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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.

The Art of Breathing and Teaching

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Breathing is an autonomic body function and is essential for human life. A healthy person breathes without thinking about it. When teaching children, knowing when to pause and take another breath to let learning unfold is a conscious act of breath control. Effective teachers know the art of breathing.

What do we know?

As a child, I was told to pinch my nose, jump into the deep end of the pool and swim. “Take a deep breath, hold it, and jump!” “Oh, and do not open your mouth to breath until you must. You will know when!”

As a student teacher, I learned to prepare an objectives-based lesson with a Madeline Hunter lesson design. When all students were seated and I had their attention, I took a deep breath and jumped into the lesson. Once I had connected the day’s lesson to yesterday’s lesson, I taught/swam hard moving through my lesson plan. My college supervised advised, “Once you have children’s attention, do not lose that connection until the lesson is finished. It is easier to keep them with you than it is to regain the attention of children you lost.” That mantra served me well until I looked up and around. Like a swimmer who has held his breath and come up for air, I was teacher in the middle of a lesson without knowing much about the children I was teaching. Their learning was secondary to my teaching.

Experience can teach us, and informed experience teaches us to create better experiences. I learned that I did not need to pinch my nostrils and hold my breath like a balloon under water. Diving headfirst was both more efficient and more exhilarating. I learned shallow racing dives and to hold a for four flutter kicks then to begin my stroke count and breath as planned. Informed practices created better experiences.

So, it is with teaching. Breathing may be autonomic, but effective teachers know how to pause, breathe, and let learning catch up with their teaching.

Intellectual breathing.

Hunter taught us to check for cognitive understanding. Checking is taking a breath from teaching finding the extent to which children are learning from your teaching.

Strategies for intellectual breathing include the following:

  • Cold calling. Do not ask for volunteers, but call in your “bell weather” students, the students who if they understand then most other students also will understand.
  • Think-pair-share. Students write quick responses to your question, share their response with another student, discuss and modify their mutual response, and report orally to the class.
  • Roll a question around. Ask a question requiring more than recall, one that causes a child to connect new learning with prior learning or provide a new context. Then ask another child to either agree, disagree, or add to the response. Continue with five or six students to push their thinking.
  • Quick quiz/ticket. Ask students to respond in writing to name the main points of the lesson so far, or to explain a concept in the first instruction, or formulate questions they have about what they have learned.
  • Use a visual fist to five. This strategy checks each child’s security with what they have learned. A five-finger wave says the child believes she has a high level of understanding, and a fist says, “I am confused.”

These are formative strategies that tell a teacher “Success. Keep teaching.” Or “Whoa, you need to reteach, correct, clarify, and reinforce what children know before going on,”

Emotional breathing.

Teaching usually is focused on what children think and know. Take a breath and pause to allow children to consider how they feel about what they have learned. “Aw, this is soft. Feelings do not help students on their statewide assessments.” Wrong!

Unlike the factual nature of checking for cognitive understanding, taking an emotional breath is observational and attitudinal. As children progress through a lesson or unit, their executive skills, social awareness, relationship skills, and ethical well-being are equal to their cognitive understanding.

Can or are all students able to –

  • Initiate and use a new skill independently? Can they self-start or are they dependent on their teacher?
  • Aware of the social context of what they have learned? Do they know that different economic, socio-political, cultural, or linguistic groups have a different take on the topic? Can they accept such diverse thinking? How do they feel about this?
  • Work with all other children in the class to extend their new learning. What groupings will help understanding? What needs to be done to improve child-to-child relationships?
  • See ethical and responsible decision-making issues in what they are learning? Can children self-regulate based on their ethical integrity?

Emotional breath taking relies on a teacher’s observational and perceptional acuity. First, a teacher must be self-aware of each of these. Second, a teacher needs to be aware of indicators of SEL indicators that children give off in their classroom experiences. Third, a teacher needs to be prepared to convert observation into planned instructions. If children are lacking in executive functions, teach them. If students are socially unaware, teach them. If children do not see ethical issues, teach them.

Taking a breath of emotional checking assures that teaching and learning are not mechanical but also humane.

Self-awareness.

Breathe also for yourself. Like the swimmer coming up for air, take a pause to help yourself adjust within the lesson. Stop teaching. Take a sip of water. Look around and breathe. Take time to see where you are in the classroom. As a mentor told me, “Pull your socks back up. You have been going at it strong.” I have seen teachers so “into their teaching” they are not aware that they have walked themselves into a corner of the room where the whiteboard hits the wall. One or two kept on teaching through the passing bell and when they turned around a new class of children was seated in their classroom wondering what they should do.

With experience, most teachers know when lessons are working successfully and when they are not. Perceptive teachers know when a lesson that is faltering lies in their preparation and when it is with them in the moment. They can take a breath and adjust themselves and their teaching.

At the same time, ineffective teachers do know how to breathe. They plow ahead in their ineffective lessons with ineffective practices.

The Big Duh!

Teaching is a human endeavor exercising the art and science of causing children to learn. Because we are human, we need to use our natural instincts to inform our uses of the arts and sciences. Effective teachers know how to stop teaching, take a breath, use the pause to monitor and adjust themselves and their instruction, and with new insights go forward.

Lastly, and most importantly, while you pause for breath look around at children engaged in learning. It is a most wonderful sight. And know that your pause for breath also is instruction and reinforcement to children that they also need to pause and breathe.

If You Do Not Hear A Student, Is The Child Really Present? A Cartesian Problem.

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Today I am writing about children in school who are seen but seldom heard. Each of these conditions, to be seen and to be heard or not, is a personal choice a specific group of children. While most kids clamor for the attention of their peers and their teachers, there are kids who are inclined or consciously choose to be visibly present every day AND to be audibly and participatorily absent. It raises a spin on Cartesian logic. If a shy or introverted child is present in the classroom everyday but never volunteers to speak and shuns large group engagement is the child really here? Is the child successfully learning? Is school supporting and helping shy and introverted children?

A different kind of invisibility.

While learning can be exciting, schooling can be devastating. Universally, our youngest children are social beings when they enter school. As they look at their classmates, they only see other children just like themselves and they instinctively move toward and with their new age-mates. If they cannot be the first in line, they all want to be the second. The group, like a swarm of bees, moves together and any child who wanders off, quickly scurries to rejoin. Their judgements of each other only last a micro-second because the very next moment holds new excitements and things not to be missed. They seldom see differences that may exist between themselves and others.

Early school days are filled with the excitement of new things. Children have large eyes and hands that want to touch everything. There is sensory stimulation galore. Most children are energized by the sounds, sights, and activity of their school environments. In fact, they contribute to the managed chaos. School is a beehive of activity.

Early in their school experiences, children learn that attention swings between the whole and individual students constantly. When their teacher asks a question, many children want to answer at once. Before the question is finished they have their hands in the air waving and saying “Call on me! Call on me!’ At school, taking turns is a learned school behavior. However, with taking turns comes the spotlight of attention. When a child asks the teacher a question or the teacher asks a child a question, the attention of all other students and the teacher is on THE student. How a child responds to being the focus of attention can decide whether the child will choose to be visible or invisible in school.

Elevated levels of sensory stimulation and focused attention abound in school. In fact, schooling promotes these and success in school requires children to adapt to these two conditions. So, what about the child who is shy or introverted?

Yes, the child may be present every day. Yes, the child is present but seems to cower at sudden and loud noises and overly excited and prefers to work alone. Yes, the child has opportunities but declines to speak and never volunteers to speak. Yes, the child can learn successfully if the child can do so independently. And no, schools typically prefer and reward extroverted children and do not help and support shy and introverted children very well.

Choosing to be a non-participant is both an unlearned and learned behavior.

What causes a child to clam up in school? Fear and/or avoidance. Shy children fear or are highly self-conscious about being negatively evaluated by others. Introverted children avoid external stimulation and prefer quiet and solitary environments to process their own thoughts. Fear and avoidance – each is a distinct psychology and emotion and are not the same. They may overlap – shy children can also be introverted. And they may seem contradictory – introverts can seem outgoing, and extroverts can prefer shy environments. However, in school, we tend to lump the shy and introverted together. They are children who seldom volunteer in class or do not like to take part in public and social activities. They avoid being in the spotlight or being singled out. As a result, most teachers “let them ride,” do not call on them, and leave them alone because they do not cause trouble or draw attention to their needs. We let shy and introverted children become invisible in our classrooms.

Shyness is a real behavior and can be the product of a variety of things. Shyness or behavioral inhibition can be genetic. This inherited trait is related to about 15% of children who appear shy. Inherently, some children are cautious, tentative, and sensitive in social settings. They can be shy by nature.

Children can become shy and tentative when their parent(s) is domineering. A mom or dad who is overbearing, overly critical, and loud in directing a child can cause that child to become tentative. If the child were older, we would say they are “brow beaten.” An overly critical parent diminishes a child’s willingness to take risks. Why volunteer for loud, unwanted criticism? Adults around them can cause children to be shy.

Shyness, as in social anxiety, also can be attributed to personal experience. A child builds confidence and social security when she is successful in engaging with others, in raising a hand to volunteer, and giving correct responses when asked questions. Overtime, these successes encourage risk taking. However, the lack or success and a personalization of failed attempts can cause the opposite. It does not take many disappointments in social settings for a child to self-create a fear of any events that could result in public failure.

Social anxiety also can be the result of peer intimidation, ridicule, and harassment. If a classmate(s) makes fun of a child’s failure to answer a question correctly or asking a question another student labels as “stupid,” that child can become inhibited from speaking in class. Student to student bullying is a hot topic in schools today with interest on stopping bullies and helping the bullied. Too often the bullied already face other challenges.

At an extreme level, shyness can be a social phobia and is classified as a mental health issue.

Introversion and extroversion also have a genetic basis. Heredity accounts for 40% to 60% of children characterized as either introverted or extroverted. In their inherited biologies introverts have a higher level of baseline cortical arousal and dopamine sensitivity in their brains. They already are intrinsically stimulated so they avoid extrinsic stimulation. Over stimulation with more dopamine actually drains their energy and makes them emotionally edgy.

At an extreme level, introversion also is classified as a mental health issue.

Classroom anonymity.

Being shy can just be shyness and being introverted can just be introversion. They are are not related to intelligence and are not synonymous with school failure. Many valedictorians, National Honor Society members, accomplished athletes, and school leaders are shy and/or introverted students. They succeed in the classroom fringe and school shadows where they avoid attention or environmental distractions. They find anonymity in taking tests and submitting written assignments and papers. Given the solitude of paper and pencil, now digital schoolwork, these students can quietly earn As and Bs and build strong academic records without raising a hand in class or being in the front of a line. They learn to work independently, whenever possible, and often are the most creative and divergent thinking children in class. If assigned to group work, they make positive contributions, often leading the group in a behind-the-scenes way that does not draw overt attention.

They excel in sports and arts that feature independent, solo performances in more controlled environments. They run and swim, play golf, and chess and e-games, and debate, and build robots. The endure negative aspects of these with a focused commitment on what they can control – their personal achievement.

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, each stupendously successful in their business lives, were shy and introverted in school. Buffett says he became physically ill in anticipation of public speaking and would do all he could to avoid it. Gates is a classic introvert who focused on academics and showed asocial behaviors of awkward or rude social awareness. Introversion can cause children to miss or not recognize social cues clear to others. Successful introversion breeds continuous introversion.

Though good examples of introversion, Buffett and Gates are outliers. Few shy children will reach their levels of worldly success. The question before us is “What potentiality, like a Buffett or Gates or just a good, solid, and productive person, lies behind the shell of a shy or introverted child in school?”

Insecurity is a hard nut to crack.

Success in school requires a substantial level of risk taking. Children must navigate different environments each having its own challenges. School busses, hallways, cafeterias, restrooms, playgrounds, recesses and before and after school activities, as well as classrooms, are risky places. They also can be places possessed by elevated levels of activity, noise, lights, and chaos. In each of these, we see children walk along the walls, sit alone, appear head down, and talk with no one. They are risk and chaos averse individuals. And they can thrive when their work is evaluated not their persona.

There are self-help routes available to shy people and introverted children. Buffett enrolled in a Dale Carnegie public speaking course and says what he learned changed his life. With determination and strong personal effort, an introvert can become less introverted. The last words are key to Buffett – he became less introverted by learning skills of social engagement, like public speaking. Two things are true – earned billions of dollars and he still is a shy person.

Bill Gates was a loner in school avoiding large group activities and social events. He also is a gifted as a computer programmer and scientist. He has extraordinary strategic vision, critical thinking skills, and intellectual rigor. He overcomes his introversion when speaking about his work passions but prefers solitude when not. Due to his many successes, he can selectively choose when to be less introverted.

As educators, we can be as life changing for shy and introverted children as Dale Carnegie was for Warren Buffett. Our goal should not be to change shy children into attention seekers or introverts into extroverts. We need to teach them less shy and introverted behaviors and mentor them to optimize their personal assets. At the end of the day, shyness and introversion are not bad behaviors, they are behavioral preferences.

We can help and support the shy and the introverted child in your classroom by –

  • Providing opportunities for children to engage in independent and small-group work. Give all children to choice to work autonomously or in a small group (2-3) as often as possible. While some lesson activities are most productive as whole group activities, alternatives support all children.
  • Before whole group or larger group activities, incorporating time for children to process their thinking alone. Private time promotes their thinking and creativity.
  • Having quiet spaces in the classroom – a table and chair, a puff pillow chair, or a rug – where a child who prefers to engage in their lesson privately can do so.
  • In whole group discussions, quietly encouraging a shy child to take part with “I see you have done some good thinking/work. I would like to share it.”
  • Or quietly forewarning the shy child that you will call upon that child to take part. Give the child time to prepare for risk taking.
  • Using digital tools for student participation where a shy child can contribute ideas, written responses, or turn in work without speaking.
  • Expanding your definition of participation if you grade or record each child’s level of participation. Positive engagement in learning is not always extroverted speaking. Substantive participation can be the level of personal note taking, submission of quality work to a group, non-verbal contributions. Participation is not always what is seen and heard.
  • Scaffolding oral participation. Assign lesser time requirements or smaller audiences as beginning points for shy children. Consider the quality of thinking and planning prior to their speaking not just the length of time they speak.
  • Frequently using one-to-one checking with shy and introverted children to assure you, the teacher, that they are on track with their learning. Extroverts give lots of clues.
  • Valuing progress being made by a shy or introverted child as a class participant. Extroverts grab attention but may not improve the quality of their thinking or planning as much as a progressing introverted child.

We need to

  • stop applying negativity to children whose fearful shyness keeps them from raising a hand or volunteering for class activities and introversion avoidance moves them to fringe of classroom excitements. Their preferences are not a statement about our teaching or their classmates but about how they can learn best.
  • Find the academic and performance strengths that shy and introverted students bring to their studies and create curricular pathways for them to achieve our curricular goals using those strengths. When we hold to curricular goals, individual pathways don’t matter.
  • Expand how we communicate and reinforce communication with all children. The private, quiet, and individualized touch with shy and introverted children assures them that our teaching includes them.

Principals and administrators can help and support shy and introverted children by recognizing their quieter and less demonstrative successes and contributions to the school and their classmates. There are usually more shy and introverted people “backstage” contributing to the success of the few extroverts “on stage.” Personal recognition by school leaders reinforces the self-esteem of a shy or introverted child who avoids the limelight.

The Big Duh!

Increasingly, we are seeing the whole group of a classroom as a collection of diverse children. Some have special education challenges. Some have cultural and linguistic needs. Some are gifted and talented. And some are shy and introverted. The characteristics we once considered normal are now a small group within the diversity.

Educators need to respect the preferences of shy and introverted children for independent and less stimulating school environments AND provide them with diverse opportunities to express their intelligence and skills as students.

These are four references that can be helpful for the informed educator.