Author Archives: Stephen Seyfer

Change Cell Phones from Distractions to Learning Tools

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If today’s child treats their cell phone like Linus treated his blanket, do not fight with Linus – let him have an acceptable blanket. There are too many lessons children need to learn at school and arguing about cell phones is not one. School leaders, either make Linus’ blanket work for you or give Linus a blanket that works for school.

Make the cell phone work for learning.

Children have power in their pockets. I continue to be amazed with this statement. A modern cell phone has more computing power than Mercury and Apollo astronauts had in their combined space capsules. Their on-board computers were not much more than calculators and programmable switches. Continuing the evolution of computing power, the chip in my cell phone far outperforms my earlier desktop and laptop computers and equals a contemporary tablet. In my pocket I carry a powerful computer.

Stop the redundancy. Schools spend hundreds to thousands of dollars each year providing children with laptops and tablets for school use. In real world terms, we create computing redundancy. A child at school has computing power on her desk and in her pocket. The real difference is screen and keyboard size. When asked to calculate numbers or find or verify a fact, does a child need a larger screen and keyboard?  No. How many times during a typical class does a child need a larger screen to look up data? Never. A phone’s on-board calculator and Internet browser are more than adequate for everything schoolwork can dish up. And children know how to use their phones for these purposes.

Save money. Save time. Save effort. Save the argument. Tell children to use their phones for in-class work that does not require a larger screen.

Imagine the first time a teacher says, “Okay, for this assignment take out your phones. You will use your calculator to ….” More than pins will drop

Cell phones are collaborative.

Goals of education at all levels include socializing and collaboration. We want children to learn to talk to each other both purposefully and socially. How many times have you watched a child on the phone either contact a friend or answer a friend’s contact and not been engaged in the communication? Whether phone calling or texting, children get engaged. It is easy to translate this into a school application.  How many times has a teacher formed a group of children and they either sit a look at each other or allow one child in the group to dominate or do all the work? If we want engagement, let children engage in a real-world way on their phones.

“Today you will work with partners to answer this question: how did the NASA mission of sending a man to the moon affect everyday life for Americans? Please use your phones to look up as much info on the Internet as you need to answer the question. Then text what you know to at least three classmates. When you have received three texts, use what you learned from your search and what your friends sent you to write out your complete answer to the question in longhand.  We are going to use cell phones for research and collaboration and longhand for original work. One last thing – send the text messages you received to your computer, print out those messages, and attach them to your handwritten work.”

This assignment uses cell phones to do research and collaborate, uses long handwriting to ensure original work, and ties the two together as a finished product. Linus would be happy.

Make the cell phone a learning tool not a distractor.

We contribute to every struggle between adults and children with fixed “No!” statements. As soon as “You cannot …” is declared, the commandment becomes a challenge for defiance. Defiance is not in either a teacher’s or a child’s best interest. There are, in fact, several non-negotiable rules for children in school. No fighting, no stealing, no cheating, no weapons, no drugs, and no bullying fit that descriptor. There are rules about technologies, like the non-negotiable rules, that are necessary ground rules for children in and out of school. Cyber-bullying and cyber-stalking are non-negotiable, especially as AI adds unforeseen dimensions to both. Almost all children will understand the “don’t use technology to …” rules. The rule that says “no cell phones” is an automatic challenge for defiance.

It is when children use cell phones for non-learning uses that a cell phone is a distractor in the classroom. Defiance and dug in opposition follow. Stop the defiance by showing children how to use cell phones as a learning tool. The more we can make a cell phone a tool for learning, the more we will make it a non-distractor. And the sooner we make it a non-distractor, we will make both teachers and children happier.

Rules Should Serve Kids Not Adults

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Today it’s cell phones and backpacks.  Depending upon your generation, it was chewing gum, the length of girls’ skirts, boys’ low-slung jeans and exposed boxers, high school boys with face hair, or checking that every child showered after PE class.  There always has been a rule that school enforces upon children, an arbitrary rule with disciplinary repercussions. Why?

Pecking order of rules.

School rules fall into a pecking order.  There are hard and fast rules and soft and contextual rules.  At the top of the order are the generalized, little argument, good for everyone rules.  They read like a Ten Commandments for students.  Respect one another.  No fighting.  No weapons.  No drugs.  No stealing.  No cheating.  Stay seated while the bus is moving.  These Commandments don’t need a lot of retelling to children and don’t get push back unless a child is caught breaking one of them.  Even then, harsh consequences are understood because breaking one of these is a school sin.

In the middle of the order are rules that make sense if someone is watching.  No running in the hallways.  Don’t cut in line.  No talking during tests.  Do your own homework.  These rules make sense even when they curb what children would like to do without a rule saying “don’t”.  Lots of children break these rules with a “no harm, no foul” mentality.  The usual consequences for infractions of these middle order rules are middle order punishments. “Go to the back of the line” and “Go back and let me see you walk without running”.  Most children view these as “if you do the crime, spend the time” rules.

At the bottom of the pecking order are the arbitrary rules that are either irrational to children or are purposefully confrontational.  Today, these include rules about cell phones, use of AI, social media, and gender-based rules.  In yesteryear, these included rules about clothing, hair, language, and gum chewing.  Children know a rule is arbitrary when the school rationalization boils down to “because we say so!”.

Need for school rules.

It is hard to conceive of a place where hundreds to a thousand or more children, or adults for that matter, gather without some overarching understanding of orderliness.  Rules rule for orderliness.  We believe that a lack of understood rules creates conditions as in Lord of the Flies or the “wild west”.  To prevent school anarchy every state constitution assigns its department of education and local school boards the responsibility of propagating school rules.   

“Should schools have rules?  Obviously, yes.  No one – I think – disputes the necessity of having rules that keep people safe and make life easier and more pleasant for everyone involved.  So, a full setting out of acceptable behavior in a science lab or tech workshop is clearly important and sensible.  Rules governing minimum expectations of how students should behave in classrooms and social spaces are also desirable, as are rules about how teachers should and should not interact with children.”

Rules, however, do not make conditions orderly.  It is the people who enforce the rules who create order.  Therein, lies one of the rubs of arbitrary school rules.

“Teachers are woefully, incredibly, amazingly undertrained on the behavioral issues,” Wells says. “Teacher training today looks a lot like it did in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. The typical teacher training tends to be about 80 percent content, on academics and curriculum, then 20 percent on the human factor. If you ask a teacher how many days they’ve had dominated by content, they just laugh. Their days are dominated by bad behavior.

Schools continue to prepare teachers for Beaver Cleaver and the 1950s. You talk to teachers, they’ll tell you they’ve got Beavis and Butthead. We’ve got a profound mismatch going on.

When a teacher feels he or she is losing control, Wells says the natural impulse is to start piling up arbitrary rules to regain some sort of order.”

Digging Into Seemingly Arbitrary School Rules

In most teacher preparation programs, a teacher-to-be completes one course in child development and one course in classroom behavior management.  These six credits are contrasted to the other 114 content, pedagogical, and student teaching credits in a typical 120 credit requirement for a BA in education. 

Teachers are indeed woefully unprepared to deal with a class, a grade level, and a school of contemporary children.  If teachers spent more time in the field study of child behaviors, the psychology of changing behaviors, and did clinical work in the negotiated management of children, we would see a great reduction in teacher stress and children’s confrontation with school authority.  But the institution of teacher prep is not going to change.

Hence, arbitrary.

As educators, we get to being arbitrary quickly when confronted with child behaviors we can not easily change with Commandments or Makes Sense rules.  The hardest confrontations today between teachers and children are cultural, generational, technology-based, and gender related.  There are issues in each of these categories for which children today and adults of yesterday do not see eye to eye.  In fact, they are flat out oppositional and each side digs in for battle with little provocation.

This is not new.  Speech and dress and the right to protest rocks schools in the 60s and 70s.  Smoking and marijuana created trench warfare in the 70s, 80s and 90s.  Every issue was addressed with specific, “don’t you dare, kiddo” rules with punishments beginning with suspension and moving immediately to expulsion.  Schools carved out the cancers of defiance with hard justice.

As soon as a cell phone carried the Internet, phones in schools became the line in the sand not to be crossed.  Kids of all ages engaged in social media and texting holding their phones under their desk or table.  Just like POWs in enemy prisons, kids improvised and learned to text each other blindly with their phones in their pockets.  Genius, but against the rules.

Now it is AI.  “More than 4 in 10 teens are likely to use AI to do their schoolwork instead of doing it themselves this coming school year, according to a new survey.  But 670 percent of teens consider using AI for schoolwork as cheating, according to the nationally representative survey of 1,006 13- to 17-year-olds conducted by research firm Big Village in July for the nonprofit Junior Achievement.”

https://www.edweek.org/technology/teens-will-use-ai-for-schoolwork-but-most-think-its-cheating-survey-says/2023/07

The bad news is that although they consider it cheating, 40% of teens are likely to use AI for school assignments and claim the work as their own.  The good news is that many educators are using in-class targeted assessments instead of larger scale assignments and take-home tests.  Schools also use AI to detect AI.  The harsh news is that developers, mainly kids, develop programs to get around AI detection as fast as schools adopt detection. 

The Big Duh!

We adults tend to forget that the purpose of school is to prepare children for life after school.  We substitute the message that each grade prepares a child for the next and elementary for secondary school, and high school for college.  It is not so.  Public education prepares children for life after school and for a growing number of children, that means work not college.  The rules we create should have some basis in the real world.  Rules for our youngest should mirror child development in the homes of our community.  Rules for our oldest should mirror the rules they will find after graduation. 

Our School Commandment rules are sound and eternal in a school setting.  Our middle order rules also are sound, and their purpose is close to eternal in school setting.  They keep school from being the Wild West.  It is our arbitrary rules that cause us to woe.  We must find alternative ways to get around the swamps.

For example, due to school violence and school closings and changes in school activities, parents want their upper elementary through high school children to have immediate communication options with their parents and parents with their children.  It is not the cell phone that is the problem but the smartphone.  If schools are going to bar or bag smartphones, then provide every child with a simple cell phone with no Internet.  When a crisis or emergency hits, a school’s Wi-Fi is overwhelmed.  The cost of simple, no Internet cell phones is less than the time, energy, and hassling over student abuse of smartphones.

For example, the use of AI only grows.  In the non-school world, collaboration is valued whereas in the school world we want a student’s original work.  Make high stakes assessments paper and pencil and focus formative assignments on information gathering and synthesis and collaboration.  AI lives in the non-school world so make school AI parallel.

For example, remember that our nation was and is a melting pot of world cultures.  Learn from others as they learn from our culture, whatever that may be.  Don’t put up walls; keep the spoon stirring in the melting pot.  Be inclusive not exclusive.

And every adult in school needs to remember they are there only because kids are there! 

Do I Teach Subjects to Children or Children to Understand Subjects?  Huh?

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“I am a teacher.  I am a licensed social studies teacher.  My teaching assignment is middle school social studies; 7th and 8th grade, to be exact.  These are statements about my profession, my licensure, and my teaching assignment.  They are facts.

This is the question I answer every day.  Do I teach social studies to children, or do I teach children to understand the social studies?  How I answer the question makes a world of difference to me and to the outcomes of my teaching.  The answer is not a fact but a disposition about the purpose of teaching.

When you construct these statements about yourself, substituting your teaching license and your teaching assignment, how do you answer the question regarding the teaching of curriculum or the teaching of children?  The direct object of your statement indicates the focus of your teaching.”

I pose the above to adults who want to enroll in our post-baccalaureate teacher licensing program.  The completion of the program produces a teaching license.  However, from the get-go, I want each person to pre-consider the kind of teacher they will become.  Will they teach curriculum to children or teach children to understand curriculum?  I tell each person “The children you teach will know the difference on the first day they sit before you”.

Usually, these enrollees ask me for more information.  “How are these two things different – teaching subjects to children or children to understand subjects?”.  My response is “I will ask you this question again mid-way through your program.  I also will ask you to explain your response in a manner that exemplifies your role as a professional educator.  If you don’t understand the difference between teaching subjects to children or children to understand subjects by that time, we will discuss your future as a teacher”.

There are some questions that need to be answered.  The disposition of teachers toward the subjects and the children they teach lives out every day in their classrooms.  Teachers must know why they teach.

Personally, and professionally, choose this answer.  I teach children to understand the social studies.

Disaggregated, There Is a Vast Difference in Teachers

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Teachers are a vast hodgepodge of people.  They come in all colors, shapes and sizes, and from the wide spectrum of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.  At one point, each decided to be a teacher.  Some early in life, the majority during their education, and others after experiencing other vocations.  Each is the product of an educator preparation program.  Each has earned a baccalaureate or more degrees and each carry one or more teaching licenses.  As practitioners today, they range from first year teachers to four decade-long veterans.  Teachers also range across the spectrum of effectiveness.  That describes the hodgepodge of our profession.

Question?

If a teacher teaches a lesson and no one learns, did the teacher really teach?  Though a play on Cartesian logic, it is a question that is asked everyday about teachers.  We teach to cause children to learn. 

Every day there are millions of lessons taught in our schools.  A lesson is a complicated dance requiring teaching skills, teacher empathy, child readiness to learn, and child engagement with the teaching.  Teachers know the dance steps but too often their teaching does not lead to learning.  Some point to the other person(s) in the room – children.  “Only if the children …” is their lament.  Others point to the current morass of distractions confronting teaching and learning.  Technology, social media, unstable home life, poverty, harassment from their peers – take your pick, they each bear guilt.  On the Cartesian other hand, if a teacher teaches a lesson and every child learns, the teacher really did teach.

Not all teachers are created equal.

The following may be generalizations about teachers, but when you close your office or classroom door and consider your faculty peers, their names and faces fall into these.

We know teachers who have learned instruction as a form of mechanical teaching.  They can construct lessons.  They also know their curriculum.  They can attach content knowledge and skill development to their instruction.  They teach and some children learn some things sometimes.  If these teachers were inspired and excited about learning and if they were “connected” to the children they taught, the results would be different.  But they are not

We know teachers who innately care about children and in return children respond to them.  Their classrooms are happy and exciting places.  They teach and children engage because the teacher cares about them, their school life and their home life.  Children hear and see and do and learn something sometimes. However, being happy and excited overpowers their constructive instruction.  Class time is full of talk and activity and excitement, but their instruction is not focused and scaffolded to build learning outcomes.  These teachers are liked by children, but these students will need reteaching next year of what they did not learn this year.

We know teachers who can deliver high quality instruction and innately care about children.  They connect their caring of the child as a unique person to their instruction of the child as a student.  Because the teacher cares about children, children care about their learning what the teacher teaches.  These classrooms combine a caring and inspired teacher with honed and effective teaching skills with children who are wanting and ready to learn.  Children learn.

The crux.

We can teach teachers pedagogy.  We can teach teachers the content and skills of their curricular disciplines.  We can purchase and provide all the curricular print and media, install and train teachers in the appropriate technologies, employ simulations and games in a rich educational environment.  But we cannot teach teachers innate caring.  The amorphous “teacher’s heart” is a variable we cannot grow.

On the positive side, we can train teachers to be responders to child needs.  As trained teachers, they do wonders in assuring that children have the support and programs they need in school.  Training is what moves children from hunger to being fed, unclothed to being clothed.  Training helps them respond to students who are victims of bullying and harassment and low socio-emotional self-esteem.  As trained teachers, they can implement their training, but training is not caring.  There is a difference between caring that is from the heart and caring that is a trained response to need.

Our reality.

There is not a shortage of people who completed teacher preparation programs and are licensed to teach.  There is a shortage of licensed teachers who want to be in classrooms.  We need to acknowledge the latter.

As another generalization, the low arc of teacher compensation over the first decade of employment and the low esteem the public has for public school teachers means that undergraduates in the top half of their graduating class do not choose education as a degree program.  Engineering, medicine, law, and business draw the top half of each graduating class. 

The same reasons have diminished the annual numbers of graduates with a teaching license.  In yesteryear, a district posting a teaching vacancy could expect dozens to a hundred applications.  Today districts are lucky to receive five applications, and some postings result in zero applicants.

The shortage issue has caused state government to open apprenticeship pathways to a teaching license.  People without teaching licenses are hired by school districts on the condition that this person enrolls in a teacher preparation program.  Concurrently, these unlicensed teachers teach and learn how to teach.  Understand clearly that school boards are happy to have a teacher of any dimension in the classroom even as they acknowledge apprentice teachers are not yet trained teachers. 

This introduces a new category to our generalizations about teachers.

  • The inspired, caring, highly effective teacher who causes successful student learning and growth.
  • The caring teacher who engages children socially and emotionally and causes some children to learn some things sometimes.
  • The technically-efficiently but emotionally vague teacher who constructs lessons and causes some children to learn something sometimes.
  • The apprentice teacher who is learning how to teach on the job.

The Big Duh!

We need to know our teachers and their widely differentiated qualities and understand what we settle for when we place every teacher in a classroom.  Children know the difference, so should we.

When Trust Is Reciprocal, Great Things Happen

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“In my last visits to your classroom, I was not certain I was in a math class.  You and your students were talking about current events on three consecutive days”, her principal told her.

“It’s my classroom and I will determine what my students do there”, she told her principal.

“All of your students made good progress this year as we look at fall and spring assessments.  Your tier 2 attention to a handful who had some significant gaps last fall really paid off”, her principal said in the last weeks of the school year.

The tension between a principal’s supervision of teaching and student learning and a teacher’s freedom to teach is real.  Principals and teachers each have skin in the game of what is taught, how it is taught, and the outcomes of student instruction.  The tension is a positive force when both parties understand their roles and responsibilities.  Tension becomes negative when either party strays into the other’s role and responsibility.  At its best, the tension is shared, and each trusts the other as a professional.  At its worst, it is a drama and a showdown.

A principal’s role and responsibility.

Principals are the working interface between school board policies and approved curricula and the classrooms, theaters, libraries, and fields where teaching, directing, and coaching take place.  In theory and practice, principals are instructional leaders.  It is important for all faculty to know the why and wherefore of a principal’s role and responsibility.

Principals are legally authorized to supervise teachers regarding the teacher’s curriculum and instruction.  Wisconsin state statute 118.01 directs school boards to “provide curriculum, course requirements, and instruction consistent with the goals and expectations established” in the next section of that statute.  Further, statute 118.24 speaks to the employment of a district administrator and school principals to “supervise the professional work” of the school district.  And statute 120.12(2m) directs school boards, typically through school principals, to “evaluate the effectiveness of each teacher … using either the system established under (statute), or the equivalency process established by rule …”.

School boards use this authority to set the principal’s job description and responsibilities.  One of the universal duties of a school principal is to supervise/evaluate the professional work of the faculty and ensure fidelity of instruction with the school board’s approved curriculum.  This responsibility, as written, does not belong to anyone else in the school district, even districts with significant central office staffing.

“What” principals are to do is enunciated in policy and job description.  “How” they do it is not specified and the “how” contributes to the quality of the tension.  The best analogy is this – teachers instruct children in the classroom and principals instruct faculty and staff in the schoolhouse.  Using this analogy, a principal’s curriculum and instructional strategies are designed to cause high quality instruction in every classroom.  The “how” lies in the principal’s personal and consistent conversation and oversight of each teacher’s classroom work.  Oversight can be a talk over a cup of coffee, a focused conversation about children and their learning needs, provision and discussion of personalized coaching, and informal and formal classroom observations.  A principal’s “how” relates to her personality and ability to keep instructional leadership a top daily priority.  Too often the other principal responsibilities, like student discipline, campus supervision, filling in for absent faculty and staff, and responding to general school problems, erode a principal’s time for teacher talk and classroom visits. 

A teacher’s role and responsibility.

Teachers hold a license to teach specific subjects and grade levels of students.  Typically, school districts provide each teacher with specific students to teach and an annual curriculum to teach to those students.  These are the “who is to be instructed” and the “what is to be instructed”.  There is no language regarding “how they are to be instructed”, beyond the effective educator provisions of WI statute 120.12(2m).  Teachers have a broad reach in their choice of pedagogies to use in their teaching.  This choice is their “freedom to teach” in ways that best meet their contractual responsibilities.

Teachers are responsible for the “how” they teach.  A teacher’s instructional decisions in the units and lesson plans she designs are fully hers.  A teacher’s instructional “toolbox” will contain strategies for direct and explicit instruction, inquiry-based instruction, problem- and project-based instruction, outcome-based instruction.  Each of these strategies can be effective in causing children to learn a curriculum and one strategy may be most effective for the curricular unit being taught.  Teacher’s choice!

The concept of a teacher’s academic freedom is real.  It relates to the teacher’s decisions of how best to cause all children to be successful learners of the school curriculum.  All teachers have freedom in choosing their instructional tools.  Academic freedom, however, does not extend to decisions about what to teach.  The teacher’s contract designates the teaching position and curriculum related to the position.

Shared responsibility for learner outcomes.

At the end of the proverbial day achievements in student learning are the responsibility of both principal and teacher.  School boards and superintendents smile when student achievement demonstrates growth but look for faults and blame when achievement is not what they expect.  Then, principals are teachers share the hot seat. 

In the post-pandemic the relationship between principals and teachers has been stressed.  Some students readily re-engaged with school.  However, other students returning from remote instruction and those who fully disengaged from school instruction demonstrate a wide range of patterns in daily attendance, lost or forgotten learning, and socio-emotional problems.  Finding solutions has not been easy.  Schools with positive principal/teacher relationships sorted issues, tried solutions, and adjusted solutions together.  In other schools, disconnected students only added to the tension.

One of the indicators of relationships is teacher attrition in schools.  The patterns of principals and teachers who are leaving public education or seeking different school districts are closely related to their feeling of partnership and collaboration. 

Trust is earned.

In the decades of my experience as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and school board member, I found that trust is a reciprocal relationship.  To be trusted, one must trust.  The quickest way to create mutual trust is to recognize and honor the interfaces of roles and responsibilities of others, personally engage in consistent and constant professional conversation with every employee and celebrate not just enjoy the synergy of the environment.  When teachers trusted my leadership, they relied on me to trust them to form positive relationships with students and to use all their instructional tools to cause all children to learn.  Also, we trusted each other to always work for the best interests of our students.  Trust does not need to be complicated.

Synergy in a school is not openly discussed as much as it should be.  Call it a special place in time, synergy or the good times, happens when everyone from the superintendent to teacher to custodian to bus driver is in synch with each other.  It is when all the stars of the school universe congregate together and shine.  I observed good times that lasted from months to years.  “Lasted” is the operative word.  Schools that are recognized for excellence enjoy the synergy that creates excellence for a period but then those stars of the universe begin to drift.  People retire or move on to other positions.  Teaming that coalesced for effective work becomes individuals left to carry on.  The new personnel, as good as they may be, just don’t jive as well.  Schools still can be successful in their programs, but that special aura of camaraderie does not last.

When everyone in the schoolhouse seems happy, trust is never discussed.  When there are troubles, lack of trust is the first word spoken.  Troubles quickly divide personnel by roles and mutuality and reciprocity are abandoned.  Distrust becomes the byword.

So, what are we to do?

At their core, teaching and principaling share this similarity – they are callings.  Those who are called have an innate motivation to work with children and to help in shaping children’s lives through learning.  When we discard all the other issues of public education and recognize our mutual calling, understand the roles and relationships of a school’s organization, and place ourselves in our role with a commitment to contribute to the school’s commonwealth, it is relatively easy to synthesize a successful school.  It is when we add back all the other issues that the work becomes difficult.  So, keep it simple.  Know and build trust in each other.