Category: school culture

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 

The New Year presents the perfect opportunity to teach your students how to begin to live a principled life by writing a mission statement for themselves.  Today’s teenagers are the ultimate consumers and already too familiar with the slogans and mission statements of companies eager for their spending dollars.  You can introduce them to another kind of mission statement one that can be a blueprint for their future. 

To help students begin to deeply reflect on the purpose of their lives divide them into small groups, each group will receive the pieces to a jigsaw puzzle.  Do not give them a picture of the completed puzzle.  (Perhaps you can solicit your co-workers for enough puzzles to go around).  Students will quickly discover how difficult it is to put the puzzle together without a picture or a blueprint.  Use the blueprint as a metaphor for their mission statement.  In the same way you can’t complete a puzzle, or build a house without a blueprint you don’t build your life without a plan.  If you want to be successful, have joy in life, and experience meaningful relationships you’d better have a plan.  The mission statement is their plan.

Students can begin brainstorming by using these questions to dig deeper.

·       What do I want to have?

·       What do I see myself doing? (In my school life, in my personal life and as a contribution to others)

·       Who has served me as a role model and has influenced me in a positive way?

·       What qualities does this person have that I would like to possess?

·       What qualities of character do I admire most in others?

·       Think of something that represents you (something in nature, music, poetry ect.)  … Why does it represent you?

Do not give your students too much time to think about these questions, the purpose is to freely associate and record their first responses.   Remind them hidden in their responses are challenges that can be incorporated into their statements about who they are and what they will stand for. 

Explain to your students this first draft represents a new script for their life.  This script is based on personal leadership because they are now acting on principles not opinion, not peer influences, and not emotions.  You could call this statement their personal constitution, or Bill of Rights.  Their statements like the constitution must be based on correct principles.  It empowers them to respond to problems and obstacles in life with strength and resolve. Students can begin to discover that they can live with change and even uncertainty if there is a changeless core inside.  

It might help your students if you can share some of your own core values and use these as the foundation for your classroom Bill of Rights.   Practice what you teach and help your students discover  the  real excellence of living a principled life.

“One man cannot do right in one department of life while he is occupied doing wrong in any other department.  Life is one indivisible whole.”

Mahatma Gandhi 

The best way to know where you are going and what you are about is to write a personal mission statement.  A personal mission statement is a philosophy or creed that focuses on what you want to be and do.  It clarifies your values and principles.  It is unique, because it is you. 

Every classroom teacher should have a personal mission statement.  This powerful document expresses your personal sense of purpose and meaning in life.  It acts as a governing constitution by which you evaluate your decisions and choose behaviors. 

The importance of this cannot be understated because the challenges of teaching are so great.  Your mission statement can be your compass in times when it’s easy to lose your way.  Stress, troubled students, pressures from administration and your own personal life will tax your energy and resolve.   The process of writing a mission statement allows you to reevaluate your old scripts and create new ones based on principles. 

Creating a mission statement involves as much discovery as it does creation.  It gives you a chance to explore the future using the four endowments of self-awareness, imagination, conscience and independent will.

The benefits of a personal mission statement are:

·       It encourages you to think deeply about your life

·       It helps you examine your innermost thoughts and feelings

·       It clarifies what’s really important

·       It expands your perspective

·       It imprints self-determined values and purposes firmly in your mind

·       It enables you to make daily progress toward long term goals

Take the time this holiday break to begin the process of writing a mission statement. Just begin by listing things you want to have in your life that are important.  Identify the five most important things.  Ask yourself what you daydream about, what you see yourself doing if you had unlimited time and resources.  What activities do you consider to be of your greatest worth? 

This is the start of enhancing your own quality of life and expanding your personal leadership.  Your leadership as a classroom teacher and in your personal life will make you a person of influence.

“What lies behind us is nothing compared to what lies within us and ahead of us.”

Anonymous

More to come on mission statements and leading your students to discover their right paths.

The New York Times recently reported that the 52^nd week of the year is becoming the last week of business for many in America.   For those still open for business the 52^nd week can either be a molasses slow or a nice quite stretch and a time for reflection and planning. 

My stock went up the 52^nd week every year I worked in the middle school.  As the last stop before suspension my room became a clearinghouse for all pre holiday woes and worries.  One year so many students accused me of ruining their Christmas that I was tempted to hang a sign on the door that said, “Home of the Grinch.”   Anticipating the holidays exacted a heavy toll of stress upon my usual customers (those students with behavior and learning problems).  All of this forced me to question the sanity of our rush to celebrate and to shop while raising expectations.  Children quickly fall into disappointment when they compare their own family’s holiday with the expected traditions.  Working in a school it’s impossible to deny that holiday’s exposes dysfunction.  They create a divide between those who seem to have it all and those who don’t.

So how do you survive the 52^nd week and still be an effective and compassionate teacher?

One way is to devote this week to a very important job.  The very important job should be service related.  The service that is appropriate for your classroom can be in the form of simple community service tasks for your school building and grounds or if possible it could be expanded to embrace the larger community.   Some of the very important jobs I utilized with students were:

• Create groups to clean up the cafeteria after each lunch period.  Some prep work is required for this.  Cleaning the detail with your custodial staff, and providing adequate supervision during the clean up is a must.   If cleaning the cafeteria is not possible find alternatives; some possibilities are the media center, commons area or main entry, restrooms, and if weather permits outside trash details.  It’s also possible in some districts to arrange for schools buses to be on site for some inside cleaning. 
  • The immediate results for cleaning make these jobs very gratifying for students, not only can they see the results of their hard work but also experience the appreciation of those who directly benefit.

• Arrange for field trips to local nursing homes, animal shelters, and homeless shelters.   All of these require preplanning and with a little effort can be on the calendar every year the 52^nd week.  Exposing students to the disadvantaged, the weak and the needy is a paradigm shift for most and an experience they won’t forget.   Trips outside of school should have a quality of a life lesson, at the very least something not forgotten and at best inspiring.  

• Finding prep work from other teachers in the building.  One year the life skills teacher needed first aid kits assembled for her 120 students.  The job was time consuming and tedious but fit my definition of work for someone else.  In the past I was able to find similar jobs from the tech ed teacher, the art teacher, and various science teachers for labs.   I viewed these tasks as “sweat equity” and explained to students how real work creates something tangible and useful. 

My 52^nd week lesson plan was to expand student’s definition of the holidays, to find a way to experience meaning and connection.   Reading aloud Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carole” or O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” are two wonderful literary works that departs from our ideas of the holidays and also gives a glimpse of the different expressions of love. 

It’s challenging to structure a disciple program that teaches something but with a bit of imagination and effort students will have more than a time-out from the classroom they will gain important life skills.   

How do you observe the holidays in your school?  Is your school ethnically diverse?  Are there more than three religious groups represented?  Is there extreme socio-economic disparity?

The holiday season can be complicated but it doesn’t have to be.   At the core of the Christian Christmas is a celebration of the possibilities and a hope for peace. Teaching students that peace is a way of being can be the theme for your school during the holidays.

So how do you teach peace to children? 

Mahatma Gandhi said, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”  In order for children to practice peace they first have to learn it’s language.  The language of peace relies on the rational thinking of the higher brain.  Our lower brain is instinctive because our emotions are centered there.  Unfortunately for children their emotional responses feed their egos.  They feel hurt, sad, offended, and inferior; it’s a long list when you begin to consider those negative responses.   But the lower brain is also the chief agent for bonding.  When you look into someone’s eyes and recognize a loving expression, what’s happening is irrational, in the pure sense that your brain is bypassing the cortex and going directly to its intuitive and emotional centers. 

The first lesson for peace is to model and practice the look of loving kindness every day.  Children can learn this by observing your own personal greeting to them.  Do you smile from the heart?  Teach your students that the first rule of good manners in your classroom is to greet each other with a smile.   Now maybe for some that smile will be forced but eventually that smile will become automatic.  Scientists know that the very act of smiling increases the production of healthy hormones in the brain. 

As your students practice smiling they can begin the school day with a simple Metta mediation, metta means loving kindness.   One way to do this is to begin the day by meeting in a circle holding hands.  Students should close their eyes as they recite along with you:

May I be filled with loving-kindness,

May I be peaceful and at ease

May I be well,

May I be happy.  

A variation of this mediation is for each student is to recite the name of a classmate. You might suggest they say the name of the student next to them.  In this way each student is sending their good intentions to someone else.

This is a practice of undoing the chemistry of negativity, of anger and frustration.  Making an intention to create a kind loving environment is the first step in achieving that goal. Children react well to habits and structure, the standard of smiling, patience, and acceptance is powerful. 

Since the higher brain is our rational center you can challenge your students to create expressions of peaceful resolutions with stories, artwork, and music.  Teach them the values of character (respect, forgiveness, honesty) as you guide their creations.  

Whatever your core religious or moral beliefs are what better expression this holiday season than to establish a peace community within your own classroom and perhaps your entire school.   Peace is a vision, one that must grow on its own.  But the vision can follow your inner desires for a better world.

When you enter the Museum of Tolerance In Los Angeles California you will watch a video on the vast variety of prejudices all designed to show you that everyone has a few.   And then you will go into the main part of the museum through one of two doors.   One door is marked prejudiced the other door is marked unprejudiced.  The door marked unprejudiced is locked in case anyone misses the point.   Occasionally a few people will demand to enter through the locked unprejudiced door.   

Each one of us has biases whether we admit it or not.  Our brain is designed with blind spots making it difficult to question our own thinking.  It’s hard to see when we are wrong even when the wrong thinking is made clear like the locked unprejudiced door at the Tolerance Museum.  

Prejudice is a paradox because it’s the greatest thing that divides us and also the greatest thing that connects us because it’s something we all share. National Public Radio did a segment recently in which they examined their coverage of both presidential candidates.   They had received an enormous amount of mail from viewers from both parties criticizing the amount and type of coverage given to the opposition.   So they examined the number of hours given to both parties and type of coverage.  The results were surprising; both candidates had received almost the same amount of airtime. Despite what some viewers thought their coverage seemed to be balanced.  

Teaching tolerance to children might be any teacher’s greatest challenge because before this universal inclusion can begin the teacher must first acknowledge and accept his or her own biases. Teachers must look at their own thinking to begin to expose these blind spots.   One good way to start is next time you are tempted to use a stereotype to explain someone remember to someone else you are a stereotype too. 

This same introspective thinking can be practiced with students.   Create informal games in which students can label and then unlabel the stereotypes they believe about each other.   Allow them to recognize how limited stereotypes are.  Learning tolerance is essentially knowing the importance of appreciating the differences of others and how to treat every individual with the same level of compassion, kindness and respect. 

The Internet is a great resource for teachers wanting to incorporate tolerance lessons into the curriculum

• Education World at www.educationworld.com - has a lesson planning articles on teaching tolerance with five lesson plans
• Scholastic Magazine on Diversity scholastic.com/professional/teachdive/ offers lesson plans and professional resources to help teachers develop a diversity curriculum
• Teaching Tolerance Magazine www.tolerance.org/teach/indes.jsp distributes information to support the efforts of K-12 teachers and other educators to promote respect for differences and appreciation of diversity.

What do you tell yourself? 

Almost every waking minute of every day you are listening to the same re-runs in your mind.  It’s recycled chatter about your life.   Perhaps you tell yourself that sometime in the future you can let go and relax, start changing, or be happier.  Maybe your re-run is playing over and over conversations about your fears and anxieties, or reviewing grievances and making past offenses stronger and more meaningful, instead of letting go.

Whatever it is that you tell yourself it’s not original material.  The sad truth about what you tell you is most self-talk tends to limit and restrict instead of liberate and expand. 

It’s difficult to not become a victim of your own thinking.  But once in awhile a story catches your attention and allows you to re-think the possibilities. 

Today I heard one such story on Good Morning America.  It was the story of a remarkable little boy named Mattie Stepanek.   Mattie died just three weeks before his 14^th birthday.  He suffered with an incurable disease called MDA, which interrupts normal functioning like breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.  Because of this Mattie lived on a ventilator in a specially equipped wheelchair.  But that’s not what is remarkable about this boy.  He was a self-appointed peacemaker and poet.   He is the author of seven books and become an inspiration to millions simply because he embraced the idea that every day is a gift and he made the most of it. 

On Saturday October 18 The Mattie J T Stephanek Park was dedicated in Rockville Maryland.   The park is a 26 acres recreational facility.    A peace garden with Mattie’s statue is open including benches with plaques and quotes from his books and speeches.  

You have to wonder how so young a boy could accept the severe limits of his short life and become such a powerful inspiration.   Mattie was an original thinker.  What he told himself was to seize the moment, seize the day and see what develops.  His body limited him but his mind ran through boundaries most of us will never cross. 

What you tell yourself is important because your thinking becomes who you are and it influences others.   As a teacher your influence is substantial.  Every day you have a captive audience of learners who can take their lead from you.  They are open to be inspired and lead into new ways of thinking.    Let what you tell yourself be empowering, tell yourself how important your job is.  Today travel with your students to Mattie’s website at www.mattieonline.com.   Who knows what they might begin to tell themselves.

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered, the point it to discover them.” 

Galileo Galilei

Are you leading your students on the path of discovery?  

The commitment to learning needs to be more than just obtaining competency in a certain subject area, it needs to be a desire to know more.   A teacher who leads their students into the unknown nurtures that desire. 

So what is the unknown?   It’s the great mystery of life, whether that is how the universe came into being or how numbers, order and sequence affect our daily lives.  Once the search begins the mystery unfolds.

The current bestseller list is full of titles that explore the mystery.

• The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, is about how randomness rules our lives.  The author explores how chance and probability affect our financial markets and our own individual choices.

• Change your Brain; Change your Life by Daniel G Amen.  The book gives instructions for conquering anxiety, depression and anger

• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.   The author devotes his book on the cognitive miracles of music.  It is a study about the pathologies of musical response and what they teach us about the anatomy of the human brain.

• The Power of Limits by Gyorgy Doczi.  Explores the discovery of patters in nature, and how these patterns are repeated again and again. 

• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  A book about how we think without thinking.  It explores our choices and how we come to make them.

All of these books give their readers something more to think about.  Perhaps that’s a good position for every teacher, give your students just a bit more to think about, give them a glimpse of the bigger picture help them become an explorer. 

Galileo is remembered not just because he put forth the model of the sun-centered universe but also because he stood alone against the authority of the science of his day and of the church.   He represented the humble reasoning of one man and was strong in that conviction.  

For many teachers Friday is the best day of the week.  It means relief from the hectic schedule of early mornings and late nights, from emotional meltdowns with students and sometimes parents and struggles with learning and discipline.   You have to wonder is it possible to have that liberated Friday feeling on a Monday? 

It is but it requires a disciplined mind and a willingness to embrace a new kind of thinking.   Creating your day means you believe in the power of intentional thinking.  That you believe that the thoughts you have when you start your day will actually affect what happens.   This paradigm shift is a life altering change.  

The power of intentions already shapes what you do.   It also shapes the physical world around you.  If you intend to mow the grass, you eventually mow it and the grass itself is changed.  Intention means you have a plan or design in mind.  Your plan has an outcome.   The power of self directed intention is a creative process and you share it with everyone on this planet because each one of us has intentions for good or ill.   Your intentions are communicated through you interactions with others.  Your words and actions along with a multitude of non-verbal cues let others know what you desire. 

Imagine the power of this kind of thinking at work in your classroom.  You imagine a day in which students are excited about learning, a day in which kindness and respect become contagious, a day in which your colleagues are excited about best practices and share without ego or judgment.   This day allows for the best in education, because all those words in your mission statement don’t just take up space on your school’s website they are translated into actions.

Creating your day is not just idle daydreaming; it’s the possibility for a better today.  Before you dismiss this completely try it, create your own paradigm shift, imagine what you want  and then act as if it’s already happening.    

When you do this you become part of a growing movement in thinking.  You have changed the paradigm of what you see, how you think and what you do.  Your worldview has just expanded in an infinite number of ways.  

George Bernard Shaw said,  “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.  I don’t believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances that they want and if they can’t find the, make them.” 

Americans look to their doctors to be healthy.   A doctor’s advice is considered gospel, you’ll often hear “my doctor said.”   The irony of this is that the greatest advances in public health did not come from individual doctoring but rather in increasing awareness about health practices and sanitation.   That awareness is responsible for increasing life expectancy in the United States because information is more powerful than any single doctors visit. 

Tragically right now in American’s public schools health awareness is at risk.  Currently there is no dedicated funding for comprehensive sex education in our schools.  Schools have become hostage to political and religious ideology about what’s best for all children. The abstinence only curriculum guarantees that our youth will not learn reproductive information that could potentially not just save their lives but also determine the direction of their lives. 

Today one in four American teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. Nearly half of black teenage girls have at least one sexually transmitted infection.  The Center for Disease Control and Prevention also reported in the study that for the first time in fifteen years the rate of teenage pregnancy has significantly increased.    The United States has high rates of unintended pregnancy, abortion, and STD’s.   And what is our answer to reverse this situation?

Federal funding to schools limits and denies information in our sex education programs.  Abstinence only programs ignore the fundamental precept that sex is powerful in our lives and that it does have consequences.   Education is not taking this problem seriously enough.  Much of what is learned in school is not just learned for the present moment it’s learned to take students through a lifetime of choices.  It’s learned to give children information on how to base decisions.  Decisions about sexual activity happen at all stages of life not just during the teen years. 

What can educators do to improve this situation? 

Become a powerful and compassionate voice for change in your school.  First recognize that all parents fear the possibility of their children having a sexual life, and their greatest desire is that their children delay sexual activity until later into young adulthood.  Often these fears and desires keep parents acting in the most proactive way by demanding a comprehensive program.  The principles of abstinence programs do give a voice to the importance of relationships and communication but they totally lack the substance of information to help children make informed decisions and avoid the consequences.  

Teachers have the ability to engage with parents on the most personal and intimate level.  They both have a child’s best interest at heart.   Teachers can begin a dialogue with parents especially those at the middle school level when students are first given reproductive information.  

So what’s a good way to start?

Approach this taboo subject by bringing awareness to parents about the minefield of influence their children will navigate.  Teens have this perception of being immune of being invulnerable.  Many don’t know what risks they face; they can’t make decisions in the dark because they aren’t properly prepared to make them.   Myths about pregnancy continue like urban legends.  Some girls believe that drinking or douching with coke with prevent a pregnancy.   This type of thinking is a disaster waiting to happen. 

If parents see their child’s teacher and their child’s school as a partner in the future of their children perhaps they will trust educators to make decisions on what’s best for all children instead of politicians.