Category Archives: Blog

Recentering Our Matters

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I was raised in schools that prioritized academic and athletic successes above all else.  This was unspoken fact for young baby boomers in the 1950s.  As Kindergartners, we did not know that grades and scores would define how we would be perceived, treated, and schooled in the next thirteen years.  We were the first generation of school children for whom it could be said – we are our achievement scores – and, in hindsight, baby boomers as educators perpetuated this paradigm for the next 70 years.  We shaped and led schools with the rear-view mirror mentality that what mattered in the 50s, 60s, and 70s matters in the 2020s.  Our mantra has been “schools today must reflect how we were schooled”. 

How did this happen?

Sitting cross-legged on the floor in a large circle for our weekly “show and tell”, every Kindergartner was center stage every week for several minutes at a time.  Across that year of “show and tells”, we learned and appreciated the joy and responsibility of being the center of attention.  The shyest as well as the most gregarious classmate was given the same opportunity to “show and tell”.  When Jimmy, sitting next to me, emptied his marble bag one week to show a collection of purees, cats-eyes, agates, woodies, and steelies, all eyes were on Jimmy, including the teacher’s.  Sadly, that was probably the last time I remember Jimmy being the focus on any positive attention. 

By the second grade, classroom attention was portioned according to reading groups and school recognition was aligned with scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, quarterly grades, and a student’s time in the 50-yard dash and ability to throw and catch a ball.  Tattoos were not a thing in the 50s, but if they were each child’s ITBS percentile would have been inked on their forehead.  Jimmy’s ITBS score was below the 50th percentile.  We knew enough back then to peek at each other’s ITBS scores when a sheet of tabled numbers and small print was handed to each child to take home to unaware parents.  Scores mattered.  As a result, Jimmy was in reading group 4, the last to meet in the reading circle with our teacher before lunch each day.  Teacher attention to Jimmy and his group mates’ reading progress was more often ended by the lunch bell than the conclusion of the lesson being taught.  Low scorers went to the periphery of school.

The pecking order of scores was shared across the school.  The top 10% were most often picked by art, PE, and music teachers to take center stage on school teams, exhibits, and musicals and plays.  Barb had an eye for design, shape, and color.  When we created with papier-mâché, tooled tile blocks for block printing, and made hanging mobiles, Barb’s wore the blue ribbons.  But, no one in the school ever talked about artistic kids, because art was not a score.  Barb’s work went from her art table directly to her home. Barb’s standardized test scores were in the 70th percentile and she was just inside the periphery.

Gradually this reality suggested itself and now, decades later, it was as clear as a full moon on a cloudless night.  Children who got good grades and were on the starting teams had more opportunities in school than children who did not; the did nots were given fewer opportunities.

By junior high school, Jimmy and Barb were lost in the academically tracked classes of low and underachievers and although he was cat-like and agile and she saw art that her classmates could not even imagine, their academics consigned them to the background of school.

There were 736 in our high school graduating class.  Jimmy’s photo does not appear in our senior yearbook and his name is printed only once – in a list of “those not submitting a photo”.  Barb appears alphabetically in the rows of senior photos with no other citations of her high school years.

Scanning the on-line obituaries of my hometown newspaper, I recently recognized Jimmy’s face before I read his name.  He was loved by his wife, children, and grandchildren, worked for 45 years as an electrician, and was valued by his church and the local Boys and Girls Club where he was a mentor.  A good life well-lived, by all accounts, yet I wonder what his life might have held if school had not numbered him as a low priority.  Perhaps his life would have been the one he lived; however the paradigm of his schooling did not treat him well enough for him to find out.

The paradigm has changed.

With time, the world moves past and beyond our generations.  Gen X, Millenials, and Gen Z display core characteristics and values that influence how they live and how they want their world to be.  Their’s are not the values of Boomers, yet it is surprising how Boomer values persist.  Perhaps it was the high number of Boomers who took leadership in our governmental and educational institutions and by virtue of their seniority have sustained values of Boomerism.  Public education has been exceptionally slow to relinquish the idea that “children are their achievement scores”, but it is happening.  We are looking at children as children beyond their academic metrics.

The pandemic is an accelerator for a new paradigm.  In the immediacy of our return to in-person teaching and learning, the concern for lost or missed academic learning was pre-eminent in our schools.  We believed we must make children whole in the school’s academic scheme of what is important.  But, just like a racehorse coming out of the pack along the rail and into the lead, concerns for the social-emotional and mental health of children have become the new, overarching driver of post-pandemic educational programming.  Concern for social-emotional well-being disaggregates children from achievement groups and academic tracks into individual, single children as points of interest.    When we ask, “How are you doing?”, it is in the singular, personal tense.  Today we are asking Jimmy and Barb to respond directly to the question with the mutual understanding that Jimmy and Barb are each the sole point of our interest.

New realities also emerged from the pandemic economy.  High school students are seeing more opportunities for post-high employment and careers that do not require a baccalaureate degree.  Hands-on experience is valued as highly if not more than an academic transcript.  Certainly, the amount of personal debt associated with an college education is a factor.  The result is a lowering percentage of high school students intend to matriculate to college and this causes schools to reconsider their high school graduation requirements and traditional course sequences pointed toward college.  We are looking at programming for high school students individually rather than as college-tracked cohorts.  If Jimmy had been seeking high school preparation as an electrician, his success would have been as important in school as a classmate who was accepted to Harvard.

Give another credit to the pandemic.  As children re-entered their schoolhouse doors, national and local media highlighted principals who greeted children individually and by name.  While social distancing forbade hugging, a principal’s recognition of a child by name proclaims a new paradigm.  This is not to say that pre-pandemic principals did not know children by name, but intentional public and personal greeting on a daily basis tells us that things have changed.  Jimmy and Barb were faces not names.

Will a new paradigm hold?

Statistics tell us that over time everything regresses toward the mean.  The old mean average of school was narrowly focused on Boomerisms.  Without concerted efforts for change, school will center itself again on its older constructs.  Soon, we need to find out if the implementation and growth of more holistic school programming can be made permanent.  If so, then the mean will shift, and we will have recentered school on what matters in the 2020s.

Add Student Executive Functioning Skills to Your Student Performance Box Score

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In the 2020s, grades and test scores may be alternative facts because they no longer are credible indicators of annual student learning and learning that matters.  Our pandemic experience has exposed indicators of educational and personal development that are more essential life in and beyond school.

Americans love the box scores.  These are a summary display of numbers that tell us who is winning and who is losing.  In every event of significance in our culture there always are winners and losers because we score everything.  Sadly, at this date and time we work harder at discriminating between learning performances than we do in elevating all performances.  In education, the box scores are report cards and transcripts and the numbers of interest are grades, test numbers, and credits earned.

In June, millions of children will celebrate the end of the 2021-22 school year and their promotion to the next grade level or graduation from school.  Their smiles and the pride of their families are immeasurable and worthy of the moment.  Each child will have achieved the box scores required for promotion and graduation.  Congratulations all around!

Blame or give credit to the pandemic; two years of abnormal school life gave us pause to reflect on what we do and how we do it in our schools.  Promotion and graduation in the future may have and need different bell weathers than grades, tests, and credits.  The box scores of the past will not suffice.

Our early pandemic efforts to sustain academic instruction for 4K-12 children caused us to examine the essential nature of teaching and learning in our in-person, remote, and hybrid modeling.  Our continued pandemic efforts caused us to recognize the unheralded, non-academic, dispositional, and inter- and intra-personal skill sets and values of an education that are submerged in the usual nine month, in-person slog of a school year.  More now than pre-pandemic, educators are asking questions about learning that matters and how we understand that learning.

One of the first educational dispositions that leapt to our attention in the pandemic was executive function.  I will post-hole on executive functioning in this writing.  There are a dozen or more other highly significant indicators of education.  Post-holing on executive functions will illustrate how non-traditional, developmental topics should be considered as highly valued indicators of a child’s full education.  Think of these as a new “mattering”.

Usually, we speak of executive functioning as a set of skills that enhance our behaviors for planning and achieving goals.  In school settings, I frequently hear educators refer to these during discussions regarding children demonstrating ADHD characteristics and it always is about the absence of executive functioning skills.  I cannot remember a conversation pointing to where we teach all children these essential planning and doing skills.  We always assume their instructional existence in our curriculum – or how well children not being considered for exceptional education demonstrate executive functioning – without our teaching them.

Across multiple sources, these are the usual skills of executive functioning:

  • Adaptable thinking
  • Planning
  • Self-monitoring
  • Self-control
  • Working memory
  • Time management
  • Organization

Remote students were winners and losers as learners for reasons far beyond their completing or not completing graded assignments or even the quality of their technology.  We observed significant numbers of children in every school and in every grade who were more than lost; they did not know how to begin when on their own.  It was more than disconnection; it was lost in space.  If schools did not have a plan for how to educate children in a pandemic, many children had no idea of how to be a student out of school

As I consider usual report cards, I observe the 3 Rs, mathematics, science, social studies, art, music, physical education, and technology grades and credits.  Add to these the elective experiences that round out a graduate’s final transcript.  We aggregate quiz and test scores, grades on reports, papers, and projects, and report periodic and year end grades as indications of what and how well children have learned. 

Then, I look at report cards for any semblance of executive functioning skills.  While I am told that executive functioning is inherent in a child’s school success, no teacher raises her hand when I ask them to describe how they explicitly teach these functioning skills to their students.  The closest we come to meaningful instruction is providing children a planner/calendar or teaching note taking skills.  We are hit or miss, at best, when it comes to having a plan for all children to learn executive functioning.

I consider a 4K and Kindergarten child and their very early need to use these seven skills.  The introduction and development of phonics-based reading is essential for 4- and 5-year-olds learning how to read.  Equally, each of the seven executive functioning skills is developmentally essential for the same children.  I wonder how children learn to self-monitor themselves and exercise self-control.  I hear teachers telling them to do so, but I cannot find explicit teaching of either.  Memory is a natural brain function, yet we do not explicitly teach for short- or long-term memory.  We tell children to reread and study at home.   A curriculum that explicitly facilitates and supports executive functioning in 4K-5 has provided exponential value to each student everyday and in all subjects.

I consider how child and parent relations at home would be impacted if school invested explicitly in teaching executive functions.  Or, do we assume parents are more equipped and skilled at teaching these skills than professional educators.  This would be a true game changer for most for most families.

Executive functions become more complex with age.  We expect a level of these skills from our youngest children and a more sophisticated demonstration from older children.  We accept gaps in things organization and time management from younger children are less tolerant of those gaps in older children.  Interesting – we can label the deficiency in an executive functioning skill for many children, but I cannot point to a planned school intervention to remedy the deficiency, except in an IEP.  Except, do better next time.

This conversation causes me to wonder how an employer or a post-secondary school would value a school transcript that included the progressive demonstration of executive skill proficiencies?  Would these seven skills be more or less valued than the completion of high school Biology or US History?  Anyone want to make a bet?

A long-retired radio host finished his show with “… when you know what is right, try to do it”.  Apply his advice to the explicit instruction of children next year.  Embed a constant thread of instruction, planned activation, clarification, reinforcement, and celebration of executive functioning by every child in school.  I will bet a bag of Snickers that children who are taught and practice executive functions will not only demonstrate improved satisfaction with school but will raise the numbers in their other box scores.

Smart Is As Smart Does

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A while ago Holiday Inn Express enjoyed using “I’m not a rocket scientist, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night” as an indicator of the smart and well-informed traveler in their clientele.  They seemed to say, “smart is as smart does”, a reverse paraphrase of Forest Gump. 

Almost every public conversation today about school is overly loaded with Holiday Inn Express overnighters and back door Forest Gumps.  A great many, no matter where they spend the night, speak like an expert on educational subjects.  Truth be told, many a speaker’s most recent personal experience with 4K-12 education was their last day of school prior to graduation. 

That written, public education is all about the opportunity for any person to speak their mind regarding the life and times of their local schools, teachers, curriculum, instruction, and school taxes.  School boards meet in public sessions with scheduled times on the posted agenda for any person to speak to the board members.  In the past two years the public has spoken to school boards, sometimes loudly and passionately, sometimes raucously, and many more  times with explicit commentary.

Professional educators are often baffled by the real outcomes when the public speaks to the school board.  Long-standing past practice, sound theory and research, and well-laid out plans can be cancelled by the requests, demands, and wants of the lay public.  This is not say that a parent or community member is not informed and well-prepared in their speech.  They frequently are.  It is, however, to poke a solid hole in the mantle professionals wear.  School boards can discount professional education and professional experience in the face of a teary, angry, and demanding public in the blink of an eye or the casting of an “aye” vote.

Often, on the night before a school board meeting, I am tempted to drive 200 miles round trip in order to say at the meeting, “I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express” last night.  That may be all the context and perspective that is warranted today.

Institutional Elasticity Stymies Growth

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As a child I was fascinated with elasticity.  First it was rubber bands.  Stretch them, twist them, tie and untie them, bunch them into a ball, and they always return to their essential shape.  Good old rubber bands.  Then it was Silly Putty.  Extract it from its container, shape it, tear it into bits, make it into anything you want, and then put it back in its container.  Voila!  Silly Putty melted and molded back to the internal shape of the container and was ready for more future silliness.

Public education, both in the pandemic and in the post-pandemic, has been exceedingly elastic.  And, required to be exceedingly elastic by our school communities.  All the accommodations schools made for the continuing instruction of children over two-plus fraught school years were stretches to meet the emergency.  And, just as soon as the various levels of emergency ended there was an immediate expectation that school would return to its pre-molded shapes of the past.  Public education is expected to be institutional silly putty in the face of change.  Any forward movement or change will be countermanded by an equal or greater snap back toward past practices.  Elasticity does not lead to permanent change.

This is not a put down or a slam, but an objective observation.

Test this hypothesis regarding educational elasticity.  What aspect of institutionalization was permanently changed by the pandemic?  School calendar and school day, curriculum, rules and regulations, school athletic and activity life, instruction of children with exceptional needs, and faculty and staff employments – all snapped back to the pre-pandemic norms just like a good old rubber band. 

The pandemic certainly added to the challenges of future public education.  Mental health and social-emotional welfare of children and school employees jumped to the forefront of many school conversations.  Gaps in student learning and achievement are evident.  Shortages in the candidate pool for every category of school employee arose during and continue after school closures.  These three may be our most significant post-pandemic challenges.  Yet, our elastic institution is required to meet all new challenges with old institutional thinking.  We are struggling to fit mental health and SEO programming into the old Silly Putty can of a school day and school year and already budgeted school revenues.  We are compromised – do we fill gaps in learning or teach this year’s curriculum?  It is difficult to do both with fidelity.  Even though there are real shortages in every category of classroom teacher, my work with the WI DPI finds few alternative pathways being approved even when the alternative meets the rigor of teacher license requirements.  Snap back personified.

Test the hypothesis of elasticity within schools.  What new options and pathways are being approved to meet these challenges?  Generally, nada.  The first and dominant impulse is to make the spring of 2022 look and feel like the spring of 2019.  We are trying to fix post-pandemic challenges with pre-pandemic tools.  Every news story about school districts across the nation trying new approaches to new as well as old challenges is quickly followed with stories about slap back and snap back. 

Heaven help the school board that makes remote education, simultaneous studio teaching, and Zooming a regular instructional delivery.

It is the nature of a true institution to be change resistant.  Institutions by definition have a constancy of predictable behavior.  Lack of predictability causes lack of confidence.  In general, our test of predictability is that today’s school must behave like the school adults attended when we were children.  That is the same definition our parents and grandparents used to assure predictive continuity – unchanged schools.

Without causing too much uproar, we need to reform one of the three underlying assumptions about public education. 

  • Parents and the economic community depend upon the school as predictable day care for all children of school age.
  • Children depend upon the school to educate them in preparation of continuing education after graduation or beginning steady employment.
  • Schools are institutional not dynamic agencies.

The first assumption is tied to the constancy of day and time.  As a generalization, the calendar is September 1 to June 1 and the clock resembles an adult workday, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm.  Without exception, adults schedule their adult world around the predictability of the school’s provision of day care.  This assumption is inviolate; the scope of educational reform is restricted by the need for all children to be in school on all scheduled school days.  If the calendar and clock are malleable, many more options are available for matching selected children with selected programs at selected times of the day.  Personalization and differentiation increase dramatically.  Day care is day and time based; education is outcome based.  Which will prevail?

The second assumption questions the two traditional tracks of 4K-12 education.  Our traditional paradigm is all children are in a college track or they are in a world of work track.  A new paradigm may say – in 4K-5 children achieve foundational learning and in 6-12 children apply, extend, and enrich foundational learning.  Historically, the college track fed the future of professional careers, and the non-college track fed the future of business, trades, and labor.  The reality of college debt and its punitive effect upon twenty- through thirty-year olds is reducing college matriculation annually.  A local school that traditionally sent 95-97% of its graduates to college now sends 75-80%.  Additionally, the very productive options for personal, experience-based education that is not associated with higher education tells us to rethink tracking in favor of blended education and career exploration, apprenticeship, and internship for students in grades 6-14.  Will the snap back to traditional and institutional tracking define the future or will an extended and expanded secondary education provide innovative options for transitioning students into adulthood?

Finally, the third assumption is about fences.  Is the best provision of public education institutional or dynamic?  When a school board seeks a new district administrator, are they hiring leadership that assures continuity of past programming or innovative thinking for new opportunities?  It makes a difference.  Educators follow their leadership, and the nature of a school aligns to its leader.  Institutional thinking is about fencing that assures constancy and the predictable delivery of past outcomes.  Dynamic thinking looks beyond the fences to possibilities.  What kind of agency should our school be?

If 2019 can fix our needs for 2022-23, then let’s keep playing with Silly Putty.  If 2022-23 and beyond requires more than pre-2019 provided, let’s enjoy elasticity in our Spandex not our schools.

Learning, Perhaps

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There is no overtime period for learning at the end of a school year.  When we reach the last day of the school year, instructed learning stops.  The calendar for teaching and learning expires.  Mr. Mixdorf told our ninth grade World History class in 1962, “I can only teach what time allows.  Perhaps you will learn more in some future course or on your own.  Perhaps not.” 

As a stray thought, the end of a school year is the closing of a door.  In lit class, the last chapters will not be read and we are left to wonder if the heroine will survive.  The beginnings of a ceramic piece are pulled from the wheel and returned to the clay storage bin.  Some students will never touch clay again.  The Bunsen burner is turned off and the lab equipment reshelved.  For most, there is only one high school chem class.  And, in Mr. Mixdorf’s class, we were left pondering if the United States will follow the patterns of the Greek, Roman, and British empires; the rise and fall thereof. 

These bits and pieces of curriculum and learning lie like single socks without their mates.  They will remain incomplete until a match can be made and the mental imagining of the heroine’s plight is resolved, the intricate shaping of new clay will finally grow on the wheel, and the smell and color of heated chemicals will prove the lab hypothesis.  Or, perhaps not.  For many students, incomplete curriculum, like the unmatched sock, goes into a basket in the back of the mental closet until it is forgotten under the subsequent layering of life’s detritus.  So, on the last day of school, the school year ends.

However, Mr. Mixdorf’s “perhaps” lingers with possibility and doors of learning are left slightly ajar.  Possibilities do rise next school year and some time in high school or college.  Unexpected door re-openings exist on the job or in the variety of jobs most people work during a lifetime.  Somewhere and sometime an unmatched sock reappears and life’s experience kindles an interest to explore your “perhaps” moments of incomplete learning.  Thank you, Mr. M, for leaving learning doors ajar.  The rise and fall of empires is unfolding before our eyes and I would not be considering the historical context without you.

ps:  Every teacher from the past exists forever just behind doors ajar.  They are unchanged by time.  Last week, I read Mr. Rosenberg’s obit.  Every word I read was in his distinct voice, spoken with his distinct smile and sincerity, and what he taught is unchanged even in death.  They are with us whenever we choose to peek into the bends and turns of our past.