Category Archives: Blog

When the Edges Crumble, We All Fall Down

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Schooling has never been agnostic.  The egalitarian notion that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste” has always been slightly twisted to mean “as long as that mind thinks like my mind”.  As a generalization, we purposed each generation to create enough educated and productive citizens to support our continuing commonwealth.  So much for intentions. 

Within the past decade, the conceptual walls of restraint that have kept schooling and America’s best interests in touch with each other are failing.  The edges of our restraints are crumbling as they are cleaved by narrow-minded self-aggrandizers.  As a result, our enduring concept of an “American Way of Life” is shrinking into regional pockets of “my way of life”.  We no longer have a critical mass of self-balancing integrity, but loud spoken factions wanting public education to espouse their selective self-interests.  When the edges of our social contract fail, and they are, we will fall down.

What we know about us.

In truth, the education of children always has been self-interested.

For several millennia, royals learned to read, write, and count and the masses mumbled.  Property and wealth were guarded by laws interpreted only by men who could read and write it.  Illiterate people were easier to rule.  This social construct for education migrated to America.

The first school in the English colonies, the Boston Latin School of 1635, taught a narrow curriculum to a small number and group of children for specific community purposes.  To fill in the blanks, Boston’s town elders wanted their sons only to have a classical education like their father’s education so that sons could take their rightful place in the elite political, social, and economic life of New England.  Latin, Greek, the Puritan Bible, and the arithmetic of commerce.  White, Puritan, propertied boys only, please.

Up and down the English colonies, this was how early efforts in public education began.  New England merchants, middle colony merchants and landowners, and southern planters each assured an education for the propagation of their regional ways of life.

A change began in our post-Revolutionary expansion into western lands.  Early 1800s immigration brought peoples who aspired for economic and social mobility contrasted with the protective, conservatism of our colonial forefathers.  The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 said “…Article 3.  Religion, morality, knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, school and the means for education shall forever be encouraged” and ideas of a more universal education to support an expanding nation crept into public ed, slowly but not for everyone.  This was the 1800s.  Enslaved people were purposefully kept illiterate.  American Indian children were consigned to boarding schools to educate native culture out of their future.  Gradually, white girls were enrolled in school.  Public education though still white, discarded its denominational and propertied requirements.

Eastern cities used compulsory school attendance laws to manage millions of immigrant children.  Truancy laws were lax when children were an essential and necessary low-cost labor force for mill work. Truancy enforcement became stronger when the need for literate, voting adults was required.  An eighth-grade education was the American educational capstone through the 1930s.  The need for a high school education was confirmed only after America entered WW2 and too many draftees lacked the basic, secondary education our military required.  Sound cynical?  It was. 

For the most part, 19th and 20th century America shaped our public ed into this:  an assured child daycare system that freed adults for work, an elementary-level education that prepared adolescent children for adult employment, a literate population able to read newspapers and magazines for their daily news, and an inculcated understanding of white, mainstream history and non-parochial values.

Still sound cynical?  It was.  It still is.  Politics shapes educational practices constantly.

Public education served special interests beyond literacy.  No matter the need, public ed has been our conduit for government taking significant, universal actions to stem perceived national emergencies.  When President Truman signed the National School Lunch Program, he not only fed school children, he provided a federal subsidy to our nation’s post-war farmers that continues today.  We eradicated polio in the 50s by lining up every boy and girl in school for a shot of Salk and a sugar cube of Sabin vaccines.  Children were a captive public health clientele.  The President’s Physical Fitness Awards became the standard in school PE to assure a constant readiness of fit, young men for military service.  A letter and lapel pin from Ike kept me doing pushups for years.  When the Russians launched Sputnik, we strengthened high school math and science curricula and enrollment in German language resurged because German was the language of physicists.  Public ed was a launching pad for the space race.  Schooling has been an agent for economic stabilization, public health, national defense, and international competition, forever.

In 2002 No Child Left Behind was a knee-jerk response to the downward trending of domestic NAEP and   international PISA test scores.  Politicians feared that the assessed education of American children was failing to keep up with the scores achieved by children in China.  If this continued, the United States would lose its status as the leading international economy.  Nationally mandated curricular standards and testing swamped schooling for the next decade.  We studied Finland’s educational delivery as a model for besting China.  Huh?  With NCLB we let an implied perception that our nation’s international economic status was sliding beat up students and teachers and schools for a decade.

A lesson in a senior economics class should ask this question:  What single expenditure balances a state’s annual budget?  Answer: Money for public schools.  Every governor runs as a “Friend of Education” making loud criticisms regarding the state’s past educational report card with promises for future improvements.  Once elected, each governor, regardless of promises, uses the state’s annual allocation to public education to balance the state’s annual budget.  When revenues are low, the Gov cuts education spending.  Governors ease the impact of inflation on other state agencies by regulating school funding.  The failure to increase education spending always is blamed on the opposition party.

“According to The Century Foundation, we are underfunding our K-12 public schools by nearly $150 billion annual, robbing more than 30 million school children of the resources they need to succeed in the classroom”.  Except, fully funding public education would require spending that partisan governors are unwilling to commit.

When Schools Are Underfunded, Children Suffer

These are facts; you can look them up.

Critical junctures today

The liberal-minded desegregation of public schools in the 1950s and 60s is losing ground to a re-segregation of local schools.   New, conservative state statutes espousing parent rights allow charter schools to evolve into select-enrollment enclaves receiving public funding.  Parent choice is no longer just a choice of available schooling but a right to create schooling for parent purposes.  Segregated charter schools not only reject children of color but also children with educational disabilities.  Courts reason that assigning state funding to the children being schooled rather than to school districts justifies a re-segregating of public schools. 

https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/black-segregation-matters-school-resegregation-and-black-educational-opportunity

The Return of School Segregation in Eight Charts

States where the governor, legislature, and state Supreme Court are held by one political party are using partisan power to change public schooling.  Statutes are being written to shape curriculum, subjects, and teaching strategies to further partisan thinking.  Books are banned, curriculum is prohibited, and school leaders who oppose such can be charged with felonies. 

https://www.eqfl.org/board-of-education-passes-anti-LGBTQ-rules

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/1600-books-banned-2021-22-school-year-report-finds-rcna4836

Why Is This Thus?

Perhaps Sir Isaac Newton explains the reversal of integration in public education policy with his third law – for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.  To wit, slavery led to the abolition of slavery and freed slaves led to Jim Crow laws and that led to the desegregation of schools.  Now, an equal and opposite action reverses integration into a legal resegregation of schools.  However, to accept this explanation is to justify doing wrong and labeling it as right.  Is equal opportunity under the 14th amendment just a majority party definition?  Today, yes.

There are other forces at work. 

Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers In Their Own Land) examined the sociology of Louisiana and neighboring communities in Mississippi and Texas.  Specifically, she examined the effects of partisan politics on a population already plagued with a congruence of economic, cultural, and political pressures.  Highly dependent upon a regional oil employment and affiliated industries that made their communities into historic company towns, these working families are not only dependent on industry pay checks but also forced to live in chemically toxic communities.  Politically afraid, they oppose all governmental entitlements that help people of color with food stamps, jobs, and job training.  They see the world as win-loss and believe liberal government is taking from them to give advantage to others.  They support conservatives who are cheerleaders for their local fears. 

But reductive policies and practices are not found only in deep southern states. More than half our 50 state legislatures have entertained bills to restrict curriculum, subjects, and books.  More than half have considered legislation that would restrict student opportunities based upon gender identification. 

School boards in all states are being approached by parents demanding specific books be removed from school library circulation.  Populist censorship is determining what children can read in school. 

What Are We To Do?

The Newtonian pendular swing of partisan-written educational policies will not serve the long-term future of our children.  Special interested voices make the endgames of all their machinations defined by the widest arc of their collective policy statements, and these increasingly speak for fewer and fewer of our population.  Each iteration becomes more and more radical or reactionary and less and less unifying.

I am guided by the sign-off words of a late-night radio host I heard in the 1970s.  “When you know what is right, try to do it” and I flavor his words with Margaret Mead’s commandment “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think”.  Throughout time, when adults attempted to shape the world their children would inherit by placing bias and prejudice in their upbringing, disaster has been sprung upon the world.

An older slogan comes to mind.  Nancy Reagan asked children and young adults to “just say no” when confronted with illegal drugs in the 1980s and 90s.  We need to tell our governmental representatives they are to “just say no” to any legislation intended to ban books, restrict curriculum, or restrict educational participation for special interested reasons.  Our children need to be educated to think and not to regurgitate selective and biased thinking.

We Are Born To Hear; We Must Be Taught To Listen

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“Are you hearing me?”.  Right question.  Humans begin hearing sounds, including human voices, in the womb.  Unless impaired, hearing, like seeing, is an innate characteristic of humans.  We are made to hear the noise that surrounds us every day. 

“Are you listening to me?”.  Another right question.  Listening is an acquired skill that the person you are speaking to may not have mastered.  Given the noise a person hears in their immediacy, it is an assumption that you are being listened to.  There is a huge difference between hearing and listening.

“Are you actively listening to me?”.  A better question.  But, “maybe not” is a very common answer.

As educators, the issue we face is how to teach hearers to become listeners and listeners to become active listeners.  If we believe in natural learning, we can allow a hearing child to wander through life in the belief that experience creates listening skills.  The skills of listening are in her and just need time and place to become effective everyday tools.  That may happen, but many adults today demonstrate untrained listening characteristics.  They hear.  They recognize the source or speaker.  They may acknowledge the topic of the speaker.  Then, they fade into being untrained listeners.  Their focus wanders, they insert own ideas, they start to create a rebuttal before the speaker has finished, and their thinking pursues unrelated tangents.  Some of the unschooled just shut down when they are asked to listen because they don’t know how. 

Listening is an acquired skill we need to teach to children.

What is listening?

“Listening begins by hearing a speaker producing the sound to be listened to.  Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act.  People are always hearing, most of the time subconsciously.  Listening is done by choice.  It is the interpretative action taken by someone in order to understand, and potentially make sense of, something one hears”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listening

Why should we listen instead just hearing?

Listening and seeing are the primary ways people gather information.  This is one of the reasons Helen Keller’s stories is so meaningful.  She was deaf and blind.  She did not hear or see and was unable to learn from these two essential senses.  With instruction, her brain learned to associate meaning through touch and smell and associate Braille dots with letters and words.  She truly was taught to “listen” to non-sounds.  Almost all of us take our hearing and seeing for granted.  However, without learning how to listen and to discern listening from hearing, we also are disabled in our ability to learn from our sense of hearing.

There are other good reasons to become good listeners.

  • Good listeners are more likable. Individuals with strong listening skills are present in the conversation. People who listen with focus are often perceived as more likable.
  • Good listeners build stronger relationships. Communication is not a one-way street. Good listeners show interest, ask open-ended questions, and acknowledge what’s being said. This helps reduce misunderstandings and builds stronger relationships.
  • Good listeners have a clearer understanding of the topics being discussed. Individuals with refined listening skills seek to fully understand a speaker’s message. They pay attention to both verbal and nonverbal cues and ask for clarification when needed.

https://online.maryville.edu/blog/types-of-listening/

What do we know?

Parents are a child’s first teachers of listening skills.  With their first “Say ‘Mama/Dada”, parents teach an infant to associate sounds and words with a desired meaning.  A parent says a word and coos to give it meaning, or holds up a toy and names it, or points to food on a spoon and names it.  They speak “baby talk” or “parentese” to encourage their baby to make a desired association.  Most parents do not have training in this; they are not taught how to teach their child to listen.  They do what they remember being done for them, or what family members tell them to do.  Others talk with their young parent peers.  In general, infants from birth to pre-school or instructional daycare are subjected to several years of popular wisdom-informed parenting.

The Science of Early Learning provides 22 techniques for parents to try in their efforts to move their baby from hearers of sounds to a baby who is building skills as a listener.  A search of the literature, including the tenth edition of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, provides a plethora of resources for parents to teach their children to be listeners. 

How to Talk to Babies

By age 4, children reflect many of their parents’ listening characteristics.  This comes as conflicting news for many parents, because in their multiple family roles they are not always aware that an infant is listening to their every word.  Children hear us even when we do not want to be heard.  An infant’s auditory vocabulary is influenced by and mirrors the words, vocabulary, sentence structures, and dialects their parents or their older siblings use.  Babies soak up almost everything they see and hear a parent do because they have no filtering mechanisms.

When infants do not begin to micmic parents and siblings, there is worry that hearing may be impaired. 

That is why schools are mandated through Child Find activities to use auditory testing to verify a child’s hearing

In Wisconsin, schools, daycares, pre-schools, and local physicians partner to inform young parents about the Child Find activities of local elementary schools.  One of the screenings typical of a Child Find appointment is a hearing assessment.  Teachers work with parents in the primary school when either believes that a student/child has difficulty hearing.  Testing and a diagnosis can lead to further testing and perhaps to special education service and accommodations.

https://dcf.wisconsin.gov/files/childcare/pdg/lceymeetings/2022-08-04-lcey-handout-early-childhood.pdf

What do schools do to teach listening skills?

Who at school teaches children to be listeners?  Incidentally, we may think school bus drivers are at the frontline of teaching children to listen because they are the first adult to greet a child each school day. Be clear, drivers want children to listen but they do not teach listening skills.  A drivers’ first priority is bus driving and student safety, and she/he does not typically speak instructionally but in an directing voice. 

Schools are mandated to teach children to listen and do so indirectly and directly.  One of a 4K-K teacher’s first action each morning is gaining student attention, channeling them from all the noise surrounding them as they get out of a family car or school bus, enter the school, put their things on hallway hooks or in cubbies or lockers, and enter their classroom.  The sounds of their classmates surround them.  Children hear their teacher say, “Sit down.  Eyes on me.  Give me your ears”.  And so, school listening instruction begins.

Veteran kindergarten teachers look like magicians to parents of 4-year-olds gathered for Kindergarten round ups and orientations.  They efficiently quiet squirming kids and boisterous children as easily as they herd cats.  For most veterans, the use of curated commands, signals, words, voice, body language, and attitude over time work to change behaviors and make children more amenable listeners.  Effective teaching at all levels incorporates myriads of indirect communications that move a hearing child to a listening student.

https://www.fayschool.org/kindergarten-readiness/six-strategies-to-teach-kids-to-listen

The mandate for direct instruction derives from our state’s adapting the Common Core ELA standards into Wisconsin’s ELA standards.  All children are to be instructed in listening, as well as reading, writing, and speaking.  The Wisconsin DPI standards place listening and speaking in the context of effective communications.  Schools are mandated to instruct children in how to listen and in how to speak that causes them to be active and “productive communicators” in a wide variety of school and life circumstances.

https://www.coreknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/CK_CCSS_ELAAlignment.pdf

This sayeth the mandate –

“Speaking and Listening Standards – Introduction

These standards are directed toward developing students’ abilities to productively participate in communicative exchanges. Productive participation means that students are able to communicate in large group, small group, and one-on-one exchanges with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations; can respond to and develop what others have said; can contribute accurate, relevant information; and can analyze and synthesize a multitude of ideas in various domains. Students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of conversations and communicative exchanges in order to practice and apply these standards. Some standards repeat from grade-level to grade-level in recognition of the fact that students’ understandings develop and deepen over time. The ultimate goal of these standards is that students are able to understand and make flexible choices in their use of language in order to meet their communicative goals with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations.”

https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/ela/resources/Standards%20Listening.pdf

Each phrase in the above introduction points to a facet of effective communication and the last sentence poses the capstone – to meet communicative goals with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations.  Additionally, the fluid use of the word “varied” causes almost all listening skills  instruction to be embedded in subject, content, or skills instruction.  The context is listening within the instruction of reading or math or art or PE.  Seldom do teachers provide naked listening skill instruction devoid of a context for listening to something to be learned.

Elementary teachers focus early instruction of listening skills, so children learn to listen in these multiple school situations:

  • Audience – one-to-one communications, small group, large group.
  • Purpose – listening for directions, information, entertainment, conversation.
  • Situations – casual, focused, highly important, emergencies.
  • Responding based upon purpose – repeat what is heard, interpret what is heard, personalize what is heard,
  • When choices are available, be able to make a choice based upon what has been heard.extend

Teachers prepare and move children from one learning activity to another many times during a school day.  Routines are normalized and expectations for student listening are essential.  Teachers use routine signals to alert children to listen.  They may flick the classroom lights on and off, use a chime, or a buzzer.  The concept is that the signal alerts children to listen.  Once alerted to listen, a teacher focuses students to listen for “who is to do what, how, when, and why”.  Twenty or thirty minutes later, another signal is used, students are alerted to listen, and the class moves into another activity. 

Many listening skills are universal for school children.  Given the age of elementary learners, a great deal of instructional time is committed to group expectations and how an individual student in a group or classroom listens.  One college’s teacher prep program stresses the “Three As of listening – attitude, attention, adjustment.”  Teachers must shape children’s behavior first to an attitude of community.  A recognition that all classmates matter is a huge first step for a 4K-K child.  Once teachers have each child moving from “me” to “we”, the teacher creates, uses and reinforces strategies for gaining student visual and auditory attention.  We tend to pay attention to what we are looking at and that attention helps us to block out the noise so we can focus on the sounds coming from the person being seen.  In evolving from hearing to focused listening a child is ready to adjust to what is being said, asked, or directed.

Put into context, the routine above is used to prepare children for whole group activities, like recess or lunch.  Listening routines also are used to prepare students for reading group instruction, or individual work time at interest centers in the classroom. 

https://www.centenaryuniversity.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Triple-A-Listening-Supplemental-Reading.pdf

Ready to listen is not the same as listening

Hearing to listen is a first step.  Listening for a purpose is a second.  Listening as preparation for doing something based upon what one listens to is a new step.  Studies indicate we remember only between 25-50% of what we hear – the rest is abandoned as noise.  After ten minutes of listening, most people begin to drift and can remember less that half of their initial level of remembering.  Unfocused listening results in an awareness of less than 25% of what we hear.

https://www.mindtools.com/az4wxv7/active-listening

Based upon these studies, teachers learn to “chunk” communications they want children to hear, listen to, remember, and be able to respond to or act upon.  To do this, there are several time-tested cues for getting a child to listen and follow directions.  The institutional experiences of Boys Town tell us to do this. 

When communicating with children –

  • Stay calm
  • Be direct
  • State commands positively
  • Give one command at a time 
  • Give age-appropriate instructions
  • Give brief reasons
  • Be physically present
  • Ask the child to repeat the instruction
  • Reward compliance 
  • Make sure you mean it

https://www.boystown.org/parenting/Pages/how-to-get-your-child-to-listen.aspx

Listening to what?

So far, we have addressed the importance of listening, the mandate to teach children to listen, and the general routines and frameworks for listening.  The next level, teaching children to be active listeners, is where the effective communications expectations of the mandates make an educational difference.

Accuracy.  For decades teachers have heard and used the phrase “checking for understanding”.  Ask children to repeat back to you what they listened to you say.  An accurate repeat conveys congruence – the child heard and listened to what you said.  Asking multiple children to repeat what they listened to you say creates an accountability for listening.

Don’t be surprised when a child’s repeating of what they heard you say is nothing like what you said.  They “heard”, they did not “listen”.  Listening is a learned skill.  Patience and persistence are called for.  Simply tell your information a second time and again check for understanding.  And perhaps a third and fourth time.

Because listening is an acquired skill and “acquiring” requires time to learn and time is a valuable instructional commodity, teachers sadly diminish checking for understanding over time.  Teaching accuracy in listening takes time and time wasted due to misunderstanding is far greater that the time to check for initial understanding.

Detail.  Active listening requires an ear for details, and we can teach children to pay attention to details.  The first step is to write down the details as they are verbally given.  Check for understanding on the details.  A second step is to create “responsibility” for details.  One student listens for the “who”, another for the “what”, another for the “how”, another for the “to what degree” and another for the “when”.  Check for understanding.  Rotate responsibilities as some details are given at the end of the directions and everyone must listen to the entire direction.

I observe high quality teachers checking for understanding and for the details of listening in junior and senior high school classrooms.  Not only is what the mandate tells us to do, it is best practice.

Nuance.  Many of the things we listen to are loaded with clues as to the feelings and values and dispositions of the speaker.  Accuracy and details may be further understood by the way they are delivered.  Teachers are not robotics delivering information in monotoned voices.  They imbue what they tell children with the excitement and suspense of new learning.  Children need to understand nuance and identify when it supplies extra meaning to their listening.  Have children listen specifically for descriptor words and phrases; listen to the adjectives and adverbs and prepositions.  Ask listeners to interpret the socio-emotional flavor of what they listened to. 

Clarification and response.  Assign listening students to craft a clarifying question after their listening.  Is there a detail that is not clear enough?  Is there a possible early response a listener wants to try out while still in a checking for understanding phase?  Consider all the time teachers spend answering student questions after the work has begun.  When children ask clarifying questions at the time of the directions they demonstrate and reinforce their skills as active listeners.

Synergy.  Active listening demonstrates a respect and rapport between teacher and students.  When the speaker and listeners are actively engaged, speakers are encouraged to be more descriptive of details and nuance.  Respect for the speaker

In order to propel student learning, communications must become two-way, respectful, challenging, and nuanced.  It may require specific vocabulary and exacting terms.  As communication becomes more focused in specific outcomes, the need for listening and responding skills become even greater. 

How to teach children to be active listeners?

Generalized, active listening is hearing, paying attention, listening, and an ability to respond to what is listened to.  These statements cover the waterfront of how children and teachers engage in school communications, especially as children get older.  It takes loads of concentration, focused attention, and personal commitment to be an active listener.  To be active, a listener has to set aside all of the bad habits of hearing and initial listening and shift into being a committed listener.  Active listening skills come from with in the listener.

  1. Pay attention.  When paying attention, there is about a one second lag between the speaker speaking and the listener’s brain hearing. 
  2. Show that you are listening.  When a speaker perceives you as a listener, the speaker’s brain recognizes and begins to lock into this interpersonal communication.  Take notes.
  3. Provide feedback.  Repeat key points to demonstrate listening. 
  4. Defer judgment. 
  5. Respond appropriately.  Ask valid and respectful questions, summarize key points, suggest what you want to know or do next.

https://www.mindtools.com/az4wxv7/active-listening

Elevating active listening to upper-level listening.

Knowing that active listening is within the listener yet is cued by teacher communication, we can elevate active listening by moving our teaching interactions from the lower three levels – remembering, understanding, and applying – to higher levels of thinking – analyzing, evaluating, and creating.  The sociometrics of a classroom conversation change drastically when we move from asking students for the recall or interpretation of knowledge to the comparing and contrasting ideas, evaluating an ideas significance, or generating new solutions.  Instead of teacher-student interactions, conversations become student-student exchanges.  Teachers use wait time to assure students have time to consider their arguments while using body language to assure a student who is eager to contribute will be able to do so.  Active listening leads to intellectual excitement – the teaching moments teachers cling to in their memories of classroom work. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy

The United States State Department provides these four keys to their personnel regarding listening skills.

1. Seek to understand before you seek to be understood.

2. Be non judgmental

3. Give your undivided attention to the speaker

4. Use silence effectively

They read like sound advice to any teacher who is an ambassador for student learning.

https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/a/os/65759.htm

The Big Duh!

Once again we are called to use what we know to be true of good teaching and learning yet find difficult to do in the fast pacing of school life. 

We know these things.

  • Listening is a core skill essential for students at all levels of their education. 
  • Listening is a learned behavior that we must teach at all grade levels and in all subjects. 
  • Listening is more than hearing if it is to be educational. 
  • Listening takes time and commitment to the behaviors of attention, attitude, and adjustment that allow us to receive, understand, and act upon what we listen to. 
  • Active listening leads to higher levels of intellectual and academic productivity.

And we too often do these things.

  • Pace our teaching based on the first child who appears to have heard us.
  • Do not check for accuracy, detail, or nuance with enough children to assure that good listening occurred.
  • Let the clock determine what comes next in a lesson rather than what we listen to as student readiness for next instruction.

Students are more likely to mirror how we listen and use listening skills than they do our instruction in reading, writing, and speaking.  You know this is true.  Just listen to yourself.

Righting the Second R

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Take a breath, pause, and then jump back into the restructuring of our 3 Rs.  Our modern Thirty Years War over how best to teach Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic is not yet over.  While our national and state-based educational generals have cast their critical eyes on reading and math, the second R, writing, has slipped into the backwaters of school subjects.  We need to correct this.  Said simply, reading is the development of understanding and writing is the demonstration of understanding and more.  As we teach children to be skilled readers, we must teach them to be skilled writers.  We must do what is right by writing.

What Do We Know?

No Child Left Behind and the Common Core focused national educational systems on student achievement in reading and math.  These two initiatives provided a warlike educational scenario.  NCLB was the mandate that made improvement our only option and the Common Core was our dictum.  The reading, ELA, and math Core standards became the subjects that mattered.  If you want proof, check your school’s official state report card.  What gets tested gets taught.  Although writing is appropriately and very well addressed in the Common Core, the two expressive sides of reading, writing, and speaking, get short shrift. 

We finally are back on track in our instruction of reading.  Elementary teachers have slogged through more than thirty years of reading wars.  A resurgence of explicit instruction of reading in the larger, well documented Science of Reading is moving the needle of student achievement in reading.  The two-pronged attack of language comprehension and word recognition are moving all children into the realm of skilled readers.

The Missing Link Between Information and Knowledge

Today we face a “now what” question.  As children become skilled readers, what do we want them to do with the information they read?  How do we use input reading skills and meaningful reading material to generate useful student knowledge?  We teach all children to expose their learning through writing.

All children need a complete education.  NASA does not send astronauts to the moon without having planned for their return to earth.  When we ask a child to read a book, we don’t say “Good.  Job well done.  You can read.  End of story”.  We ask them “to do” something with what they read.  Our something modalities are speaking, performing, or writing.  The first two modalities are predicated on the third – plan what you want to say or how you want to demonstrate it by writing it.  The reading trip is not complete without a child writing about what they read.

 Input skills Become Output Skills

The Science of Reading teaches us five elements that create language comprehension.

  • Background knowledge
  • Vocabulary
  • Language Structures
  • Verbal Reasoning
  • Literacy Knowledge

With learned word recognitions skills, these five building blocks help a reader understand the printed letters.  They interpret letters into sounds, sounds into words, and words into the writing of Shakespeare.  These same five building blocks help students tell us what they think about Romeo and Juliet.  They use verbal reasoning to craft summaries, interpretations, comparisons and contrasts with other works, evaluate what they read, and create their own original written “masterpieces”.  They use their vocabulary and background knowledge to form what they want to write and language structures and literacy knowledge to tell their story.   One does not write well without language comprehension faculties.  Reading skills are writing skills. 

Some educators are attempting to construct a Science of Writing to mirror the Science of Reading.  Unnecessary.  The skills sets are known.  All we need to do is turn inputs into outputs.

When we provide children with exciting things to learn, we also provide them with exciting things to write about.  At all grades and in all subjects, writing is essential for students to tell us and others about what they are learning, the music they are playing, the art they are creating, the experiments that go “bang”, and the difference between “bull” and “bear” markets.  Stephen King tells us “The scariest moment is always just before you start”.  The teacher’s job is to get the writer started.  They will write.

Our To Do

Stephen King, again.  “If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others:  read a lot and write a lot”.  We have launched our students as readers.  Now we need to land them as writers to make the reading-writing connection complete.  If I can be appreciative of anything we received from the pandemic, it is school technologies.  Almost all children have a laptop or IPad for their writing instrument.  They can write anywhere anytime.  They can save, delete, and send.  They can share and edit.  I watch actors in role of Shakespeare use a quill and rough paper to simulate his writing.  Ink-stained fingers and balled up discards abound.  Today’s writers have the ease of technology.  They know how to get information as readers, and we can teach them how to tell us what they know as writers.

Our Not To Do

Teachers: Don’t should thyself with reading everything a student writes.  Writing for learning assessment purposes is only one of many reasons for student writing.  Student writers need to read their own writing many times in the writing process.  They need to reciprocally read and comment on other student’s writing.  Parents need to read their child’s writing.  Other teachers need to read student writing.  Your principal’s need to read student writing.

Once you stop shoulding thyself to read everything, do right by writing.  Write away!

To Be Visible or Not to Be, That Is The Question

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“Nothing, really,” is a chronic response to the legendary parent inquiry “What did you do at school today?”  Nothing.  Really?  Seven-plus hours at school and you did nothing?  Parents frown and their child says no more.  But what if this response is true.  Can a child shrink into an invisibility and skate through the school day without any meaningful involvement?  You bet they can.  Sadly, invisibility can also be bred into instructional designs albeit unintentionally.  Either way, invisible children do not engage in their daily instruction and do not make the educational progress they can make.

Invisibility 101

School can be a wonderfully engaging place for children.  Playgrounds, hallways, cafeterias, and gyms invite children to be active and engaged.  Classrooms are something else.  Most children fall into three classroom categories.

  • Visible, “look at me”, and “ask me anything”
  • Shy and “I know what you want but please don’t call on me”
  • Invisible, “don’t call on me and if you do, I won’t engage”

It is relatively easy for a child to become invisible in a classroom if she follows these four basic tenets to invisibility. 

  1. Never raise your hand. 
  2. Never cause trouble.  Troublemakers get a lot of attention.
  3. Answer every teacher question with “I don’t know.”  Wait out the teacher until she asks another student.
  4. Sit halfway back in the outside rows of desks and chairs.  These are the desks least frequently scanned by teachers. 

These behaviors have been proven over time to make a child invisible in plain sight.

Institutional Invisibility

Given a class of 25-plus children and a limited number of minutes for teacher-led instruction, statistically only a handful of children will be directly engaged.  This is true for elementary and secondary instruction.  A lesson design that commits most of the class time for student work begins with a teacher connecting today’s lesson with yesterday’s lesson.  This is followed by the teacher providing new information, showing new skills, demonstrating expanded ways of doing what is being learned, and modeling this instruction.  The third component of the lesson is focused on the teacher checking to see if children heard, saw, and understood her instruction.  The teacher calls on several children to repeat, re-model, re-tell the teacher’s instruction.  The teacher does not ask every child to participate in this checking of student understanding, but randomly calls on children.  If four out five children make an accurate and positive response, the teacher typically proceeds to the independent student work time of the lesson.  If the invisible child is called on, she just says, “I don’t know” and the teacher will call on another student.  Voila!  Invisibility.

The passage of class time also assists invisibility.  An elementary school day is full of math, ELA, social studies, science, specials, and recesses.  A secondary class of 45 to 50 minutes always ends with a bell.  If a child makes it to the tenth minute of most lessons without being personally engaged, they are most likely to be invisible for the entire lesson.

Making the Invisible Visible

The degree of invisibility a child achieves ultimately rests with the teacher.  Two time-tested strategies for engaging children are these:  keep a running record of student engagement and never accept an “I don’t know” response.

Sociometrics allows a teacher to chart the number and type of student interactions observed by the teacher.  Or, better yet, observations are made by an “observer” or mentor-coach in the classroom.  This is a quality strategy for tracking student interaction.

A teacher uses a seating chart and makes notations of interactions.  One notation will indicate the children the teacher called on.  A second notation indicates that the child volunteered.  A third notation indicates that a child asked a question.  And a fourth notation indicates that a child responded to another child’s question or comment.  Across several days, a notated seating chart describes for a teacher the patterns of child interaction and those children who have not interacted – the invisible children.  Knowledge is power and sociometrics points the teacher toward an assured and intentional engagement of all children.

Notations also are efficient cues for indicating how engaged a child is in other class activities and in other modalities.  A silent child who engages quickly in a group activity can demonstrate she was paying attention and learning.  A silent child may respond with clear understanding in a writing assignment.  A shy child may behave like an invisible student but be internally very engaged.  Don’t confuse the two.

“I don’t know” is a child response that needs to be eradicated from classrooms because it so seldom is a true statement.  All children know something regarding a question asked of them.  We need to persist or ask a better question. 

When a child says, “I don’t know”, a teacher can follow with “Then tell me what you think about…” or “Tell me how you feel about…” or “Ask me one question that will help you to know.”  Whereas a child may not know the correct answer to a question, that child does have a “thought” or a “feeling” about how the question can be answered.  Eradicating “I don’t know” requires an immediate follow-up engagement by the teacher.  When the child sits in silence to the second inquiry, allowing a smidgeon of wait time is good, but then persist.  “You’ve had time to think – now tell us what you think.”  If this sounds like bullying, it isn’t.  It’s causing behavioral change.

The message to children when teachers track their instructional engagement and do not accept “I don’t know” responses is clear.  All children in this classroom will be active learners.

As a final comment, a teacher who tracks child interactions and does not accept “I don’t know” is heavily armed when a parent declares “Every night my child says they didn’t do anything in school today.  What’s going on in your classroom?”  If that happens, smile and say “here are the facts in my classroom.  I engage every child every day and these are the ways your child was engaged today.”  Nothing!  Really?

Nothing, really” May Not Be A Statement About School

We also know that “Nothing, really” is a child’s way of not wanting to engage with a parent.  This supper table response, like “I don’t know” in school, is a child’s way of saying “I don’t want to talk with you.”  Many children who voluntarily and actively engage in school instruction use the “Nothing, really” to stiff-arm talking about school with their parent.  Consequently, a child who says “Nothing, really” at home may not have been invisible in school.  In fact, they may have been stellar students who just don’t want to talk with their parents.

Tighten The Lug Nuts of Learning

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I watched a technician in the auto shop balancing and installing new tires on my car.  He used a pneumatic wrench to tighten the lug nuts that secure each wheel to its axel hub.  The sound of the wrench ratcheting said the nut was tight.  When all four wheels were attached, he walked around the car and manually checked each with a torque wrench.

Catching my watchfulness out of the corner of his eye, he said “Just making sure the work is done right.  Don’t want your wheels flying off while you are driving”.

What We Should Know

With my car safely back in the school parking lot, I recently watched fifth grade children struggle with dividing fractions.  The concept of a reciprocal, inverting the divisor, and multiplying the dividend by the inverted divisor is a head scratcher to many children.  Dividing fractions is not a single lesson, but an operation that is taught, clarified, and strengthened in many lessons.  Some children demonstrated they understood but others had no confidence in their work.  They did what they were told to do without understanding why they did it.

Over the next weeks, I observed this fifth grade teacher checking the lug nuts of dividing fractions.  She knew that only a few children successfully learned this operation through their initial instruction.  Consequently, she literally walked new and clarifying lessons on dividing fractions around the classroom until every child knew what to do when presented a fraction to divide and also could explain how the reciprocal of the divisor allows us to use multiplication to split the dividend into equal parts.  She made each child’s future division of fractions roadworthy for use in learning advanced math.

Does this make teaching and learning just a matter of mechanics?  Not at all.  It demonstrates the diligence required to ensure that all children achieve learning success.  Knowledge and skills that are essential for future and scaffolded learning require teachers to check and recheck that these have been securely learned by every student.  Without the process of checking and tightening, the wheels of their future education will come loose and their learning will crash.

Why Is This Thus?

Although I use mathematics as my example, this blog applies to every unit of instruction taught in school. 

The legendary math “wall” is real and almost all students hit their math “wall”, usually within the content of trigonometry or calculus.  The “wall” arrives when the abstraction of mathematics is greater than the student can conceive.  The “wall” is not a big deal because most of us do not use advanced math in our daily living or careers.  However, not having the math skills below the wall is huge.  All children need to be skillful in math reasoning using numbers and operations, measurement, data analysis, geometry, and solving problems with unknowns.  These are career and life math skills.

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs97/97885.pdf

Successful learning in math up to the “wall” is achieved through scaffolded, grade level or course instruction, and active engagement between a teacher and student.  The scaffold looks like continuous instruction in 4K through grade 6 mathematics, pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, and Geometry.  The scaffold is an annually spiraled teaching of operations, reasoning, and problem solving.  Each successive instruction tightens student comprehension and application of math learning.

Active engagement is when a student interprets the math problem, explains her plan to solve the problem, uses math thinking and reasoning to resolve the problem, and presents a solution.  Engagement is all of these, not just one of the three.  The process takes in-class time because it requires ongoing student and teacher conversations.  The student must put math into words and words into mathematical thinking and use mathematical thinking to find clear and clean solutions.  The teacher listens, critiques, guides, and confirms.  The conversation is a must because it clarifies and secures the student’s learning.  The conversation is the teacher’s torque wrench.

We tighten the math lug nuts in 4K through algebra/geometry by actively engaging each student in exercising their mathematical reasoning continuously through the math curriculum.

What Should We Know About This Thusness?

It is easy and fun for teachers and students to start new lessons.   Motivation to do the work assigned is high when the information and skills are being introduced.  There are multiple “I get it” moments.  As the applications of the new information and skills become more complex, the number of “I get it” moments are harder to achieve.  Ultimately, more students say “I don’t get it” and this is when the engagement between teacher and student is critical. 

“Tell me what you do get” starts the conversation of clarification. 

“Let’s rethink the problem” opens new possibilities for successful learning.

“Let’s assure we are applying the right operations in the order needed and that we understand why we are doing this” secures student learning.

Each of these steps is an out loud conversation that moves a student from “I don’t get it” to “I get it” and the ability to apply what is learned in the future.

It is the diligence to complete and secure student learning that is hard and this is where too much teaching and learning stumbles.  The wheels come off a student’s learning when we leave her in an “I don’t get it” moment.

To Do

Plan what the learning outcomes look like and secure the learning of each outcome for every student.  Tighten the lug nuts everyday. 

Do this through personal engagement.  Asking “Are there any questions?” after giving students initial instruction only confirms that no one wants to ask a question.  It does not confirm that any student learned what was taught.  “Does anyone have a question?” does not tighten the lugs.

“Tell me…” and “Show me…” and “Explain your thinking” and taking the time to listen, clarify, critique, and confirm are the wrenches that tighten the lug nuts of student learning.

The Big Duh!

Because there is so much to teach and so little time to teach all of it, we feel the need to move quickly through units of instruction.  “We need to be done with this unit by the end of the month” often drives us to close the unit before all children are secure in their learning.  We are consoled by the curricular spiral and thinking “if they don’t learn it this year, they will learn it next year”.  This is how the lug nuts of learning loosen.  Next year’s learning is predicated on success this year, it is not a repeat of the past.

Don’t worry about how long it takes to have every student reach secure learning of a unit.  Learning is built upon secured learning; future learning fails when the clock tells us to move on.

Tighten the lug nuts of learning in every lesson taught to ensure all students are roadworthy for their next educational adventure.