Author Archives: Stephen Seyfer

The Curious Kick the Can of Facts into Possibilities

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Blessed are the curious, for they shall have adventures – Lovelle Drachman.

How many times does a teacher prepare and ask a question in the hopes that no child will ask “Why?” or “What if …?” or say “Ya, but…” In the explanation of 15th explorers when asked what lay beyond the undrawn borders on maps of the day, they would say “There be dragons!” I know teachers who consider open-ended questions as doorways into the land of their dragons. What is a teacher to do if she does not know the answer or cannot make an informed and understandable explanation? Hello, curiosity!

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. – Arthur Ward

In an educational industry held accountable with high stakes achievement tests, right answers are gold and a teacher who packs children with facts is a high-quality tradesman. However, in a child-based environment a teacher who inspires children to learn is a magician. It is magical to watch a child see the power of inquiry and questioning to learn something new or to change what they know into more powerful knowledge. Inspiration that lights the imagination for learning is magical. Once inspired, curious children are free to roam the world.

A society that wants right answers shutters curiosity.

We are a society wanting correct answers. We also believe that a person who knows the correct answers is a winner, not just on Jeopardy, but in the game of life. For millennia, knowledge was power and clerics and priests guarded access to knowledge. An ability to read opened minds to questions so literacy was afforded only to the chosen few. Gutenberg’s press ended that darkness and created common access to documents leading to greater literacy. People wanted to know. Today we are a literate nation. We have access to so much information that reading everything is impractical. Instead, we do not read to answer questions; we ask Siri, or Google the question, or make inquiries in AI. Answers to everything is a keystroke away.

If correct answers appear instantly on our screen, how far down on the screen do we need to read? Students tell me “Only the first sentences. Siri and Google begin each response with a statement that answers the question. I do not need to read any more than that.” The same students add “That satisfies my teachers.”

Our ingenuity in creating databases is that we can readily access and processing tools that allow us to re-assemble information to stand for what we know is becoming an academic dilemma. Secondary and collegiate teachers spend more time detecting plagiarism in documents students submit than ascertaining the insights the student has learned. Heck, they also use AI to read and grade student submissions.

The Big Duh! Ask for possibilities and probabilities.

Soon there will be little daylight between a person who knows the answer and a person who can digitally obtain the answer. The speed of response will be indistinguishable. The answers will be the same or virtually the same – what is the difference? Every student will be Siri’s echo.

With a political poke: when we are told that facts are not true and that lies are alternative facts, the knowledge of correct answers is dubious.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. – Oscar Wilde

Where does schooling enter this story? Students have told me that “I do not need to attend class to learn (fill in the name of the course). I can pass the test with what I learn online. YouTube teaches everything!” Traditional schooling for known knowledge and known skills may soon be archaic. But schooling for the unknown will not.

Today and yesterday, we ask the wrong questions when we ask for facts. Facts are pedestrian in a fast-changing world. The Big Duh for educators is to ask children to use the facts they acquire to inquire into new possibilities and probabilities. Be curious and pursue your curiosity.

Curiosity will revise an Occam’s Razor that the next generation will use to answer important national and global questions. Where Occam said that “the simplest explanation is often the best explanation,” the revised Occam Rule will be “the best explanation will be one of possibilities that synergize into an informed probability.” Curiosity will lead us to possibility thinking, possibility evaluation, and synergy will lead to new knowledge and ways to use new knowledge. “Best” will be the most effective proposal and evaluation of possibilities not the simplicity of conclusions reached. The journey will be more valuable than the destination.

Why is this so?

Curiosity is an innate human characteristic. We are like kittens that cannot resist pushing a ball. The result of each push opens the possibility of where the next push will lead. I am not suggesting that a kitten conceives of results, kittens only see the opportunity. Human ingenuity and creativity are what we play with after we first push the ball and see where it has rolled and consider “why and what if.”

Humans respond to two types of curiosity – perceptual and epistemic. Perceptual is the need to resolve the dissonance in unexpected or contradictory things. The ball bounced back off the wall or, by starting a push with a pull, the ball rolls forward and then reverses backward. Curiosity looks to know “why this is so” and “what if I …” Perceptual curiosity is episodic and usually is connected to externality. We encounter contradictions, we resolve contradiction, we are satisfied with a new status quo.

Epistemic is internal and constant; it is our happiness motivator, and every human responds to it. A thirst to know or to do something that is new and novel, that intrinsic drive, is answered by a rush of dopamine. Curiosity that leads to dopamine happiness can lead to more curiosity to get more dopamine. For the epistemic curious there always is another hill to climb to see what is on the other side. Epistemic curiosity ignites our body to create dopamine and humans like a surge of dopamine.

Understanding the power of curiosity is a tremendous tool for teachers. We can create episodes of dissonance. We can suspend reality of real-world problem-solving simulations for students. We can use reverse engineering causing students explore “What would life in North America be like today if Britain had defeated the colonists in the 1770s?” Or “How would our world have responded if Neil Armstrong found life forms under the dust and gravel on the moon?” There is a universe of “what if” propositions that require students to use what they know to explore what they do not. The answers are not facts but examples of possibilities and the reasons they are possibilities.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. – Zora Neale Hurston

At the same time, teachers can excite dopamine generation with challenges that push children to achieve more than they considered physically, intellectually, artistically, and socio-emotionally possible. A truth about American education is that we do not push our students to their potentialities. We are hesitant about backlash. Consequently, too many students are bored with school. Children are kittens at heart and want to push the ball to see where it will go. Unlike kittens, we can challenge children to push more complex problems than where a ball will roll and mutually be excited with how each child responds to the challenge.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education that does not evoke curiosity is telling the same stories over again in a daycare center to children who daydream with their eyes and ears closed.

The Big Duh!

Curiosity does not kill cats; it makes a cat a cat. The curiosity of possibilities and probabilities is the next frontier in an educational world that has made facts mundane,

Remember that things are not always as they appear to be… Curiosity creates possibilities and opportunities. – Roy Bennett

Is The Outcome of Public School a Generalized or a Specialized Education? The Answer is Yes.

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An old question arises constantly and though we try to make firm, theory- and research-based responses, the issue still haunts the work of public educators. Are we to familiarize children with a broad veneer of background knowledge and skills so they can say “I know something about that?” Or are we to educate children with a depth of knowledge and understanding of specific concepts and skills they can apply in their life and work with a degree of excellence?

Put in educational outcomes language, is it our goal given what we know about the future real-world needs of our children that

  1. all students read every chapter in their grade-level texts, solve every math problem, dabble in the arts, and achieve a basic score on an end-of-year test, or
  2. all students do close reading and deeper analysis of information in selected chapters of selected texts, are highly proficient in essential math processes, create a quality performance or object in the arts, and achieve a proficient score or better on an end-of-year test?

Today, teachers in America do not have a clear answer to this question. National leaders are more interested in power struggles with higher education, deconstructing the Department of Education, and rewriting the American story in their own image. State leaders know that education is a reserved power in the Constitution delegated to the states, yet they mire in petty partisan issues and pass the authority to educate to local school boards. Our representatives like to legislate but they avoid accountability for outcomes. Local boards of education try their hardest with ever decreasing funding to provide the schools demanded by local constituents. Public education in the United States is our nation’s longest standing institution; however, its compass direction today is decided in thousands of classrooms by individual teachers. Our educational mission is adrift.

What do we know?

We know the nature of educational design is theoretical, opinionated, and tenuous.

Put a dozen educators in a room, ask their opinion of “shall we make our children into generalists or specialists,” and expect a split decision. There are strong cases for either. Then, when the air clears, most educators settle into a T- or inverted triangular-shaped design for public education. All children should have a broad academic base of general education and the opportunity to delve deeply into subjects of their personal interest. At least, in principle.

Then, we put children in the classroom and teaching gets real. Children have their own agenda on what they want and need to learn. Some children want to generalize, and others want to specialize. And we educators, who are supposed to educate each child to their fullest potential, decide to generalize all children when they are young and provide specialization for children who want it when they are older. Of course, some children specialize early, and others prefer to stay generalists through graduation. Public education is a messy proposition, so we settle for a Hippocratic-like solution of “do no harm to any student” and avoid the blame game. Today, without any other imperatives, we provide a generalist education for all and hope that graduates will specialize after high school.

For the generalists –

E.D. Hirsch taught us the importance of knowing a little about a lot. He wrote in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987) that background knowledge provides us with content ideas to read and think about. Second, reading and thinking about facts creates a student’s encyclopedic knowledge. Further, when we all share a level of mutual understanding of communal information, we are bound together as a nation (or state). He said the role of public education is to “enculturate” children with their national story and thereby strengthen a continuity of our American society. In the end, cultural literacy prepares us to play the game of Jeopardy and win.

David Epstein, Range – Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized Word (2019), also favors a generalized background. He believes that students who specialize have more difficulty connecting disparate ideas and adapting new learning to what they already know. Specializing creates a commitment to what has been learned and a resistance to changing that knowledge base. Conversely, children with a generalized knowledge are not burdened in learning unfamiliar information and adapt it into their overall knowledge base more efficiently.

And, in school most children hear from their school counselor the importance of experiencing as much academics, arts, activities, and athletics as possible to find their true interests and aptitudes. America has a tradition of providing a liberal education in high school plus early collegiate years. Specialization for many is relegated to the junior and senior years of college, and post-graduate years of education.

For many classroom teachers, generalization only makes sense. A school curriculum responds to the loudest voices speaking to the school board. And school board members are lay leaders with little to no professional training in education. Their sole interests are in doing what is best for children, satisfying their constituents, and staying within a finite budget. Hence, school curriculum expands and never contracts. An addition to a grade level or course curriculum is not accompanied with more school days, hence every other thing in the syllabus is diminished to make room for what is new.

For the specialists –

But WAIT! In every other decade since the 1960s politicians in the United States have concluded that children in America are falling behind the academic achievements of their international peers. Political leaders believe that educational outcomes are a matter of national security. In the 60s the Elementary and Secondary Education Act funneled federal funding into math, science, and foreign language so that the United States could respond to Sputnik and be first to the moon. The Nation at Risk report (1983) gave official warning that children in America were being undereducated. Reforms abounded. In the early 2000s No Child Behind Left Behind legislation generated the Common Core Standards in reading and mathematics. NCLB mandated that all children must pass tests of their abilities to read and write and resolve math problems. Large scale, high stakes assessments were administered in all public schools and disaggregated achievement scores were published. Penalties were prescribed for underperforming schools and teachers. With heavy hands, our nation pushed specialized learning in reading, language arts, and higher-level mathematics to the detriment of all other academics, as well as arts and athletics.

With no surprise, universal and high stakes testing did not significantly increase our students’ achievement on international assessments, like PISA. And any improvements were substantively lost during the pandemic.

Government was not alone in its attempts to strengthen educational outcomes. Higher education groups beefed up teacher preparation with more intellectual rigor and exacting pedagogical training. The Holmes Group of college deans and chief academic officers proposed teacher training that resembled medical and legal professionals – the license is awarded at the master’s degree level after intensive pedagogical examination. Admission to the undergraduate college of education was more restrictive to create a more select and elite class of teacher candidates. Some aspects of the Holmes proposals were adopted by higher education accrediting agencies, but most have been nullified by the current shortage of public-school teacher candidates. Our current reality is that teacher licensing requirements are being liberalized to place a licensed adult in every classroom.

What not to do?

First, to paraphrase Rita Mae Brown (Sudden Death, 1983), “Continuously doing the same things expecting different results is a definition of idiocy.” The trending data on educational achievement looks like the same old, same old data or slightly worse. What we are doing is not achieving international competitiveness, a positive return of educational investments, or satisfying our students still in the public education pipeline.

Public education suffers annual student attrition. More students transfer to private or home schooling each year. They find secondary education in our public schools to be too unfocused. Parental choice allows parents, guardians, and 18-year-old students to choose private, parochial, cooperative, or home schooling. However, instead of changing public school programs to retain or reclaim students, we complain and make few substantive changes to K-12 education.

Second, we really know what to do but lack the courage to do it. Anyone who takes a public stand to change long standing tradition gets bloodied. Every living American is a product of traditional K-12 education, either as a graduate or as a transfer to another educational format. Love it or leave it, what we have is what we know.

Third, public educators have been made thin-skinned. In the last decade, it is increasingly common for parents to make loud and frequent complaints to their school board. The say “My child’s teacher is a task master and is too hard on kids.” Or “My child’s teacher is too easy, and kids get by without learning.” A parent may not like the teacher’s choice of books for children to read or the music literature they are to perform. A parent may think the teacher’s grading scale is too strong and her child deserves a higher, unearned grade. And parents have learned that school boards do not want to hear such complaints repeatedly. The result is most teachers acquiesce and their teaching and curriculum moves toward the middle ground of complacency.

What to do.

  • Mean what we say. Most school mission statements include the word “excellence” but do not define the term. School boards must decide the degree and rate of learning achievements that are excellent in their schools and set those as non-negotiable standards. Further, make these definitions public and then live up to them.

Our schools know what excellence looks like, but we do not want to belittle any child whose performances are not excellent. The result is we praise our champions and award-winners and wait for the next time we have a champion or award-winner. We need to treat all children as award winners in the making and teach them to be winners. Praise not just the award winners but also praise the “climbers” who are approaching excellence. Mediocracy or average is not an acceptable standard.

  • Stop acceptable failure. Too many schools adopt the 80% Rule – 80% of the children will achieve a score of 80% or better in 80% of the curriculum 80% of the time. This rule accepts that 20% of the children will not meet your standard for 20% of the curriculum 20% of the time. Use and mean the words “All students” instead of 80%. If not, how do you start a lesson when accepting that 1 in 5 students will not learn the lesson successfully? We can do better.

A principle of outcome-based education should become our rule. “Given enough time and resources, we can teach every child to succeed in their learning.” We really do have the time and resources if we believe that principle is true. If we do not believe the principle, what are we doing in education?

  • Accept the T model of generalized/specialized education and ensure that all students are proficient in all the foundational curricula. “Knowing about” or a “basic understanding” is not an acceptable level of predecessor knowledge upon which children can later specialize.

For example, no student advances to Algebra 1 without fluency in basic operations, order of operations, number sense, number properties, exponents, variables, equalities, expressions and equations, ratios and proportions, and knowledge of a coordinate plane. Why do we push children into courses we know they are not prepared to pass? Stop doing that.

Create a similar advancement requirement in ELA, science, and the social studies. All predecessor knowledge will be at Bloom’s Applying and Analyzing levels educational goals not at Remembering and Understanding. Recalling and explaining background information will not get children to excellence. Working with background knowledge in new situations and finding connections between ideas will get them there.

The concept of a Maker Lab is not just for technical education; it also applies to academic learning. Create multiple vertical legs in the T model. We currently have adequate AP and IB courses for students who want to learn more deeply in academic subjects. Our advanced academics begin in middle school and culminate with an AP or IB test. Create advanced learning sequences in each category of career education. Teach a multi-year deep, performance-based learning in each of the following curricular areas”

  • Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources
  • Business and Information Technology,
  • Family and Consumer Sciences
  • Health Science
  • Marketing, Management, and Entrepreneurship
  • Technology and Engineering

The Big Duh!

We need a new educational model if we want to achieve different results. The answer to whether we should cause all children to achieve a general or a specialized education is “yes” to A and B in the second paragraph above. However, instead of talking about a T-model, we need to execute a T-model.

During the ages of pre-K and into middle school, all children must achieve memory, understanding, application, and analysis skills in reading, ELA, math, science, and social studies, art, music, world language, and technical education. We will teach each child until each child achieves mastery of these four levels of learning goals. This is where “no child can be left behind” really applies.

In middle school through grade 12, all children must achieve given standards in their chosen field of academic and/or career education advanced learning sequences. Children may enroll in more than one field. Attainment standards in advanced learning will be the earning of articulated college or technical college credit while in high school and/or employment as an apprentice or trainee in a Career and Technical Education field of study.

High school graduation will be a clear linkage to post-high school education and/career.

Excellence in American education must mean more than daycare and universal literacy. A proactive construction of T-modeled generalized and specialized educations based on mastery of background knowledge and deeper learning in specialized subjects will redefine and re-establish our nation’s educational excellence.

To Improve Student Outcomes, Theory Needs to Guide Teaching and Learning Practices

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When veteran PK-12 teachers consider how to best instruct the children in their classrooms, what influences that critical decision? Do they give primary value to the teaching/learning theories they learned in their teacher preparation and post-graduate programs? Do they implement the school policies and instructional initiatives of their school district? Do they adopt the hot button interventions that seemingly rise for every school crisis. How teachers decide to teach and the rationales for their choices make a difference not only in how teachers teach but also in how children learn.

Reality tells us that local school policies and governmental mandates form a teacher’s working conditions and these conditions shape daily work for classroom teachers. In the post-pandemic era, school boards have been highly active in revising and creating policies on district curriculum, student academic achievements, and student wellness. As lay leaders, board members respond to assessments, parents, and their community. They tend to perseverate on generalized data without drilling into local and disaggregated data. And board members universally lack foundational philosophical and theoretical working knowledge that should underlie educational decisions. This is not fault finding, just descriptive analysis. I am a retired school superintendent who also served as school board president.

Given the above, it is essential that professionally trained educators – teachers and administrators – provide their school district with the philosophical and theoretical foundations that ensure pedagogical and developmental appropriateness are embedded in solutions for academic and socio-emotional problems.

What do we know?

George Lucas tells us that “Your focus determines your reality.” When so many children are underperforming academically and are in socio-emotional distress, it is easy to focus on the here and now and that is what happens in school board meetings. Here and now focuses on existing problems by providing instructional remediation, services for the afflicted, and adopting rules and regulations to guard against repetition. Parents and community want to see action – something done now. A focus on immediate and direct responses, band aids though they may be, generally pleases constituents. When data says there is a problem, responses tend to focus on changing/improving the data. Action and quick response can be a focus and can be a wrong focus.

When I look at the number displayed on my bathroom scale each morning, I am presented with two different ways to focus on reducing that number. The first way, the one I usually choose, is fasting for two days and doing two-a-day routines on the elliptical. An immediate reduction of caloric intake and increase in calorie burn off lowers the numbers on the scale. If I repeat this routine every week for two months, I can really move the numbers. This is the same type of focus I see in too many school reactions to unsatisfactory data. Do something that is very visible now, repeat it over the short haul, and publish better data.

If I chart the numbers on my scale over several years, I can point out the months when I fasted and exercised and the months when I did not. However, I have known all along that this regimen is not healthy. It only moves the daily data. I can hear the old knight in Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade, tell me “You did not choose wisely.” And I know he is right.

We need to focus educationally on the soundness of our programming before we decide that the data we see is bad data. In fact, we may be seeing the data we should expect given the construction of our programs. Our programs may be working very well to give us the results we see because this is appropriate data for poorly aligned programming. My weight, though I may not like it, is my weight given the decisions I make.

What to do?

Focus on the through-line of practices that produce quality outcomes.

The disconnect between educational training and everyday teaching practice is not new. There is very little incentive for a teacher to tell the children doing her math assignments that she consistently compares her teaching with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to ensure she always follows the highest professional standards. Or that “Today our learning objectives are at Bloom’s first two levels, remembering and understanding. Next week your learning will be at his application level.”

However, when focusing on the through-line of teaching practices that cause quality learning, there is every incentive for declaring the educational theories and principles of an instructional program and how those theories and principles are consistently developed in daily practice.

Examples look like these –

One should expect that EC/PK programs are aligned with national early childhood education standards (NAEYC), demonstrate an understanding of Piaget and child development, incorporate Montessori-like designs, are play-based, and emphasize socialization as well as pre-academic curriculum.  These should not be assumed but should be a published and highlighted through-line for every child. EC/PK teachers should tell parents about the theories and principles that are foundations in their children’s daily schooling. EC/PK programs aligned on this through-line begin to see student performance data aligned with program expectations. Programs aligned with valid principles see data resulting from best practices. There always may be room for improvement, but there are no end-of-year comments of “We never expected that data.”

One should expect a K-12 mathematics curriculum to teach and require children to demonstrate understanding of and proficiency with each grade level of mathematics before progressing to the next level or course. Two realities exist for students in K-12 mathematics. First, math is not easy for all children, but all children can learn mathematics. Second, the “math wall” is not due to harder concepts in upper-level math but to the failure to master predecessor content, procedures, and reasoning. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, Ausubel’s development of predecessor knowledge, Vygotsky’s principles of proximal learning, theories of retention and transfer, and best practices of explicit teaching tell us these two realities are true.

The reality behind our students’ dismal performance on NAEP and international assessments is that children in our schools get passing grades without mastering developmental mathematics. The theory and principle-based through-line for mathematics must be theory and principle-based instruction AND mastery of content and procedures. Children cannot advance to the next level with demonstrative deficiencies in their predecessor understandings and skills. If they do advance, we should be pleased that the data resulting from their poor assessments correlate directly with the quality of our teaching.

One should expect all K-12 teachers to be versed in child and adolescent development, be proficient in identifying and responding to a child’s own aberrant behaviors and aberrant behaviors directed at other children. Bullying and harassment are real, just like a child who says 2 + 2 + 5. And they need to be corrected and repaired just like an academic error. Teachers who know and talk about principles and practices of logical consequences, assertive discipline, restorative justice, discipline with dignity and special needs programming of PBIS are prepared to deal with bullying and harassment when they encounter or are informed about it.

The Big Duh!

To paraphrase a line from the movie, The American President, “We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them.” In a nutshell, the problem is not the data resulting from student assessments. The problem is that we expect better data without fixing the breakdowns in our teaching an learning. The data is accurate given our disconnected instruction.

When we align foundational teaching and learning theories, principles, and practices as a through-line in student learning, we will see improved data because it results from connected instruction.

Banning Cellphones In School Creates Unintended Consequences.

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Adults 1, children 0. This is the score in the argument about children, cellphones, and school. State legislation and policymaking are banning children from accessing cellphones in school. In Wisconsin school boards must have a policy restricting child access to cellphones during instructional time. This may be a good decision based upon good intentions with assumed positive outcomes. However, nature abhors a vacuum. If children are banned from looking at cellphones, what will replace their attentive focus? Assumptions abound.

What do we know?

Nature abhors a vacuum. It is an immutable law. We learn about this in science class. When we pour water out of a glass, its vacant volume fills with air. There is a balanced equilibrium that sustains itself. Leave a garden untended and preferred plants will be overrun by surrounding nature. We call them weeds but they really are survival plants seeking a place to grow. When a political leader retires, others fight to fill the void. This is real.

This immutable rule applies to human behavior. To stop smoking, a person replaces the habit with another, like chewing gum. Try keeping silent with a group of people; someone will start speaking, humming, or whistling. Telling someone they cannot do something often strengthens their resolve to do it.

Let us apply other equally valid adages.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. No matter one’s good motives, there always are unintended consequences to every decision. Plastic in the 1960s was the miracle material of the future. Today we cannot rid the planet of plastic waste. Every new medicine carries with it a list of “side effects.” Cigarettes were handed to WW2 service men like candy leading to a generation of cancer victims. Few good intentions go totally unpunished.

A third rule is hypocrisy knows no bounds. Adults are addicted to cellphones like their children. Workplaces are just as disrupted by employees looking at their phones as classrooms are by children looking at theirs. Yet adults make the rules, and most rule makers make rules for other people.

So how do these three pearls apply to our educational landscape?

Adults are upset that too many children in school prefer to look at their cellphones rather than pay attention to their teacher or engage in what their teacher is teaching. In nation-wide surveys, teachers report that classroom behavior is increasingly worsening in the post-pandemic years. “An increasing percentage of educators reported worsening student behavior, from 66% in 2021, to 70% in 2023, to 72% in 2024.” Surveyed teachers “… frequently blamed (cellphones) for student misbehaviors and distractions.”

EdWeek – post-pandemic increase in classroom misbehavior

In connecting classroom behavior with cellphones, hypocrisy arises. If classroom teaching were engaging and meaningful, would children blatantly look at their cellphones instead of their teachers or their classroom assignments? The connection between teachers, teaching, and children is innate and if the lesson is compelling, children will give it their attention, and the number of cellphone users will diminish. The hypocrisy is in blaming cellphones for a lack of student attention when the lack of compelling teaching and teacher-child relationships are equally at fault.

Given the hypocrisy, the rules of unintended consequences must be accounted for. Children in a classroom, like the natural environment, abhor a vacuum. We know this by their behavior when we gather them together without something to do. They find their own things to do. When we take away the cellphone and students still are not engaged by their teacher, students will find something else for their attention. We do not know what their next “something else” is, but we soon will.

Best solutions.

Strengthen teacher-child relations. For some teachers, this is just usual practice as they prioritize their connections with all children in their classroom every day. But this is not the case universally. An EdWeek 2024 survey shows “A majority of high school students – 57 percent – say the adults in their school care about them at least a moderate amount, but 1 in 5 students say the adults care little or not at all about their well-being and success.” Reverse that perception to 43 percent do not say their school adults care about them at least a moderate amount!

EdWeek – Do Teachers Care about Students

Just as “teach the best, ignore the rest” is a worst practice, so is “care about some, disregard the rest.” There will be tipping points when the no care factor will be what fills the vacuum in the no cellphone era. If teachers do not care, why should children?

In another EdWeek survey of how teachers can improve classroom behavior, “building strong relationships with students seemed to win by a landslide” with 59% of the vote. “Maintaining consistent rules” earned 28% of the votes.

EdWeek – How to improve classroom behavior

What to do?

If you do not want unintended consequences, rely on best practices.

  • Build positive connections with all children. There are invisible children who attend class every day, never volunteer, and seldom are called on by the teacher. They are seldom absent, are not discipline problems, and do not draw attention to themselves. Consequently, they get little attention and easily disengage from classwork. Give all children your attention every class period. Let no child go unnoticed.

An EdWeek surveyed student said, “When there is a teacher that I have a relationship with, I 100% try harder in class. Even if I got no sleep the night before, I will stay up (to study) for first period because I like the teacher.”

EdWeek – Student Engagement

One of the easiest ways to connect with a child is proximity. Every time a teacher kneels at an elementary student’s desk to see how the child is doing or sits at a table with secondary students during their group work, proximity is a positive relationship force. When a teacher stands at the front of the classroom or behind her desk and never gets close to children, the lack of proximity disengages children.

  • Learn and use motivational theories. Madeline Hunter taught us six concepts that will motivate children to engage in their learning. She taught us to raise their level of concern (positive anxiety), create a positive feeling tone about learning new things, show how successful learning begets more successful learning, give students immediate feedback on their learning, personalize learning to increase student self-interest, and gradually move them from their extrinsic motivation to their own intrinsic motivation. Motivation takes work and using tested theories makes the work make sense.

Hunter – Motivational Theory

The EdWeek survey on student engagement reinforces this. “The vast majority of students, 83 percent, say there are not enough opportunities at school for them to be curious.” Classwork by itself does not raise curiosity; it is just an assignment to do. The ability to raise curiosity is an art form in a teacher’s toolbox of skills. Creating curiosity is how a new topic is introduced or inserted strategically as children advance in a lesson. Strategic use of curiosity motivates children to be engaged.

  • The care factor is multidimensional. Know the children you teach. Greet them at the classroom door every day. Acknowledge their other school activities. Applaud their efforts in school activities, arts, and athletics does not demean academics. Integrate the diverse languages and cultures of your students into the classroom. Recognition enhances a child’s realization that her teacher really knows her and raises a mutual care factor.

The Big Duh!

Banning student access to cellphones during instructional time is not simply a rule change. It is a transaction that demands teacher attention to the question of “what now?” If teachers think banning cellphones alone will improve classroom behavior and student attention, they are in for very rude future. Acknowledge the vacuum created without cellphone access. Recognize the essential need for positive teacher/child relations. Rely on high quality teaching using motivational theories to engage the recently disengaged and sustain children who were not cellphone users. Make everyone in the new no cellphone era a winner.

Knowledge, Like Water, Will Slip Between Our Fingers Unless.

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When you cup your hands and use them to scoop up a drink of water, how long can you hold the water before it seeps between your fingers and out of your hands? Some can hold onto the water longer than others, but eventually the water slips from everyone’s hands. So, it is with our memory. We hear a name or phone number or read a story and for a bit of time we remember these. However, after a bit of time, that length of time varies with the person, recall of the name and phone number and the details of the story slip from our memory like water between our fingers. Short-term memory is only that, good for a bit of time. If we want to remember things for a longer stretch of time, we need to build long-term memory. We can build memories if we choose to do so.

What do we know?

We consider memory to be a natural phenomenon for keeping track of things. In everyday life, we have hundreds of micro experiences every day. These are things we see, and hear, and do as part of daily living. Yet we remember very few, because they were insignificant and occurred quickly and without reason to become longer memory. Our brains are not intended to remember everything we see, or hear, or do because there are thousands of these minutiae every day. Consider what it would be like inside your head if your brain were constantly trying to make sense of every detail in every second of your life. Happily, no one knows what your head would be like because this does not happen naturally. Instead, our brain sheds the minutiae in short order. Forgetting is as natural as remembering. Unless we actively work to build memory.

Being a student in school may build many memories but schooling itself does a poor job of teaching students how to remember. Our curricular program for every grade level and every course is industrial in nature. A teacher organizes units of instruction and teaches them one after the other. Sadly, schooling is assembly line instruction, and the conveyor belt only stops at graduation. The daisy chain organization of curriculum assumes that some of what a child learns at an earlier age will relate to or be applied in a later age. Certainly, a child’s developing skill sets in phonics-based reading and use of arithmetic skills are used throughout school and later life. However, what the child reads in fourth grade or the math work the child did in sixth grade are stand-alone assignments. 

Case in point – why do children in the United States typically study US history in grades 5, 8, and 10? The casual answer is that by teaching it again in 8th and 10th grade children develop a deeper understanding of their national story. If that were true, why do so many children have trouble on tests of US history? It is the most repeated curriculum in PK-12 yet ask any adult the name of the 8th US President or the relationship between the American Revolution and the War of 1812 or the effect of the Smoot-Hawley Act and you will wait a long time for answers. Are these important to remember? Maybe not, but they are indicative of how we treat this three-peat taught curriculum. Most American adults cannot pass the Immigration Service civics test. We are illiterate about our national story. So much for teaching children how to remember.

Being smart in school by remembering what you learn should not be a secret – help every child to be as smart as they can be. We need to teach children all the “secrets.”

Long ago and before the Internet’s instant access to information, knowledge was power. People who knew things and could do use their knowledge had advantages over people who did not know. Sadly, schools and teaching were a matter of “teachers know and children do not know – and only the smartest children learn what teachers know.” Too many of us experienced this in school.

Today our teachers’ job is to cause all children to learn what teachers know. A first-grade teacher’s job is to cause all first-grade children to learn the first-grade curriculum. A chemistry teacher’s job is to cause chemistry students to learn chemistry. This is teaching with an “I will do everything in my ethical abilities to teach my children what they need to know and do.”

Memory work is not easy, and it is not intuitive for all children. If a child has natural memorization ability, great! For children who need help memorizing, teach them how to remember. This mandate and constantly needs adaptive practice in every PK-12 classroom. We do not teach how to study and remember in elementary school and never again in middle and high school. We teach and practice these abilities in every classroom.

What to do better.

Start by acknowledging the current state of learning and remembering. We do not teach for long term memory. We do not teach children how to build long term memory, and our classroom practices do not build memory for the long-term. We talk about the importance of building, recalling, and using background knowledge but do not teach children how to recall and use what they have been taught.

Be intentional. Building recall does not take as much time and effort as reteaching what children have forgotten. “Children, we are going to learn how to improve our memory.”

  • Use recall events. Tell children “Before the next chapter or unit test, we are going to do things to help you remember what you are learning. These small activities will strengthen your memory of what you are learning before our usual tests.” Every several days have children “Tell me about the story we have been reading? I want to hear what you recall and your thoughts about the main characters, the plot, and where you think this story is going.” At the start, be non-evaluative and over time expect children to develop correct details. Have children tell each other about steps they have been taught to use in checking their multiplication problems. Do not just do the steps but explain why each step is mathematically important. Have children hum the song they are learning or restate the safety rules for using a turning wheel for pottery. Work on recalling the essential things in the current chapter or unit or story or class activity. Then, do it again next week.
  • Use non-graded retesting. Tell children “Frequent review of what you learned and was in a recent test helps you to remember what you learned. So, we will have several follow-up tests of that same information. The follow-up tests will not be graded, because we are taking these tests to build memory of what you already were tested on.”
  • Use flash cards. Have children make their own flash cards. This applies to all K-12 children in all subjects. Cards can be created to build recall for vocabulary and definitions, events with dates and names, series of steps in a process, and to explain significance. The practice of creating flash cards alone builds memory; the use of flash cards builds stronger memory.

No child is too old for flash cards! At age 77 I am relearning French language and flash cards are part of the routine.

  • Use intermittent review. Students tend to cram for tests. Tell children “Better practice is scheduled or intermittent review over time. Do not leave studying for a test until the last night before test day.” The recall events described above practice intermittent study. Use intermittent for end of course and end-of-year tests. Next month do a review of essential content and skills taught the previous month. Run through last month’s flash cards. Three months hence do it again. The reason is this – background knowledge, like water in your cupped hands, eventually will slip away if you do review/refill it.
  • Use memory organizers. Tell children “It is okay to create your own ways of remembering what you don’t want to forget.” Teach them how to draw a concept map linking ideas together as supporting details. Teach them associations to link new learning to what they know. Teach them how to create a rhyming word phrase so that each word reminds them of ideas and strings of ideas they want to remember. Teach them to use a simple sentence where each word reminds them of an idea or string of ideas they want to remember.

The Big Duh!

Return to a variation of Cartesian logic. “If I taught something to children and they did not learn it, did I really teach them anything?” Possibly. Instead posit, “If I taught children and did not teach them how to remember what I taught them, did I really teach anything?” Indeed, not. If you expect children to remember what you taught them, teach them how to remember.