In This Issue:

1. The gracious leader

2. Life lessons

3. Building relationships in the opening days of school

4. Smiling before Thanksgiving

5. Cultural factors in the education of Chinese-American students

6. Helping college students deal with first-year self-doubts

7. Short item: A teacher’s video

 

Quotes of the Week

“Sooner or later life teaches you that you’re not the center of the universe, nor quite as talented or good as you thought. It teaches you to care less about what others think and, less self-conscious, to get out of your own way.”

            David Brooks (see item #1)

 

“Let’s remove all sarcasm from our comments, realizing that the sting of even a small, tossed-away remark can leave a lasting scar.”

            Rick Wormeli (see item #3)

 

“If we want our students to be educated more than manipulated, convinced more than coerced, and even indignant more than indifferent, we have to approach our work with a relational and sometimes passionate orientation. We need to let them see us sweat and smile way before Thanksgiving. Students know we’re not robots, so let’s not try to act like them.”

            Eric Toshalis (see item #4)

 

“Using humor leads to recuperation, restoration, and redemption. Humor allows you to get your spiritual deposit back from periods of tragedy, betrayal, loss, and fear. It is emotional recycling at its best.”

            Regina Barreca (see item #2)

 

“If you are comfortable, you are not learning.”

            Jean Twenge (ibid.)

 

“Expect failure, learn from it, smile at it – and move forward anyway.”

            Glenn Geher (ibid.)

 

“Teachers are coaches of understanding.”

            Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in Understanding by Design Framework, ASCD, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. The Gracious Leader

            In this New York Times column, David Brooks says, “The people in public life we really admire turn experience into graciousness. Those people, I think, see their years as humbling agents. They see that, more often than not, the events in our lives are perfectly designed to lay bare our chronic weaknesses and expose some great whopping new ones. Sooner or later life teaches you that you’re not the center of the universe, nor quite as talented or good as you thought. It teaches you to care less about what others think and, less self-conscious, to get out of your own way.”

            Brooks mentions a number of gracious leaders – Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Pope Francis, Vaclav Havel – and quotes Juan Gabriel Vasquez: “Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.”

            Brooks continues: “You can learn some truth out of a book or from the mouth of a friend, but somehow wisdom is not lodged inside until its truth has been engraved by some moment of humiliation, delight, disappointment, joy, or some other firsthand experience… Experience distills life into instinct. If you interpret your life as a battlefield then you will want to maintain control at all times… If you treat the world as a friendly and hopeful place, as a web of relationships, you’ll look for the good news in people and not the bad. You’ll be willing to relinquish control, and in surrender you’ll actually gain more strength as people trust in your candor and come alongside. Gracious leaders create a more gracious environment by greeting the world openly and so end up maximizing their influence and effectiveness.”

 

“The Art of Gracious Leadership” by David Brooks in The New York Times, August 26, 2016,

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/opinion/the-art-of-gracious-leadership.html?_r=0

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2. Life Lessons

            “On the one hand, our homegrown instincts about the world can be deeply flawed,” say the editors of Psychology Today. “The bias built into each of us is exactly what the methods of science are designed to overcome. At the same time, wisdom proceeds directly from personal, lived experience.” This serves as an introduction to sixteen behavioral scientists’ advice for leading a good life.

            • Don’t hold back; change demands full-on commitment. Peter Kramer learned to ski in his thirties, and having reached the intermediate plateau, was held back by fear. “The problem, instructors said, was that I was still ‘in the back seat,’ holding my weight up the mountain,” says Kramer. “I needed to commit, to trust my skis, to let them carve.”

            • When life issues an invitation, accept it. “Spontaneity, in my view, is the best antidote to fear and habit,” says Joachim Krueger, “both of which are part of our repertoire but should not dominate. Fear and habit hold us back and make us predictable. Spontaneity opens the door to creativity and happiness, in part because of the unpredictability it brings.”

            • Value a little compulsion. “The drive to discover brings deep satisfaction,” says Joe Herbert of his work as a researcher. “And we understand the compulsion that drives musicians, artists, writers. They create, we discover.”

            • Understand how the human mind works. “Our brains are designed to create, not to hold onto, content,” says Todd Kashdan. “It is essential to extract information and file it away into easily retrievable documents. I keep an electronic diary on my computer plus a physical notebook in every cranny of my house. When possible, I also ‘outsource’ tasks that require self-control, tying daily activities to environmental triggers. Automated routines increase my efficiency – paradoxically offering the greatest space for serendipity.”

            • Expect the unexpected. “And when that unexpected thing is not to your liking but you cannot change it, make peace with it,” says Toni Bernhard. Formerly a professor at the University of California/Davis law school, she became ill and was confined to her house, often her bed. “I was angry and full of self-blame,” she says. “It took me years to realize that the battle I was waging against what I could not change was only adding mental anguish to the physical suffering.” She began to study classical music, grew bonsai trees, and wrote about chronic pain and illness to help others similarly afflicted.

            • Practice the art of under-reacting. “A Zen perspective helps balance the bad and the best,” says Douglas Kenrick. An ancient Chinese story captures this mindset. A farmer wakes up to find that a wild horse had wandered onto his land, and his neighbors congratulate him on his good fortune. The next day, his son tries to ride the horse and is thrown, breaking his leg in several places. The neighbors commiserate on such bad luck. The next day, an army marches through conscripting young men for a war in a far-away land, but the son is spared because of his injuries. The neighbors marvel at the family’s good fortune. In all three cases, the farmer just shrugs. He has the right perspective on life.

            • Stop. Worrying. Now. Karl Andrew Pillemer interviewed hundreds of senior citizens, asking them what advice they wanted to pass along to young people. To Pillemer’s surprise, the most frequent suggestion was to spend less time worrying. “Older people are fine with planning,” he says. “What they want us to stop is the repetitive, pointless rumination about things we can’t change… Worry is not only futile, it poisons the present.”

            • Always carry a sense of humor. “Using humor leads to recuperation, restoration, and redemption,” says Regina Barreca. “Humor allows you to get your spiritual deposit back from periods of tragedy, betrayal, loss, and fear. It is emotional recycling at its best. Once you make an event into a story, it’s no longer just something that happened to you. You control it.”

            • Do it while you can. “When we conceive of time in the abstract, objectifying time, one moment seems as good as the next,” says Tim Pychyl. “This perspective allows us to play a shell game of procrastination, where the promise of a future time quells the anxiety of the present, so we move our intention to act to tomorrow… Every moment is a moment in which both future and past are at stake; every moment is the decisive moment, the right moment.”

            • Consider the opportunities you will one day kick yourself for missing. “Younger people often regret actions they have taken that were embarrassing or got them into trouble,” says Art Markman “– cheating on tests, asking out a romantic interest and being turned down. In contrast, the biggest regrets of adults in their 70s and 80s are the actions they did not take – never learning to swing dance or not switching careers when they had a chance. When young, people are prone to avoid risks and potential failures in the belief that they will rue any bad outcomes… It is helpful for younger adults to deploy the mental capacity to travel in time… Consider the experiences that the older you will likely regret not having had.” Markman had a moment like this in his 30s, learned to play the saxophone, and experienced many transcendent moments that he will never regret.

            • Take the long view. “Our identity in the present is shaped in part by our view of the person we hope to become,” says Susan Krauss Whitbourne. “By checking in on that future perspective, especially when big decisions come your way, your hoped-for self can become the self you achieve.”

            • Respect your future self. “Setbacks are no reason to jettison belief in yourself,” says Glenn Geher. “You need to be open to the fact that, when it comes to your future, anything can happen. So don’t sell yourself short… Expect failure, learn from it, smile at it – and move forward anyway.”

            • Don’t just look – observe. When Joe Navarro came from Cuba to the U.S. as a child, he spoke no English, but he had a lot of questions: “Who likes me? Who portends ill? Whom did I have to avoid? How do you make friends out of enemies? How do people talk to each other? What is too close when talking? What is too loud? What do I do when I don’t understand the rules of basketball, volleyball, kickball, or tennis? Whom should I hang around with and whom should I avoid?… Early on, I began to observe and catalog what people felt, thought, intended, or desired through their nonverbal communication. It allowed me to deal with my new American reality and to help my parents.” All his observing and questioning served him well when he became an FBI special agent – a job that he says is basically people-watching.

            • Lived experience is a fine teacher. “Only when I became a parent,” says Jonathan Wai (he took two years of parental leave to raise his first son), “did I understand my own parents – and especially why my mother kept seeing me as a child and telling me what to do. When a parent sees a grown child, they also experience an emotional time continuum – all the years and memories that came before.”

            • Comfort is overrated. Jean Twenge is critical of the way some colleges are requiring professors to post trigger warnings, which, she says, “have come to mean that no one would ever feel uncomfortable. This is a counterproductive, even dangerous notion. We cannot be protected from every risk and challenge… If you are comfortable, you are not learning. Feeling uncomfortable is not a reason to reject an opportunity. It’s a reason to embrace it.”

            • We never outgrow the need to sharpen our game. Ronald Riggio describes how he put the lessons of psychology to work in his life, determined not to settle for “good enough.” Among other things, he figured out how to get to sleep at night, how to set SMART career goals, and how to be a better listener.

 

“16 Life Lessons” from various authors in Psychology Today, October 2016 (Vol. 49, #5, p. 62-71), no e-link available

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3. Building Relationships in the Opening Days of School      

(Originally titled “What to Do in Week One?”)

            In this article in Educational Leadership, consultant Rick Wormeli remembers how hard he worked as a middle-school teacher to learn the names of all 185 new students in the days right after Labor Day. “It was the first leg of the year’s journey in relationship building,” he says. “[A]ll of us feel honored when others whom we respect think our names are worth remembering. In that simple act, we make a connection.” Wormeli has several other suggestions for the opening weeks of every school year:

            • Make sure students feel safe and know they belong. “Once students feel sure these needs are met, they’ll dive into learning,” says Wormeli. Some key steps: Teachers laughing at their own mistakes and modeling how to handle them constructively; not ridiculing students’ questions, however silly they may seem; removing “all sarcasm from our comments, realizing that the sting of even a small, tossed-away remark can leave a lasting scar;” not assuming that students understand the idioms and references we use; not taking students’ inappropriate comments or reactions personally (“That doesn’t sound like you, Matthew. What’s really going on?”); giving students specific feedback on their work and a chance to improve it; affirming risk-taking and welcoming participation, however imperfect, in class discussions; asking students to explain their thinking and affirming what’s right; and when students say they don’t know, trying this line: “Pretend that you did know the answer – what words would come out of your mouth?”

• Be yourself. “Students detest duplicity in their teachers,” says Wormeli. “The first few weeks should provide consistent proof of personal authenticity… We are sad at sad moments and happy at happy moments. We don’t embrace students’ cultural likes and dislikes just to be more accepted by them. We share our unique interests – a favorite sport or book; how much we liked Legos as a child; our dream of going into space someday; our fondness for summer camp, bike touring, and pecan pie; and a little about our families and our deep commitments to them.”

• Know your students well. Wormeli recommends that teacher teams glean from students, over the course of the year, information on key areas that affect learning and keep them in a secure database in the guidance office:

-   Socioeconomic status

-   Family dynamics

-   Nationality

-   Transiency rate

-   Parents’ jobs

-   Students’ home responsibilities

-   After-school work schedule

-   Previous school experiences

-   Religious affiliation

-   English language learner status

-   Technology access and proficiency

-   Personal interests – sports, music, movies, TV, movies, books, hobbies

-   Physical health and maturity

-   Behavior and discipline concerns

-   Social-emotional learning strengths and challenges

-   Existence of an IEP

-   Challenges such as Tourette syndrome, Asperger syndrome, ADHD

-   Vision and hearing problems

-   Gifted/advanced learner status

-   LGBT identity and transitions

-   Leadership qualities

-   Multiple intelligences

-   Myers-Briggs personality profile

In addition, Wormeli suggests asking parents at the beginning of the year, “In a million words or less, tell me about your child.” He’s found that this open-ended invitation garners better information than conventional parent surveys.

A related strategy is asking students, “Write a letter from your parent to the teacher describing you.” This approach is surprisingly effective – some sample responses: “If it’s important to remember, please write it on the board or screen. Otherwise, Jerry doesn’t think it’s important.” “It drives Carla crazy when there’s nothing creative, so don’t be boring.” And “Lena finds sweat stains under teachers’ armpits revolting, so please keep them dry or don’t raise your arms.”

Another idea: ask students to write on a card everything that helps them learn – perhaps using high-contrast colors on dry-erase boards, speaking more slowly, allowing students to drink water or juice in class, identifying online tutorials, and making homework interesting.

Wormeli also recommends doing something like hiking up a mountain together. “Witnessing our students outside normal classroom and school contexts reveals something close to their true selves,” he says. “It’s gold.” Similarly, working with students in a club, sport, or extracurricular activity builds esprit de corps and strong relationships.

• Practice empathy. Wormeli finds the following techniques helpful for better understanding students’ minds and souls:

-   Make home visits and observe students’ roles in their families;

-   Sit at students’ desks and see the classroom from their point of view;

-   Ask students to explain their thinking verbally, in writing, or by teaching a classmate;

-   Really try to see why students don’t understand what you think you’ve taught effectively;

-   Attend to students’ essential human needs – hydration, movement, nutrition, light, fresh air, sightlines, tools;

-   Avoid overgeneralizing about students (for example, ignoring the great diversity of ELLs) and avoid the tendency to make a minority group member the spokesperson for his or her group.

 

“What to Do in Week One?” by Rick Wormeli in Educational Leadership, September 2016 (Vol. 74, #1, p. 10-15), http://bit.ly/2bHsHQh; Wormeli can be reached at rwormeli@cox.net.

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4. Smiling Before Thanksgiving

(Originally titled “Correcting Our Connections”)

            In this article in Educational Leadership, Eric Toshalis (Jobs for the Future) remembers working in a university kitchen that served thousands of undergraduates. He particularly remembers what he and his colleagues said as they carried scalding water or sharp knives through the noisy space: Behind you. “Wherever I was in that kitchen and whatever work I was doing,” says Toshalis, “I heard those two words filling the space with a constant message of safety and compassion. As a result, I knew I was seen, trusted, and cared for. That made me feel like a valuable part of a team, it made me work harder, and it made me want to take care of others.”

            When he became a teacher, Toshalis heard a lot about caring for students but saw a disconnect between words and deeds. “For example,” he says, “we’d help students by publicly telling them what they were doing wrong, and then later we’d scold them for not requesting more help. Or we’d shower students with praise for their intellect, then tell them we were disappointed when they didn’t persist in challenging tasks that might broadcast their incompetence.”

All this made Toshalis believe that the classroom was not a good place for many students, that “my fellow teachers and I were cooking up forms of care that essentially made our students disappear, made them understand themselves as untrustworthy, and ultimately made them feel unsafe.” He began to think about ways that classrooms could be more like the safe environment he’d experienced in the college kitchen. Some ideas:

• Being dispassionate doesn’t work. Teachers are told, Don’t smile till Thanksgiving, Don’t let them see you sweat – ways of maintaining control and not letting relationships cloud professional judgment. Toshalis disagrees: “If we want our students to be educated more than manipulated, convinced more than coerced, and even indignant more than indifferent, we have to approach our work with a relational and sometimes passionate orientation. We need to let them see us sweat and smile way before Thanksgiving. Students know we’re not robots, so let’s not try to act like them.” Standing in the hallway during passing time and chatting informally with students is a start.

• Recognize that schools are not a level playing field. Toshalis believes the power dynamics in schools often work against the disadvantaged, that most students know perfectly well who is privileged as schools divert resources to those who “deserve” them, ranking and sorting students. “In the end,” he says, “to truly care for students in a way that allows us to claim authentically, ‘I’ve got your back,’ we have to work with youth to recognize and articulate the political realities all of us must shoulder.”

• Trust has to be earned. “Given how vulnerable students are to our moods, evaluations, and decisions,” says Toshalis, “students need to determine whether we are worthy of risking interpersonal engagement before they agree to learn from us.” And that takes time.

• Students’ anger isn’t a threat; it’s an emotion. “The real threats,” says Toshalis, “are apathy, disengagement, indifference, neglect, cruelty, and violence.” Anger is a thermometer telling us what’s going on inside. Calm down, lower your voice, take it easy are ways to tamp down anger. “Doing so cuts us off from rich, nuanced information we might otherwise use to better construct relational connections and pedagogical interventions,” he says. Anger is actually “the tip of the information iceberg.” It’s best to ask, “Tell me why you’re upset right now. I want to know what happened that made you feel this way.”

• Lecturing isn’t connecting. “Dialogue is the oxygen of healthy relationships,” says Toshalis. “The give-and-take of perspectives, ideas, needs, and desires is what allows us to know the other and negotiate. The familiar IRE – initiate-respond-evaluate – classroom pattern is the opposite of this. “In the mind of a hypothesis-testing, question-posing, edge-exploring, meaning-making adolescent, this turn-by-turn exchange is unnatural and stultifying. It’s why students are animated and engaged in conversations with peers and why they’re often withdrawn and silent in class.” The solution? Ask open-ended questions. Get students talking to each other. Call on students at random. Move away from the front of the class and sit with students. Talk with them. Slow down. Listen.

 

“Correcting Our Connections” by Eric Toshalis in Educational Leadership, September 2016 (Vol. 74, #1, p. 16-20), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2bMJsq1; Toshalis can be reached at etoshalis@post.harvard.edu.

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5. Cultural Factors in the Education of Chinese-American Students

            In this article in Communiqué, Angela Chen and Kristin Rispoli (Michigan State University) caution K-12 educators about stereotyping Asian-American students. Focusing on Chinese-American families (from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Malaysia), who are on track to be the largest Asian population in the United States, Chen and Rispoli suggest that families fall into three groups:

-   Highly acculturated – The parents were born in the U.S. and went through the American school system; they advocate fearlessly for their children and often engage with school personnel and participate in school policymaking; they support their children’s learning through joint reading and fun activities at home.

-   Partially acculturated – The parents received some education abroad and some in the U.S.; they are more likely to be uncertain in their views and patterns of involvement, reflecting a desire to balance traditional Chinese and mainstream American practices.

-   Least acculturated – The parents are recent immigrants who completed their entire education abroad; they advocate for their children only as needed and aren’t likely to be active in school functions and communicate regularly with educators; they support their children’s education with academically focused resources (museums), extra homework (practice drills), and close monitoring of progress.

“The distinct differences in school involvement between these groups of parents,” say Chen and Rispoli, “may relate to their level of English proficiency, familiarity with mainstream American culture, and understanding of the U.S. general and special-education school system.”

            The researchers go on to identify three examples of different cultural orientations among Chinese-American families:

            • A collectivist social orientation – Individuals are defined in terms of their social relationships and are expected to protect their social self and maintain a central role within the social group. Children are expected to fulfill parents’ high expectations for academic achievement and bring honor to the family. This orientation can also be expressed in an indirect communication style, nonverbal signals to convey thoughts and feelings, and a tendency to avoid conflict and maintain harmony.

            • Growth mindset – Families are influenced by the Confucian belief that all individuals are teachable and perfectible with adherence to learning values: sincerely engaging in learning, concentration, diligence, perseverance, and dealing with hardship.

            • Beliefs about health and disease – Families’ orientation is shaped by Eastern philosophy and religion: Taoism (yin and yang), Buddhism (fate, cause, and effect), and Confucianism (harmony, benevolence, and righteousness). This belief system may lead families to explain children’s learning trajectory in terms of physical, supernatural, or metaphysical forces.

            These cultural beliefs produce a strong work ethic that goes a long way to explaining the above-average academic achievement of many Chinese-American students. But there is a downside. “The focus away from children’s innate ability,” say Chen and Rispoli, “could contribute to denial of an existing condition (e.g., learning disability, autism), a lack of understanding of children’s needs, or a delay in help-seeking by some immigrant Chinese-American parents, who may believe that their children just need to work harder to catch up with their peers, rather than seek school-based services to support the needs of their children.” Significant numbers of Chinese-American parents believe that disabilities in their children are caused by physical agents (e.g., birth control pills or extended delivery time at birth), supernatural agents (punishment from a god), or metaphysical agents (yin-yang imbalance).

            Taking all this into account, Chen and Rispoli have the following recommendations for educators working with Chinese-American families:

-   Keep parents regularly informed about children’s learning progress and social-emotional development to promote trust in the school.

-   Provide families with information on developmental expectations, preferably in Chinese, using familiar cultural and social terms to encourage early help-seeking.

-   Seek to understand parents’ perspectives when explaining diagnosis and treatment of learning problems.

-   Do not assume that lack of communication with educators means apathy, passivity, or good understanding about families’ roles in supporting children’s learning.

-   Work with families to jointly establish expectations for their participation in IEP meetings and intervention strategies at home, and regularly check on whether parents are satisfied with their level of involvement.

-   Be sensitive to differences in beliefs and communication styles, especially personal versus group-oriented goals for children, nonverbal communication, and conflict avoidance.

 

“Cultural Considerations in Engaging Chinese-American Families” by Angela Chen and Kristin Rispoli in Communiqué, September 2016 (Vol. 45, #1, p. 4, 6), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2bLLPtd; Rispoli can be reached at rispolik@msu.edu.

 

6. Helping College Students Deal with First-Year Self-Doubt

            “Regardless of their credentials, many freshmen doubt that they have the necessary brainpower or social adeptness to succeed in college,” says David Kirp (University of California/Berkeley) in this New York Times article. “This fear of failing hits poor, minority, and first-generation college students especially hard. If they flunk an exam, or a professor doesn’t call on them, their fears about whether they belong may well be confirmed. The cycle of doubt becomes self-reinforcing, and students are more likely to drop out.”

            But recent research shows that this “dismal script” can be changed by a simple, low-cost intervention, says Kirp. In one study, researchers at a major state university asked incoming students to spend 40 minutes reading upperclassmen’s accounts of how they as freshmen struggled with being snubbed by their classmates and intimidated by professors – but how things turned around when they reached out to instructors and began to make friends. One upperclassman wrote, “Part of me thought I had been accepted due to a stroke of luck, and that I would not measure up to the other students. Early on, I bombed a test. It was the worst grade I’d ever received, and I felt terrible and isolated. But then I found out that no one did well on that test. The professor was trying to set a high standard.” A second group of freshmen read a summary of Carol Dweck’s research on the malleability of intelligence – that it’s not a fixed trait but can be grown through hard work.

            Using either of these brief interventions had a significant effect on students from disadvantaged homes, reports Kirp. The year before, only 69 percent of similar students completed a full freshman course load, compared with 79 percent of more-fortunate students. The interventions cut that gap in half.

In a similar experiment by the same researchers with students from top-rated urban charter schools, 41 percent of students in the treatment group remained full-time college students during freshman year, compared with just 32 percent in the control group. The students who read the upperclassmen’s accounts or the Dweck research were more likely to get into the swing of campus life, reach out for academic help, and live on campus.

            Two of the researchers who conducted these studies, Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen of Stanford University, also tracked the progress of African-American students who had graduated from an elite private university. As freshmen, they had been through a similar intervention. By graduation, their grades were a third of a grade-point average higher than students in the control group (the difference between B+ and A-), and the black-white achievement gap had been cut in half. These students said they were healthier and happier, and since graduation, they are, so far, doing better professionally and personally.

            Researchers are working on getting this simple intervention used by more colleges, and the impact could be significant. But Kirp says that colleges still have to do their part – identify roadblocks to graduation, improve the quality of classroom instruction, support students financially, and provide mentoring and counseling services for students in need. As Gregory Walton says of the psychological intervention, “It’s the engine oil, not the engine.”

 

“Overcoming Freshman Fear” by David Kirp in The New York Times, August 21, 2016,

http://nyti.ms/2bwK5nu; Kirp can be reached at kirp@berkeley.edu.

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7. Short Item:

            A teacher’s video – Check out Dwayne Reed’s beginning-of-the-year video for his fourth graders: http://www.wmtw.com/news/mr-reed-welcomes-4thgrade-class-with-fun-rap-song/41334622

 

“Welcome to the Fourth Grade” by Dwayne Reed, August 23, 2016

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