Is Humanity Enough?

One of my principals once said, “Even though it may seem like some of them may have been raised by wolves, we still have to teach them!” This quote was ever present on my mind this week as I pondered the question of relating to at-risk students. How do you relate to someone with whom you don’t immediately share commonalities? Is it essential to have something in common to relate to someone? Is the common thread of humanity enough?

Based on the readings and many of the postings, I feel like authentic learning happens when a trusting relationship is established between the teacher and the students within the confines of a trusting environment. Some students enter a classroom and automatically trust the adult and their peers; they are open to experiences, eager to learn, and have adequate supports at home. Establishing a rapport with such students can be relatively easy.  However, more and more, students come to having experienced life in ways that make learning a lower priority than having other needs met. Maslow theorized a hierarchy of needs whereby basic necessities like food, shelter, and clothing are imperative before higher order needs can be met. Many standards mandated by school boards are simply unessential. Therefore, if a student comes to school without the basic needs being met, he or she will be incapable of truly participating in the learning process. Schools have some supports in place to fill in some of these needs, but just the uncertainty of the essentials can negatively impact the psyche of a child and become a substantial barrier to learning.

So for these students, teachers must “go the extra mile” and identify ways to build a relationship. If a child feels safe, this removes one major barrier to learning. Another way to build that trust is to identify ways in which the teacher can potentially empathize with the students. Personally, as a child of contentious divorced parents, I can relate to many students who are forced to move frequently, deal with marginal incomes, and struggle to fit in with peers who seem to have so much more than they do. As a young teacher, I thought it would be best to keep these experiences to myself; however, as I have grown, I feel openness has afforded me opportunities to reach student who otherwise would be skeptical of my relatability.  Naturally, there will be students who experience things that I did not; things that are much more challenging and perhaps even life-threatening. In those times, I feel like I can only demonstrate compassion, lend a listening ear, and be an advocate for my students who need me most.

So is humanity enough to relate to each other? I say yes. It does not matter who raised the kids because, deep down, I feel we are all responsible for them anyway.

My Why

At the beginning of the school year, my principal asked us to come up with our “why”- why are we teaching? Why are we showing up every day? This was a no brainer for me: I am here to help kids think. If I can help them think about things at a deeper level than before they got to me, I will be satisfied. As I see it, we have a thinking deficit occurring in epidemic proportions in our society. Many of my colleagues express dissatisfaction with a generation possessing learned helplessness and extreme egocentricism. I often wonder about the merit of this, and if it’s true, what’s to be done? That’s where thinking comes in.

When people are empowered with thinking tools, they can see the world beyond their noses. They can create; they can consider the less obvious.  In many ways, this is what Slavin (2012) describes as transfer or “the application of knowledge acquired in one situation to new situations” (p. 205). With transfer as the desired outcome for all lessons, students have an increased chance that they will feel empowered with useful skills to navigate the world and perhaps begin to see more complicated situations beyond their individual bubbles.  

This is the reason for my why. As a huge fan of Sir Ken Robinson, I have often been inspired by many things he has said or written, but one snippet in particular always resonated with me: “All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think” (BrainyQuote, 2015). It pains me to think that this gets squeezed out of kids when we need their creative juices to make advancements in our world. Problems are solved when people are able to analyze, reflect, initiate, create, and persevere. That’s my why. I just gotta get em thinking. We need them to.

BrainyQuote (2015). Ken Robinson quotes. Retrieved from  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/k/ken_robinson.html#dePxbXUxVsH1M57q.99

Slavin, R. E. (2012). Educational psychology: Theory and practice (Tenth ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Ask why... and wait

Sometimes I find myself, if just for a moment, wondering where I would be professionally if I had chosen to major in education immediately out of high school. After all, I did win an essay contest about why I wanted to be a teacher, but instead, I majored in psychology and fell in love with solving human behavioral puzzles. For one of my classes, I was given the Myers-Brigg personality test where it was revealed that I was an ENFJ. Over the years, I have often wondered if I would still be an E, and admittedly I cannot even remember what the N and F are supposed to reveal about me. However, I know for certain I remain a solid J (judger) as I am a highly decisive, live and die by your decisions kind of woman.  In my twenties, this translated to an individual who harbored little patience or tolerance for indecision. 

Fast forward 20 years and three sons later, a lot has changed about my J-ness. Personally, even though I tend to be less impulsive and more deliberate, I would still consider myself highly decisive. However, after years of waiting on my P husband and choosy children, I have developed, most likely by necessity, a patience for those who take a little longer to figure things out. Therefore, I believe this personal growth has allowed the teacher me to not only have patience for but also genuinely appreciate waiting for students to decide. As Slavin (2012) noted, teachers should be waiting at least 3 seconds to allow for students responses. Although it is not mentioned, I believe the deeper the question, the more processing time that’s required for students to adequately formulate a response. My favorite questioning strategy is to follow up student responses with “Why” and wait. As Tom Petty might say, “The waiting is the hardest part.” The silence can be incredibly awkward; the whole room feels it sometimes. So many students want to chime in while their peers are agonizing searching within themselves for something to say. But man, when they come up with a deep insight or experience an Oprah famous aha moment, it’s pure bliss for everyone. The satisfaction is palpable. 

In addition, in my experience, asking students to tap into their metacognitive skills by asking them why requires time.  This strategy aligns neatly with one of the pervasive undercurrents of Common Core, which demands that students explain their responses. If they are practicing providing explanations for their thought processes in the classroom with a high level of regularity, hopefully this will transfer to many situations throughout their academics. 

So I suppose the path I chose after high school was correct. Had I become a teacher at 22,  I’m not sure I would have developed my ask why and wait approach. While that may have been fine, I believe my students and I are better off with the experienced less “J” me.

Reflections on knowledge and skill acquisition

Since entering graduate school almost two years ago, I have often reflected that I can feel myself growing smarter. I am not only talking about learning new facts and applying them to my practice as an educator. More, I am referring specifically to my ability to think critically, reason, question, and problem solve. Many times I thought I was just excited to be back in the classroom in that capacity again. However, after reading this week’s text selection, I felt validated when Slavin (2012) discussed brain research that found “that as a person gains in knowledge and skill, his or her brain becomes more efficient” (p. 155). I understand that this specific research  supports the idea that our brain utilizes fewer spaces as skill increases; however, this ties neatly with the notion of automaticity, which occurs when skills are so fluid and fluent that there is no apparent effort involved. I am by no means implying that I find graduate school effortless. To the contrary, being in graduate school, working full time, and having a life provides numerous challenges that sometimes seem insurmountable. Instead, I’m referring to the ease at which I accomplish the tasks put forth to me by my professors.

Thus, the great hope as a teacher is to identify ways to instruct students, allow them to discover, and practice new skills to the point where eventually there is that level of automaticity. So the great question, is how do we teachers attain that? Based on readings, some of that comes from the brain growing, developing, and doing its things. However, this seems a very minor component of the larger puzzle. Exposure is essential to developing the proper pathways to build knowledge (Slavin, 2012). Therefore, adults (including parents and teachers) must provide rich and meaningful experiences to help build the neurological pathways and background knowledge to facilitate long-term storage of new semantic memories.

A second takeaway from this week’s readings also caused me to reflect on my personal experiences as a student. The notion of interference was raised by Slavin (2012), and was defined as “the inhibition of recall of certain information by the presence of other information in memory” (158). What’s interesting about this is pondering the number of stimuli that could potentially interfere with the acquisition of new memory. Personally, I’m fascinated by what makes for optimal conditions to learning and how to subsequently apply that understanding to help my students learn. If a student is being bombarded by auditory stimuli, how can there be merit in many student’s claims that they learn better why listening to music – and not the calm, tranquil kind. This seems counterintuitive, but so many claim this, there must be some merit there, right? Certainly, I look forward to learning more on this subject and how I can apply this to my practice.

Slavin, R. E. (2012). Educational psychology: Theory and practice (Tenth ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.