Teach Your Children

The opening of Graham Nash's 1970 song, "Teach Your Children" reminds the listener of the critical role of character development in K-12 education programs and the importance of acquiring a moral compass that will support and guide every learner during their self-directed academic, social, and emotional journey to adulthood.

"You, who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.
And so become yourself because the past is just a good bye."

Education programs should provide countless opportunities for students to discover their talents and pursue their passions, instead of being an obligation and competition to be “ready” for college and careers.

Schooling should be about students learning to love, being loved, and cultivating a love of learning, rather than students learning primarily for assessment.

"We always find time for what we truly love, one way or another.

Suppose further that love, being an inclusive spirit, refused to choose between Shakespeare and Toni Morrison (or Tony Bennett, for that matter), and we located our bliss in the unstable relationship between the two, rattling from book to book, looking for connections and grandly unconcerned about whether we’ve read “enough,” as long as we read what we read with love…

The whole world’s a classroom, and to really make it one, the first thing is to believe it is.

We need to take seriously the proposition that reflection and knowledge born out of contact with the real world, an education carpentered out of the best combination we can make of school, salon, reading, online exploration, walking the streets, hiking in the woods, museums, poetry classes at the Y, and friendship, may be the best education of all—not a makeshift substitute that must apologize for itself in the shadow of academe…

You get the idea. The American tradition, in learning as well as jazz and activism, is improvisatory. There are as many ways to become an educated American as there are Americans."

~ Jon Spayde, “Learning in the Key of Life”, Utne Reader, 1998

Today many schools are eliminating vigorous extracurricular experiences that help students discover and develop the diverse ways they are “smart”, so they can devote more time to preparing students for rigorous standardized tests so the state can measure and compare how “smart” they are.

Ed reformers clearly fail to understand that for many people, success in life is not about being a good test taker or the subjects you learned in school, but are you ready to test your limits and have you learned how to live...

"Hope when the moment comes, you’ll say…

I, I did it all
I, I did it all
I owned every second that this world could give
I saw so many places, the things that I did
With every broken bone, I swear I lived…"

Unfortunately, pursing your passions and creating your future self are not priorities of the Common Core State Standards which are focused primarily on preparing students for standardized tests that will measure and determine if they are "on track " to graduate ready for college and careers.

It is foolish to believe that students who are prepared and trained to think and perform within the sterile “box” of a standardized test will become adult learners and workers who can create and think “outside the box”.

As Sir Ken Robinson has explained…

You can’t just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.

Google VP Laszlo Bock explained in a NY Times interview…

“One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation…

After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment…”

In Head-Hunting Big Data May Not be Such A Big Deal NY Times, 6/19/13

Rather than focusing on rigorous math/ELA standards and skills that prepare students for a standardized test, K-12 learning programs should focus on vigorous, purposeful, and transferable standards and skills that are relevant to students and prepare them for life.

Learning unfolds in a safe environment that rewards and values curiosity, innovation, imagination, and risk-taking. A properly designed and implemented education program will nurture student confidence rather than fear, and cultivate hope rather than despair.

The CCSS close reading strategy demands that all students independently “dive into” and master complex informational text and teachers are discouraged from answering student questions or introducing and reviewing prior knowledge with them.

 In the EngageNY directions for the Common Core exemplar, “A Close Reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address” it states,

“The idea here is to plunge students into an independent encounter with this short text… Some students may be frustrated, but all students need practice in doing their best to stay with something they do not initially understand. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address…The aim is not to have them ask questions but do what they can on their own.”

This callous “sink or swim” approach to reading instruction may benefit our highly skilled readers, but what about those students who will be discouraged and may become even less confident readers due to repeated “near drowning” experiences?

More importantly, is this approach likely to instill a love and appreciation of reading for enjoyment, and help start all of our students on a journey down the path to becoming lifelong readers?

The notion that the best and most effective way to cultivate "grit", is by compelling students to complete frustrating math and ELA activities is foolish.

This misguided approach is more focused on students learning how to endure and tolerate unpleasant and dispiriting reading activities than cultivating pluck and persistence.

K-12 learning standards would better serve and support the academic, social, and emotional needs of lifelong learners if they cultivated stamina, devotion, enthusiasm, resolve, and resilience.

"You've gotta swim
Swim for your life
Swim for the music
That saves you
When you're not so sure you'll survive...

Yeah you've gotta swim
Don't let yourself sink
Just find the horizon
I promise you it's not as far as you think"

People will develop and acquire these essential life skills when they are engaged in personally relevant and vigorous learning activities that they feel passionate about, whether thay take place inside or outside the classroom.

"That hail storm back in '83,
Sure did take a toll on his family.
But he stayed strong and carried on,
Just like his Dad and Granddad did before him."

The school experience should not be reduced to rigorous lessons in, at best, tolerating innumerable uncomfortable situations where the constant rationale is, "Don't you want to be college and career ready?" and "You need to know this for the test!" The whole school experience has been diminished and transformed into a forced march toward a state designated performance level.

Instead of focusing efforts on rigorous learning that cultivates student grit, we should be creating vigorous learning activities and experiences that capture students’ interest and stimulate's their own desire to learn, also known as “flow”.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, students achieve flow when they find a challenge or task so enjoyable they will pursue it as a reward in itself.

When a person experiences flow they want to do more of an activity leading to advanced skill development and mastery of the task.

 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi further explains the importance and power of learning activities that activate flow in, ”Thoughts About Education” …

“…Yet it seems increasingly clear that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive in nature. It is not that students cannot learn, it is that they do not wish to…

 Of the two main forms of motivation — extrinsic and intrinsic — I focus primarily on the second kind. Although both are needed to induce people to invest energy in learning, intrinsic motivation, which is operative when we learn something primarily because we find the task enjoyable and not because it is useful, is a more effective and more satisfying way to learn…”

Supporters of the Common Core may point to standards that call for creative and divergent thinking yet the multiple choice format of the Common Core standardized tests discourages and discounts such thinking as they have only one right answer and plausible responses are graded as wrong.

Rather than rating and sorting students according to a common and narrow set of testable academic skills we should be celebrating and cultivating uncommon talents and divergent thinking in our classrooms.

As Arnold Dodge explains, schools should be honoring and uplifting the creative “characters” in their classrooms…

Many of our schools have become dry, lifeless places. Joy and spirited emotions have been replaced by fear, generated by masters from afar. These remote overseers — politicians, policy makers, test prep executives — have decided that tests and numbers and drills and worksheets and threats and ultimatums will somehow improve the learning process…

When a student does well on a reading test, the results tell us nothing about how well she will use reading as a tool to learn larger topics, nor does it tell us that she will be interested in reading at all. What it tells us is that she is good at taking a reading test…

With the battle cry “College and Career Ready,” the champions of standardization are determined to drum out every last bit of creativity, unpredictability, humor, improvisation and genuine emotion from the education process in the name of useful “outcomes.”..

The self-righteous, powerful and moneyed, if they have their way, will eliminate from schools kids who have character — or kids who are characters, for that matter…

But there is another way. If we believe that children are imaginative creatures by nature with vast amounts of talent waiting to be mined, and if we believe that opening children’s minds and hearts to the thrill of learning — without competition and ranking — is a healthy approach to child development, then we are off to a good start…

William Glasser, M.D., studied schools for over 30 years and in his seminal work, The Quality School, he outlines five basic needs that all human beings are born with: survival, love, power, fun and freedom.

How many policymakers today would subscribe to having fun or experiencing freedom as a goal of our educational system? Just think of the possibilities if they did. Kids actually laughing in school and not being punished for it. Students feeling strong enough to talk truth to power and not being silenced. Youngsters feeling free to write with creativity and originality without being ridiculed for deviating from state test guidelines.

And that’s before we even get to love.

Think of the characters that would emerge from such an environment. Comedians, orators, raconteurs, revolutionaries, magicians, clowns, young people with agency and drive, having fun, not afraid to take risks or make mistakes. Not afraid to be children…

The BLOG: Needed in School: 140 Characters ~ Arnold Dodge

We are foolishly implementing national education reforms obsessed with measuring how students compare to each other at a time when schools should be doubling their efforts to maximize our students ability and inclination to care about others.

It is unwise to focus so much instructional time on students staying closely connected to text, when many of them lack the ability to socially and emotionally connect with people.

Education reform should be about cultivating changemakers, good decision makers, and healthy risk takers rather than training text dependent thinkers and proficient multiple choice test takers.

Ensuring that all students are college and career ready is of little consequence if it comes at the expense of preparing confident learners that are courageous and compassion ready.

"I am a giant
I am an eagle
I am a lion
Down in the jungle
I am a marchin' band
I am the people
I am a helpin' hand
And I am a hero...

I'm that star up in the sky
I'm that mountain peak up high
Hey, I made it
I'm the world's greatest
And I'm that little bit of hope
When my back's against the ropes
I can feel it
I'm the world's greatest"

"We make a living by what we get,

but we make a life by what we give."

~ Winston Churchill