21st Century Skills

on July 16, 2010

A great emphasis in education these days is the call for “21st Century Skills” to be taught in PreK–12 education. The purpose of this emphasis is to bring curriculum and instruction into alignment and relevance with the environment today’s students will live and work in as adults.

There is no universal agreement on what the list of these skills should include. Googling this hot-button topic reveals a minefield of viewpoints. But here’s a sample:

• The three R’s include: English, reading, or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography.

• The four C’s include: critical thinking and problem solving; communication, collaboration; and creativity and innovation

(From: Partnership for 21st Century Skills—a collaboration of several major players in government, national education organizations, business, and industry)

Some schools seeking to head in this direction are currently using curriculum and instruction approaches such as the Responsive Classroom approach®, Tools of the Mind®, or Developmental Designs.® These (and other quality programs) teach the integration of social and academic learning through differentiated, theme and project-based instruction with an emphasis on problem-solving. Schools using these programs are already headed in the right direction.

Think critically about what you read in all the treatises and white papers on 21st Century Skills and then line up those concepts next to this list of familiar skills that I’m constantly featuring on this blog:

• Cooperation—the ability to work, learn, evaluate, and accomplish something together with a partner, a family, a teacher, a work group, or a community.

• Assertion—the ability to communicate ideas, suggest solutions, develop a sense of one’s voice in the world.

• Responsibility—the ability to understand and act constructively in relationship to our interdependency in all social, academic, and civic environments.

• Empathy—the ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective and act in response with kindness, respect, and compassion.

• Self-regulation/self-control—the ability to inhibit impulsive action, to calm oneself, to think before taking action, to make a plan, to listen.

These skills are foundational prerequisites for the acquisition of any of the more complex and abstract metacognitive skills being explored as essential in this 21st Century of ours.

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Executive Functioning and Cognitive Growth: The Intersection of Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning

on July 8, 2010

A number of studies in early childhood classrooms have documented that “self-regulation predicts academic performance in first grade, over and above cognitive skills and family background.” (Examples of these studies: Blair, 2002; Farran, 2010; McClelland, M. M.; Piccinin, A., & Stallings, M. C., 2010; Raver & Knitzer, 2002).

Educators are increasingly becoming aware that social and emotional learning is at least equally as important as academic skill development in schools. They’re also realizing that explicit instruction in both social-emotional and academic skills, when well integrated, can have a dramatic impact on behavior as well as achievement.

This awareness is moving schools to think more profoundly about applying child development knowledge; brain research on executive functioning; and the benefits of kinesthetic learning, music, dance, art, and physical exercise with explicit instruction in social skills into their core curriculum and daily practice.

Recent tragic suicides traced directly to bullying behavior in schools have led states like Massachusetts to enact legislation with strict enforcement and heightened school programming to deal with repeated unregulated behavior of this nature targeted at individual children. In Massachusetts, the legislation also has moved the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to “publish guidelines for the implementation of social and emotional learning curricula in grades kindergarten through 12, inclusive, by June 30, 2011.”

Social and emotional learning can no longer be relegated to the backseat character education slogan of the month or other such superficial feel-good lesson approaches that talk at kids about how they should be behaving. Zero-tolerance, “just say no” approaches to intolerable behavior are also being shown to have less than desirable, if not negative, impacts on school climate, culture, and learning.

Schools can certainly benefit from explicit and conscious curriculum approaches such as Tools of the Mind® in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, the Responsive Classroom® approach in K-6, Open Circle® in K-6, Developmental Designs® in grades 5–9, and programs of the Developmental Studies Center™, K–6. All have developed integrated social and academic instructional approaches over a period of 15 to 30 years.

But whatever approaches schools choose in order to deepen the connection between social and academic growth, in the end, the outcomes in both citizenship and scholarship for the children will depend on the nurturing classroom teachers, staff, and school leaders provide for their students. Hopefully, an emphasis on the whole child and the social-academic connection for positive learning outcomes will provide both encouragement and hope for these adults in their critical work.

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Lily Heads for Kindergarten

on June 30, 2010

My granddaughter, Lily, loves to swim. Watching her in the water in the summertime is one of the most joyful experiences of this grandfather’s days. In her element, she challenges herself at the leading edge of learning and adventure. She now floats on her back long distances, swims underwater, treads water, and is beginning to dive off the end of the board at the pool at our local public recreation center. She loves playing games in the water with her brother and me when we go to the pool at dinner time and there are few other swimmers around. From the water she notices birds and planes overhead, the shapes in the clouds, the color of the sky.

Lily gets to know all the life guards and will begin another year of swimming lessons in another week. She meets the water on her own terms. She knows her limits when she is over her head, but it is good there is always a lifeguard there to keep a watchful eye.

Lily and her swimming makes me think of Lily and kindergarten, which she enters in September. Lily turns six in September, which will make her one of the oldest children chronologically in her class. She loves to play, pretend dress up, paint, sing and dance, write, and be read to—all the things good kindergartens provide. My greatest wish for Lily and her classmates, some of whom will have just turned five in August, is that they be allowed to explore learning in their classroom the way Lily explores the water at the Rec Center. All teachers, but especially kindergarten teachers, are like lifeguards and swim instructors: They keep a watchful eye, observing all that their students do; noticing their interests, strengths, and gifts; and scaffolding new learning with instruction that stretches their abilities and challenges their intellect.

In the best kindergartens, children get to learn with their whole selves, just as in swimming, not just with their heads and with pencil and paper. They get to play and paint, learn through dramatic play, construct with blocks and puzzles, learn math with manipulatives and games, hear classic children’s literature, swim in a print and picture rich environment, and challenge themselves at the leading edge of their learning, wherever that is for them.

I’ve already had a chance to visit Lily’s kindergarten with Lily’s mom and I am confident that a joyful experience awaits her and her classmates and that they will quickly become a learning community for each other under the watchful eye of their competent lifeguard and instructor.

My granddaughter, Lily, loves to learn. So do all children entering school, each in their own way. May kindergarten be preserved everywhere as the place where children can learn to swim through the world of learning and develop the courage and confidence they need to be “in school.”

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Isaiah Turns Eleven

on June 16, 2010

Grandson Isaiah’s tenth year was filled with collections of boyhood in the year in which children are typically drawn to collecting and classifying. His album of baseball cards expanded as did his knowledge of amazing facts from nature and the Guinness Book of World Records (undoubtedly in the top ten of favorite fifth grade books). Like many children at this age, Isaiah became a voracious reader of chapter books, relishing series (Percy Jackson) and themes (outdoor adventure) from Gary Paulson, Roland Smith, Ben Mikaelsen, and others.

Isaiah showed perseverance with his martial arts (gaining a green belt) and with his first year in organized baseball: He got to pitch in two games, played the outfield, and by the end of the season began to connect with his bat. While his team struggled through a losing season, he and his teammates had good team spirit and the kind of patient coach every ten-year-old needs. The coach taught the kids a lot of fundamentals about the game and good sportmanship.

Isaiah showed considerable lack of perseverance when it came to chores or a neat room—not unusual for a ten-year-old. But as the year progressed, he did gain some ground accomplishing his homework with fewer reminders. He got some outside help understanding his attentional issues and his strong cognitive abilities and how to cope with both. Having the opportunity to talk to a trusted adult outside the family can be a great asset for children at this age. This was especially important for Isaiah, who benefitted from having a counselor he could talk to about his feelings surrounding the divorce of his parents, which occurred during his tenth year. Some of Isaiah’s friends were also experiencing the divorce of their parents at the same time as Isaiah. It’s a not uncommon occurance in the lives of many children today.

So ten was a struggle for Isaiah, but his resilience, great sense of humor, fun classmates, a good teacher of 28 lively students, and the support of his family make the advent of eleven and the years ahead full of promise.

Isaiah’s turning eleven reminded me of the wonderful words of Sandra Cisneros in Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories. In a story called “Eleven,” a child muses about how we contain within us all the ages that we have been before.  “The way you grow old,” she says, “ is kind of like an onion . . . or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.” And sometimes, she believes, it takes a while to feel that you really are the new age. Even then, “you might need to sit on your mama’s lap sometimes because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay.”

And so I wish for Isaiah—and all the other tens turning eleven— joy and strength, fun and flexibility, and the willingness to come to the adults in their lives for loving support on those “I feel a whole lot younger than eleven” days.

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Writing into Summer

on June 3, 2010

I was so inspired by Margaret Wilson’s recent blog post on “Last Read-Aloud of the Year”—she gives such great ideas for final classroom reading-writing connections leading into the summer break! It made me think about how much teachers and schools are doing to get kids to read over the summer as a way to address the summer learning gap that affects so many young students. Lists of books, book bags, book-count contests and challenges, summer reading programs at libraries—all help motivate and engage children who love to read and encourage children who might not otherwise pick up a book over the summer to do so.

Margaret’s suggested classroom activities made me think about how much the general literacy skills of children might get a boost over the summer if students also went home with a list of writing ideas to share with their parents:

  • Give your kids a “shopping list” pad for their own use over the summer. Kids love to make lists too, whether they are four or fourteen and heading to the mall or the beach. Dictate your grocery list to your child as you drive to the supermarket. Let them check off items on the list as you shop.
  • Give your child a summer journal, or, if you have the time, make one togther with your preschooler or early elementary student. Some kids love to write everyday, keeping a diary, writing fiction stories.
  • Yes, older kids are writing every day, many are adctd2txt (addicted to text), but they are busily writing, even if they are not using vowels. Are you up for learning the lingo?
  • Emailing to grandparents (yes, I know Skype is wonderful, too) is a great way to build writing skills, and grandparents love written communication as well as being talked to on the phone. (What they really adore the most, of course, is snail mail on real paper written by the grandchild in his or her own handwriting with a drawn picture or two to go along.)
  • Older children love to write fan mail to ball players and to music and movie stars and sometimes can be encouraged to write letters to the editor of a local paper or to comment on a blog.
  • Remember picture post cards! If you’re traveling, have kids send them to themselves as well as to relatives. They love to get mail from themselves when they get home and they are always surprised because you usually beat the postcard home (the ultimate snail mail).
  • Memory boxes. Have children write a letter to themselves at a given age about their summer, for example, “The Summer I was Six” They can put the letter in a special envelope and you can start a Summer Memory Box…a private time capsule that can be read in future years, who knows when…add pictures and drawings to taste.

Happy writing!

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Standing Up with Self-Control

on May 11, 2010

Standing up with self-control is the final of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, assertion, responsibility and empathy.

The ability to control and regulate feelings, thoughts, and actions are at the core of cognitive growth and logical understanding, academic learning and achievement, social and moral reasoning, and positive behavior. We learn for social reasons. We learn self-control in order to get along, to learn things from each other, to navigate our world, to build a place for ourselves, our family. Children learn early on that getting along and practicing self-control requires understanding and following certain rules.

For very young children, understanding rules is often heavily influenced by other-regulation, a term used by child psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his colleagues to describe what happens when one person is regulating another – as when a mother teaches a toddler how do something independently by giving her directions and alternatives (“You can wash your dishes in this tub and dry them with this towel like Mommy’s.”).

In preschool, kindergarten, and the early elementary grades, children spend a good deal of time other-regulating each other as they interpret the rules of games and the roles they take in them.

  • “You’re the wicked witch and I’m the scarecrow guy. That’s what you promised!”
  • “Go over there. That’s where all the ponies are supposed to be. You’re a pony.”
  • “You’re out. It bounced twice. I counted.”

Tattling is one of the ways children exercise other-regulation. By tattling, children are letting teachers or playground aides know that they understand the rules; they are other-regulating by proxy, if you will. Tattling, therefore, is an important precursor to greater self-control. A good response is to tell the child that you’re glad they know the rules, and to repeat the rule to them: “Brian, I hear that you know the rule about one bounce in four square. Good for you.” Usually that’s enough to send the child happily back to the game. Some children, still wanting your other- or outside-regulation, will say, “Aren’t you going to do something about it?” You might respond, “I’ll review the rules with everyone at the end of recess today. Thanks for helping.”

It’s important, of course, for children from preschool on to learn the difference between tattling and reporting a problem that requires adult attention. Teach them that tattling is telling adults about ordinary conflicts, such as kids not always sharing, picking teams unfairly, and making up their own rules in a game, and that students don’t always have to tell an adult about these. But explain clearly that if the situation involves danger or injury, hurting someone physically or emotionally, or repeatedly scaring someone – in other words, bullying – then they must get adult help immediately, “As fast as your little feet can get you there,” I would tell them.

Meanwhile, it’s important for us adults to know the difference between developmentally appropriate other-regulation and inappropriate other-control. Examples of the latter include telling other kids they have to do something or else they are going to get a punch or be pushed down, herding a child into a corner of the playground, and keeping another child out of a game through verbal intimidation. Inappropriate other-control is a potential early warning sign of bullying behavior that should be addressed promptly.

Self-regulation or self-control is an essential life skill for independent learning and living as children gradually move away from the watchful eye of adults over the course of their journey into adulthood. Other-regulation, too, must be a strong companion on this journey as classmates and friends learn to stand up for each other as teammates and able rule followers in heated competition and the often difficult social struggles of adolescence and young adulthood.

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Standing Up with Empathy

on May 5, 2010

As reported by the Boston Globe, on May 4, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick signed into law one of the most comprehensive antibullying measures ever passed. The family of 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, who killed himself in April 2009 after extensive bullying, attended the signing, as did a group of teenagers who advocated for a statewide “No Name Calling Day” that became part of the bill. The article reads in part:

The law, which advocates call one of the toughest in the nation, prohibits physical, emotional, and online taunting and mandates training for faculty and students. It requires school staff to notify parents about incidents and harassment under the umbrella of bullying behavior.. . . Patrick and other lawmakers also emphasized the role students would have to play in ending the physical and emotional taunting.

In signing the bill, Patrick said, “Bullying is not a normal piece of childhood. Emotional and physical abuse is more than, as they say, kids just being kids.’’

—————-

Empathy is one of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, assertion, responsibility, and self-control.

Standing up to bullying requires being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to have a sense of what they are feeling — and when what they are feeling is pain, to want to alleviate that feeling.

Empathy is an early emotion. One baby cries in the nursery and many may cry. In preschool, when children see someone fall down and cry, they often go see what has happened and find out if they can help or lend a hand (even if sometimes they might have caused the hurt in the first place).

Notice that empathy seems to be an innate emotion. To become an internalized skill, empathy requires modeling and teaching, first from mothers and fathers and then from older siblings and peers (from whom young children learn enormous amounts). If that modeling is positive and kind, empathy will emerge. It is a self-rewarding skill. The reward is courage.

We can’t just rely on mothers and fathers and older siblings and peers to model empathy, though. We have to actively teach it in school. The definition of empathy I like best is “Empathy is how people behave when they believe they belong together.” That’s what we should expect in our classrooms and our schools. We may need legislation these days to expressly prohibit un-empathetic behavior, but to teach empathy we must:

  • Take time to run thank-you circles in our classrooms where kids appreciate the small, specific things they do for each other on a daily basis — like waiting to go out to recess with a classmate, or helping a peer with a math problem, or standing up for a friend by telling someone, “Hey, he’s trying his best. Knock it off.” In a thank-you circle, any child who wants can give a thank-you: “Thank you, Evan, for standing up for me when I was trying to kick the ball at recess yesterday. I thought you were brave,” whispers Brian. “You’re welcome,” Evan replies with a smile.
  • Model empathy as adults with each other through our words and actions, especially avoiding sarcasm and any humor that marginalizes or stereotypes by gender, race, or any other category.
  • Pay attention to the small acts of unkindness, shunning, or not picking certain partners by addressing each act directly and privately with the children engaging in the behavior. This is holding children to your standard (and hopefully the school’s standard) of appropriate citizenship.

There are several worthwhile programs that help teach empathy:

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Standing Up with Responsibility

on April 28, 2010

Responsibility is one of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, assertion, empathy, and self-control.

Standing up to the bullying and other mean and hurtful behavior that children see happening in their classrooms, in the cafeteria, on the playground, in the neighborhood, or even among brothers and sisters at home requires the ability to act responsibly in the face of such behavior.

Children can only learn responsibility by being given responsibility. Children learn responsibility early in their lives by being taught certain routines: picking out clothes in the morning, getting dressed, putting the dirty clothes in the basket, washing their faces, clearing the table, getting their things ready for school, and so on.

At home, siblings engage in what is called “other-regulation” by teaching each other the rules and responsibilities (even if they are not always following them so well themselves). “That’s not where your dirty socks, go!” an older sibling says. “Put your dishes in the sink, Amanda,” commands a four-year-old to her two-year-old sister. In school, older children often tattle to their teachers about children they see breaking the rules. This, too, is a form of other regulation. Children who tattle are letting their teachers know that they know the responsible thing to do and have seen other children not being responsible. Young children constantly other-regulate each other about rules of the games they play and roles they are playing in pretend play. “That’s what the rescue worker does – not the policeman,” says one five-year-old to another at the scene of a pretend accident on the playground. “Direct traffic,” she orders.

Preschool, elementary, and middle school programs that build opportunities and expectations for practical responsibility into students’ daily lives help to increase the chances for improved social and academic skills and decrease the chances for problem behaviors, including bullying.

These opportunities and expectations include:

  • Doing daily jobs in the classroom: line leaders, homework-pass-in checkers, lunch count-first count for teacher, late greeters for tardy students, classroom curators for bulletin board displays, morning meeting activity leaders, middle school advisory team leaders, etc.
  • Learning, from the earliest age, what Montessori called “practical life” tasks such as putting out snacks, collecting counting cubes and putting them away, etc.
  • Working substantially with diverse partners on early academic activities such as math games, puzzles, reading, writing, and listening to a story at the listening center and then talking about it together. Heavy dosages of partner activity is a foundational prerequisite to teaching responsibility in both small groups and the whole class, and is where children learn the basics of individual responsibility they will carry out on the playground and in the cafeteria.
  • Completing meaningful, reasonable, differentiated homework that is used in classroom instruction, corrected, improved, and duly noted by teachers so that students truly learn to be responsible for and respected for completing and learning from their homework. Giving “busy work” homework that is not paid attention to the next day actually models irresponsibility. Imitation is the proof that children have their eyes on their teachers.
  • Assuming schoolwide positions such as helping to lead all-school assemblies; reading morning announcements; serving on student councils; acting as special events helpers for field days, book fairs, parent nights, community service fund raisers, community dinners, etc.

As children develop stronger responsibility, they can take on the more advanced skills of problem-solving and conflict resolution in the classroom, and peer mediation schoolwide. Without a solid foundation built on daily practice in early grades, however, these approaches will often seem like triage and reactive crisis mode interventions. The best intervention of all, of course, is having a school- and community-wide approach to teaching social and academic responsibility from the start.

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Standing Up with Assertion

on April 22, 2010

Assertion is one of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.

Teaching assertion is the business of raising every voice in the classroom every day with conscious purposefulness.

If we don’t teach children how to be assertive in positive ways, aggression is more apt to be prevalent in school. It is natural for assertiveness and aggression to share the stage in young minds and emotions as children compete for air time, space and pecking order in classrooms, in lunch rooms, and on playgrounds. Teachers, administrators, and other adults in school have the important job of fine-tuning their awareness to pick up on the difference between assertion and aggression. When it feels like the boundary is being crossed, they need to step in and redirect the energy in acceptable directions. Without this vigilance, bullying will fill the vacuum.

This is not always an easy task in a culture that increasing values the race to the top, being the best, the brightest, the most beautiful, voted in or out. Children are confused by the mixed messages of the Pledge of Allegiance, the promises of democracy, and the particular place they may occupy in the classroom or on the school bus. Teachers, and school leaders as well, are challenged by the mounting complexity of multiple mandates of time-on-task accountability to raise academic performance, test scores, and exemplary, caring young citizens.

What to do? For me, it always comes back to the small things:

  • Insisting in Morning Meeting that children have time to ask each other relevant questions and listen respectfully to each other’s answers. If that means skipping an activity in the meeting on a given morning so sharing can take a little longer, so be it. The meeting doesn’t have to be any longer that morning, but the listening can be deeper.
  • Insisting during academic periods that kids work with different partners frequently. Everybody gets to know and talk with everybody else. Everybody knows everybody else’s voice as well as they know their teacher’s.
  • Insisting that no one eats alone or plays alone, that there are lunch invites and play invites and that shy children get to practice their assertion by using the words of invitation with their teacher and then with a friend and then with someone they wish were their friend.

Democracy doesn’t just happen. Neither does bullying. It takes assertion to lift every voice.

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Standing Up with the Skills of C.A.R.E.S.

on April 14, 2010

In reflecting on some of the responses to my last blog about bullying (and what we can do to be more proactive in our classrooms and schools to address this serious issue at all grade levels), I spent some time thinking more deeply about the social skills at the core of the Responsive Classroom® approach to teaching and learning.

Originally drawn from the work of Stephen Elliott and Frank Gresham and the now well-known Social Skills Rating System, the five skills of cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control serve as reliable and measurable positive social standards for behavior. Responsive Classroom strategies of proactive classroom management and logical consequences for misbehavior enhance acquisition of these five skills and are supportive of productive academic outcomes, as shown in research.

Yet, it serves us well as teachers and as parents to examine each of these skills in the context of our classrooms and the children with whom we live or work on a daily basis. For the next five blog posts I will focus on one skill at a time and I welcome your comments and conversation.

I’ll take the position, beginning with cooperation, that every social skill, though we seek to frame and teach it in a positive, prosocial way, has the potential for harm. For example, take bullying. Bullying takes cooperation. Peer pressure bears down on children at earlier and earlier and earlier ages, it seems. If you don’t cooperate in picking on someone who is different, you run the risk of being picked on, too. If you tell on someone who is bullying, you run the risk of getting beat up. “Snitches get stiches,” you know. Better cooperate!

So teaching children how to cooperate for positive ends has to become a part of the social glue of families and classrooms from the earliest ages. It has to be modeled by the adults. Children have to see teachers helping one another for real and not just telling and showing the kids how to help each other. It has to be modeled and role-played in the classroom. It has to be part of the fabric of learning. Children need to learn what it means to be a partner, a buddy, a listener, a helper … in reading, math, science, at clean-up, recess, lunch, Morning Meeting, on the bus, on a playdate.

Teachers should plan jobs and academics in the classroom that require a partner twice as often as they plan individual or whole-class work. Remember, cooperation, done well, multiplies positive social and academic learning outcomes.

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