Who Needs a Makeover?

I was so happy to read this piece, recently published in the Washington Post. As a former elementary classroom teacher and mother of two young boys, I have experienced a great deal of frustration over schools that are not built for kids. Instead, we keep trying to makeover kids in school’s image, medicating and punishing and demeaning them into compliance.

The idea that a well-managed classroom means all students (even the youngest, at 3 or 4 or 5) are sitting in a chair, studiously bent over their papers and working for hours on end goes against everything we know from child development, academic achievement, growth, maturity, and health. Even in the workplace, we’re realizing that people (of any age) can’t just sit and work and work and work without moving. This article in the New York Times outlines why people “hate” work and steps that can improve one’s health and happiness in the workplace. If we’re recommending adults at the office get up every single hour and spend time walking/moving, why would we do any less for children? If we’re pushing for standing and walking desks at the office, how can we be forcing quiet sitting time for our kids?

My favorite teaching moments happened when kids were moving and smiling and (yes) making noise. When I was teaching second grade, my students had to learn about the concepts of predator and prey in their science lesson. The bulk of the lesson was outside, with some students acting as predators (making their eyes look straight ahead) and others as prey (moving their heads side to side to get as much of a 360 degree view of their surroundings as they could). We commenced a form of freeze tag in which the predators tried to freeze tag the prey, and the prey tried to keep away. Years later, those children are nearly finished with their bachelor’s degrees, but I still use that as an example of one of my most effective lessons ever.

Lip service is paid to the underperformance of boys in school, but can we really be surprised that boys (in particular) are struggling to conform to an institution in which they are not allowed to move and explore and demonstrate curiosity? My oldest son spent five days in Kindergarten before we gave up and enrolled in a distance learning/homeschooling program. Each of those five days, the teacher’s lesson centered around forcing the children to sit in quiet and still circle on the floor while she stood off to the side and created a tiny origami crane that she’d give to the student who demonstrated the most quiet and still behavior. Could you win that prize? Could you sit still, on the floor with no cushion/padding, without moving or squirming at all? Even for 5 minutes? How about 20? 30? That’s what she was demanding of 20 five-year-olds every day during the first week of their first year of school.

It’s about time we made school for kids, rather than trying to remake our kids for school.

Be Intentional? Yes, Please!

Fans of the Song of Ice and Fire book series and/or HBO’s Game of Thrones will know that that various Houses have “words.” For House Stark, “Winter is Coming.” If my family’s House had our own words, they might be “We Do What We Say We Do.” We consistently communicate our future plans and follow through with them. Along those same lines, we don’t make promises/projections that we aren’t sure we can keep.

So, when I recently read Colleen Flaherty’s piece about a recent symposium about the faculty models used in higher education, the main thrust of the symposium’s outputs resonated with me. According to Flaherty, the big takeaway from the symposium was that the purpose and role of higher education in the 21st century needs to be better defined and institutions’ missions clarified in order to drive the best faculty model to support those purposes/missions. In other words–choose the faculty model that best helps you “do what you say you do” as an institution.

This is something I believe my own institution has done well. We have a mission to ensure students can access the higher education they need to reach their professional goals and be productive members of their respective organizations. Since students need knowledge and skills relevant to their professional goals and organizations, the faculty are practitioner faculty. The large bulk of our faculty members are current practitioners in their respective fields who share their knowledge, skill, and expertise from their day jobs with students in our classes. Students gain up-to-the-minute examples of the ways that course concepts and research-based theories are applied in real-world settings. I regularly have students tell me that they gain something from class today that they use in their jobs tomorrow. For a school whose mission is to connect so closely to the profession, I don’t see how it gets any better than that.

What strikes me, though, is how other institutions aren’t being so intentional about their selection of faculty. Articles abound describing the lot of adjunct faculty members who are piecing together an existence in academia by teaching a few classes at several different institutions because full-time (let alone tenure track) positions are not the norm. If the main takeaway from this symposium about faculty models was “we’re not ready to select a faculty model,” what does that say about the way institutions are doing it now? For me, it says they are in a constant “stop-gap” mode, just being sure that classes are covered by someone, but without attention to either getting the best person for that role, or ensuring there is a corps of faculty-employees who can devote sufficient time and attention to their teaching jobs.

More on the Value of Going to College

The value of a degree is becoming a daily topic in the media. Data on the earnings differential for baccalaureate grads versus college drop outs versus high school grads is sliced and diced in countless ways, with most analyses demonstrating that there is at least some financial benefit for earning a college degree, all other things being equal. Setting aside the problem that past performance may not be a good predictor of future outcomes, advocating for any one individual to base a university enrollment decision on such data analyses is always a bit fraught with difficulty. Ben Casselman recently crunched a different, but related, set of numbers. In his analysis, Casselman examined graduation data to provide some insights into which students who attend college are most likely to graduate.

The data shows a graduation gap for certain types of college students. Casselman wrote, “Part-time students have an even lower completion rate [than the average], as do racial minorities and older and low-income students.” This suggests that students in such situations might need to examine their circumstances and make a realistic determination of their drive for degree attainment. Starting but not finishing is a recipe for potentially staggering debt without the benefits of the better-paying positions that might come with a complete degree on the resume.

I’m left wondering where institutions of higher education should be focusing their energy, as they provide educational opportunities. Energies spent in the admission/enrollment processes get students in the door. But this data suggests that institutional energy would better be spent on helping students to commencement, in particular providing structures and supports for populations of students with lower attainment rates. 

Current efforts at my institution include academic diagnosis at admission, course tracks designed with higher supports for lower-performing students, individualized academic and financial advisement for the duration of the program of study, and class availability on a rolling basis. Ongoing course and program revision include attention to smoothing points of friction in the course of study at which students often withdraw. But in light of the data shown in Casselman’s analysis, better help for students to examine their circumstances to help them determine their overall chances for persistence to graduation might be in order. Because there is good evidence that starting college and dropping out may leave most students worse off than not starting at all.

Teachers Bully, Too

Bullying and anti-bullying campaigns are everywhere. The U.S. government has declared October Bullying Prevention Awareness Month. Wikipedia has an entire category devoted to pages about a host of anti-bullying initiatives. The national teachers’ unions, NEA and AFT, have efforts to raise awareness about bullying. Most of these organizations spend energy, time, and money to address situations where children are bullying other children. While there is evidence that these efforts may be counterproductive, they also miss what might be an even more serious issue: teachers as the bullies.

While not as prevalent as the news proclaiming all of the anti-bullying initiatives, there are media reports of teacher bullying. In one, a teacher was caught on video joining with child bullies to attack a 13-year-old boy. This post highlights several other instances of teacher bullying. Parenting and medical sites offer advice to parents who suspect their children are being bullied by teachers. My own son, at his first experience in a formal school setting, experienced five days of bullying at the hands of two Kindergarten teachers. Other children physically attacked him as well, with the tacit and outright approval of these teachers. Needless to say, the fifth day of this was his last in the school.

Dr. Stuart Tremlow researches this phenomenon. In one study, he found a correlation between prevalence of bullying teachers in a school and the rates of behavioral problems among children in that school. In another, he found that teachers who were victims of bullying during their youth were more likely to engage in bullying behavior as adults. Other teachers serve in the role of bystander, witnessing bullying but doing nothing.

Perhaps instead of raising awareness of bullying, or declaring a bullying prevention month, we demand that teachers stop being bullies and bystanders. Perhaps we expect teachers’ dispositions include active support of all students rather than than victimizing children.