Category: Environment

What are you resisting?  Is it a change in curriculum?  A change in staffing? A new assessment?

Whatever it is, your resistance is you being swept away by your own thinking and fears.  When you look at the formidable wall of resistance it’s easy to rely on your default tactics.  A default tactic is your personal position and when your emotions run high you subconsciously revert to one of these.  It could be the use of power to get your way, manipulation of others, applying the force of your reasoning to build a wall, ignoring what you don’t want, making a deal to get support for your position or killing the messenger.

Unfortunately all these tactics do is to sometimes create a win for you that turns out not to worth the cost. 

So how do you approach resistance without caving into your own fears?  First it’s important to recognize that all resistance is a natural part of change.   Before you can move beyond what is fearful you first have to recognize it.  Have a dialogue with yourself about what you are afraid of, is it failure, is it the adjustment of something new, or is it just moving out of your comfort zone?

Once you have clarified your feelings maintain a clear focus on the changes ahead.  Ask questions about the proposed changes, respect the other point of view, and remember that in a school everyone should have a shared mission and goals.   Keep in mind both a long and a short view of the changes to come.  Think about your present position and work and imagine how the changes will impact the future.  What is the desired future outcome; can you see the possibility of this?  And have patience, nothing happens successfully for any organization without the quality of perseverance which requires you not to quit or lose heart when things seem not to be working. 

Change can be a dynamic time, a time to embrace new ideas and to explore your own inquiry into your schools values and vision.  As you do this you will be able to embrace the commitment to continuous improvement.  No learning community can successfully survive without a commitment to the discipline of self-assessment and self-improvement. 

The best part about surviving these changes and shifts in your professional life is the ability to adapt to be flexible will become part of your personal relationships.  One side will constantly benefit the other.  You will find yourself being a better teacher and enriching all the other roles you have outside of the classroom. 

Michael Phelps now holds the record for the most gold medals won at a single Olympics with a total of eight.  He said, “ I’ve dreamed a lot of things, and written down a lot of goals, and this one was the biggest one I have ever written down.” 

But not too long ago he could have been labeled a problem student.  He still jokes about his middle school teacher who said he would never be a success.  In school he struggled with AHDH and started swimming to provide an outlet for his excess energy.

Phelps unlike many struggling students overcame his disability, he had the support of an encouraging and loving family and he never believed the words of his critical teacher.  How often do you think this happens?

It is inevitable that every teacher will experience a student with ADHD. It could be the biggest challenge a teacher can face.  It can result in frustration and exhaustion for the teacher worse it can negatively impact a student’s self-confidence and belief in his or her own ability to learn. 

What you tell yourself can become a self-defeating mantra whether you are the teacher or the student. 

Teachers who dread the presence of a student with ADHD will communicate this even in non-verbal ways.  What teacher’s witness is the impulsive, unorganized and easily distracted student.  What they don’t see or connect to is this behavior is a cry for help saying, “reach me and accept me.”  Teachers can look at the glass half-full or half-empty when dealing with a student with ADHD.   When they make a connection with the student and use behavior and classroom modifications this connection will become a life preserver. 

Some of these modifications are:

• A touch – on the shoulder or a smile so the student know what good behavior is
• Rewards to motivate like a smiley sticker on the corner of the deck
• Verbal reinforcement with positive praise
• Give the student specific tasks that require movement in the classroom
• Provide structure at all times and remain calm
• Have the student repeat verbal directions
• Provide advanced warning when a change is coming
• Take five minutes everyday with the with the student to make sure he or she is using a planner for organization
• Divide tasks into chunks of time with shortened assignments
• Consider how desks are arranged and be sure ADHD students are grouped with others and frequently switch

As difficult as this seems when a teacher practices compassion and understands how critical “what you tell yourself” is to learning  things can change and improve.  Look to Michael Phelps as an inspiration.  Know that in his life it was not just what he told himself but also what he heard from others. 

Ornithologists have observed that flocks of birds have no leaders.  The synchronization of bird flocks appears to be a complex interaction of movement and communication.  Within the flock is constant communication between individuals.  The key to this sophisticated system is shared goals.  Each individual must survive, but the group must also prosper if any individual is to improve their chances as well.  Thus feeding, safety, repositioning to  new areas – all of these are shared goals to help achieve the success of the group. 

So what is the relevance of this information for teachers? 

Complex systems in the natural world are based on a just a few simple rules.  The key element of these rules is this:  every small act is individual but it’s taken from the perspective of the whole. Sticking together each individual might increase his or her own chances of success. 

The success of any school is a human endeavor.  It’s also based on many small acts.  It’s not possible to see the immediate result of every small act but understanding this interconnectedness brings new awareness to what you do every day.

When teachers see themselves not just as individuals but rather as part of a group they will begin to enhance the capacity for student learning.  They can work on building a collaborative school culture.  As a group teachers can implement curriculum, instruction, and assessment. 

In this colloraborative culture teachers create a resource of shared knowledge.  By building shared knowledge all teachers have access to the same pool of information thus increasing the likelihood that they will arrive at the same conclusions. 

Some of the advantages of teachers working in collaborative teams are:

• Gains in student achievement
• Higher quality solutions to problems
• Increased confidence among all staff
• Teachers able to support one another’s strengths and accommodate weaknesses
• Ability to test new ideas
• More support for new teachers
• Expanded pool of ideas, materials and methods.

It’s possible that big things can be accomplished by small acts.  The behavior of birds in the natural world demonstrates this.  We are all connected to this same complex system.   Our future success depends on the ability to recognize that sometimes we is more important than me.

Jane Goodall’s animal observations have helped her understand some aspects of human behavior and its place in nature. She recalls a story about a young male elephant who was the lone adolescent in the herd.  Everyday he would station himself on a path that was used by buffalo on their way to drink at a pond.  He hid in the undergrowth and then as the buffalo appeared he burst from his hiding place and charged toward then, ears out with a great trumpeting sound.  The startled buffalo would scatter in all directions.  The young elephants game of surprise was something the buffalo did not expect.  Jane Goodall was able to look into a peephole at the young elephant and witness his joy and creativity at play. 

The desire to play is intrinsic; it is a state of being that is intensely pleasurable.  It has the ability to energize and renew a natural sense of optimism, an optimism that opens us up to new possibilities.   Recently scientists have begun to view play as a profound biological process.  They are learning that play sculpts our brains; it makes us smarter and more adaptable and is central to brain development.

When children play they learn trust, empathy and social skills.   Fourth grade teacher Amy Whitcomb part educator and part comedian at the Rooftop School in San Francisco uses her love of play and fun to teach math.  she says, “my general philosophy is if it’s not fun they are not going to want to learn.”  She has learned to keep her inner child alive and uses it to engage and teach her students.

Play optimizes the learning process and increases performance.  There are patterns of play like the periodic table of the elements.  A teacher can use this table to integrate play into their lesson plans

• Attunement Play - simply means you are attuned to one another; it’s spontaneous, like laughter or a loving smile.  Get into the habit of connecting to your students daily with this infectious type of joy
• Body Play and movement – think of simple movements like skipping.  Skipping is a lesson in gravity, flexibility and rhythm.  Any movement that is done for its own sake is intrinsically playful.
• Object Play - hands playing with all types of objects help the brain develop problem solving.  The manipulation of objects creates curiosity and innovation.
• Social Play – creates bonds, fosters belonging and is a celebration.
• Imaginative and pretend play - the ability of the young child to create their own sense of their mind takes place through pretend play.  It remains the key to innovation, creativity and discovery.
• Storytelling – narrative play – is the way most children love to learn, it is play under a microscope.  A story helps make sense of the world, helps to understand others and gives children a way to expand their own consciousness.  Stories can give your own life with, drama, love and comedy.
• Transformative – integrative and creative play - uses fantasy, theatre, art and music to give enrichment.

A transformation in education is possible, if educators apply the understanding from the science of play.   Students are primed for learning through play, when they have fun at learning, they will pursue it for it’s own sake.  It is how nature assured us how to learn about the world and our places in it.  

“I’ve learned that people will forget what your said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you make them feel.”

Maya Angelou

As a child I remember sitting in my desk in my fourth grade classroom trying to make myself smaller.  My thinking was if I was smaller I would become invisible to the teacher and that meant she couldn’t single me out to go to the board to work out a math problem.  Going to the board was a public humiliation.  Her words, “it’s wrong” echoed in my childhood memory for a long time.   The feeling of being inferior, not capable and dumb stayed with me all through school.  Imagine how different I might have felt if my teacher had used the board as a place to make mistakes and ultimately discover the answer.

How you feel determines your success or failure, satisfaction or discontent, feeling competent or stupid.   Each one of us has a need to feel capable in what we do and to be loved and valued.  In the elaborate net of life the single underlying thread in our shared humanity is the potential for kindness in every encounter. 

Teachers can create a quality environment for their students, and the first element of quality is practicing kindness.   A quality teacher must ask: “is what I am about to do, stand a reasonable chance of strengthening this relationship.”

The elements of a quality teacher are:

1.     Who you are.  Your students are eager to know about you, let your self-shine though for them.

2.     What you stand for and why you stand for it, are of endless interest to your students.  Discussions big and small with people who they respect create ideas in the minds of students as they begin to form opinions. 

3.     What you will ask them to do.  Make sure your students know what you will ask them to do.  Never surprise them.

4.     What you won’t ask them to do.  Setting this expectation gives students freedom in their choices.

5.     What you will do for them.  As long as they make an effort to learn, you will help them in any way you can.  Discussions will be encouraged; disagreement will be laid on the table and explained or changed.

6.     What you will not do for them.  You will not do their work, or tell them what to do if you believe they can figure the answer out for themselves.  You will spend a lot of time teaching them how to evaluate their own work and to defend their evaluations. 

To be successful in life, we must evaluate ourselves and work to improve; we cannot and should not depend on others to do this for us.   Students treasure a quality teacher because a quality teacher makes them feel valued, competent and capable.  

Have you ever dismissed your own shortcomings by saying, “it’s just the way I am,” or “I can’t change that?”

If you have you truly are a creature of your own habits.  Question is do your habits own you or do you own your habits?   Most people are owned by their habits simply because the human brain forms synaptic pathways like an expressway and it’s difficult to exit off that path without consciously developing new ways of doing and thinking.  When you change anything you create parallel synaptic paths and new brain cells that can jump onto a new track. 

The problem is whenever you initiate change even positive changes you activate fear in the emotional brain, and if the fear is big enough your flight or fight response will go off and you will literally run away from what you’re trying to do.    That’s why extreme changes like a new diet, fitness regiment or change in career will be difficult and uncomfortable. 

Authors Dawa Markova of “The Open Door” and M.J. Ryan of “This Year I Will” have found that humans approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, collaboratively and innovatively.   What happens is during adolescence the brain shuts down half of that capacity and uses only those modes of thought that seemed the most valuable during the first decade of life.   The result is few use the innovative and collaborate modes of thought.  It’s these two that creates discovery, invention and excellence. 

Teachers have the perfect opportunity to help students adapt to change by creating a stretch zone in their classroom.  The stretch zone is the place in the middle that will feel awkward and unfamiliar but it’s where true change occurs.  When students stay in the stretch zone their brain is healthier because it’s constantly challenged to learn not just new things but create new pathways. 

So how do you create the stretch zone?   Look for ways to challenge students to make tiny continuous improvements. 

• Students should have their own improvement list and work to check off one item every week.  
• Teach students how to access their weak areas and grade their own progress.
• Guide students along their learning path by moving though new material like an explorer in a new place, it’s here they will go from curiosity to wonder.
• Remind students that new ideas like new habits feels awkward at first, and feeling awkward is a valuable moment one that scientists call confusion because it’s fusing the old with the new.  If the process is repeated enough the brain will begin organizing the new input with new synaptic connections.

Teach your students to become innovative thinkers, create collaborative groups where they can explore all the possible solutions to a problem. Every time students do this they will ingrain their brain with the ability to create parallel pathways.

Your classroom can be the best place for students not just to learn but also to create the ability to become a creature of new habits. 

Almost every student will have heard of the character of Indiana Jones. This swashbuckling adventurer is fiction but in real life there is an Indiana Jones of science, his name is Stephen Hawking.  Unfortunately most students have never heard of him.   He wrote a popular science bestseller, “A Brief History of Time” in it he takes the reader along on one of the greatest adventure stories ever, the creation of the universe.  His book compels the reader to ask questions and challenges beliefs.  

Every child begins their life as budding scientists.  Most every parent will attest to the uninhibited and unabashed curiosity of their children, they want to know what things are and how they work.  Unfortunately by the time they have a chance to begin science in school this curiosity is replaced with boredom.  Science does not seem to relate to everyday life.  

Many studies have focused on this problem.  Recommendations range from increasing the level of training for science teachers to curriculum reforms.   But most of these studies fail in one important area.   The teaching of science fails to reveal the breathtaking vistas of the universe. The focus is on the need to first gain competency with details instead of engaging students with the big picture.  The big picture captures the drama and it’s a drama that’s been unfolding for thousands of years. 

Just to get a sense of the raw material available, in physics the most revolutionary of advances have occurred in the last one hundred years.  More recently the last ten years have witnessed an upheaval in the understanding of the composition of the universe, a whole new picture of the cosmos.  Unfortunately it is rare to see a mention of these paradigm-shaking developments in a middle school or high school science class.  And it’s the same for biology, chemistry and math. 

The root of the problem is a firm belief in the approach that you must master A before moving onto B.  But science is so much more than it’s details.   Our greatest scientists had the curiosity and the insights to move ahead of solving problems and reciting facts.  They were transported. 

Science needs to be taught young and in a way that captures the imagination.  It needs to be placed alongside of literature, art and music, as an indispensable part of an interesting life. 

Teachers can begin by becoming more curious and paying attention.  There’s a lot to bring attention to and engage students of all ages in the conversation of what things are and how they work.  The more this can be done the more students will want to know.  It is the birthright of every student to look into the sky and marvel at the creation of the universe. 

Perception is everything.  How you see things shapes how you interpret the world.  In the classroom the teacher’s perceptions can mean the difference between success and failure.  The verbal and non-verbal communication of the teacher lets a student know if he or she is capable and smart or inadequate and challenged. 

Consciously or not you tip people off as to what your expectations are.  You exhibit thousands of cues, some as subtle as the tilting of the head, raising an eyebrow or dilation of the nostrils, but most are much more obvious.  And your students pick up on these cues.   In other words once an expectation is set, even if it isn’t accurate an individual tends to act in ways that are consistent with that expectation.  Surprisingly often, the result is that the expectation comes true.

Students who lack academic and social skills continue to struggle sometimes even when they are capable and the help and encouragement is sufficient.  Could it be because no foundation has been built to give that student confidence?

Every student needs to learn in a quality environment.  This type of classroom allows for failure.  For students the perception is mistakes are bad and embarrassing and should be avoided.  When in fact mistakes are opportunities to learn something.  The more mistakes made the more a student will learn and the greater chance they will of have of succeeding on the next try.  The key is to learn from the mistakes, not making the same mistake twice.  

Thomas Edison would never have invented the light bulb if he did not take this principle to heart.  He failed more than 10,00 times before he found the filament that would create light for a sustained period of time.  He did not view these as failures. 

How a student views their failures comes from you, the teacher.  If you can eliminate judgment and comparing, you can give every student the mental confidence to know that they can succeed.  An interesting case in point is the story about a group of American schoolteachers who were visiting schools in Japan.  In one school they watched a Japanese boy struggling at the board with a single math problem.  For forty-five minutes this boy worked on the problem making repeated mistakes.  During this time the American schoolteachers became anxious and embarrassed for the little boy.  Yet the boy did not seem to mind.  The teachers wondered why they felt worse than he did.

What they didn’t understand is that in Japanese schools practice in making mistakes is accepted as a natural part of learning.  Once the boy got the answer right his classmates cheered.  Maybe in American schools it’s forgotten that achievement is just a matter of plain hard work.  If students are worried about meeting expectations they many never get on the path to success thus ensuring themselves of the very thing they are afraid of – failure. 

Teachers can empower their students to learn by making their classroom mistake friendly.   Create room to fail with collaborative and cooperative groups.  Give students a stretch zone in which they move away from what’s comfortable and challenge themselves everyday.  Let them learn from their mistakes.

How much fuel are you putting into your refrigerator?

It’s hard to imagine putting fuel into your refrigerator but that’s exactly what happens every time we buy food.  The average American puts 400 gallons of oil into their refrigerator every year.  This number is calculated by adding up the distance that food travels from farm to plate and the amount of petroleum-based fertilizer used to grow the food.   If every American ate just one meal a week from locally organic produced food oil consumption would be reduced by 1.1 billion barrels of oil per week. 

This one small change in consumption could make a big difference.   But for many of Americans the sentiment is why bother?  For many it seems hopeless to imagine much less attempt a different sort of life.  The inclination is to put faith in market based solutions.  But much more needs to be done and right now.

All across America a quite revolution has already begun and the 1000 students at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley California are part of it.  This school is home to the Edible Schoolyard Project.   An idea that started with a vacant lot has evolved into a one-acre organic garden and kitchen classroom.  In this program children grow and prepare the whole foods they will eat.   Not only are these students gaining nutrition and ecological knowledge they could be the key to our future.   This systems approach addresses the crisis of childhood obesity while making food production truly sustainable. 

If this urban school of 1000 students can feed itself than the possibility of every American either growing or purchasing locally produced food is not just a talking a point.  

Here are some things to consider:

·      Growing some of your own food sets an example for others. If enough people bother, each one influences the other.  Consciousness is raised, maybe even changed.

·      Planting a garden is one of the most powerful things an individual can do.  It reduces your carbon footprint but it also reduces your sense of dependence.

·      Growing your own food begets a new set of solutions and changes other habits; you learn to provide other things for yourself.

·      The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is it changes your relationship to the planet.  It’s a long season from seed to vegetable and you get to experience it all.

Schools can introduce and nurture this concept with their students.  For many students school is the only way  to experience this lesson.  Every teacher can begin this simply by starting seeds in paper cups.  Start with popular and easy to grow vegetables, tomatoes plants, cucumbers, carrots, radishes are just a few.   Students can be encouraged to take these pots home to plant in the ground or a bigger pot.   Teachers can also introduce students to local produce by taking field trips to farmers markets and local farms.  With a little imagination and planning every classroom can begin to teach sustainability.   Students will discover a new way to provide for themselves without diminishing the planet.  Our future relies more on action than hope.