The Soul of Education

A short time ago, we lost one of the clearest and most courageous voices in the field of education. Rachael Kessler, author of  The Soul of Education: Helping Students Find Connection, Compassion, and Character at School and a leader in the field of social and emotional learning, passed away at the end of January.

Rachael knew the needs of adolescents as few others do and gave voice to those needs in her writings and in the creation of PassageWorks, which carries on her work. She leaves a legacy of wisdom and insight and grounded applications for middle and high school teachers and leaders—and for all of us. Her ideas speak as precisely to the needs of adolescents today as they did ten years ago when The Soul of Education was first published. Her “Seven Gateways to the Soul in Education,” detailed in her book, provide a stunning articulation of the hopes of the human heart.

In the last paragraph of  The Soul of Education, Rachael writes, “Perhaps most important, as teachers, we can honor our students’ search for what they believe gives meaning and integrity to their lives, and how they can connect to what is most precious to them.”

It is the meaning of this italicized “they” that Rachael championed. We honor her by continuing to listen and pay attention to future generations in the ways she taught us.

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Parents, How Can You Best Reinforce Your Child’s Strengths?

In my entries about children’s positive attributes, you can find details about the kinds of strengths children seem to display at different ages and stages of their development. No two children are the same, of course, and each will gravitate to different interests at the same ages because different things excite different children, energize them, engage and enlighten them. and make them feel strong. Noticing and asking about these interests helps children feel validated in their choice making.

Some children persevere with interests because the more they stay engaged with them the stronger they feel. Other children move often from interest to interest until they settle on something they recognize as making them feel strong.

A remarkable author has helped me to understand that a child’s strengths are not the same thing as their abilities or skillfulness in a particular area. Jennifer Fox has written a powerful book titled How to Discover and Develop Your Child’s Strengths: A Guide for Parents and Teachers The first two sections of the book build an understanding of how our educational system and parenting penchants and inclinations tend to focus on a deficit model of thinking and learning. We can become consumed with what our children do not know and cannot do. We then try to fill what we perceive as a void with extra tutoring help, specialized athletic camps and coaching, extracurricular activities and counseling. Fox calls this way of looking at children “The Weakness Habit.”

“…whether your approach to life is positive will have a great effect on your children’s ability to put the strengths they discover to work in the real world,” says Fox. She writes, “Remember, strengths are not talents or skills, or what your children are good at. All those things are open to evaluation and criticism. Strengths are far more personal—they are the activities that make someone feel strong.” This she calls “A Strength Awakening.”

The last section of the book is an actual workbook in which you can do specific activities as a way of exploring strengths with your child. An extensive appendix also looks at Fox’s own work as an educator and explores a strength-based approach she developed known as “The Affinities Program.” She’s implemented this program at the Purcell School in Pottersville, New Jersey, since 2003.

This book is both challenging and affirming. It will make you question a lot of your parenting assumptions and practices and give you lots of ideas for communicating with and supporting your child.

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New Look–and Another Look at Positive Attributes

Thanks to all the wonderful people at Responsive Classroom, you’re now seeing a new-year, new-decade look for my blog, Yardsticks4-14.com. You’ll find that it’s now easier to post and find comments from other readers on any topic of interest related to child development, parenting, teaching, school, and educational issues. It’s also now easier to be in touch with me directly if you have particular questions to which you’d like a private answer.

Parents, I hope, will be pleased with—and will take frequent advantage of—the new “Just for Parents” page. I’ll sometimes post specific entries of particular interest to parents on that page, but it’s also a place for you to speak out—to pose your observations and questions about your child’s growth and development and about home, school, peer, and sibling issues.

Entering the new year and decade, I’d like to link you back to a series of entries I posted last year about the “Positive Attributes” of children. More and more, I think we gain strength as parents and teachers by being able to see and appropriately appreciate our children’s and students’ strengths and the interesting ways they learn from daily adventures and challenges.

As I wrote in the post to introduce the “Positive Attributes” series:

As parents and teachers, we are keenly interested in knowing and understanding everything we can about our children as they grow and mature. We cannot help but wonder if certain behaviors are typical or normal at the age or grade in school our children are currently navigating. Often we may find ourselves most attentive to what we may perceive as negative or inappropriate behavior or possible deficits we suspect in learning abilities or personality and social or emotional development.

As we compare our children (or students) to others in their same age range it is natural for us to create a kind of mental ranking about where one child falls in our understanding of what is appropriate at a certain age or grade. Is she behind or ahead academically? Too shy or too bossy? Is he “keeping up” with his peers socially? This normal way of observing and measuring sometimes keeps us from seeing more of the strengths children are exhibiting and developing and from appreciating all the positive aspects of the social and cognitive learning challenges that they face.

If you didn’t have a chance to read these posts last year, if you’re a new visitor to Yardsticks4-14, or if you just want a boost from reading about the great things you can expect to see in your child or the children in your classroom this year, you can read these posts right now under “Positive Attributes”  in the “Categories” list on the right side of this page. You can also look for the new “Growing Strong” series in the Responsive Classroom newsletter. Starting February 2010, each issue will feature the positive attributes of children at a different age.

Welcome or welcome back!  Chip

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Welcome to My Newly Redesigned Blog!

I hope you’ll like the new look, and I also hope you’ll enjoy these new features:

  • A page where parents can ask questions about their child’s development
  • A place to post general comments and questions

If you’d like to subscribe so that you’ll get an email message each time I post, it’s easy. Just go to the top upper right corner of the page, type your email address, and click “Subscribe.”

If you were already subscribed, and you’d like to continue your subscription, you need to resubscribe. Again, just go to the top right corner of this page, type your email address, and click “Subscribe.”

I’m looking forward to continuing to share good conversation with all of you!

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Voices in the Wilderness

If you work in the field of education, you may share the same troubling mental image I have as we enter the new decade and ponder the future of our children.

I see the beginning of a national marathon with teachers, administrators and state education officials all crowded at the starting line. There’s a giant banner over our heads. “RACE TO THE TOP,” it says. There are cash prizes to the winners of this race. The Secretary of Education has the starter gun in his hand. The President will make an appearance at the finish line in a large high school gymnasium filled with adoring students, parents, and teachers.

Many politicians and national educational experts think this is the race we must run to be the best educational system in the world. Governors, college presidents, educational researchers, economists are all in the grandstands, cheering. Some will even pass out water bottles and serve at check points along the marathon route. But those of us who continue to teach every day, or lead a school or school system, will be the ones who will actually run this race…along with our students, actually. It’s not a fair contest, particularly for those students, schools and districts that start the race at a distinct disadvantage.

Way back in 1964, civil rights leader Whitney Young, writing of the “discrimination gap” in his book To Be Equal (out of print; try your library or used book dealer), used a similar foot race analogy to state the obvious:

The situation is much like that of two men running the mile in a track meet. One is well-equipped, wears track shoes and runs on cinders. The other is barefoot and runs in sand. Seeing that one runner is out-distancing the other with ease, you then put track shoes on the second fellow and place him on the cinder track also. Seconds later it should surprise no one to see that the second runner is still yards behind and will never catch up unless something else is done to even the contest.

An achievement gap is certainly real in education. But under-resourced public schools cannnot close this gap for their students by being given a new pair of track shoes and then being asked to catch up. “Something else” must be done. Young called for a “domestic “Marshall Plan” in the sixties that was partially realized in President Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation. A similar moral and financial resolve is needed (at the level approaching that used to bail out the banking industry) if we are serious about equal educational opportunity for our neediest students. Focusing on our country being behind in a perceived global competition by raising standards, testing students more often, and closing failing schools is not the way to close our domestic achievement gap.

As “Race to the Top” draws near, I urge you to take the time to listen to a prophetic voice urging the President, the Secretary of Education, and all national policy makers to think carefully about the unintended consequences of running this race. Yong Zhao is a distinguished professor of education at Michigan State University and author of Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. If you can’t get to the book right away, read Zhao’s recent interview with Kappan.

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Hunters and Gatherers

A recent article in our local paper referenced a study from Brunel University in West London, England, released in 2005, that studied the shopping behaviors of men and women in some 14 different countries. It appears that what we may have all observed or experienced during this holiday shopping season does, in fact, mirror the ancient roles of male hunters and female gatherers. Women like to take their time, searching the choices carefully, looking for bargains and taking in all the nuances of the environment as they gather up the best deals. Men, on the other hand, spend as little time as possible on their shopping hunt. They’re on a mission. They move in swiftly for what is usually a single purchase, then get out of the store as quickly as possible.

This got me to thinking about my observations of our two grandchildren, Isaiah, the ten year old “hunter” and Lily, the five year old “gatherer.” It seems to me there is something to certain genetic predispositions being carried by gender, despite our clear intentions as parents and grandparents to “level the gender playing field.”

Before he was five, Isaiah knew how to make gun sound effects, use a stick as a sword or pistol, and talk like a pirate. Lily has happily focused on collections of fairies, baskets of flowers, household odds-and-ends, first writings of shopping lists and menus, and gathering friends, real and imaginary.

Even in the holiday shopping department, the trends do seem to begin early. Lily was delighted to construct her presents, gathered from her craft supplies…a bag for her Nana with her glue-down glitter, hand-lettered name splashed across it; a T-shirt with similar design elements for her other grandmother with her name on the front and angel wings ironed on the back—a good afternoon’s project with her mom. For Isaiah, one-stop shopping in the local farm store, with quick (and thoughtful) selections for all his family members, except for the grandfather who took him on his “hunting expedition.” (Isaiah is currently fascinated by knives and quickly picked out one that he was sure his dad would like…Isaiah liked it a lot.)

How our children and grandchildren will carry their roles into their futures remains to be seen. My hope is that some of the stereotypical roles will give way and melt together to make stronger leaders and followers in distant tomorrows.

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“Over the River and Through the Woods”

Holiday traditions are developing some new wrinkles as the wrinkles of the generation that carried the torch for their forbearers become more evident with age.

Case in point—a colleague who is the principal in one of the district’s elementary schools where I now serve as curriculum director related this tale to me. She happened to be in a third grade classroom recently where the language arts activity was to work with a partner to talk and think about what you would need to take on a long road trip, say if you were going to a grandparent’s house a ways away for the holidays—“over the river and through the woods,” perhaps. She sat down with a boy and a girl who were beginning their conversation and asked them what they do when they are in the car for a long time. The boy replied that he played with his electronic, handheld game device (the digitalized name of the gadget escaped the principal).

The principal casually mentioned to the kids that when her family went on a long road trip when she was a girl they would all sing in the car. She said the look from both children was one of stunned incredulity. When asked what she did on long trips, the girl replied that she just turned on a DVD she could watch from the back seat. The principal said in her family they would play games like counting license plates to see how many states they could find or play “I Spy with My Little Eye” out the window. Same incredulous looks of disconnect.

I notice the same “keep yourself entertained” (usually with electronics) on the part of my grandchildren as well. “Are we there yet?” is predictably asked only at the end of a game or show when we happen to be in the van on a long trip. Noticing the scenery might occur if I shouted, “Look, a bear!” (which can occur in our part of the country).

On short trips we often don’t allow electronics so we can play “I Spy” and other car games, so perhaps they will choose to pass on these quaint traditions some day to their own children. (They secretly seem to love these games, though they complain about not having their digital delights.)

Perhaps you’ve noticed too, how much children have conversations about virtual reality rather than real life. Because they spend so much time in these pursuits, their conversations focus on telling each other with great enthusiasm about how many whatevers they have bombed into obliteration on level such-and-such in a game with some war-related objective. Note how quickly you tune out of this conversation because you have no common experience, but the kids can easily follow the shared story line and carry on for some time, especially if they don’t have the game with them.

As kids get older, of course, they now graduate to texting and tweeting and other forms of instant messaging. What this all portends is hard to say. The older generation, myself included, bemoans the loss of time-honored traditions, forms of communication and conversation and reflection that seem deeper and more meaningful. But then I remember my parents thinking the world was in serious trouble when television and the Beetles emerged on the scene.

One thing for sure. In America, significant relationships and family ties are more fragile and disrupted than ever before in our history. Those of us who work in schools experience the impact of this every day. Traditions are golden threads that help weave a stronger fabric of connections for children as they grow and as families change. They are worth holding onto and passing on both in our families and in our special school traditions as well.

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Holiday Season—Lily and Isaiah Count the Days

Opening an Advent Calendar is a tradition in our household and yesterday, December 1st, was the day to begin taking turns for 5-year-old Lily and 10-year-old Isaiah. Our family calendar consists of 24 little boxes surrounding an empty manger. Each box has a number on it and contains a little magnetic surprise—a star or lamb, camel, wise man, etc., one for each day.

Last year Lily went first and Isaiah got to be the last opener on the 24th when the baby Jesus appears and is placed in the middle of the crowded Christmas scene. This year Lily was excited to put the calendar up again and wanted to go first. I reminded her how disappointed she was last year that Isaiah got to go last and what that meant. When Isaiah saw the calendar going up, he nonchalantly said he’d take the even numbers, easily predicting the final outcome of that strategy. I said that it was Isaiah’s turn to go first this year and that we would keep switching every year.

Lily has been counting the boxes around the calendar ever since, with special attention to the even numbers (the “brown ones”) and can’t wait to wake up each morning. Unlike last year, there was no fussing between the two grandchildren about taking turns this year. This acceptance is simple evidence of two consolidating and more centered periods of development for these children at fully five and fully ten years old than at four and nine. The peacefulness also reflects the children’s deeper cognitive appreciation for ritual and tradition.

Chanukah traditions are also part of our holiday attention and appreciation with the reading of the story, eating latkes, and playing dreidel. Chanukah begins this year on December 12th, so counting days ‘til then and counting each of the eight days of the miracle and the lighting of a candle each day on a menorah adds to the numbering of days and of blessings. The first day of Chanukah will come the day before the third Sunday of Advent, also a candle-lighting day. Kwanza also follows a tradition of candle lighting, each day after Christmas for seven days, and is part of our grandchildren’s heritage.

Lily especially loves a book we’ve read often throughout the past year: Latkes, Latkes, Good to Eat: A Chanukah Storyby Naomi Howland, a very fun melding of fairy and folk tale that’s appropriate as a read-aloud for ages 4 and up and as a reader for ages 7 and up. It tells a delightful story of caring and sharing when there’s not enough to go around. It’s also a cautionary tale about what can happen when people try to take advantage of a precious gift without knowing how best to take care of it. Thanks to a strong and wise heroine, all ends well, and a Chanukah feast ensues.

Enjoy with your children and grandchildren whatever holiday traditions you will be engaged in this month, and may blessings of peace and light prevail.

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The Thank You Circle

An activity I always enjoyed facilitating in my classrooms as a teacher was the “Thank You” Circle. As a principal, I also led these circles with teachers and staff at staff meetings. The activity comes to mind in this season of thanksgiving.

We often appreciate what others do for us, but in our busy lives we have few opportunities to recognize or experience the accumulated power of small kindnesses. This is what the Thank You Circle makes possible.

I see my fifth grade class gathering for Morning Meeting on the rug. It’s Friday morning and it’s been a week with a mix of preadolescent drama and solid academic accomplishments. I wonder what they’ve noticed and felt about each other as they’ve worked together over the week. Thanksgiving is coming.

“This morning, after our greeting, we’re going to have a Thank You Circle,” I say. Eyes dart around the Morning Meeting circle. “Let’s begin with a silent greeting,” I whisper. The children concentrate and silently mouth “Good Morning” to someone across the circle until all have been greeted. Sometimes it’s hard to hold back a giggle, and there are lots of smiles.

“Remember with our thank you’s,” I say, breaking the delicious silence, “that this is not a time for the great big ones, like “Thank you for being the best teacher in the world” (they all laugh), or thanks for being my best friend. Remember to be specific. And we know from other thank you circles that maybe not everyone will get a thank you today, but we do appreciate everyone for their contributions in this class, and everyone who wants to gets to participate in the Thank You circle.

“I’ll go first,” Amanda says. “Thank you, Jolina, for walking with me to the office this morning.”

“You’re welcome,” Amanda responds with a smile.

“Thanks, Jermain,” for helping me on the map project. You’re a good drawer,” states Michael.

And so it goes as small, specific thank you’s pile up in the center of our circle…in our collective short-term memory…and we recognize the strength of our community, and sometimes places where we need to grow as we notice those who have not spoken or been spoken to.

In an occasional staff meeting at school, the Thank You Circle is equally powerful. It feels perhaps even more awkward for grownups at first than for the children.

“Thanks, Martha, for that cup of coffee this morning. I needed it and it was such an unexpected surprise.”

“Ken, I really appreciated your taking the time with my Phillip this morning after he came to your room to take a break.”

A professional learning community can be so much more than data teams.

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The Thankful Tree

My five-year-old granddaughter Lily showed me the Thankful Tree at her preschool when I picked her up the other day, and by the time we got home she wanted to make one for her home, too. Out into the field we went with her wagon collecting a small branch, leaves, pinecones, tall grasses, an old pot, and a few rocks. We brought the treasure trove inside and Lily began decorating. Within a matter of minutes a new family tradition was born. I asked Lily what she was thankful for. With unwavering clarity she named every member of her family and extended family, including pets. That was it. We wrote these down on some paper, punched a hole in it and hung it with yarn from a branch of the Thankful Tree. I did the same for myself. My five-year-old mentor reminded me that relationships are everything. My paper had a long list of names.

If you google Thankful Tree, you’ll find there are many families who share this tradition at Thanksgiving time.

There’s so much about our children (and grandchildren and students) that we have to be thankful for, and I realized as I gazed at Lily’s tree how many times we may pass by an opportunity to let them know. I’m thankful for Lily’s smile and the way she lights up when we play together. I’m thankful for Isaiah’s sense of humor and how he makes me laugh. I’m thankful for the children in kindergarten who earnestly teach me about their story projects while also teaching me so much about how they learn. I’m thankful for one particular student’s courage to keep coming to school and for the many adults whose supports are making this possible…and then my thanksgiving turns to all the teachers and paraprofessionals and administrators I work with who give so unselfishly of their time and talent above and beyond the call of duty, to a higher calling of commitment and compassion.

Come to think of it, every classroom and teacher’s room could have a Thankful Tree just with the names of everybody in the class (or on the staff). What a nice reminder for the “thank you” we don’t want to forget. This could also extend to “Thank you Circles” in classrooms and staff meetings…another story…another blog post.

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