18 May
Thanks to our friends at the Fusion Academy blog who posted this great video: “Animal School” from RaisingSmallSouls.com. This video reminds us that every child is different, and so of course learns differently. It is up to the parents, teachers, and schools to recognize those differences and use them to help the child learn, rather than expecting them to fit into a specific “mold.”
9 Mar
Why is it that some students seem so unmotivated to learn?
In a free report on Inside the School, “Five Ways to Motivate Unmotivated Students,” educator and school psychologist, Dr. Allen Mendler, acknowledges that motivation is different for every student, and so he presents us with:
…five ways teachers can motivate unmotivated students beyond traditional leverage…
These five ways focus on “helping difficult youth succeed” and consist of: emphasizing effort and praising mistakes, challenging a failure mentality, noticing and building upon strengths, giving students more than one chance on an assignment, and connecting with students. Be sure to download the free report for all of the details on these five tips.
Rick Lavoie is another educator and presenter with a great deal of information to share on student motivation. If you’ve ever seen him speak, particularly on “The Motivation Breakthrough,” you know how powerful this information can be in understanding how different people are motivated (because everyone is motivated by something) and therefore how we can reach children who seem on the surface “unmotivated,” but who are really just motivated in different ways. Be sure to check out his website for more details on his workshops, videos, and books, which are packed full of useful information on motivation and other key educational topics.
3 Dec
In a great example of arts integration into the curriculum, schools scattered across the country are using dance and movement to learn about subjects from science to social studies. Not only is this a wonderful way of keeping the arts alive in schools, and particularly dance, which often receives the least attention of the arts, but it’s also a valuable way for students to engage with topics and ideas using their whole bodies.
As the principal of one of the elementary schools using dance (Karen Harris of Fort Garrison Elementary School) said:
“This is how learning should be. It should be active, it should be engaging. It should use a variety of modalities. That’s how we all learn.”
Read the full story in Education Week’s article, Schools Integrate Dance Into Core Academics.
30 Sep
The idea of child-led learning is a component of many educational approaches, to a greater or lesser degree. One of these that can be found in early and primary school education across the world is the Reggio Emilia approach.
Started in the city of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, by Loris Malaguzzi, this approach has been gaining popularity since its inception, shortly after World War II. Essentially, it sees the child as a natural learner, one who is competent and imaginative, and so let’s the child lead the learning process with the environment acting as the “teacher” and the teacher as a resource and guide, there to share expertise with the child while also learning alongside him or her.
Given the importance of the environment, in a true Reggio Emilia approach great cares are taken to create an aesthetically beautiful space with lots of natural light and pastel colors. The arts, both studio and performing, play a large role in the learning process as does documentation of and reflection upon the childrens’ work. Parents are also extensively involved, as the child’s learning is seen as being based on relationships, with open dialogue between children and adults.
One of the benefits of this approach over a traditional school environment seems to be the actual physical environment, which is arranged to be a peaceful, joyful place of learning. The children are actively involved in deciding what they are learning, and how they are learning it, so are more likely to be engaged in the process. Furthermore, rather than formal assessments, student progress is determined through the documentation of student work, which includes pictures of the children “working”, their words written down as they talk about what they’re doing, and visual art such as sculpture, drawing, painting, etc. The belief is that reviewing this documentation together allows the child to reflect on the learning process, with the thoughts and emotions involved, and therefore to deeply learn.
As there is no formal certification to practice this approach, schools and teachers can start implementing these philosophies at any time. To learn more about the Reggio Emilia approach to learning in early education and grade school, check out the articles by Andrew Loh on Brainy-Child.com and by Rose Garrett on Education.com. You can also compare it to some other models on RecognitionAndResponse.org, in Finding Just the Right Curriculum.
14 Aug
Written by Sallie Borrink.
Tamara Fisher, a gifted and talented specialist, describes her job in this way:
(I)t’s my goal (among others) to help them understand, accept, and learn how to manage the advantages and disadvantages that can come with their high intelligence and high creativity. We have conversations about effective ways to respond to (or not respond to) teasing, we discuss friendship issues and strategies for finding and making quality (vs. quantity) friends, we talk about what giftedness is (a learning difference) and what it is not (specialness), we celebrate challenge and the hard work it takes to learn when challenged, and we foster an attitude that it’s okay to be who you are… our world needs all sorts. Generally speaking, these conversations, over time, do help them to understand, accept, and manage the advantages and disadvantages that come with their giftedness.
Fisher recently shared her students’ perspectives on the downsides of being gifted. She then later asked them what they appreciated about being gifted. Here is a sampling of their responses as to the upside of being gifted:
“Having a great ability at something gives me the joy of immersing myself in working on that area.” Michelle, 7th grade
“Being gifted is great when the school meets me where I’m at academically. I love being challenged in my advanced classes.” Wendy, 7th grade
“I just learn differently, and I’m okay with that.” Cural, 5th grade
“I think I have found a lot of less-known things interesting, causing me to have a very diverse set of life experiences. Because of that, I have a very different thought process than most people.” Scribblenaut, 12th grade
“I sometimes enjoy feeling smarter than the others and I feel like all that I have worked for in the past has paid off. And I’m thankful that there is a class where I can (humbly) exercise my abilities and be surrounded by others who have the same talents, a class where I won’t feel different from other kids.” Olive, 9th grade
“I like that I can ‘see through’ the motives of the so-called cool crowd.” Puff the Magic Dragon, 5th grade
Helping students who learn differently to embrace and even enjoy their differences is a large part of helping them become successful students and, eventually, successful adults. Celebrating their strengths and individuality on a regular basis will contribute greatly to their own acceptance of their unique approach to life.
26 Jun
Written by Sallie Borrink.
Every college student understands the pressure associated with timed exams. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the high stakes situation of the ACT and SAT. With so much riding on a few tests, students are under tremendous pressure to perform well and to do it as quickly as possible. But an increasing number of people are asking if timing these exams is in the best interest of the students and if such rapid-paced test-taking is truly an accurate reflection of a student’s academic ability.
Valerie Strauss writes in Stop timing the ACT and SAT for The Washington Post that part of the challenge lies with the companies who administer the tests:
Why, exactly, are these tests timed the way they are? Why, for
example, do students have exactly 60 minutes to take the ACT math section but 25 minutes to write an SAT essay?It’s not because extensive research has shown that subjecting
students to exactly this amount of time to complete these academic problems reveals something important about a teenager.It’s because the entities behind the tests, ACT Inc., and the College Board, say so. The big thinking is that high school students need to be tested under pressure to see how they will fare in the pressure-filled environments in college. The other problems cited is the problem of securing and paying proctors and test sites for unspecified amounts of time.
Strauss is not the first person to suggest that timing should be eliminated. In 2002, Howard Gardner, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggested that tightly timed, high-stakes testing proves very little in terms of future success in college and beyond. Gardner wrote in The New York Times op-ed, Test for Aptitude, Nor for Speed:
Nothing of consequence would be lost by getting rid of timed tests
by the College Board or, indeed, by universities in general. Few tasks in life — and very few tasks in scholarship — actually depend on being able to read passages or solve math problems rapidly. As a teacher, I want my students to read, write and think well; I don’t care how much time they spend on their assignments. For those few jobs where speed is important, timed tests may be useful. But getting into college, or doing satisfactorily once there, is not in that category.
Indeed, by eliminating the timed component, the College Board would signal that background knowledge, seriousness of purpose and effort — not speed and glibness — are the essentials of good scholarship. What matters is not what you have at the starting point, but whether and how well you finish.
Strauss further explains that it is challenging for students who truly need more time to qualify for it. There are numerous hoops to jump through, many of which involve expensive testing to prove a true need and cooperation with already overburdened high school guidance counselors. She suggests that many students who do need extra time in order to successfully take the tests never get it because they do not have access to the additional expensive advocacy they need.
It is a widely acknowledged fact that many students need individualized instruction or accommodations in order to be successful in school. Their struggles are not due to a lack of intelligence or desire. Some students simply learn differently and can be very successful when given the opportunity to approach school in a different way. Eliminating the timed aspect of the ACT and SAT would give all students the opportunity to perform to the best of their ability and demonstrate their true knowledge and aptitude.
7 May
Written by Sallie Borrink.
Children who are both gifted and learning disabled (known as 2e or twice-exceptional) face unique challenges as do their parents and teachers. Correctly identifying 2e students is the first step in meeting their specific academic, personal, and social needs. The 2e Newsletter offers a helpful overview in Twice-exceptional Students: Who Are They and What Do They Need? by Micaela Bracamonte.
Specifically identifying students has become somewhat easier as researchers have uncovered some distinct tendencies among 2e children. Bracamonte writes:
By analyzing the records of students currently in 2e programs, researchers have developed a profile of twice-exceptionality. 2e students typically perform at very high levels on some, but not all, of the gifted screening tests used by public schools. On the other hand, they tend to simultaneously perform very poorly on one or more of the local, state, or national standardized assessments used to measure individual student progress. One of the hallmarks of twice-exceptionality, then, is inconsistency in performance and, in particular, in test results.
Bracomonte provides four profiles of “typical” 2e students. These short overviews give a glimpse of the complexity of identifying 2e students in the school setting. She then offers five strategies for working with twice-exceptional students:
Bracomonte clearly recognizes the need to provide these twice-exceptional students with an appropriate education. She writes in closing:
The ideal classroom environment for the twice-exceptional student is very far from what exists… With a handful of exceptions, highly promising, creative students with learning differences continue to be systematically denied what they need in school – a flexible combination of acceleration, remediation, and social/emotional supports – whether the context is general, gifted, or special education.
To meet the needs of these children, there must be a paradigm shift from a remediation or deficit model to a strength-based model of education. This is particularly true as a growing body of research demonstrates that learning disabilities also appear to afford and coexist with unique learning strengths. These children need programs and schools that transform the research on twice-exceptionality into a daily commitment to combine academic rigor with individualized accommodations and adaptations.
One million of our nation’s most promising, most innovative thinkers – bright children who learn differently, not “deficiently” – constitute a neglected national resource. Twice-exceptional children need an education that fits, and it’s in all of our interests to give it to them.
24 Apr
Written by Sallie Borrink.
Groups based on ability have been a fixture of American schools for decades. Whether it is reading groups or another area of education, schools frequently divide children into groups for both the ease of the teacher and the perceived betterment of the students. One teacher discovered that grouping by ability has unexpected consequences. Put in her own lower level group, the teacher realized the implications of these choices.
Cris Tovani wrote in I Got Grouped for Educational Leadership that her own experience with ability grouping for technology training made her realize some of the challenges faced by her struggling readers. She writes of the four insights she had as a result of this troubling experience:
When reflecting upon the first insight, Tovani wrote:
I started to wonder whether our beliefs about struggling readers had inadvertently given students permission to give up. I know from experience that when people believe in my abilities, I work harder to prove them right. When colleagues ask me for help with reading instruction, I know they trust me to know what I’m doing. This belief encourages me to produce and perform.
Expressing belief in someone’s ability is powerful—especially if the person dishing out the belief is in a position of authority. As a result of being grouped, I realized that people I respected didn’t have a lot of confidence in my computer abilities. This public declaration almost forced me to give up my goal of becoming proficient with technology. My initial reaction was, why try? Because no one believed in my abilities, there was no pressure to perform. I was off the hook.
We have inadvertently given many struggling readers the message that no one believes they can or will read in school. Our low expectations give students an excuse to opt out of improving. Struggling readers, like all struggling learners, need confidence, or they won’t take risks. And if they don’t take risks, they won’t improve. Of course, just saying to struggling readers, “I think you’re the best reader in the world!” isn’t going to magically make them so. But there is a valuable middle ground. Having reasonable expectations and providing scaffolding with strategy instruction may not be flashy, but it’s effective.
Success begets success and students who are struggling are in even greater need of experiencing success. Quite often the first step toward success is to simply have someone cheering them on, encouraging them that they can do it and believing they have the ability to grow and learn. Tovani explains in the rest of the article how she has refocused her own teaching as a result of the experience.
17 Apr
Written by Sallie Borrink.
Students today spend copious amounts of time multitasking. Whether it is listening to music, texting, surfing and chatting online, or playing games, young adults view multitasking as a completely normal way of life. But research is showing that multitasking is not nearly as effective as many people believe.
Clifford I. Nass, professor of psychology at Stanford University, published a study that indicates people who heavily multitask consistently overestimate their abilities. In Divided Attention from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students’ minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently—so the worry goes—students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.
“Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities,” says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. “But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”
But perhaps of even greater concern is the idea that chronic multitasking diminishes a person’s ability to reason. From the same article:
In a recent unpublished study, he and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than otherwise similar peers on analytic questions drawn from the LSAT. He isn’t sure which way the causation runs here: It might be that media multitaskers are hyperdistractible people who always would have done poorly on LSAT questions, even in the pre-Internet era. But he worries that media multitasking might actually be destroying students’ capacity for reasoning.
Students today are different from any previous generation in terms of how they interact with technology. Their desire to constantly be plugged in and connected impacts how they view their educational process as well. Finding a way to meet them where they are while also delivering the important skills they will need will be an increasing challenge for educators and parents in the years ahead.
9 Feb
Written by Sallie Borrink.
It is no secret that children learn differently. Finding a way to customize and individualize education is one of the core values of American Education Group.
Class Struggle by Jay Matthews in The Washington Post featured a letter from educator Susan Ohanian entitled Elementary gifted ed made easy. Ohanian recounts how she changed things up for students and made Resource a place of learning and exploration through open-ended “messing around”.
Eons ago, I persuaded my principal, who was starting a new school that had a state mandate and funds to be innovative, to do away with remedial reading (I was the remedial reading teacher). We called my room Resource and I announced I was an adjunct of the media center.
(snip)
Mind you, I was still the remedial reading teacher–but we kept this secret from the kids. Teachers had a list of students who had to come to the room x times a week to fulfill our obligation to the state. For everyone else (K-6), it was student initiated: a child came when he could persuade his teacher to let him. There was no schedule and there were no bells.
(snip)
In the spring, state Education Department officials came to see why the reading scores for the identified remedial readers soared. As expected, they were mystified. Building bridges, making musical instruments, discovering the law of gravity in Remedial Reading? (One day my principal came into the room sputtering, “You mean to tell me that this heavy box and this ball fall at the same rate?” A student team dropping objects in the stairwell had been explaining their experiment to him.)
(snip)
I’m not trying to say what a good teacher I am. I’m just trying to say “yes” to your point about flexibility being the key. Different kids have different needs, and providing choices allows all children to soar at different things.
Understanding the learning style of each child is of paramount importance. Accepting learning differences and personalizing learning opportunities based on those realities means greater opportunities for all students.
