Finding Compassion - Affect and Education

At the beginning of The Great Gatsby, narrator Nick Fitzgerald, while reflecting on how advice from his father relates to his past summer in New York, writes: “...all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had...Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”  To paraphrase in three pieces:

• Those of us who live lives we enjoy should all be grateful for the opportunities we’ve been given by the people and the climate(s) we’ve known.
• The first step towards believing in and helping others work towards their full potential is to understand them, empathize with them and believe in who they can become instead of chastising, criticizing, or trying to correct who they are.
• It’s a fundamental, ego-driven flaw to think that behaving the way we do is the right way to behave.  Even if we are in charge of the rules, and can go about dismissing people and/or punitively controlling others, we have to see that this is ego on our part, not actual correctness.  

Now I’ll put it in school language:

• Educators wouldn’t be educators if we hadn’t had at least one person who believed in us help us to find success in schools. I’d even bet that most of us have had multiple people at key moments in our lives take an interest in who we were and what we needed in order to grow.  We have to realize how lucky we are to have had these people and these moments.  We are not necessarily biologically awesome so much as beneficiaries of our environments.
• We always have to believe that our students can become forever increasingly amazing people and students.  
• Judging a student instead of supporting him/her immediately stops the process we’re in school for...becoming educated.  
• Educators have endless amounts of things to learn.  It’s fully flawed and egocentric to believe that we are always right.  The more we’re willing to grow, the more our students will be able to learn.  
• The way we design our schools, classrooms, and curricula isn’t flawless; it would be detrimentally arrogant to think otherwise.  The more we are willing to listen, accommodate and adapt, the more everyone can grow.  
• We can try to be taskmasters who whip (proverbially) schools, teachers, and students into shape, but that is not an atmosphere that’s at all conducive to optimal learning.  

With this on my mind this morning, I watched Alex Shevrin's (@shevtech) video on having unconditional positive regard for students.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtDRVuNCkhU&feature=youtu.be

Yes, we could spend our time saying that her approach is excessive and that we have many more students who’d need that level of support than we can manage.  We could also say that we aren’t social workers and that we just couldn’t engage at that level of wraparound care for our students...and we’d be mostly right.  The logistics of public schools do often keep us from being able to - logistically and financially - meet all of the needs of some of our neediest students in ways that Alex might be able to in her small, alternative school setting.  

What I do know is that not being able to control all of the factors in their lives shouldn’t stop us from respecting the students enough to think carefully about the things that are in our purview.   This is like the failed argument - at least it’s failed in my opinion - that poverty keeps students from being able to learn.  Yes, it makes it tougher at times, but if schools are doing our part, progress happens.  We should be inspired by thoughts like hers instead of just brushing them aside as implausible. Always keep in mind:

• The way we communicate with students - before, during and outside of classroom time - plays a huge role in the way they see their ability to succeed in their classes.
• We must ensure that we ask things of students because they’re good for students, not because it’s the way we like it.  Our students’ variability must push us to be as flexible as possible with our acceptance of their personal journeys to proficiency and mastery.
• We have all worked on plans to help students who struggle with literacy, numeracy, organization and memorization.  Are we ready to modify our rules and regulations to accommodate those who either haven’t yet learned to behave “properly” or who come from a different value system?
• In a world full of research about the failure of programs that include retention, detention, suspension, homework zeroes, punitive summer schools and power struggles, have we moved forward toward newer ideas such as restorative justice and standards-based-grading?

What’s left is now to admit that being patient and flexible isn’t going to help in all situations any more than becoming angry, frustrated, and punitive.   Asking them to change who they are as children and teens isn’t any more realistic than suggesting that their future employers will be willing to put up with their attitudes and defiance.  

If you have thoughts about what works and what doesn’t, please feel free to comment here and/or join #edchatma on Tues, October 7 at 9pm to discussion affective education.

Finding a Home Base

Because my family relocated from NY to Massachusetts to be near family (always has to be our first priority, in my opinion), I’ve been looking for a new position since last Spring, of 2013.  That’s a lot of time spent finding job boards, understanding certification processes, reading job postings, polishing resumes, writing cover letters, substitute teaching, presenting at conferences, and meeting people.  I’ve never written so much and reflected so much and grown so much in my life.   

Meeting people was the toughest, yet most interesting, important and beneficial piece of all of this work. (In case it’s a surprise to anyone out there, I put this in red!)

“Networking” is easy.  I can get on social media for a bit and network by liking things, posting resources and following people, but actually meeting people takes a lot of time and investment.  It means that being “out there” and active in chats, groups, workshops, and it means humbly and sincerely connecting with people with phone calls and emails.  It takes patience, persistence, and a deep recognition of realism (people only have so much time and can only be asked to do so much for strangers and new acquaintances.)    I’m beyond excited and proud to say that I’ve been able to create a network of 1000s, of whom I’ve actually met a large amount.

I’m creating three goals in relation with this experience:

• I’m going to continually be open to meeting new people. There is so much going on in education right now, and I can’t even begin to figure it out on my own, so I want to network, meet, listen and discuss as often as possible, whether it gets to be face to face in my district and at workshops or virtually through social media such as #EdChatMa.  
• I want to “pay it forward” and be a resource for people who need help or advice with things such as networking, blogging, social media, job hunting, resume writing, and cover letters.  
• I’m going to walk into my new position on the shoulders of the giants who’ve supported me and helped me learn throughout my career and over this past year by leveraging their passions, examples, and lessons to benefit my new school.  

I thought to shout out a bunch of specific people here, but realize that my list would always be incomplete, so I’ll just say that I’m lucky to have the family, friends and PLN that I do and grateful to have the opportunity to live up to the needs of the school and the students with whom I’m now learning.   My hope is to know you all for a very long time.  

A Healthy 2014-2015

It feels really good but a bit awkward to be writing about something outside of my norm, but this isn’t going to be about ed policy, classroom practice or technology.  There won’t be anything about literacy or systems thinking.  The only thing on my mind this morning is health.  My health and the health of educators.  Today I want to move beyond all of those unhealthy years I’ve spent in schools, tell you that I’ve found a path forward, and see if anyone wants to join a new kind of team.  

It’s important for me to share this story because I’ve always been a “big guy,” both of my parents passed away young (57 and 61), I have two wonderful kids (6 and 9), and because my life as an educator - for many reasons - has often been in conflict with my physical health.  This past year has added the “final straws” for me. First, my father-in-law passed away, which both left my kids with only one Grandparent and prompted me to leave my position in a Bronx, NY high school and move to Massachusetts.  Family first...period.  Finally, I’ve been out of work this past year while getting set up here, so there has been the type of unforeseen set of anxieties and stressors in my family’s life that are always brought about by change.  

Doing something about my health has afforded me a fantastic level of optimism and agency in my life.  We aren’t always in control of situations, so I believe in embracing the facets of life in which my choices will directly impact the outcome.  

I’ve lost 40 pounds since April vacation and have another 30 to go.  

Along the way, here’s what I’ve come to know about our modern culture (feel free to join me in admitting taking part):

- We eat too much food.  Whether we are super-sizing, socializing or sitting around the house, it’s just too much.   

-  We use food to mark any and all special occasions.  The irony being that we’ll celebrate birthdays with junk food, calling it a treat, where it’s not a present for our bodies.

- Like so many products out there, food is marketed to give us emotional responses to it.  We, in kind, tend to think food will help us emotionally.  Bacon cheeseburgers and Bloomin’ Onions to don’t solve life’s struggles.  We don’t respect ourselves, become adventurous or get along with our family because of what we eat.  These things happen because of the way we feel about ourselves and those around us.

- We are too high-strung and don’t sleep nearly enough.

As an educator, my lifestyle always exacerbated these issues:

- I always stood throughout my classes, but far too much of my overall day was spent at a desk, either with student work, at meetings, or with content to review.  Before my children were born, I’d be at the gym by 5 so that I could make school by 6:30, but that wasn’t happening anymore.  I also tended to eat when I was sitting.  

- I barely slept.  Lots of people don’t get their 6-8 hours a night.  I rarely got more than 5.

- The stress.  I felt not only the weight, urgency, and overall responsibility for the students’ education, but also the struggles against public opinion, unwise political reforms, and painfully shrinking budgets with which to work.

- The parties.  Everyday was cupcakes this, pasta tray that, bagel mornings and Friday social hours.

- Time. I was always eating something quick, which can mean unhealthy. The schools I have been in usually allotted 25 minutes for lunch.  Not healthy.  

I’m looking to start a team!!

Take Shape for Life is an organization with the research, people, mindset and resources that I’ve needed.  It’s first and foremost about leveraging the strength of their organization and the personal nature of a “health coach” to understand, focus and maintain a healthy state of mind, but it also has components that are helping drop my weight fast.  Eventually, because they depend on word of mouth and therefore spend very little on traditional advertising, there are also built-in opportunities for a level of financial health with which everyone can get involved.

Like everything in life, I think this works better for people with a support team, so I’m writing this because I’m proud of what’s going on in this corner of my world, I’m excited about how it’s happening, and I’m hoping to find some people who are looking to make a change in their lives.  

You can find me to tell me about your experiences and talk about what I've learned through Take Shape for Life right here in the comments, at a new email I’ve set aside for this, dhoch.tsfl@gmail.com or on either of my Twitter accts @TSFLNewEng  or @DavidHochheiser

You can read about TSFL all over the news, watch a few videos on YouTube from a wide range of people, see how it’s presented by the founder and a number of top coaches or read through the official website.

If you want to feel better throughout this school year and beyond and/or you know someone else who might, I’d love to hear your stories and team up to move forward.  

Keeping Students' Full 360 in Mind

Please note: This post also appears as part of Edutopia's community page. http://bit.ly/UkYIkq

The biggest tragedy I’ve read about in modern schools has to be the increasingly myopic ways schools are addressing foundational needs of literacy and numeracy.  Yes, I get that reading, writing, and arithmetic form the basis of most everything that’s done, so I get why they’ve always been prioritized. What doesn’t sit well with me - or for our students - is that places are cutting so many other pieces of students’ education - e.g. arts, history, sciences, recess - and replacing them with more reading, writing, and mathematics worksheets, videos, and computer testing applications.  Yuck.  There are four tremendous issues with this approach:

1) These decisions are almost always based on scores from standardized testing, which means that even if reading, writing, and math were the only things that a school ought to be teaching, moves like these are only looking at a very limited perspective on them.  I’ve never, for instance, heard of a school changing the schedule and shortening or even cancelling recess because students were taking a long time to choose an independent reading book or craft a blog post.  It’s such a limited way to look at education.  In truth, if students are struggling, schools need to be excessively creative in broadening the scope of topics, ideas, and courses to which students are being exposed.  We have to fight to engage them and help them see that we are interested in them as people.  Then, they’ll be more likely to follow our example and dig into the foundation lessons when it’s time.

2) The pieces being dropped have been proven to be essential to the development of great academic programs.  Art, music, playtime, and science and history courses have all been proven to elevate students’ overall achievement, self-perception, and - yes - test scores.  Too many teachers, schools and districts are just choosing to ignore this research.  This , this , and this are all articles that speak to the need to develop the “360 child,” which I’ll get to in a second when I address the idea of “summer slide.”

3) What schools really need to do is ensure the quality of their Tier 1 teaching.  Subjecting students to more weak instruction or sitting them in front of a computer as a means of “remediation” is not a strategy I’m buying into.  Yes, sometimes, more is more, and practicing helps (think: McDowell’s 20,000 hour theory), and yes, there is software out there that can be appropriately used to support struggling students, but all of this has to be part of a purposeful program that ought to be founded on the best instructional practices we know about.  

I’m thinking about this in mid-July because of this article (http://bit.ly/Wez1Dy) I just read on how to prevent the “summer slide.” At the fully polar opposite end of the spectrum from the other articles, this one speaks to setting aside time during the summer for family activities that sound a lot like test prep to me.  So let me offer some alternatives, things I believe take a 360 in helping students who struggle, things that could very likely also be part of schools’ curricula, things that come to mind when I stop long enough to ask questions like these: http://t.co/5OA9uFAdmf.

- Adults need to be walking with children, taking them places.  They can then write letters and postcards, with photos and art work, telling relatives and friends where they’ve been and what they’ve seen.

- Research the historical significance of places they’ve seen and/or heard about.  Invite them to journal and/or teach someone something about it.

- All kids, by the way, should have a special journal.  If you think money can’t help education, think about how powerful giving all students a nice notebook of sorts to write or draw in over the summer could be.

- Kids and libraries are such a natural mix.  Not only can they get all sort of books to borrow for free, but there are also often great programs going on.  Surround kids in the chance to choose books as much as possible.  Invite them to tell you about what they’re choosing.

- If you’re going to the store, bring your children and have them help figure out the costs.  Have them ask people where things are and check the change at the register.  Social skills and math all wrapped up together :)

- If you or your kids are sports fans, the potential to work on geometry and statistics are bottomless.  

- Find paper maps of wherever you’re going with the kids and have them navigate.

- Try food from another country and learn about the place of origin while you’re at it. Music and art great components of culture studies.  

- Speaking of music and art, can you get to a museum and or a concert?  Summer is a great time for free, outdoor music and many museum and zoos have free days.  

- Model and share:  Kids should know that even though all of these are great, adults still like to sit down and read during their days.  (If you’re not a reader, by the way, having kids is a great excuse to become one.)  Find some time to relax and read something, be it a book, magazine or otherwise.  Share with your kids what it is that’s interesting to you about what you’re reading.  Invite them to do the same.  Reading books together is also great.  

The reason ELA and math have become the focal points for education is that they are found everywhere, in everything.  It’s a miss on the part of adults, then, when the opportunities we give kids to master them are exponentially skewed to the pieces that are easiest to measure and photocopy.  Even my daughter, who in her own nerdy way actually loves workbooks, gets much more excited when I ask her to tell me a story about or take a picture of something that interests her.  

My Non-Negotiables for Great Teaching

Often enough, I'm in conversations about how I know what good teaching looks like, and although I've used effective tools like Danielson's Framework for Teaching and Saphier's Skillful Teacher framework, fulfilling those expectations isn't the answer I go with.  Here's a stab at the big picture of what I consider non-negotiables for great teaching.



An understood purpose
                      (link)

A sense of urgency

                     (link)



Contagious Passion
                      (link)

I'd love your questions, comments, and/or additions? How do you know when you're seeing great teaching?

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Vigor instead of Rigor

I’ve written a good bit about tremendous shifts towards healthier, more productive and more psychologically sound educational practices for our students that can be found in slight shifts of semantics.  There’s this piece about the why we should embrace students’ struggling instead of accepting or even applauding their failures (what’s now very popular).  I also realized - and explained here - how outcomes and standards-based-learning can easily become a daunting laundry of things for students to know and do if we don’t focus on the processes that contextualize, scaffold and give purpose to courses’ content.   

Before I work a bit to convince you towards adopting the spirit of “vigor” instead of “rigor,” I have to say that it’s not an original idea.  Shawn White - @swpax - first wrote about this last year, but lost the post in a blog-host transfer.  He’s an educator I came to respect for his ideas and his warm, welcoming, clear-headed, student-centered and growth-focused tenor.  The fact that we’ve spent a solid amount of time sharing ideas and resources allows riffing on his idea to feel natural to me.  

I read the definition of rigor and sardonically chuckle about how poorly it connects with everything I believe about successful teaching, especially components such as the importance of relationship building, the pitfalls of classroom power struggles, and effectiveness of affording students room for choice and voice in as many aspects of the class as is possible.  On one hand, it’s clear that the “make it more rigorous” camp has had great intentions in mind.  If we think about curriculum and pedagogical goals, we’d include mantras about having high expectations for all learners; having students connect with content at higher orders of synthesis, evaluation, and creation instead of just knowing; and pacing our classrooms so that there’s a sense of urgency around purposeful instruction that maximizes learning opportunities during the school day and potentially afterwards.  There is, though, a dark underside to “rigor” that comes through when we sit in its definition’s quicksand.  It manifests itself in zero-tolerance policies for behavior and late work, courses that are challenging for students because of the sheer volume of work that’s assigned and material that’s covered, courses and programs of studies that put all students into lockstep rituals and trajectories (you can read here about why I’m a Common Core supporter, but poor implementation can do put schools in this category), and - of course - let’s not forget the emotional, logistic and cultural impacts of the big-testing culture. I’m thinking about all three of my masters-level education programs, none of which allowed for a single elective, or teachers who spend endless amounts of time defining, explaining, and assessing the ins and outs of works cited pages’ logistics. I’m thinking about the NCAA, who was unwilling to count a “Film and Literature” course as a required English credit but happily accepted something called “English 12.” All of these are considered “rigorous,” and all of these are considered by many to be good practice.  They just don’t represent the sort of courses I want to teach, cultures I’d like to work in, or agendas I’d like to promote.  

I’m so inspired by the idea of moving from rigor to vigor because while they both start with the goal of strong student growth and achievement, rigor gets there through single-path systems, power hierarchies and student compliance.  Vigor, however, is another story.  If I was going to annotate its definition, I’d highlight the ideas active, healthy, intense, vital, energetic, and - let’s not forget - effective.  What does this feel like in an education system or a class?

It’s a culture that’s still going to ask students to be involved in the heavy lifting and deep thinking that’ll lead to the desired high levels of achievement, but I’d see vigorous schools as those that start with a foundation of respectful relationships and afford students the choice and voice that gets learners excited about their work.  It doesn’t lower standards, but it helps teachers leverage the passions they have for their subject matter in ways that are contagious to their students, contextualizing content with meaning and relevance.  It understands that moving through a curriculum and covering chapters is not the same and engaging with ideas or creating new ideas, so it slows the pacing down whenever possible and recognizes that play, the arts, independent reading, creation, and electives all play a “vital” role in developing “healthy” adults.   It’s professional development for teachers and administrators that looks and feels more like Twitter chats and edcamps than Department of Education lectures and webinars.  

It’s about students learning because they’re interested and empowered instead of because they’re threatened, coaxed, and complacent.  I’ll riff a bit on a piece from “The Letter from Birmingham Jail” here and ask us if we want to be an extremist for a position, do you want to work towards an education culture that’s “rigorous” or “vigorous.” Think about it.  Your comments and suggestions are welcomed.