Relationships Aren't the Frosting on the Cake of Education

An infant possesses a tractor-beam gaze that finds your eyes and locks into them, compelling connection. I remember that with my first-born, hours after birth. And this summer I was reminded of it with my first born’s second born (see photo above). When the interactive smiles and cooing start, they only strengthen the attraction. Humans are hardwired for connection. 

For Christians, this comes as no surprise, knowing we are made in the image of a God whose very being is relationship among three persons: “Let us make mankind in our image” (NIV, Genesis 1:26). And after proclaiming each act of creation good and very good, that trinitarian God declares something in that beautiful paradise not good—a person alone (Genesis 2:18). When God became human and walked among us, Jesus focused his most powerful teaching on individuals in relationship (see "What Does It Mean to Teach Like a Disciple?"). 

The significance of relationship in teaching is corroborated by science. Jeff Myers summarized the findings in his book Cultivate: Forming the Emerging Generation through Life-on-Life Mentoring (30-31): 

• Students’ sense of being liked, respected and valued by a teacher predicted whether they would value the subject matter and expect success.
• Students who believed their teacher cared for them believed they learned more.
• Students’ feelings of being accepted by teachers were significantly related to emotional, cognitive and behavioral engagement in class.
• Teachers who expressed greater warmth tended to develop greater confidence in students.
• Teachers’ nurturing behaviors were related to students’ adoption and internalization of teachers’ goals and values.
• Teachers’ interpersonal relationship skills were significantly associated with students’ achievement motivation and self-esteem.

If a warm relationship between students and their teacher is that significant, I can’t ignore them. I can’t just say, “Well, some teachers are gifted interpersonally, but not me. My gift is intellectual grasp of my subject.” Or “I’m an introvert—relationships aren’t my thing.” (Seriously, this gets personal. My lowest rating on student surveys tends to be in the area of students not being fully persuaded that I care about them.) What, then, can I do to meet this student need for connection?

Current pedagogy recognizes the importance of knowing students as individuals in many topics including differentiation (knowing students’ interests and skill levels in order to better connect them to the learning that happens in the classroom), restorative discipline (based on the idea that the biggest issue with behavior is not that a rule has been broken but that relationships have been damaged), and social and emotional learning (where teachers are prime models as well as explicit instructors of relationship building). (See below for recommended books on these topics.)

In addition to reading up on the topics mentioned above, here are some things I have found helpful:

(1) Beginning of the year activities. Right now the my Pinterest and Twitter feeds are awash with such activities. Alternatively, I just Googled “get to know students” and came up with 2.6 billion results in 0.5 seconds, like “Getting to Know Your Students” (TeacherVision). In case you’ve missed the first day, you still have time: see “The First Six Weeks: Getting to Know Your Students” (TeachThought). Think this is just for elementary students? Here’s advice to college professors at Carnegie Mellon University: “Get to Know Your Students as Individuals.”

(2) Questioning and listening strategies that demonstrate my own curiosity about and value for students’ thinking, including open-ended questions, wait time, and follow-up exploration “What makes you say that?” For more on positive questioning and listening, see “Weaving SEL into our Classroom Questioning” (MiddleWeb).

(3) Other good ideas? See “33 Ways to Build Better Relationships”  Here are my favorites:

• Know your children well and allow them to know you well [see the following paragraph on Brene Brown]
• Every child (and adult) needs a champion [see the final paragraph on Rita Pierson]
• Healthy relationships are built on high challenge and high support 
• Create a sense of belonging
• Catch ‘em getting it right more than you catch ‘em getting it wrong
• Magnify strengths rather weaknesses and focus on gifts rather than deficits
• If you’re not modeling what you’re teaching, you’re teaching something different
• Listening is what you do to understand, not time spent simply waiting to reply

(4) Learning how to be brave and vulnerable myself from reading Brene Brown’s books.  Now she has a free online resource to help teachers implement her principles for students. It's called Daring Classrooms. She says, “We must be guardians of spaces that allow students to breathe, be curious, and to explore the world and be who they are without suffocation. .... And what I know from the research is that we should never underestimate the benefit to a child of having a place to belong—even one—where they can take off their armor. It can and often does change the trajectory of their life.”

Educator Rita Pierson in her TED Talk “Every Kid Needs a Champion,” says, “[O]ne of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. Relationships.” What will I do today to cultivate relationship with the kids in my life—whether students or grandkids—who I want to become the confident, competent, curious, collaborative, creative divine image bearers they were created to be?

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Resources:

1. Differentiation: How to Differentiate Instruction in Academically Diverse Classrooms
2. Restorative Practices: Hacking School Discipline: 9 Ways to Create a Culture of Empathy and Responsibility Using Restorative Justice
3. SEL: All Learning Is Social and Emotional: Helping Students Develop Essential Skills for the Classroom and Beyond

Review of All Learning Is Social and Emotional

“Why does he look like that?” my 3-year-old grandson asks, pointing to a picture of the Lorax in the book we’re reading. 

I respond, “I wonder…maybe he’s sad…or maybe he’s frustrated. Which one do you think he is?” 

“I think he’s sad.” And we talk about why the Lorax might be sad and what he can do about it. And I hope that maybe, just maybe, my little grandson will be a little more sophisticated at processing his emotions the next time his mom asks tells him it’s time to clean up his toys… Well, that’s one way I’ve been applying my recent reading.

All Learning Is Social and Emotional: Helping Students Develop Essential Skills for the Classroom and Beyond is a great book—I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and would love to read it again, slowly, in a discussion group, to thoroughly process and embed in my classroom all the fantastic ideas it contains. It is engaging, clear, challenging, and full of concrete applications to all grade levels and content areas.

First, what’s your response to that phrase "social and emotional learning" (SEL)?

• What is it? It’s learning how to recognize and regulate one’s thoughts and feelings in order to attain goals, solve problems, build and repair relationships, and contribute positively to the larger community.
• Does it belong in schools? We are teaching it, whether it’s intentional or not. If we make it explicit, we can be sure we are teaching what we want, what kids need, and doing it as intentionally and effectively as possible.
• Doesn’t it take time away from content learning? Actually, these skills will not only make students better at mastering content material
• Isn’t this just for students who come to school deficient in skills that should be taught at home? This will level the playing field for students coming in with gaps, but it isn’t only remedial. It’s the same skills adults are buying books on—Brene Brown, anyone?  And it’s the skills we want the inhabitants of our future world—whether they’re our kids, our students, or ourselves—to have.

These issues and more are addressed in the first chapter (you can read it here).

So what are skills are we talking about? According to this book’s authors, the 5 skills, outlined in the 5 chapters 2-6, are as follows: 

• Identity and Agency: Identifying strengths and setting and attaining goals
• Emotional Regulation: Identifying, responding to, and managing one’s own emotions (essential for the impulse control that not only sustains stable relationships, but also enables the famed ability to delay gratification) 
• Cognitive Regulation: Paying attention, organizing, and solving problems are all school skills in this category, which starts with metacognition, or the ability to “(1) recognize one’s own and other people’s thinking, (2) consider the actions needed to complete a task, and (3) identify the strategies one might use to carry out those actions” (69-70).
• Social Skills: Sharing, teamwork, relationships (communication, empathy, repair)—many of the 21st Century skills employers are valuing now.
• Public Spirit: “Taking action to contribute positively to one’s family, classroom, and larger community” (121).

What did I especially love about this book?

• Integration: Rather than proposing a separate SEL curriculum (there are many on the market already), it advocates and empowers integrating those skills throughout the school. There are many examples from all grade levels and subject areas to show what this could look like.
• Teacher’s role: A clear emphasis on teachers intentionally modeling and identifying strategies, teaching students tools, and structuring classroom routines and assignments to give students practice using the tools and helping each other use them with growing independence.
• More books: The appendix may be my favorite 21 pages of the book—literary recommendations for picture books and chapter books related each of the 5 competencies, with fictional and nonfictional characters who exhibit the skills we want students to master.
• Restorative justice: This approach to school discipline in integrated into the chapter on social skills. For more information I highly recommend the book Hacking School Discipline: 9 Ways to Create a Culture of Empathy and Responsibility Using Restorative Justice.
• Outward focus: In all 5 components there is a focus on using learning to help others, from the first one on Identity and Agency (“individual persistence and grit aren’t enough; they should be leveraged to better the lives of others.” 3rd grade teacher, p. 34) to the last one on Public Spirit. Public Spirit includes respect for others (“seeing worth and value in every human life, regardless of differences….true empathy lies in carefully listening to others in order to hear their thoughts and feelings” [121]), courage (“Courageous acts include speaking up o behalf of others and making unpopular choices that are nonetheless ethical” [124]), ethical responsibility, civic responsibility, social justice, service learning, and leadership.

The final chapter provides strategies and tools for bringing this approach to SEL to your school. 

I want my grandkids, my students, and the inhabitants of my future to have identity and agency, emotional regulation, cognitive regulation, social skills, and public spirit. They will be effective students, healthier and happier people, and aware and active citizens. As the authors sign off, they liken teaching these skills to planting a tree: “It’s been said, ‘The best time to have planted a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.’ What tree will you plant? And when?” (156).

Using Picture Books in the Secondary Classroom

Shh, don’t tell! I got my grandson a book for his birthday. I know that’s no surprise, but it’s such a cool book, I want to share it with secondary English students in Japan as well as with my 3-year-old grandson in America. (Spoiler alert: I’ve figured out a way. And it's not just me--there are many advantages to using picture books with older kids!) 

The title? Take Me Out to the Yakyu by Aaron Meshon. It’s a really cool picture book about a little boy going to a baseball game with one grandpa in America and with another grandfather in Japan. The pictures use vivid colors, and the story goes through the day of the game point by point on each two-page spread, from the trip to the ballpark to bedtime, comparing what it’s like in America and what it’s like in Japan. Sometimes there’s a difference, like the meal (hot dogs and peanuts vs. soba noodles and edamame) or the pitcher. (“In America, the pitcher throws a 95-mile-per-hour fastball. In Japan, the toushu throws a 153-kilometer-per-hour sokkyu.”) Sometimes there’s a similarity, like asking, “Are we home yet?” 

I hope my grandson enjoys it and learns a little bit about the culture of Japan, where his mother grew up and where his parents met—about similarities and differences with his own home culture of the US. 

My secondary English students in Japan would also love this book. When you live in Japan but study in English, you see little of your own exact experience in what you read. I think they’d be tickled pink to recognize some of their own experiences, so I’d have their attention. And while I have it, I could teach a killer lesson on comparison/contrast structure: This one is point-by-point. How else could we organize the information? What would it look like to group all the American information and all the Japanese information? What would it look like to group the similarities and the differences? Which is the most effective for the picture book audience and purpose? What would be another audience and purpose, and what method of organization would work best for it? Maybe secondary students could write their own picture book text comparing/contrasting another activity in 2 cultures they are familiar with. The possibilities are endless for deeply embedded understanding of comparison/contrast.

Using picture books in secondary EAL is a thing now. It offers an accessible entry into a topic (like The Butter Battle Book for the arms race), content (like Are You My Mother? for irony) or a skill (like the one in this blog). While they’re particularly helpful for English language learners and students who learn differently, they also add a sense of play for all students. They are short—perfect for using in a mini-lesson or with a text set. Also perfect for diversifying classroom literature without devoting the time for a whole novel. Workshopping the Canon, the professional book I read earlier in the summer, includes picture books in all its sample text sets. (I blogged on participating in the book's Facebook discussion here and Twitter chat here). Here’s a blog from another secondary teacher about using a picture book. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more as I read to my grandson over the next year of sabbatical. 

And I've already ordered a second copy of Take Me Out to the Yakyu for myself!

Doing field work to discover new picture books!

Review of Upgrade Your Teaching: Understanding by Design Meets Neuroscience

“I don’t know!” my nearly three-year-old grandson whispered, his little body tense on the edge of the couch, eyes sparkling.

The setting for this anticipation? I was reading him "The Lorax," which he has heard many times before. When we caught our first glimpse of the Onceler in his lerkim on top of his store, I wondered aloud, “Who do those green arms belong to?” 

Why does my grandson claim he doesn’t know, when he certainly does? Why is he so excited about finding out what he’s pretending he doesn’t know?

I suddenly remembered the explanation in the professional book I was reading about how our brains are wired to seek patterns, and when we match a new experience to the pattern we had predicted it would fit, it sparks a dopamine release. In small children, this looks like the joy they get in matching each newly experienced reading of the same book to the pattern they’ve come to expect. 

It will take more variation from the original pattern as kids get older, but the same behavior and response is definitely there. In literature I recognize it in the shock of pleasure as I recognize foreshadowing, a word I’ve just learned, the revelation of something I’d suspected, a connection with something I’ve experienced, or the perfectly appropriate conclusion. In writing it happens when I find just the right idea, word, phrase, sentence, quote, example, or organization to communicate what I want to say—and especially when I get a response from a reader confirming that it was, indeed, just right.
 
The marvelous thing about this dopamine shot is it's a 3-for-1 when it comes to learning. Not only does it make learning fun by giving immediate pleasure and satisfaction, it also sets the brain up for more learning by making the brain want to repeat the experience and by creating an even more conducive state for learning: “Concomitant effects include enhanced attentive focus, motivation, curiosity, memory, persistence and perseverance” (10). And who doesn’t want that in their classroom?

That’s just one example of the insights in Upgrade Your Teaching: Understanding by Design Meets Neuroscience by Jay McTighe and Jury Willis, M.D. There are many more where that comes from. Having read and discussed the original Understanding by Design several times and helped with the revision of two schools’ curricula based on the model, and being aware of some of the new brain research coming out with specific application to learning and schools, I was really interested in seeing how this book would bring the two together. It was well worth the read. 

In fact, if you haven’t read Understanding by Design, you could read this instead—then you’d get an introduction to both. The first two chapters are an overview of neuroscience and Understanding by Design (UbD) respectively. Chapters 3 - 6 go into more depth about using the UbD framework to plan curriculum, assessment, and instruction that fit how the brain works best. The curriculum chapter focuses on goals both for and by students; the assessment chapter on both formative and summative assessment; and the two instruction chapters on teaching for memory acquisition, meaning making, and transfer and on lesson planning. The final chapter adds to the topics previously included in UbD to include how it and brain science address recent discussion of the social and emotional factors that affect learning (SEL) in “Creating a Brain-Friendly Classroom Climate.” All of the chapters feature not only clear explanations but also specific examples of how to apply the principles. 

The first chapter’s neuroscience overview is important because it sets the stage for the rest of the book. All subsequent chapters reference how the elements of UbD and SEL address and utilize the brain’s wiring to enhance learning and minimize interference. Topics the first chapter introduces are the brain’s attention filter; the amygdala; fixed/growth mindsets; pattern-seeking; dopamine; neuroplasticity; short-term, long-term, and concept memory construction; and the video game model. The video game model is a brain-based explanation for why kids find this kind of learning addictive: video games provide desirable goals, achievable challenges, constant assessment with specific feedback, acknowledgement of progress and achievement. The rest of the book applies this content to teaching vis a vis UbD.  (You can actually read chapters 1 and 3 from this link.)

I love learning why the things that work well in my class do, and how to intentionally do them better and more. I could also add after reading this book, I love the dopamine dose that comes from encountering a new lesson or student issue, recognizing how it may fit a pattern I’ve encountered before, and experiencing success in my response. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m sure it was a little dose of dopamine that caused the joy I felt in recognizing my grandson’s response as an example of what I’d just read. 

Review of A Mind Made for Stories

A Mind Made for Stories—the very title makes my heart pump faster and my soul shout, “Amen!” It makes me think of how Sharon Bala's novel The Boat People helped me understand the plight of Sri Lankan refugees earlier this year. It also makes me think of how reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything in 10th grade suddenly unlocked her previous year’s science course for one of my daughters, causing her to burst out: “Oh, THIS is what they were talking about in physical science!” This, however, was not what the book was about—or rather, it was only a small piece of it. 

My favorite teaching books have stories about kids learning and then tell me how to get similar results in my classroom. As I got started on this one, I realized this was not one of those books. Rather, it was theory about how narrative, instead of being the kiddie menu of writing modes, is actually the deep structure of all reading and writing. (Note: An idiosyncratic definition of narrative is used.) But as I read on, author Thomas Newkirk tapped into some of the thinking I’ve been doing about writing—reading it, doing it, teaching it—validating, challenging, and extending some of my thoughts. His use of examples grounded the theory, and his voice embodied the theory, keeping me with him for the whole, enjoyable journey. And I even ended up with a couple of really good new teaching ideas! 

I began to be intrigued because over the last 4 years of teaching AP Language and Composition, I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for nonfiction reading and writing—for the significance of audience, occasion, and purpose; the importance of balancing appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos; and the sheer variety of moves and their combinations available in nonfiction. I’ve told my students (with fingers crossed, hoping I wasn’t committing rhetorical heresy) the opposite of Newkirk’s assertion—everything is persuasion. A description of the sunset is persuading the reader to see beauty where I do. A novel persuades the reader to enter its world, solve its mystery, understand its characters. A user’s manual persuades the reader to operate the car safely and effectively. 

On the other hand, I’ve become more and more convinced that there is a shape to every individual piece of nonfiction—and not a one-shape-fits-all generalization like a hamburger on a bun, or the three-layer square of the (3-point) body with the introduction and conclusion funneling in and out, but something as unique as the voice, knowledge, perspective, and passion of this particular author on this particular slice of this particular topic. This is basically Newkirk’s definition of narrative. I’ve attempted a variety of ways to help students chart or represent capture or articulate this shape, but I’m not entirely satisfied with the result. 

Newkirk didn’t give me a template or final answer, but he did let me know it’s okay to be thinking these thoughts about writing as I read, and write, and talk to students about reading and writing. His initial discussion of efferent (for extracting information) and aesthetic (for effect or enjoyment) writing targeted the false dichotomy between them, because, as he argues, we most effectively remember information when we’ve enjoyed the process of reading it (ch. 1). Suddenly I had language to describe what my AP Language students have experienced with a really excellent textbook, The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric. They’d come back from the first reading assignment saying, “That’s the best textbook I’ve ever read! It’s not even like reading a textbook!” And subsequent textbook reading assignments were never met with groans.

I love Newkirk’s description of all good writing for sustained reading as “scratch and itch”—the author creating in the reader a need to know, and then satisfying that need, on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, and chapter by chapter basis, whether in fiction or nonfiction (ch. 3). The chapter on the seven deadly sins of textbook writing reinforces that good writing has commonalities across genres, and not just for students. Here are the sins, backed up with examples of transgression and re-writing (ch. 4):

• Flatness. “By flatness, I mean the seeming refusal to create human interest, often in events that were tremendously interesting.” (See initial anecdote of A Short History of Nearly Everything.) 
• Overuse of “to be” verbs and passive construction. On every English teacher’s list of targeted no-no’s, and here it applies even to textbooks!
• Piling on. There are more and less effective ways to list and elaborate.
• Refusal to surprise.
• Lack of a point of view. 
• Refusal of metaphor and analogy.
• Ignoring the human need for alternation.

Future chapters elaborate, such as ch. 6, “On Miss Frizzle’s Bus: Or, How We Really Want to Learn Science.” So by the end, I really had an altered consciousness—or at least an example of an altered consciousness, and therefore permission to pursue my own musings toward an altered consciousness—about, as the subtitle promises, How We REALLY Read and Write Informational and Persuasive Texts.

And, yes, there were also a few immediately employable ideas, for myself as a reader/writer as well as for my students. One is “a manageable list of features of writing that call for special notice” (p. 41): titles, beginnings, climaxes/key details, extended descriptions, changes (e.g. in direction, setting, …), point of view, repetition, surprises/ruptures, and endings. This could be pasted inside any reading journal. 

One that could be pasted inside any writing journal is “A Baker’s Dozen of Self-Prompts or How We Give Ourselves a Conference” (p. 18): 

• What happens next?
• What does it look like, feel like, smell like?
• How can I restate that?
• What’s my reaction to that?
• What example or experience can I call up to illustrate that?
• What’s my evidence?
• What parts of my prior reading can I bring to bear on that?
• What comparison can I make that makes that clearer?
• Why does that matter?
• What do I mean by that?
• Who else would agree with that? Disagree? What would they say?
• How can I qualify that statement? What are the exceptions?
• How does that fit into larger debates or controversies?

A final one is “Stories of Our Thinking” (p. 49), a more organic, inquiry based structure than the traditional 5-paragraph essay for a literary analysis essay:

• Describe a scene or situation in a text that raises an interesting question.
• What is that question?
• What are some possible answers to that question?
• Which is the most compelling answer to that question?
• How does this new understanding of the situation help you understand other parts of the book?

The book works illustrates this structure using the “careless people” quote from The Great Gatsby. I can immediately think of quotes from Cry, the Beloved Country, Night, and The Scarlet Letter that would do just as well for those books.

All in all, it was a worthwhile read, both in content and as a mentor text—one I’ve referred to in conversations already this summer, and will certainly read again.