“Who went to State this year?”, I asked, and the line-up of students was wonderful, remarkable, and insightful. “Going to State” traditionally identifies high school students whose performances rise above local and regional competitions to a select number who qualify for best-in-the-state competitions. We are a small, rural school. Based upon enrollment, we are always in the smallest school divisions. Based upon “going to State” experiences, we are heavyweights with a high percentage of high school students who are staties. (I take a liberty to label students who go to a state tournament “staties”.)
It is March. For many, March is tournament madness, not just NCAA but WIAA. March is when the long winter of high school seasons rise to a finale of state tournaments. Boys’ and girls’ basketball, boys and girls hockey, boys and girls wrestling, boys swimming, and girls gymnastics find their frenzy in their respective state tournaments. Perhaps it is due to their being winter, indoor sports that causes such madness. When we mention going to State, a lot of folks think of March tournaments. Our line up of “statues” disabuses us of that thought. We are staties of all seasons.
There are high school trophy cases loaded with trophies and WIAA plaques for athletics. Some schools are considered dynasties in their sports. We have a dynasty in the theater; we dominate in One Act competitions. Our “staties” are students of “parts” who, under the direction of one of our state’s most awarded drama directors, each year find a new piece to perform. They perfect their parts and their roles and polish their total performance with the aspiration that they too will go to State. And they do. Every year it seems. And they bring home a full slate of awards from the WI Interscholastic Speech and Dramatic Arts Association.
Our musicians go to State in the WI School Music Association’s solo and ensemble competition. Standing tall in our lineup of staties are singers and instrumentalists whose perfected performances rank among the best the in the state. Many go to State each year of high school. We go to State in the arts!
Small business, the heart of our local economy, makes business and marketing education an important curriculum in our school. Perennially, we send students in their blue blazers and neckties to the WI DECA state competition. Of all our staties, it is the DECA competitors who have the strongest connection between their high school state tournament experience and their post-high school and career goals. They are coached by local businesspeople who see future business owners in the making.
The WASB student art competition has honored our student artists at the annual school board convention. An art competition is unique; it is not about Mano a Mano competition but about the quality of what a student produces. It hangs on a wall or on a shelf or stands on the floor and says, “look at this – I did it!”. The artist stands to the side trying not to smile too much.
When the WIAA approved 8-man football, our team of sleek, fast players shed long time slugfests with bigger enrollment teams and went to State in this new division. Immediately, we became football staties. There is something to be said for sending major sport teams to State. Schools pop their pride buttons over this.
Going to State also is podium time. Team and large group competitions have their award ceremonies but individual performance competitions place students on a podium to designate their personal awards. Track and field are primed for podium time and every year runners, sprinters, and jumpers carry our school colors to the state track meet. Sadly, our spring sport tournaments are held after the last of school in June and the joy of returning to school in triumph is not part of their celebration.
Finally, our lineup includes March Madness staties. After a long drought of staying home, our boy’s basketball team played in the state tournament. And yes, there is magic in going to State in March. It lights up the school and community like no other state trip can.
In reflection, going to State, like so many of life’s experiences is a fading glory. Kids in all competitive activities strive to go to their State, work for it, and then it is over. For a very few, scholarships and opportunities to continue in their competitive sport or arts performance in college derives from going to State. For most, it is benchmark memory, a moment of glory that will fade with time.
In the final analysis, does going to State matter? I think so. When a student commits time and energy to a specific competitive performance and works hard to climb from local, sectional, and regional competitions to go to State and does so, it gives that student an accomplishment that is remembered for their lifetime. We also know that students don’t get to State without the support of parents and family, and coaches and directors and teachers. At its core, it is talent development and a student’s opportunity to show a talent. Achieving a state-level performance is an achievement that matters.
It also is a bit of luck. Fifty-seven years ago, I hit a home run in a high school State Championship game. We won. My name is on a State Championship trophy. I smile when I think of it and thank a pitcher from Council Bluffs for a pitch with my name on it. A swing and a miss and he would have the memory and his name on the trophy. Being a statie and a champ, I share the excitement of every student in our school who has her or his own state moment.
A most heartbreaking moment for a principal rises when a parent asks “Is Mr. Jones a good teacher? I want to know because my Susie needs a very good teacher”. With no place to run or hide, a principal knows Mr. Jones is not among the best teachers in the school. I’ve been there and I plead guilty to prevarication. Prevarication is a long and uncommon word to describe how we answer such a question and it hurts to use it. The angst deepens because we know Susie and she really does need our most talented teachers. So, the principal prevaricates and speaks to Mr. Smith’s middling strengths with enough enthusiasm that Susie’s mom nods her thanks.
But we know the truth. Not all teachers are created equally. A school faculty has all-star, backbone, and assignment filler teachers. Schools bask in the excellence of the all-stars, work the heck out of the backbones, and carefully use the roles of the fillers.
I will not go into depth to describe the attributes of each category of teachers. Instead, please consider a continuum of high to low on three professional traits: empathy and care for all children, engagement in the art and science of teaching, and enlightened classroom performance.
Empathy for all children
High
Sometime
Low
Engaged in the art and science of teaching
High
Sometime
Low
Enlightened classroom performance
High
Sometime
Low
Personalize this by considering all the teachers in your personal history – your elementary, middle level, secondary and even post-high school instructors. How does your memory distribute your teachers on these three traits? The fact that you remember some more clearly than others, probably the all-stars and sadly the fillers are most memorable, states the case. All schools have all-star, backbone, and filler teachers.
Principals and personnel directors have work to do
Let the all-stars produce strong learning outcomes. Principals and all-star teachers collaborate to cause the most talented instruction to interact with the most students. Unless there is an ego problem, all-stars don’t need direction. We exploit their talent for enlightened teaching, instructional leadership, and curricular planning. Incidentally, it is true that some all-stars shun leadership and curricular opportunities; they just want to teach. So be it and thank you. We use their luster to add to the reputation of the school. The bottom line is we do what it takes to sustain an all-star’s happiness and satisfaction and reap the rewards of their exemplary work. This is not “babying”; it is respectful recognition and appreciation. We give all-stars as many opportunities to work with our Susies as we can while understanding that children of all abilities want and should be in an all-star’s classroom.
Grow backbone teachers, the heart of the faculty, in their instructional and curricular skills. Principals coordinate with and coach their backbone teachers through meaningful professional development. Respectful relations are essential with backbone teachers, because they do so many things well and deserve constant reinforcing commendations. They also have large potential for growth and Improvement of their teacher talents. We coordinate their pursuit of masters degrees, national board certification, professional workshops, and leadership of district initiatives. Coordination is required because, backbone teachers fill so many roles in the school, they face potential burn out. We weave backbone teachers into the decision making and program development of the school so that the strength of our faculty is invested in the school’s ongoing work.
Our administrative work is to cause all children to be nurtured as learners and to learn from their lessons by gathering the best faculty of teachers we can. Given annual changes in the faculty, the availability of highly talented and talented teachers makes a huge difference in student success and satisfaction.
Principals play general manager with the fillers – grow or go. We are careful with fillers’ instructional assignments. Lackluster teaching can impede the overall teaching enterprise as well as stunt student progress. We are thankful that many fillers are first to accept necessary ancillary assignments such as taking tickets at athletic events, selling in a concession stand, and supervising field trips. They do this to demonstrate their value to the faculty. Principals, however, look more clinically at their empathy and care for all children, the art and science of their teaching, and their achievement of student learning resulting from their teacher performance. Fillers have demonstrated deficits in these three key traits.
Fillers do not go unnoticed. The majority of parent and student complaints about school are associated with filler teachers. Principals observe what critics say about filler teachers. Too many worksheets. Too much sit time. Incomplete lessons that don’t bring student learning to closure. Impersonal student relationships. Lectures or non-directed student projects. Too much lag time in class periods waiting for the bell to ring.
School is a dynamic organism, and its faculty changes every year. Teachers go and teachers come. Ironically, this is the natural sequence that allows principals to upgrade their faculty by hiring an all-star or backbone when a filler leaves. Another force in the dynamics happens when principals take purposeful action to cause a filler teacher to become a backbone teacher or to leave the faculty. Principals construct and diligently supervise tactical plans for a filler’s professional improvement. As a general manager, end their employment to create the opportunity to employ an all-star or backbone teacher.
We have urgency in our work
Susie and every child in school deserves a talented teacher all the time. Principals place Susies with as many all-star and backbone teachers as possible. However, some grade level and course assignments will be with a filler teacher. Some refer this to an “unluck of the draw”. But there should not be luck or unluck in Susie’s teacher assignments. If she isn’t getting quality instruction, she is falling further behind because of her starting points.
A principal’s work with a filler teacher is “pull up your socks” time for both. For teachers, pulling up the socks means finding ways to improve their empathy and care for all children, increasing and sharpening their teaching skills, and delivering complete lessons that lead to measurable student learning. For principals, pulling up the socks means either improving a filler’s work to the backbone level or ending the filler’s employment in the school. In most schools, this is a two-year work effort because of the time and documentation required to terminate a teacher’s employment.
Truth be told, executing a grow or go plan for a filler teacher takes persistence and often the many other issues of schooling allow the filler teacher to slide into yet another contract year. After a time, a status quo emerges, and the filler reaches 10+ years on the faculty and a grow or go process becomes harder to enact.
The final truth is this for principals: moving a filler teacher off the faculty roster makes room for an all-star or a backbone teacher to join the roster. Terminating employment is a business-like process that seems counter to everything else we do in school, but it is necessary work. Its effects on instruction and schooling for children can be a revelation. So, pull up your socks to ensure all the Susies in your school a talented teacher who is empathetic and caring, is a skilled instructor using an array of the arts and sciences of teaching, and who moves Susie’s learning needle in a positive direction.
I invite you to read the WI DPI State Report Card for your local high school and you also may learn two contradictory facts. I use my local high school’s 2022 school report card for this purpose.
65% of the students in the high school are proficient in reading and 25% are proficient in math, and
the DPI says this school’s achievement significantly exceeds the state’s expectations for high school reading and math.
Based on the DPI labeling Niche claims these achievement scores rank the school 83rd out of 496 high schools in the state and US News and World Report banners on the school walls recognizing this as a school of excellence.
There should be a head scratch arising when we assign excellence to a school where 35% of students are not proficient in reading and 75% of students are not proficient in math, especially the math statistic. How would we interpret these school results if the headline on the report read “One of every three students lack proficiency in reading and three of every four students lack proficiency in math”? This is more than seeing our world as a glass half full as compared to a glass half empty. 35% of high school students not proficient in reading and 75% not proficient in math is not good news and is not excellent. Not!
Perhaps our understanding of schooling excellence is like Billy Bean’s answer to Peter Brand after disconnecting his phone call with another team’s general manager in the movie “Money Ball” – “when you get the answer you want, hang up (the phone)”. Such thinking tells us “Don’t argue with US News and World Report when they say your school is excellent or with the Department of Public Instruction when they say you significantly exceed Wisconsin’s expectations”. However, what do we say to the too many students who are not proficient? Your school did well even if you did not.
Using labels to describe how well schools cause children to learn is political appeasement. In general, everyone wants to feel good about their local school. Parents don’t want to think badly of the place they send their children to be cared for and educated. Secondly, like parents, taxpayers don’t want to think badly about the schools their taxes support. Sadly, property taxes in support of schools are generally higher in many of our districts where achievement is lowest. Thirdly, political leaders know they have little power to change educational outcomes at the local school level, so they create labeling that does not rock their political boat. For these three reasons, we are given inflated words in our annual school report cards that often do not align with statistical truths.
The bar for school excellence is a low bar. Few want to tear the scab from the historic dilemma faced when school report card data is disaggregated by the socio-economic characteristics of schools in our state. It is a fact that students in urban schools with neighborhoods of poverty, high numbers of children of color, and children with significant educational challenges generally fare poorly on academic state report card measures. As a result, the bar for school excellence in our state is set very low so as to not exclude all such schools and the bar is obfuscated by including measures of annual growth from preceding school report cards. We applaud upward changes in annual tests even though the measures may never achieve proficiency.
What Needs Doing
As a mentor would tell me years ago when we faced a difficult task, “Let’s pull up our socks and get about doing better”. When we stop labeling and address the data, the work before us changes immensely.
Label the data as if we were grading a student’s daily academic assignment. Use a generally accepted grading scale. Why grade schools differently than we grade our children’s schoolwork? Soft sellers will tell us that there are many other variables to consider when evaluating the success of a school, but do they also use those variables when grading a student’s daily assignments? No. So, use a grading scale even children will understand.
Using the College Board’s grading scale, our local high school would receive a D grade for reading proficiency and an F grade for math proficiency.
Urgency attaches to how we label the quality of our work. The current rating of “exceeds expectations” conveys very little urgency, even though 35% of students are not proficient in reading and 75% are not proficient in math. From our students’ perspective, there is immense urgency. And if we graded our work accurately, grades of D in reading and F in math would indeed be urgent. In fact, there may be hell to pay for such results. The use of current labeling blinds us to real urgencies.
Instructional analysis and change follow how we label our schools. Analysis is short-lived when a school is labeled as excellent. The general conclusion is “if we are excellent, little needs to be changed”. And that is the case in most schools taking comfort in the current DPI labeling. However, if we base our analysis on a grading of our schools, how we instruct children in reading and math is in for extreme rethinking. A reading program that results in 35% of students being non-proficient and a math program that results in 75% of students being non-proficient are not acceptable reading and math instructional programs. Instruction needs to change.
If we continue to teach children in our elementary school the same way we taught our current high school students when they were elementary students, that instruction will cause similar statistical results. The changes needed are K-12 not in the high school alone.
The requirement for honesty in reporting school data is essential because we use the data as our perception of education in our schools. Words like “succeeds expectations” and “excellence” cause a warmth of pride followed by complacency. When schools are told they are good, they smile and relax. When told they are not good, they frown and are prodded to do better.
The Big Duh!
What a difference it would make if a school’s banner read “Grade A School: More than 93% of students are proficient in reading and in math”. That truly would be a school of excellence that significantly meets expectations.
More importantly, what a difference it would make for the children of the school who would be proficient in reading and in math.
We need to pull up our socks and get about the work of being better.
Schooling has never been agnostic. The egalitarian notion that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste” has always been slightly twisted to mean “as long as that mind thinks like my mind”. As a generalization, we purposed each generation to create enough educated and productive citizens to support our continuing commonwealth. So much for intentions.
Within the past decade, the conceptual walls of restraint that have kept schooling and America’s best interests in touch with each other are failing. The edges of our restraints are crumbling as they are cleaved by narrow-minded self-aggrandizers. As a result, our enduring concept of an “American Way of Life” is shrinking into regional pockets of “my way of life”. We no longer have a critical mass of self-balancing integrity, but loud spoken factions wanting public education to espouse their selective self-interests. When the edges of our social contract fail, and they are, we will fall down.
What we know about us.
In truth, the education of children always has been self-interested.
For several millennia, royals learned to read, write, and count and the masses mumbled. Property and wealth were guarded by laws interpreted only by men who could read and write it. Illiterate people were easier to rule. This social construct for education migrated to America.
The first school in the English colonies, the Boston Latin School of 1635, taught a narrow curriculum to a small number and group of children for specific community purposes. To fill in the blanks, Boston’s town elders wanted their sons only to have a classical education like their father’s education so that sons could take their rightful place in the elite political, social, and economic life of New England. Latin, Greek, the Puritan Bible, and the arithmetic of commerce. White, Puritan, propertied boys only, please.
Up and down the English colonies, this was how early efforts in public education began. New England merchants, middle colony merchants and landowners, and southern planters each assured an education for the propagation of their regional ways of life.
A change began in our post-Revolutionary expansion into western lands. Early 1800s immigration brought peoples who aspired for economic and social mobility contrasted with the protective, conservatism of our colonial forefathers. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 said “…Article 3. Religion, morality, knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, school and the means for education shall forever be encouraged” and ideas of a more universal education to support an expanding nation crept into public ed, slowly but not for everyone. This was the 1800s. Enslaved people were purposefully kept illiterate. American Indian children were consigned to boarding schools to educate native culture out of their future. Gradually, white girls were enrolled in school. Public education though still white, discarded its denominational and propertied requirements.
Eastern cities used compulsory school attendance laws to manage millions of immigrant children. Truancy laws were lax when children were an essential and necessary low-cost labor force for mill work. Truancy enforcement became stronger when the need for literate, voting adults was required. An eighth-grade education was the American educational capstone through the 1930s. The need for a high school education was confirmed only after America entered WW2 and too many draftees lacked the basic, secondary education our military required. Sound cynical? It was.
For the most part, 19th and 20th century America shaped our public ed into this: an assured child daycare system that freed adults for work, an elementary-level education that prepared adolescent children for adult employment, a literate population able to read newspapers and magazines for their daily news, and an inculcated understanding of white, mainstream history and non-parochial values.
Still sound cynical? It was. It still is. Politics shapes educational practices constantly.
Public education served special interests beyond literacy. No matter the need, public ed has been our conduit for government taking significant, universal actions to stem perceived national emergencies. When President Truman signed the National School Lunch Program, he not only fed school children, he provided a federal subsidy to our nation’s post-war farmers that continues today. We eradicated polio in the 50s by lining up every boy and girl in school for a shot of Salk and a sugar cube of Sabin vaccines. Children were a captive public health clientele. The President’s Physical Fitness Awards became the standard in school PE to assure a constant readiness of fit, young men for military service. A letter and lapel pin from Ike kept me doing pushups for years. When the Russians launched Sputnik, we strengthened high school math and science curricula and enrollment in German language resurged because German was the language of physicists. Public ed was a launching pad for the space race. Schooling has been an agent for economic stabilization, public health, national defense, and international competition, forever.
In 2002 No Child Left Behind was a knee-jerk response to the downward trending of domestic NAEP and international PISA test scores. Politicians feared that the assessed education of American children was failing to keep up with the scores achieved by children in China. If this continued, the United States would lose its status as the leading international economy. Nationally mandated curricular standards and testing swamped schooling for the next decade. We studied Finland’s educational delivery as a model for besting China. Huh? With NCLB we let an implied perception that our nation’s international economic status was sliding beat up students and teachers and schools for a decade.
A lesson in a senior economics class should ask this question: What single expenditure balances a state’s annual budget? Answer: Money for public schools. Every governor runs as a “Friend of Education” making loud criticisms regarding the state’s past educational report card with promises for future improvements. Once elected, each governor, regardless of promises, uses the state’s annual allocation to public education to balance the state’s annual budget. When revenues are low, the Gov cuts education spending. Governors ease the impact of inflation on other state agencies by regulating school funding. The failure to increase education spending always is blamed on the opposition party.
“According to The Century Foundation, we are underfunding our K-12 public schools by nearly $150 billion annual, robbing more than 30 million school children of the resources they need to succeed in the classroom”. Except, fully funding public education would require spending that partisan governors are unwilling to commit.
The liberal-minded desegregation of public schools in the 1950s and 60s is losing ground to a re-segregation of local schools. New, conservative state statutes espousing parent rights allow charter schools to evolve into select-enrollment enclaves receiving public funding. Parent choice is no longer just a choice of available schooling but a right to create schooling for parent purposes. Segregated charter schools not only reject children of color but also children with educational disabilities. Courts reason that assigning state funding to the children being schooled rather than to school districts justifies a re-segregating of public schools.
States where the governor, legislature, and state Supreme Court are held by one political party are using partisan power to change public schooling. Statutes are being written to shape curriculum, subjects, and teaching strategies to further partisan thinking. Books are banned, curriculum is prohibited, and school leaders who oppose such can be charged with felonies.
Perhaps Sir Isaac Newton explains the reversal of integration in public education policy with his third law – for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. To wit, slavery led to the abolition of slavery and freed slaves led to Jim Crow laws and that led to the desegregation of schools. Now, an equal and opposite action reverses integration into a legal resegregation of schools. However, to accept this explanation is to justify doing wrong and labeling it as right. Is equal opportunity under the 14th amendment just a majority party definition? Today, yes.
There are other forces at work.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers In Their Own Land) examined the sociology of Louisiana and neighboring communities in Mississippi and Texas. Specifically, she examined the effects of partisan politics on a population already plagued with a congruence of economic, cultural, and political pressures. Highly dependent upon a regional oil employment and affiliated industries that made their communities into historic company towns, these working families are not only dependent on industry pay checks but also forced to live in chemically toxic communities. Politically afraid, they oppose all governmental entitlements that help people of color with food stamps, jobs, and job training. They see the world as win-loss and believe liberal government is taking from them to give advantage to others. They support conservatives who are cheerleaders for their local fears.
But reductive policies and practices are not found only in deep southern states. More than half our 50 state legislatures have entertained bills to restrict curriculum, subjects, and books. More than half have considered legislation that would restrict student opportunities based upon gender identification.
School boards in all states are being approached by parents demanding specific books be removed from school library circulation. Populist censorship is determining what children can read in school.
What Are We To Do?
The Newtonian pendular swing of partisan-written educational policies will not serve the long-term future of our children. Special interested voices make the endgames of all their machinations defined by the widest arc of their collective policy statements, and these increasingly speak for fewer and fewer of our population. Each iteration becomes more and more radical or reactionary and less and less unifying.
I am guided by the sign-off words of a late-night radio host I heard in the 1970s. “When you know what is right, try to do it” and I flavor his words with Margaret Mead’s commandment “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think”. Throughout time, when adults attempted to shape the world their children would inherit by placing bias and prejudice in their upbringing, disaster has been sprung upon the world.
An older slogan comes to mind. Nancy Reagan asked children and young adults to “just say no” when confronted with illegal drugs in the 1980s and 90s. We need to tell our governmental representatives they are to “just say no” to any legislation intended to ban books, restrict curriculum, or restrict educational participation for special interested reasons. Our children need to be educated to think and not to regurgitate selective and biased thinking.
“Are you hearing me?”. Right question. Humans begin hearing sounds, including human voices, in the womb. Unless impaired, hearing, like seeing, is an innate characteristic of humans. We are made to hear the noise that surrounds us every day.
“Are you listening to me?”. Another right question. Listening is an acquired skill that the person you are speaking to may not have mastered. Given the noise a person hears in their immediacy, it is an assumption that you are being listened to. There is a huge difference between hearing and listening.
“Are you actively listening to me?”. A better question. But, “maybe not” is a very common answer.
As educators, the issue we face is how to teach hearers to become listeners and listeners to become active listeners. If we believe in natural learning, we can allow a hearing child to wander through life in the belief that experience creates listening skills. The skills of listening are in her and just need time and place to become effective everyday tools. That may happen, but many adults today demonstrate untrained listening characteristics. They hear. They recognize the source or speaker. They may acknowledge the topic of the speaker. Then, they fade into being untrained listeners. Their focus wanders, they insert own ideas, they start to create a rebuttal before the speaker has finished, and their thinking pursues unrelated tangents. Some of the unschooled just shut down when they are asked to listen because they don’t know how.
Listening is an acquired skill we need to teach to children.
What is listening?
“Listening begins by hearing a speaker producing the sound to be listened to. Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act. People are always hearing, most of the time subconsciously. Listening is done by choice. It is the interpretative action taken by someone in order to understand, and potentially make sense of, something one hears”.
Listening and seeing are the primary ways people gather information. This is one of the reasons Helen Keller’s stories is so meaningful. She was deaf and blind. She did not hear or see and was unable to learn from these two essential senses. With instruction, her brain learned to associate meaning through touch and smell and associate Braille dots with letters and words. She truly was taught to “listen” to non-sounds. Almost all of us take our hearing and seeing for granted. However, without learning how to listen and to discern listening from hearing, we also are disabled in our ability to learn from our sense of hearing.
There are other good reasons to become good listeners.
Good listeners are more likable. Individuals with strong listening skills are present in the conversation. People who listen with focus are often perceived as more likable.
Good listeners build stronger relationships. Communication is not a one-way street. Good listeners show interest, ask open-ended questions, and acknowledge what’s being said. This helps reduce misunderstandings and builds stronger relationships.
Good listeners have a clearer understanding of the topics being discussed. Individuals with refined listening skills seek to fully understand a speaker’s message. They pay attention to both verbal and nonverbal cues and ask for clarification when needed.
Parents are a child’s first teachers of listening skills. With their first “Say ‘Mama/Dada”, parents teach an infant to associate sounds and words with a desired meaning. A parent says a word and coos to give it meaning, or holds up a toy and names it, or points to food on a spoon and names it. They speak “baby talk” or “parentese” to encourage their baby to make a desired association. Most parents do not have training in this; they are not taught how to teach their child to listen. They do what they remember being done for them, or what family members tell them to do. Others talk with their young parent peers. In general, infants from birth to pre-school or instructional daycare are subjected to several years of popular wisdom-informed parenting.
The Science of Early Learning provides 22 techniques for parents to try in their efforts to move their baby from hearers of sounds to a baby who is building skills as a listener. A search of the literature, including the tenth edition of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, provides a plethora of resources for parents to teach their children to be listeners.
By age 4, children reflect many of their parents’ listening characteristics. This comes as conflicting news for many parents, because in their multiple family roles they are not always aware that an infant is listening to their every word. Children hear us even when we do not want to be heard. An infant’s auditory vocabulary is influenced by and mirrors the words, vocabulary, sentence structures, and dialects their parents or their older siblings use. Babies soak up almost everything they see and hear a parent do because they have no filtering mechanisms.
When infants do not begin to micmic parents and siblings, there is worry that hearing may be impaired.
That is why schools are mandated through Child Find activities to use auditory testing to verify a child’s hearing
In Wisconsin, schools, daycares, pre-schools, and local physicians partner to inform young parents about the Child Find activities of local elementary schools. One of the screenings typical of a Child Find appointment is a hearing assessment. Teachers work with parents in the primary school when either believes that a student/child has difficulty hearing. Testing and a diagnosis can lead to further testing and perhaps to special education service and accommodations.
Who at school teaches children to be listeners? Incidentally, we may think school bus drivers are at the frontline of teaching children to listen because they are the first adult to greet a child each school day. Be clear, drivers want children to listen but they do not teach listening skills. A drivers’ first priority is bus driving and student safety, and she/he does not typically speak instructionally but in an directing voice.
Schools are mandated to teach children to listen and do so indirectly and directly. One of a 4K-K teacher’s first action each morning is gaining student attention, channeling them from all the noise surrounding them as they get out of a family car or school bus, enter the school, put their things on hallway hooks or in cubbies or lockers, and enter their classroom. The sounds of their classmates surround them. Children hear their teacher say, “Sit down. Eyes on me. Give me your ears”. And so, school listening instruction begins.
Veteran kindergarten teachers look like magicians to parents of 4-year-olds gathered for Kindergarten round ups and orientations. They efficiently quiet squirming kids and boisterous children as easily as they herd cats. For most veterans, the use of curated commands, signals, words, voice, body language, and attitude over time work to change behaviors and make children more amenable listeners. Effective teaching at all levels incorporates myriads of indirect communications that move a hearing child to a listening student.
The mandate for direct instruction derives from our state’s adapting the Common Core ELA standards into Wisconsin’s ELA standards. All children are to be instructed in listening, as well as reading, writing, and speaking. The Wisconsin DPI standards place listening and speaking in the context of effective communications. Schools are mandated to instruct children in how to listen and in how to speak that causes them to be active and “productive communicators” in a wide variety of school and life circumstances.
These standards are directed toward developing students’ abilities to productively participate in communicative exchanges. Productive participation means that students are able to communicate in large group, small group, and one-on-one exchanges with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations; can respond to and develop what others have said; can contribute accurate, relevant information; and can analyze and synthesize a multitude of ideas in various domains. Students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of conversations and communicative exchanges in order to practice and apply these standards. Some standards repeat from grade-level to grade-level in recognition of the fact that students’ understandings develop and deepen over time. The ultimate goal of these standards is that students are able to understand and make flexible choices in their use of language in order to meet their communicative goals with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations.”
Each phrase in the above introduction points to a facet of effective communication and the last sentence poses the capstone – to meet communicative goals with varied audiences, for varied purposes, and in varied situations. Additionally, the fluid use of the word “varied” causes almost all listening skills instruction to be embedded in subject, content, or skills instruction. The context is listening within the instruction of reading or math or art or PE. Seldom do teachers provide naked listening skill instruction devoid of a context for listening to something to be learned.
Elementary teachers focus early instruction of listening skills, so children learn to listen in these multiple school situations:
Audience – one-to-one communications, small group, large group.
Purpose – listening for directions, information, entertainment, conversation.
Responding based upon purpose – repeat what is heard, interpret what is heard, personalize what is heard,
When choices are available, be able to make a choice based upon what has been heard.extend
Teachers prepare and move children from one learning activity to another many times during a school day. Routines are normalized and expectations for student listening are essential. Teachers use routine signals to alert children to listen. They may flick the classroom lights on and off, use a chime, or a buzzer. The concept is that the signal alerts children to listen. Once alerted to listen, a teacher focuses students to listen for “who is to do what, how, when, and why”. Twenty or thirty minutes later, another signal is used, students are alerted to listen, and the class moves into another activity.
Many listening skills are universal for school children. Given the age of elementary learners, a great deal of instructional time is committed to group expectations and how an individual student in a group or classroom listens. One college’s teacher prep program stresses the “Three As of listening – attitude, attention, adjustment.” Teachers must shape children’s behavior first to an attitude of community. A recognition that all classmates matter is a huge first step for a 4K-K child. Once teachers have each child moving from “me” to “we”, the teacher creates, uses and reinforces strategies for gaining student visual and auditory attention. We tend to pay attention to what we are looking at and that attention helps us to block out the noise so we can focus on the sounds coming from the person being seen. In evolving from hearing to focused listening a child is ready to adjust to what is being said, asked, or directed.
Put into context, the routine above is used to prepare children for whole group activities, like recess or lunch. Listening routines also are used to prepare students for reading group instruction, or individual work time at interest centers in the classroom.
Hearing to listen is a first step. Listening for a purpose is a second. Listening as preparation for doing something based upon what one listens to is a new step. Studies indicate we remember only between 25-50% of what we hear – the rest is abandoned as noise. After ten minutes of listening, most people begin to drift and can remember less that half of their initial level of remembering. Unfocused listening results in an awareness of less than 25% of what we hear.
Based upon these studies, teachers learn to “chunk” communications they want children to hear, listen to, remember, and be able to respond to or act upon. To do this, there are several time-tested cues for getting a child to listen and follow directions. The institutional experiences of Boys Town tell us to do this.
So far, we have addressed the importance of listening, the mandate to teach children to listen, and the general routines and frameworks for listening. The next level, teaching children to be active listeners, is where the effective communications expectations of the mandates make an educational difference.
Accuracy. For decades teachers have heard and used the phrase “checking for understanding”. Ask children to repeat back to you what they listened to you say. An accurate repeat conveys congruence – the child heard and listened to what you said. Asking multiple children to repeat what they listened to you say creates an accountability for listening.
Don’t be surprised when a child’s repeating of what they heard you say is nothing like what you said. They “heard”, they did not “listen”. Listening is a learned skill. Patience and persistence are called for. Simply tell your information a second time and again check for understanding. And perhaps a third and fourth time.
Because listening is an acquired skill and “acquiring” requires time to learn and time is a valuable instructional commodity, teachers sadly diminish checking for understanding over time. Teaching accuracy in listening takes time and time wasted due to misunderstanding is far greater that the time to check for initial understanding.
Detail. Active listening requires an ear for details, and we can teach children to pay attention to details. The first step is to write down the details as they are verbally given. Check for understanding on the details. A second step is to create “responsibility” for details. One student listens for the “who”, another for the “what”, another for the “how”, another for the “to what degree” and another for the “when”. Check for understanding. Rotate responsibilities as some details are given at the end of the directions and everyone must listen to the entire direction.
I observe high quality teachers checking for understanding and for the details of listening in junior and senior high school classrooms. Not only is what the mandate tells us to do, it is best practice.
Nuance. Many of the things we listen to are loaded with clues as to the feelings and values and dispositions of the speaker. Accuracy and details may be further understood by the way they are delivered. Teachers are not robotics delivering information in monotoned voices. They imbue what they tell children with the excitement and suspense of new learning. Children need to understand nuance and identify when it supplies extra meaning to their listening. Have children listen specifically for descriptor words and phrases; listen to the adjectives and adverbs and prepositions. Ask listeners to interpret the socio-emotional flavor of what they listened to.
Clarification and response. Assign listening students to craft a clarifying question after their listening. Is there a detail that is not clear enough? Is there a possible early response a listener wants to try out while still in a checking for understanding phase? Consider all the time teachers spend answering student questions after the work has begun. When children ask clarifying questions at the time of the directions they demonstrate and reinforce their skills as active listeners.
Synergy. Active listening demonstrates a respect and rapport between teacher and students. When the speaker and listeners are actively engaged, speakers are encouraged to be more descriptive of details and nuance. Respect for the speaker
In order to propel student learning, communications must become two-way, respectful, challenging, and nuanced. It may require specific vocabulary and exacting terms. As communication becomes more focused in specific outcomes, the need for listening and responding skills become even greater.
How to teach children to be active listeners?
Generalized, active listening is hearing, paying attention, listening, and an ability to respond to what is listened to. These statements cover the waterfront of how children and teachers engage in school communications, especially as children get older. It takes loads of concentration, focused attention, and personal commitment to be an active listener. To be active, a listener has to set aside all of the bad habits of hearing and initial listening and shift into being a committed listener. Active listening skills come from with in the listener.
Pay attention. When paying attention, there is about a one second lag between the speaker speaking and the listener’s brain hearing.
Show that you are listening. When a speaker perceives you as a listener, the speaker’s brain recognizes and begins to lock into this interpersonal communication. Take notes.
Provide feedback. Repeat key points to demonstrate listening.
Defer judgment.
Respond appropriately. Ask valid and respectful questions, summarize key points, suggest what you want to know or do next.
Elevating active listening to upper-level listening.
Knowing that active listening is within the listener yet is cued by teacher communication, we can elevate active listening by moving our teaching interactions from the lower three levels – remembering, understanding, and applying – to higher levels of thinking – analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The sociometrics of a classroom conversation change drastically when we move from asking students for the recall or interpretation of knowledge to the comparing and contrasting ideas, evaluating an ideas significance, or generating new solutions. Instead of teacher-student interactions, conversations become student-student exchanges. Teachers use wait time to assure students have time to consider their arguments while using body language to assure a student who is eager to contribute will be able to do so. Active listening leads to intellectual excitement – the teaching moments teachers cling to in their memories of classroom work.
Once again we are called to use what we know to be true of good teaching and learning yet find difficult to do in the fast pacing of school life.
We know these things.
Listening is a core skill essential for students at all levels of their education.
Listening is a learned behavior that we must teach at all grade levels and in all subjects.
Listening is more than hearing if it is to be educational.
Listening takes time and commitment to the behaviors of attention, attitude, and adjustment that allow us to receive, understand, and act upon what we listen to.
Active listening leads to higher levels of intellectual and academic productivity.
And we too often do these things.
Pace our teaching based on the first child who appears to have heard us.
Do not check for accuracy, detail, or nuance with enough children to assure that good listening occurred.
Let the clock determine what comes next in a lesson rather than what we listen to as student readiness for next instruction.
Students are more likely to mirror how we listen and use listening skills than they do our instruction in reading, writing, and speaking. You know this is true. Just listen to yourself.
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