It's Elementary

School began yesterday. When I arrived home, I scrolled through my personal and professional Facebook accounts. On the social network a distinction between elementary and secondary parental involvement we in education have long lamented became clear.

Filling the news-feed were pictures of perfectly groomed elementary students, all posed with backpacks and lunch boxes. Most of the pictures had some comment about the picture being required or expected.

Absent were any pictures of high school students.

Instead there were comments from my secondary teacher friends about surviving the first day.

What happens between fifth and sixth grade?

I do not believe that parents start to care any less.

Having worked at elementary, middle, and high school, I know the educators do not care any less.

As many reasons as there are parents and educators have been proposed, many with compelling arguments, but if we honestly understood the reason, we would have long ago changed the amount of parent involvement at the secondary level. If we as educators make it clear that we want the parents present, working with the school, then we can work through the myriad reasons why each parent chooses to back off the “aren’t they cute with the lunchbox” emotion of elementary school to a “we’re getting ready for life” pride in high school.

Being the Adult

Education, by nature, is a very person-centered profession. As person-centered individuals, we sometimes have difficulty making decisions that affect another person’s life because we see the dozens of shades of gray in each option. Regardless of our consideration, a decision must be made and we move on from it. My mantra of late has been, “someone has to be the adult.”

I am not implying that anyone is being childish.

“Being the adult” means making the hard decisions that risk making someone unhappy. Parents do it on a daily basis because children do not have enough life experiences to keep themselves safe. As educators, we need to understand that sometimes our students do not have enough life experiences to make educationally sound decisions.

Finalizing the schedules for our high school students always brings up the question about whether a student should repeat a failed class or go into a credit recovery program while progressing to the next level. Conventional wisdom says that if you force students to repeat classes you only create dropouts. Such “wisdom” assumes that the students have already disconnected from school and the punishment only communicates that they will never be successful there.

Maybe the students have disconnected from school.

But what lesson are we giving them if we take away the consequences of failure?

If they fail a class in college, they repeat it.

If they fail at a job, they get fired.

Removing consequences in an effort to engage a student only reinforces lower expectations. In the end, we, the educators, scramble to cobble together a plan to meet requirements for graduation because we are too afraid of falling below a mandated completion rate – regardless of how prepared for college or career our students are. We work harder than the students to protect our ranking from public scrutiny.

When I was still in the classroom, I had a poster above the chalkboard at the front of the room reminding my students that it was ok to fail in my classroom because I wanted them to be risk-takers. In my classroom, taking a risk and failing did not change the course of students’ lives; taking a risk and succeeding proved to them they could do much more than they ever imagined. In truth (as most of us find in real-life) my students learned more from those failures than they did from the successes. Very few students failed my class, though many had spectacular failures in my class. In the end, they experienced success and satisfaction.

As educators and as an education system, we can change the stigma of failure into a genuine learning experience. Poor decisions lead to failure and that comes with a consequence. It can also be overcome. I do not advocate that we allow the students to continue without proper support. We must be responsible (the adult) for making certain they understand the situation and the various opportunities available to them. Despite the perception of a somewhat rigid system with credit (unit) requirements and testing requirements for graduation, myriad paths crisscross they system. Finding the right one builds resiliency and an earned sense of accomplishment.

We all know when we have worked hard enough on any accomplishment and when someone else had done the work while we have taken (some/all) of the credit. Why do we think our students are any less self-aware? Navigating the students through the system takes work, but by the time they leave the system, they should feel pride at the work they have done, not just relief that it is over.

Success at getting these challenging students through the system relies on our person-centered nature. In the last ten years, prompted largely by findings from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the three “R’s” have changed to Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. The first two are easy: we know how to design a high-level lesson and connect it to the world in which the students live. Having a positive, professional relationship with a teenager presents a world of challenges, but remembering “positive” and “professional” can guide us through the task.

Failures in life are not the end; just ask Thomas Edison, one of the most famous inventors of all time, it is what you do with the knowledge gained in each failure that matters. We can teach our students how to move beyond failure to success. It is what we learn from each of our students’ failures that matters. It is also what we do with that knowledge. Are we the adult?

Starting from Scratch

Having recently taken the plunge into social media for professional purposes, it has been an interesting experience starting from scratch when I have been used to my own fair share of exposure on the Internet. With a completely new identity it has been fascinating to watch connections come into shape, something I did not pay attention to as I added one tool after another in a random fashion with my personal profiles.

Earlier this week, I read an article that talked about not being afraid of zero because that is where we all begin with any type of connection. As a blogger for over eight years, I am used to having over 100 visitors a day check out the two blogs I have long had going. Fewer than 40 hits in two weeks with this, my “new” blog, has taken a bit of getting used to for a person obsessed with checking statistics. I keep reminding myself that it took five years before my first blog began getting a significant number of readers daily.

Statistics provide guidance in meeting the needs of audiences. Knowing a post has been read by many people gives a sense of satisfaction and encouragement for future compositions in my personal writing. For my professional blog, knowing which posts have been read by many other educators lets me know what topics I am reflecting on that connect to fellow educators, thus guiding me to work more on similar topics.

After making the connections, the next step involves building dialogue. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ all afford the opportunity for interaction through comments. By successfully encouraging commentary with each post, all participants learn from one another. The more active discussion, the better the online community thrives. I welcome everyone to comment on my posts on whichever media they find them. I make them public for a purpose.

My goal in creating the personal connections through the various media is to foster an online learning community which will benefit me as much as it benefits the participants. The staff with whom I have communicated have largely been enthusiastic about the opportunities. My regular mantra has been that educators want to do the best they can for their students and we are our own best teachers. So far, my hunch is proving true.

Starting from scratch may not offer the immediate gratification we have become used to, but it does not take long before it begins to grow exponentially. The learning that occurs may be unpredicted, but isn’t that the most exciting?

Field of Expectations

In the movie Field of Dreams, a struggling farmer, Ray Kinsella, heard voices that encouraged him to “build it and he will come.” People around him thought it foolish to plow under his crop and build a baseball field. Despite the skeptics, he persisted and continued following the guidance of the voices/spirits/ghosts (it’s a fantasy, so those characters could be any number of apparitions). The farmer expected the voices’ prophesy would come to pass, and at the conclusion of the movie, what he expected happened.

Sometimes in education it is too easy for us to hear the skeptics and let our experiences of failure dominate the plans we make for the future. With multiple years’ history at a particular institution, we claim we know what the staff and students will and will not do. More harmful, we claim we know what the staff and students can and cannot do. More often than not, we can find data to prove those claims.

 

If asked, every almost every educator will say we hold high expectations for all students. Administrators say the same thing about their staff. Nevertheless, when we use comments like will/can and will not/cannot we admit to accepting lower expectations for our students and staff.

The data proves us correct.

It does not make us right.

The campus where I work serves a majority of students who come to us with significant deficits in skills. Their skill levels are measurable. We often mistakenly equate skills with ability. When we accept this false connection, we begin to lower the expectations we have for our students. Without the skills, surely they cannot (insert activity here).

Skills though, are what we teach. When we know what skills our students are missing, we have researched strategies to help them gain the skills they need to be successful. Keeping our focus on skills instruction rather than the skills deficit offers a way for us to maintain high expectations for all students.

The rules that apply to students apply to educators – teachers, counselors, administrators. Lack of success in the classroom likely reflects missing skills. Just as skills can be built in students, they can be built in the educators who work with them.

Skills though, are what we teach. When we know what skills our staff are missing, we have researched strategies to help them gain the skills they need to be successful. Keeping our focus on skills instruction rather than the skills deficit offers a way for us to maintain high expectations for all staff.

In the movie, Kinsella resisted the naysayers and followed his belief. He risked his livelihood and triumphed. The movie is a fantasy with the courageous protagonist coming out ahead in the end for sticking to his belief.

How often do we as educators risk our livelihood and stick to our stated belief of high expectations? The accountability game may guide our decisions which give us the opportunity to allow some students to slip through the cracks. As a result, our actions do not match our stated belief. Systems and skills combine to let us off the hook without us even realizing it.

At least I did not realize it until I started looking closely at systems and data this summer. I always prided myself in doing all that I can do to ensure high levels of student success, but digging more deeply, I found that I too sacrificed certain students for program acceptability. Acceptability cannot be the standard we accept if it allows us to fail any student.

To live up to the expectations we claim we have means we need to adapt our systems and vocabulary to match the expectations. Our systems must allow us to teach with the strategies to help even the most skills-deficient student reach skill proficiency. Our vocabulary must abandon the will not/cannot mentality. As far as the skills go, we do need to honestly understand and identify the skills our students are missing, but instead of focusing on the skills our students do not have, we change the focus to building the needed skills.

Educational research and practice has proven methods for increasing students’ skills. Equipping teachers with the skills to facilitate learning through those proven methods empowers them to achieve high skills attainment for all students.

When we adapt our system and shift our vocabulary we will find a new spirit of education transforming our schools into integrated learning communities with students and staff benefiting from healthy high expectations. Fulfillment of dreams does not only happen in fantasies, it happens in real life when we do the right thing. Kinsella heard a voice telling him to “build it and they will come.” If we expect it, they will learn.