Archive for: January 2009

When Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame in 2005 he said, “ I was in awe every time I walked onto the field.  That’s respect. A lot of people say this honor validated my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation.   I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel.  I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and play it with respect.  If this validates anything, it’s that the guys who taught me did what they were supposed to do.”

Playing by the rules is an institutional practice.  And these practices are passed down and evolve.   “There is a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules,” writes political scientist Hugh Heclo in his book “On Thinking Institutionally.” 

Heclo believes we are defined by what life asks of us.  As we go through life we travel through institutions, family, school, and then institutions that become part of our profession.

Your students need a model to learn how and why to play by the rules because right now it seems everyone has broken all the rules.   As educators you have not just an opportunity every day but an obligation to pass on the importance of respect in every aspect of your students life. 

So how can you do this? 

There is nobility and integrity in honoring what is right and especially doing this when challenged.  Classroom teachers are challenged everyday by the disruptions and demands of their students.  It is impossible to plan without planning for the unexpected.  The unexpected is the student who is testing your good humor and your patience.  It is the love and the discipline of the one student that communicates the love for the others. 

Stephen Covey author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” said, “It’s how you treat the one that reveals how you regard the ninety-nine, because ultimately everyone is the one.” 

If students can learn this lesson of the importance of the one they can practice playing by the rules for life.  They can learn to become persons of the highest integrity, calling a penalty on themselves when need be. 

As teachers you don’t need a plan or a special time of day to weave this lesson into the curriculum you can do this simply by practicing and honoring your craft.  You have a relationship to teaching that could almost be described as a covenant.  Your job is to do it right, to play by the rules yourself so your students can follow in your footsteps.

Creative World Connection Series 1 is a collection of daily messages that help you reinforce this lesson with your students.  As a small company CWC is able to adapt our material to the needs of your student population.  Contact us today for more information on how we can help your students learn the importance of playing by the rules. 

Science stands alone as an extraordinary intellectual invention, it helps to neutralize our human tendency to see only what we expect to see.  The scientific process creates experiments to establish a clear connection between cause and effect.  Science cancels out our prejudices, groupthink, tradition, pride, and dogma.

The importance of science cannot be over stated.  Students of science not only learn to abandon ideas when new evidence is presented they also learn to practice intellectual honesty.  This intelligence simply means that when confronted with new evidence they can admit that far from knowing more they suddenly know a lot less.  Science allows us to live in the mystery, to be in the quest of knowledge. 

Schools have not embraced the study of science.  Many of us persist in believing what is most comfortable instead of what is evident. Evolution and climate change are two examples and still hotly debated despite evidence to the contrary. 

Schools need to start early to capture the minds and imaginations of their students. The timeline from Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton to Einstein demonstrates a group of individuals who rejected the easy familiar conclusions to explore the unfamiliar ones. 

I propose that science be taught in much the same way that literature is.   Instead of teaching just the facts present the big picture and the excitement that made the big leaps possible.  In this way students can learn to love science and not to fear it.   For many in schools both teachers and students the study of science has an elitist attitude.  Classes like chemistry and physics cannot be reserved for only those considered smarter.  This idea is damaging to students and to their understanding of science.

Our students are surrounded by technology but yet have little understanding of how we got here.   In our daily lives we arrive at our beliefs usually though a patchwork of opinions, prejudices and personal experiences.  Most of us would be hard pressed to trace the source of these beliefs in any rigorous way.   Creating a population of scientists gives our future generations a tool to allow examination and reason to form their beliefs. 

Encourage your students to constantly ask “why.”  Asking the difficult questions is what leads to discovery.

Every pediatrician has this conversation over and over with parents about setting limits and consistently praising good behavior.  What these conversations really are about is manners.   Dr. Perry Klass said, “When you are in an exam room with a child who seems to have none, you begin to wonder what is going on at home, at school and questions of family dysfunction problems begin to cross your mind.”

Practicing good manners has a huge impact on people’s lives despite the fact that some people think manners are out of date. Are they?

Having good manners is akin to showing respect.  Respecting yourself as well as others is one ingredient to becoming a successful human being.   Schools are the epicenter of the manners debate.  Students without manners are seen as rude and this contributes to behavior problems. But few schools have the time or resources to teach manners in addition to their academic benchmarks.  So what’s the answer?

Continuity of practice, practice makes perfect and when anything is repeated enough it eventually becomes part of a new habit.   Schools can teach students good manners first by practicing good manners.  Manners are our public behavior and the first lesson is that there are other people whose feelings must be considered.  Learning this affects a child’s most basic moral development.

Schools can teach manners 101 every day by:

• Address a manners issue every morning as part of their daily messages
• Simple examples are reminders to students to use polite language, practice right of way when walking (road rules for your hallways), and examples of kindness

• Classroom teachers should display manners rules in the classroom and begin the day with reminders to practice. Teachers also demonstrate good manners when they maintain composure under pressure.

• Reward and recognize students who practice good manners. 

• Help students learn good table manners by periodically eating lunch with your students.  Give helpful reminders to students about how to eat properly.

Students who are loud, demanding and insistent show that no one has taken the time to teach them manners; their basic needs are not being met.  Remember children by definition are selfish.  It’s a parent’s job to teach them there are other people in the world and other people have feelings.  Unfortunately when parents fail schools are left to pick up the slack and civilize the behavior of children. 

Creative World Connection is dedicated to helping schools provide comprehensive character education for their students.  Any school that is seeking a dedicated program that is consistent, timely and successful can contact us to purchase material tailored to their school’s needs.   The advantage of being a CWC subscriber is that we are flexible in content and pricing.  Contact us today and mention this blog entry for special pricing on Series 1 and also on custom programs. 

Failure to thrive is a medical term used to describe children who have stunted development.  It’s unclear why but doctors know this affliction is not a result of malnutrition, infections or any other single physical process that science can identify.  What they do know is the condition is reversed when children are in a loving and nurturing environment. 

Children can be stunted physically if they are not given sufficient love and attention now imagine the effect a lack of this has on the learning process.   Our current education system is being stressed by enormous social and economic factors, some of which seem overwhelming.  The suggestion that a failure to thrive is now the responsibility of a school is not meant to criticize but to empower. 

Creating a sufficient loving environment should not be a challenge for a school but a requirement.  Every school should ask: what conditions are necessary for a student to learn?

The most important condition is every student must feel and know that their classroom is safe.  They are treated with respect and trust what their teacher will ask them to do.  At some level the student must believe that their teacher has their best interest at heart.  It is in this environment that students will want to do some work to please their teacher.  They are engaged and attending to the work.  This is a great first step in the process to change from schooling to learning.  

The second step is students will begin to realize that what they are learning is important, it’s relevant to their life and is useful.  They will begin to bring the community of learners into their quality world.  They trust those around them and work together for a common goal.  The momentum is contagious and learning can become fun.

The last step is students learn how to self evaluate their own work.  They decide to make it better.  At this phase students are learning for the sake of knowledge. 

All of this sounds slightly utopian and out of reach.  But remember it’s derived from the basic premise that children thrive in a loving environment.  Any environment that tells a child you matter, you are important, and you can master this is a place where a child can excel.

Schools need to move away from mediocre standards and models.   They can solve their own problems but only by changing their thinking. 

Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking which created them.”

Our best thinking got us here, we can change. 

Recently the New York Times ran a health article about self-handicapping.  Self-handicapping is one way to lower expectations and protect your ego.  The way you do it is to make a disclaimer before attempting a task where failure is anticipated. 

I’ve done this unconsciously for years; I’m always quick to say that I’m not good in math, poor at navigating directions, and not skilled at team sports.  These disclaimers quickly excuse my mistakes in advance.  This is a strategy in protecting my ego. 

Now imagine your typical classroom filled with students who are self-handicapping.  This lowered self-image creates a real impediment to learning because students who are convinced of the truth of this will not even try.

So how does a classroom teacher encourage students certain of failure to try?

One important way is to create a classroom environment that is cooperative instead of competitive.   Cooperative learning groups promotes a positive kind of interdependence where individual success is not as important.   This type of structure also gives students of all learning abilities a chance to succeed.   And results show that students who are given a chance to work collaboratively learn faster and feel more positive about school.  It would also seem likely they would self-handicap less often. 

One of the consequences of self-handicapping is it constantly reinforces the negative belief of not being smart enough to be comprehend difficult subjects.   Many students believe that high intelligence is only associated with book smarts and higher graders.  When in fact there are seven measurable kinds of smart. 

Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliners” says high IQ even at the genius level is not a predictor of success.  He illustrates in his book that practical intelligence helps an individual read a situation. It’s procedural and is about knowing how to do something without necessarily being able to explain it.  Practical intelligence helps you handle the challenges of life.  And it is not innate but can be taught.

We’ve grown accustomed to associating smart with success and high academic achievement.  That could be why even as an adult I will avoid having to do complicated mathematic calculations.   Just to test myself and try to undo some of my old scripts I forced myself to take an online math test.  I did the equations over and over until finally I began to understand what had been missing. 

Researchers have discovered that being good at math is not an innate ability.  It’s not so much ability as an attitude.  You can master mathematics if you are willing to try.  Success is a function of persistence and the willingness to work hard to make sense of something.  

My little experiment is too late for rich academic development but it did prove to me that self-handicapping has been an impediment to learning.  I wonder if given different circumstances as a child would I have discovered a talent or even a passion that I don’t have now. 

Teachers have an opportunity to shape the beliefs of their students by giving them the freedom to have a “glorious misconception” (as Mr. Gladwell writes) about something and then the time to work enough to resolve it.   These “ah ha” moments are truly the windows of opportunity because students will tap into the possibilities. 

Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.  According to Malcolm Gladwell the author of “Outliners,” the emerging picture is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything. In study after study this number comes up again and again.

The experts claim there are no naturals that float effortlessly to the top. Once a person achieves a certain ability the one thing that truly distinguishes them is how hard they work.  The interesting thing about ten thousand hours is that it’s an enormous amount of time and it’s impossible to reach that number all by yourself.   You have to have encouragement and support and in most cases an extraordinary opportunity to give you a chance to put in those hours. 

KIPP schools are giving their students this extraordinary kind of support and opportunity.  In  KIPP schools students spend 50 to 60 percent more time learning than in traditional public schools.  Everyday students have ninety minutes of English and Math and one hour of science.  Every student in the school plays in the orchestra.  Nationally more than 90 percent of their middle school students go to college preparatory high schools and later to college. 

It sounds like these numbers could be exaggerated especially when you factor into this equation that almost all their students are low-income and African American or Latino.  But on closer examination you see what’s going on here.  Every student signs a contract to put learning first.  Most students begin their school day by getting up at 5:30.  In return for this effort students are rewarded with work that is meaningful.  The three qualities that make work satisfying autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward are part of the KIPP program. 

The KIPP philosophy closes the achievement gap.  It has been an accepted belief for too long by too many that disadvantaged children are not as smart as their more privileged counterparts.   And that educators are not doing a good enough job of teaching them.  When what really is responsible is having gaps in their learning. 

The real problem for students who aren’t achieving is there isn’t enough time for school.  Whatever gains are made during the school year are lost during the summer.  This cycle continues year after year.   Expanding the amount of time spend in school closes this gap.

What KIPP is doing is consistent with the number for excellence; it’s the practice and the time devoted to it that makes a difference.

Instead of talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a new laptop and increasing funding  schools need to look at the amount of time students spend learning.  Summer vacation is considered a permanent  feature of school life.  The causes of Asian math superiority are obvious.  Students in those schools don’t have summer vacations. In the US the school year is on average 180 days, in South Korea it’s 220 days and in Japan 243 days.  Longer days and a shorter summer will help American students will catch up to our most successful competitors