Category Archives: Blog

Start A New School Year? Restart Continuous Instruction!

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A new school year is new because it follows a summer recess and has a different annual number than the last school year. That’s all. If we overdo the concept of “new” and the fresh start to a “new experience”, we damage the reality of a child’s continuous progress toward achieving K-12 learning outcomes. The start of the 2018-19 school year was the last day of the 2017-18 school year.

Schooling for children is a thirteen-plus year experience that is segmented into learning to read, write, and compute and then reading, writing, computing and problem-solving to learn. If it weren’t for their new school clothes in September, children would perceive of schooling as a continuous string of months of school with intermittent recesses. School starts at age 4 or 5 and ends around age 18 with graduation.

Adults, on the other hand, impose different conceptions. Each August or September is a “new” school year with “new” expectations and “fresh” opportunities for learning success. Each fall adults administer tests to understand what a child knows, can do and can resolve “now” and with this “new” information set in motion a “new” year of schooling. These impositions are made for adult reasons, not children’s reasons. It is adults who need “new” and “fresh” starts.

Notwithstanding that a child grows and matures and has interesting living experiences in the months of a summer recess, the continuum of academic learning does not change much as a result of summer vacation. A child’s academic skills seldom jump forward during these ten to twelve weeks. Instead, many children suffer academic regression because they do not read, write, compute or resolve academic problems during the recess. Perhaps, the proper look in Spetember is not forward but backward, as in “what learning do we need to refresh before we can instruct new learning.”

Instead of touting “new” and expecting that September’s new assessments will differ greatly from last May’s assessments, children are better served when this September’s teachers confer with last May’s teachers to assure an intentional continuity of instruction of learning for every child. That is, a frank discussion of each child’s academic abilities and needs for successful learning not just a comment about their class as a whole. The learning preferences children display seldom change as a result of the summer recess. Instead of taking weeks to personally identify a child’s learning styles, teachers talking to teachers can catapult instruction forward in the early days of the new school year.

We make a great fuss about the “new” school year. If the fuss does not create a more efficient and effective continuity of learning, the first day of school is the “new” school year. Welcome back! Now, on the second day of the new school year, let’s get on with the continuity of learning.

Retire Like You Worked – No Final Flurries

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Important news for soon-to-be retirees. If you feel compelled to finish every task that you have been working on or to clear your desk of every item on your To Do List, don’t. Stop! Here are the reasons for leaving things undone that will salve your conscience and allow you to walk away with a positive conscience.

Disclaimer: If your personality is completely compulsive and at the end of every day you cleaned your desk not only of loose odds and ends but also of every task on your To Do List, the remainder of this article does not pertain to you. Your retirement was planned long before you contemplated life after your primary career.  Good luck in your very neat future.

For everyone else –

  • Projects still in the works belong to the organization, not you.  Sometime ago, a discussion was held that said, “This is what the outcomes of the project should look like and this is approximately how long the project will take to complete.”  If the project is on target and on its timeline, let the next person in your chair own the completion.  Not you.
  • Daily tasks on your To Do List typically are not organizational projects.  They are the frequent and constant details that have been part of your every day job.  For each To Do that you rush to check off, another will be added to the list in the next hour.  And, the day after you retire more items will be added to your successor’s To Do List.  These tasks are like daybreak.  When day breaks, tasks To Do appear.  They will get done, but not by you.
  • Introspectively, a rush to complete everything will cause the organization to wonder, “So, this is what she could have accomplished if she really put her mind to it.”  A final flurry is not indicative of your career, so don’t make your last days on the job an unreal portrayal of how you worked over the years.  Make your final days reflect the good, steady work performance you have given every day of your tenure.
  • Leave some things for your successor to do.  These are part of your legacy.  If you clean your desk of every task so that your successor assumes a “clean plate”, then every task immediately has his or her brand on it. You have effectively erased yourself from the organization’s short-term history.  Leave enough of your undone work for your successor so that everyone will perceive the continuity of you to your replacement.
  • Always allow your successor to owe you something.  The start of a task is a good owe.  Let your successor appreciate how you set the task in motion.  The groundwork for your successor’s first success is a good owe.  Almost every replacement employee completes some things her predecessor began.  Let it be her first success.  Established collaborations are a good owe.  When colleagues meet and greet your successor with collegial not competitive welcomes, your successor will know that you and your workmates worked well together.  Positional relationships are a good owe.  Your successor steps into the shoes with which managed your up and down relationships  These owes establish your successor’s appreciation that they are part of an ongoing work effort, one that you handed to them as she will hand similar relationships to her successor one day in the future.
  • Leave no regrets.  On the first day of retirement, do not think about the work you did not complete.  That was yesterday and your retirement is all about today and tomorrow.

If, by chance, your former employer contacts you to ask if you can assist the organization or your successor with work that no longer is your responsibility, smile. And, if you say, “Yes, I would be happy to help,” do not work for less than your prior salary. Work is work and post-retirement must be compensated. After all, you could be on a cruise or on a golf course or touring the world. Post-employment income always is appreciated.

Correct Learned Errors Or Live With The Consequences

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Mulligans and do overs are feel good events. A do over means that a first attempt gone awry does not count – it never happened. One says, “There, that feels better” and progresses to the next opportunity to test one’s skills. When doing a mulligan, one tends to pay more attention, focus on technique, listen to an inner voice of coaching, and the result often improves over the first. But, what about the next “first time”? Will mistakes and learned bad practices surface again? Mulligans and do overs perpetuate mistakes and these will be repeated if the cause for the error is not corrected. Do overs have consequences.

The stand-by example for learned error is usable once again. A child says “five apples” when asked the answer to the question, “How many apples will you have if you have two apples and you find two more apples?” Telling the child to “try again” will not change the conceptual arithmetic error the child made in thinking “five” is the answer. “Try again” only says, “Guess again.” Like the mulligan in golf, the child tees up her brain power and takes another swing at the question guessing “three” as the second answer and another ball slices into the woods. If we do not stop to make a correction in the child’s mental computation, or at least reframe the problem in its components so that the child can conceive of the correct answer, the child will be lost in more “threes” and “fives” for years to come.

One of the hardest things for a teacher to do is to say “Stop. We need to resolve this problem before we do anything else.” Stopping goes against the flow. Stopping requires other children to occupy themselves while the teacher focuses on correcting a problem. Stopping infers that the child with “threes and fives” is a problem. And, the answer to each of the preceding is “yes”. Stopping to correct an error in thinking or judgment or skill execution does mean that the teacher will focus immediate attention on a student or group of students and that all other students will need to work independently until the teacher has corrected the mistake.

Stopping to correct a mistake also is hard because it requires the teacher to have clinical skills in how to focus the student on the error in learning.  This begs the question “Does the teacher possess these clinical skills?” Can the teacher identify the critical attributes of the erred learning and isolate the root of the error? Can the teacher use multiple approaches to teach the correction – visuals, manipulatives, models, simulations, as well as verbals? Can the teacher check for understanding at each step to assure correction and repetition to cause retention? Can the teacher use intermittent review to further retention? Can the teacher effectively reinforce the correct learning? These are clinical steps that should be part of initial instruction, but when classmates quickly understand the new instruction it is easy for struggling learners to be left with “threes and fives.”  Expediency causes teachers to skip necessary steps in initial instruction that otherwise would promote effective learning by all children.

Stopping to correct mistakes also is a cultural problem. We seem to accept a level of error or mistake in our everyday lives. Recalls and returns to the store are so common that we accept the fact that products may not work as they are designed every time. But, student learning needs to live in a different culture; a culture that does not accept learned errors.  Recalls and returns are extremely expensive when applied to human enterprise.

A child who cannot understand that two plus to equals four is destined to make an unbelievable number of future errors in mental calculations. The number of errors will multiply and the complications of these errors will be increase geometrically.

A community culture that favors the achievements of the best and brightest children is destined to spend untold resources in the future to remediate and retrain adults who did not effectively learn when in school. Or, the community will live with adults working in local enterprises who bring their learned errors to work.

An educational culture that accepts that some children will always make calculation errors does not serve its children or its community. Perhaps it is this culture that must be corrected even before the learned mistakes of children are addressed.

Fix the cause of mulligan and stop the perpetuation of a do over mentality.

Unabashed Recruitment of Future Teachers

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How many teachers were valedictorians of their graduating class? Salutatorians? Top ten in their class? Being number one through ten in a graduating class is not a prerequisite for being a “top ten” teacher, but being an excellent student is a perfect segue into consideration of a career in education.

Our state faces a dramatic and pivotal shortage of teachers. Dramatic in the quantitative sense; pivotal in the qualitative sense. Without the number of teachers to staff classrooms, legislators are diminishing the academic pathways for being a licensed teacher.  On a parallel course, political and cultural actions dissuade many students from considering a career in education. The increasing lack of teacher candidates, diminished teacher prep requirements, and the aversion of the best and brightest students to a career in education is a dire crisis in the making. Without high quality teachers, some children will learn on their own and most children will not learn all that they could and should.

Historically, the teaching profession has not been self-promoting. We listen neutrally to students’ talk about their life and career goals. We smile and wish them well. Instead, we should be unabashed promoters of education as a professional choice to fulfill life and career goals. Teacher, counselor, principal, psychologist, school nurse, social worker, nutritionist, school law, school architect, school business manager, college professor, educational writer, pedagogical theorist – there is a myriad of professional opportunities in the field of education. And, an academically successful high school student will find appropriate academic challenges and rewards in a career and life in education.

Start today. Send a text or have a conversation with high achieving students in your classes or school about education as a career choice. Persist. Send or talk about an article you have read or a story you can share about the personal and professional satisfaction that rises from work in education. Allow a future educator to use you as their reason for choosing education as their career.

Educators must recruit future educators. No one can be as effective.

Unteach To Unlearn or Befriend Your Mistakes

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“That’s wrong!”

“Don’t do it that way!”

“Stop! Don’t repeat that again.”

Learning something new is a triumph. Learning, meaning the ability to internalize an idea so that one can recall, restate, compare and contrast the idea against other ideas, and use the idea to justify future actions is a significant intellectual achievement. Learning a physical or manipulative skill to the degree that one can repeat the skill with efficiency and accuracy is equally significant. We celebrate these types of learning.

But – what if the idea learned is incorrect? What if the reasoning behind the idea is flawed and wrong? What if the outcome that a learned skill produces no longer is the outcome wanted? Properly learned ideas and skills are strategically developed with practice and reinforcement so that they are ingrained in our intellectual and muscle memories. Proper repetition makes these learnings stronger. That is what education for the purpose of causing learning is designed to do.

How then do we unlearn an idea that we do not want to know or a skill set we do not want to repeat?

I find support for this dilemma in the Harvard Business Review.

“Unlearning is not about forgetting. It’s about the ability to choose an alternative mental model or paradigm. When we learn, we add new skills or knowledge to what we already know. When we unlearn, we step outside the mental model in order to choose a different one.

As an example, last summer I rented a car to travel around Great Britain. I had never driven this kind of car before, so I had to learn the placement of the various controls. I also had to learn how to drive on the left side of the road. All of that was relatively easy. The hard part was unlearning how to drive on the right. I had to keep telling myself to “stay left.” It’s the reason crosswalks in London have reminders for pedestrians to “look right.” It’s not easy to unlearn the mental habits that no longer serve us.”

“The good news is that practicing unlearning will make it easier and quicker to make the shifts as your brain adapts. (It’s a process called neuroplasticity.)”

https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-the-problem-with-learning-is-unlearning

Consider a child who inadvertently learns that 2 + 2 = 5. Somehow, when counting on fingers or manipulating sticks or doing simple addition problems, the child always arrived at the answer “5.” When asked how many dollars a person who has two dollars and is given two more dollars would have, the child always says, “Five dollars.” This is an idea that has been intellectually learned but it is a wrong and incorrect idea.

Try telling this child that the correct answer is “four” and that whenever he or she is confronted with 2 + 2 in the future, the correct answer is 4. Like a rubber band snapping back to its original shape, the child will say “2 + 2 = 5.” Learning is powerful because it is meant to be remembered and repeatable.

Unteaching is required for unlearning. We need to expend as much effort in teaching a child to unlearn a wrong idea or unwanted skill set as we initially expended in the initial learning. Unteaching is purposeful. Unteaching is based upon sound learning theories and practices. Unteaching takes time and almost always is a one-to-one proposition. Unteaching is essential if we want students to have correct and accurate understandings and contemporary and required skill sets.

I find no research that illuminates the quantity of learning that is incorrect or inaccurate or wrong. Research typically points in the other direction – learning achievements. However, any school person with reasonable hearing and vision and a sensitivity to accurate and supported ideas and refined, purposeful skill sets cringes with frequency when incorrect facts, unsupported reasoning, mispronunciation, incorrect answers and misshaped products are slung about without correction.

The requirement is this: When educators discern learning that is wrong, incorrect, unsupported, incomplete, and that creates errors in judgement and productivity, educators must take the time to unteach what is wrong and then teach what is right.

The work it takes to achieve our mistakes requires double the work to achieve our successes, because we must first unlearn what is wrong. If we are not willing to engage in unteaching for unlearning as a requisite for new learning, then we must befriend our mistakes and every future error that our mistakes will create.