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Content Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Empathy Are Equal Teaching Skill Sets

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President Theodore Roosevelt said, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” As educators, we know this, but we do not heed these words.

I work with a teacher licensing agency in Wisconsin. We are WI Department of Instruction-approved to prepare and endorse candidates for teacher licenses. Candidates are instructed and assessed in their understanding of and ability to teach content knowledge and to know and effectively use pedagogical skills. These two categories dominate teacher preparation.

Yet research and experience tell us that the single most essential quality children of all ages look for in their teachers is genuine care combined with trust of them as children and learners. Teacher empathy drives the “why” students engage in our curricular and pedagogical improvement strategies. We will not improve the data-based results until we attend to the human-based inputs.

A positive, empathetic care factor needs to become the third and co-equal skill set in teacher preparation. Until we do this, all other concerns for student academic achievement, student mental health and well-being, and their preparation as good citizens will continue to founder in our school systems. Children need to know their teacher cares about them individually before they begin to care about what that teacher is teaching.

What do we know?

Classroom environments, the way teachers and students behave, conform to teacher-student relationships. An observer sees it at once. The teaching/learning climate is a result of how children perceive their teacher’s relationship with them. There is no avoiding the nature and quality of interactions between teachers and students.

On the positive side, these are characteristics that occur in classrooms where children feel and know their teacher cares about and knows them as individuals, these things happen.

  • Children learn best when they feel safe to make mistakes, ask questions, and take risks.
  • Students work harder for teachers they believe they care about them.
  • Strong relationships reduce behavioral issues because students want to maintain connection and respect with their teacher.
  • When teachers communicate belief in a child’s potential, students persist longer and are more resilient.
  • Positive teacher-relationships are powerful for students from marginalized or high-risk backgrounds.

On the negative side, reverse each statement in classrooms where children do not believe their teacher cares about them as individuals. Feelings of safety, willingness to take academic risks, effort levels, behaviors, and persistence on difficult assignments – they all go away.

Question our assumptions.

In our teacher preparation programs, we assume that people who want to be teachers innately care about children. Why would they want to be teachers if they did not? It is a mistaken assumption. We know people who, as students, loved literature and story writing, doing math problems, completing science experiments, turning wood on lathes, and competing in athletics who though being an English, math, science, shop, or PE teacher would extend that love into a profession. Causing children to learn a curriculum is completely different than loving a curriculum. Too many people who love a subject do not find enjoyment in the messiness of children’s lives and classroom dramas. They have no empathy for the child who is not like they were as a child.

Even teachers who consider themselves to be empathetic often rate themselves as being higher on the empathy scales than their students rate them. Empathy is not the demanding and careful work needed in lesson planning, even when the planning acknowledges differences in students. Empathy for students is in the personal interactions between a teacher and children – it is in the immediacy and intricacies of what is said and done. If children believe that an empathetic teacher  

  • listens attentively and respectfully,
  • is consistent and fair,
  • knows each student’s name, interests, and challenges,
  • has and supports high expectations for each child’s learning, and
  • responds to mistakes and problems with guidance not shame, then

help teachers teach them. If they do not believe these to be true, classrooms are relational battlegrounds.

What to do.

Treat empathy as co-equal to content knowledge and pedagogy. Candidates are not born with content or pedagogical knowledge, and they are not born with genetic-based empathy. Each of these co-equal essentials is learned and can be improved with learning.

Begin by dropping the mistaken assumption that all teacher candidates are empathetic toward children. Instead, teach them about empathy and empathetic behaviors. Teach them how to understand and use their knowledge of empathy to build professional relationships with children, parents, and colleagues. Teach them how to measure their own empathy over time and in different contexts. And teach them that empathy is not a dispassionate strategy but a constant disposition. Empathy lives in a growth mindset.

Create a teacher preparation curriculum based upon empathy as a muscle memory that can be learned and strengthened. Teach –

  1. cognitive empathy, an academic understanding of perceptions of others and how to respond to those perceptions. There is a full, academic curriculum of this content.
  2. and practice affective empathy, a non-academic, real-world exposure of how to translate academic empathy into reactions and relationship-building. There are clinical settings for practicing and refining affective skills. As a type of muscle memory, we can help teacher candidates rehearse empathetic behaviors and self-critique their behaviors for a clearer understanding of how others perceive their empathetic skills.
  3. teach empathetic regulation to avoid burning out, potential callousness, and over emoting. There are models for understanding and resolving stress.

Use self-reports, observational tools, and student surveys to measure effect and impact of what candidates learn and how they internalize their learning into professional behaviors and relationship building.

Teach teacher prep providers and school supervisors to use research-based assessments to guide candidate development of empathetic skills sets AND to give classroom teachers feedback on their classroom and school practices. Most classroom observation tools avoid clinical critique of empathetic behaviors.

Make the use of research-based assessments a part of school-wide professional development divorced from employment evaluation. The quality of a teacher’s empathy for and relationships with children is hidden in academic and discipline reports yet it affects those outcomes immensely.

The Big Duh!

Traditional teacher preparation programs historically have emphasized the “hard” components of teaching and shunned the “soft” components. In Wisconsin PI 34, these are the rules for teacher prep programs, we have hard guidelines and assessments for content knowledge and the applications of pedagogical knowledge. We document these. At the same time, prep programs “record” human relations and educator disposition surveys. The latter are not treated like the former. Candidate licensing applications pass or fail their prep programs based on their content preparation and demonstration of pedagogy; their relations and dispositions surveys are check-offs and this flies in the face of what Roosevelt taught us.  I repeat –  “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

If doing the same things repeatedly expecting different results is a sign of unintelligent behavior, then ignoring what we know about the co-equal skills sets of teacher empathy is equally unintelligent. Ramp up teacher knowledge and use of empathetic skill sets to see improvements in student learning and behaviors.

If We Do Not Teach Children to Listen, Why Are We Talking to Them?

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

“Are you listening to me?” Another good question. Listening is an acquired skill that the person you are speaking to may or may not have mastered. Given the noise a person hears in their immediacy, it is an assumption that you are heard AND are being listened to. There is a stark difference between hearing and listening. You can be aware of a person speaking and not pay attention to their speech.

“Are you actively listening to me?” A better question. To this question “Maybe not” is a common answer. And the reason is “I don’t know how to listen actively.”

What do we know?

Parents and guardians expect their children to hear their adult voices early in life. In the smaller family setting, hearing, and listening to a parent and sibling voices is different than hearing and listening in larger, social, and real-life settings where noise is ubiquitous. Hence, educators teach children to listen.

Focus is essential for listening. However, focus is not easy to attain and harder to sustain. Focus is measured by attention span. These are reasons for us to consider the importance of focus for a listener.

  • Humans have an average attention span shorter than the attention span of goldfish. The average focused human attention span is 8.25 seconds. A goldfish pays attention for 9 seconds.
  • Attention spans range from 2 seconds to over 20 minutes, seldom longer.
  • Females have longer attention spans that males.
  • The average human attention span decreased by almost 25% from 2000 to 2015. Technology and media surround us with constant noise resulting in our hearing but not listening to it.
  • The average audience attention span is 8 to 10 minutes before needing a shift in delivery or format, though initial engagement (the first 30 seconds) is crucial to grab focus, as it is highly dependent on interest, task, and presentation style.
  • Your attention span can be affected by how emotionally engaged you are in a task. It also can be improved by mindfulness.

Our choices are to let children independently develop their natural listening skills or we can teach children to listen. We can adhere to Rousseau and allow a hearing child to wander through life in the belief that experience creates listening skills. Natural listening skills are in each of us, and we just need time and place for these to become effective everyday tools. Natural listening begins with survival – discerning danger – and evolves into listening to the surrounding environment. There is a wealth of wonderful sounds in nature.

Natural learning to listen happens. However, our contemporary world has changed compared to the time of Rousseau and has magnified sounds into noise. As children grow, they need to discern the information heard within all the noise that surrounds us. Information may be glorious melodies or the klaxon of emergency vehicles. Or ideas that excite us to learn more. Listening elicits responses to what is heard.

Many people today show 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 their own ideas. They start to create a rebuttal before the speaker has finished. Or their thinking pursues unrelated tangents. Some of the untrained just shut down their listening when they should listen because they do not know how. Then all sounds are noise.

So, we teach children to listen. Listening begins by hearing something or someone producing a 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 a choice. It is the interpretative action taken by someone to understand and potentially make sense of something heard. Active listening is an acquired skill we need to teach to children.

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 perceived to be more likable people.
  • Good listeners build stronger relationships. Communication is not a one-way street. Good listeners show interest, ask open-ended questions, and acknowledge what is being said. This helps reduce misunderstandings and build stronger relationships.
  • Good listeners have a clearer understanding of the topics in discussion. Individuals with refined listening skills try 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 children’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” 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. Parents do what they remember being done for them, or what family members tell them to do. Others talk with their peers to learn how to talk to their baby. In general, infants from birth to pre-school or instructional daycare are subjected to several years of popular, culturally 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.

https://thescienceofearlylearning.com/tips/how-to-talk-to-babies

By age 4, children reflect many of their parents’ listening characteristics. 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 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 primary school when either believes that a student/child has difficulty hearing. Testing and 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? Many people talk to children every school day but are not teaching listening. Active listening is a concise curriculum in all grades and in all subjects.

Schools are mandated in WI Stats 118.01(2)(a)1. to teach children basic skills “… by listening …” One of a 4K-K teacher’s first actions 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.  As 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 might 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 active 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 also derives from our state’s adoption of the Common Core 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. Students are 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

The ELA mandate reads –

“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 groups, small groups, 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 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 all listening skills instruction to be embedded in subject, content, or skills instruction. The context is listening within the instruction of reading, math, 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 on simple listening skills and, with repetition, increase the complexity of listening. Children are taught to discern these:

  • Audience – Is the speaker talking only to me or to a small group or to a large group. Who am I in the audience?
  • Purpose – Am I to listen for directions, information, entertainment, or is this a conversation?
  • Situations – How important is my listening? Is this casual, focused, important, or emergency?
  • Responding based upon purpose – What am I to do? Do I repeat what is heard, interpret what is heard, personalize what is heard, or remember what is heard?
  • Next – How do I use what I heard to be ready for what is next?

Teachers prepare and move children from one learning activity to another many times during a school day. 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.” Ten to fifteen 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 devoted 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 pay attention to what we are looking at, and visual 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 different from 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 show 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. 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 these to help children be ready to listen.

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 for 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.”  We ask children to repeat what they listened to you say. A correct response 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.

Do not be surprised when a child’s repeating 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 required. Simply tell your information a second time and again check for understanding. And perhaps a third and fourth time, if necessary. Accuracy matters.

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 than 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 in middle and high school classrooms checking for understanding. Not only is this what the mandate tells us to do, it is best practice. Checking assures accuracy and detail in student learning.

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

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

How do we know a child is an active listener?

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.

These are signs that a child is an active listener.

  1. Pays attention. When paying attention, there is about a one second lag between the speaker speaking and the listener’s brain hearing. 
  2. Shows that she is listening. Visually looks at the speaker, shows facial expressions equal with what is said, and takes notes.
  3. Provides feedback. Repeats key points to prove listening.
  4. Defers judgment.
  5. Responds appropriately. Asks valid and respectful questions, summarizes key points, suggests 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 idea’s significance, or generating fresh 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. 

https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy

The United States State Department provides these four keys to their personnel about listening skills and they can be applied to any upper-level listening.

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

2. Be nonjudgmental

3. Give your undivided attention to the speaker

4. Use silence effectively.

This is 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!

It may be that active listening skills are the most important life skill we teach to children in school. Active listening is crucial in every aspect of life. And, as the volume of noise in the world increases, knowing the difference between hearing and listening will be a valued skill.

Every teacher is responsible teaching active learning. We fail when we believe that by middle school all children know how to be active listeners. Good listening skills must be taught and practiced in every grade and every subject for every child. Given all the noise in the world, it is too easy for any child, or adult, to slide into the noise.

The Curious Kick the Can of Facts into Possibilities

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

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

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

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

A society that wants right answers shutters curiosity.

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

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

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

The Big Duh! Ask for possibilities and probabilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is this so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Duh!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do we know?

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

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

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

For the generalists –

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

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

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

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

For the specialists –

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

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

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

What not to do?

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

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

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

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

What to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Duh!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do we know?

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

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

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

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

What to do?

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

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

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

Examples look like these –

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

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

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

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

The Big Duh!

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

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