attests, better reading in boys!

Joe

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Anybody who has watched little boys for even five seconds knows that they are exhausting. At school, they tear around the playground, bolt through corridors and ricochet off classroom walls.

According to a new Finnish study, this is all helping them to be better at reading.

The study found that the more time kids in Grade 1 spent sitting and the less time they spent being physically active, the fewer gains they made in reading in the two following years. In first grade, a lot of sedentary time and no running around also had a negative impact on their ability to do math.

Among girls, sitting for a long time without moving much didn’t seem to have any effect on their ability to learn.

The study found that lower levels of moderate to vigorous physical activity, higher levels of sedentary time, and particularly their combination, were related to poorer reading skills in boys.

While the test group was small, the study offers some evidence for what parents have been thinking for a long time: we may not be educating boys the right way.

As pressure increases on schools to show evidence of learning, many education systems have tried to provide a more academically rich environment. But sometimes this has come at the cost of physical education and/or recess.

The connection between exercise and learning is not new, but the Finnish study provides stronger objective evidence that the increased emphasis on sedentary academic activity among the youngest learners may be fruitless if it comes at the cost of physical activity. Boys whose days were more sedentary when they were in first grade (a crucial year for learning to read) made fewer gains in reading in second and third grade. They also did worse at math for that year.

The authors aren’t sure why the difference between boys and girls is so stark. Not as many girls participated in the study, so that may have influenced results. Moreover, it may have less to do with the difference between the male and female brain; for girls, academic achievement may be more influenced by factors such as parental educational support, peer acceptance, teachers’ positive attitude and their own motivation.

Girls and Gender Beliefs

This week’s article summary from The Atlantic is 6-Year-Old Girls Already Have Gendered Beliefs About Intelligence.

Teachers have been aware of the negative effects of gender stereotyping since the 1960s. Veteran educators remember the influence the book Reviving Ophelia had in urging teachers to be more cognizant of empowering girls in the classroom.

Although the research findings below were not surprising to me since we still live in a male-centric society, how early gender stereotyping occurs and its deleterious effect on female students were. 

The end of the article asks who is responsible for female students continuing to believe that boys are smarter and that math and science are subjects for boys, not girls. 

The culprit is a combination of factors led by an overarching societal norm reinforced by the media that consequently overtly and covertly influences our own attitudes and beliefs.

I know I’m fall prey to implicit gender bias (as well as other biases), but I try to be aware of always stressing how females have been and will be leaders, athletes, scientists, etc. 

I’ve seen much positive change in my lifetime yet as the study below attests, the is much more room for growth.

Joe

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“There are lots of people at the place where I work, but there is one person who is really special. This person is really, really smart. This person figures out how to do things quickly and comes up with answers much faster and better than anyone else. This person is really, really smart.”

Linn Bian, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, read this story out to children, aged 5 to 7. She then showed them pictures of four adults—two men and two women—and asked them to guess which was the protagonist of the story. She also gave them two further tests: one in which they had to guess which adult in a pair was “really, really smart”, and another where they had to match attributes like “smart” or “nice” to pictures of unfamiliar men and women.

The results were stark. Among the 5-year-olds, both boys and girls associated brilliance with their own gender. But among those aged 6 or 7, only the boys still held to that view.

At an age when girls tend to outperform boys at school, and when children in general show large positive biases towards their own in-groups, the girls became less likely than boys to attribute brilliance to their own gender.

You could frame that as a good thing: While boys continued to believe in their own brilliance, the girls, on average, developed a more equal view. But that view has consequences—Bian also found that the older girls were less interested in games that were meant for “really, really smart” children.

The stereotype that brilliance and genius are male traits is common among adults. In various surveys, men rate their intelligence more favorably than women, and in a recent study of college undergraduates, men overrated the abilities of male students above equally talented and outspoken women.

But Bian’s study shows that the seeds of this pernicious bias are planted at a very early age. By the age of 6, boys and girls are already diverging in who they think is smart.

“The stereotype has an immediate impact,” Bian adds. “In the long-term it will steer away many young women from careers that are thought to require brilliance.”

“Not only do we need to break down the ‘science is male’ stereotype, but now we need to break down a ‘brilliance is male’ stereotype, too.”

Why do these beliefs occur? It’s not to do with actual ability. At that age, girls tend to outclass their male peers—and the girls in Bian’s study knew it. When she showed them pictures of four children and asked them to guess who got the best grades, the older girls were actually more likely to pick girls than the older boys were to pick boys. “Everyone agreed that girls do better in school but that didn’t seem to matter,” says Bian.

Why? Parents, perhaps? Parents tend to think that their sons are brighter than their daughters, and they’re 2.5 times more likely  to do a google search for “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?” Their teachers could be another font of stereotypes. So could the characters in the movies they see and the books they read.

“We have to be more deliberate about presenting examples of brilliant women to girls and boys as young as five to help them avoid developing this association. Brilliant women exist, like Rosalind Franklin, Shirley Jackson, Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, and Katherine G. Johnson, whose story is popularized in Hidden Figures.