Help not Punishment for Struggling Teachers, Schools and Students

Some Useful Websites
AAA Math features a comprehensive set of interactive arithmetic lessons. Unlimited practice is available on each topic which allows thorough mastery of the concepts. A wide range of lessons (Kindergarten through Eighth grade level) enables learning or review to occur at each individual's current level.
Energy Kids-Find energy related stories, hands-on activities, and research articles for your classroom! These curriculum-based lessons are separated by age-grade.
The Open Door Web Site is a reference source for both students and teachers.  The contents of this site are designed for use by students between the ages of 9 and 17.

Articles about Cognition, Affective Education and Pyschomotor Benefits
Emotional Intelligence Is the Missing Piece -This article is explains how social and emotional learning can help students successfully resolve conflict, communicate clearly, solve problems, and more.
Why Exercise Makes you Less Anxious - At a time when high stakes testing is imposed upon our students this article by Gretchen Reynolds point makes it clear that Physical Education should be more important to our curriculum than before.
Proficient Readers Need Good School Libraries - Gaby Chapman's article focuses on the fact that studies show that reading achievement in a school is directly related to the quality of its library but says,

School libraries are slowly but steadily being replaced by an onslaught of packaged reading programs designed to teach “virtual reading,” in which students can learn everything about reading without actually doing it.

Book Review
Mind Reading- by Allison Gopink  is a book review for Stanislas Dehaene's new book about the reading and the brain called Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention .  Neuroscientist are discovering that reading has not been around long enough for humans to have become an inate part of the human brain.

Thoughts From Yrisarri
In my years of teaching and working in schools I came across a few poor teachers.  But, as I listen to to the movement for reform it seems as if there are many more bad teachers than I ever imagined.  One of the cornerstones of the current push from the Secretary of Education and other reformers is to rid the schools of bad teachers.  It seems that teacher unions and teachers themselves are to blame for the education disaster in America!

Once again the Department of Education is missing the point of the future for our children.  It is more important in today's workforce to know how to cooperate, punitively firing teachers who are deemed "bad" teachers by some objective or subjective criteria, is not going to help create a culture of learning that teaches our children good values.  Competition is between companies, not between workers in the companies.   The current thinking seems to be that competition is the missing equation in education.  This includes students and the teaching force. It is as if teachers and students are always applying for the job but never get to practice their skills.

Instead of calling for dismissal of teachers for doing poor work, let us first decide that we will help any teacher who does not meet basic benchmarks without threatening the job of someone who invested personal treasure in themselves to become a teacher.  Perhaps schools that don't meet the benchmarks can be assured that their community will be helped without a threat of takeover or dismantling of a community investment.  Maybe we can even make it clear to our students that we want to help them not fail them.  I think that message is not received by many of our students today.

What I suggest is that our first instinct be to help others rather than dismiss them.  One of the great reforms for education could be to create a culture of kindness and a tradition of caring about others.  We can begin this by finding ways to "dismiss" the punitive natures of some of our classrooms and schools.  One way to begin this reform is by committing to help struggling teachers, schools and students rather than punish them when they fail. 

The Educational Crisis

Some Useful Websites
NCS-Tech! is a mix of K-8 educational technology resources, commentary, lesson ideas and more, for members of any school community and the world.
Crayola Digi Color is a site from Crayola where your young chldren can choose a type of pen and color and then scribble or write whatever they want.
Classtools.net allows you to create free educational games, activities and diagrams in a Flash! Host them on your own blog, website or intranet! No signup, no passwords, no charge!
Rethink Learning Now is a powerful website where people share their most important learning moments, you can share your story here too!
Neuroscience for Kids is a site where you can discover the exciting world of the brain, spinal cord, neurons and the senses. Do experiments, activities and games to help you learn about the nervous system.

Some Articles to Read
When Teaching the Right Answers is the Wrong Direction
Dyslexia: Some Very Smart Accomplished People Cannot Read Well
Cognitive Scientists Debunk Learning-Style Theories -Scroll down the articles in the blog Inside School Research to access the article.

Thoughts from Yrisarri
I recently read Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them by Benedict Carey in NYTimes.com.  This article is primarily about teaching young children focused math education based upon  brain  and learning research.  Current research indicates that a number instinct is hard-wired into the anatomy of the brain.  Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist believes that

The firing of the number neurons becomes increasingly more selective to single quantities, he said; and these cells apparently begin to communicate with neurons across the brain in language areas, connecting precise quantities to words: “two,” “ten,” “five.”

A similar honing process is thought to occur when young children begin to link letter shapes and their associated sounds.  Cells in the visual cortex wired to recognize shapes specialize in recognizing letters; these cells communicate with neurons in the auditory cortex as the letters are associated with sounds.

There is some research indicating that the brain does not fully fuse letters and sounds until a person is about 11 years old.

I have always believed that the most important part of an early education are affective and psycho-motor learning not cognitive skills acquisition.  My experience and some early studies in learning revealed that by age 8 most children were in about the same place with their reading skills.  Brain research is teaching us that our brains are plastic and although there are optimal learning times for some things, any "learning deficit" is not irreversible.

If our "hardwiring" for sound-letter recognition is not fully developed by age 11, why are we pushing our children to learn to read before the age of 8?  The article in  NYTimes.com indicates to me our children could be much better served by focusing their learning on math rather than reading.  I think that it would be even better if we added second languages, dancing, singing, art and lots of movement into the early learning curriculum creating language rich and non stressful environments for learning.  They will learn to read when they are organically ready and motivated to do so.

It is my belief that we do not have an educational crisis.  The reform that needs to take place in education has to do with adults and their perception of what is important for children and what constitutes success.  Many successful people are poor readers,  yet we are planning to put teachers jobs on the line if they can not teach their classes certain reading skills within a certain amount of time. 

We do have a crisis in our inner cities.  That has been well documented by authors such as Johnathon Kozol.  When children are coming to school stressed from their environment they are not going to be able to learn.  We need to address the crisis in their environment and give them schools where learning does not add more stress to their lives.  When they are ready to learn we need to teach them skills that will lead to their success.

NCLB a Noble but Misguided Policy

 Some Useful Websites
Kids Count Data Center is a place where you can "access hundreds of measures of child well-being" from state data and data across states.
Coalition for Better Education is a site"Created to dignify the autonomy of our children and of their teachers."
Some Interseting Articles
It Is Time to Refocus on Education, R&D and Innovation If We Are to "Think Different"  from the Huffington Post, this article points to the importance of creative thinking. 

Talking to your child about technology is like having the sex talk. Except kids are helping to write the rules  is  a series of articles in the Laptop website about children and technology from a parents point of view.

I Don’t Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…)   is from a blog by Will Richardson and points out what our children can expect from technology that we don't get.

Thoughts From Yrisarri
No Child Left Behind is a noble but misguided effort to level the playing field for all members of our society.  It is noble by its very mission.  To acknowledge that school has not paid dividends for a some of our citizens is the next step in the civll rights movement.  But the the cure for this problem targets all students in our schools instead of just those in need by gathering data from test results rather than taking constructivist action.

George Siemens recently stated in his blog that the term learning really has no meaning. 

....... our focus is not on some esoteric concept of learning. Instead, the intent is to orient ourselves to a complex set of phenomenon and to plan potential courses of action.

We are always learning, it is a function of our  brain’s reaction to its environment.  Siemens wants to replace the term learning with “sense making “  That should certainly be the mission of our schools in todays interconnected world where every kid will soon have access to all the information in the world on their phone.  I would add that that part of “sense making” is focusing our learning on environments appropriate to our cultural and societal needs as well as individual needs.

NCLB’s cure for what ails education is not based upon “sense making”  but as Dr. Deborah Waber says in an address at a Learning and the Brain conference, the cure is finding deficiencies in subject areas.  Therefore, reading scores are deficient because teachers and students are lazy. So instruction time is increased, tests are given, and failure is punished.   These deficits are seen as pervading all of our schools because there are students who do not succeed in all of our schools.  Instead we should be focusing our intervention on those students who need help by understanding the conditions that have caused them to be termed deficient.

Brain research is clear about the results of stress  on learning.  The data is also clear about who comes to school stressed.  NCLB seems to be based on the philosophy of the Education Equality Project .  They believe, and I agree, that "what happens in schools has a tremendous impact upon the achievement gap in our country".  What I don’t agree with is a one size fits all prescription.  That prescription has led to instructional practices that do lead to later success in life.  Joe Williams from the Education Equity Project in an interview in EdcationNext says,

We keep finding ourselves debating that key distinction with people who argue that the external forces in a child’s life represent obstacles too large for even great schools to overcome. While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right

This philosophy seems to ignore the reality of many “deficit” children’s lives and rejects the brain research on stress and learning. Children from low income families are are at risk for educational achievement. Studies find that these children are more likely to experience violence than their middle and upper income peers. All indicators of stress are at higher levels for children from low income families. That puts them at risk for developing the affective skills needed for academic success. Executive capacity in our frontal lobes is responsible for development of self-regulation and if a child can not self-regulate learning becomes almost impossible. Impossible that is until we determine that they have a problem that needs medication.  Stress is cumulative and releases hormones into the brain that inhibit learning. A child’s language development is another predictor of academic success and students from low income families come to school with about 25% of the vocabulary of their peers from higher income families. The good news is that our brains are plastic!

So we can slow down!  Testing is not the answer  especially for our younger children.  It only causes more stress.   We can develop language rich environments with  projects and activities and teach young children to read and other academics when they are ready.  We do not have a reading deficit if we do not expect all children to learn the same thing at the same time no matter the cirucumstances!  We need to help students make sense of the vast body of knowledge at their fingertips rather than force feed information to them.   All kids come to school ready to learn, but we place them in competitive, stressful classrooms and tell them they have deficits before they have had time to make sense of the information they already have.  If we treat our youg chldren as individuals, when they reach the upper grades they will have the skills they need to begin making sense of the larger world!

Social Emotional Learning

Some Interesting Websites
Picturing the 1930s is a site from the Smithsonian Institute that not only teaches about the 1930s but allows users to create documentaries that others who visit the site can view.
ReadKiddoread.com is a web site by James Patterson dedicated to reading. There are many book lists and all types of activities about books and reading.
Kids Activities from Education.com  if you are looking for kids activities to show your child the fun side of learning, from science experiments and math games to writing projects and more, you will find it at this site

Some Interesting Videos
Selling SEL: An Interview With Daniel Goleman describes the importance of social emotional learning in our schools.
I Am What I learn shows samples from The Department of Education's top 10 finalist in this contest.  Presented by ESchoolNews.com
Program Offering Recess Coaches to Schools a segment from the Jim Lehrer New Hour on PBS reporting on a program in the Oakland Public Schools to help students learn to cooperate.

Some Articles to Read
The Heart of Learning: The Value of Cultivating Emotional Intelligence by Ken Ellis
Raise Your Student's Emotional-Intelligence Quotient by Diane Curtis

Thoughts from Yrisarririck
The Social Emotional Learning Quotient

Intrinsically, schools are social places and learning is a social process.  Students do not learn alone but rather in collaboration with their teachers, in the company of their peers, and with the support of their families. 

Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning, Joseph Zins et al, editors

As the educational reform discussion takes place almost all of the emphasis is being placed on academic success for all.  We have goals that all children will be able to read, and do math.  Why don’t we have goals like, all children will learn to cooperate and all children will feel safe?  Those are some of the goals that social emotional learning promotes. Research shows that if students are taught social and emotional skills academic success will follow. 

Research finds that students who receive lessons in appropriate social and emotional behavior do better in school and life. 

Emotional Intelligence Research:  Indicators Point to the Importance of SEL, Eductopia Staff

When I ask people what they liked about school, the answer is almost something about the social emotional side of the schooling.  I liked being on the football team, the chess club, and hanging out with my friends are common answers.  My experience teaching indicated that the students who did poorly in academics had a more difficult time relating to the other students or had lives full of drama preventing them from developing the necessary social and emotional skills needed for success. We should recognize that creating goals to help all children feel secure and promoting cooperation are just as important as goals for reading. 

Social and emotional learning goals need to be an integral part of our curriculum and thinking about education .  CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning have developed a list of five core groups of social and emotional competencies that should be integrated into lessons from grades pk-8.  They are:

Self-awareness—accurately assessing one’s feelings, interests, values, and strengths; maintaining a well-grounded sense of self-confidence
Self-management—regulating one’s emotions to handle stress, control impulses, and persevere in overcoming obstacles; setting and monitoring progress toward personal and academic goals; expressing emotions appropriately
Social awareness—being able to take the perspective of and empathize with others; recognizing and appreciating individual and group similarities and differences; recognizing and using family, school, and community resources
Relationship skills—establishing and maintaining healthy and rewarding relationships based on cooperation; resisting inappropriate social pressure; preventing, managing, and resolving interpersonal conflict; seeking help when needed
Responsible decision-making—making decisions based on consideration of ethical standards, safety concerns, appropriate social norms, respect for others, and likely consequences of various actions; applying decision-making skills to academic and social situations; contributing to the well-being of one’s school and community. 

Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning

I watched  a great show on TV called,  Program Offering Recess Coaches to Schools which aired on PBS’ The Jim Lehrer News Hour.  This program demonstrates a way to integrate cooperative learning and conflict resolution into a school’s curriculum.  Instead of thinking about social and emotional learning as fragmented programs which identify problems, we need to integrate this type of learning into our way of thinking about education and make it a part of each school day for all children. 

Development Based Education

Useful Sites  
Librarians' Internet Index
Refdesk.com
Infoplease

Articles of Interest
Schools Need a Culture Shift is an article by Betty J. Sternberg who addresses motivation in schools.
What the Workforce Will Require of Students is another Education Week article by Catherine Gewertz who questions the need for all students to have college-level skills.

Technology
Here are two short videos from ConnectEd a site for educators from Walden University.  They address topics that have been part of discussions with educators throughout my career.
Why We Need To Teach Technology in School
21st Century Skills: How do We Get There?

Thoughts From Yrisarri
As I listen to the discussions about educational reform I feel that a key concept is missing from the dialog.  I was trained to be a middle school teacher and learned the importance of considering how children are grouped in terms of developmental progress.  That was the impetus behind the middle school movement, that children have a stage between childhood and adolesence that requires a different approach to teaching than children or adolescents. 

I was reminded of this while reading  Scholars: Parent-School Ties Should Shift in Teen Years by Deborah Viadero in Education Week  as she talked about education reform and parental involvement.  She says that there is no mention of how the parental involvement requirements of No Child Left Behind should differ between age levels.  I believe this is the cause of some of our problems in education.  As we discuss public policy we do not recognize the different roles of each stage in the education system.

We only seem to consider that each grade is a preparation for the next grade.  We do not consider that children have development stages and teachers should employ different modes of teaching to capture the interest at different stages.  If the federal government is going to become the source of education policy then they should discuss educating our children not just general education beliefs.

Brain-Based Learning

Useful Websites
Read•Write•Think is a website providing educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction.
Academic Earth provides free video courses from leading universities in most subject areas.  You can not get credit, but you can audit some awesome classes from universities like Yale and Stanford.
There is also a complete AP Test Prep course for your college bound students.
The 60 Second Brain Game and Word Wanderer are two games from Posit Science , a  company that provides brain training software.
More Brain Exercise is a site that has tons of interesting facts about the brain and exercises to help develop your brain's potential.

Articles of Interest
Kindergarten crunch: Lack of playtime killing joy of learning, say advocates : Early childhood education is becoming the first step in our stressful public schools.  We are creating high stakes testing for our youngest children! This article promotes the importance of play for kindergarten children. 
A Program Teaches Students What to Believe in the Digital World  This article discusses the topic of media literacy and the News Literacy project that brings seasoned journalists into high schools to help them learn how to interpret the news. 
From Brain-Based Research to Powerful Learning: Innovative Teaching Techniques In the Classroom visits Key Largo, a P-8 school of 1,200 students where all classrooms are wired and where the student-to-networked-computer ratio is 3 to 1.  It demonstrates ways to use technology to put brain-based research to work for our kids.

Thoughts from Yrisarri-Neuroscience and Education
I have always been interested in research concerning how the brain works and learning.  In 1980 my principal at La Plata Jr. High School brought a brain researcher to speak to the faculty and he told us of very interesting research concerning young adolescents and learning.  Since then I have attended workshops with Tim Burns, Eric Jensen and others speaking to this topic.  I believe that what neuroscientists are learning about how the brain works will change the way we teach.

In February LaWanda and I attended the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco.  The Learning and the Brain society is an organization dedicated to sharing information between educators and neuroscience.  They state in their members site that:

educators and neuroscientists share a great many goals. Neuroscience is delving into realms that have pre-occupied educators for years, such as learning and memory, the emotional development of children, the basis of musical talent, bilingual experiences, and dyslexia to name only a few areas of mutual interest.

At the conference almost every speaker spoke to this statement.  Neuroscientists are very interested in using their research to help teachers and are looking for feedback from eduacation to help them direct their research in useful ways.  As I think about what I have learned from my studies of how the brain works, I realize that much of their research reinforces what we already know about good teaching.  For instance, brain researchers have shown that if we want to remember something for a test, we need to practice with the information we want to remember.  Another finding that many educators already know is that vision trumps the other senses when learning new information.  But the brain research goes much deeper than just reinforcing what we know about good teaching.

An important neuroscientist's work that comes to my mind is Robert Saplosky .  His  Great Courses' class Biology and Human Behavior taught me how we are truly unique biological beings.  His presentation made me realize that there is no one way to teach everybody.  When we put students together in a lecture, we are lucky if only a few hear what is said, much less remember it.

Eric Medina's 10 brain rules have had a great impact on my thinking about teaching and learning.  His studies on stress strike me as one of the most important facts about our brains that all teachers should know.  Medina states that stressed brains do not learn the same way and:

Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.

I believe that our competitive nature and fear of the future for our children have caused us to create schools that are institutions of stress.  Teachers can cause a child to feel stressed with a look, a few demeaning words or work that is beyond their ability.  We have not created places of safety and security for all children.

The research on memory holds much promise for teachers.  There is no one place that holds a memory.  Memory is a web of nueronal connections that have been prompted by something that can pull them together.  You have to cause students to remember what they already know in order to teach them something new!  In addition,  memories are suspect, brain research indicates that after you learn something you do not recall it exactly as it was learned.  Then, each time we recall that memory it is remembered as it was the last time it was recalled.  Memory is a complex process and if we want students to remember what we teach, brain research can help us understand how to do that.

The concept of the plastic brain is an important for educators to understand.   As Mariale Hardiman and Martha Denckla state in their article,  The Science of Education: Informing Teaching and Learning Throught the Brain Sciences:

Research shows that learning changes the brain. The brain is “plastic”—it makes new cellular connections and strengthens existing ones as we gain and integrate information and skills. In the past decade, the enormous growth in understanding brain plasticity has created an entirely new way to consider how learning and achievement take place in the education of children.

This means that everyone can learn.  The brain can change and adapt to meet the needs of each person.  Almost every child in school can learn what they need to know!

Probably the most important thing for teachers to know about brain research is that when a statement begins with "based upon brain research...." we should be skeptical.  Last week I used the article about Disney refunding money because of their claims about the Einstein Baby videos and learning were false.  There are many brain myths circulating in our culture and we need to research claims of better learning based upon brain research before we purchase programs making those claims.

Are we preparing our students for their future?

Useful Sites for Teachers
Teaching With Contests.com caused me to remember how much my students loved to study using games.  Here is a site full of academic contests students can enter!  In addition, you can find activities for different subject areas, as well as scholarship help and more.
Activity TV is a site that my 9 year-old grandson will love!  It contains hundreds of videos that will teach him how to do something new.  It includes activities for crafts, magic, dance and much more.  Activity TV Jr.  does the same for pre-schoolers.
Black Holes , a part of the Hubble Site, has students making decisions while exploring outer space looking for a black hole.  Great animations of the universe!
Mr. Martini's Classroom has all type of flash cards.  A great place to practice learning math facts in many math topics including algebra, fractions, geometry, the four basic operations and more.

Articles of Interest
Newsweek's Top 100 Books - This is a great list of books that should be read.  You will recognize the name of many books on the list that you will want your children to read.
For Improving Early Literacy, Reading Comics is No Child's Play from Science Daily is an interview with Carol L. Tilley a professor of library and information science who talks about understanding comics as literature. Last Week I provided a site for creating comics called Tap Into The World of Comics  This article points out another important aspect of the comic book.  Professor Tilley says;

Comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of literature, and children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other types of books.

This School is on a Mission by Grace Rubenstein describes YES Prep North Central. This charter school in Houston's mission is to send every graduate to college.  They are very successful.  I believe it is because they have motivated students (read last weeks blog).  These students achieve that same success at Sudbury Valley School where there are no classes.  YES has a lot of structure and the students come from lower economic background, but motivation is what drives the success of both groups.

Thoughts from Yrisarri
Education Reform and Web 3.0

I began working with technology in the 1960s.  I received an education which enabled me to understand how computers work.  As a library director I filled data bases with information from the card catalog and automated library operations.  Then, as a teacher and as a librarian, I began accessing and interacting with that information.  Thanks to the computer almost anybody today can do what I was trained to do, find infomation and interact with that information with on-line learning or some other variation of research, social, or academic networking program.

So I have worked through Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and the experts say Web 3.0 is on its way.  Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web calls it the "semantic web" which will,

...... enhance every piece of data on the Internet with related 'metadata' . This would, for instance, enable currently passive computer applications to think about the data you enter and advise you.

Wow, I thought my gradparents, born in 1899 and lived to experience the moon landing, had experienced change in their lifetime.  Think about that, you computer will think about the data and it will interact with you!  If I, in my lifetime have experienced such change, what will my grandchildren be wrapping their minds around?

Neuroscientists in their study of the brain have found that our environment literally wires our brain as we grow.  Don Tapscott in Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World speculates that;  

....from ages 8-18, the brain is still being built and that kids’ brains are becoming hard-wired to live in a digital culture.

So my grandchildren are going to grow up with a brain hard-wired to live in a digital culture!  What does this mean for education?  It seems that we have embraced web 1.0, still covet that data base of knowledge, and we use web 2.0 technology to present that data to our students.  But are we preparing our students for their future?

David Nagel, in an article entitled Are Schools Preparing Students for 21st Century Learning?  , reports that there is a "disconnect" between school administrators and parents on this topic. 

The findings were part of a report released this week--Learning in the 21st Century: Parents' Perspectives, Parents' Priorities. They were compiled from data collected as part of Project Tomorrow's annual Speak Up survey, which included responses from more than 335,000 K-12 administrators, students, parents, and educators.

The report says that parents think teachers need more training and schools need more "technology-infused approaches to education".  At the same time more than half of the prinicpals in the survey thought they were doing a good job preparing students for the 21st century.

I think that we need more than "technology-infused" approaches to education.  Our children are already infused with a way of thinking that includes technology.  We need to allow them the opportunity to learn to think about the massive amounts of data they will encounter.  How do they make meaning of all that infomation.  How do they deal with a machine that can think about their problems?  Can you teach them how to do that in 12 years?

The Speak Up Survey also notes that students are gravitating to on-line schools in astonishing numbers. Schools may not even have 12 years to help them make meaning of the data because they will be persuing information that interests them on-line. We must begin thinking about educating our children to think critically and creatively and we better be able to do it in a "technology-infused" manner.

Maybe we should begin treating the students and their parents as customers of the education system.  The education system has a product called curriculum that the customers can peruse to find the best  and most effective deal.  Will they know any better than the educaton establishment what is needed for the future?