Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform

Here's a story from NPR about how a teacher's expectations can influence how well a student performs in school and on tests.  It includes seven suggestions on how to change your expectations.

Vigor Instead of Rigor

This was written by Joanne Yatvin, a vet­eran public school educator, author and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Though my years in the classroom are long past, at heart I am still a cranky old English teacher who bristles at some of the neologisms that have crept into public language. I never tack “ly” onto ordinal number words, or say “myself” when I mean “I” or “me.” I won’t use “access” or “impact” as verbs because I consider them still to be only nouns.
Even so, I remain politely quiet when others commit such grammatical transgressions. But, there is one word I dislike so intensely when used in connection with education that I can’t remain silent under any circumstances. That word is “rigor.”
Part of my reaction is emotional, having so often heard “rigor” paired with “mortis.” The other part is logical, stemming from the literal meanings of rigor: harshness, severity, strictness, inflexibility and immobility. None of these things is what I want for students at any level. And, although I don’t believe that the politicians, scholars or media commentators who use the word so freely really want them, either, I still reproach them for using the wrong word and the wrong concept to characterize educational excellence.
Now, more than ever, “rigor” is being used to promote the idea that American students need advanced course work, complex texts, stricter grading, and longer school days and years in order to be ready for college or the workplace. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) already adopted by 45 states, were designed for rigor and will inexorably lead to it in all forms in almost all classrooms.
Since I believe it is time for a better word and a better concept to drive American education, I recommend “vigor.” Here my dictionary says, “active physical or mental force or strength, healthy growth; intensity, force or energy.” And my mental association is to all the Latin-based words related to life.
How much better our schools would be if they provided students with classes and activities throbbing with energy, growth and life. Although school buildings have walls, there should be no walls separating students from vigorous learning. No ceilings, either.
To learn vigorously, students need more than academic skills and knowledge, more than the generalities and hypotheticals found in textbooks and workbooks. By reading newspapers, magazines, graphic novels, even the daily comics and Internet articles; and by getting to know people of all ages, types of work, and cultural backgrounds they can learn about the real world they live in. Although it is not practical to send hordes of children and teen-agers out into that world to learn all the things they need to know, many more in-school classes and supplemental activities can be vigorous.
Instead of aiming for higher test scores like rigorous schools, a vigorous school would care about what students do with what they have been taught in classrooms. At all levels vigorous schools would foster activities that allow students to demonstrate their learning in real contexts, such as serving in the school lunchroom or assisting in the school library, communicating with students in other parts of the world, proposing changes in student rules to the school board, organizing playground games for younger children or reading to them, making items to sell in a school store, planning Jeopardy-like quiz shows, creating a school garden, painting murals in the halls, producing original plays or making videos, setting up a school art museum.
Vigorous schools would also encourage students to perform in musical groups, clean up the school grounds, adopt a road, publish a student newspaper or a parent newsletter, establish a school post office, run a school recycling program, write to newspapers or public figures, and work with adults on community projects.
As a result of all the vigor these activities exemplify, there would come the intellectual intensity, precision, critical alertness, expertise and integrity that critics of education are really calling for when they misuse the word “rigor.” These habits of mind, body and spirit are the true fruit of educational excellence. In the end, vigor in our schools is the evidence of life, while rigor is the sign of an early death.

Silent Hand Signals

It would be so nice to come up with school wide signals for MV.  I especially like the one that reminds students to use a full sentence.

Addressing Poverty in Schools

From the NYT: By JOE NOCERA About two years ago, Dr. Pamela Cantor gave a speech at a Congressional retreat put together by the Aspen Institute. Her talk was entitled “Innovative Designs for Persistently Low-Performing Schools.” Cantor is a psychiatrist who specializes in childhood trauma. After 9/11, her organization, the Children’s Mental Health Alliance, was asked by New York City’s Department of Education to assess the impact of the attack on the city’s public school children. What she found were plenty of traumatized children — but less because of the terrorist attack than because of the simple fact that so many of them were growing up in poverty. “If children are under stress, the ways they respond are remarkably similar,” she says. “They get sad, distracted, aggressive, and tune out.” That is what she saw in the high-poverty schools she visited. Chaos reigned. The most disruptive children dominated the schools. Teachers didn’t have control of their classrooms — in part because nothing in their training had taught them how to deal with traumatized children. Too many students had no model of what school was supposed to mean. “These were schools that were not ready to be schools,” she said. The traditional therapist’s response, of course, is to recommend therapy for traumatized children. But that’s an impossible solution in a big-city school of 1,000 or more students. Still, Dr. Cantor wondered, would it be possible to design schools that could, in her words, “address the issues poverty poses as they present in the classroom?” She came to the belief that the answer was yes, and, in 2002, she founded a new organization, Turnaround for Children. It’s what she’s been doing ever since. Part of the reason this work strikes me as so important is the obvious: there are an immense number of children growing up in poverty — one out of three in New York City alone. The good charter schools can take only a tiny fraction of those children; the rest are in public school, far too many of which are dysfunctional. The second reason, though, is that Turnaround is trying to bridge an important divide. Part of the debate over school reform is about poverty itself, with the reformers taking the view that a great teacher can overcome the barriers poverty poses, while the other side says that the problems of public schools can’t be solved until poverty itself is alleviated. Cantor is suggesting an alternative way of thinking — that students in public schools can do well if the issues they face are dealt with head-on, instead of sidestepped. I have space to give only the barest outline of how it works. A three-person Turnaround team embeds in a group of schools for three to five years. One works with the principal to create a positive, disciplined culture, where students come to believe they can succeed in school. One works with teachers, showing them tools, for instance, that will allow them to handle disruptions while keeping the other students on track. The third is a social worker who helps train the school social workers to help with the psychological and emotional needs of children in poverty, while identifying the most troubled students, the ones who can drive the entire school. Instead of suspending them, or expelling them, though, Turnaround contracts with mental health organizations to provide them with services. That sends an important signal to the other students. I should stress that even after a decade, Turnaround is still an experiment, and relatively small. In 2008, it underwent an independent evaluation by the American Institutes for Research, which showed that its schools had far fewer disruptions and were generally calmer, safer, indeed, happier places. But that same evaluation suggested that Turnaround needed to put more emphasis on improving the academic environment in the classroom. That is what Dr. Cantor and her team are implementing now. Which brings me back to that speech she gave a few years ago. In it, she laid out her ideas about the importance of facing poverty squarely in schools. They struck a chord. Since then, she has spent a great deal of time in Washington, where officials both in Congress and the White House have been receptive to these ideas. In May, a group of White House officials visited a Turnaround school in Washington, where they were impressed by what they saw. Ultimately, if Dr. Cantor’s ideas gain enough momentum in Washington, they could become part of what the federal government — and school districts across the country — expect from schools. By refusing to accept the status quo, school reformers kicked off an important movement, long overdue. Although I happen to think there is an overemphasis on test scores, the demand for teacher accountability has also been an important step. Creating schools that are designed from the start to deal with the predicable challenges of poverty — it is the most important thing we can do next.

Small Changes

"As the twig is bent, so grows the tree."  I believe we need look for small ways to improve instruction instead of trying to make major overhauls of our programs.  This article explains how focusing on text while reading to emerging readers led to better literacy outcomes.

Integration Worked

Why have we rejected it?

What Makes a Good Teacher?

The Teacher of the Year discusses some interesting issues in this article.

Teacher Appreciation - All Year Long!

On Tuesday, the United States Department of Education is hoping that people will take to Facebook and Twitter to thank a teacher who has made a difference in their lives. I want to contribute to that effort. And I plan to thank a teacher who never taught me in a classroom but taught me what it meant to be an educator: my mother. 

Read whole article here.

Summer Institute - Teaching Beyond Textbooks

This visible thinking workshop looks like it will be an extremely worthwhile and enjoyable event.  There are already four of us who have signed up to attend on August 9.  

Quote for Reflection

The best thing about being a teacher is it matters. The hardest thing is that it matters every day. All the time.

Are We Raising a Generation of Helpless Kids?

Except from article by Micky Goodman:

Parents have become obsessed with their children's safety in every aspect of their lives. Instead of letting them go outside to play, parents have filled their kid's spare time with organized activities, done their homework for them, resolved their conflicts at school with both friends and teachers, and handed out trophies for just showing up.

"These well-intentioned messages of 'you're special' have come back to haunt us," Elmore says. "We are consumed with protecting them instead of preparing them for the future. We haven't let them fall, fail and fear. The problem is that if they don't take risks early on like climbing the monkey bars and possibly falling off, they are fearful of every new endeavor at age 29."

Psychologists and psychiatrists are seeing more and more young people having a quarter-life crisis and more cases of clinical depression. The reason? Young people tell them it's because they haven't yet made their first million or found the perfect mate.

Teachers, coaches and executives complain that Gen Y kids have short attention spans and rely on external, instead of internal motivation. The goal of Growing Leaders is to reverse the trend and help young people become more creative and self-motivated so they can rely on themselves and don't need external motivation.

Family psychologist John Rosemond agrees. In a February 2 article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, he points out that new research finds that rewards often backfire, producing the opposite effect of that intended. When an aggressive child is rewarded for not being aggressive for a short period of time, he is likely to repeat the bad behavior to keep the rewards coming.

Where did we go wrong?

• We've told our kids to dream big - and now any small act seems insignificant. In the great scheme of things, kids can't instantly change the world. They have to take small, first steps - which seem like no progress at all to them. Nothing short of instant fame is good enough. "It's time we tell them that doing great things starts with accomplishing small goals," he says.

• We've told our kids that they are special - for no reason, even though they didn't display excellent character or skill, and now they demand special treatment. The problem is that kids assumed they didn't have to do anything special in order to be special.

• We gave our kids every comfort - and now they can't delay gratification. And we heard the message loud and clear. We, too, pace in front of the microwave, become angry when things don't go our way at work, rage at traffic. "Now it's time to relay the importance of waiting for the things we want, deferring to the wishes of others and surrendering personal desires in the pursuit of something bigger than 'me,'" Elmore says.

• We made our kid's happiness a central goal - and now it's difficult for them to generate happiness -- the by-product of living a meaningful life. "It's time we tell them that our goal is to enable them to discover their gifts, passions and purposes in life so they can help others. Happiness comes as a result."

The uncomfortable solutions:

"We need to let our kids fail at 12 - which is far better than at 42," he says. "We need to tell them the truth (with grace) that the notion of 'you can do anything you want' is not necessarily true."

Kids need to align their dreams with their gifts. Every girl with a lovely voice won't sing at the Met; every Little League baseball star won't play for the major leagues.

• Allow them to get into trouble and accept the consequences. It's okay to make a "C-." Next time, they'll try harder to make an "A".

• Balance autonomy with responsibility. If your son borrows the car, he also has to re-fill the tank.

• Collaborate with the teacher, but don't do the work for your child. If he fails a test, let him take the consequences.

"We need to become velvet bricks," Elmore says, "soft on the outside and hard on the inside and allow children to fail while they are young in order to succeed when they are adults."

Sir Ken Robinson

Many of us were able to attend the lecture by Sir Ken Robinson at UCSB last week.  If you weren't one of the lucky one, here are some videos that are sure to pique your interest.  Thanks to my friend Dennis Naiman for providing the links!  (Last two are on YouTube, so that can't be viewed at school.)

Education Gap Grows

 Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.

Read the whole article here.

ReadWriteThink

The ReadWriteThink site is maintained by the International Reading Association and NTCE with resources for teachers, parents, and afterschool programs.  There are lesson plans, curriculum development, and professional development -- AWESOME!" ( to quote Lisa)

Resources for Common Core Standards

Click here for the link that Dr. Cooperman shared at our staff meeting.

Groupthink - NYT Article

Andy Rementer

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted.  

Intrigued?  Read the entire article here. 

 

Andy Rementer

Lessonopoly

Lessonopoly is a free site with thousands of  lesson plans.  You can browse them all or search for something specific by subject, grade level, or California State Standard.  Lessons include resources, materials, and assessments that are easy to download and print.

My Hero

 

Elizabeth says, "This one looks great!  Kids can submit writing or art or films or whatever about someone they consider a hero.  Might be more appropriate for older kids, but there are some interesting articles on heroes for teachers to explore with kids."

Ruby Bridges Site

Elizabeth shared this site and I'm hoping she will add some information in the comment section below to let us know more about it!El

Sugano Recommendation

From Isao - "Great site for follow-up work on lots of different standard skills. 

I thought the LA sites were particularly good - Reading, Vocabulary, and Writing to some degree."

What Is Finland's Secret for School Success?

Find out in this article from The Atlantic.

Teach Like a Champion Videos

The video clips that are in the book are all available here.

You Tube Education

Click here!  This should open at school!

Military Schools - NYT Article

Military Children Stay a Step Ahead of Public School Students

Attention Getters

Add others in comments!

Class Matters - NYT Article

Class Matters - Why won't we admit it?

Lisa's Discovery

Smart Classroom Management

Lisa found this great site that has lots of quick, useful ideas for behavior management. A good place to start is with the post listing the Best Articles of 2011.

Alternatives to Handraising

Click here to check out the great suggestions that engage all students in learning!

Teaching Channel

Teaching Channel is video showcase of effective teaching practices. There are short clips of lessons, behavior management techniques, etc.