Category Archives: #cpchat

COVID and the Five Stages of Grief

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Years ago I had a colleague draw a connection between special education and the five stages of grief. He talked of parents having visions and dreams of their child’s future (which indeed we do). When a school tells a parent their child has a disability, those visions often have to change. The vision families have for the future won’t happen, and families end up engaging with the Five Stages of Grief. Through that lens, grieving the loss of a future event, I’ve been thinking about the current COVID situation.

As we anticipated the start of school, as we anticipated Halloween, as we anticipate Thanksgiving and the holidays, we all had and have a vision of how these should look (ideally, like last year). The coronavirus has had us worried that it might be different, but we’ve tried to hold out hope. When school arrived, it was not what we’d hoped for. Halloween was really different too. And now we’re all trying to figure out what the holidays will look like.

As we prepare to grieve the loss of another event to COVID, where are you?

Denial: Nah, this COVID thing isn’t a big deal. We can still do Thanksgiving and the holidays like last year.

Anger: Regardless of your political stance, there is someone you can be mad at about the situation we’re in.

Bargaining: Maybe I can do the shopping early, and then lie about symptoms to get insurance to cover the test, then try to work from home for a couple days while I wait for results. And if everyone in my family can do that…

Depression: This sucks. That’s it, it just sucks.

Acceptance: Comparing 2020 Thanksgiving to pre-pandemic Thanksgiving is a fool’s errand. Our traditions won’t work in this environment. We need to start building new traditions (which may involve a lot of Zoom).

The five stages aren’t a path; we can bounce around between them. I know I have. I’m trying to spend more time in acceptance though. How about you?

It’s Time to Stop Giving Perfect Attendance Awards

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Perfect Attendance awards… let’s take a moment to think about these. I know, it feels good to celebrate our students for good behavior and for valuing their education enough to come to school every day. But is that what we’re celebrating? Are students with perfect attendance the ones who value school, or are there other ways they end up with this recognition?

schoolIn reality, students have perfect attendance for a variety of reasons:

  • They never got sick.
    These students won the genetic lottery and have strong immune systems. If we’re going to celebrate genetically strong immune systems, why don’t we celebrate other genetic traits? How about awards for the tall blonde kids too?
  • They came to school when they were sick.
    These students were contagious and still came to school. In reality, we want these kids to stay home. Do we really want to be celebrating questionable decision making that puts classmates and staff at risk?
  • They couldn’t stay home because their parents don’t have paid time off.
    These students are sick, but keeping them home costs their family money since their parents don’t have paid time off. These parents also tend to be in lower paying jobs. So what are we celebrating here, poverty?

If we could be 100% sure that perfect attendance meant that a student valued education I’d be all for it – yes, let’s celebrate that! But we can’t be sure, there are too many other things that contribute to perfect attendance – things we don’t necessarily want to celebrate.

So, let’s stop giving perfect attendance awards.

 

Photo by Andy Simonds, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Look our for SQUIRRELs

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They sneak up on us from everywhere. Something we heard about at a conference, a blog post we read, something we saw on Pinterest or Facebook or Twitter. Maybe at an EdCamp or an observation at another school. We think, “If I did this, it would change everything; it would totally solve the problem of __________.” And all the sudden we want to drop everything and focus on that idea.

I like to call these squirrels, those silver bullets for situations that don’t have silver bullets. Deep down, we know there’s no quick fix (of course there isn’t), but that shiny new package is so … shiny.

We know that change takes time. We know that one quick intervention won’t solve a complicated problem. We know that getting that new piece of technology, having everyone read that new book, or adopting that new policy won’t change things overnight. We know this. But those squirrels are still out there, vying for our attention.

And of course, there’s no quick fix (squirrel?) to avoid squirrels. But we need to be aware that they’re always there. And if you find yourself super-excited about something as soon as you hear about it, sure that this new idea will solve that problem, stop. Take a breath. Sleep on it. Ask some colleagues what they think.

Beware of squirrels.

This started as a post about technology (about Squirrel Apps), but as I mulled it around it became about so much more in schools (and in life for that matter).

Don’t Talk If They’re Talking

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This morning I checked in with a first-year teacher in my building. Knowing she’s ready (or at least as ready as any of us were in our first year) I offered one quick piece of advice: Don’t talk if they’re talking.

If your’ve giving directions, everyone needs to be listening. Everyone. What you have to say is important, so no one else should be talking. If you allow them to chat when you’re talking it sends the message that what you have to say isn’t important (which is a dangerous message to start sending on day one).

Wait as long as you have to. They’ll figure it out. When you’re talking to students, don’t talk if they’re talking.

Reflections: Starting Year Two as an Administrator

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Tomorrow, staff return. Next week, the students. As I prepare for my second year as an administrator (assistant principal at an elementary school), I’ve been looking back on year one. What went well? What didn’t? What do I want to keep doing? What do I need to pay more attention to? Three things came to mind.

1. Being in Classrooms

This went pretty well. I tried to get into as many classrooms as I could each day. Even if just for a minute. Teachers and students got used to me popping in when I was “in the neighborhood.” Some days I got to all of them, other days none. I also tried to use errands as a way to get into classrooms – if I had to go to the gym I’d try to swing by a few classes on my way there/back.

This year, I want to see more. I’d like to try to carve out an hour a day in my calendar (between other less-flexible things) to be in classrooms. I’ll still shoot for every classroom, every day – that has to be the goal.

2. My “Peers”

I had been warned by many that being an administrator is isolating, and I thought I was prepared. By January I realized that I wasn’t quite as prepared as I thought. Sure, I had a few key people to bounce ideas off, but the large peer group I had as a teacher simply didn’t exist anymore. And as things got busy, I neglected my online peers (losing touch with twitter and my blog – which serve as place for reflection and hashing out ideas). And my hour-long commute didn’t help any either.

This year, I need to get back to this blog. And back on Twitter. They are ways for me to reflect as well as connect with other educators. Without the large default peer group I had as a teacher I need to put some directed energy into creating/maintaining one.

3. Exercise

Between the craziness of administration and my hour-long commute exercise took a back seat. I saw it happening, but had a hard time getting my routines back. In February I signed up for a May marathon (not my first, I’ve run many, and I can’t advise running your first marathon in your first year as an administrator). It helped give me a goal and helped me get back into a routine. Marathons are hard enough, I wasn’t about to put myself in a position to start the race unprepared.

Did I get every workout in exactly as planned? No, but I was able to look at my calendar every Sunday night and map out my training for the week. Move a workout here and there, cancel a run all together from time to time. But knowing raceday was coming kept me out on the roads (marathon training isn’t something you can fake or cram in at the end).

This year, I need to take care of myself a little better in the fall. Running is an important part of my routine (physically and mentally) and no one benefits if I neglect it. Looking at my calendar and planning each week of workouts seemed to work.

Looking Forward

I’m looking forward to year two. I know the staff and the school in ways I couldn’t have coming in to year one. I’ve identified some stuff to tweak and some stuff to keep doing. It’s going to go well. And I’ve moved closer to school; I should get close to an hour a day of my life back. That will help in a variety of areas.

Photo credit: Ben Schersten

Field Day, 95 Degrees, and a Button-up

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Yesterday was Field Day. I spent most of the day outside. It was 95°. The low the night before was 70° (so is wasn’t even cool in the morning). There was blue sky from horizon to horizon. I still wore my button-up with a bow tie, the same thing I wear to school every day.

Because… consistency.

I’ve written about consistency before in Your Students Secretly Hate Vacations and Is Your School Year Winding Down or Winding Up, and it holds true for things like Field Day. As an assistant principal there’s a good change that on a very-different, less-structured day I’m going to have a chat with one my regulars, one of my friends who really relies on the consistency we’ve taken away from them today.

Will that conversation be more productive if look like I do every other day, or if I’m wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers? No doubt consistency, predictability, will make it a more productive conversation where I can help get the student back to Field Day activities as soon as possible.

So, no matter the day, you know what I’ll be wearing.

—

Side Note: To be clear, I have no qualms about my teachers wearing shorts, t-shirts, and sneakers for Field Day. They play a different role in the success of the day, and dressing for success and what’s best for kids sometimes look different for teachers and administrators.

It’s Not About Teaching, It’s About Learning

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laotzuI recently had a teacher tell me one of her students had accused her of not teaching him anything. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“You don’t teach us anything in science.”

What?! The teacher was confused. What about all those experiments we did? What about the weeks of carefully planned lessons? What about all that stuff you learned?

The student responded, “yea, but you didn’t teach me that. I did all that by myself.”

Isn’t this what we want to have happening? Having students play a roll in their education. Not just being lectured to, but actually learning though experience? Something needs to change if we have a culture where students feel cheated out of something if their teachers don’t rely on direct instruction.

Google and Schools

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Yesterday I had the opportunity do attend a teacher PD day at the Google offices in Cambridge, MA. At the end of the day there was a panel of Googlers and one of the questions was, “what do you like best about working for Google?”

The answers were much what you would expect from a company that is often rated as one of the best places to work. Things like:

  • Great people
  • Being connected to current events
  • A culture of collaboration
  • A job where you get to use your brain every
  • A place where nobody ever says, “I can’t help you, that’s not my job.”

This poses the most obvious question: isn’t this what schools are supposed to be like? 

Seriously, if someone asks your teachers why they like their job shouldn’t this be part of their answer too? And if it’s not, why? And how do you start changing that?

Elementary Homework, Is It Worth It?

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Nearly every teacher has some pretty firm thoughts on homework. Most of it is anecdotal though – something like, I had homework and I turned out okay so students today should have the same experience I did. That sounds all well and good (though one could argue that the world is different today so our students’ experience school should also be different), but what does the research say about homework?

origin_2194119780To the Research:

Whenever anyone talks about research on homework it always seems to come back to a meta-analysis done by Harris Cooper in 2006 (he also did one in 1989). If you don’t have practice reading scholarly articles, it’s always tempting to read the abstract in the beginning and call it a day. Harris notes in the abstract:

“…there was generally consistent evidence or a positive influences of homework on achievement.”

Its tempting to just stop there; homework is a good thing. Though in the abstract he also notes that there is “a stronger correlation existed (a) in Grades 7-12 than in K-6 and (b) when students rather than parents reported time on homework.” So, students do a better job of reporting time spent on homework; that makes sense since students are the ones doing the homework. And homework seems to be more effective with older kids.

Sill, we’re left with the impression that homework is good for everyone.

But, the story isn’t over.

If we dig way down into the paper we find correlations for sub-groups. So, with math homework, there is a statistically significant positive correlation; this means that averaged across all grade levels, math homework makes you better at math. With reading this is also true, though to a slightly lesser extent.

It still feels like homework is a good thing for everyone, right?

But, when you separate the data by grade level, things get interesting. For grades 7-12, there is a positive correlation between homework and academic achievement. But for grades K-6, it gets a little murky.

“A significant, though small, negative relationship was found for elementary school students, using fixed-error assumptions, but a non-significant position relationship was found using random-error assumptions.”

What does that mean? It means depending on how you run the data you either get:

  1. Homework correlates with slightly lower academic achievement (small, but big enough that it’s statistically significant), or
  2. Homework correlates with slightly higher academic achievement (but so slight, that it’s not statistically significant – so it doesn’t count).

Yep, I said it (well, Cooper did). Homework in elementary school doesn’t increase academic achievement and might actually decrease it.

origin_12918347633But I Want to Teach My Students Good Study Habits

If you want your students to get in the habit of bringing school-related stuff home every night and bringing it back, that’s fine. I’ve heard many teachers make that argument and in the past I’ve even made it myself. But if that’s your goal, why not send home a piece of paper for parents to date, initial, and send back. You’re still teaching the bring-it-home-and-bring-it-back skill.

But Why Doesn’t Homework Help in Elementary School ?

Harris goes on to note that “younger children are less able … to ignore irrelevant information or stimulation in their environment” and “appear to have less effective study habits.” This shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s worked with young students; elementary students don’t have strong independent study skills when it comes to learning something new – that’s where good teachers come in.

Data Driven Decision Making

So why are we still doing this?

As schools focus more and more on data-driven decision-making (which is a good thing), why aren’t we looking at the data on homework?

 

Cooper, H., Robinson, C. R., Patel, E. A. “Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987-2003.” Review of Educational Research. Vol. 76, No. 1 (2006): pp. 1-62. Print.

photo credit: Cayusa via photopin cc
photo credit: davidmulder61 via photopin cc

Will Making Kids Read Instill a Love of Reading?

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origin_4351943418For years elementary teachers have been trying to sell the idea that if we assign nightly reading to students that it will make them learn to love reading. We tell our struggling readers, and their parents, if you read every night you’ll start to love reading.

Wait . . . really?

So if there’s a skill I don’t like and am not good at, practicing it will make me love it? I don’t buy it. Will practicing long division make me love long division? Will practicing doing the dishes make me love doing the dishes? Will practicing scrubbing bathrooms make me love scrubbing bathrooms? No, no, and no.

Will practicing a skill that I am not good at make me better at it? Of course it will. But we need to stop trying to sell the idea that practicing a skill will make kids love it. Given how much long division we make fourth graders do, you’d figure we’d see kids doing long division for fun in their free time – but we don’t. Because practicing a skill won’t make you love that skill.

Will practicing a difficult skill help you improve. Yes, of course. Will practicing a difficult skill make you love that skill? No, of course not. We need to stop telling people it will.

photo credit: Ðenise via photopin cc