Camp Creek Blog

preK drop-outs

2010-03-07T14:32:36Z

Developing an enthusiasm for learning is especially important in the primary grades. Even students who have excelled in preK or kindergarten can find first or second grade so trying that they turn off to learning. Such disengagement has become so widespread that Sharon Ritchie, a senior scientist at FPG Child Development Institute, has worked with educators on a dropout-prevention project that focuses on children in preK through third grade.

“You can walk into a classroom and see kids who by third grade are done with school,” she says. “They are angry and feel school is not a fair place or a place that sees them as the individual that they are.” Some of that disengagement, Ritchie says, is rooted in the way students in second or third grade are taught. She found that students in preK classes spent 136 minutes a day involved in hands-on projects. That dropped to 16 minutes by kindergarten and 12 minutes a day by second and third grade.

— Developmentally Appropriate Practice in the Age of Testing, Harvard Education Letter

Go ahead and boo me. I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short. You’re competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week, 11, 12 months a year.

— Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, addressing middle- and high-school students in Denver

How long do we need to make the school day to give children meaningful learning experiences?

skills are nice, but give them time to develop creativity

2010-02-27T16:50:36Z

Most adults, with our increasingly hectic schedules, assume that at least creativity is alive in our children when we send them off to drawing class or bassoon lessons. Yet most children’s time in the arts is spent either appreciating someone else’s art or learning the skill required to make the art, so that perhaps in the future one could be creative. This training sometimes leads to amazing technical skill. I have met more than a few children who can perfectly recreate a Dragonball-Z character or still-life bowl of fruit, but who struggle to create an original character, story, technique, or idea.

So what is creativity? Many will argue about semantics and definitions. I will not enter that fray. Whatever it is, creativity revolves around unique, independent, and original thinking. It sometimes leads to an activity, such as playing the violin or implementing a new program to end homelessness. But without creative thought, the activity simply cannot be creative. In the end, only you can say whether you have been creative — only you can know whether your thoughts are unique, independent, original. So when was the last time you were creative? The answer for many Americans’ children is “never.” — Michael Bitz, Creativity in Crisis: The “Brain Drain” in American Schools

Do

2010-02-16T15:24:59Z

If things need to change, it means that what we do becomes incredibly more important. Do. Action suddenly becomes more valuable. It means that there is opportunity, if one can perceive everyone else’s blind spot and find some white space for themselves. If everyone is getting together and complaining, it means that there’s a lot of unoccupied space somewhere.

Basically, it means that your contribution matters. And if you can muster up the strength to push against your fear, you might be able to do something that changes the game… It isn’t about being Anti. It’s about being pro-something-good and making and acting and moving towards Pre-something-incredible.

— Frank Chimero

the hardest thing

2010-02-15T16:10:34Z

The whole problem with people is … they know what matters, but they don’t choose it … The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters. — Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

open thread

2010-02-13T13:39:15Z

If you do not push the boundaries, you will never know where they are. — T.S. Elliot

Anyone around this weekend want to chat about this or that? I’m here…

passion requires autonomy

2010-02-10T22:31:36Z

practicing violin in his swimsuit

Parents who want their children to discover a passion for music, sports, or other hobbies should follow a simple plan: Don’t pressure them.

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“Passion comes from a special fit between an activity and a person,” said Geneviève Mageau, a psychology professor at the University of Montreal. “You can’t force that fit; it has to be found.”

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In one study, the researchers followed 196 middle-school students as they picked up a musical instrument for the first time. After five months, the psychologists found that one major variable that predicted whether children developed a passion for music was if their parents allowed them the freedom to practice on their own schedule. The passionate kids on average scored 9 percent greater on the autonomy scale than the non-passionate kids, which is a big effect in a psychology study, Mageau said.

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“I’m not telling parents to let their kids do whatever they want without limits,” Mageau said. “The most important message is to focus on the child’s interests and not to impose one’s own on them.”

— Want Passionate Kids? Leave ’em Alone (thank you to Sarah for the link)

We had a somewhat difficult time finding music teachers for our sons who would honor our desire to not force them to practice. I made it very clear that we wanted them to further develop their love for music and do whatever they wanted to with it, and we did not care about speed or amount of progress. Still, twice we had to replace teachers who pressured the boys or scolded them for not practicing enough.

My younger son only practices piano 5 to 10 minutes a day, but he loves music and writes his own pieces.

what really changes our beliefs

2010-02-10T14:19:21Z

I used to think that people’s beliefs determined their practices. And now I think that people’s practices determine their beliefs. As a child of the 1960s, I believed in the power of ideas to shape people’s behavior. I believed, for example, as many in my generation did, that the problems of failing schools originated in the failure of educators to “believe” that all children were capable of learning or — to choose a more contemporary framing of the issue — that changing teachers’ attitudes about what children can learn would result in changing their practices in ways that would increase student learning.

The accumulated evidence, I regret to say, does not support this view. People’s espoused beliefs — about race, and about how children learn, for example — are not very influential in determining how most people actually behave. The largest determinant of how people practice is how they have practiced in the past, and people demonstrate an amazingly resilient capacity to relabel their existing practices with whatever ideas are currently in vogue.

As practitioners, we are notoriously poor observers of our own practice and therefore not very good at judging the correspondence between our beliefs and our behavior. I know this about my own practice — as a teacher and as a consultant — which is why I rarely, if ever, practice solo any more. Resilient, powerful new beliefs — the kinds of beliefs that transform the way we think about how children are treated in schools, for example — are shaped by people engaging in behaviors or practices that are deeply unfamiliar to them and that test the outer limits of their knowledge, their confidence in themselves as practitioners, and their competencies. For example, presenting students with learning challenges that adults think are “too hard” for their students often reveals to the adults that the problem lies less in children’s abilities than it does in their own command of content and pedagogy. In many instances, our greatest successes in school improvement stem from scaffolding the adults’ content knowledge and pedagogy up to the level of what we know students can handle. In these cases, adult beliefs about what children can learn are changed by watching students do things that the adults didn’t believe that they — the students — could do.

You don’t really know what your espoused beliefs mean until you experience them in practice. The more powerful the beliefs, the more difficult and seemingly unfamiliar the practices. I now care much less about what people say they believe, and much more about what I observe them to be doing and their willingness to engage in practices that are deeply unfamiliar to them.

— Richard Elmore, I Used to Think … and Now I Think …, Harvard Education Letter, Jan/Feb 2010

How can we ask our children to push themselves as learners — to try new and difficult things, to critically reflect on their work and attitudes, to engage in work that challenges them intellectually and personally — if we aren’t willing to do the same?

See: Who Decides What You Can and Cannot Do?

not that ironic

2010-02-09T15:18:59Z

Why should we be working toward incorporating more real-life tasks, carefully structured group work and multidisciplinary projects in our classrooms? For one thing, the countries that are eating our lunch in those international tests use them — and their assessments reflect the higher-level thinking skills involved, too. And because well-done inquiry learning is centered on, reinforces and integrates the acquisition of useful knowledge. Ironically, many homeschoolers take their children out of public schools so they can adopt wholesale progressivism: long-term projects, lots of field trips, passionate pursuit of individual interests.

So why do some people insist — obstinately persevere in asserting — that project-based learning is fluff? That inquiry is an “ed school orthodoxy”? That discovery learning has nothing in common with a rich, planned curriculum?

— Nancy Flanagan, Fluff and Nonsense

designed to raise children, not test scores

2010-02-07T14:36:51Z

Our current educational approach — and the testing that is driving it — is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike.

In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does. Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on.

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What they shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

Along the way, teachers should spend time each day having sustained conversations with small groups of children. Such conversations give children a chance to support their views with evidence, change their minds and use questions as a way to learn more.

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Our success depends on embracing a curriculum focused on essential skills like reading, writing, computation, pattern detection, conversation and collaboration — a curriculum designed to raise children, rather than test scores.

— Susan Engel, senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College, New York Times Op-Ed column Playing to Learn

a worthy goal

2010-02-06T17:01:54Z

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better. — Paul Theroux