Category Archives: Blog

Give Books, A Gift Full of Rewards

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I give books to my grandchildren as Christmas and birthday gifts. At other times of the year, I may gift them with clothing or sports equipment or something that just makes Gramps feel good to give. But, at Christmas and birthdays it is books. Books in print format; no e-books or audiobooks, although Gramps buys a lot of those for Gramps and Grandma.

My grandchildren receive books that are classics for their age as well as books that are currently trending. They receive books that are age appropriate and that push the boundaries of their vocabularies. They unwrap books of fiction, biography, as well as US and world history. I dare say these are the only print books they receive as gifts all year long. There was a time in their infancy when their parents bought them large, picture books and novelty books – books about birds and dogs and later about pooping and farting. Now that my grandchildren are in upper elementary and middle school and looking for the latest in electronics, their parents no longer buy them books. “Who wants to give a kid something the kid doesn’t want!”, I hear from my offspring. I do. So, I do. I am building breadth and depth to their knowledge base, some of which pays dividends in school. When a teacher asks, “Who knows where Patagonia is?” and most children answer, “In the clothing section at Macy’s”, my grandchildren say with assurance, “Patagonia is at the southern end of South America and is part of Argentina and Chile.”

Books. It is hard to beat the experience of reading books. Using Siri or Google as your reference is very contemporary. But, being able to say “You just crossed the Rubicon, Bud!” to a person who is unbelievably offensive speaks to being well read. What a gift.

“I Like My Teacher” Is A Measurement For School Success

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Ask a primary school-age child about school and what do you expect to hear? Unlike their older siblings, these bright-eyed cherubs love to talk about school and they talk and talk and talk. Their most common response falls into two types: I like/don’t like school and I like/don’t like my teacher. For most children, if they like their teacher they like school and if they don’t like their teacher they don’t like school. Their conception of school is formed by the teacher/student relationship their teacher can create. It is interesting to track the “I like school/I like my teacher” responses through the years of a K-12 education. Perhaps the most significant contributor to school success returns to the youngest child’s response – I like my teacher.

We measure many things in the name of educational accountability. An accountability measurement requires the use of a metric – some reliable gauge that indicates the degree and consistency to which the variable of interest is being attained. Standardized test scores come to mind. “I like my teacher” may seem like a soft subject for measurement or one that is too whimsical to provide meaningful results. “Ask again tomorrow and the little kid will give you a different answer,” a skeptic may say. But that would be a wrong impression and conclusion and cause us to avoid seeing that the bond between teacher and student is the highly significant contributor to school success that it is.

The American Psychological Association gives us several things, derived from academic studies, to consider.

• Students with close, positive and supportive relationships with their teacher will attain higher academic achievement than students who do not. They have higher school attendance, are more willing to engage in new learning, and to persist through difficulty.

• Students without close, positive and supportive relationships with their teacher seldom attain higher academic achievement, have higher rates of school absenteeism, are less willing to participate in new learning, and tend to shut down when frustrated.

• Attempts to manipulate aspects of a neutral or negative teacher and student relationship will not reliably cause improvements in academic achievement.

http://www.apa.org/education/k12/relationships.asp

The conclusion I reach is this and it is one that every little kid knows down deep: “I know if my teacher likes me and I really like it when my teacher likes me.” Try as one might, this “liking” can’t be faked. Kids know it. Interestingly, “liking” does not look the same teacher to teacher, because it is part and parcel of the character of each teacher. As unique and different as they might be, every time I have observed a close, positive and supportive relationship between a teacher and student, the outcomes are the same. Kids are demonstrably engaged in their learning, kids are demonstrably achieving their curricular goals, and kids are demonstrably developing an enthusiasm for future learning. Teachers who can cause these relationships are worth their weight in gold.

A kindergarten teacher I observed was a “kid magnet.” She bubbled with affect everyday. Her classroom was activity-rich and she was a cheerleader for everything a student tried. She celebrated loudly and happily when any child was successful and when a child missed the mark, she was constant with “let’s try that again, together”. While building learning self-esteem, she also created a consistent record for causing every child to be ready for first grade reading and arithmetic and many performed well beyond first grade. She was no faker of “I like kids” and all her kids knew she liked them for who they were. It was easy to track her K-graduates throughout elementary school because of their “I like school” behaviors.

Another teacher, in first grade, was a teacher’s teacher. She attacked teaching for learning everyday. She came to school early and stayed late and her classroom was purposeful. When she sat with a child, she listened and watched first and taught second and her teaching always was spot-on for what the child needed to know or do or consider to be successful in that activity. Kids did not bask in her smile because she did not smile a lot; they basked in her attentive presence and praise. When she said “good job” it meant “success achieved.” She was no faker either. Kids knew that she gave them her best everyday to help them be successful and liked her for it. It was easy to track her first graders throughout elementary school because their “I like school” behaviors were ingrained.

Caring, positive and supporting teachers don’t just live in the elementary school. A high school chemistry and physics teacher, the only teacher of these subjects in the school, gave her students a rigorous, college-preparatory instruction and kindled a “my teacher cares about me/I like my teacher/I can learn chemistry and physics” attitude in her students. She was firm as a rock in demanding that students did every homework and lab assignment. “Miss one and fail the course” was her rule. Yet, they knew she was in her classroom every morning before school and every afternoon after school to help them not just do the assignment but learn from the assignment. Some of her personal mannerisms caused teenagers to snicker, but when asked “Who is your favorite high school teacher?”, she topped most lists. She did not teach fluff and did not tolerate bad behaviors and students respected and venerated her for it.

In contrast, an intermediate grade teacher taught reading and arithmetic and science not children and her kids knew it. Lessons were planned and executed and children received instruction but there was no real “I care about you” or “I will do everything in my power to help you” in present I her classroom. When kids said “I don’t get it” they heard from the teacher’s desk “Well, try it again.” It may have been that long division and fractions were more difficult to learn than addition and subtraction and that reading science was not like reading to learn sight words, but the absence of a caring, positive and supportive relationship only made learning her grade level curriculum even more difficult. She created distance, not closeness. And, kids knew it. It also was easy to track her former students through their pre-Algebra and beyond math courses. Too many of her students had a skills and concepts deficit that would take a significant teacher and student recommitment to learn what should have been learned to overcome their lack of grade level achievement.

Theories of psychology help to explain the connection between “I like my teacher/I like school” and school success. Psychologists tell us that “attachment” between a student and teacher causes a child to want to please the teacher and that success in pleasing extends itself to subsequent school activities. They tell us that students learn school success through social cognitive modeling and that success in watching and following others who are successful, especially teachers, causes a positive bonding. And, that self-esteem theories, the “when I feel good because I have…”, are strong factors in developing positive and supportive relationships between teachers and students.

Whatever the reason, the outcome of an “I like my teacher” attitude is inarguable. Teachers who elicit an “I like my teacher/I like school” response from children cause these children to be successful students.

Tell Me What You Learned Today. I’m Listening.

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I watched my granddaughters skip up the walkway to their elementary school and wondered. What will they learn today? How well will they learn today what is important for them to know? How will they handle their learning frustrations? How will each feel about herself as she compares herself to her classmates?

I listened to the parents dropping of their children. There are a few fellow grandparents; our white and gray heads are badges of grandparenthood. I heard a common theme in what they said as their drop-offs headed into school. “Have a good day. Have fun today. See you after school.” Some kids waved back at these words; most did not, as they heard the same words every day.

My wondering derives from a career as an educator with a constant charge to “cause all children to learn” everyday. It is that causation piece that drives my wondering about my grand girls. What purposeful teaching will they experience today and what learning will they be expected to achieve? How will their teachers present today’s lessons? How well will their teachers monitor all their students to see how well they all are learning? And what will these teachers do to assist those children who don’t “get it” right away. Will the teacher persist until all children have met the learning expectation of the lesson? And, how will children feel about themselves as learners at the end of the day? Will they run out the doors at the end of the day to celebrate another day of learning will they escape out the doors to the great reward of “after school”? Sometimes my wondering is a pain!

At the end of their school day, when I see them next, my grand girls know the questions they will be asked. My queries will not be “What did you have for lunch?”or “Did you have fun today?” They and I know what was packed in their lunch boxes and they and I know that school is fun for them because they come from a heritage that extols schooling. Expect fun – have fun. No, they know I will say, “Tell me one thing you learned today.” “Not really a question, Gramps,” they always say. “More like a command!” They also know they are not only expected to tell me the what they learned, but also to explain how it was learned and how well it was learned. They know that sometime in the next several days I will return to what they learned today just to see how well they retained it in their thinking.

These girls are living a tradition. Their mother smiles, or is it a grimace, when they tell her that Gramps “Quizzed us again when he picked us up at school!” She was tortured in the same way, as were her two brothers. And, as are her cousins when they visit Gramps. They all know that “Nothing special” or “I don’t remember” or “I don’t want to talk about school right now” will not satisfy Gramps. They simply know what Gramps always tells them. “At your age, school is a great exploration and adventure. When we talk about your day at school, I ask you to share with this old man your stories of the new things you have seen and done. Now, what about your adventure today.”

This routine was created by design. “You’re torturing us,” the say, but they do it anyway and they do it everyday. The design is this – parenting for strong learning. Too much of family life is compartmentalized. Mom and Dad go off to work. Kids go off the school. Mom comes home and takes care of the home things she does. Dad comes home and takes care of the home things he does. Mom and Dad have their friends. Kids have their friends. And, it is easy for everyone to go to work or go to school and live their life in their compartment. Some find it safer and easier, because it avoids the messiness that other lives bring into their life. Parenting for learning is designed to bridge the compartments. I, as an adult, ask them, as children, to tell me about their school experiences. Sharing their adventure assures them that someone else knows and cares about what they do at school and understands and reinforces the importance of their daily education. I can’t imagine the pain of a child who goes to school everyday for thirteen or more years and never is asked to talk about what was learned on any one day. That would be child abuse and I will not tolerate it. Not on my watch.

So, “Tell me what you learned today. I’m listening.”

Self-Interest Drives School Choice

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School choice is self-interest and self-interest is what it is, self before all else. One can parse out all the other motives and characteristics that underlie school choice and the one common denominator is “I want to choose who my child will associate with in their school attendance.” Is self-interest a good or a bad thing? Not necessarily either. In a world that places the highest values upon “the Dream,” American or otherwise, giving people the opportunity to express their self-interest by choosing the school their children will attend seems an American thing to do.

Lest we forget, school choice is not a new phenomenon. Parents in our nation have made choices relative to the school their children will attend for hundreds of years and almost always on the basis of social association. Parochial schools, preparatory schools, military schools, and finishing schools have been part of the K-12 landscape since colonial times. In my hometown in the 1950s, my childhood friends spun off in many school directions. Whereas, most attended their local neighborhood public school, kids in my neighborhood also attended Catholic and Lutheran parochial schools. We played street ball and kick-the-can without any consideration of where our school desks were housed. When we left our elementary schools for junior high, several kids left the neighborhood for military school, most notably Shattuck Academy or St. John’s Military Academy. I remember overhearing our parents talk about “a need for discipline” and the next time I saw my friends they were home “on leave” with very short haircuts. And, when it was time for high school, the last culling sent several friends to selective college preparatory or finishing schools. They sent letters from Exeter and Phillips Academy and Patricia Stephen’s Finishing School.

Did these choices truly make a difference in the lives of the children they affected? That is a difficult answer to make. For my parochial school friends, their parent’s choice of a Catholic or Lutheran education was a commitment to sustaining their chosen family values. “Everyone in our family goes to St. Patrick’s” was a way of saying “we are and will be a Catholic family.” And, many still are these many years later. Attending a prep school in New England was a variation on the same theme as a parochial education. Going to Exeter said, “these are my peers and being in their social cum economic circle is an investment in a powerful professional future.” Most of my friends who went East to school stayed East in their professional and cultural adult lives. They truly became doctors, lawyers and business leaders. And, the girls who attended Stephens made the social register when they married; they were debutantes.

School choice has been with us a long time, but the choosing of a school in yesteryear was different than the burgeoning school choice issues of today. When we look at the child in the school choice discussion, school choice still is about associations. It is the parental determination of “who will my child attend school with and what advantages will accrue from those associations” that drives the specific selection of a school. Parents give lip service to matching their child’s learning needs to a particular pedagogy or curriculum. School choice is an aggressive election to move away from undesirable school associations and to move toward more desirable associations.

When we look at the adult in the school choice discussion, school choice is about power. It is the power of a parent to make the decision of school attendance and the political and economic mechanisms that support the parental power to decide. Whereas, parents always had the power to send their children to parochial, military, prep and finishing schools, they personally funded their choices. Today’s school choice discussion is all about the reallocation of public funds to support parental school choice decisions and getting at these large public funds is all about state and local politics.

One does not redirect tax-based dollars without writing new laws. Moving another step, one needs elected lawmakers to write new laws. And lastly, elected lawmakers need financial backing to assure that they remain elected. Hence, school choice today is not about a parent in the neighborhood who wants his or her child to attend a different school in order receive a more advantageous education. School choice is about getting candidates, and enough candidates, elected to office so that new laws will direct state money that otherwise would be allocated to public schools redirected to “schools of choice” and to vouchers for the public payment for a child to attend a school of choice.

Or, from a different perspective, school choice today is about reinstitutionalizing a child’s education. The old institution of public education is being taken down and the new institution of consumer- and commercialized-education is being raised up. The power brokerage necessary to create new institutions needs organization and funding and there is plethora of political action groups ready to funnel the dollars of large and small donors to purchase and sustain the legislative votes necessary to create charter and for-profit schools of choice.

Self-interest is a powerful human motivation. One should understand a person’s self-interest in order to predict their future human behavior. When the nominated Secretary for the US Department of Education, Betsy DeVos, states that she is “…in favor of charter schools, online schools, virtual school, blended learning, and any combination thereof, and frankly, any combination or any kind of choice that hasn’t yet been thought of…”, then one can predict that we have not yet conceptualized the extent to which school choice will be institutionalized. The fact that a wealthy political activist like DeVos is even nominated to head the USDE moves the actualization of self-interest in school choice from choice as an alternative to choice as the new mainstream.

One thing we can know is this, the school choice available to our grandfathers will be nothing like the school choice available to our grandchildren. In fact, public school may become so deinstitutionalized that PS #1 in your community will be the school of choice for only those who cannot or will not choose to send their children elsewhere.

Stop Coddling the Hare; Tend to the Tortoise

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Aesop spun a fable about a race between the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise won! However, that was just a fable and not likely in real life where tortoises are what they are – slow and late to the finish line. Aesop aside, most races are dominated by the hares. The daily news is replete with stories of hares and scant mention of tortoises. A banner runs at the bottom of the TV screen with scores of games – winners in bold. Social media texts the day’s stock market activity – gains before losses. As Billy Bean said in Money Ball, “Nobody remembers who came in second in the World Series.” Winners matter and they get the attention; but, there are a lot more tortoises in the world than hares and the quality of the world’s life is shaped by the status of the tortoise not the bling of the hare.

Hares in most races are the genetically gifted, the economically advantaged, and the lucky-in-birth who most often are at the head of the pack from start to finish in every race, game and contest. Most people don’t choose to be hares; they are born with quick twitch muscles, funds for training, and into the cultivation of their winning ways. Although there are real-life “boot strap” kids who blaze like comets out of poverty and disadvantage, seldom do tortoises become hares. The hares win at the Olympics, in pro sports, and in the general elections. They also win in school races, on school tests, at spelling bees, and whenever school work is graded. This is where our real story begins. We can abide the hare winning at most things, but we must not abide the tortoise losing in education.

It is up to us to make Aesop’s fable into a new reality in which tortoises, more common and greatly more numerous than hares, win in school. And, win with regularity. This is exceedingly hard to do in a contemporary culture that adores winners and cradles every newborn in the hope that he or she will be a star. But, absent star power, what will it take to create school winners of all the tortoises?

Surprisingly, not much – just two things. Let the hares run.  Stop coddling them.  And, calmly tend to the tortoises.

Let the hares run is easy. Star students most often are self-directed and self-starting. The greatest dilemma they face in school is not being allowed to run. So, let them. “I see you completed today’s assignment and did well, as always. What would you like to do now? Great, what do you need?” Say and do no more, because the hares will run happily and they will learn and grow and succeed. In fact, the more you tend to their needs, the less and the slower they run.

Interestingly and politically, parents of the hares have made schools feel guilty when their hare-children are not receiving constant attention. Stop feeding the speed frenzy of the speedy. Just say, “If your hare really is one of the special children, they don’t need someone else telling them what, when, or how to learn.  We’ll point them and let them run.” Attending to hares who run fast and in many directions is a never-ending commitment. Stop with the endlessness.

Calmly tend to the plodding tortoises. Sit beside each tortoise, they won’t run away from you, and frequently make this single, simple inquiry. “Let’s see where you are now on this assignment. Tell me (show me).” And, follow their reply with instruction that causes them to continuously advance their work until the assignment is successfully completed. It should not surprise us that most tortoises fail in school not because they cannot understand and complete the assignment, but because they run out of time. When the hares finish the same assignment that the tortoises work on slowly, time runs out for everyone and the entire class moves to the next assignment. There is a long trail of uncompleted assignments behind every tortoise, assignments they could and should have completed if the race was not all about the hares.

An educational system focused on student learning success, not student speed in learning, will let the hares run and tend to the tortoises until all, hares and tortoises, have crossed the finish line.