Principaled Confessions

So apparently there’s a type of challenge going around for school administrators to announce snow days in song. Well one of my school board members begin challenging me last year to do one.  I finally got around to doing a version of it.  Here you go….https://youtu.be/9kb1ZA-FPKc

Sousa Snow Day Video

So this year at my school, we have spent a fair amount of time focusing on kindness.  Our students and staff have made conscious efforts to treat each other with kindness, always trying to presume the best intentions.  So far, people around the school have been energized by this and has led to Guidance and classroom lessons on kindness as well.

School related bullying and meanness has been around for a long time.  One of the large differences between that behavior when I was young versus today, is that when kids went home, they could escape the meanness and the discouragement.  These days, social media apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc, mean that children can’t escape the negativity.  They are surrounded by it 24/7.  While social media has the capacity for good, such as allowing families and friends to stay connected even if they are separated by great distances, often times, when we find that students have not been kind to each other, social media is at play.

Children are not the only ones that use social media.  Many communities, clubs, and towns have websites, Facebook pages, etc. that act as forums for adults to both praise and persecute.  Much like we see with children, it is often easier for a person to type negative comments, rather than make the effort to seek out face to face conversation to work out differences.  Sadly, I have seen schools and teachers be the targets of such posts all too often.  While public education is often a targeted topic for politicians, newspapers, and television, it is the personalization that social media allows that makes it so pervasive.  When it comes to education and social media, I encourage folks to “Praise Locally and Criticize Globally”.

You may have seen teachers, family, and friends, referenced negatively in a post.  Slandering a teacher’s name or alluding to a specific teacher in a media post does little to solve a problem.  While there may be an allure to public venting, an actual conversation with the teacher about a frustration or miscommunication does so much more to resolve the situation.  Overall, as an educator, I have had great experiences with parents.  Some of whom I have become friends with and most of whom I respect greatly.  It is no easy job being a parent.  I was always fond of telling those parents who apologized for calling me to “complain/discuss” their child, that they should not apologize for being their child’s advocate, even if they are doing it in an emotional manner.  Frankly, I am more concerned with the parents who don’t advocate for their kids, or who are not emotional about their child’s education and well-being.  I just wish folks would refrain from posting their concerns online.

Communication works best when it goes both ways.  As teachers, we often take for granted that our students are talking to their parents about school, and while we provide constant feedback to our students, the major methods of communication home are often the student agenda books, webpages, progress reports and the report cards that go out every few weeks.  Please consider these a strong part of our overall communication.  If there is something that is not understood or concerning, email or call, and we can talk about how we can move forward to ensure learning.  Most times, this results in teachers, parents, students, and principals being on the same page.  It takes time, communication, and understanding so that we all have each other’s best interests at heart but we have to start by assuming best intentions.

Overall, schools work best if we all assume best intentions and increase communication, (and not through Facebook).  If I had one thing to offer to parents (and teachers) it is that positive communication, early and often, is key to creating a strong partnership between home and school.  Take time to think about all the positives we experience with regard to our children’s education, and then highlight some of them with a note or phone call.  I assure you, you’ll make someone’s day, and you’ll be glad you did.

What are schools designed to do? It appears that the definition, the mission, of our schools change almost year to year. The days of a school teaching the three “Rs” are long gone. I do not believe that public education can solve all of society’s ills, however, if we are going to educate children, we need to address some of the issues that get in the way of them being ready to learn.

In addition to teaching academics, schools must address students’ behavioral health for students to be successful, and not with the same thinking we used years ago. Behavioral health is more complex. It is an amalgam of mental health, physical health, and emotional health, and as such deserves a more sophisticated approach than the traditional behaviorist strategies. We know much more about how children learn and develop now than we did when I first starting teaching, so we must employ what we know to help students be ready to attend to learning in order for them to be successful.

If you were to ask public school teachers what are the top two things they do as a teacher, they would no doubt say, teach academics and manage behaviors, not always in that order. In each of these veins, teachers are successful with the vast majority of their students, but what about those students that Ross Greene called “unlucky”? Those are the outliers that traditional Skinner-esque interventions do not work with. These are the students that engage in “unlucky behaviors” whose public school behaviorist remedies, often fail and lead to more often than not, strategies that end in “…sion’s” – detention, suspension, expulsion.

Dr. Ross Greene’s premise, that a behaviorist’s approach will not fully change these children’s behaviors, because it simply addresses the symptoms of the behavior rather than its root cause, is echoed by Jessica Minehan, author of The Behavior Code (2012 Harvard Education Press, Cambridge, Mass). She agrees with Dr. Greene, when she states that “behavior is communication.” and educators must dig deeply to find what the communication is telling us about the student’s real concerns or issues. I recall a student I had while teaching 7th grade in a small school in Vermont. His name was Lance. Lance lost his mother two years prior, his father was away often as a truck driver, and there was little financial security in his home. He was a bright enough student, however, he had a particularly bad time behaviorally and academically, especially in my colleague’s English/Language Arts class. I had developed a relationship with him along with our school’s social worker. Together, and not overnight, we surmised that Lance felt powerless in school, particularly in classes that were rather “strict” and limited student choice. We worked with him to take control of his learning, to give him strategies to allow him to change the perception my colleague had of him. We asked him to start by saying hello every day, answering questions in class even if they are wrong, and turning in homework even if it was not done completely or correctly. The teacher started to compliment Lance, and reach out to him to support him, commenting to me and others how much Lance had changed. The effect on Lance was that he began to believe he was gaining some control over his experience in that classroom, and soon his plan to “control” his environment turned into him actually changing his own behavior and achieving some actual success.

I heard Jessica Minehan speak at a presentation in my district. Ross Green’s comments brought me back to her overall message, that we as educators must consider students’ underlying reasons for their behavior, and until we treat the root cause, the behavior will continue. But how we do it is not easy. Early in my career I was part of a team that started a behavioral intervention program where our goal was to address student’s negative behaviors by creating a program that focused on raising the academic levels of the students who happen to be demonstrating the most disruptive behaviors. We started out with a small number of students, as we thought that ratio and relationship development was key to our success. In the first year we did experience success, so much so that the district leadership decided that they would triple our number of students without adding staff. I was not courageous enough as a young teacher to stand up the forces that did this and explain that the programs small ratios and relationship focus was at its core success. In the end, after one year of success, it took less than a year for it to fail. In Alfie Kohn’s book, Beyond Discipline (2006 ASCD Alexandria, VA) he explains that one of the reasons “children act in troubling ways because they are wanting for warm, caring relationships…”. That experience brought Alfie Kohn’s premise to life for me, and has influenced my teaching ever since.

While I recognize that I employ, more often that not, a “Pollyanna” perspective on modern education, I do think that regardless of our success rate, we need to have compassion as we address student behavior. In today’s world of immediate social media posting, lawyers quick to litigate, and the news media’s ease at which to call schools’ to task, employing compassionate, outside the box approaches to behavior is not easy. However, if we are courageous enough and can combine compassion with the correct supports needed to cut to the root cause of student behavior, we can change a child’s academic future.

Originally Posted on April 13, 2012 by C Sousa

I was once told that time is the currency of education. I believe this to be true. We need time to teach our students, to allow them to reach goals, and be creative in their approaches to learning; and this time must be fluid and flexible in order to support the varied learners in our schools. Recently, it occurred to me that if time is the currency, experience is the bank, and what we bank matters. There have been recent conversations about our education system and how we are experiencing a lack of innovation and creativity, and that we must teach students to think creatively. I agree, and the standardized, over scheduled, lock step programs we have our schools’ operating by does not serve this goal. If we want to increase innovation and creativity in our students, and if time is the currency and experience the bank, then it is just as important to bank creativity, to experience it, as it is to find the time to practice it.

Let me explain. During a recent lesson I asked students to take historically significant speeches and transcribe them using a different vernacular, and perform them. We looked at vernaculars, both past and present, and yes, humor, props, and costumes were absolutely encouraged. In the end we had some great performances of famous speeches done in “valley girl”, “hip-hop”, and “1960’s hippie” lingo. It was fun and it allowed the students to use concrete tools and analyze, evaluate, and create, and while the level of difficulty was not high, I was hoping that the creativity would be.

Overall it was a nice lesson, but what was interesting to me was not the students who excelled, but rather the students who struggled creatively with the assignment. As I thought more on it, and discussed it with my colleagues, it became evident (at least in a totally nonscientific way) that those students who struggled with creativity may not have had much of a bank of creative experiences to draw from. We saw a common thread in those who struggled with the lesson; their educational independence, along with their creativity, had been limited due to a variety of suspected reasons (a hyper-focus on test achievement, parenting styles, school/class rankings, peer pressure, etc).

I recalled what I had learned at the Learning and Brain conference this past fall; that everyone can be creative and that creativity is built on prior learning. Robert W. Weisberg, PhD references this in his recent work; Out-of-the-box thinking in creativity (2009). Dr. Weisberg uses many examples that cite creativity is most often based on prior learning. “Creative” people adapt what they have learned to a new scenario, twist what they have experienced to fit into a new reality, and borrow from past achievements to create the building blocks of new ideas. This makes sense, and following this line of thinking means that we must fill our children with meaningful “out of the box” experiences so that they can draw from them in order to be creative in life and learning.

Now there are certainly some people among us who have a propensity for outstanding creativity, giving way to the Picasso’s in life. And while everyone cannot be a Picasso, everyone to some degree can exhibit Picasso-like creativity. However, it is not enough to only have the prior knowledge in which to build on. The propensity for creativity is also tied to the manner in which that knowledge is acquired. Students who are risk takers, who are not afraid to think independently, who are more willing to “think outside the box” have had that skill fostered. Risk taking has become part of their learning. Our current educational environment is not always conducive to this, and with outside influences that tend to put our children in boxes and label them, teaching students to push their boundaries and take educational risks is more important than ever. To foster creativity we must allow and create opportunities for children to take risks, acquire knowledge, and be available to build, creatively, on their learning.