Quite often, the High School years are our last chance to change or influence the academic self-image of our children. It is therefore extremely important that educators recognize the “risk and reward” variables involved with oral responses in the classroom.

Unlike written responses, oral responses are available for scrutiny by teacher and peers alike. The immediate response by the teacher and other students is critical to the future academic development of the student. How they respond will have a great impact on whether the “risk” was worth the “reward”.  Let’s face it, the answer would not be volunteered if the child didn’t think it was correct.

There are a number of ways to protect the child and still let him know the answer was not correct. It is usually our haste to find the correct response–so we can “move on”–that prompts a damaging response.

The following is a brief list of teacher responses that do NOT provide a nurturing environment and can cause even the brightest of students to become reluctant or even refuse to provide an oral response:

This is a short list of responses that DO provide a nurturing environment and can prompt even the most reluctant of students to challenge the “risk and reward” system in your classes when asked for an oral response:

Framing Your Success, Edwards’ model for school improvement, is an intensive comprehensive professional learning program for continuous and sustainable district-wide improvement. The model provides on-going, consistent, focused trainings that are based on district and individual school needs. Framing Your Success focuses on student learning, data-based decision making and people and practices instead of programs. We also provide participants with numerous opportunities to apply, practice, reflect, and reinforce the newly-learned practices.

In essence, Framing Your Success is a practical mechanism to turn ideals into reality. Through the use of face-to-face visits, virtual follow-ups, on-going assessment and fine tuning with customized rubrics, Edwards Educational Services, Inc. enables your educational community to develop a cadre of high-quality principals and instructional leaders (teachers) committed to creating a student-centered, high-achieving learning environment. Framing Your Success moves schools from a superficial compliance with directives and use of programs to a strengths-based model to improve your school.

- Dr. Darrin Martin

Specifically, I discussed both how we could help prevent tragedies like what happened at Penn State–relying upon my experience in both education and youth violence prevention–and the folly of testing as an education-reform panacea. You can listen to my interviews on the Matthew Filipowicz here and the David Pakman show here, and I should soon have audio available from my appearance on The Shannyn Moore Show.

I look forward to having more conversations such as these, so I can continue to share ideas for how we can help schools and students in America be safe and reach their academic potential.

On the Friday before the first day, my wife took my son, Noah, to his school to put his supplies in his classroom and to meet his teacher. Noah was apprehensive about going into school and meeting his new teacher, even though he had had a great experiences with his kindergarten and first grade teachers.

When Noah got to the classroom, the names of all the students in his class were on the door, but there was one name missing – Noah’s. This immediately made him very nervous, but my wife reassured him that it was OK; this was the right room and they would go in and meet the teacher and everything would be fine.

When they entered the class the teacher was there, but she made no attempt to come over and greet my wife or Noah.  In fact my wife had to make the initial outreach, shaking the teacher’s hand and introducing Noah. My wife questioned Noah’s placement in her class, indicating that they did not see his name on the door with all the other children in the class. The teacher responded simply by saying “it was an oversight,” and then another parent walked in the room with her child and the conversation abruptly ended.

My wife then spent the rest of their time there (and much of the rest of the afternoon) reassuring Noah that it was the right class and that his teacher is very excited about him being in her class (although this was not at all evident from their first encounter).

In education, as well as most everything else, relationships and first impressions are critical. If you try to build a lasting, beneficial relationship without laying the proper foundation it will often crumble.  We all know that it is much easier to get off on the right foot from the start rather than try to salvage a broken relationship later on.

A student’s drive to achieve academically is often driven more by the student-teacher relationship than by a fundamental interest in the subject. We can all probably recall an instance in the course of our own educational career when we weren’t particularly interested in or good at a subject, but we had a teacher who gave us the ability to achieve in the face of our own shortcomings. These are the kind of teachers that I, as a parent and an educator, hope become the standard in our nation’s schools.

Students surveyed have said, time and again, that teachers who respect their students, show enthusiasm about what they’re teaching and display a positive attitude toward their students make the difference between students being able to excel and students only being able to achieve at an average or sub-par level. Relationships – especially those between students and teachers – are the foundation of a child’s success in school and should not be undervalued.

How might the situation with Noah been handled differently by the teacher? The teacher should have come over and introduced herself to my wife and then knelt down at Noah’s level to shake his hand. She should have told Noah how excited she is to have him in her class and what a great year it would be. When my wife shared that Noah’s name was not on the door, the teacher’s response should have been, “Let’s get that corrected right now. Noah come with me and help me put your name on the door.  In fact, let’s put your name at the top! There we go, now our door is complete.”

What might have been the impact on Noah (and my wife) if the teacher had made those simple changes? I am confident that my wife would have had a much different conversation with Noah when they got in the car and his stress about the first day of school would have been dramatically reduced.

Instead Noah felt diminished in the eyes of his teacher and more stressed than ever about the first day. The teacher missed the boat and it’s obvious that she simply didn’t get it. And now as we think about out son spending 180 days this year with this teacher, it makes us wonder: What else doesn’t she get?

Emotional Intelligence is underdeveloped and devalued in our training of educators and school leaders, which from this instance is painfully obvious. Until we begin to view students as customers in our schools, our nation’s children will keep getting the short end of the stick by not getting everything they can out of their education, whether they’re in kindergarten or college. Relationships matter and we, as educators, should never forget it.

On both programs I had the opportunity to address some of the systemic problems that are holding back America’s children from reaching their full potential. Presently, our country’s educational system from pre-kindergarten grades on up places much, much too great an emphasis on standardized testing scores in measuring student achievement, allocating resources, and setting both local and national educational policy.

This one size fits all approach – which doesn’t take into account any number of cultural, social, economic factors nor the fact that each and every child learns and adapts a little differently – is squandering the potential of millions of kids in this country and we need to stop.

I would like to thank both hosts for inviting me on their programs and thoroughly enjoyed the engaging discussions that I had with both of them.

Ok, so according to him, the Wake County School Board’s goal is to make the issues of poor and minority kids so great they can’t be ignored?  Was that his campaign platform?  “If elected, I vow to create schools where at least 80% of the students come from high poverty.  I vow that I will do whatever I can to make the educational issues and needs of these students so dire, that they can’t be ignored.”

Scary reasoning: let’s address the educational problems associated with poverty by making them so bad we have to address them.

When the Wake County Board drafted a preliminary map of new school assignments, it was clear that their plans would create a handful of “high-poverty, racially isolated schools.”  Perhaps more alarming, however, was the rationale offered by Art Pope, a former state legislator who said he would back extra funding for such schools.  According to Pope, “If we end up with a concentration of students under-performing academically, it may be easier to reach out to them.”  Brilliant.  Address the needs of under-performing students by creating a situation where they will likely under-perform.

Sound strange?  I thought so, and so too did Stephen Colbert, who blasted the school board in a recent segment on The Colbert Report.  To me, the only focus should be on what’s best for kids–not parents, teachers, board members, or the community.  There’s plenty of research demonstrating the negative impact on students who attend school with a high concentration of poor or minority students.  The conclusion of Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowling’s 2010 article, Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity Data is compelling in the argument against the Wake County Board of Education’s position:

“. . .  going to a high-poverty school or a highly segregated African American school has a profound effect on a student’s achievement outcomes, above and beyond the effect of individual poverty or minority status. Specifically, both the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student’s school are 1 3/4 times more important than a student’s individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes.”

So what’s the real agenda with the Wake County Board of Education?  To me it seems like the Wake County Board of Ed’s flimsy arguments and  faulty reasoning do little to mask their real agenda:  to (as Stephen Colbert puts it) ‘disintegrate’ their schools.  Is this really what the Wake County Board of Education and the community members believe is in the best interest of all kids?

Tweet

So with all of the talk about cyber bullying and bullying in general, what should be done with this teacher? What are your thoughts on an “educational professional” venting about her students on the internet?  How would you react as a student? A parent? A colleague?  Let’s hear your comments.

Video link: Teacher Suspended for Blogging About Students

Tweet

All this holds true even under the most optimal conditions.  Today’s educational leaders, however, are constantly presented with new sets of administrative and pedagogical challenges. These difficult conditions require leaders to mine their own creative resources to implement new and improved ways of running their schools—a Herculean task, rife with pitfalls. There are, however, lessons from leaders past that we can draw upon to guide our solutions.

Read the rest of Dr. Edwards’ most recent article, featured in Update, the journal for Wisconsin School Principals and Administrative Leaders.

Although many people often talk about an ‘education of quality’, it is intellectually challenging to try to define what this means. Let me try to summarise for you what such a concept of excellence means at St Gilgen International School.  By way of global context, there are certain accepted facts. We know, for example, that the next global generation will need exceptional academic and intellectual creativity to take on positions of leadership and address the many challenges that face our world.

But in truth they will need so much more than just formal academic qualifications.  They will need to be exceptional people as well as exceptional scholars.  Across Europe and beyond, there is much talk about the need for strong leadership in education, concerns about standards in schools, worries about the Pisa Comparability Studies and, sadly, a move towards what I term ‘Education as a Currency’.  By this I mean an education is often boiled down to a series of summative grades and assessments that, as a totality, claim to show a person’s academic worth.

If only life was that simple.

There is a saying in England: ‘You do not fatten a pig by constantly weighing it.’ The same is true in education. We must value much more than what we can measure by simple assessment grades. Surely, in addition to academic qualifications our world needs exceptional, well-rounded people with healthy minds and healthy bodies. It also needs people with a strong sense of moral purpose and a deep spirituality.  Those concerned about the depletion of resources in the physical environment, and latterly about global warming, were the first to discuss the concept of sustainability.

In addition, our concern should perhaps be with the depletion of resources in the social and moral environment. Our society is changing, incrementally, and perhaps not for the better. Surely, all we value in society, community and the family must also be sustainable?  So,  at St Gilgen we will work with parents to develop exceptional scholars, ready for further study at leading universities across the globe.  Children here will excel academically.   But this, in itself, is not enough.   We must also help to nurture a strong sense of morality, a deep inner spirituality and a sense of service in our children. This notion of a non-denominational spirituality is important, especially when linked to academic study.

It really is vitally important that the leading schools in the 21^st Century provide a genuinely holistic international education to prepare learners for the responsibilities they will face in their lives. Even more important, they must be places where honesty, moral integrity and mutual respect are expected.  Our world needs great leaders and the children here at our school are part of that next generation who will go on to positions of significant responsibility across the globe.  Given this, it is incumbent upon the school to help children to understand the true nature of great leadership.

The most effective leaders do not come galloping in on white charging horses shouting that they will ‘change the world’ in an egotistical manner and waving their sword in the air.  We will teach our children that the greatest, most effective leaders have a quietness, a moral purpose and a deep spirituality.  Joseph Badaracco at Harvard Business School wrote a wonderful book in 2002 entitled Leading Quietly. He argues that leaders who do the right thing lead quietly. They are not spiritual in terms of God-like purity, but in fact are all too human with all the human frailties that go with this.  They don’t try to “save the world,” but nor do they “bend the rules” or “craft compromises.” They have an inner toughness.  These leaders exemplify what he calls  “three quiet virtues—restraint, modesty and tenacity”.  What great virtues upon which to build a school and, indeed, a community upon!

In parallel with academic excellence, for every child, (and indeed every adult), we will focus upon the development of moral purpose, responsible global citizenship, peaceful co-existence in the community, and physical health.  No school could do more. This is my definition of our moral purpose as a learning community and also our commitment to excellence.

Research Article by Rebecca Edwards on Student Engagement

Student achievement gaps receive a great deal of attention in the United States. Articles and documen­taries remind us that, according to testing data, U.S. students are lagging behind students in other coun­tries in math and science at an alarming rate. Society is so consumed with these achievement gaps that it has pressured schools and educators to almost singularly focus on closing them. But if you ask people about the student engagement gap, what can they tell you? Can they point to neatly packaged statistics and studies regarding which stu­dents are engaged and which are not? Even those working in the education field are alarm­ingly unclear about what student engagement is and, perhaps more importantly, why educators should be concerned with increasing student engagement in their classrooms.

Focusing first on increasing student engagement, rather than on improving test scores, can actually foster greater gains in students’ academic, emotional, social, and behavioral achievement (Klem & Connell, 2005). Students often complain of being taught content and information over strategies and skills. When asked what increases their engagement in and connection to school, students’ responses are not surprising: more hands-on activities, relevant curriculum, interesting material, and—most influential to student engagement—caring, interested teachers (Yazzie-Mintz, 2006).

In order to increase student achievement in the class­room, students need to be engaged in ways that honor their innate ability to multitask, network, and shift di­rection quickly. While it is not necessary to abandon student assessment and data analysis in order to focus solely on student-determined, self-directed learning, it is essential for educators to focus first on skill devel­opment and student engagement methods as a means for increasing academic gains and student success. Together with students, educators must view learning and educational success as a blend of content and skill mastery, each dependent upon the other, and neither mutually exclusive—but both relying on student’s engagement in the classroom and with the material.

Visit ERS to order the complete report on student engagement and learn about:

Defining Student Engagement
Benefits of Student Engagement
How Does Student Engagement Happen?
Today’s Students:
Understanding Digital Natives
Student Engagement in Their Own Words
Why Are Students Disengaged?
Other Causes and Consequences of Disengagement
Increasing Student Engagement: The Importance of the Teacher
The Teacher as Coach
Doing Things Differently, Not Doing Different Things:
What Teachers Can Focus on Right Now
Differentiation and High-End Learning
Involve All Players