Study All Tips & Health Rss

Why Poetry Is Making a Comeback in Schools

2024-09-24T03:08:00.001-07:00

View the full episode transcript.

On a spring afternoon last year, students in Melissa Alter Smith’s class bustled around the room, filling 16 ounce plastic bottles with hot water, food dye, glitter and glue.

“You can mix colors if you want. Just use one whatever you think represents the theme of your poem,” Smith instructed as students moved between stations.

This was English, not art class, and the goal was not just to make a pretty, calming bottle. Each student had selected a contemporary poem to analyze, and they chose food coloring and glitter that would represent the tone of the poem. When finished with their bottles, they wrote a paragraph on an index card, explaining their choices.

One student, Christina, chose a poem called, “Like When Passing Graveyards” by R.A. Villanueva. In it, the poet recalls holding his breath when riding past cemeteries as a child. “The sparkles are for nostalgia and your childhood and looking back when you have like, you’re growing up with your siblings,” Christina said as she held up her bottle. “But then also the dark color is the whole point of the poem is it’s about a childhood fear. So I wanted to do something that shows the darkness of a graveyard and the fear behind it.”

The “tone bottles” exercise, which was created by teacher Valerie A. Person, is one of dozens on Smith’s Teach Living Poets website. Smith created the website as a place for teachers to share lesson plans as her hashtag, #teachlivingpoets, took off on social media in the late 2010s. The idea behind both the website and the hashtag is to encourage teachers to diversify the literary canon and expose students to the vibrant world of contemporary poetry.
High school teacher Melissa Smith is the creator of the #teachlivingpoets hashtag and website. (David Boraks for KQED)

Smith began using the #teachlivingpoets hashtag about eight years ago, after seeing how actively her students tuned in when she invited real poets to class to give readings and talk about their craft. After a few students asked to borrow her poetry books over spring break, she tweeted about it, and tagged the poets. One of them, Kaveh Akbar, replied: “Thank you for teaching living poets.”

“I was like, that has a real ring to it, doesn’t it? And so that’s how the hashtag was born,” Smith said. “So every time I would share then, anything I was doing in my classroom regarding living poets, I included that hashtag with it, and teachers were liking it. They were sharing it, they were replying to it, they were eating it up.”

As the idea and hashtag grew, so, too, did the need for lesson plans to teach the work of living poets. “You can easily find a curriculum guide for Robert Frost’s work or for Shakespeare’s sonnets, right? But if you’re going to teach a poem that was just published a month ago, there’s no SparkNotes for that,” Smith said.

Filling that gap meant getting creative, even weird, Smith said, whether that means asking students to “walk a poem” to feel the rhythm and patterns, having them design shoes based on a poem, or facilitating a March-Madness-style poetry smackdown.

Thanks #teachlivingpoets and @MelAlterSmith for the inspiration to do poetry threads! Adding more annotations, connections, and pictures to them next week! pic.twitter.com/E5EYmd34e9

— Kristin Stanfill (@StanfillKristin) May 18, 2024

For Christina, making the tone bottle reminded her of kindergarten – in a good way. “It makes it honestly a little bit more fun,” she said. “When you notice the colors and you’re able to point out more techniques and, like, the smaller details of a poem, especially when we’re looking for certain lines and certain words, rather than just ‘Oh, what’s the theme? What’s the tone?’ You’re looking for more specifics.”

According to Smith and former students, teaching and studying living poets not only makes poetry more fun; it also makes it more accessible and relevant to current generations and empowers them to find themselves as readers and writers.

Opening up the canon

Aaliyah Farmer, a former student of Smith’s and recent college graduate, remembers loving poetry as a kid – when her classes read whimsical poetry by Shel Silverstein. “In elementary school and middle school, we’re so used to reading poetry like that. And then whenever we got to, like, ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, it was immediately like, oh, you’re reading Shakespeare or like Shakespeare-esque poets from previous, before, like, way before we could even think about.”

Farmer said that when she read centuries-old poetry, the language and the themes felt disconnected from her life. But things changed when she took Smith’s AP literature class at Lake Norman Charter High School. Reading books by contemporary poets, like Clint Smith and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, reminded Farmer of her early love for the form. “18-year-old, 17-year-old Aaliyah, reading Clint Smith and Aimee, I’m so excited to read it because I just understand it better than other poets I had read before,” she said.

For Farmer, Clint Smith’s writing did something the classics did not: It reflected the world she was growing up in. “For me and I would say my other friends that I had the class with that were also African-American, we had a pride in what he was saying in the book,” she explained. “If he was talking about, like his father or his grandfather or influential people in his life, we all have like that same person in our lives, so we were just able to build that pride and then also … how there’s also duality between slavery, but also everything that everything else that we’ve overcome, we were able to connect. And I think the pride for me came out in that sense as well.”
Students in Melissa Smith’s class at Lake Norman Charter High School take notes while watching Rudy Francisco recite “My Honest Poem.” (David Boraks for KQED)

Giving students a chance to see themselves in the literary canon is one of the biggest benefits of teaching living poets, according to Smith. She has a lot of stories about her students finding personal connections to living poets. Like when she gave a blog writing assignment and two transgender students chose to write about the trans poet H. Melt. With permission from her students, Smith shared the blog posts with H. Melt, who in turn sent signed book copies to the students.

One of Kaveh Akbar’s poems about addiction resonated with another student. “One of my students’ father was struggling with alcoholism, and the way that the poem hit her was very different than how I took in the poem,” Smith said. “Hers was just more raw and emotional and personal, and really beautiful, actually, in the way that she processed it, and tied it to her own experiences with her family.”

A Latina student told Melissa that her class was the first time in her entire schooling she’d been assigned a book by a Latino writer. “And she’s a senior. So it’s moments like that that make all of this – the Teach Living Poets hashtag, movement, website, all the things happening in the classroom – worth it,” Smith said.

Farmer said Clint Smith’s Counting Descent has stuck with her. “A lot of the books from high school, I’m not going to lie, I did not keep. But that one I did keep.”

Empowering young writers

Another powerful effect of teaching living poets, according to Smith, is empowering students as writers. Every spring, she organizes a big workshop where guest poets visit in person to give readings and discuss their craft with her students.

“It was probably one of my favorite days of high school. It was like a full day and we had lunch with them,” said Jenna Johnson, another of Melissa’s former students. “I sat at a table with R.A. Villaneuva and I was just, like, freaked out the whole time, like kind of starstruck.”

Johnson started writing poetry around age 15. “It felt important in the moment. But looking back, it’s like reading your embarrassing diary. Like a lot of just melodramatic high school love poems, breakup poems, all that stuff,” she said.

Early in high school, Johnson planned to become a nurse. But when she didn’t like AP bio and loved AP lit, she started rethinking her path. “One of the big things that I didn’t realize until I read contemporary poets is kind of like the lawlessness of poetry. You don’t have to adhere to strict forms or rhyme schemes or – kind of knowing that you can literally just write a poem and there’s so many different forms, you can do literally anything with it. That was a huge thing to me that felt like that made it something I could do,” she said.

The workshop in Smith’s class was Johnson’s first time hearing poets read their work live. “That just changes how you can approach someone’s work completely. Kind of hearing the tone and the voice that they intend for it to be read.”

Johnson is now in a creative writing master’s program at New York University. She wants to continue writing poetry and become a professor. This fall, she’s teaching a writing class for undergraduates. Heading into the semester, Smith’s influence was still present.

“I felt like I had a really good education in poetry because of her. And I felt really well prepared going into undergrad and grad school that I knew of these contemporary poets,” Johnson said. “So when I was writing my syllabus, I was thinking a lot about it, and including as many living poets as possible that I felt like my students will be able to feel close to and feel like they can relate to a lot more.”

Embracing joy and rigor

Villanueva – the writer whose poem Christina analyzed and who Johnson met during the workshop – is not only a living poet. He’s also a middle school English teacher and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. He met Smith on Twitter, around the time she started the #teachlivingpoets hashtag. He said it was inspiring to see that conversation spread among teachers.

“Melissa’s pedagogy really continues to vivify and bring to life over and over again, the fact that poetry is not some ancient, antiquated form for us to to be archeologists and dig around in. But it’s that and something else. It’s something contemporary, it’s something modern. It’s something that people do because they love and are frustrated by language,” he said.

Villanueva is a recurring guest at Melissa’s poetry workshop. He said her classroom is special because of the way she challenges students academically while also centering joy. He thinks teachers are too often told that joy and rigor can’t co-exist.

“What if rigor is not just pain?” He asked. “What if … what you’re actually trying to say is there’s a certain intensity? But intensity can also be imagination. And that’s what her classroom feels like. … There are skills that are being tested, muscles that are being stretched. But it’s not done only through trauma or grief or like rote memorization and then regurgitation. It’s something else. It’s something weirder. And I think that is what we should allow teachers to have space to try.”

Smith said teaching living poets has transformed not only what she teaches, but how she teaches. “It has re-sparked my passion for teaching in general. I have loosened up my sense of the need for control over the lesson and the learning and giving some of that control over to my students,” she said. “I have come to realize for me in my classroom that the best learning happens when I actually don’t say a thing, right? Where I allow my students to have a conversation, to collaborate and to explore a poem together, and then to share it with me.”

Episode Transcript

Shel Silverstein: “I cannot go to school today!” / Said little Peggy Ann McKay / “I have the measles and the mumps / A gash, a rash, and purple bumps / My mouth…

Kara Newhouse: That’s the voice of Shel Silverstein, who’s been one of the most popular poets for elementary schoolers – for multiple generations now. Recent college graduate Aaliyah Farmer remembers loving Silverstein’s poems when she was young.

Aaliyah Farmer: In elementary school and like middle school, we’re so used to reading poetry like that. And then whenever we got to, like, ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, it was immediately like, oh, you’re reading Shakespeare or like Shakespeare-esque poets from previous, before, like way before we could even think about.

Kara Newhouse: Aaliyah says that when she read poetry from several centuries ago, the language and the themes felt disconnected from her life. But things changed during her senior year of high school. That’s when Aaliyah took AP literature, and her teacher assigned books by contemporary poets, like Clint Smith and Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Aaliyah Farmer: That was like a comparable experience, like five-year-old or six year old Aaliyah reading Shel Silverstein, like, I was so excited to read poetry. 18-year-old, 17-year-old Aaliyah, reading Clint Smith and Aimee, like, I’m so excited to read it because I just understand it better than other poets I had read before.

Kara Newhouse: For Aaliyah, Clint Smith’s writing did something older poetry did not: It reflected the world she was growing up in. Here’s an excerpt from Smith’s poetry collection, Counting Descent, which explores themes of lineage, tradition and Black humanity.

Clint Smith: My grandfather is a quarter century / older than his right to vote & two / decades younger than the president / who signed the paper that made it so. / He married my grandmother when they / Were four years younger than I am now / & were twice as sure about each other / As I’ve ever been about most things.

[Music]

Aaliyah Farmer: For me and I would say my other friends that I had the class with that were like also African American, we like, had a pride in what he was saying in the book. If he was talking about, like his father, or his grandfather, or influential people in his life, we all have like that same person in our lives, like so we were just able to build that pride and then also, like, how there’s, like, also duality between slavery, but also everything that everything else that we’ve overcome, um, we were able to connect. And I think the pride for me came out in that sense as well.

Kara Newhouse: Aaliyah says Counting Descent has stuck with her.

Aaliyah Farmer: A lot of the books from high school, I’m not going to lie, I did not keep. But that one I did keep.

Kara Newhouse: This is MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Kara Newhouse.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Aaliyah Farmer read Clint Smith’s book in a class at Lake Norman Charter High School in North Carolina. Her teacher, Melissa Smith, has made it her mission to bring vibrant contemporary poetry into her classroom. She encourages other teachers to do this too – through the social media hashtag #teachinglivingpoets. She’s written a book and created a website with the same name.

Melissa Smith: When I say teach living poets, I don’t mean to completely cut off those traditional canonical poets. To discover how they’re in conversation with poets today is actually really brilliant and amazing. It’s just we need to open the door wider to let more voices into our classrooms and who we’re teaching in our poetry curriculum.

Kara Newhouse: Melissa first observed the power of teaching living poets about eight years ago.

That’s when she found out that Pulitzer Prize finalist Morri Creech taught at a university not far from her school. She invited him to visit her classes.

Melissa Smith: He was like, here, sitting in front of us and having conversation with us about his poems. And I distinctly remember one of my boys, he was decked out in his soccer uniform because he had a game later that day, and at the end of that class he said, ‘Miss Smith, that was the coolest class I ever had.’ And I was like, by golly, I’ve unlocked some sort of secret, right? I was like, I need to do this more and more.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: So she reached out to poets who were active online. She invited them to speak with her students in person and on Skype.

Melissa Smith: I saw just the energy change in my classroom. I saw their eyes light up. I saw them actually being interested.

Kara Newhouse: When some of Melissa’s students wanted to borrow her poetry books over spring break, she was thrilled. She tweeted about it, and tagged the poets.

Melissa Smith: And Kaveh Akbar, one of my favorite, most favorite poets ever retweeted and said, ‘Thank you for teaching living poets.’ And I was like, huh, that has a real ring to it, doesn’t it? And so that’s how the hashtag was born, was out of his, retweet, ‘Thank you for teaching living poets.’ And so every time I would share then, anything I was doing in my classroom regarding living poets, I included that hashtag with it, and teachers were liking it, they were sharing it, they were replying to it. They were eating it up.

Kara Newhouse: As the #teachlivingpoets hashtag grew, Melissa realized there weren’t a lot of materials for teaching contemporary poetry in high school English.

Melissa Smith: You can easily find a curriculum guide for Robert Frost’s work or for Shakespeare’s sonnets, right? But if you’re going to teach a poem that was just published a month ago, there’s no SparkNotes for that. Right? And so I think a lot of teachers are – I don’t want to use the word fearful, but for lack of a better word, nervous or uncomfortable with teaching contemporary poetry, because it’s, they feel like they have to have all the answers. And that’s really not the case.

Kara Newhouse: Melissa created the Teach Living Poets website to fill the gap. She and other English teachers share free lesson plans there.

Melissa Smith: Sometimes as a teacher it can be a very isolating job, especially in our current climate, with teachers being attacked by angry parents and, you know, trying to ban books at school board meetings and whatnot. To have a community that you feel supported by and included in can be a game changer for some teachers.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: One activity Melissa’s students enjoy is a March Madness Poetry Bracket. It’s like the March Madness basketball tournaments. But instead of athletes competing, it’s poetry.

Melissa Smith: So first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to watch the poems one last time.

Kara Newhouse: Each day Melissa’s classes watch two poetry videos. Students decide which poem they think is best and try to persuade their classmates in an informal debate. Then they vote.

Melissa tallies the votes across all periods. The winners from one week go head-to-head the next week, and so on. Until only two remain for the final round.

That’s where things stand today. The students are going to vote for the big winner.

Melissa Smith: OMG. A true battle of champions.

Kara Newhouse: The first contender is “My Honest Poem” by Rudy Francisco. It’s an exploration of his fears and flaws. Here’s an excerpt.

Rudy Francisco: I’m still learning how to whisper /

I’m often loud in places where I should be quiet, / I’m often quiet in places where I should be loud. / I was born feet first and I’ve been backwards ever since.

Kara Newhouse: The other finalist in today’s showdown is called “Touchscreen” by Marshall Davis Jones. It’s about how technology is reshaping our lives.

Marshall Davis Jones: Introducing the new Apple iPerson / complete with multitouch and volume control / doesn’t it feel good to touch? / doesn’t it feel good to touch? / doesn’t it feel good to touch? / my world is so digital / that I have forgotten what that feels like

Kara Newhouse: Some of Melissa’s students take notes at desks around the edge of the room. Others lounge on comfy chairs in the middle, using lap pads to write on. When the second poem finishes playing, they dive into discussion.

Xuting: There’s this one line where he says, ‘We used to be in the trees. We swung down, and then someone slipped a disc, and now we’re hunched over touchscreens.’ Right. And if you think of that image of, like, the human evolution, right. What is hunched over is the ape, the primates. And what is standing up is the human. And if we’re hunched over again, then, I mean, does that mean we’re going backwards?

Kara Newhouse: They debate how well each poem conveys its message.

Collin: Some of the quotes, for example, ‘I wonder what my bedsheets say when I’m not around.’ I feel like that’s kind of one of those things when you don’t know your own identity. So it’s kind of a broader message that Rudy is speaking, and I feel like that makes it where it’s easier to relate to.

Kara Newhouse: And they reflect on bigger issues raised by the poets.

Emma: I, I think that, um, the fact that technology is such a prevalent problem, like everybody knows. You are constantly told not to be on your phone, to limit your screen time, over and over and over. What isn’t talked about is how all of us face our own, like internal issues. That’s and I think that’s what makes, like ‘My Honest Poem’ more impactful because nobody really talks about that.

Sam: I’d like to say that I think a lot of these internal issues, at least in modern society, are being intensified by the technology talked about in ‘Touchscreen.’

Kara Newhouse: These high school seniors are identifying literary devices, citing evidence to support their arguments, and connecting what they’ve heard to their own lives. These are all the things English teachers want to hear in class. They’re also laughing and being playful with each other. Melissa says that’s typical.

Melissa Smith: At first, the kids are like, oh, yeah, this is fine. This is cool. But once we get down to, like, the Final Four and especially the last two poems, they start arguing. They start getting really, you know, invested in the poem that they like better. They, they try to convince their neighbor like, ‘no man, vote for the other one.’

Kara Newhouse: After 15 minutes of discussion, it’s time to pick a winner.

Melissa Smith: All right. Heads down. Secret vote. Raise your hand if you want to vote for Rudy Francisco, ‘My Honest Poem.’ Raise your hand if you want to vote for Marshall Jones, ‘Touchscreen.’

Kara Newhouse: The students won’t hear the winner until the next day, but when Melissa counts votes across all her classes, “Touchscreen,” the poem about technology, comes out on top.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: After the vote, they move on to an activity called tone bottles.

Melissa Smith: And so, one of your glitter choices is going to represent the tone before the shift.

Kara Newhouse: This lesson plan was created by another teacher, Valerie A. Person. She shared it on Melissa’s Teach Living Poets website. It’s meant to help students capture the tone of a poem.

Melissa Smith: Right, so what is the author’s attitude towards his subject before the shift? And then the other type of glitter you’re adding into your bottle is the tone after the shift, right?

Kara Newhouse: Each student has picked a poem to analyze. They fill a 16-ounce bottle with hot water and glue. Then add food dye, glitter and sequins.

Melissa Smith: You can mix colors if you want, just use one, whatever you think represents the theme of your poem.

Kara Newhouse: When they’re finished, Melissa adds mineral oil and hand soap to the bottles to create viscosity. Students shake up their bottles to see the glitter and sequins swirl around. They also write a paragraph on an index card, explaining how their tone bottle reflects their poem.

Kara Newhouse: A student named Dean based his bottle on “Looking for the Golf Motel” by Richard Blanco.

Melissa Smith: And why did you pick orange for your liquid?

Dean: Because it reminds me of, like, the sunset that he was describing.

Melissa Smith: And what what glitter do you have in there?

Dean: I have, like, a mixture of red and yellow to go, like, counteract the orange. But then I also like black describing his feelings when he couldn’t find it.

Melissa Smith: Aw, that’s really good.

Dean: Yeah.

Melissa Smith: Nice job, Dean.

Kara Newhouse: Another student, Christina, chose a poem called, “Like When Passing Graveyards” by R.A. Villanueva. In it, the poet recalls holding his breath when riding past cemeteries as a child.

Christina: So the sparkles are for nostalgia and your childhood, but then also the dark color is the whole point of the poem is like it’s about a childhood fear. So I wanted to do something that shows, like, the darkness of a graveyard and the fear behind it. But it’s also like the nostalgia of growing up with your siblings and, like, having these connections and these little fears that you like, create off each other.

Kara Newhouse: Christina says she enjoys this approach to analyzing a poem.

Christina: I feel like it makes it honestly a little bit more fun. It’s like kindergarten, but also it makes it more visual, because a lot of the time when you’re just writing what you feel from a poem or what you imagine, it’s when you notice, like, the colors and, like, you’re able to point out more techniques and, like, the smaller details of a poem, especially when we’re looking for certain lines and certain words, rather than just oh, what’s the theme? What’s the tone? Like, you’re looking for more specifics.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: With these activities, students are practicing the same academic skills as when they study any other piece of literature. But Melissa says focusing on living poets does two things that studying dead poets does not.

The first is that it diversifies the literary canon. We heard a little about that from Aaliyah, the former student who identified with Clint Smith’s poems about his experiences as an African American.

Melissa has a lot of stories about her students finding personal connections to living poets. Like when she gave a blog writing assignment and two transgender students chose to write about the trans poet H. Melt. Here’s an excerpt from H. Melt.

H. Melt: When they say “we are all trapped in the wrong body” / Imposter, impossible / No. / We are on the bus next to you / In the cubicle next to you…

Kara Newhouse: H. Melt sent signed book copies to Melissa’s two students after she shared their blogs.

Melissa Smith: And it was really special that now they have this signed copy of a, of a poet that they studied in class and, and just fell in love with and felt that common bond with because that’s like part of their identity.

Kara Newhouse: Kaveh Akbar’s poem about addiction resonated with another student.

Kaveh Akbar: In Fort Wayne I drank the seniors / Old Milwaukee Old Crow / in Indianapolis I stopped / now I regret / every drink I never took

Melissa Smith: One of my students’ father was struggling with alcoholism, and the way that the poem hit her was very different than how I took in the poem. Hers was just more raw and emotional and personal, and really beautiful, actually, in the way that she processed it and tied it to her own experiences with her family.

Kara Newhouse: A Latina student told Melissa that her class was the first time in her entire schooling she’d been assigned a book by a Latino writer.

Melissa Smith: And she’s a senior. So it’s moments like that that are – make all of this, the Teach Living Poets hashtag, movement, website, all the things happening in the classroom, worth it.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: The second big thing Melissa says teaching living poets can do is empower students as writers. Every spring, she organizes a big workshop where guest poets visit in person to give readings and discuss their craft with her students.

Jenna Johnson: It was probably one of my favorite days of high school. I sat at a table with R.A. Villaneuva and I was just, like, freaked out the whole time, like kind of starstruck.

Kara Newhouse: This is Jenna Johnson, another of Melissa’s former students.

Jenna Johnson: I started writing when I was about 15. And, like, it felt important in the moment. But looking back, it’s like reading your embarrassing, like, diary. Like a lot of just, like, melodramatic, like high school love poems, breakup poems, all that stuff.

Kara Newhouse: The workshop was her first time hearing poets read their work live.

Jenna Johnson: That just, like, changes how you can approach someone’s work completely. Hearing, like, the tone and like the voice that they intend for it to be read.

Kara Newhouse: Early in high school, Jenna planned to become a nurse. But when she didn’t like AP bio and loved AP lit, she started rethinking her path.

Jenna Johnson: One of the big things that, like I didn’t realize until I read contemporary poets is kind of like the lawlessness of poetry. Like, you don’t have to like, um, adhere to, like, strict forms or rhyme schemes or – kind of knowing that you can literally just write a poem and there’s so many different forms, you can do literally anything with it. That was a huge thing to me that felt like that made it something I could do.

Kara Newhouse: Jenna is now in a creative writing master’s program at New York University. She wants to continue writing poetry and become a professor. This fall, she’s teaching a writing class for undergraduates.

Jenna Johnson: I’ve been thinking a lot about Miss Smith, because I know that, like, I felt like I had a really good education in poetry because of her. And like, I felt really well prepared going into undergrad and grad school that I knew of these contemporary poets and stuff. So when I was writing my syllabus I was thinking a lot about it. And like including as many living poets as possible, that I felt like my students could or will be able to, like, feel close to and feel like they can relate to a lot more.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Remember how Jenna said she felt starstruck sitting next to a guest writer at the poetry workshop?

Kara Newhouse: I spoke with that poet – R.A. Villanueva, whose first name is Ron.

Ron is not only a living poet. He’s also a middle school English teacher and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. He met Melissa on Twitter, around the time she started the #teachlivingpoets hashtag. He says it was inspiring to see that conversation spread among teachers.

Ron Villanueva: Melissa’s pedagogy really continues to vivify and bring to life over and over again, the fact that poetry is not some ancient, antiquated form for us to to be archeologists and dig around in. But it’s it’s that and something else. It’s something contemporary, it’s something modern. It’s something that people do because they love and are frustrated by language.

Kara Newhouse: Ron is a recurring guest at Melissa’s poetry workshop. He says her classroom is special because of the way she challenges students academically while also centering joy. He thinks, too often, teachers are told that joy and rigor can’t co-exist.

Ron Villanueva: What if rigor is not just pain? And like, what if rigor is what you’re actually trying to say is like – there’s a certain intensity. But intensity can also be imagination. And that’s what her classroom feels like. There are skills that are being tested, muscles that are being stretched. Um, but it’s not done only through trauma or grief or like rote memorization and then regurgitation. It’s something else. It’s something weirder. And I think that is what we should allow teachers to have space to, to try.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Melissa says teaching living poets has transformed not only what she teaches, but how she teaches.

Melissa Smith: It has re-sparked my passion for teaching in general. I have loosened up my sense of the need for control over the lesson and the learning and giving some of that control over to my students. I have come to realize for me in my classroom that the best learning happens when I actually don’t say a thing. Right? Where I allow my students to have a conversation, to collaborate and to explore a poem together, and then to share it with me.

Kara Newhouse: The contemporary poetry scene is full of innovative and diverse writers. By inviting those voices into their classrooms, teachers can open doors for students to connect with the rhythms and rhymes of poetry. And that can help them grow as readers, writers, and people.

Kara Newhouse: This episode would not have been possible without Melissa Smith. To learn more, you can read the book she wrote with Lindsay Illich. It’s called Teach Living Poets.

The students you heard in this episode were: Xuting, Collin, Emma, Sam, Dean and Christina.

Thanks also to Aaliyah Farmer, Jenna Johnson and Ron Villanueva.

I’m Kara Newhouse.

The rest of the MindShift team includes Ki Sung, Marlena Jackson-Retondo, Nimah Gobir and Jennifer Ng.

Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer.

Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad and Holly Kernan.

David Boraks provided field recording.

MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.

If you love MindShift, and enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. We really appreciate it. You can also read more or subscribe to our newsletter at K-Q-E-D-dot-org-slash-MindShift.

Thank you for listening to Season 9 of the MindShift podcast. That’s it for these deep dive episodes. MindShift will be back soon with new episodes featuring conversations about big ideas in education. Be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss a thing.

http://dlvr.it/TDcb0H

A Decade of Data in Tennessee Shows an Unexpected Result When Colleges Drop Remedial Courses

2024-09-23T03:08:00.001-07:00

Fifteen years ago, the Obama administration and philanthropic foundations encouraged more Americans to get a college degree. Remedial classes were a big barrier. Two-thirds of community college students and 40% of four-year college students weren’t academically prepared for college-level work and were forced to take prerequisite “developmental” courses that didn’t earn them college credits. Many of these college students never progressed to college-level courses. They racked up student loan debts and dropped out. Press reports, including my own, called it a “remedial ed trap.”

One controversial but popular solution was to eliminate these prerequisite classes and let weaker students proceed straight to college-level courses, called “corequisite courses,” because they are combined with some remedial support at the same time. In recent years, more than 20 states, from California to Florida, have either replaced remedial classes at their public colleges with corequisites or given students a choice between the two.

In 2015, Tennessee’s public colleges were some of the first higher education institutions to eliminate stand-alone remedial courses. A 10-year analysis of how almost 100,000 students fared before and after the new policy was conducted by researchers at the University of Delaware, and their draft paper was made public earlier this year. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and may still be revised, but it is the first longer term study to look at college degree completion for tens of thousands of students who have taken corequisites, and it found that the new supports haven’t worked as well as many hoped, especially for lower achieving students.

First the good news. Like earlier research, this study of Tennessee’s two-year community colleges found that after the elimination of remedial classes, students passed more college courses, both introductory courses in English and math, and also more advanced courses in those subjects.

However, the extra credit accumulation effect quickly faded. Researchers tracked each student for three years, and by the end of their third year, students had racked up about the same number of total credits as earlier students had under the old remedial education regime. The proportion of students earning either two-year associate degrees or four-year bachelor’s degrees did not increase after the corequisite reform. Lower achieving college students, defined as those with very low ACT exam scores in high school, were more likely to drop out of college and less likely to earn a short-term certificate degree after the switch to corequisites.

“The evidence is showing that these reforms are not increasing graduation rates,” said Alex Goudas, a higher education researcher and a community college professor at Delta College in Michigan, who was not involved in this study. “Some students are benefiting a little bit — only temporarily — and other students are harmed permanently.”

It seems like a paradox. Students are initially passing more courses, but are also more likely to drop out and less likely to earn credentials. Florence Xiaotao Ran, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware and the lead researcher on the Tennessee study, explained to me that the dropouts appear to be different types of students than the ones earning more credits. Students with somewhat higher ACT test scores in high school, who were close to the old remedial ed cutoff of 19 points (out of 36) and scoring near the 50th percentile nationally, were more likely to succeed in passing the new corequisite courses straight away. Some students who were far below this threshold also passed the corequisite courses, but many more failed. Students below the 10th percentile (13 and below on the ACT) dropped out in greater numbers and were less likely to earn a short-term certificate.

Data from other states shows a similar pattern. In California, which largely eliminated remedial education in 2019, failure rates in introductory college-level math courses soared, even as more students also succeeded in passing these courses, according to a study of an Hispanic-serving two-year college in southern California.

Ran’s Tennessee analysis has two important implications. The new corequisite courses – as they currently operate – aren’t working well for the lowest achieving students. And the change isn’t even helping students who are now able to earn more college credits during the first year or two of college. They’re still struggling to graduate and are not earning a college degree any faster.

Some critics of corequisite reforms, such as Delta College’s Goudas, argue that some form of remedial education needs to be reintroduced for students who lack basic math, reading and writing skills.

Meanwhile, supporters of the reforms believe that corequisite courses need to be improved. Thomas Brock, director of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University, described the higher dropout rates and falling number of credentials in the Tennessee study as “troubling.” But he says that the old remedial ed system failed too many students. (The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization, also based at Teachers College but is unaffiliated with CCRC.)

“The answer is not to go back,” said Brock, “but to double down on corequisites and offer students more support,” acknowledging that some students need more time to build the skills they lack. Brock believes this skill-building can happen simultaneously as students earn college credits and not as a preliminary stepping stone. “No student comes to college to take remedial courses,” he added.

One confounding issue is that corequisite classes come in so many different forms. In some cases, students get a double dose of math or English with three credit hours of a remedial class taken concurrently with three credit hours of a college-level course. A more common approach is to tack on an extra hour or so to the college class. In her analysis, Ran discovered that instructional time was cut in half for the weakest students, who received many more hours of math or writing instruction under the old remedial system.

“In the new scenario, everyone gets the same amount of instruction or developmental material, regardless if you are just one point below the cutoff or 10 points below the cutoff,” said Ran.

There are also big differences in what takes place during the extra support time that’s built into a corequisite course. Some colleges offer tutoring centers to help students fill in their knowledge gaps. Others schedule computer lab time where students practice math problems on educational software. Another option is extended class time, where the main professor teaches the same material that’s in the college level course only more slowly, spread across four hours a week instead of the usual three.

Overcoming weak foundational skills is not the only obstacle that community college students face. The researchers I interviewed emphasized that these students are struggling to juggle work and family responsibilities along with their classes, and they need more support – academic advising, career counseling and sometimes therapy and financial help. Without additional support, students get derailed. This may explain why the benefits of early credit accumulation fade out and are not yet translating into higher graduation rates.

Even before the pandemic, the vast majority of community college students arrived on campus without a strong enough foundation for regular college-credit bearing classes and were steered to either remedial or new corequisite classes. High school achievement levels have deteriorated further since 2020, when the data in Ran’s study ended. “It’s not their fault,” said Ran. “It’s the K-12 system that failed them.”

That’s why it’s more important now than ever to figure out how to help under-prepared college students if we want to improve post-secondary education.

This story about corequisite courses was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

http://dlvr.it/TDZN4g

Does Hearing ‘Thank You’ Make a Difference for Parent Well-being?

2024-09-19T03:06:00.001-07:00

This post was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram.

Most days being a parent can feel like the most thankless job in the world. You are working tirelessly and pouring our heart and soul into giving your children everything, yet it is rare to even get a “thanks,” much less a heartfelt acknowledgement of everything you have done for your children. Of course, it would be nice to hear “thank you” every once in a while, but does experiencing gratitude from those you love really matter?

Previous research has found that hearing “thank you” or any expression of gratitude may be important for relationship quality between romantic partners, but what about the relationship between parent and child or what about the relationship quality between two partners who are also parents? A study recently published in The Journal of Positive Psychology addressed this question by examining whether hearing “thank you” was linked to any positive outcomes such as improved relationships, less parenting stress or better psychological well-being.

Study details

This study included 593 parents of children from ages 4 to 17 years. All parents in this study were married or in a romantic relationship. The parents filled out a questionnaire about whether their family members expressed gratitude to them, that is the extent to which their partner or children expressed appreciation and acknowledgment of the work they did for the family. The researchers also asked about their relationships with their partner, their level of parenting stress and whether they had any symptoms of psychological distress (translation: feeling nervous, hopeless, or depressed). The researchers divided children into a younger group (4 to 12 years) and an older group (13 to 17 years) to examine whether the age of the children had any impact.

Main findings

The researchers found the following:

* Gratitude from children (both older and younger) is linked to lower parenting stress. This seems to be particularly true for gratitude from older children.

* Gratitude from romantic partners and older children is linked to lower levels of psychological distress. This means that gratitude from your family members is linked to a lower likelihood of feeling nervous, hopeless, or depressed.

* Gratitude from a romantic partner or spouse is linked to better relationship quality, but not lower parenting stress. This backs up previous research and extends it to relationships in the context of parenting.

* Mothers feel less appreciated than fathers. Mothers reported lower levels of gratitude from partners and older children.

* Gratitude may matter more for mothers than fathers. Gratitude seemed to have a greater positive impact for mothers than fathers.

Overall translation

The takeaway message here is that it really does matter whether you hear “thank you” as a parent. Feeling like your children and partner are grateful for all of the work that you do is linked to improved relationship quality, lower parenting stress and a lower risk for psychological distress. There seem to be unique benefits for feeling gratitude from your partner versus your children, so it may be important to receive gratitude from both. In terms of gratitude from your children, it seems to be more meaningful when it comes from older, teenage children. This may be because older children can articulate gratitude more sincerely and specifically than younger children. Finally, gratitude may be harder-won and more meaningful for mothers than fathers. Research finds that mothers take on about twice as much household labor as fathers on average, so it makes sense that they would expect gratitude more and appreciate it more when they receive it.

Of course, there are limitations of this study that make further research necessary. It was a relatively small correlational study (meaning that we do not know if gratitude actually causes positive outcomes or is simply linked to them). It was also based on self-report of gratitude, and future research should examine whether perceived gratitude actually reflects expressed gratitude.

You are likely thinking “Okay this is nice but how do I get my child or partner to actually express gratitude!?” Of course you could send this study to them but if that feels too passive-aggressive for you, here are some additional ways to promote gratitude in your family:

* Help your children notice what others do for them. Children are often blissfully unaware of all of the work that goes into making their lives run smoothly. Start pointing out everything that others do for your children whenever possible. For example, explain what their teacher might have to do before they even arrive at school in the morning, remind them that someone will have to clean up the table after you leave a restaurant, or involve them in everything that goes into making a meal for them from planning to grocery shopping to cooking to cleaning up.

* Remind your child to thank their other parent. If you have a parenting partner, prompt your child to show gratitude. You don’t have to “force” them to say thank you but you could simply remind them of the effort of the other parent. For example, “That was really nice that daddy took you to the playground this morning. He knows how much you love the playground and wanted to do something special for you.” If you are a single parent, talk to a friend about doing this for each other.

* Model gratitude. Frequently and sincerely express gratitude to your children, your partner and other people in your life. You can thank them for what they do for you but also anything they do for others or that has a positive impact, such as thanking your child for being kind to their sibling.

* Tell your partner and children how much it means to you when they express gratitude. Do not feel bad about asking for more gratitude! You can also explain how to express gratitude in a way that is most meaningful to you (for example, do you like a simple “thank you” or would you prefer that they are more specific?). When they do express gratitude, make sure you tell them how happy or proud it makes you feel and that it means a lot to you.

* Make an agreement with your spouse to acknowledge each other’s efforts and express gratitude at regular intervals. It is easy to forget to thank your parenting partner but this research really underscores how important it is. Try to make thanking each other and expressing gratitude more of an everyday habit.

* Teach your children about gratitude. Teach your children how it makes others feel when they express gratitude and teach them different ways to express gratitude above and beyond simply saying thank you (such as saying “I am so grateful” or “That meant a lot to me” or even writing a letter).

Cara Goodwin, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, a mother of four and the founder of Parenting Translator, a nonprofit newsletter that turns scientific research into information that is accurate, relevant and useful for parents.

http://dlvr.it/TDQbkr

Youth Mental Health Is Declining. School-based Supports Can Help

2024-09-18T03:02:00.001-07:00

Youth mental health has steadily declined in the years prior to and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the worst affected? Pre-teen boys and teenage girls, according to the August 2024 report, “A Nation’s Children At Risk,” published by the Center for Applied Research in Education at the University of Southern California.

According to the study, teen girls were more than three times as likely to experience abnormal levels of emotional symptoms compared to the other three groups: pre-teen girls, pre-teen boys and teen boys. The study also found that for the fall 2023 semester, students who were chronically absent from school were also three times more likely to be experiencing mental health issues.

Researchers asked parents and caregivers questions about their children’s emotional symptoms, behavior, peer relationships, school attendance, grades and wellbeing, among other topics.. However, the study didn’t ask families to report on the causes behind declines in mental health. COVID-19 disruptions and continued academic learning loss have created “tons of pressures for these kids that are different from the pressures that existed before,” said Amie Rapaport, a co-author of the study and research scientist at USC.

It’s important to note that mental health among certain groups is declining more rapidly than other groups, but equally as important to “understand the causes are likely to be different for individual children,” said Morgan Polikoff, a co-author of the study and professor of education at USC. “We don’t want to imply that it’s one or two things that’s causing this crisis…it’s multifaceted.”

School-based mental health services and advocacy programs, like resources from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and the Youth Mental Health Corps initiative, are some of the solutions that researchers and advocates pointed to to help students experiencing mental health challenges.

What the numbers tell us

1. Pre-teen boys scored high for negative behavioral health issues.

Pre-teen boys showed the greatest struggle with conduct problems – such as cheating, fighting and stealing – and hyperactive and inattentive behaviors in the last six months of 2023. According to the study, 24% of pre-teen boys experienced mental health issues related to hyperactive and inattentive behaviors, while they also scored high on conduct issues, when compared to the other groups surveyed.

2. Teenage girls scored highest for emotional symptoms tied to poor mental health.

Teenage girls were found to have higher levels of negative mental health outcomes in many areas, but the highest were in emotional symptoms, which the study defined as “depressive behaviors, anxiety, nerves, fears and internalizing symptoms of those emotions,” such as stomach aches and headaches. Teen girls were also the most likely demographic to be struggling in multiple areas, according to the report.

3. The mental health services schools say they offer and what parents report being available don’t match.

According to Rapaport, there is also a discrepancy between what parents said was available in their children’s schools and what schools report nationally as being available. The study defined mental health supports as “counseling therapy guidance, counseling, case management support programs based on specific needs.”

“I suspect that there’s a lack of awareness of services in some of the districts [or] maybe the services are in the schools, but there’s a waiting list and the parent can’t get their child in,” Rapaport said.

4. The kids who need the most in-school mental health support have the least access to it.

Families with the lowest incomes reported the lowest numbers of in-school mental health supports, while families with the highest incomes reported the highest numbers. However, when asked, only 11% of families with the highest income said that their children used the mental health supports provided in school. Conversely, over 50% of families with the lowest incomes reported that their children used in-school mental health services. “It is unlikely that this pattern reflects a difference in need; it is more likely that highest-income families are seeking services outside school,” the report said.

Less than one third of Black families reported that their school had mental health supports for students, but more than one half of white families reported availability of mental health services in their schools. A deeper dive into barriers to mental health services at the local level is needed, Rapaport said. “What one district is struggling with might not be the same as what another district or school is struggling with.”

Mental health support services in school

Polikoff pointed to school-based mental health services as an important part of addressing youth mental health needs, especially for families with limited resources. Because young people spend most of their day in school, “it makes sense to have resources there, especially when parents have so many other stressors, things that they’re worried about and trying to do,” said Kelly Davis, the vice president of Peer and Youth Advocacy at Mental Health America (MHA), which provides programming to help young people advocate for their and their peers’ mental health. “We know mental health services are incredibly expensive,” said Davis, who looks at mental health services in school as an issue of equity.

Youth Mental Health Corps, a public-private collaboration between AmeriCorps and several other organizations, launched earlier this year with a plan to train 18- to 24-year-olds to provide mental health services to young people in areas with shortages of mental health professionals.

The OneStar Foundation, a non-profit that partners with AmeriCorps, has helped to bring 80 Youth Mental Health Corps members to schools throughout Texas, one of four states to adopt the program for the 2024-2025 school year. According to Jaclyn Kolar, OneStar’s director of national service, one of the goals is to prevent dropouts by addressing students’ mental health needs.The Youth Mental Health Corps in Texas offer weekly one-on-one and small group sessions to economically disadvantaged students. These in-school sessions help students learn coping strategies, build self-esteem and practice goal-setting, said Kolar.

Teens finding solutions

For Rishika Rohatgi, the report’s findings are familiar. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rohatgi noticed the increased loneliness and isolation among her peers, on top of the academic, extracurricular and social pressures they were already experiencing as teenagers. So she and a friend started a mental health awareness club at their high school. After they participated in their school’s activity fair, 50 students joined. “We saw such a positive reaction almost immediately,” said Rohatgi, a former NAMI Next Gen Advisor. While no professional mental health services were offered through the club, it created a space for an open-ended dialogue between students. “Students really need advocacy that is for students and by students,” she said.

Rohatgi highlighted the importance of creativity when approaching students about mental health difficulties. For example, on Valentine’s Day, students in her club decided to write love letters to themselves “to highlight the traits of themselves that they loved.” Rohatgi’s club often found success with activities, like the love letters, that “boost mental wellness, but don’t explicitly say that they’re boosting mental wellness,” she said.

“Our club was not therapy,” Rohatgi emphasized, “but we found that when students were helping others with their mental health, they were talking about how that in itself was helping their mental health as well.”

http://dlvr.it/TDNFbS

Answering the Age-Old Math Question, ‘When Will I Use This in Real Life?’

2024-09-17T03:06:00.001-07:00

Excerpted from Math Therapy: 5 Steps to Help Your Students Overcome Math Trauma and Build a Better Relationship With Math by Vanessa Vakharia. Copyright © 2024 by Corwin Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Ask any math teacher what question they get asked the most and it’ll likely be, “But when will I use this IRL?” or some derivative of that sentiment.

I believe this is one of the most misunderstood questions in math class — and one that has led to far too many textbook problems about curved bridges, spaceship flight paths, and the plight of some poor person carting, like, 456 watermelons home from the grocery store.

The thing is — our students aren’t asking us when the particular math concept they’re learning can potentially be used by a human on this planet. What they’re really asking is when will they actually use this concept in their actual real life, like, now.

“But when will I use this irl?” = “But why should I actually care?”

Distilled into one word, what they’re asking about is purpose. Students need to feel like the skills they are learning in your class serve a purpose. Immediately! For skills to serve a purpose to your students, those skills must be relevant to them either now, or in the very near future! Students don’t benefit from forced attempts to apply math to like, planet Earth, in general. Take questions such as “There are 2 trains moving toward each other at 60 km an hour; they’re 5 miles apart. How long will it take for them to pass each other?” or “Use sin law to figure out what angle a cable needs to be attached to the top of a roof in order to tether it to the ground.” They might be “practical applications” of math, but guess what? No one cares, thus rendering such questions as ones without purpose!

Purpose in your classroom can be found in two central ways to help motivate your students: math skills and math-adjacent skills.

Meaningful math-adjacent skills

Math-adjacent skills are skills that are built by doing math but that aren’t necessarily considered exclusively mathematical in nature many of which, like “reason abstractly and quantitatively” and “make sense of problems and persevere in solving them” are built into the math standards.

For example, when working on a challenging problem, students might try multiple methods to solve that problem, work with friends to get new perspectives, or make a mistake and start again. They are building math-adjacent skills like risk-taking, critical thinking, collaboration, and learning how to grow from mistakes. These are all meaningful skills that can be used in their real lives, right now! They can use these same skills when making new friends (risk-taking, collaboration), trying out for the soccer team (risk-taking, collaboration, growing from mistakes), or getting a part-time job (risk-taking, critical thinking, collaboration). Emphasizing that the math-adjacent skills they learn in your classroom will enhance their actual lives right now is a simple and effective way to motivate your students.

Meaningful math skills

It is a lot harder to convince your students that the math skills they are building in your class serve a purpose (you probably know this from experience!); therefore, you have to work a lot harder to use this as a motivation tactic! That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but I totally get how hard it is, given that we have little to no control over the actual math content we teach.

What this means is that we need to find creative ways to connect this content to our students’ actual, lived experiences. One way to do that is by treating our content in culturally responsive ways. This might involve recognizing and incorporating diverse cultural perspectives, experiences, and examples into your curriculum so that students see themselves reflected and find the content meaningful to them. Another way to show students that the math skills they are learning serve a purpose in their lives is by using relevant examples (remember, relevance means it matters to them right now). Esther Brunat is a math teacher who is a total pro at doing this! Over the years, I’ve seen her students learn patterning and probability by exploring the latest trends and fads (like, why are so many people suddenly wearing Crocs again? Or how likely is it that in a group of 100 that at least one person will be wearing this hideous footwear, and does this stat differ by region?), learn all about money by creating their own imaginary small businesses, and learn how to graph by filming TikTok dances to identify how different equations visually move (and yes, she used this activity as an approach to summative assessment, which is genius if you ask me!).

Finally, one of the most effective ways to bring purpose to the actual math skills students are building in your classroom is by broadening the definition of “math” to include all of the skills we tend not to emphasize enough — skills that actually matter to your students. These include skills like estimating, trendspotting, navigating, budgeting, managing time, logical reasoning, making change, optimizing, making comparisons and literally solving any type of problem. When we talk about math in this way, kids have the opportunity to connect the math they’re learning to what brings them meaning, and also, kids are usually able to at least find one skill that they feel capable of and confident about, which is a huge win when it comes to motivation!

Known as the Lady Gaga of math education, Vanessa is the founder and director of The Math Guru, a boutique math and science tutoring studio in Toronto that’s changing stereotypes about what math education looks like. She is also the host of the Math Therapy podcast, author of the Math Hacks Scholastic book series, and lead singer/keytarist for rock band Goodnight Sunrise. She has her Bachelor of Commerce, Teaching Degree, and Masters of Math Education. She appears regularly on national television and news outlets as an expert in math education and math positivity, and her goals are to be Oprah-level famous and to change math culture so that STEM is finally as cool as every single Taylor Swift song ever written. She failed Grade 11 math twice, which she says was the best thing that ever happened to her.

http://dlvr.it/TDKwt2

An AI Tutor Helped Harvard Students Learn More Physics in Less Time

2024-09-16T03:02:00.001-07:00

We are still in the early days of understanding the promise and peril of using generative AI in education. Very few researchers have evaluated whether students are benefiting, and one well-designed study showed that using ChatGPT for math actually harmed student achievement.

The first scientific proof I’ve seen that ChatGPT can actually help students learn more was posted online earlier this year. It’s a small experiment, involving fewer than 200 undergraduates. All were Harvard students taking an introductory physics class in the fall of 2023, so the findings may not be widely applicable. But students learned more than twice as much in less time when they used an AI tutor in their dorm compared with attending their usual physics class in person. Students also reported that they felt more engaged and motivated. They learned more and they liked it.

A paper about the experiment has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but other physicists at Harvard University praised it as a well-designed experiment. Students were randomly assigned to learn a topic as usual in class, or stay “home” in their dorm and learn it through an AI tutor powered by ChatGPT. Students took brief tests at the beginning and the end of class, or their AI sessions, to measure how much they learned. The following week, the in-class students learned the next topic through the AI tutor in their dorms, and the AI-tutored students went back to class. Each student learned both ways, and for both lessons – one on surface tension and one on fluid flow – the AI-tutored students learned a lot more.

To avoid AI “hallucinations,” the tendency of chatbots to make up stuff that isn’t true, the AI tutor was given all the correct solutions. But other developers of AI tutors have also supplied their bots with answer keys. Gregory Kestin, a physics lecturer at Harvard and developer of the AI tutor used in this study, argues that his effort succeeded while others have failed because he and his colleagues fine-tuned it with pedagogical best practices. For example, the Harvard scientists instructed this AI tutor to be brief, using no more than a few sentences, to avoid cognitive overload. Otherwise, he explained, ChatGPT has a tendency to be “long-winded.”

The tutor, which Kestin calls “PS2 Pal,” after the Physical Sciences 2 class he teaches, was told to only give away one step at a time and not to divulge the full solution in a single message. PS2 Pal was also instructed to encourage students to think and give it a try themselves before revealing the answer.

Unguided use of ChatGPT, the Harvard scientists argue, lets students complete assignments without engaging in critical thinking.

Kestin doesn’t deliver traditional lectures. Like many physicists at Harvard, he teaches through a method called “active learning,” where students first work with peers on in-class problem sets as the lecturer gives feedback. Direct explanations or mini-lectures come after a bit of trial, error and struggle. Kestin sought to reproduce aspects of this teaching style with the AI tutor. Students toiled on the same set of activities and Kestin fed the AI tutor the same feedback notes that he planned to deliver in class.

Kestin provocatively titled his paper about the experiment, “AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning,” but in an interview he told me that he doesn’t mean to suggest that AI should replace professors or traditional in-person classes.

“I don’t think that this is an argument for replacing any human interaction,” said Kestin. “This allows for the human interaction to be much richer.”

Kestin says he intends to continue teaching through in-person classes, and he remains convinced that students learn a lot from each other by discussing how to solve problems in groups. He believes the best use of this AI tutor would be to introduce a new topic ahead of class – much like professors assign reading in advance. That way students with less background knowledge won’t be as behind and can participate more fully in class activities. Kestin hopes his AI tutor will allow him to spend less time on vocabulary and basics and devote more time to creative activities and advanced problems during class.

Of course, the benefits of an AI tutor depend on students actually using it. In other efforts, students often didn’t want to use earlier versions of education technology and computerized tutors. In this experiment, the “at-home” sessions with PS2 Pal were scheduled and proctored over Zoom. It’s not clear that even highly motivated Harvard students will find it engaging enough to use regularly on their own initiative. Cute emojis – another element that the Harvard scientists prompted their AI tutor to use – may not be enough to sustain long-term interest.

Kestin’s next step is to test the tutor bot for an entire semester. He’s also been testing PS2 Pal as a study assistant with homework. Kestin said he’s seeing promising signs that it’s helpful for basic but not advanced problems.

The irony is that AI tutors may not be that effective at what we generally think of as tutoring. Kestin doesn’t think that current AI technology is good at anything that requires knowing a lot about a person, such as what the student already learned in class or what kind of explanatory metaphor might work.

“Humans have a lot of context that you can use along with your judgment in order to guide a student better than an AI can,” he said. In contrast, AI is good at introducing students to new material because you only need “limited context” about someone and “minimal judgment” for how best to teach it.

This story about an AI tutor was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

http://dlvr.it/TDHf08

Tips for Reclaiming Your Time as a First-Year Teacher

2024-09-11T03:01:00.001-07:00

During her first year of teaching, Allison Bacon cried until November. The amount of things that teachers juggle every day overwhelmed her. “You’re not thinking about anything else. You’re thinking about the kids, you’re thinking about the content, you’re thinking about the planning and the curriculum, the standards,” she said.

Bacon’s experience is not an anomaly, and for some, it leads to a change in career path. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 66% of teachers who left the profession after the 2020-2021 school year found a better work-life balance in roles outside of teaching. Bacon stayed and is now the coordinator of instructional technology for the Ossining Union Free School District in New York, where she helps teachers make use of digital tools in their classrooms. She said that artificial intelligence tools in particular can offer some relief to the overwhelm of the first year of teaching.

Miriam Plotinsky, an instructional specialist and author, is also familiar with the immense workload teachers manage from her own classroom days. In her newest book, Small but Mighty: How Everyday Habits Add Up to More Manageable and Confident Teaching, Plotinsky shares tools to maximize teachers’ time both during planning and teaching.

AI in the classroom

For Bacon, who is entering her 24th year of teaching, AI isn’t just a gadget, but a tool that can be used to regain a work-life balance and help relieve pressure. Although there are reasons to be skeptical of AI in teaching, Bacon argues that these tools “could be the difference between this being the three [to] five year thing or a lifetime career.”

Brisk Teaching and Gemini are two of her district’s most commonly used AI tools. Here’s how she helps teachers use them:

* The Chrome extension Brisk Teaching and Google’s AI feature Gemini can generate quick and accurate translations for students who may not be proficient in English. Not only are these translation tools helpful to teachers, but they also help newcomer students to feel welcomed and more engaged in the classroom, Bacon said.

* Brisk Teaching also allows teachers to input an article and receive a grade-level appropriate version of the same article in a Google Doc. It can also translate the article into different languages. According to Bacon, this allows teachers to be flexible and topical with lesson plans.

Bacon likes to remind other educators that, ultimately, they hold the expertise, not AI. AI is just another tool to help set up a framework for a lesson plan or activity, she said. It is the responsibility of the teacher to modify what AI has generated and to determine how to use that content in the classroom.

According to Bacon, the International Society for Technology Educators (ISTE) offers support like free monthly webinars for all teachers looking to learn more about edtech tools. The Connect app, a collaboration between ISTE and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), features forums by topic where teachers can communicate with each other.

‘Small but mighty’ ways to use your time effectively

The amount of choices teachers make about instruction in a single day can feel exhausting, especially for new teachers. Plotinsky suggests “embracing less to accomplish more” as a way to prevent decision fatigue. “If [teaching] is something you’re truly passionate about doing and you want to have longevity in the profession, it means making some choices about what you need to do versus what you want to do,” she said.

* Don’t overplan. While new teachers might want to feel prepared by mapping out lesson plans months in advance, Plotinsky said that doesn’t accommodate the moment-to-moment changes that are inevitable in a classroom. Instead, she recommended that new teachers have an overarching idea of lesson plans mapped out a few weeks in advance, and that new teachers are ready to adjust their plans along the way.

* Talk less. One of the most transformative lessons that Plotinsky learned as a new teacher was “learning when to be quiet,” she said. She encouraged teachers to think about ways and places they can condense their active teaching to allow students “to show us what they know and how they’re approaching content.” For example, by reevaluating what she was giving students during the first 20 to 40 minutes of class, Plotinsky recognized that some students knew more than others about a topic before beginning a lesson. Using activators to draw out the knowledge that students already hold on a subject can even the playing field. Students can also contribute to developing activator questions and activities, which can save time during lesson planning for teachers.

* Stack your habits. According to Plotinsky, habit stacking, the practice of “layering habits on top of one another, one at a time, to produce enduring results,” can help to increase brevity in the classroom. Plotinsky likes to use going to the gym for the first time as an example of habit stacking. First you have to drive to the gym, once you’ve parked, you’re more likely to go inside, and once you’re inside, you’re more likely to workout. Setting a goal to make a bigger change can’t be done all at once, “you have to break it into component parts,” she said. “For new teachers, it’s establishing routines and structures that are tenable for them, because if they don’t do that early and often, they are going to feel that sense of panic that just never stops.” Plotinsky recommended establishing designated methods for things like grading papers, and check-ins with students, as well as establishing designated time for yourself.

* Get student feedback. Teaching consists of a lot of guesswork and intuitive thinking, said Plotinsky. That’s why asking for and listening to student voices can and save a lot of time. Asking students open-ended questions or having them ask the teacher open ended questions about class or a specific lesson can be a good formative assessment. It doesn’t need to happen daily, but when teaching new lessons, it helps to understand what your students do and don’t know, Plotinsky said. She encouraged teachers to be explicit with students about what they are doing and learning and why. However, she warned against asking yes or no questions and about underdelivering on student feedback. “Don’t ask if you don’t want to know,” she said. Implementing student feedback “should be a very authentic process or kids will lose interest really quickly.”

Teachers shouldn’t expect themselves to be at the top of their game their first year, but “you’re supposed to try your best,” said Plotinsky, whose own first year teaching was difficult. “The question is, how do you just keep trying and bounce back and keep persisting because you will be okay. It’s just hard work.”

http://dlvr.it/TD5c7l

Humanizing History by Teaching with Primary Sources

2024-09-10T03:59:00.001-07:00

View the full episode transcript.

To an outside observer, there’s nothing particularly special about the beige rug at the front of Miranda Lyle’s fourth grade classroom. But for Lyle, it’s the best spot in the room. It’s where students gather for morning meetings, read-alouds, and when Lyle wants to facilitate an intimate learning conversation instead of a lecture. Lyle compared the feeling on the rug to that of gathering around a campfire. “They’re all kind of sitting in a relaxed, comfortable place, there’s proximity, but there’s also, you know, just like a shared comfort level of having the rug,” she said. That makes it easier for her students to test new ideas, express emotions and disagree civilly. “It’s been a very intentional place for us every year to see each other as equals and see each other as people,” Lyle said.

Last spring, her students gathered on the rug as they kicked off a social studies unit on school desegregation in Virginia, where they live. Lyle projected vocabulary words, like segregation, prejudice and integration on the smartboard above their heads, and the class practiced saying them together. Then Lyle clicked forward to a black and white photo of a group of teenagers. Lyle asked the fourth graders to study the image closely. “I want you to observe and see as many things as you can before we even start today,” she said.

The teenagers in the photo were students at R.R. Moton High School – a segregated school in Farmville, Virginia, just over two hours southeast of where the fourth graders attended school. In 1951, the Moton students went on strike to demand better school conditions, which the white school board denied them. Their activism led to them becoming the only student plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education – the Supreme Court case that found school segregation unconstitutional 70 years ago.

Instead of reading about the Moton student strike in a textbook, fourth graders in Rockingham County Public Schools, where Lyle teaches, learn about it through photographs, diary entries and stories of the young people involved. These first-hand accounts of history are called primary sources. “A primary source at its very core is the raw material of history,” said Lee Ann Potter, the Director of Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives at the Library of Congress.

Many students today are learning history through primary sources. That shift, according to Potter, arose in the last two decades as museums and archival institutions began digitizing their collections, making them accessible to teachers and students online. At the Library of Congress, Potter and her team develop resources to help teachers use primary sources in their classrooms.

In Rockingham County, Lyle and a team of teachers designed a fourth grade civil rights unit using the Inquiry Design Model, an instructional approach that encourages students to explore and investigate topics, rather than being passive recipients of information. In the civil rights unit, primary sources prompt that inquiry and exploration. That’s possible because, according to Lyle and her colleagues, primary sources can make people and events from history feel more real and more textured for students. They can also help kids learn to think critically about the information they’re consuming. That’s increasingly necessary as young people navigate a digital world filled with misinformation and disinformation from both humans and artificial intelligence.

Building empathy with historical figures

On the first day of the civil rights unit last spring, Lyle didn’t tell her students all the details about the Moton student strike. That would come later. Looking at the photo of the students was a preview amid a broader introduction to racial segregation. After answering some initial questions, Lyle clicked through slides that included background information on the Jim Crow era and more black and white photos of segregated water fountains, buses and neighborhoods. With each slide, the fourth graders pointed out details and asked questions. As the images marched on, their frustration with the injustices of the past rose.
Fourth graders in Miranda Lyle’s class sort through historical photos trying to identify which ones reflect segregation and which ones reflect integration. The activity was part of a lesson on the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia. (Kara Newhouse/KQED)

“So far, are you guys feeling like ‘separate but equal’ is fair?” Lyle asked.

“Nooo! No!” The students shouted before she even finished the question.

“I think that’s a lie,” said one student, Alex.

Lyle said their reactions illustrated how photographs can help students empathize with people and events of the past. “Giving kids primary sources is one of the biggest signs of respect we can show the kids and the story,” she said. “I think it tells [them] we trust them. We know they can do it. And it gives them the opportunity to not just sit back and listen, but to become detectives, to uncover the story that might be deeper than what we were going to present them to begin with.”

Examining agency and decision making

At another fourth grade classroom in Rockingham County, students know teacher Carrie Lillard as a history buff who will occasionally bust out a rap from Hamilton. On one wall of her room, a bulletin board says, “History is storytelling” and features over a dozen cards highlighting notable people and events in Virginia history. By framing history as storytelling, Lillard said she wants students to see that the past is composed of people who made choices. And to be able to analyze the consequences – good, bad or complicated.

One of the historical characters the fourth graders learn the most about in the civil rights unit is Barbara Johns, the quiet 16-year-old who led her Moton High School classmates in the strike for better school facilities and resources. Moton High School was constructed for about 200 students. But by the 1950s it held more than 450. And that wasn’t the only challenge. The roofs of the buildings leaked. Students had to hold umbrellas over their heads on rainy days. The only heat was from a potbelly stove. Anyone who sat near it got too hot, and kids who sat far away shivered in their winter coats.

None of these problems existed at the nearby high school attended by white students. But despite lobbying by parents, the school board refused to build a new school for Black students. When Johns and her classmates went on strike, they wrote to the NAACP for help and eventually sued the school board. Their case became one of five that made up Brown v. Board of Education.

“For a nine and ten year old, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that someone their age, or slightly older or sometimes slightly younger can change the world and with just one small decision. And that’s exactly what she did. So kids really grasp onto that,” said Lillard.
Barbara Johns led classmates at Moton High School in a fight for better school facilities that they took all the way to the Supreme Court. (Courtesy of the Robert Russa Moton Museum)

In addition to photos, the Rockingham County fourth graders learn about Johns’ motivations through another primary source: her diary. They read entries that Johns wrote later in life, recounting her time in high school. In one entry, she recalled missing the school bus one morning and trying to hitch a ride.

“One morning I was so busy rushing my brothers and sister down the hill to school that I forgot my own lunch and had to rush back up the hill to retrieve it. In the meantime, the bus arrived, picked them up and left me standing there by the roadside waiting to thumb a ride with whomever came by. About an hour later, I was still waiting when the white school bus drives by half empty on its way to Farmville High School. It would have to pass by my school to get to that school, and I couldn’t ride with them. Right then and there, I decided, indeed, something had to be done about this inequality – and I still didn’t know what.”

For Emery, a fourth grader in Lillard’s class, reading Johns’ own words brought this history to life. “I liked how it was, in particular, how it was [the story of] a young girl,” Emery said. “Normally we learn about older people. But no, we learned about a 16-year-old, still a teenager.”

Although the Moton students and other Brown v. Board plaintiffs were successful, school segregation didn’t end immediately in Virginia. Local and state officials there actively defied the court ruling, even closing schools in several counties instead of integrating. It took more protests and more court cases, for schools to actually integrate.

Lillard said her emphasis on viewing historical figures as people who had agency and made choices helps her students process this complex history. “I’m like, OK, so, you know, think about the same people who weren’t just automatically okay with the Civil War being over, they still harbor a lot of anger and resentment the same way, just because you’re forced to apologize to a friend doesn’t automatically fix it,” she explained.

Fostering critical thinking skills

Lillard and Lyle said that their former students still bring up Barbara Johns even when they leave fourth grade. For Lyle, that’s different from when she covered this topic without primary sources. “They knew her role. They knew her name. That was really it,” she said of earlier students. “I’m not even sure if they remember her story at all. Because they were passive in that process.”

The goal of social studies isn’t just to memorize a list of names and dates. It’s also to help kids learn skills like analyzing information sources, using evidence to distinguish fact from opinion, and comparing and contrasting people, places and events. An example of that kind of critical thinking occurred as Lyle’s students studied old photos of segregation. While examining a photo of a sign for a whites-only neighborhood, a student named Lily raised her hand.

“What makes me mad is that when the sign says, ‘We want white tenants in our white community,’ it has American flags on it,” she said. “And the Black people … are a part of America. So why do the white people say they’re usually more a part of America than the black people?”

Lyle said that Lily’s observation and question impressed her: “I was kind of sitting back there like, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s brilliance.’ And that’s because she had the opportunity to just stare at a picture and stare long enough to see the little details that otherwise could be missed.”

Potter, the Library of Congress educator, agreed that giving students opportunities to study primary sources can foster critical thinking. “The fact that you can go to the source where the information originated and get the context of the source and the rest of the story – if you can get kids interested and excited about that, then what we’re going to do is train a generation of young people to constantly question where information is coming from,” she said. “That is absolutely what primary sources can do for young people. And goodness knows we need more of that.”

For teachers new to primary sources, Potter recommended picking one item or document that complements the secondary sources in the curriculum. Teachers can invite students to observe, reflect and ask questions about the primary source using a one-page worksheet developed by her team. The library’s website also contains curated sets of primary sources related to popular curriculum topics, such as the New Deal, women’s suffrage and Rosa Parks. Blog posts offer tips for how to use those resources.

Episode transcript

Kara Newhouse: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Kara Newhouse.

Nimah Gobir: And I’m Nimah Gobir.

Kara Newhouse: Nimah, do you like to make pancakes?

Nimah Gobir: I do! They’re one of my favorite foods.

Kara Newhouse: Have you ever put peanut butter in your pancakes?

Nimah Gobir: No. It sounds delicious, but Kara, why do you ask?

Kara Newhouse: I recently learned that civil rights icon Rosa Parks put peanut butter in her pancake batter. Her recipe is handwritten on the back of a bank envelope.

Lee Ann Potter: And the recipe itself is terrific. It really is. If you need a good pancake recipe, add some peanut butter to it, and you will love them.

Kara Newhouse: That’s Lee Ann Potter. She’s the Director of Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where the Rosa Parks papers are held.

Nimah Gobir: The Library of Congress is home to all sorts of documents from America’s past. They range from legal records to items that reflect the daily life of historical figures.

Kara Newhouse: The Rosa Parks collection includes a date book, photos of her with family, birthday cards sent to her by admiring children, and more.

Lee Ann Potter: There’s a series in her papers of her membership cards. And, you know, you see her membership card for AARP. And it’s like, never occurred to me that Rosa Parks might be a member of AARP. But her membership card is in her papers.

Kara Newhouse: Lee Ann and her team develop resources to help teachers use Library of Congress materials like these in their classrooms.

Lee Ann Potter: There is not a day that goes by when I don’t stumble on something in the collection that either catches my breath or makes me think, oh, who can I tell about this cool thing? And the former classroom teacher in me is always thinking about, what is the thing that might have captured student attention or gotten students to think differently or deeply about something?

Kara Newhouse: The materials at the Library of Congress are what we call primary sources. Unlike textbooks, they are first-hand accounts of the past.

[Music]

Lee Ann Potter: A primary source at its very core is the raw material of history. They can be newspapers. They can be photographs, maps, architectural drawings, sound recordings. They can be receipts. They can be memos. They can be scribbles. They can be doodles. They can be, truly, objects.

Kara Newhouse: Many students today are learning history through primary sources. That wasn’t always the norm.

Nimah Gobir: In the past two decades, museums and archival institutions started digitizing their collections and putting them online.

Lee Ann Potter: I think as soon as the materials became available and more and more of these organizations worked in partnership with educators to really start building some pedagogy and tools around using these materials as classroom tools, as exercises, as opportunities for students, that’s when everything started to change.

Kara Newhouse: Primary sources can make people and events of the past feel more real and more textured for students.

Nimah Gobir: They can also help kids learn to think critically about the information they’re consuming. That’s increasingly necessary as young people navigate a digital world filled with misinformation and disinformation from both humans and artificial intelligence.

Lee Ann Potter: The fact that you can go to the source where the information originated and get the context of the source and the rest of the story – if you can get kids interested and excited about that, then what we’re going to do is, is train a generation of young people to constantly question where information is coming from and constantly wonder, what is the original source for this bit of information that someone is trying to convey to me? And I think that is absolutely what primary sources can do for young people. And and goodness knows we need more of that.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: In this episode of MindShift, we’re going to hear how primary sources can bring history to life and deepen students’ understanding of the past.

Nimah Gobir: We’ll do that by visiting two schools in Virginia where students are learning about the Civil Rights Movement. Stay with us.

Miranda Lyle: What happened after the Civil war?

Whole class: Reconstruction!

Kara Newhouse: To dig into the power of learning with primary sources, we’re visiting a fourth grade classroom in Rockingham County, Virginia.

Miranda Lyle: So what are the words we’re gonna talk about today?

Whole class: Amendment, segregation, and pre-

Miranda Lyle: Prejudice.

Kara Newhouse: Amendment, segregation and prejudice.

Whole class: Prejudice.

Kara Newhouse: Those are the vocab words that students are learning in Miranda Lyle’s fourth grade class. The class is gathered on a beige rug at the front of the room.

Miranda Lyle: You think you know what segregation means? What do you think it means?

Nimah Gobir: This is the start of a social studies unit about school desegregation.

Miranda Lyle: White and Black people were separated from each other based on race, right?

Nimah Gobir: Next, Miranda projects a black and white photo of a group of teenagers onto the smart board.

Miranda Lyle: You’re going to read this picture. I want you to observe and see as many things as you can before we even start today. What do you, what do you notice? Why don’t you have a quiet thumb up. Keep looking at the screen. See if you can give me more than one idea.

Kara Newhouse: The photograph is from 1951. It shows about 40 African-American teenagers standing outside looking at the camera. The boys wear collared shirts and in some cases ties. The girls wear dresses or long skirts and blouses. Many also wear long coats. In the background there are two buildings and a sidewalk flanked by mud and puddles.

Levi: They look like they’re going to school.

Miranda Lyle: They look like they’re going to school. What makes you think they’re going to school?

Levi: Because they have, like, uniforms on. Well, like they have clothes that look school-y.

Miranda Lyle: They have clothes that look kind of professional, kind of ready for school, I like that.

Nimah Gobir: These teenagers were students at R.R. Moton High School. That was a segregated school in Farmville, Virginia – just over two hours southeast of where the fourth graders are sitting now.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda’s students don’t know it yet, but the young people they’re looking at were some of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education – the Supreme Court case that found school segregation unconstitutional 70 years ago.

Miranda Lyle: Abigail.

Abigail: It looks like, like, in the background those are like schools. Like the schools that they were in, like those small buildings.

Unidentified student: Like cabins.

Miranda Lyle: It looks like schools, smaller buildings, you notice they kind of look like cabins. What makes you think cabins when you look at that?

Unidentified student: Like they’re made out of, like, wood and, like, it doesn’t really look like somewhere you’d want to live.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: The buildings they’re discussing were temporary classrooms made with cheap tar paper siding. Some people in Farmville said they looked like chicken coops. County officials built them to deal with overcrowding at Moton High School.

Nimah Gobir: The school was constructed for about 200 students. But by the 1950s it held more than 450. And that wasn’t the only challenge. The roofs of the buildings leaked. Students had to hold umbrellas over their heads on rainy days. The only heat was from a potbelly stove. Anyone who sat near it got too hot, and kids who sat far away shivered in their winter coats.

Kara Newhouse: None of these problems existed at the nearby high school attended by white students. But despite lobbying by parents, the school board refused to build a new school for Black students. To protest the disparities, a quiet 16-year-old named Barbara Johns led her classmates in a two-week strike in 1951.

Nimah Gobir: The students wrote to the NAACP for help and eventually sued the school board. Their case became one of five that made up Brown v. Board of Education.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda’s fourth grade class will learn about all of that during this social studies unit. For now, this photo of the R. R. Moton students is just a teaser. Today is all about understanding the historical context of the Jim Crow era.

Miranda Lyle: We’re going to keep going because today we’re going to be looking at a lot of different pictures and a lot of different primary sources like this one.

Nimah Gobir: Miranda clicks through slides that include background info and more black and white photos depicting segregated water fountains, buses and neighborhoods. The fourth graders point out details and ask questions.

Kara Newhouse: As they study the photos, they’re getting a strong sense of what racial segregation looked like. And they are not happy about it.

Miranda Lyle: So, so far, are you guys feeling like separate but equal …

Alex: Is really a lie.

Miranda Lyle: Is fair?

Whole class: No. No!

Miranda Lyle: What are you feeling so far, Alex?

Alex: It’s like, I think that’s a lie.

Miranda Lyle: You think that separate but equal is a lie.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda says, these photographs help students empathize with people and events of the past.

Miranda Lyle: Actually giving kids primary sources is one of the biggest signs of respect we can show the kids and the story. I think it tells us we trust them. We know they can do it. And it gives them the opportunity to not just sit back and listen, but to become detectives, to uncover the story that might be deeper than what we were going to present them to begin with.

Kara Newhouse: Here’s one student, Lily, responding to a photo of a sign for a whites-only neighborhood.

Lily: What makes me mad is that when the sign says ‘We want white people in our white community,’ it has American flags on it. And the Black people are a part of America. So why do the white people say they’re usually more a part of America than the Black people?

Miranda Lyle: You’re angry because those flags are for the United States, right? And you’re saying all races live in the United States. And at this point, remember, this is after that 15, 13, 14, the 15th amendment. So the Constitution says, yeah, these people are Americans, too.

Nimah Gobir: Miranda and a team of teachers in Rockingham County designed this civil rights unit using inquiry-based teaching. That’s a method that encourages students to ask questions about the world and develop analytical thinking skills.

Kara Newhouse: Lily’s observation about the flag is an example of how primary sources can drive inquiry.

Miranda Lyle: I was really impressed. I was I was kind of, like, sitting back there like, oh my goodness, that’s brilliance. And that’s because she had the, you know, like, had the opportunity to just stare at a picture and stare long enough to see the little details that otherwise could be missed.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Learning with primary sources has some great benefits, but it also comes with challenges.

Nimah Gobir: One of the big ones is that documents from the past may use language we wouldn’t use today.

Kara Newhouse: For instance, some of the photos that Miranda’s students were looking at included signs referring to Black people as “colored.”

Miranda Lyle: Which is a sign that we’re going to see in a lot of different primary sources we look at. But remember, we talked last week about that Maya Angelou quote in, um, growth mindset that said, ‘know better and do better.’ Remember how we talked about how that’s something that was on those signs, but are we going to use that term? No, because we know better than that, so we’re going to do better than that. So using terms like African-American, even saying things like Black people or brown people, that’s allowed. But we want to stray away from using words that aren’t used anymore.

Nimah Gobir: Even with the upfront discussion about appropriate language, these are fourth graders. They’re still learning. And things can come up that require gentle correction.

Unidentified student: … that the Blacks are not getting treated very nicely because they have like —

Miranda Lyle: Black people – we want to make sure we have that ‘people’ word at the end there. The Black people.

Unidentified student: Mmhm.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda tries to model the “know better, do better” idea herself, too. During their Civil War study, she had a slide that used the term “runaway slaves.”

Miranda Lyle: And I was talking with my class one day. I was like, I don’t like how that sounds, because, you know, and they’re like, ‘Well, yeah, runaway sounds like it’s a bad thing.’

Kara Newhouse: She went online and looked for alternate terms.

Miranda Lyle: And one that I found that my kids have really attached to was freedom seekers, because we talked about how ‘runaway’ sounds like they’re doing something wrong and they’re not doing anything wrong. They’re trying to, you know, gives them just a different way of looking at the entire situation.

[Music]

Nimah Gobir: It’s not just language that can be hard in social studies. Topics like slavery and segregation reveal difficult truths about violence and injustice in American history. These topics have also become politicized in recent years.

Kara Newhouse: According to the news outlet Education Week, 17 states have passed bills or other policies that limit teachers’ ability to discuss racism in school.

Nimah Gobir: That includes here in Virginia, where the governor issued an executive order that bans so-called “divisive concepts,” such as critical race theory – which is an academic and legal framework.

Kara Newhouse: Proponents of such policies often say that talking about racial injustice will make white children feel guilty. Miranda’s school is predominantly white, and that hasn’t been her experience.

Miranda Lyle: I had a student put on a study guide, ‘Which side did Virginia support?’ It was like ‘Virginia,’ he outlined in a heart, and then ‘supported the Confederacy’ and then had a broken heart. So they’re able to see, like, it’s not ‘you’re the problem’ or ‘Virginia today is the problem.’ They’re able to kind of see these, yeah, that was a big mistake people made for a long time. That was actually really detrimental. Why? Because kids, I think even our age, when we were children would have had the same, ‘That’s not fair’ had it been presented as, look at these primary sources. Look at these actual pictures.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda also makes sure her students know that even though the R.R. Moton facilities were unequal, the students there were smart and had teachers who maintained high expectations for them. She doesn’t want her students to unconsciously equate bad conditions with people being downtrodden.

Miranda Lyle: Just because they had more supplies or they had better buildings or things like that, does that mean that the students weren’t as good?

Whole class: No.

Miranda Lyle: Does it mean that the teachers weren’t as good?

Whole class: No, no.

Miranda Lyle: Remember we talked about at one of the schools we’re going to discuss, at R.R. Moton high school, one of the teachers would go on to work for NASA. Does that sound like somebody who’s going to be a good science teacher? Somebody who goes to NASA?

Unidentified student: Yeah.

Miranda Lyle: A good math teacher? Yeah. So we’re going to keep talking about these things.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: After this introduction to segregation, the fourth graders will learn about Barbara Johns, the 16-year-old I mentioned earlier. She led her classmates in a fight for equal education that they took all the way to the Supreme Court. That story is the beating heart of this unit.

Carrie Lillard: One of the coolest things about Barbara Johns is that she was one, a student. She was not the same age as my own kids that I teach, but she was still a student who saw a problem in her school, which was in Virginia.

Kara Newhouse: This is Carrie Lillard. She’s another fourth grade teacher in Rockingham County. She was on the same team as Miranda that created this unit about Barbara Johns and her classmates.

Carrie Lillard: For a nine and ten year old, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that someone their age or slightly older, or sometimes slightly younger, can change the world and with just one small decision. And that’s exactly what she did. So kids really grasp onto that.

Nimah Gobir: One way the fourth graders learn about Barbara Johns is from another primary source: her diary.

Lily: One morning I was so busy rushing my brothers and sister down the hill to school that I forgot my own lunch and had to rush back up the hill to retrieve it.

Kara Newhouse: That’s one of Carrie’s students, Lily. She’s reading a diary entry that Barbara Johns wrote later in life recounting her time in high school. In it, Barbara recalls missing the school bus one morning and trying to hitch a ride.

Lily: About an hour later, I was still waiting when the white school bus drives by half empty on its way to Farmville High School. It would have to pass by my school to get to that school, and I couldn’t ride with them. Right then and there, I decided, indeed, something had to be done about this inequality.

Kara Newhouse: Here’s another student, Emery, recalling what Barbara did after the day she missed the bus.

Emery: She went up to her music teacher and said, ‘Hey, I have a problem’. And the teacher and she told her the problem. And the music teacher said, ‘If you have a problem, why don’t you fix it?’ And she gathered all these people in the auditorium and said, ‘If you want to be with me, you can be with me.’ And then she led a strike.

Kara Newhouse: Reading the diary entries helped Emery connect with Barbara Johns and the Brown v. Board case on a personal level.

Emery: I liked how it was, in particular, how it was a young girl. Normally when we, we learn about, like, older people. But no, we learned about a 16 year old. Still a teenager.

Kara Newhouse: Why did that stand out to you?

Emery: Because usually to teenagers, like these days in 2024, do some dumb stuff.

Kara Newhouse: [laughs] But Barbara Johns wasn’t doing dumb stuff?

Emery: No, she was doing brilliant stuff.

Kara Newhouse: The Rockingham County teachers told me that their former students still bring up Barbara Johns even when they leave fourth grade. Miranda says that’s different from when she covered this topic without primary sources.

Miranda Lyle: They knew her role. They knew her name. That was really it. And if they held onto it, what I could say about it now. I’m not even sure if they remember her story at all. Because it was more, they were passive in that process.

Nimah Gobir: The goal of social studies isn’t just to memorize a list of names and dates. It’s also to help kids learn skills like analyzing information sources, using evidence to distinguish fact from opinion, and comparing and contrasting people, places and events.

Kara Newhouse: I heard examples of all of those skills as the fourth graders discussed photos and diary entries from Virginia’s history.

Miranda Lyle: They’re not just sitting back and being passive listeners to a story. They’re seeing the actual actions and the consequences of those actions.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Those critical thinking skills also help students wrestle with the complexity of the past. Like the fact that schools did not immediately integrate after Brown v. Board of Education.

Nimah Gobir: In Virginia, local and state officials actively defied the court ruling. They even closed schools in several counties instead of integrating.

Kara Newhouse: It took more protests and more court cases, for schools to actually integrate in Virginia. Carrie says the fourth graders learn about all of that.

Carrie Lillard: Approaching history from ‘we are we are a combination of all of the choices we make’ helps when we get to this point. I’m like, OK, so, you know, think about the same people who weren’t just automatically okay with the Civil War being over, they still harbor a lot of anger and resentment the same way, just because you’re forced to apologize to a friend doesn’t automatically fix it.

Kara Newhouse: For their final assignment, the fourth graders write a letter to Barbara Johns’ sister, Joan Johns Cobbs. She participated in the Moton student strike and is still alive today.

Leigha: Dear Mrs. Johns Cobbs. We have been learning about your sister Barbara Johns’ legacy in my history class and the impacts she has made in our lives. She was brave by doing what is right because she felt like she had to do something.

Kara Newhouse: That’s Leigha, now a fifth grader. She’s reading the letter she wrote a year earlier in Carrie’s class.

Leigha: … I’m going to defend girls because she inspired me to say ‘no’ when boys say girls can’t run or play sports, but they can. Barbara Johns has inspired me to stand up for what I believe in. Thank you for making the USA what it is today. Thanks for everything.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: We just heard about an entire social studies unit centered around primary sources. But teachers don’t have to overhaul the whole curriculum to get started teaching this way.

Nimah Gobir: Lee Ann Potter’s team at the Library of Congress recommends picking one primary source that complements the secondary sources schools are using. Teachers can invite students to observe, reflect and ask questions about the primary source.

Kara Newhouse: The Library of Congress’s website for teachers has a one-page worksheet to walk students through that observe-reflect-question cycle. The website also has curated sets of primary sources related to popular curriculum topics. And lots of tips for how to use those resources.

Nimah Gobir: History is rich with stories. Primary sources can unlock those stories by humanizing the people who came before us.

Kara Newhouse: When young people form connections with the past, it helps them understand our world today and determine the future they want to create.

Kara Newhouse: Thank you to Miranda Lyle, Carrie Lillard and all of their fourth grade students. The students you heard in this episode were:

Levi, Abigail, Alex, Lily D., Lilly J., Emery and Leigha.

Thanks also to Lee Ann Potter at the Library of Congress and Beau Dickenson at Rockingham County Public Schools.

If you want to learn more about Barbara Johns, you can visit the Robert Russa Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia.

I’m Kara Newhouse.

Nimah Gobir: And I’m Nimah Gobir.

Kara Newhouse: The rest of the MindShift team includes Ki Sung, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Jennifer Ng.

Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer.

Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, and Holly Kernan.

Nimah Gobir: MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.

Kara Newhouse: If you love MindShift, and enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. We really appreciate it. You can also read more or subscribe to our newsletter at K-Q-E-D-dot-org-slash-MindShift.

Thanks for listening!

http://dlvr.it/TD3Lv9

Can Tutoring at Scale Lead to Academic Recovery? One Advocate’s New Study Yields Underwhelming Results

2024-09-09T04:19:00.001-07:00

Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, was an early proponent of giving tutors — ordinarily a luxury for the rich — to the masses after the pandemic. The research evidence was strong; more than a hundred studies had shown remarkable academic gains for students who were frequently tutored every week at school. Sometimes, they caught up two grade levels in a single year.

After COVID-19 shuttered schools in the spring of 2020, Kraft along with a small group of academics lobbied the Biden administration to urge schools to invest in this kind of intensive tutoring across the nation to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. Many schools did — or tried to do so. Now, in a moment of scholarly honesty and reflection, Kraft has produced a study showing that tutoring the masses isn’t so easy — even with billions of dollars from Uncle Sam.

The study, which was posted online in late August 2024, tracked almost 7,000 students who were tutored in Nashville, Tennessee, and calculated how much of their academic progress could be attributed to the sessions of tutoring they received at school between 2021 and 2023. Kraft and his research team found that tutoring produced only a small boost to reading test scores, on average, and no improvement in math. Tutoring failed to lift course grades in either subject.

“These results are not as large as many in the education sector had hoped,” said Kraft in an interview. That’s something of an academic understatement. The one and only positive result for students was a tiny fraction of what earlier tutoring studies had found.

“I was and continue to be incredibly impressed with the rigorous and wide body of evidence that exists for tutoring and the large average effects that those studies produced,” said Kraft. “I don’t think I paid as much attention to whether those tutoring programs were as applicable to post-COVID era tutoring at scale.”

Going forward, Kraft said he and other researchers need to “recalibrate” or adjust expectations around the “eye-popping” or very large impacts that previous small-scale tutoring programs have achieved.

Kraft described the Nashville program as “multiple orders of magnitude” larger than the pre-COVID tutoring studies. Those were often less than 50 students, while some involved a few hundred. Only a handful included over 1,000 students. Nashville’s tutoring program reached almost 7,000 students, roughly 10% of the district’s student population.

Tennessee was a trailblazer in tutoring after the pandemic. State lawmakers appropriated extra funding to schools to launch large tutoring programs, even before the Biden administration urged schools around the nation to do the same with their federal COVID recovery funds. Nashville partnered with researchers, including Kraft, to study its ramp up and outcomes for students to help advise on improvements along the way.

As with the launching of any big new program, Nashville hit a series of snags. Early administrators were overwhelmed with “14 bazillion emails,” as educators described them to researchers in the study, before they hired enough staff to coordinate the tutoring program. They first tried online tutoring. But too much time and effort was wasted setting kids up on computers, coping with software problems, and searching for missing headphones. Some children had to sit in the hallway with their tablets and headphones; it was hard to concentrate.

Meanwhile, remote tutors were frustrated by not being able to talk with teachers regularly. Often there was redundancy with tutors being told to teach topics identical to what the students were learning in class.

The content of the tutoring lessons was in turmoil, too. The city scrapped its math curriculum midway. Different grades required different reading curricula. For each of them, Nashville educators needed to create tutor guides and student workbooks from scratch.

Eventually the city switched course and replaced its remote tutors, who were college student volunteers, with teachers at the school who could tutor in-person. That eliminated the headaches of troublesome technology. Also, teachers could adjust the tutoring lessons to avoid repeating exactly what they had taught in class.

But school teachers were fewer in number and couldn’t serve as many students as an army of remote volunteers. Instead of one tutor for each student, teachers worked with three or four students at a time. Even after tripling and quadrupling up, there weren’t enough teachers to tutor everyone during school hours. Half the students had their tutoring sessions scheduled immediately before or right after school.

In interviews, teachers said they enjoyed the stronger relationships they were building with their students. But there were tradeoffs. The extra tutoring work raised concerns about teacher burnout.

Despite the flux, some things improved as the tutoring program evolved. The average number of tutoring sessions that students attended increased from 16 sessions in the earlier semesters to 24 sessions per semester by spring of 2023.

Why the academic gains for students weren’t stronger is unclear. One of Kraft’s theories is that Nashville asked tutors to teach grade-level skills and topics, similar to what the children were also learning in their classrooms and what the state tests would assess. But many students were months, even years behind grade level, and may have needed to learn rudimentary skills before being able to grasp more advanced topics. (This problem surprised me because I thought the whole purpose of tutoring was to fill in missing skills and knowledge!) In the data, average students in the middle of the achievement distribution showed the greatest gains from Nashville’s tutoring program. Students at the bottom and top didn’t progress much, or at all. (See the graph below.)

“What’s most important is that we figure out what tutoring programs and design features work best for which students,” Kraft said.

Average students in the middle of the achievement distribution gained the most from Nashville’s tutoring program, while students who were the most behind did not catch up much
Source: Kraft, Matthew A., Danielle Sanderson Edwards, and Marisa Cannata. (2024). The Scaling Dynamics and Causal Effects of a District-Operated Tutoring Program.

Another reason for the disappointing academic gains from tutoring may be related to the individualized attention that many students were also receiving at Nashville’s schools. Tutoring often took place during frequently scheduled periods of “Personalized Learning Time” for students, and even students not selected for tutoring received other instruction during this period, such as small-group work with a teacher or individual services for children with special needs. Another set of students was assigned independent practice work using advanced educational software that adapts to a student’s level. To demonstrate positive results in this study, tutoring would have had to outperform all these other interventions. It’s possible that these other interventions are as powerful as tutoring. Earlier pre-COVID studies of tutoring generally compared the gains against those of students who had nothing more than traditional whole class instruction. That’s a starker comparison. (To be sure, one would still have hoped to see stronger results for tutoring as the Nashville program migrated to outside of school hours; students who received both tutoring and personalized learning time should have meaningfully outperformed students who had only the personalized learning time.)

Other post-pandemic tutoring research has been rosier. A smaller study of frequent in-school tutoring in Chicago and Atlanta, released in March 2024, found giant gains for students in math, enough to totally undo learning losses for the average student. However, those results excluded a quarter of the roughly 1,500 students who had been assigned to receive tutoring but did not attend sessions.

Kraft argued that schools should not abandon tutoring just because it’s not a silver bullet for academic recovery after COVID. “I worry,” he said, “that we may excuse ourselves from the hard work of iterative experimentation and continuous improvement by saying that we didn’t get the eye-popping results that we had hoped for right out of the gate, and therefore it’s not the solution that we should continue to invest in.”

Iteratively is how the business world innovates too. I’m a former business reporter, and this rocky effort to bring tutoring to schools reminds me of how Levi’s introduced custom-made jeans for the masses in the 1990s. These “personal pairs” didn’t cost much more than traditional mass-produced jeans, but it was time consuming for clerks to take measurements, often the jeans didn’t fit and reorders were a hassle. Levi’s pulled the plug in 2003. Eventually it brought back custom jeans — truly bespoke ones made by a master tailor at $750 or more a pop. For the masses? Maybe not.

I wonder if customized instruction can be accomplished at scale at an affordable price. To really help students who are behind, tutors will need to diagnose each student’s learning gaps, and then develop a customized learning plan for each student. That’s pricey, and maybe impossible to do for millions of students all over the country.

This story about tutoring research was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

http://dlvr.it/TD14bR

How ‘Spotlight Reading’ Helps Students Learn to Trust Their Literary Instincts

2024-09-05T11:43:00.001-07:00

Ten years ago Roy F. Smith, an English teacher at Round Rock High School in Texas, was inspired by the idea of putting a text under a microscope while reading “The Art of X-Ray Reading” by Roy Peter Clark. Smith, who has been teaching for 24 years, developed what he calls “spotlight reading,” a quick activity used at the start of class to get students to engage with written language without worrying about a grade.

Spotlight reading puts a magnifying glass to a single sentence or short poem and encourages students to analyze the small bit of text without worrying about a grade. “I wanted them to be able to read critically because too many times in high school, kids are reading for a grade, and they’re not really interacting with the text in an authentic way,” Smith said. “[Spotlight reading] engages all of their skills for reading, writing and thinking within the first ten minutes of class.”

Smith uses the activity once or twice per week throughout the school year in his AP literature and composition and dual-credit American literature classes. He said he’s seen an improvement in AP exam scores since he introduced the activity. The practice is now widely used at Round Rock High School, and has been picked up by teachers elsewhere, too.

What is spotlight reading?

Smith starts spotlight reading by putting a short excerpt from a book, essay or poem on the board before students enter the classroom. His first excerpt of the year is usually a complex sentence from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood that contains cumulative ideas. Smith reads the quote for his students and asks them some questions, which they answer by writing in their notebooks for three to four minutes. He said it doesn’t matter if the students have read the complete text or not.

One of Smith’s favorite questions to ask is, “What do you notice first?” Every student can notice something, regardless of background knowledge or skill level, he said. Other questions might have to do with the broader lesson that students are learning that day, such as, “What literary elements or techniques do you see?” or “What do you think the overall meaning is?”

Smith encourages students to “just write” and go with their first ideas without overthinking. Then, students talk in small groups about their ideas for two minutes. Smith listens in on conversations, but is careful not to interject. If he hears a particularly interesting idea, he taps that student on the shoulder and asks them to share it with the class after the small group discussion.

Okay!

Inspired entirely by @Englishroy, this is what my AmLit students will do with a different text every day. Roy calls this process “spotlight reading” and it should take no more than 12-15 minutes every day as our bellringer.

Alt text available for each slide
https://t.co/aimwGFwDnp pic.twitter.com/IPf9sghTot

— The Madwoman in the Classroom (@heymrsbond) August 13, 2024

Spotlight reading works best when done every week and for the entire school year. “The kids get into routines and thinking, seeing and responding,” Smith said. According to him, after the first few spotlight readings, students know exactly what to do when they enter the classroom and see a quote on the board. Spotlight reading also helps to set the tone for the rest of the class period. Especially for Smith’s fourth period class for seniors, which falls after lunch. “Spotlight focuses those kids quick,” he said. And it “starts the day with all three things that I teach: thinking, writing and reading.”

Sometimes Smith uses spotlight reading to catapult the class into a bigger discussion or lesson for the rest of the class period. Other days, spotlight reading fulfills the practice of what Smith calls “risky writing,” which de-emphasizes grammar and polished ideas. During spotlight reading, “I just want them to get used to responding to a text or a poem,” he said.

This lesson segment is designed to take 10 to 13 minutes at the beginning of a class period, and for students, gradually builds their ability to respond quickly to texts. At the end of each grading period, if students have completed each spotlight reading, they earn 100% credit.

Greater impact

Smith’s Round Rock colleague Meredith Lawrence collaborated with him to introduce spotlight reading schoolwide. According to Lawrence, “these short bursts of shining a light on [challenging texts] could be more powerful sometimes than spending an entire class period” on that text. By writing without scrutiny during spotlight reading, they learn to trust their literary instincts. “I call them reckless writings because…I want [students] to be reckless and excited for doing just like the activity itself, and not worrying about rules,” Lawrence said. “The reckless writing breaks them out of their own heads a little bit,” she continued.

After students write, Lawrence asks them to highlight all of the places that they feel they’ve developed an interesting idea or thoughts that they want to explore more. This practice of highlighting key moments “starts to build up [the students’] confidence and you start to see, as the year goes on, there’s more and more highlighted and there are fewer moments” of uncertainty, said Lawrence.

For Lawrence, spotlight reading also allows students to explore a text that she otherwise would not get to teach. Her hope is that students are exposed to authors and texts that “they end up choosing for independent reading some other time.” Throughout the years of spotlight reading, Lawrence has seen students’ confidence in their academic discussions. “It helps them be more engaged and comfortable with their own thought process,” she said.

For AP literature and composition, Smith’s students have to be able to write an essay in 40 minutes. That’s hard, he said. “So I need them to be able to read and recognize and find places to enter in quickly … I credit spotlight reading for all the gains we’ve had in our [AP] scores over the years.”

Smith said spotlight reading is particularly helpful for English language learners because he does not emphasize grammar. The important part is that the students are writing down their thoughts. The form can come later.. For students who may not understand the exercise right away, spotlight reading allows them to hear what their peers are saying. “They’re learning from each other,” Smith said.

http://dlvr.it/TCswCD

What Did the US Surgeon General Say About Parental Stress, And What Can We Do About It?

2024-09-05T05:48:00.001-07:00

This post was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram.

Last week United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory about the current state of parenting and the unprecedented stress and mental health concerns that parents are experiencing.

The surgeon general’s report explains that parents in particular are under an undue amount of stress and that the amount of stress has increased over the past decade. The report cites a 2023 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association that found that 1 in 3 parents (33%) are highly stressed while only 20% of the general population reported this level of stress. In addition, this report found that 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed that they can’t function, and 48% of parents say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming. This is clearly not sustainable and serious changes are needed in order to address this situation.

Murthy, who is a parent of a 6-year-old and 7-year-old himself, also highlighted the lack of respect for parenting in our society. He wrote: “In modern society, parenting is often portrayed as a less important, less valued pursuit. Nothing could be further from the truth.” But why is parenting more stressful now than ever before? The advisory cites several factors in parents’ stress levels.

* Parents in the United States are both working longer hours than ever before and spending more time than ever with their children. According to the American Time Use Survey, work hours have increased 28% for mothers and 4% for fathers from 1985 to 2022. During the same time period, time spent directly caring for children has increased 40% for mothers and 154% for fathers. If you are thinking that this “math isn’t mathing” and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day — you would be correct. In order to accomplish this, parents (particularly mothers) are spending less time on leisure for themselves, spending less time with their partner and sleeping fewer hours.

* Parents are financially strained. One in four parents (24%) report that there were times in the last year when they did not have enough money for basic needs, such as food or rent. One in five parents (20%) report that they have struggled to pay for child care or health care for their families. This is not surprising, given the cost of child care has skyrocketed in the United States, growing by 26% in the last decade, according to a White House briefing.

* Parents are very worried about their children’s health and safety. Three quarters (74%) of parents report that the possibility of a school shooting is a significant source of stress. One in five children also have a special health care concern, such as asthma, ADHD, anxiety, behavioral problems, learning disabilities or a developmental delay) and a child experiencing one of these health problems doubles the risk for mental health concerns in parents.

* Parents are isolated and lonely. Many parents lack community and social support which further increases stress. Among all parents, 65% report experiencing loneliness. That number goes up to 77% among single parents, while only 55% of non-parents report loneliness.

* Parents are very concerned about their children’s mental health. About three-quarters of parents (76%) worry about their child struggling with anxiety or depression in their lifetime, according to a Pew Research survey. This is a well founded concern given the current mental health crisis among children.

* There are other unprecedented stressors for parents. According to a Pew Research survey, 70% of parents also report that parenting is more difficult now than it was 20 years ago. According to these parents, two of the top reasons for this are social media and technology. In particular, parents are worried that social media use will increase the risk for anxiety/depression, lower self-esteem, bullying, peer pressure and exposure to explicit content.

Why does this matter and what can we do?

Parents are people, too, and we should be concerned about such a large percentage of the population suffering. The stress and mental health of parents also directly impacts the next generation. Research finds that children with a primary caregiver with poor mental health are twice as likely to have mental, behavioral or developmental concerns and four times more likely to have poor health.

So what can be done? Murthy called for changes in policy and cultural norms to reduce the stress of parents. Specific changes that were recommended include:

* Change the national discourse. We need to talk about how challenging parenting can be and all of the stressors that parents face. We need to recognize that parenting is a real job that is just as important as any paying job. Schools and other community organizations can start a dialogue about parent stress and help to destigmatize mental health concerns in parents.

* Governments and communities need to provide emotional and practical support for parents. We need policy changes and community involvement in ways that provide practical and emotional support to parents. Policy changes recommended by Murthy include such as universal preschool, paid family and medical leave and access to high quality mental health care. We also need more social programs that provide opportunities for parents to connect with each other in genuine ways.

* Employers also need to support working parents. Employers need to create policies and programs that support working parents and allow for work-life balance.

While we are all waiting for these policy and systemic changes, what can we do?

* Accept that parenting is extremely challenging, particularly when you live in a country like the United States that doesn’t provide a lot of support for parents. If you are struggling, it is because you are in a system that is setting you up to fail, not because there is something wrong with you.

* Recognize the importance of connection. Connection with others is key to reducing stress and improving mental health. Even though it is challenging, find time for connection — talk to a friend on the phone while you fold laundry, schedule regular play dates with other parents and their kids, get together with a neighbor after your kids go to bed, strike up a conversation with other parents at the park, etc.

* Educate yourself about different mental health conditions that parents and children may face and seek professional help when necessary. The National Institute for Mental Health website has information on common mental health conditions, such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Findsupport.gov is also a great free resource with information about how to know when you need help and how to find a mental health professional or program. If you are having a mental health crisis or considering hurting yourself, you can call or text 988 for free and confidential support in the United States.

* Try a different kind of self-care. This report recommends making time for self-care but adding self-care can also feel like a burden on an already overwhelmed parent’s to-do list. If a parent feels pressure to wake up at 5 a.m. every morning to exercise or meditate, it may actually increase stress (or at least reduce sleep). It might be more helpful to rethink self-care. Think about what you already do in a day and where you can add joy or peace. For example, listen to an audiobook or a meditation app during your commute to work, go for a walk with your family after dinner instead of watching a TV show, run errands with your partner or a friend to make them more fun, clean the kitchen while your kids are still awake so you can go to bed earlier, include your children in activities that you love such as baking or gardening, etc.

Murthy summed up the core message of this report with this statement: “Something has to change … Raising children is sacred work. It should matter to all of us.” Now is the time for real change to give parents the support they deserve for this sacred and important work.

Cara Goodwin, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, a mother of three and the founder of Parenting Translator, a nonprofit newsletter that turns scientific research into information that is accurate, relevant and useful for parents.

http://dlvr.it/TCs6DY

How Can the Community School Model Support Newcomer Education?

2024-09-03T03:35:00.001-07:00

View the full episode transcript.

When global events unfold, the ripple effects often land in unexpected places — like a classroom in Oakland, California. Increased refugee resettlement, immigration at the U.S. southern border and the buses sent by Texas to cities like New York have created a growing need for more support for newcomer students in schools. According to the Migration Policy Institute National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, nearly one million immigrant students enrolled in U.S. schools in the 2020-21 school year. Newcomer students are typically immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers who have recently arrived in a new country and are entering the school system for the first time. At Oakland International High School (OIHS), welcoming and supporting these students isn’t a new challenge; it’s the very foundation of their mission.

Since its inception in 2007, OIHS, which is part of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), has served newcomer students from over 20 different countries, according to Lauren Markham, a founding member and Learning Lab Co-director at OIHS. Newcomer students may face language barriers, cultural differences and other challenges in adapting to a new educational environment. They often require additional support to succeed academically and socially in their new surroundings. “Newcomer students fail at wildly disproportionate rates throughout the country. And we know that when any one population is failing, it’s a function of the system and not the students,” Markham said.

Students at OIHS drop out at nearly half the rate that newcomers students do at other Oakland high schools. The school’s success comes largely from the community school model, which co-locates essential services on campus, ensuring easy access for students and families. The model adheres to the principle of “Maslow before Bloom,” which suggests that students must have their basic needs met before they can fully engage in learning. “If someone has an abscessed tooth, they’re not going to be able to focus on math,” Markham said. “And if someone has a pending deportation hearing and no immigration lawyer, they’re not going to be working on their group project.” OIHS has leveraged the community school model to build a comprehensive support system, providing food, medical, legal, and mental health services, so that newcomer students can not only adapt but thrive in their new environment.

Food services

With food prices spiking over the past year, many families struggle to afford nutritious meals. Immigrant families, especially if they are undocumented, often experience food insecurity because they are excluded from federal programs. OIHS partners with a local food bank to provide food to students and their families. Recently, the school increased its food bank services from bi-weekly to weekly, with one food bank exclusively for students on campus and another serving the local community, including recent graduates.

Madenh Ali Hassan, OIHS’s community school manager, emphasized the importance of providing culturally relevant food. The food bank ensures that the food provided reflects the dietary needs and cultural preferences of the school’s diverse families. “It’s always sweet because everybody’s taking what they need, and nobody feels ashamed,” Hassan said. “It feels good to feed people and to see them feel a sense of community here.”

Medical services

Many newcomer students arrive with unmet medical needs, particularly asylum seekers and refugees who fled countries in turmoil. “A lot of our students need immunizations, physicals, or have other health issues,” Hassan noted. OIHS tries to eliminate barriers to students and families getting medical care. For instance, the school hosts yearly flu clinics and brings in mobile vision companies to assess and fit students for eyeglasses.

Language barriers often prevent families from accessing social services, so OIHS staff connect families with medical services, often helping them translate and fill out necessary documents. Karen Moya, an OIHS graduate, recalled how her parents struggled to navigate new systems after immigrating from Guatemala. “They didn’t have the support because they didn’t know where to ask,” she said.

Moya now works as a case manager at OIHS, helping students navigate similar challenges. “If they need a dental or vision appointment and don’t have insurance, or if they receive a letter in the mail they don’t understand, they bring it to us, and we help.”

To someone who has lived in the U.S. for most of their life, accessing medical care may seem straightforward, Moya said. But that’s not true for everyone. “We keep in mind that these are new families coming to the country. And so we try to explain and provide every little thing that can be beneficial to them.”

Legal services

Newcomer students may face complex legal proceedings due to their immigrant status. The district’s newcomer office conducts a formal intake when students first arrive, assessing whether they or their families have been detained, are unaccompanied, or are undocumented. OIHS then connects students and families with the appropriate legal services. The majority of students do not have lawyers, meaning there is no one to explain a legal document they might get in the mail. Bilingual case managers work with families to translate documents and figure out next steps whether it’s making families aware of a future court date or connecting them with a lawyer.

Mental health services

Newcomer students may have left their home countries under traumatic circumstances. “There’s a lot of grief around leaving your country, let alone the grief caused by war, violence or other events that displace people,” Hassan said.

At OIHS, students with severe mental health needs are connected with specialists. “By the end of the year, we’ll have 90 kids connected to mental health services, but that’s never enough,” Hassan said, noting the need for more bilingual clinicians of color.

The school also tries to address mental health needs through other on-campus services. They have a wellness center where students can relax with a cup of tea and connect with case managers. They also partner with an organization called Soccer Without Borders, where soccer coaches double as case managers to offer additional support to students.

While the arrival of newcomer students can pose challenges for some districts, it also presents a unique opportunity to improve educational outcomes through community-based resources. Denver Public Schools has established specialized community hubs for over 3,500 newcomer students and their families. Similarly, Chicago Public Schools is piloting a welcome center to offer vital services to newly arrived students. Hassan is encouraged by those efforts. “We need people dedicated to doing that work outside of the classroom to better support the work happening in the classroom,” he said.

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Nimah Gobir: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir. The 1960s was a decade of social and cultural change. There was the civil rights movement…

[Martin Luther King, Jr. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood].

Nimah Gobir: Women’s liberation…

[May Craig question to John F. Kennedy (clip): …for equal rights for women, including equal pay…]

Nimah Gobir: Vietnam war…

[President Nixon Vietnam speech (clip): There were some who urged that I end the war at once… this would have been a popular and easy course to follow…]

Nimah Gobir: A moon landing

[Neil Armstrong (clip): …one giant leap for mankind].

Nimah Gobir: It was a time when the very fabric of society was being questioned, and people were having big ideas about how people think and how people are taught. It was also when the black power movement was getting traction.

[Malcolm X (clip): We are oppressed. We are exploited. We are downtrodden. We are denied not only civil rights but even human rights].

Nimah Gobir: The emphasis wasn’t on being free or access to white spaces, it was about empowerment and self-sufficiency even as widely accepted racist practices were trying to keep Black people down. It was during this era, in1966 that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense started in Oakland. They believed in Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense against police brutality.

Ericka Huggins: The first thing that drew me to the Black Panther Party that I always remember about it, it said the Black Panther Party for Self-defense and Self-defense, people get their hackles up about that.

Nimah Gobir: This is Ericka Huggins. She joined the Black Panther Party in 1968.

Ericka Huggins: People think that self-defense is physical. It can be and needs to be when necessary. However, this was about supporting people who live poor and/or oppressed.

Ericka Huggins: We said you cannot continue to kill us. You can’t break down our doors to our homes and shoot at us. You cannot arrest us, wrongly incarcerate us and beat and murder us while we are incarcerated. You cannot deprive us of food, housing, clothing and peace.

Nimah Gobir: Some of the more popular images of the Black Panthers are photos of armed men in berets looking out from behind these dark sunglasses. Or women – like Ericka – with afros waving flags and raising their fists. Even the United States FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover saw the Panther’s stance on protecting and empowering themselves as dangerous.

Ericka Huggins: J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panther Party is the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.

Nimah Gobir: The Black Panthers had a reputation as a militant group but they did way more than challenge the police and protest against racist policies.

Nimah Gobir: If you look up pictures of the Panthers– yes you’ll see guns and berets, but there are other images too. And the one that sticks with me is this photo of a Black Panther Party member putting down plates of food in front of young children. It’s a photo of their free breakfast program

Ericka Huggins: Children were expected to go to school and learn without any food. We knew because we were those children.

Nimah Gobir: They had a founding charter which included a 10 point platform. I won’t go into all of the points but it basically said that our people – Black people– need to be able to eat, find work and feel safe. This episode we’ll talk about point 5, a focus on a fulfilling and effective education system

[Bobby Seale Speech at Oakland Auditorium (clip): We want decent education for our Black people in our community that teaches us the true nature of this decadent racist society and to teach Black people and our young Black brothers and sisters their place in this society because if they don’t know their place in society and in the world, they can’t relate to anything else].

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: Education was always important in the party.

Nimah Gobir: Angela LeBlanc-Ernest is a documentarian and community archivist from Texas. She has studied and written books about the Panthers pursuit of education.

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: Whether it be the study sessions they had reading the different books by revolutionaries – political education classes is what they would call them – that were required, or whether it was party members tutoring kids in the local community.

Nimah Gobir: She told me the idea to create a school came about when party members saw how their own kids were mistreated in mainstream schools

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: You had to start envisioning what society needed to look like for your child if they survived. Right? There is a sense so many of them didn’t think they would survive

Nimah Gobir: Party members started to conceive of a community-based alternative to the poor educational experiences they had as children. They were often disciplined harder and discouraged from asking questions. Their schools lacked supplies and books, and the curriculum rarely included stories of people who looked like them.

Nimah Gobir: So in response to this they opened the Intercommunal Youth Institute in east Oakland in 1971

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: It was an old church that they converted into a school and so it was a small space. They decided that they wanted to start with the number they had, which was 50 students.

Nimah Gobir: Gradually, other people noticed that the students and families were being treated well at this scrappy little home school where they used mindfulness practices and restorative justice. Students were engaged, respected, and learning in an environment that valued their heritage and experiences.

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: When the community approached the Black Panther Party, when it was just the insular home school to say, “Hey, can you make this available to the community, to children in the community?” That was a prompt for them to think more broadly.

Nimah Gobir: As new people joined from outside of the party, they began outgrowing the space and so they had to look for something more permanent. They changed the name to Oakland Community School and Black Panther Party member Ericka Huggins became the director.

Ericka Huggins: We opened the Oakland Community School in the school year of 1973-74.

Nimah Gobir: Students were ages 5 -12, so it was basically an elementary school, but there were no grades. They were grouped according to their academic abilities. They also had childcare for kids who were younger than five.

Nimah Gobir: Many of the students came from the Oakland area but some were coming from the greater bay area too.

Ericka Huggins: We had more than party members on staff. Not only did the people take their children out of public school, the public school teachers left, too, to work at… as it used to be, nicknamed the Panther School.

Nimah Gobir: This school is special for a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons is that it was one of the earliest versions of community schools in the country.

Ericka Huggins: The school was community based, child centered, tuition free, parent friendly and we paid special attention to children whose families had trouble with clothing and food.

Nimah Gobir: Nowadays when we talk about community schools, we’re talking about schools like this one, that provide for the whole child beyond academics. Often these schools have the things that families need located at or provided by the school. Oakland Community School provided groceries to families in the community and food throughout the school day.

Ericka Huggins: Three meals a day and I said it was tuition free. The meals were also for the students and staff of the school.

Nimah Gobir: If parents couldn’t afford the city bus. A bus from Oakland Community School would come pick their kids up. They used curriculum that actually reflected the students that were going to the school

Ericka Huggins: Our motto was “the world is a child’s classroom.” Which is a little different than the United States is the center of the universe.

Ericka Huggins: We talked about the enslavement of Africans. We talked about the indigenous people. We talked about the resilience and brightness of our ancestors and our generations up to them and how beautiful and bright they are. We always affirmed the children. We wanted them to know about history. We wanted them to know about themselves as people coming from great ancestry no matter their race or ethnicity. We didn’t ever turn away a student because they were not Black.

Nimah Gobir: Students at the so-called Panther school were Black –but they were also Latino they were white students they were Asian students and biracial students

Ericka Huggins: When people see this, they’re shocked, like, oh, why are you shocked? We were the Black Panther Party and they have to think about what they’ve been told.

Ericka Huggins: We were just brave and committed because it wasn’t easy. I want everybody to understand that it didn’t just appear itself as one community school with all angels floating around making things happen. No, it was hard work and. But the reward was in the faces of those parents and grandparents and aunties and uncles. The faces of the staff. And most importantly, the lives of the children.

Nimah Gobir: After about ten years of operation, The school closed in 1982 — This was around the time when The Black Panther Party officially dissolved after years of government surveillance and attacks. The free breakfast program is believed to have paved the way for expanding the government’s School Breakfast Program, which still exists today. And the Black Panther legacy is still in Oakland. For one thing, many members of the Black Panthers are alive today and physical sites across the city bear the Panthers’ name.

Nimah Gobir: Now, if we fast forward 40 years, what are Oakland Schools doing with that legacy? We’ll get into that after the break.

Nimah Gobir: Let’s jump ahead to present day Oakland. Angelica was enrolling in 10th grade at Oakland International High School.

Nimah Gobir: She was 18 years old and so nervous. Originally from Guatemala, she didn’t speak a word of English.

Angélica: Mi hermana me inscribió en esta escuela porque ella estuvo en esta escuela y se graduó aquí y pues me sentí nerviosa porque pues no sabía nada del inglés, nada, no entendía nada, nada.

Nimah Gobir: But her sister, who she was staying with at the time, was adamant about her going to school.

Angélica: Tienes que estudiar. Tienes que aprender. Es te necesito que tú llegas a otro nivel más que yo.

Nimah Gobir: Shortly after enrolling, circumstances for their family changed. All of the sudden, Angélica’s sister was providing for her kids,2 nephews, and Angelica. It was too much.

Angélica: Mi hermana ya no podía con muchos gastos porque ella tiene hijos también y ella tuvo que tuvo que mantenerme a mí y a mis dos sobrinos. Pero luego ella me dijo tú ya estás grande y pues ya no sé qué voy a hacer contigo y así lo siento mucho. Y pues ella se mudó y yo me quedé sola

Nimah Gobir: Her sister moved away and Angélica had to support herself, which meant she had to make a choice that so many students make: should she keep going to school or should she leave school to work?

Angélica: Tuve que salir de la escuela, tuve que irme y no tenía otra opción más que como mantenerme a mi misma.

Nimah Gobir: She decided to work. She didn’t feel like she had much of a choice. According to a report by the Urban Institute, nearly a third of students ages 16-19 are working and not in school.

Nimah Gobir: I want to take a moment to zoom out on Angelica and talk about the school district she’s in. Oakland Unified School District. It’s credited with being the first full service community school district in the nation. That means in all of their public schools they don’t just going to focus on academics, they provide other services students and families might need like food and social services. Is this starting to sound familiar?

Nimah Gobir: The superintendent Tony Smith who rolled out the plan for the community school district said that it has echoes of the Panthers and their deep care for kids. There are great examples of how Oakland Schools are drawing on the Panther legacy. And one of them is Oakland International School. The school that Angelica goes to.

Lauren Markham: Oakland International High School is a public school in the Oakland Unified School District that serves all newly arrived immigrant students, all of whom are English language learners.

Nimah Gobir: Here is Lauren Markham, one of Oakland International’s founding members.

Lauren Markham: Not all, but a lot of our students are coming from conditions of poverty. We have the highest poverty rate of any Oakland high school.

Nimah Gobir: When I walked through the school I could hear a bunch of different languages all at once. Spanish and Arabic are the ones you’ll hear most. It reminded me of the way Ericka Huggins from the Black Panther Party talked about the diversity of students and educators at the Oakland community school

Lauren Markham: We have students from about 20 different countries. I often describe our school as a delayed mirror of world events.

Nimah Gobir: What she means by this is that if something happens in a country far away. For example, if there’s political turmoil in Central America and it leads to a lot of refugees or asylum seekers, Oakland international will have an influx of these students a year or so later.

Nimah Gobir: More refugees arrived in the United States in the first eight months of 2023 than any year since 2017. Many schools across the country are trying to figure out how to accommodate an influx of migrant students.

Lauren Markham: Newcomer students fail at wildly disproportionate rates throughout the country. And we know that when any one population is failing, it’s a function of the system and not the students.

Nimah Gobir: The community school model is what enables Oakland International to support their diverse student population.

Lauren Markham: School Is not just a place where like learning and education and academics happen, but that all of these services that are around the classroom, that that connect to and support students lives, be it mental health services or health care or immigration legal services, which are all things that I think we do particularly well and that are particularly vital at Oakland International.

Lauren Markham: I always use this example, but like if someone has an abscess tooth, they’re not going to be able to focus on math. Right? And if somebody has a pending deportation hearing coming up and they don’t have an immigration lawyer, like, yeah, they’re not working on their group project.

Nimah Gobir: Working with newcomers makes the community school model really necessary

Lauren Markham: Because so many students are coming with limited not all, but a number of our students are coming, not necessarily entering like established communities or having like established social networks and therefore like don’t necessarily know where to go to get X, Y, Z thing, or the language that they speak isn’t represented at the social services office where they would apply for Medi-Cal or Cal Fresh.

Madenh Ali Hassan: Everybody’s taking what they need and nobody feels ashamed. I think sometimes there’s a stigma. Like, it’s free food, I don’t need to take that. But food scarcity is real.

Nimah Gobir: That’s Madenh Ali Hassan Oakland International’s Community School Manager, which means she oversees all the services the school offers in addition to academics. When I asked her what the school does really well. She said giving students and families food is their jam.

Madenh Ali Hassan: It’s a little bit of creative chaos but if you come out and see it it’s always just kind of sweet because everyone’s just taking what they need.

Nimah Gobir: In order to offset skyrocketing food prices, the school offers two separate food banks once a week.

Nimah Gobir: Just like how The Panthers saw a need in their community and provided free meals to children and families. Today we see Madenh and Oakland International doing something similar.

Madenh Ali Hassan: We typically set up right in front of the school. And so this is open for the public. So when the community sees it, there’s a line around the block.

Nimah Gobir: They also want to make sure they are serving their current students, so they have another food bank set up in the cafeteria. That one is just for their students.

Madenh Ali Hassan: Everybody’s taking what they need and filling their bags and students are doing the same in the cafeteria.

Nimah Gobir: Students who have dropped out of Oakland International also come to the weekly Food Bank. It’s relatively common for a newcomer to turn 18 and leave school to work. Oftentimes, working is necessary to pay back the people who helped them migrate to the US or to help out their families.

Lauren Markham: We understand, like this is the reality of your life and you have to tend to that.

Nimah Gobir: This is Lauren again, talking about students who drop out.

Lauren Markham: I also think that it’s reflective of our school, sort of not. Like understanding that what’s happening now is not a student’s fate forever.

Nimah Gobir: If a student needs help translating a document about a court hearing or filling out a paperwork. They know they will still be supported at Oakland International. Angélica felt that way too. When Angelica dropped out of school she got a job making sandwiches.

Nimah Gobir: Even though her circumstances made it so that she to work closing shifts. She knew she didn’t want to work in the same sandwich shop forever. So she had a conversation with her boss who let her work closing shifts so she could attend school again during the day.

Angélica: Entonces. Y mis maestros también se alegraron mucho porque yo había. Yo había ido cuatro meses y ellos me ayudaron también. Con todo. Todo. Animarme.

Nimah Gobir: When she returned to school she was welcomed with open arms.

Nimah Gobir: I found it really fascinating the way that staff and teachers at the school hold on to these two distinct realities. One being that students do better when they’re in school and the other is that some of them can’t make the decision to be there.

Nimah Gobir: When I went to Oakland International’s open house — it’s an event where they open up the campus to educators who are interested in seeing how they run things — I heard Lauren say something at the Open House assembly that I thought was profound.

Lauren Markham at the Open House assembly: A lot of what we do here is like, okay, we see the perfect version. We can whine for a little bit about not having that, but how do we get how do we approximate? That’s what we do as educators. How do we get closer to that given the resources that we have? And that’s the sort of scrappiness that is built into education.

Nimah Gobir: As someone who reports on education and talks to a lot of teachers and worked in education, this felt true and this reminds me of the panthers too in a sense. Because schools are essentially a group of people that are committed to striving for a really hard to get ideal.

Nimah Gobir: Many of the students who went to Oakland International come back to work there as adults because they see the way the community school model helps them support students better.

Nimah Gobir: Yasser Alwan came to Oakland international as a student in 2010

Yasser Alwan: We immigrated from Yemen, right before the conflict, the revolution, known as the Arab Spring.

Nimah Gobir: Now he’s a Newcomer assistant. It’s a position that started at Oakland International, where they’ll have specific people who are in classrooms like paraprofessionals to help students who are struggling. When I asked him why he came back and why he stays he said yeah sometimes there are really hard days.

Yasser Alwan: But I, I remember mostly the good ones. And for the most part it was mostly good days. And it’s just like that community is very strong and you’re like, very welcome in and like. I’m like, happier when I’m not around. And I think that’s what brings me back. Even through challenging times, I remember the good days. And I’m like, there’s going to be more good days.

Nimah Gobir: Karen Moya came to Oakland International as a student in 2010 also.

Karen Moya: We came from El Salvador.

Nimah Gobir: As an adult she joined the staff as a case manager

Karen Moya: I’m basically supporting students and their families to navigate the new systems in the country.

Nimah Gobir: When she is overwhelmed, She returns to something a colleague told her.

Karen Moya: Something that one of my colleagues said it’s like you can do anything and … You might feel that you’re not doing anything because you’re not seeing the results, but you are actually doing something. You are impacting their lives, you know, and helping them navigate the, the, the systems and the struggles of being, you know, an immigrant in this country. So I take that with me. And, and I think about it sometimes too, when I’m like, I’m helping this student and I don’t see the results that I want to see on my way, but I’m doing everything that I can in my hands to better support them and their families.

Nimah Gobir: Prior to this episode we did two other stories about community schools.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: I’m Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí and I’m the community engagement reporter at KQED.

Nimah Gobir: So Carlos is someone who has been with me throughout my community school reporting at KQED. He was with me during interviews translating Spanish. We’re coming to the end of our community school reporting this season and I wanted to reflect what it was like to really sit in these stories

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Angelica was a little a little shy at first, a little nervous, which I, you know, completely normal reaction. The thing that stuck with me for just the whole day was just her, her, just like the like that she for her this whole, you know, like her leaving school and coming back. This decision. She really made it for herself. She understands the value of education. The things she was repeating again and again was like, I wanna learn English. When I first came to the U.S., you know, the first place that we came to was Oakland and I think that, when you’re in a school that sees a lot of kids come and go, you kind of feel like you’re, you know, you’re kind of like in the fight by yourself.

Nimah Gobir: I was talking to the community school coordinator and then also, one of the founders, and they were saying, like, it’s such a weird thing to do at a school where you like, see kids leaving, but you understand that, like, their realities are things that they have to deal with. And so you have to kind of let them go. But your job is just to be like when you’re ready to come back, like, come back here and like you’ll be okay. And it seems like they do a really good job of that versus like a school that would either be like, don’t leave and then like as soon as the student leaves, it’s kind of like, yeah, if I see you, i see you.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Totally, yeah. And that’s why, I really loved being able to accompany you on these trips because it just shows many ways you can interpret the community model. Where it could be a thousand factors that could, you know, change the outcome.That goes to the point we’re making that there is no perfect quote unquote perfect community school. There’s no perfect way to establish or create a community school.

Nimah Gobir: Thank you for talking to me Carlos.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Yeah, Thank you Nimah, this was awesome.

Nimah Gobir: it’s really always a pleasure to work with you.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Likewise.

Nimah Gobir: Whether a school is based in Oakland pursuing the legacy of the Panther School or elsewhere, educators can relate to the desire for systems that serve young people better. In the meantime, they keep tracking down quick-fixes, proven strategies and those hard-to-find sustainable solutions.

Nimah Gobir: This episode would not have been possible without Ericka Huggins, Angela LeBlanc Ernest, Madenh Ali Hassan, Lauren Markham, Yassar Alwan, Karen Moya, and Angelica. Thank you to folks at Oakland International.

http://dlvr.it/TClXnx

Kids Who Use ChatGPT as a Study Assistant Do Worse on Tests

2024-09-02T03:57:00.001-07:00

Does AI actually help students learn? A recent experiment in a high school provides a cautionary tale.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn’t have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48% more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17% worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning.

A third group of students had access to a revised version of ChatGPT that functioned more like a tutor. This chatbot was programmed to provide hints without directly divulging the answer. The students who used it did spectacularly better on the practice problems, solving 127% more of them correctly compared with students who did their practice work without any high-tech aids. But on a test afterwards, these AI-tutored students did no better. Students who just did their practice problems the old fashioned way — on their own — matched their test scores.

The researchers titled their paper, “Generative AI Can Harm Learning,” to make clear to parents and educators that the current crop of freely available AI chatbots can “substantially inhibit learning.” Even a fine-tuned version of ChatGPT designed to mimic a tutor doesn’t necessarily help.

The researchers believe the problem is that students are using the chatbot as a “crutch.” When they analyzed the questions that students typed into ChatGPT, students often simply asked for the answer. Students were not building the skills that come from solving the problems themselves.

ChatGPT’s errors also may have been a contributing factor. The chatbot only answered the math problems correctly half of the time. Its arithmetic computations were wrong 8% of the time, but the bigger problem was that its step-by-step approach for how to solve a problem was wrong 42% of the time. The tutoring version of ChatGPT was directly fed the correct solutions and these errors were minimized.

A draft paper about the experiment was posted on the website of SSRN, formerly known as the Social Science Research Network, in July 2024. The paper has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and could still be revised.

This is just one experiment in another country, and more studies will be needed to confirm its findings. But this experiment was a large one, involving nearly a thousand students in grades nine through 11 during the fall of 2023. Teachers first reviewed a previously taught lesson with the whole classroom, and then their classrooms were randomly assigned to practice the math in one of three ways: with access to ChatGPT, with access to an AI tutor powered by ChatGPT or with no high-tech aids at all. Students in each grade were assigned the same practice problems with or without AI. Afterwards, they took a test to see how well they learned the concept. Researchers conducted four cycles of this, giving students four 90-minute sessions of practice time in four different math topics to understand whether AI tends to help, harm or do nothing.

ChatGPT also seems to produce overconfidence. In surveys that accompanied the experiment, students said they did not think that ChatGPT caused them to learn less even though they had. Students with the AI tutor thought they had done significantly better on the test even though they did not. (It’s also another good reminder to all of us that our perceptions of how much we’ve learned are often wrong.)

The authors likened the problem of learning with ChatGPT to autopilot. They recounted how an overreliance on autopilot led the Federal Aviation Administration to recommend that pilots minimize their use of this technology. Regulators wanted to make sure that pilots still know how to fly when autopilot fails to function correctly.

ChatGPT is not the first technology to present a tradeoff in education. Typewriters and computers reduce the need for handwriting. Calculators reduce the need for arithmetic. When students have access to ChatGPT, they might answer more problems correctly, but learn less. Getting the right result to one problem won’t help them with the next one.

This story about using ChatGPT to practice math was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

http://dlvr.it/TChy2P

Is Environmental Sustainability the New Liberal Arts?

2024-08-28T05:46:00.001-07:00

This opinion column about sustainability courses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter on climate change and education.

Environment and Sustainability in Enlightenment France. Modeling for Energy and Infrastructure Project Finance. Adirondack Cultural Ecology. Perspectives on the Amazon.

These courses, offered at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania; Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry; and Duke University in North Carolina, respectively, illustrate how institutions are rethinking the study of sustainability at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The new Higher Ed Climate Action Plan from the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor) identifies the need to educate and support students as a top priority. No surprise there.

The plan further calls for this learning to be broad, interdisciplinary and future-oriented, giving students a path to a sustainable workforce.

“The scale of the challenges we face demands that all people have baseline understanding” of climate, the plan says. “[H]igher education must advance a learning agenda…with cross-disciplinary educational offerings.”

In a 2022 global survey, 60% of higher education institutions said that climate-related content is found in fewer than 10% of their courses. But a vanguard of colleges and universities are looking to change that. Each of these diverse institutions has their own unique method and mission. They are all taking the strategy of integrating sustainability content as widely across the curriculum as is feasible. They are breaking out of traditional silos and disciplines, and ensuring that these courses are encountered by as many students as possible.

Toddi Steelman, former Stanback Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke, was a member of the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed Higher Ed Task Force. Duke introduced a wide-ranging climate commitment in 2022 that spans operations, research grants and partnerships, including with the New York Climate Exchange.

But “education is our superpower,” Steelman said. “We want every major to be a climate major. Our responsibility is to ensure we have educated our students to capably deal with these challenges and identify the solutions. Whatever they do – preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, legislators – if they have some sort of background in climate and sustainability, they will carry that into their first job and the next job.”

Accordingly, each of the ten schools within the university is working to define for itself what it means to be aligned with what Duke calls a “fluency framework.” The framework spans skills, behaviors and attitudes that uphold climate and sustainability understanding.

Allowing each school to find its own way, rather than mandating a shift to climate content by fiat, will take time. Steelman is advocating for fluency for all undergraduates by 2028, she said, but “We’re working through a committee process and we’ll see what sticks.”

The hope is that this process, honoring faculty expertise, results in more ownership and more meaningful integration of climate content. Steelman says the schools of nursing and medicine have been out in front, along with, fascinatingly, the French department.

“They are introducing climate change issues into conversational French,” she said. “They are also thinking about research about how you conjugate verbs. The way you talk and think about the future has consequences for climate change.”

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse was ranked number one in the nation (along with two other schools) for its sustainability curriculum in 2023. So it’s perhaps surprising that it doesn’t have a single course that focuses solely on climate change. At least not yet.

“We don’t necessarily teach specifically about climate change, at least at the introductory level,” said Stephen Shaw, the chair of the Environmental Resources Engineering department.

“We definitely teach the fundamentals that let people understand the science of it, and what it means to do climate adaptation, and mitigation,” he added. Students can even work with one professor to directly build instruments that measure greenhouse gases in the field.

The faculty, said Shaw, is now debating adding an interdisciplinary, introductory course that answers questions like: “What is the basic science? What are the impacts? What are the impacts to people? What are the impacts to habitat, recreation, all across the board?”

Dickinson, a liberal arts college of just over 2,000 students in Pennsylvania coal country, mandated in 2019 that every student take at least one sustainability course as a requirement for graduation. In practice, said Neil Leary, Dickinson’s associate provost and director of the Center for Sustainability Education, “over 50% of students who graduated this past May had taken four or more such courses, and one in four had taken more than six.”

Dickinson offers more than 100 sustainability courses per semester, in departments from business to architecture. The college’s “Mosaic” courses, offered once or twice a year, are of particular interest. They are co-taught by professors in different disciplines and often include an independent study and a travel component. In a recent offering, on the energy transition in Germany, students studied representations of the environment in German literature and culture, and also traveled to Germany to see its adoption of solar and energy efficiency in practice.

Like Duke with its fluency framework, Dickinson follows a broad definition of sustainability, Leary says. He cites the Global Council for Science and the Environment, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to advancing environmental and sustainability education and research, which has identified five key competencies in the field: Systems thinking, future-thinking, collaboration skills, strategic thinking and values-thinking.

“This is not value-neutral education,” Leary said. “Sustainability has a set of values that includes taking all people’s needs into account.”

For now, institutions that go all-in on sustainability are rare enough that it can serve as a selling point in the competition for students, faculty and donors. Leary says 40% of undergraduates Dickinson surveyed recently agreed that this was a major factor that brought them to the college.

But if leaders in the sector have their way, an all-sustainable curriculum will shift from a nice-to-have to table stakes. Bryan Alexander, author of Universities on Fire and an educational futurist with a particular focus on climate change, said, “My slogan is, climate change is the new liberal arts.”

This opinion column about sustainability courses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter on climate change and education.

http://dlvr.it/TCTRfl

How to Get Kids Thinking Instead of Mimicking in Math Class

2024-08-27T03:10:00.001-07:00

View the full episode transcript.

In many math classes, students are ready to bolt as soon as the bell rings. Not in Staci Durnin’s room. “A lot of times I hear kids say, ‘that was two periods of math already?’ And you know, when I hear that, it just makes me so happy,” said Durnin, who teaches sixth grade math at Mineola Middle School in New York. “Now I’m almost running out of time because, when the bell rings, they don’t want to leave the boards.”

It wasn’t always that way. After 29 years of teaching, Durnin last year adopted a new instructional approach called “thinking classrooms.” The model was developed by Simon Fraser University professor and researcher Peter Liljedahl and laid out in his book, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. Liljedahl said that his work is “a reaction to an observed and documented reality that the majority of students spend the majority of their time in math classrooms not thinking.” What are they doing instead? Mimicking.

The “I do, we do, you do” approach is a common teaching strategy in math classrooms. In it, a teacher demonstrates how to solve a certain type of problem, the class practices as a whole, and students practice independently. But Liljedahl said, “There’s nothing about that environment that prepares students for all of a sudden me saying, ‘Well, here, let me show you this property. Now figure out what this is,’ because all of their habits are around mimicking. And this is a problem because if students are not thinking, they’re not learning.”

The thinking classrooms model shakes up the norms of math class to create a different culture around problem-solving. It draws on 15 years of Liljedahl’s research about how teaching practices affect different outcomes, such as, how quickly students start a math task, their eagerness to try a problem, how much they persist in a task, and other behaviors related to engagement.

The model involves students working in small, randomly chosen groups; solving problems standing up at whiteboards; building on small bits of knowledge as they go; and consolidating their discoveries as a class after working through problems. As teachers of all subjects have struggled to get students engaged in the years after pandemic shutdowns, many in math have turned to these routines as a solution.

For Durnin, it’s been transformative. “I’ve always looked forward to going to work, but even more so now because I know that there’s so much going on,” she said. “It’s just a lot of up out of the seats talking, collaborating. The kids are walking around the room, they’re working and they’re having fun.”

Visibly random groups

Education leaders often tout collaboration as a “21st century skill.” But in the daily reality of classrooms, group work doesn’t always go well. Liljedahl has studied how to improve it, starting with a basic question: How are groups formed?

He describes two common approaches to creating student groups: teacher-assigned groups or student-selected groups. Teachers might prefer to choose groups based on academic or social goals, while students often like getting to work with their friends. It turns out, however, that neither approach is great for math engagement. Liljedahl found through interviews and surveys that regardless of who picks the groups, students go into their groups expecting to play a passive role. What works better for engagement are random groups, which break students’ expectations for how the group will act.
Sixth graders convert fractions and decimals into percents with support from teacher Heather Hazen at Mineola Middle School in New York on March 25, 2024. (Kara Newhouse/KQED)

But there’s a catch – students have to witness the groups being randomly assigned. They’ve had too many years of experience trying to decipher the logic behind teacher-assigned groups. They need to see the random assignment to believe it. Liljedahl calls this approach “visibly random grouping.” He suggests creating visibly random groups by having students pull from a deck of playing cards, but teachers who follow this approach have created their own methods, too.

In Melissa, Texas, ninth–grade math teacher Amber McMellan chose UNO cards to serve the purpose. She fans out the cards, and students pick one as they enter her room. Desks are clustered in threes with a jumbo UNO card at each to signal where each group will sit. McMellan said that the first year she tried visibly random groups, she wasn’t consistent with it, and students pushed back. The second year, she made it a daily routine, and students got on board. “Now my kids don’t even think twice about getting a card from me on the way into my classroom,” she said. “If I’m not standing over by the entryway with the cards out, they’ll walk up to me and just stand waiting for me to put the cards out. It’s pretty awesome.”

In Durnin’s classroom in New York, students pick groups via popsicle sticks with names written on them. According to Jena, one of Durnin’s students, at first it was disappointing not getting to team up with friends every day. “But now we know it’s a lot more helpful to be with other people,” she said.

Asked why it’s more helpful, Jena’s peers chimed in:

“Becoming friends with other people,” said Suraj.

“Probably you can communicate with others better,” said Sami.

“Different ways to help you learn,” said Roel.

“Maybe some people are better at the skill than you, so they can help you find strategies,” added Isabella.

Across more than a dozen of Durnin’s students in two different periods, a chorus emerged: The sixth graders liked working in random groups because they liked learning about each other and helping each other learn.

That’s no surprise to Liljedahl. “In thinking classrooms one of the things that we started to see emerge very naturally was empathy appearing among students,” he said. “What we noticed was that real collaboration doesn’t actually begin until students care as much about their partners’ learning as their own learning. And when empathy is unlocked, so many things work better in a classroom.”

Vertical whiteboards

In the thinking classrooms model, when students work in small groups, they don’t write in notebooks or on worksheets. Instead, they tackle math tasks on whiteboards or other vertical learning surfaces. This means they’re up out of their seats – another thing kids tend to like – and that their work is visible to each other and their teachers.
Students from two small groups discuss their problem solving strategies during math class at Mineola Middle School in New York on March 25, 2024. (Kara Newhouse/KQED)

This also makes it easier to differentiate instruction. McMellan, the Texas teacher, said that while students are at the whiteboards, she moves around the room, listening to how students explain their problem-solving strategies and watching for students who are hanging back from their group. “That right there tells me that they’re not confident in what the group is doing,” she said. “So I’ll try to get in there and ask questions, and try to get them involved a little more like, you know, hey, why don’t you write while (the others are) talking?”

When groups are already connecting and collaborating, it’s powerful. “They get excited when they figure stuff out, and they literally celebrate,” McMellan said. “I’m more energized as a teacher because they’re energized.”

Thin slicing

Last March, Durnin started class with a quick launch question: “You have 75% battery life on your phone or your iPad, and somebody else has one half of their battery life left. Who has more battery life? And how do you know?”

Students scribbled individually on their erasable table tops. After a few minutes discussing the solution as a whole class, they split into their random groups.

This was their first time working with percentages in math class, but there was no big lecture at the start. Liljedahl recommends that teachers only pre-teach a topic for three to five minutes, max. In his research, he found that students do a lot more thinking when they get started on math problems quickly. When students start the lesson in a passive mode, it’s hard to switch into a more active mental state.
Sixth grader Luke converts fractions and decimals into percents at Mineola Middle School in New York on March 25, 2024. (Kara Newhouse/KQED)

In Durnin’s class, each group copied a table with three columns onto the whiteboard. They needed to convert fractions and decimals into percentages, and vice versa. Some rows in the chart were already filled out, giving them examples. They worked row-by-row, with one student using the marker to write their peers’ ideas before switching roles.

The task was what Liljedahl calls a “thin slicing” task. Thin slicing is when students move through a series of problems that get slightly harder each time. Students start with something they know how to do, and the next problem has a very small variation. Instead of getting all the information up front, students build their knowledge as they go.

Using the rows that were already completed as guides, students noticed patterns – like how changing a fraction’s denominator can help with conversions. “Now I understand that any number – if you turn the denominator into 100, it’s easy to get a percent,” said Jena as her group finished their chart. “Because then it’s just the top number basically. It’s out of 100.”

Consolidation

With the math wars possibly making a resurgence, some educators who favor explicit instruction have criticized the thinking classrooms model as new packaging on old ideas of inquiry-based learning. But while the practices may not always be implemented with fidelity, explicit instruction does play a role in a thinking classroom.
Math teacher Staci Durnin discusses one group’s problem solving strategies during the “consolidation” portion of class at Mineola Middle School in New York on March 25, 2024. (Kara Newhouse/KQED)

While students work at the boards, Durnin and her co-teacher — Heather Hazen, a special education teacher — visited the groups. They asked questions and gave students vocabulary or other information to extend their learning.

Then the whole class gathered together for what’s called “consolidation.” This is when Durnin helps everyone bring together the pieces of what they discovered into a bigger picture understanding. Durnin picked one group’s board to use as a model and highlighted the things they got right and mistakes that everyone could learn from. Instead of front loading concepts and vocabulary, she used this conversation to connect the key ideas to what students had discovered themselves.
One group’s board work after being marked up by teacher Staci Durnin during the “consolidation” portion of class at Mineola Middle School in New York on March 25, 2024. (Kara Newhouse/KQED)

Liljedahl said consolidation matters because “meaning making is messy,” but “meaning made can be really neat.” In other words, when students are at the whiteboards they’re in the thick of figuring out how math works. That’s really valuable. But it’s also disorganized. Consolidation helps students organize and formalize the chaos.

After consolidation, or for homework, students do something called “check your understanding” – individual practice with options to choose between difficulty levels of “mild,” “medium” or “spicy.”

Resetting the culture

In Liljedahl’s research, when teachers tried to apply the thinking classrooms routines by starting with the regular curriculum, students resisted. Even if students don’t like math class, they have certain expectations for it. Liljedahl found that it helps to learn the new norms through what he calls non-curricular highly engaging tasks. These are math problems and puzzles that are not linked to a learning objective. They can introduce a playful energy to the classroom.

“What that does is it makes math fun, and it makes math feel achievable and enjoyable. And it can be very disarming for students,” Liljedahl said. He recommends that teachers spend three to five lessons on non-curricular highly engaging tasks at the start of the year to prime students’ brains for active learning. Durnin said she also found them useful coming back from holiday breaks.

“It’s a great way to enculture [students] into a new way of being,” Liljedahl said. “They might perceive that mathematics is different. They might perceive that you as a teacher is different, and that this is a safe space to engage in thought and collaboration. So we’ve just created sort of an aside — a safe space where students can be different and become different.”

In the usual culture of math class, where hierarchy is pervasive, it’s common to hear kids say they’re “not a math person.” But seven months into their thinking classrooms experience, Durnin’s students had no problem identifying their strengths in math. Here’s what a few of them said:

* “I’m good at factor puzzles and proportions and dividing fractions because I feel like I worked on those the most. So I’m really confident with those.” – Alexis

* “I think I’m good at math ’cause I can teach people like this certain strategy, or if they’re having trouble with the question. But sometimes I do struggle, like everybody else.” – Thayla

* “I just love problem solving. If I really want to do something, I’ll just focus my mind on only that and then block out everything else I’m working on.” – Chloe

As the school year wrapped up in June, Durnin said that her classes showed a deeper understanding of sixth grade math than students did in her many years teaching with more traditional methods.

Durnin also said it took a lot of work to for her to adapt her lesson plans but that the change in student engagement was worth it. Along the way, she sought help from a Facebook group where educators ask questions and share stories about thinking classroom practices every day. The group has over 66,000 members.

“I don’t think this is one of those teacher trends or a fad,” said McMellan, the Texas teacher. “It’s just good practices. And I think that’s what we’re all trying to find.”

Episode Transcript

Staci Durnin: What does percent mean?

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Kara Newhouse.

Nimah Gobir: And I’m Nimah Gobir.

Kara Newhouse: It would be an understatement to say that teachers have a lot on their plates right now.

Nimah Gobir: From book bans to chronic absenteeism to phone distractions, the list of challenges is long. And a lot of teachers are feeling the burnout.

Kara Newhouse: Which is why I was surprised when I started hearing a different refrain from math teachers. They were telling me that they’re more excited to go to work than ever – because their students are more excited than ever.

Staci Durnin: It’s just a lot of up out of the seats talking, collaborating. The kids are walking around the room, they’re working and they’re having fun.

Amber McMellan: And it’s really powerful to, to, to be able to walk around and, and just hear the conversations that the students have. It’s it it’s like food for the teacher heart, you know.

Kara Newhouse: These teachers are talking about a new approach to math called “thinking classrooms.”

Nimah Gobir: In this model, students work standing up at whiteboards in different small groups every day.

Kara Newhouse: It’s centered around a core idea: getting kids to think instead of mimic in math class.

[Music]

Peter Liljedahl: What teaching math so often has become is let me show you how to do it, and then you do it. Right. It’s sort of this ‘I do, we do, you do.’ And you’re going to learn to mimic these sorts of routines and practices.

Kara Newhouse: That’s Peter Liljedahl, the researcher who created the thinking classrooms model. Peter says that problem solving is “what we do when we don’t know what to do.” And we don’t usually let kids hang out in that space.

Peter Liljedahl: There’s been an agenda around teaching math through problem solving and teaching problem solving for 35 years now. But in order to do that, to really embrace that, to, if we really want to have students learning through problem solving, then they have to get stuck, and they have to think, and they have to get unstuck.

Kara Newhouse: Peter’s book, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, was published in 2020. It couldn’t have come at a better time.

Nimah Gobir: Getting kids excited about math has never been easy. And COVID didn’t help. Even now, a few years after distance learning, teachers of all subjects are struggling to get students engaged.

Kara Newhouse: So what makes thinking classrooms different? In this episode, we’ll visit a Long Island school where you’ll hear some of the key practices in action. And we’ll examine how these practices get kids thinking instead of mimicking in math. That’s all after the break. Stay with us.

Staci Durnin: OK. If you could take out a marker.

Kara Newhouse: This is Staci Durnin’s grade six math classroom at Mineola Middle School in New York. Today students are learning about percentages. They start with a question that puts percentages in a familiar context.

Staci Durnin: Okay, so you have 75% battery life on your phone or your iPad, and somebody else has one half of their battery life left. Who has more battery life? And how do you know? Can you show the work on your tabletop?

Kara Newhouse: Staci and her co-teacher read Building Thinking Classrooms over the summer. They decided to try out the practices from the book in the new school year.

Luke: Um, half of 100 is 50, making 75% more.

Staci Durnin: Why did you choose to use this percent?

Luke: Oh, because, for your phone, the max percent is 100%.

Staci Durnin: So half of 100% is 50%? And clearly, this is greater than this. Good. Anybody want to explain it differently?

Kara Newhouse: This opening problem only takes a few minutes. There’s no big lecture. Instead, students are going to try working with percentages right away. In his research, Peter Liljedahl has found that students do a lot more thinking when they get started on math problems quickly.

Nimah Gobir: That’s because when students start the lesson in a passive mode, it’s very hard to switch into a more active mental state.

Kara Newhouse: Peter recommends that teachers only pre-teach a topic for three to five minutes, max. Then students work on math problems standing up at whiteboards, in groups of 3.

Staci Durnin: All right. So we’re going to hear our groups right now. Go find your board space and get working.

Nimah Gobir: In Staci Durnin’s classroom, groups are selected using popsicle sticks with students’ names written on them. A student draws the names.

Unidentified student: Jack. Vanessa. Nick. …

Unidentified student: Luke, Aleena and Akira.

Kara Newhouse: This way of picking groups is called visibly random groups. It’s one of the key practices of thinking classrooms.

[Music]

Nimah Gobir: Kara, let’s break that phrase down. Random groups means that students don’t pick their best friends to work with. It also means teachers don’t group students based on perceived ability.

Kara Newhouse: In Peter’s research, he found that when teachers pick the groups or allow students to choose who to work with, the majority of students go into the groups expecting to play a certain role. And that role is usually passive.

Nimah Gobir: But when groups are randomly assigned and change every day, students don’t get locked into roles. Different perspectives get shared, and more students offer their ideas for problem solving.

Kara Newhouse: As for the “visibly” part of visibly random groups – that means that students actually see the groups being selected. It turns out that unless it happens in front of them, students don’t believe the groups are truly random.

Heather Hazen: All right, everyone hear their groups?

Unidentified student: I got the marker.

Staci Durnin: Get some calculators. One marker per group.

Kara Newhouse: In their groups, the students copy a chart with 3 columns onto the whiteboards. They’re working to convert fractions and decimals into percentages, and vice versa.

Jena: So, first, it’s 30 over 100.

Roel: 30.

Jena: Because it’s a percent.

Roel: 100.

Jena: And then you do —

Nicole: Three over —

Jena: Equals, there should be —

Roel: Three tenths?

Nicole: Three tenths.

Jena: Yeah, three tenths.

Kara Newhouse: Remember, this is the first time these students are seeing percentages in math class. The way they’re learning is what Peter Liljedahl calls “thin slicing.” Thin slicing is when students move through a series of problems that get slightly harder each time.

Nimah Gobir: So they start with something they know how to do, and the next problem has a very small variation. Instead of getting all the information up front, students build their knowledge as they go.

Kara Newhouse: Here’s one student, Roel, explaining how his group converted a fraction into a percentage.

Roel: So it’s 6/8, right? That’s six quarters out of eight quarters. That means it’s actually like at 100%, but it’s just a different type of fraction which can get you there. And if you do six divided by eight, which it will get, it will get, it will give you 75%.

Kara Newhouse: You can hear that he’s starting to make sense of the different types of conversions, even if he doesn’t have all the vocabulary nailed down yet.

Roel: So now this is your basic ratio.

Kara Newhouse: Thin slicing allows students to notice patterns and make meaning from math instead of memorizing.

Nimah Gobir: And by working in small groups, students can easily share what they’re noticing to help each other learn.

Kara Newhouse: When I spoke with Jena – who was in the same group as Roel – she felt she had a good grasp on the lesson.

Kara Newhouse: Had you learned anything about percents before today?

Jena: Oh.

Roel: Well yeah —

Jena: Like I got a gist, but now I really understand it.

Kara Newhouse: What do you understand now that you didn’t before?

Jena: Well, now I understand that, like any number, if you turn the, uh, the denominator into 100, it’s easy to get a percent.

Kara Newhouse: Why does that help?

Jena: Because it, because then it’s just the top number basically. It’s out of 100.

Nimah Gobir: Students are encouraged to share ideas between groups. That’s easy to do because their work is visible on the whiteboards.

Kara Newhouse: Seeing the whiteboards also helps the teacher. Peter Liljedahl points out that when students are working in notebooks at their desks, it’s pretty hard to see their thinking.

Peter Liljedahl: But if all of a sudden all the groups are vertical working on whiteboards, me as a teacher, standing in the middle of the room, I can see exactly where I need to be. And so it’s easier for me to differentiate now, because I can see that that group needs an extension, and that group needs a hint, and that those two groups actually just need to talk to each other, because one group has the knowledge and the other group needs it. And so differentiation becomes easier because everything is made visible.

Nimah Gobir: Now, just because students are immersed in problem solving in a thinking classroom, it doesn’t mean there’s no teacher talk.

Kara Newhouse: While students work at the boards, Staci Durnin and her co-teacher visit the groups. They ask questions and give students vocabulary or other information to extend their learning.

Heather Hazen: So what was that divisible by?

Nimah Gobir: Then, after board work, the whole class gathers together for what’s called consolidation.

Staci Durnin: Why is this an easy way to get to a hundred? I like your thinking. Go ahead, finish it.

Nimah Gobir: This is when Staci helps everyone bring together the pieces of what they discovered into a bigger picture understanding.

Kara Newhouse: Staci picks one group’s board to use as a model – for both the things they got right and mistakes that everyone can learn from.

Staci Durnin: So let’s talk about some patterns that you noticed here. Let’s look at this board work.

Staci Durnin: Who wants to start? Tell me about these two fractions.

Unidentified student: They’re multiplied by ten so they’re equivalent.

Staci Durnin: Good.

Kara Newhouse: When I asked Peter Liljedahl why consolidation matters, he said that meaning making is messy, but meaning made is neat.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: In other words, when students are at the whiteboards they’re in the thick of figuring out how math works. That’s really valuable. But it’s also disorganized.

Nimah Gobir: Consolidation helps students organize the chaos.

Staci Durnin: You know, you want to see a common mistake? If this wasn’t here, and this was the fraction 5/20, I often see this: oh, it’s 5%.

Unidentified student: Percent has “cent” in and cent means 100.

Staci Durnin: Ooh.

Kara Newhouse: After consolidation, and for homework, students do something called Check Your Understanding, or CYUs. Instead of everyone doing the same worksheet, students choose between easy, medium and extreme challenges.

Nimah Gobir: It’s another way to differentiate their learning. And it develops student agency.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: All of these things we heard – students standing up at whiteboards, visibly random groups, thin slicing and consolidation – they’re totally different from how Staci Durnin used to teach.

Staci Durnin: So if I taught this lesson two years ago, it would have been me up at the front of the room, showing the kids how to set up the proportion. How do you change this fraction into a percent? Let’s get the denominator into 100. Now, with the thin slicing, they’ve discovered all of that, right? They discovered that ‘Oh the denominator has to be 100 because percent is out of 100.’ And ‘Oh this fraction is equivalent to this. So this must also equal the same percent.’ So it’s getting them to discover, then you consolidate and talk about the important pieces to the lesson. And then they practice on their own.

Nimah Gobir: Not only has Staci’s teaching method changed, but the way her students are showing up has changed. In most math classes I remember taking, my classmates and I were just … silent.

[Crickets sound effect]

Kara Newhouse: Part of the engagement comes from being up out of their seats. Movement can help generate problem-solving ideas and improve memory consolidation. And kids just like it more.

Kara Newhouse: What’s your favorite thing about this class?

Luke: The stand up activities you get to do every single day. Because I don’t like classrooms where all we do is sit down and look up at the board. I like classrooms where we’re involved in something and we get to do something.

Kara Newhouse: Staci’s students also told me they really like working in small groups at the whiteboards.

Olivia: Yeah, I think it helps me more, actually, because there’s other people who might explain it better for me and I can understand it better.

Hafsa: Also you’re working with different people, so then they might have different methods that you didn’t already learn.

Nimah Gobir: Working in small, random groups feeds students’ social needs, which we know is really important for the adolescent brain. But Kara, in season eight, we talked about the needs of introverted students. How does the thinking classrooms model work for them?

Kara Newhouse: I talked to one student who said the noise at the whiteboards can be a lot. And depending on who’s in her group, sometimes she feels less comfortable sharing.

Lucia: Sometimes I don’t like working up at the boards because, like, it shows everybody what you’re doing. But like, you sometimes want to keep in your own answers.

Kara Newhouse: One of her classmates had a different take, though. She said that asking a question in front of the whole class can be scary.

Alexis: I like small groups because at the boards, because it’s not like, as, not really embarrassing, but kind of, like when you get something wrong and like, your other partners can help you.

Kara Newhouse: Small, random groups can lower the social risk for making mistakes. That’s something that Staci’s co-teacher, Heather Hazen, noticed, too.

Heather Hazen: So actually, when we started this the first few weeks of school, I said to Staci, like, this is so weird, but the kids are doing better.

Kara Newhouse: Heather is a special education teacher. She’s in the classroom with Staci to help out with students who need extra support.

Heather Hazen: And what I find for most of the kids – most, not all of them, but most of them – it gives them a chance to sit back and look, and in the small group, they ask questions to their peers more often than they would, I guess, in class.

Kara Newhouse: Heather also said the thinking classrooms model allows different mathematical strengths to be seen.

Heather Hazen: If we’re asking how many squares you see in this larger grid of squares, sometimes our struggling students are the ones that are doing best with that task. Or they may notice the pattern differently, or see it differently, or come up with another method that somebody else wasn’t thinking about. So they have chances to shine.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: I visited Staci and Heather’s classroom in March. By then, students were very accustomed to random groups and working at the whiteboards. But learning those norms takes work at the start of the year. That’s done through what Peter Liljedahl calls non-curricular highly engaging tasks.

[Music]

Nimah Gobir: These are math problems and puzzles that are not linked to a learning objective. They can introduce a playful energy to the classroom.

Peter Liljedahl: And what that does is it makes math fun, and it makes math feel achievable and enjoyable. And it can be very disarming for students.

Kara Newhouse: In Peter’s research, when teachers tried to apply the thinking classrooms practices by starting with the regular curriculum…the students weren’t having it.

Peter Liljedahl: You know, students come into the, into a math classroom already sort of believing what math is and who they are in relation to mathematics. And then they enact those, those, those beliefs in the way they engage with a new teacher and new content.

Kara Newhouse: Highly engaging non-curricular tasks essentially jolt students out of their expectations for math class.

Peter Liljedahl: It’s a great way to enculture them into a new way of being. They’ve re-constructed an identity for themselves. They have maybe re- rebuilt a relationship with mathematics. They might perceive that mathematics is different. They might perceive that you as a teacher is different, and that this is a safe space to, to engage in, in thought and collaboration. So we’ve just created sort of an aside – a safe space where students can be different and become different.

Kara Newhouse: This investment ends up paying off for the rest of the year.

Peter Liljedahl: When they’re not actively engaged in the learning in that way, everything is difficult. But when they are thinking anything is possible, like we’re tearing through Pythagoras in 55 minutes. Solving one- and two-step equations has never taken more than 45 minutes. Right. Factoring quadratics, which is a unit that can take anywhere from three to five days, we do it in 60 minutes.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: For Staci Durnin, the evidence that thinking classrooms works is not how quickly her students get through the math, but that her students don’t want to stop.

Staci Durnin: A lot of times I hear kids say, that was two periods of math already? And you know, when I hear that, it just makes me so happy. So I know, you know, in the past, the double period, even for me, it’s like I have another period of this, you know, this is tough. Now I’m almost running out of time because, when the bell rings, they don’t want to leave the boards.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Nimah, I’ve never heard as many kids talking about the real substance of math as I did in just a few periods at Mineola Middle School. Not even when I was in the math club at my own middle school.

Nimah Gobir: It’s pretty remarkable. But you know what we DO hear a lot? Kids and grownups who say, “I’m not a math person.”

Kara Newhouse: The idea of people being inherently good or bad at math is often baked into the culture of school. But when I asked Staci’s students about their strengths in math, they answered easily.

Alexis: Well, I’m good at, like, factor puzzles and, like, proportions and dividing fractions because I feel like I worked on those the most. So I’m really confident with those.

Thayla: I think I’m good at math ’cause, like, I can teach people like this certain strategy, or like, if they’re having trouble with with the question. But sometimes I do struggle with, like everybody else.

Chloe: I just, like, love problem solving. It’s just like if I really want to, like, do something, I’ll just like focus my mind on only that and then block out everything else I’m working on.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: I checked in with Staci again as her school year wrapped up. She told me that her students this year showed a deeper understanding of grade six math than students did in her many years teaching with more traditional methods.

Nimah Gobir: When math class focuses on getting students to think instead of mimic, their confidence and their problem solving skills grow.

Kara Newhouse: And what that adds up to is a very bright future.

[Music]

CREDITS

Kara Newhouse: Big thanks to Staci Durnin and Heather Hazen at Mineola Middle School in New York. The students you heard in this episode were:

Roel, Jena, Nicole, Luke, Sami, Lucia, Alexis, Olivia, Hafsa, Thayla and Chloe.

Peter Liljedahl’s book is called Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics.

Thanks also to Amber McMellan and Julie Frizzell.

I’m Kara Newhouse.

Nimah Gobir: And I’m Nimah Gobir.

Kara Newhouse: The rest of the MindShift team includes Ki Sung, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Jennifer Ng.

Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer.

Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Cesar Saldaña , Maha Sanad and Holly Kernan.

Nimah Gobir: MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.

Kara Newhouse: If you love MindShift, and enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. We really appreciate it. You can also read more or subscribe to our newsletter at K-Q-E-D-dot-org-slash-MindShift.

Thanks for listening!

http://dlvr.it/TCQnQL

Researchers Combat AI Hallucinations in Math

2024-08-26T03:30:00.001-07:00

One of the biggest problems with using AI in education is that the technology hallucinates. That’s the word the artificial intelligence community uses to describe how its newest large language models make up stuff that doesn’t exist or isn’t true. Math is a particular land of make-believe for AI chatbots. Several months ago, I tested Khan Academy’s chatbot, which is powered by ChatGPT. The bot, called Khanmigo, told me I had answered a basic high school Algebra 2 problem involving negative exponents wrong. I knew my answer was right. After typing in the same correct answer three times, Khanmigo finally agreed with me. It was frustrating.

Errors matter. Kids could memorize incorrect solutions that are hard to unlearn, or become more confused about a topic. I also worry about teachers using ChatGPT and other generative AI models to write quizzes or lesson plans. At least a teacher has the opportunity to vet what AI spits out before giving or teaching it to students. It’s riskier when you’re asking students to learn directly from AI.

Computer scientists are attempting to combat these errors in a process they call “mitigating AI hallucinations.” Two researchers from University of California, Berkeley, recently documented how they successfully reduced ChatGPT’s instructional errors to near zero in algebra. They were not as successful with statistics, where their techniques still left errors 13% of the time. Their paper was published in May 2024 in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One.

In the experiment, Zachary Pardos, a computer scientist at the Berkeley School of Education, and one of his students, Shreya Bhandari, first asked ChatGPT to show how it would solve an algebra or statistics problem. They discovered that ChatGPT was “naturally verbose” and they did not have to prompt the large language model to explain its steps. But all those words didn’t help with accuracy. On average, ChatGPT’s methods and answers were wrong a third of the time. In other words, ChatGPT would earn a grade of a D if it were a student.

Current AI models are bad at math because they’re programmed to figure out probabilities, not follow rules. Math calculations are all about rules. It’s ironic because earlier versions of AI were able to follow rules, but unable to write or summarize. Now we have the opposite.

The Berkeley researchers took advantage of the fact that ChatGPT, like humans, is erratic. They asked ChatGPT to answer the same math problem 10 times in a row. I was surprised that a machine might answer the same question differently, but that is what these large language models do. Often the step-by-step process and the answer were the same, but the exact wording differed. Sometimes the methods were bizarre and the results were dead wrong. (See an example in the illustration below.)

Researchers grouped similar answers together. When they assessed the accuracy of the most common answer among the 10 solutions, ChatGPT was astonishingly good. For basic high-school algebra, AI’s error rate fell from 25% to zero. For intermediate algebra, the error rate fell from 47% to 2%. For college algebra, it fell from 27% to 2%.

ChatGPT answered the same algebra question three different ways, but it landed on the right response seven out of 10 times in this example
Source: Pardos and Bhandari, “ChatGPT-generated help produces learning gains equivalent to human tutor-authored help on mathematics skills,” PLOS ONE, May 2024

However, when the scientists applied this method, which they call “self-consistency,” to statistics, it did not work as well. ChatGPT’s error rate fell from 29% to 13%, but still more than one out of 10 answers was wrong. I think that’s too many errors for students who are learning math.

The big question, of course, is whether these ChatGPT’s solutions help students learn math better than traditional teaching. In a second part of this study, researchers recruited 274 adults online to solve math problems and randomly assigned a third of them to see these ChatGPT’s solutions as a “hint” if they needed one. (ChatGPT’s wrong answers were removed first.) On a short test afterwards, these adults improved 17% compared to less than 12% learning gains for the adults who could see a different group of hints written by undergraduate math tutors. Those who weren’t offered any hints scored about the same on a post-test as they did on a pre-test.

Those impressive learning results for ChatGPT prompted the study authors to boldly predict that “completely autonomous generation” of an effective computerized tutoring system is “around the corner.” In theory, ChatGPT could instantly digest a book chapter or a video lecture and then immediately turn around and tutor a student on it.

Before I embrace that optimism, I’d like to see how much real students – not just adults recruited online – use these automated tutoring systems. Even in this study, where adults were paid to do math problems, 120 of the roughly 400 participants didn’t complete the work and so their results had to be thrown out. For many kids, and especially students who are struggling in a subject, learning from a computer just isn’t engaging.

This story about AI hallucinations was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

http://dlvr.it/TCNZ9L

To Raise Empathetic Children, Parents Must Practice Empathy Themselves

2024-08-21T08:14:00.001-07:00

This post was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram.

Empathy, or the ability to understand and share in the experience of emotions with others, is an essential element of all human relationships. Research also supports the importance of empathy, finding that more empathetic individuals have better quality friendships, enhanced social skills, and are more satisfied with their lives — to name just a few of the benefits.

In a world that seems increasingly divided and cold, many of us parents want to raise more empathetic children but how exactly do parents foster empathy? If we are empathetic with our children, will they show the same to others? And will the empathy that we show to them ultimately help them to become empathetic adults?

A recent study looked at how empathy is passed down from parents to children and then to those children’s children. This study looked at a mother’s empathy for their child at age 13 and how it related to the child’s empathy for their friends during the teen years (from ages 13 to 19). The researchers then followed the teens up to adulthood (mid-30’s) and looked at how empathetic they were with their own children (the third generation).

Main findings

This study found that when children have parents who are more empathetic at age 13, they are more empathetic with their friends during the teen years (ages 13 to 19). Being more empathetic with their friends in their teen years was then associated with being more empathetic with their own children as adults (that is, showing more supportive responses to their children’s negative feelings). Supportive, empathetic parenting of their own children then predicted their children’s development of empathy (that is, the children in the third generation).

How is empathy “passed down” in this way? When parents respond to children’s distress in a supportive, empathetic way, it gives children a model for how to respond to the distress of others. Friendships in the teen years may then give children a chance to practice and hone the empathy skills that they learned from their parents in childhood. Researchers describe these friendships as a “training ground” for learning about empathy. In other words, when children get the chance to practice skills like validating emotions and providing comfort to other people in their teenage friendships, these skills become stronger and more effective.

This study was limited and further research is needed on this topic. It was a relatively small and correlational study (meaning we do not know whether empathy in parents actually contributes to empathy in children but only that they are associated). This study also only focused on mother-child interactions so future research should include fathers. Finally, this study did not address the extent to which empathy is passed down due to genetics or modeling the empathy your parents show you (it is likely a combination of both).

Yet, even with these limitations, these findings are exciting because they suggest that empathy may be passed down three generations: from parent to teen then to the third generation of children. It also suggests that friendships in the teen years may provide practice for being empathetic in adult relationships, including the parent-child relationship.

Overall translation

The big takeaway message here is that the empathy you show your child may ultimately help your child to develop into an empathetic adult who is then more empathetic with your grandchildren. How exactly do you show empathy to your child? This study broke down empathy into three components and understanding each of these components may provide concrete guidance for showing empathy to your children:

1. Emotional engagement: Pay attention to what your child is feeling and/or showing with their body, allow them time to talk or show their emotions, ask follow-up questions to better understand their emotions and use active listening (translation: reflect back what you hear them say or show with their actions, such as: “It seems like you are angry because your brother won’t give you a turn”). Turn your body toward your child and make eye contact. Show genuine interest in their emotions.

2. Understanding the problem: Acknowledge that it is a problem (rather than minimizing it by saying something like “that’s not a big deal), help your child to engage in problem-solving, talk through the problem and try to come up with a solution to the problem together, show them you are committed to finding a solution and consider their needs when coming up with solutions.

3. Emotional support: Recognize that your child is distressed, express to your child that you understand their feelings, name their feelings, ask questions that might bring up additional emotions, clearly show warmth, concern and sympathy when discussing the child’s emotions

Engaging in these empathy-expressing behaviors will teach your children how to show the same to others. However, we all know that empathy is more than a set of behaviors. To quote author Brené Brown from her book Daring Greatly: “Empathy is a strange and powerful thing. There is no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You’re not alone.’”

Cara Goodwin, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, a mother of three and the founder of Parenting Translator, a nonprofit newsletter that turns scientific research into information that is accurate, relevant and useful for parents.

http://dlvr.it/TCBmZr

Debunking Myths About Graphic Novels and Comics to Unlock Learning

2024-08-20T05:38:00.001-07:00

POW! SMACK! BAM! The sounds of a classic comic book fight scene have not always been associated with academic opportunities, yet many teachers see students reaching for graphic novels and comic books more often than traditional books. Comic books and graphic novels fall under the umbrella of sequential art. It’s a medium of communication, not a genre, explained Stephane Manuel, founder of TrueFiktion, an educational company that uses comic books to teach history. “It’s the deliberate juxtaposition of images and text to convey meaning. … Audio, text and video are all communication mediums, and each has its own idiosyncrasies that make it great for learning.”

According to a 2023 survey by the School Library Journal, graphic novels have risen in popularity at over 90% of school libraries. However, the same survey reported that a majority of librarians experienced opposition to graphic novels from parents, teachers and others who didn’t consider them “real books.” Resistance often stems from misconceptions that they lack academic rigor, are too controversial, and do not build reading skills, said literary specialist Shawna Coppola at the 2024 EdCollab Gathering. When teachers dispel preconceived notions about comics and graphic novels, they can unlock these books’ potential as educational tools.

Graphic novel rigor

One common misconception is that graphic novels and comics are not academically rigorous. However, graphic novels can be used to teach key concepts in line with academic standards in various subjects. Manuel creates historical fiction comic books that cover such topics as Brown v. Board of Education, The Delano Grape Strike and the Zoot Suit Riots. In his curricula, teachers are encouraged to bring in primary and secondary sources to support students’ learning and understanding. “These comics provide a very rich opportunity to have thoughtful dialogue around a moment in history,” he said.

Tim Jones, a library media specialist in Kentucky, uses comic books and graphic novels to teach media literacy by inviting students to consider why the illustrator and author made certain decisions. He might ask students why they think the creator used a close-up of a character’s face instead of zooming out or what emotion the author or illustrator is trying to convey in a particular panel. Additionally, he asks students to look at ads or commercials and consider similar questions. Students are likely already thinking about these things in their head, Jones said. Discussions allow them to verbalize how they make meaning out of images.

While comic books and graphic novels may contain fewer words per page than the average chapter book, the authors are required to choose their words more carefully. “[They] reach for a higher-level vocabulary word that says in one word what the average person might take six or seven words to say,” said Jones. A study by the University of Oregon found that comic books average 53.5 rare words per thousand, while children’s books average 30.9, and adult books average 52.7.

Contested content

Historically, many comic books portrayed women in highly sexualized ways or included a lot of racism and bias, said Coppola. Those trends created a misconception that all graphic novels contain inappropriate content for students. However, there are many age-appropriate options available. “When I’m selecting graphic novels for a library collection, my focus is on supporting the curriculum of the school community and giving students the freedom to explore different perspectives,” said Jones.

Graphic novels have been banned or challenged in schools and libraries because they are deemed inappropriate or sexually explicit, particularly if a book includes LGBTQIA+ themes. Examples of targeted books include Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Maus by Art Spiegelman and New Kid by Jerry Craft. Coppola invited teachers to consider the meaning of “controversial” and whose lives and experiences their definition centers.

Comic book and graphic novel challenges have also focused on “diverse content” that includes stories that feature characters of color, like Betty by David Robertson and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Every student, regardless of socioeconomic background, gender, or race, should be able to see themselves meaningfully represented, Manuel said.

Real reading skills

Some educators and parents believe that the images in graphic novels distract students from the text or that there is not enough text in graphic novels to build reading comprehension skills. In fact, it’s the opposite. Graphic novels and comics contain two types of text: one in the images and one in the words. “Readers must decode, comprehend and synthesize both of these kinds of text. That is a complex thing that you have to do,” said Coppola. “There is a lot of complexity in reading even a one-panel comic.” Integrating visual and textual elements can enhance comprehension and retention.

Comics and graphic novels are made up of panels. The break between panels is called a gutter, which Jones said represents a change in time or location. Reading graphic novels uses cognitive skills such as understanding visual cues and following non-linear narratives. While reading, students practice making inferences because they have to think about what is happening between panels. This process, called “closure,” involves perceiving the whole even though you only see pieces of something, said Manuel, referencing Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics.

Manuel said that making inferences encourages the readers to take part in the storytelling process. He suggests that teachers start lessons with a gallery walk where students examine comic book art with the text removed. Then students can use post-it notes to make predictions and observations about the images. Teachers can use the information from the post-it notes to shape their lessons.

Graphic novels can engage students of all levels, especially reluctant readers. One teacher shared with Manuel that using comics and graphic novels helped previously quiet students become more engaged. Normally, it was a struggle to get these students to talk or participate, but with comics, they eagerly led discussions with their own questions.

http://dlvr.it/TC82p8

Why are kids still struggling in school four years after the pandemic?

2024-08-19T05:57:00.001-07:00

Four years after the pandemic shuttered schools, we all want to be done with COVID. But the latest analyses from three assessment companies paint a grim picture of where U.S. children are academically and that merits coverage. While there are isolated bright spots, the general trend is stagnation.

One report documented that U.S. students did not make progress in catching up in the most recent 2023-24 school year and slid even further behind in math and reading, exacerbating pandemic learning losses.

“At the end of 2021-22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that recovery had begun,” wrote Karyn Lewis, a researcher at NWEA, one of the assessment companies. “Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer support this conclusion. Growth has slowed to lag pre-pandemic rates, resulting in achievement gaps that continue to widen, and in some cases, now surpass what we had previously deemed as the low point.”

The starkest example is eighth grade students, who were in fourth grade when the pandemic first erupted in March of 2020. They now need nine months of additional school to catch up, according to NWEA’s analysis, released in July 2024. “This is a crisis moment with middle schoolers,” said Lewis. “Where are we going to find an additional year to make up for these kiddos before they leave the education system?”

All three analyses were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Teachers or parents may be familiar with them by the names of their tests: MAP, i-Ready and Star. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year to millions of students around the nation to help track progress, or learning, during the year. These companies may have a business motive in sounding an alarm to sell more of their products, but the reports are produced by well-regarded education statisticians.

Curriculum Associates did not detect as much deterioration as NWEA, but did find widespread stagnation in 2023-24, according to a report released on August 19, 2024. Their researcher Kristen Huff described the numerical differences as tiny ones that have to do with the fact that these are different tests, taken by different students and use different methods for crunching the numbers. The main takeaway from all the reports, she said, is the same. “As a nation, we are still seeing the lasting impact of the disruption to schooling and learning,” said Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates.

In short, children remain behind and haven’t recovered. That matters for these children’s future employment prospects and standard of living. Ultimately, a less productive labor force could hamper the U.S. economy, according to projections from economists and consulting firms.

It’s important to emphasize that individual students haven’t regressed or don’t know less now than they used to. The average sixth grader knows more today in 2024 than he or she did in first grade in 2019. But the pace of learning, or rate of academic growth, has been rocky since 2020, with some students missing many months of instruction. Sixth graders in 2024, on average, know far less than sixth graders did back in 2019.

Renaissance, a third company, found a mottled pattern of recovery, stagnation and deterioration depending upon the grade and the subject. (The company shared its preliminary mid-year results with me via email on Aug. 14, 2024.) Most concerning, it found that the math skills of older students in grades eight to 12 are progressing so slowly that they are even further behind than they were after the initial pandemic losses. These students were in grades four through eight when the pandemic first hit in March 2020.

On the bright side, the Renaissance analysis found that first grade students in 2023-24 had completely recovered and their performance matched what first graders used to be able to do before the pandemic. Elementary school students in grades two to six were making slow progress, and remained behind.

Curriculum Associates pointed to two unexpected bright spots in its assessment results. One is phonics. At the end of the 2023-24 school year, nearly as many kindergarteners were on grade level for phonics skills as kindergarteners in 2019. That’s four out of five kindergarteners. The company also found that schools where the majority of students are Black were showing relatively better catch-up progress. “It’s small, and disparities still exist, but it’s a sign of hope,” said Curriculum Associates’s Huff.

Here are three charts and tables from the three different testing companies that provide different snapshots of where we are.
The bars show the difference between MAP test scores before the pandemic and in the spring of 2024 for each grade. The green line translates those deficits into months of additional schooling, based on how much students typically learned in a school year before COVID hit. For example, fifth graders would need an additional 3.9 months of math instruction over and above the usual school year to catch up to where fifth graders were before the virus. Source: Figure 3, “Recovery still elusive: 2023–24 student achievement highlights persistent achievement gaps and a long road ahead,” NWEA (July 2024).
Almost one out of every five third graders is below grade level in reading, a big increase from one out of every eight students before the pandemic. Source: Figure 2, “State of Student Learning in 2024” Curriculum Associates (August 19, 2024)
The number of students who are below grade level in math is higher than it used to be before the pandemic in grades one through eight. Source: Figure 11, “State of Student Learning in 2024” Curriculum Associates (Aug. 19, 2024)
Renaissance analysis of Star tests taken between December 2023 and March 2024 (shared with The Hechinger Report in August 2024). Final spring scores were not yet analyzed.

Understanding why recovery is stagnating and sometimes worsening over the past year is difficult. These test score analyses don’t offer explanations, but researchers shared a range of theories.

One is that once students have a lot of holes in their foundational skills, it’s really hard for them to learn new grade-level topics each year.

“I think this is a problem that’s growing and building on itself,” said NWEA’s Lewis. She cited the example of a sixth grader who is still struggling to read. “Does a sixth-grade teacher have the same skills and tools to teach reading that a second or third grade teacher does? I doubt that’s the case.”

Curriculum Associates’s Huff speculated that the whole classroom changes when a high percentage of students are behind. A teacher may have been able to give more individual attention to a small group of students who are struggling, but it’s harder to attend to individual gaps when so many students have them. It’s also harder to keep up with the traditional pace of instruction when so many students are behind.

One high school math teacher told me that she thinks learning failed to recover and continued to deteriorate because schools didn’t rush to fill the gaps right away. This teacher said that when in-person school resumed in her city in 2021, administrators discouraged her from reviewing old topics that students had missed and told her to move forward with grade-level material.

“The word that was going around was ‘acceleration not remediation’,” the teacher said. “These kids just missed 18 months of school. Maybe you can do that in social studies. But math builds upon itself. If I miss sixth, seventh and eighth grade, how am I going to do quadratic equations? How am I going to factor? The worst thing they ever did was not provide that remediation as soon as they walked back in the door.” This educator quit her public school teaching job in 2022 and has since been tutoring students to help them catch up from pandemic learning losses.

Chronic absenteeism is another big factor. If you don’t show up to school, you’re not likely to catch up. More than one in four students in the 2022-23 school year were chronically absent, missing at least 10 percent of the school year.

Deteriorating mental health is also a leading theory for school struggles. A study by researchers at the University of Southern California, released Aug. 15, 2024, documented widespread psychological distress among teenage girls and preteen boys since the pandemic. Preteen boys were likely to struggle with hyperactivity, inattentiveness and conduct, such as losing their temper and fighting. These mental health struggles correlated with absenteeism and low grades.

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the $190 billion that the federal government gave to schools for pandemic recovery didn’t work. (The deadline for signing contracts to spend whatever is left of that money is September 2024.) But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Most of the spending was targeted at reopening schools and upgrading heating, cooling and air ventilation systems. A much smaller amount went to academic recovery, such as tutoring or summer school. Earlier this summer two separate groups of academic researchers concluded that this money led to modest academic gains for students. The problem is that so much more is still needed.

This story about academic recovery was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

http://dlvr.it/TC5kDJ

5 Ways the Black Panthers Shaped U.S. Schools

2024-08-13T05:00:00.001-07:00

View the full episode transcript.

When Angela LeBlanc-Ernest first learned about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in college in the 1980s, she realized there was a lot of history missing from the textbooks she used as a K12 student. A documentarian and historian, LeBlanc-Ernest went on to author chapters about women in the Black Panther Party in two books. Some 40 years later, she said textbooks still commonly misrepresent or downplay the Panthers’ significance.

Founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party was created to patrol African American neighborhoods and protect residents from police brutality. While it’s often remembered for its militancy, the party’s Ten-Point Program advocated for broader social reforms, including prison reform, voter registration drives and health clinics. Learning about the Ten-Point Program, especially point five, which demanded education that teaches people their true history, was eye-opening, said LeBlanc-Ernest. “I became curious about the Black Panther Party, which was a grassroots organization of young people primarily, who decided it was time to create a community based alternative to the poor educational experiences that they had.”

The Black Panthers’ innovative approaches to education and community support have had a lasting influence on U.S. schools. Their initiatives included creating one of the first community schools, offering successful food programs, using student-centered learning and mindfulness practices, and promoting diversity in education. Here are five ways the Black Panthers shaped the educational landscape.

1. They are credited with creating a first-of-its-kind school

From her hometown in Washington, D.C., to Lincoln, Pennsylvania, where she tutored young students and attended college, Ericka Huggins witnessed Black children’s struggles firsthand. “They couldn’t read by fifth grade, and it wasn’t their fault. We blame people for their poverty. We blame them for their lack of education,” she said. “I just wanted a better life for them.” Following this desire, Huggins and her husband drove across the country and joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1968. “I knew there had to be some way for me to connect with people who felt the same way,” Huggins said.

Oakland Community School Childcare Program van. (Photo copyright Donald Cunningham/Photo and caption courtesy The OCS Project)

In the 1960s and 1970s, Black children faced harsher discipline, were discouraged from asking questions, and attended under-resourced schools. “It was structural,” said Huggins. She described the public school system at that time as “old and broken.” In 1971, the Panthers opened the Samuel L. Napier Intercommunal Youth Institute for party members’ children ages 5 to 12 in East Oakland, converting a church into a school by day and a community center by night. This initiative attracted other parents who wanted their children to attend, leading to the establishment of the Oakland Community School in 1973, with Huggins as its director. It started with 50 students and focused on caring for the whole child beyond academics. They provided transportation, food and clothing for students and families in need.

The Oakland Community School is regarded as one of the nation’s first community schools – a model in which public schools partner with community organizations to provide comprehensive support services alongside traditional academic instruction. Many of Oakland Community School’s practices formed the blueprint for community schools today.

2. They established one of the most successful food programs

Many people are familiar with today’s free and reduced lunch options for low-income families in schools, but there was a time when free school meals were not common. “Children were expected to go to school and learn without any food,” Huggins said. This wasn’t due to parental neglect, she added. Many parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Oakland Community School students eating in the school cafeteria, July 1981. (Photo copyright Donald Cunningham/Photo and caption courtesy The OCS Project)

One of the most significant contributions of the Black Panther Party was its free breakfast program. Launched in 1969, this program provided thousands of underprivileged children with free meals before school. When the Oakland Community School opened, it extended this support by feeding students and staff three meals a day at no additional cost to families.

Although the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts starting in the mid-1960s, the program only gained traction in the early 1970s — right around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975, the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it helps feed over 14.57 million children before school.

3. They used restorative practices and alternatives to discipline

Teachers at the Oakland Community School integrated mindfulness practices into the school day. Students practiced yoga and were encouraged to do yoga poses if they misbehaved in class. “We didn’t believe in sitting anybody in a corner or in a dungeon or in a basement or ostracizing them from class and making them sit alone,” Huggins said. “We believed that you just need to recalibrate.”
Oakland Community School students stretching during physical education on the playground.

For instance, a student might be asked to do a tree pose — standing on one leg with arms extended — if they were unfocused. Difficulty with the pose indicated a need for better concentration. “We reached a point where students would say, ‘I’m not feeling focused. Can I go get myself together and come back?’” Huggins recalled. After lunch, students of all ages meditated for 3 to 4 minutes. Huggins said that former students often remember these meditation sessions fondly, even decades later.

4. Their motto was “the world is a child’s classroom”

Oakland Community School did not use traditional grade levels. Instead, children worked in groups based on their abilities in different subjects, according to LeBlanc-Ernest. The school operated on the belief that “the world is a child’s classroom,” focusing on teaching students how to think rather than what to think, she said. “They learned traditional academic information that was expanded and broadened because of the interests and the intentions of the staff.” Students engaged with the community through field trips to music performances and museum exhibits.
Ericka Huggins and Rosa Parks during Parks’ visit to Oakland Community School on May 2, 1980. (Photo copyright Donald Cunningham/Photo and caption courtesy The OCS Project)

The curriculum went beyond U.S. History to include international topics. For example, students learned the capitals of every African country — a practice that was groundbreaking at the time. The curriculum emphasized the brilliance of students’ own cultures and others. “We wanted them to know about history. We wanted them to know about themselves as people coming from great ancestry no matter their race or ethnicity,” said Huggins.

5. The students and teachers at their school celebrated diversity

Huggins described those who worked at Oakland Community School as a “rainbow staff” that included teachers who left public schools to work at the so-called Panther School.LeBlanc-Ernest noted that the staff was diverse, with equal numbers of men and women.

The Oakland Community School, late 1970s. (Photo copyright Donald Cunningham/Photo and caption courtesy The OCS Project)

Students came from various Bay Area cities, and while the majority were Black, the school also included White Asian, and Latino students. “We didn’t ever turn away a student because they were not Black,” Huggins said. Many are surprised by this diversity, she noted. “I said, ‘Why are you shocked? We were the Black Panther Party’ and they have to think about what they’ve been told.”

The school closed in 1982 after operating for 10 years, around the same time the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense officially dissolved in part due to government surveillance and attacks. “The principles, mottos and schedule of this school could be replicated today if someone chose to take it on,” Huggins said. With thousands of community schools in the United States, some may draw on the legacy of the Oakland Community School, even if indirectly, to address the needs of students and families. “It wasn’t easy. I want everybody to understand that,” said Huggins. “ The reward was in the faces of those parents and grandparents and aunties and uncles, the faces of the staff and most importantly, the lives of the children.”

In 2017, LeBlanc-Ernest started and directed The OCS Project where she preserves and shares the history of the school through recorded conversations with former party members and digital media. She has interviewed former students who have become teachers, changemakers, and culture bearers in the Bay Area and beyond. “[The Black Panthers] created a foundation for the students, for the parents, for the educators, who then took that with them into the different spaces that they moved into,” LeBlanc-Ernest said. “And I think that’s a lasting legacy.”

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Nimah Gobir: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir. The 1960s was a decade of social and cultural change. There was the civil rights movement…

[Martin Luther King, Jr. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood].

Nimah Gobir: Women’s liberation…

[May Craig question to John F. Kennedy (clip): …for equal rights for women, including equal pay…]

Nimah Gobir: Vietnam war…

[President Nixon Vietnam speech (clip): There were some who urged that I end the war at once… this would have been a popular and easy course to follow…]

Nimah Gobir: A moon landing

[Neil Armstrong (clip): …one giant leap for mankind].

Nimah Gobir: It was a time when the very fabric of society was being questioned, and people were having big ideas about how people think and how people are taught. It was also when the black power movement was getting traction.

[Malcolm X (clip): We are oppressed. We are exploited. We are downtrodden. We are denied not only civil rights but even human rights].

Nimah Gobir: The emphasis wasn’t on being free or access to white spaces, it was about empowerment and self-sufficiency even as widely accepted racist practices were trying to keep Black people down. It was during this era, in1966 that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense started in Oakland. They believed in Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense against police brutality.

Ericka Huggins: The first thing that drew me to the Black Panther Party that I always remember about it, it said the Black Panther Party for Self-defense and Self-defense, people get their hackles up about that.

Nimah Gobir: This is Ericka Huggins. She joined the Black Panther Party in 1968.

Ericka Huggins: People think that self-defense is physical. It can be and needs to be when necessary. However, this was about supporting people who live poor and/or oppressed.

Ericka Huggins: We said you cannot continue to kill us. You can’t break down our doors to our homes and shoot at us. You cannot arrest us, wrongly incarcerate us and beat and murder us while we are incarcerated. You cannot deprive us of food, housing, clothing and peace.

Nimah Gobir: Some of the more popular images of the Black Panthers are photos of armed men in berets looking out from behind these dark sunglasses. Or women – like Ericka – with afros waving flags and raising their fists. Even the United States FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover saw the Panther’s stance on protecting and empowering themselves as dangerous.

Ericka Huggins: J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panther Party is the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.

Nimah Gobir: The Black Panthers had a reputation as a militant group but they did way more than challenge the police and protest against racist policies.

Nimah Gobir: If you look up pictures of the Panthers– yes you’ll see guns and berets, but there are other images too. And the one that sticks with me is this photo of a Black Panther Party member putting down plates of food in front of young children. It’s a photo of their free breakfast program

Ericka Huggins: Children were expected to go to school and learn without any food. We knew because we were those children.

Nimah Gobir: They had a founding charter which included a 10 point platform. I won’t go into all of the points but it basically said that our people – Black people– need to be able to eat, find work and feel safe. This episode we’ll talk about point 5, a focus on a fulfilling and effective education system

[Bobby Seale Speech at Oakland Auditorium (clip): We want decent education for our Black people in our community that teaches us the true nature of this decadent racist society and to teach Black people and our young Black brothers and sisters their place in this society because if they don’t know their place in society and in the world, they can’t relate to anything else].

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: Education was always important in the party.

Nimah Gobir: Angela LeBlanc-Ernest is a documentarian and community archivist from Texas. She has studied and written books about the Panthers pursuit of education.

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: Whether it be the study sessions they had reading the different books by revolutionaries – political education classes is what they would call them – that were required, or whether it was party members tutoring kids in the local community.

Nimah Gobir: She told me the idea to create a school came about when party members saw how their own kids were mistreated in mainstream schools

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: You had to start envisioning what society needed to look like for your child if they survived. Right? There is a sense so many of them didn’t think they would survive

Nimah Gobir: Party members started to conceive of a community-based alternative to the poor educational experiences they had as children. They were often disciplined harder and discouraged from asking questions. Their schools lacked supplies and books, and the curriculum rarely included stories of people who looked like them.

Nimah Gobir: So in response to this they opened the Intercommunal Youth Institute in east Oakland in 1971

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: It was an old church that they converted into a school and so it was a small space. They decided that they wanted to start with the number they had, which was 50 students.

Nimah Gobir: Gradually, other people noticed that the students and families were being treated well at this scrappy little home school where they used mindfulness practices and restorative justice. Students were engaged, respected, and learning in an environment that valued their heritage and experiences.

Angela LeBlanc-Ernest: When the community approached the Black Panther Party, when it was just the insular home school to say, “Hey, can you make this available to the community, to children in the community?” That was a prompt for them to think more broadly.

Nimah Gobir: As new people joined from outside of the party, they began outgrowing the space and so they had to look for something more permanent. They changed the name to Oakland Community School and Black Panther Party member Ericka Huggins became the director.

Ericka Huggins: We opened the Oakland Community School in the school year of 1973-74.

Nimah Gobir: Students were ages 5 -12, so it was basically an elementary school, but there were no grades. They were grouped according to their academic abilities. They also had childcare for kids who were younger than five.

Nimah Gobir: Many of the students came from the Oakland area but some were coming from the greater bay area too.

Ericka Huggins: We had more than party members on staff. Not only did the people take their children out of public school, the public school teachers left, too, to work at… as it used to be, nicknamed the Panther School.

Nimah Gobir: This school is special for a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons is that it was one of the earliest versions of community schools in the country.

Ericka Huggins: The school was community based, child centered, tuition free, parent friendly and we paid special attention to children whose families had trouble with clothing and food.

Nimah Gobir: Nowadays when we talk about community schools, we’re talking about schools like this one, that provide for the whole child beyond academics. Often these schools have the things that families need located at or provided by the school. Oakland Community School provided groceries to families in the community and food throughout the school day.

Ericka Huggins: Three meals a day and I said it was tuition free. The meals were also for the students and staff of the school.

Nimah Gobir: If parents couldn’t afford the city bus. A bus from Oakland Community School would come pick their kids up. They used curriculum that actually reflected the students that were going to the school

Ericka Huggins: Our motto was “the world is a child’s classroom.” Which is a little different than the United States is the center of the universe.

Ericka Huggins: We talked about the enslavement of Africans. We talked about the indigenous people. We talked about the resilience and brightness of our ancestors and our generations up to them and how beautiful and bright they are. We always affirmed the children. We wanted them to know about history. We wanted them to know about themselves as people coming from great ancestry no matter their race or ethnicity. We didn’t ever turn away a student because they were not Black.

Nimah Gobir: Students at the so-called Panther school were Black –but they were also Latino they were white students they were Asian students and biracial students

Ericka Huggins: When people see this, they’re shocked, like, oh, why are you shocked? We were the Black Panther Party and they have to think about what they’ve been told.

Ericka Huggins: We were just brave and committed because it wasn’t easy. I want everybody to understand that it didn’t just appear itself as one community school with all angels floating around making things happen. No, it was hard work and. But the reward was in the faces of those parents and grandparents and aunties and uncles. The faces of the staff. And most importantly, the lives of the children.

Nimah Gobir: After about ten years of operation, The school closed in 1982 — This was around the time when The Black Panther Party officially dissolved after years of government surveillance and attacks. The free breakfast program is believed to have paved the way for expanding the government’s School Breakfast Program, which still exists today. And the Black Panther legacy is still in Oakland. For one thing, many members of the Black Panthers are alive today and physical sites across the city bear the Panthers’ name.

Nimah Gobir: Now, if we fast forward 40 years, what are Oakland Schools doing with that legacy? We’ll get into that after the break.

Nimah Gobir: Let’s jump ahead to present day Oakland. Angelica was enrolling in 10th grade at Oakland International High School.

Nimah Gobir: She was 18 years old and so nervous. Originally from Guatemala, she didn’t speak a word of English.

Angélica: Mi hermana me inscribió en esta escuela porque ella estuvo en esta escuela y se graduó aquí y pues me sentí nerviosa porque pues no sabía nada del inglés, nada, no entendía nada, nada.

Nimah Gobir: But her sister, who she was staying with at the time, was adamant about her going to school.

Angélica: Tienes que estudiar. Tienes que aprender. Es te necesito que tú llegas a otro nivel más que yo.

Nimah Gobir: Shortly after enrolling, circumstances for their family changed. All of the sudden, Angélica’s sister was providing for her kids,2 nephews, and Angelica. It was too much.

Angélica: Mi hermana ya no podía con muchos gastos porque ella tiene hijos también y ella tuvo que tuvo que mantenerme a mí y a mis dos sobrinos. Pero luego ella me dijo tú ya estás grande y pues ya no sé qué voy a hacer contigo y así lo siento mucho. Y pues ella se mudó y yo me quedé sola

Nimah Gobir: Her sister moved away and Angélica had to support herself, which meant she had to make a choice that so many students make: should she keep going to school or should she leave school to work?

Angélica: Tuve que salir de la escuela, tuve que irme y no tenía otra opción más que como mantenerme a mi misma.

Nimah Gobir: She decided to work. She didn’t feel like she had much of a choice. According to a report by the Urban Institute, nearly a third of students ages 16-19 are working and not in school.

Nimah Gobir: I want to take a moment to zoom out on Angelica and talk about the school district she’s in. Oakland Unified School District. It’s credited with being the first full service community school district in the nation. That means in all of their public schools they don’t just going to focus on academics, they provide other services students and families might need like food and social services. Is this starting to sound familiar?

Nimah Gobir: The superintendent Tony Smith who rolled out the plan for the community school district said that it has echoes of the Panthers and their deep care for kids. There are great examples of how Oakland Schools are drawing on the Panther legacy. And one of them is Oakland International School. The school that Angelica goes to.

Lauren Markham: Oakland International High School is a public school in the Oakland Unified School District that serves all newly arrived immigrant students, all of whom are English language learners.

Nimah Gobir: Here is Lauren Markham, one of Oakland International’s founding members.

Lauren Markham: Not all, but a lot of our students are coming from conditions of poverty. We have the highest poverty rate of any Oakland high school.

Nimah Gobir: When I walked through the school I could hear a bunch of different languages all at once. Spanish and Arabic are the ones you’ll hear most. It reminded me of the way Ericka Huggins from the Black Panther Party talked about the diversity of students and educators at the Oakland community school

Lauren Markham: We have students from about 20 different countries. I often describe our school as a delayed mirror of world events.

Nimah Gobir: What she means by this is that if something happens in a country far away. For example, if there’s political turmoil in Central America and it leads to a lot of refugees or asylum seekers, Oakland international will have an influx of these students a year or so later.

Nimah Gobir: More refugees arrived in the United States in the first eight months of 2023 than any year since 2017. Many schools across the country are trying to figure out how to accommodate an influx of migrant students.

Lauren Markham: Newcomer students fail at wildly disproportionate rates throughout the country. And we know that when any one population is failing, it’s a function of the system and not the students.

Nimah Gobir: The community school model is what enables Oakland International to support their diverse student population.

Lauren Markham: School Is not just a place where like learning and education and academics happen, but that all of these services that are around the classroom, that that connect to and support students lives, be it mental health services or health care or immigration legal services, which are all things that I think we do particularly well and that are particularly vital at Oakland International.

Lauren Markham: I always use this example, but like if someone has an abscess tooth, they’re not going to be able to focus on math. Right? And if somebody has a pending deportation hearing coming up and they don’t have an immigration lawyer, like, yeah, they’re not working on their group project.

Nimah Gobir: Working with newcomers makes the community school model really necessary

Lauren Markham: Because so many students are coming with limited not all, but a number of our students are coming, not necessarily entering like established communities or having like established social networks and therefore like don’t necessarily know where to go to get X, Y, Z thing, or the language that they speak isn’t represented at the social services office where they would apply for Medi-Cal or Cal Fresh.

Madenh Ali Hassan: Everybody’s taking what they need and nobody feels ashamed. I think sometimes there’s a stigma. Like, it’s free food, I don’t need to take that. But food scarcity is real.

Nimah Gobir: That’s Madenh Ali Hassan Oakland International’s Community School Manager, which means she oversees all the services the school offers in addition to academics. When I asked her what the school does really well. She said giving students and families food is their jam.

Madenh Ali Hassan: It’s a little bit of creative chaos but if you come out and see it it’s always just kind of sweet because everyone’s just taking what they need.

Nimah Gobir: In order to offset skyrocketing food prices, the school offers two separate food banks once a week.

Nimah Gobir: Just like how The Panthers saw a need in their community and provided free meals to children and families. Today we see Madenh and Oakland International doing something similar.

Madenh Ali Hassan: We typically set up right in front of the school. And so this is open for the public. So when the community sees it, there’s a line around the block.

Nimah Gobir: They also want to make sure they are serving their current students, so they have another food bank set up in the cafeteria. That one is just for their students.

Madenh Ali Hassan: Everybody’s taking what they need and filling their bags and students are doing the same in the cafeteria.

Nimah Gobir: Students who have dropped out of Oakland International also come to the weekly Food Bank. It’s relatively common for a newcomer to turn 18 and leave school to work. Oftentimes, working is necessary to pay back the people who helped them migrate to the US or to help out their families.

Lauren Markham: We understand, like this is the reality of your life and you have to tend to that.

Nimah Gobir: This is Lauren again, talking about students who drop out.

Lauren Markham: I also think that it’s reflective of our school, sort of not. Like understanding that what’s happening now is not a student’s fate forever.

Nimah Gobir: If a student needs help translating a document about a court hearing or filling out a paperwork. They know they will still be supported at Oakland International. Angélica felt that way too. When Angelica dropped out of school she got a job making sandwiches.

Nimah Gobir: Even though her circumstances made it so that she to work closing shifts. She knew she didn’t want to work in the same sandwich shop forever. So she had a conversation with her boss who let her work closing shifts so she could attend school again during the day.

Angélica: Entonces. Y mis maestros también se alegraron mucho porque yo había. Yo había ido cuatro meses y ellos me ayudaron también. Con todo. Todo. Animarme.

Nimah Gobir: When she returned to school she was welcomed with open arms.

Nimah Gobir: I found it really fascinating the way that staff and teachers at the school hold on to these two distinct realities. One being that students do better when they’re in school and the other is that some of them can’t make the decision to be there.

Nimah Gobir: When I went to Oakland International’s open house — it’s an event where they open up the campus to educators who are interested in seeing how they run things — I heard Lauren say something at the Open House assembly that I thought was profound.

Lauren Markham at the Open House assembly: A lot of what we do here is like, okay, we see the perfect version. We can whine for a little bit about not having that, but how do we get how do we approximate? That’s what we do as educators. How do we get closer to that given the resources that we have? And that’s the sort of scrappiness that is built into education.

Nimah Gobir: As someone who reports on education and talks to a lot of teachers and worked in education, this felt true and this reminds me of the panthers too in a sense. Because schools are essentially a group of people that are committed to striving for a really hard to get ideal.

Nimah Gobir: Many of the students who went to Oakland International come back to work there as adults because they see the way the community school model helps them support students better.

Nimah Gobir: Yasser Alwan came to Oakland international as a student in 2010

Yasser Alwan: We immigrated from Yemen, right before the conflict, the revolution, known as the Arab Spring.

Nimah Gobir: Now he’s a Newcomer assistant. It’s a position that started at Oakland International, where they’ll have specific people who are in classrooms like paraprofessionals to help students who are struggling. When I asked him why he came back and why he stays he said yeah sometimes there are really hard days.

Yasser Alwan: But I, I remember mostly the good ones. And for the most part it was mostly good days. And it’s just like that community is very strong and you’re like, very welcome in and like. I’m like, happier when I’m not around. And I think that’s what brings me back. Even through challenging times, I remember the good days. And I’m like, there’s going to be more good days.

Nimah Gobir: Karen Moya came to Oakland International as a student in 2010 also.

Karen Moya: We came from El Salvador.

Nimah Gobir: As an adult she joined the staff as a case manager

Karen Moya: I’m basically supporting students and their families to navigate the new systems in the country.

Nimah Gobir: When she is overwhelmed, She returns to something a colleague told her.

Karen Moya: Something that one of my colleagues said it’s like you can do anything and … You might feel that you’re not doing anything because you’re not seeing the results, but you are actually doing something. You are impacting their lives, you know, and helping them navigate the, the, the systems and the struggles of being, you know, an immigrant in this country. So I take that with me. And, and I think about it sometimes too, when I’m like, I’m helping this student and I don’t see the results that I want to see on my way, but I’m doing everything that I can in my hands to better support them and their families.

Nimah Gobir: Prior to this episode we did two other stories about community schools.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: I’m Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí and I’m the community engagement reporter at KQED.

Nimah Gobir: So Carlos is someone who has been with me throughout my community school reporting at KQED. He was with me during interviews translating Spanish. We’re coming to the end of our community school reporting this season and I wanted to reflect what it was like to really sit in these stories

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Angelica was a little a little shy at first, a little nervous, which I, you know, completely normal reaction. The thing that stuck with me for just the whole day was just her, her, just like the like that she for her this whole, you know, like her leaving school and coming back. This decision. She really made it for herself. She understands the value of education. The things she was repeating again and again was like, I wanna learn English. When I first came to the U.S., you know, the first place that we came to was Oakland and I think that, when you’re in a school that sees a lot of kids come and go, you kind of feel like you’re, you know, you’re kind of like in the fight by yourself.

Nimah Gobir: I was talking to the community school coordinator and then also, one of the founders, and they were saying, like, it’s such a weird thing to do at a school where you like, see kids leaving, but you understand that, like, their realities are things that they have to deal with. And so you have to kind of let them go. But your job is just to be like when you’re ready to come back, like, come back here and like you’ll be okay. And it seems like they do a really good job of that versus like a school that would either be like, don’t leave and then like as soon as the student leaves, it’s kind of like, yeah, if I see you, i see you.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Totally, yeah. And that’s why, I really loved being able to accompany you on these trips because it just shows many ways you can interpret the community model. Where it could be a thousand factors that could, you know, change the outcome.That goes to the point we’re making that there is no perfect quote unquote perfect community school. There’s no perfect way to establish or create a community school.

Nimah Gobir: Thank you for talking to me Carlos.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Yeah, Thank you Nimah, this was awesome.

Nimah Gobir: it’s really always a pleasure to work with you.

Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí: Likewise.

Nimah Gobir: Whether a school is based in Oakland pursuing the legacy of the Panther School or elsewhere, educators can relate to the desire for systems that serve young people better. In the meantime, they keep tracking down quick-fixes, proven strategies and those hard-to-find sustainable solutions.

Nimah Gobir: This episode would not have been possible without Ericka Huggins, Angela LeBlanc Ernest, Madenh Ali Hassan, Lauren Markham, Yassar Alwan, Karen Moya, and Angelica. Thank you to folks at Oakland International.

http://dlvr.it/TBs6GR

10 Ways to Calm Your Kid’s Back-to-School Jitters

2024-08-12T14:13:00.001-07:00

New teachers, classmates, routines and expectations — a new school year almost always means change for both kids and their caregivers. And that can be nerve-wracking for everyone.

To help families ease into the transition, Life Kit asked teachers, pediatricians and child development experts for their best back-to-school advice. These tips have been edited for length and clarity.

Adjust your child’s summer sleep schedule to a school schedule. At least one or two weeks before school starts, move bedtime and wake-up time up by 15-minute increments every few days until the desired schedule is reached. —Dr. Nilong Vyas, pediatrician and sleep consultant

Gradually reintroduce structure into a child’s daily routine to help them prepare for school. Add a 15-minute block of educational content to your kid’s routine, such as a read-aloud, math puzzle or science experiment. —Keisha Siriboe, early childhood literacy consultant

Remind kids that almost everyone feels a little nervous on the first day of school. Naming and describing an emotion and letting children know you understand how they feel can help them feel more in control over their feelings instead of feeling overwhelmed by them. —Leah Orchinik, pediatric psychologist

To ease a child’s anxiety about going back to school, help them understand what to expect. As Daniel Tiger sings, “When we do something new, let’s talk about what we’ll do.” Remind them that “grown-ups come back” [at the end of the school day] — and they can share their new experiences at school with their loved ones. –Mallory Mbalia, director of learning and education at Fred Rogers Productions, producers of the TV show Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood

Talk to your child about how they might handle challenging situations, even if they are not likely to happen. For example, if your son is worried about getting lost in a new school, help him problem solve by creating a plan about what he would do if that did happen so he feels more prepared and confident. —Leah Orchinik, pediatric psychologist

Make up a special goodbye ritual together. Morning goodbyes can be challenging. But you can create daily memories your child will cherish for years to come. Say, “See you later, alligator! In a while, crocodile!”, do a special handshake or enjoy an extra-long hug. You can also kiss your child’s palm and then hold each other’s hands tightly to “seal it in.” Tell your child to remember they’ll carry your kiss with them all day long, and they can do the same for you! —Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Workshop

Fill their connection cup before and after school. Even if you’re tired in the morning, set that alarm for 15 minutes earlier so you can have a snuggle session with your child. Read a book together. Have breakfast together. When you pick them up from school, be aware they will need another connection cup top-up. Sometimes they will present with this after-school meltdown because they’re so depleted. —Vanessa Lapointe, author of Discipline without Damage

Make sure your child knows how to navigate their world in tech-free ways. Even if your child has a smartphone, make sure they know what to do if they’re approached by a stranger, how to get help for an injury and other street smarts. Help isn’t always a button away. —Leah Plunkett, author of Sharenthood

Discuss family or classroom conflicts with your child. Have a daily conversation topic such as, “What’s been a good or hard part about your day?” or “What rules do we need to help everyone feel loved and respected?” Then have a weekly discussion to keep things on track and make kids part of problem-solving. —Thomas Lickona, author of How to Raise Kind Kids

Pour positive words of affirmation into your children on a daily basis. For example, “I love you. I’m proud of you. It’s going to be a great day. It’s OK to make mistakes.” Parents can leave notes inside their child’s lunch boxes. Or I’ve had parents ask me to write a sticky note on their child’s desk for them. These messages allow a kid to feel powerful and confident throughout the day. —Jarod Renford, first grade teacher in Washington, D.C.

The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at (202) 216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.

Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter.

http://dlvr.it/TBqsKz

Nearly 6 out of 10 Middle and High School Grades Are Wrong, Study Finds

2024-08-12T05:20:00.001-07:00

If we graded schools on how accurately they grade students, they’d fail. Nearly six out of 10 course grades are inaccurate, according to a new study of grades that teachers gave to 22,000 middle and high school students in 2022 and 2023.

The Equitable Grading Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to change grading practices, compared 33,000 course grades with students’ scores on standardized exams, including Advanced Placement tests and annual state assessments. The organization considered a course grade to be inaccurate if a student’s test score indicated a level of knowledge that was at least a letter grade off from what the teacher had issued. For example, a grade was classified as inaccurate if a student’s test score indicated a C-level of skills and knowledge, but the student received an A or a B in the course. In this example, a D or an F grade would also be inaccurate.

Inflated grades were more common than depressed grades. In this analysis, over 40% of the 33,000 grades analyzed – more than 13,000 transcript grades – were higher than they should have been, while only 16% or 5,300 grades were lower than they should have been. In other words, two out of five transcript grades indicated that students were more competent in the course than they actually were, while nearly one out of six grades was lower than the student’s true understanding of the course content.
FRPL refers to low-income students whose families qualify for the national free or reduced price lunch program. (Source: Equitable Grading Project, “Can We Trust the Transcript?” July 2024)

The discrepancy matters, the white paper says, because inaccurate grades make it harder to figure out which students are prepared for advanced coursework or ready for college. With inflated grades, students can be promoted to difficult courses without the foundation or extra help they need to succeed. Depressed grades can discourage a student from pursuing a subject or prompt them to drop out of school altogether.

“This data suggests that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students in this study may have been denied, or not even offered, opportunities that they were prepared and eligible for,” the white paper said.

This analysis is evidence that widespread grade inflation, which has also been documented by the ACT, the National Center for Education Statistics and independent scholars, has persisted through 2023. In this transcript analysis, grade inflation occurred more frequently for Black and Hispanic students than Asian and white students. It was also more common for low-income students.

Large discrepancies were documented. Almost 4,800 of the inflated grades were two letters higher than the student’s test score would indicate. An AP exam might have indicated a D-level of mastery, but the student earned a B in the class. On the flip side, more than 1,000 students received grades that were two letter grades lower than their assessment score.

The report rejected the possibility that test anxiety is the main culprit for such widespread and large discrepancies, and laid out a list of other reasons for why grades don’t reflect a student’s skills and content mastery. Some teachers feel pressure from parents and school administrators to give high grades. Many teachers factor in participation, behavior and handing in homework assignments – things that have little to do with what a student has learned or knows. Meanwhile, grades can be depressed when teachers make deductions for late work or when students fail to turn in assignments. Group projects that are weighed heavily in the final grade can swing a student’s final transcript grade up or down. In the report, one superintendent described how teachers in his district awarded students points toward their grade based on whether their parents attended Back to School Night.

Reasonable people can debate how much grades should be used to promote good behavior. The Equitable Grading Project argues that schools should use other rewards and consequences, and keep grades tied to academic achievement.

However, solutions aren’t quick or easy. The organization worked with over 260 teachers during the 2022-23 school year to implement a version of “mastery-based grading,” which excludes homework, class assignments and student behavior from the final grade, but uses a range of assessments – not only tests and papers – to ascertain a student’s proficiency. Teachers were encouraged to allow students multiple retakes. After five workshops and four coaching sessions, teachers’ grading accuracy improved by only 3 percentage points, from 37.6% of their grades accurately reflecting student proficiency to 40.6%.

Part of the challenge may be changing the minds of teachers, who tend to think that their own grades are fine but the problem lies with their colleagues. In a survey of almost 1,200 teachers that accompanied this quantitative study, more than 4 out of 5 teachers agreed or somewhat agreed that their grades accurately reflect student learning and academic readiness. But nearly half of those same teachers doubted the accuracy of grades assigned by other teachers in their own school and department.

Grading practices are an area where schools and teachers could really use some research on what works. I’ll be keeping my eye out for solutions with evidence behind them.

This story about the Equitable Grading Project was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

http://dlvr.it/TBprHS

Former Teacher Tim Walz is Kamala Harris’ VP pick. Here’s What He’s Done for Education in Minnesota

2024-08-07T09:51:00.001-07:00

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former high school teacher, is Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate.

The pick comes after weeks of speculation that increasingly focused on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Harris continued to interview potential running mates through the weekend and ultimately picked Walz, who emerged as the preferred candidate of progressives.

Walz’s background as a social studies teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School in southern Minnesota was front and center Tuesday evening, during his and Harris’ first appearance as running mates at Temple University in Philadelphia.

“It was my students, they encouraged me to run for office,” said Walz, who left teaching to run for Congress. “They saw in me what I was hoping to instill in them — a commitment to common good, a belief that one person can make a difference.”

Walz, whose wife, father, and siblings were all teachers, intoned: “Don’t ever underestimate teachers.”

Harris spoke of Walz leading his football team from a winless season to the school’s first-ever state championship. And she spoke of his decision to be faculty advisor for his school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance.

“Tim Walz was the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having and that every kid deserves,” she said. “He’s the kind of person that makes people feel like they belong and that inspires them to dream big. And that’s the kind of vice president he will be.”

As governor, Walz took advantage of a Democratic trifecta in state government to push through a progressive policy agenda that included free breakfast and lunch for most schoolchildren. Minnesota was the fourth state to offer school lunch for nearly all students, an early adopter of a policy that has become a growing national trend.

The budget he signed in 2023 included a major funding boost for Minnesota schools and a $1,750 per-child annual tax credit that aimed to reduce childhood poverty. Congress has failed to reinstate the pandemic-era federal child tax credit that dramatically cut childhood hunger and poverty.

Walz also signed a free college tuition program for Minnesota families earning less than $80,000 a year. The program provides last-dollar scholarships that close gaps between students’ financial aid packages and the actual cost of attendance.

Republicans have criticized Walz for increasing the size of state government and sidelining them in the legislative process. If Democrats win the White House in the election against Republican Donald Trump in November, they are unlikely to face such a supportive Congress.

While speculation circled around Shapiro for weeks, the Pennsylvania governor drew criticism in the week leading up to the announcement for his response to pro-Palestinian campus protesters and for an op-ed he wrote in college in which he wrote that peace was not possible with the Palestinians. He said that his views have evolved since. Some public education advocates also expressed concerns about his past voucher support.

Shapiro enthusiastically threw his support behind Harris and Walz Tuesday evening, saying he’s going to “be working my tail off” to get them elected.

“It’s easy to feel uneasy and it’s easy to get down,” he said in a speech that touched on his Jewish faith and leaned into fears about a second Trump administration. “Let me tell you something, America, I’m more optimistic than ever before.”

Walz drew support from House Democrats and from union leaders in the days leading up to the decision. Media reports said that Harris had a good rapport with Walz in their one-on-one interviews. And on social media, many teachers cheered the choice.

Walz tells a story that he got his start in politics when he took some students to a rally for former Republican President George W. Bush, and they were denied entry because one of his students had a sticker for Bush’s Democratic opponent John Kerry.

A military veteran, Walz served six terms in Congress representing a conservative district that went strongly for Trump in 2016. He won election as governor in 2018 and reelection in 2022, despite criticisms over his COVID response, including the length of school closures in Minnesota, and his response to the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In recent weeks, Walz emerged as an outspoken surrogate for Harris, gaining viral video fame for clips in which he calls former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies “weird.” He has also cast the type of policies he enacted in Minnesota as more representative of “family values” than culturally conservative positions backed by Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.

Walz has what the Minneapolis Star-Tribune dubbed “rumpled uncle looks.” Gun safety activist and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg called him the “mid-western dad we need as VP.”

When one poster on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, compared Walz’s appearance unfavorably to that of the vice president by asking “how on earth are these two people the same age,” another poster responded, “Because Tim Walz taught high school. Trust me.”

Walz joined in the joke, adding: “And supervised the lunchroom for 20 years. You do not leave that job with a full head of hair. Trust me.”

Carly Sitrin and Dale Mezzacappa contributed reporting from Philadelphia.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

http://dlvr.it/TBcynr

In the Face of Climate Change, Science Class Can Help Students Dream Up a Better Future

2024-08-05T10:31:00.001-07:00

High school freshman DeWayne Murphy has a big idea for a new green technology.

“There’s going to be a tank and it should be like a big giant metal tank,” he explains to climate scientist Ben Kravitz on a school day in May. “You fill it up with water, and the tank is going to heat up.”

The water will turn to steam, which will power a car. But it has some potential drawbacks.

“It’s not really designed to take any damage, like at all, so you have to be like really gentle with it,” Murphy says.

“What I really like about that is steam’s kind of an old tech,” Kravitz tells him. “Steam works. We know that. So, yeah, that’s a really cool idea.”

This conversation is part of a larger lesson about developing technologies that reduce planet-heating pollution. The lesson was created by Kravitz, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University; his colleague Paul Goddard; and Kirstin Milks, DeWayne Murphy’s science teacher at Bloomington High School South in Bloomington, Ind.

With heat waves and extreme weather becoming more and more common, Milks wants to empower her students with information and the creative freedom to dream up big ideas for a better climate future.

“The fact is that climate change is the story of these young people’s lives,” Milks says. “Our students need to know not just the stuff about it that is challenging and difficult, the stuff we hear about in the news, but also they need to see how change can happen. They need to feel like they understand and can actually make a difference in our shared future.”

Milks teaches her students the basic facts about human-caused climate change: that burning fossil fuels — like coal, oil and gas — is the biggest single driver of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide heats the planet, which has led to more frequent droughts, hurricanes, floods and intense heat waves.

Kravitz says, “The only permanent solution to stopping that is reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Scientists already know some technologies that could help. Solar and wind energy combined with big batteries are helping the world transition away from oil, coal and gas.

But Kravitz says the world isn’t moving fast enough. So he and other scientists are studying strategies to temporarily alter the Earth’s climate to reduce the effects of climate change. It’s known as climate engineering, or geoengineering.

Climate engineering covers a range of strategies, including reflecting sunlight back into space and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But these strategies can also pose significant risks — like disruptions to rain patterns and impacts on global crops. Meanwhile, there’s still little regulation over how these technologies might get used.

“The people who are going to be voting on whether to [pursue climate engineering], or even leading the charge, are sitting in high school classrooms right now,” Kravitz says. “So if they don’t know what this topic is, that’s a real problem. So that’s why we developed the lesson.”

Milks says she isn’t trying to persuade students to embrace climate engineering — rather, she wants to give them the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about it, if and when the time comes.

Students think up wild ideas, like covering the desert in glitter

Creativity is at the core of this lesson, Milks explains. After students learn the basics of climate engineering, they’re asked to “come up with interesting wild ideas” to slow global warming.
High school freshman DeWayne Murphy consults with Kirstin Milks, his science teacher, on a classroom experiment. (Chris Elberfeld/WFYI)

At first, no idea is too out there, says Goddard, an assistant research scientist at Indiana University who helped develop the lesson.

“As we progress along throughout the lessons, then we add more details, more constraints to their designs,” Goddard says.

In the first round of brainstorming, students imagined a solar-powered helicopter; artificial trees that store rainwater to help fight wildfires; and lots of ways to reflect light back into the atmosphere, like covering the desert in shiny glitter.

Next, students are asked to consider the potential limitations and risks to their ideas. Take glitter in the desert, for example:

“How are we going to make sure that the glitter doesn’t get eaten by the rock pocket mouse … or like snakes and stuff?” Milks asks.

The student suggests making the glitter large and smooth enough so it won’t be eaten by animals or otherwise harm them.

For their final assignment, students present their concepts — including their anticipated benefits and risks — to Kravitz, Goddard and other scientists.

High school junior Campbell Brown has an idea for a flying air filter that sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turns it into a harmless byproduct.

“It’ll decrease the amount of greenhouse gases that are in the air,” she explains during her presentation. “The risks could be that it just doesn’t work the way I want it to.”

Kravitz is impressed.

“So you want to know something? It does work,” he tells Brown. “The waste product that you get out of it is baking soda, essentially. So yeah, it works, it just can’t be widely deployed right now because it’s too expensive.”

Fostering climate optimism

Brown is thrilled that her idea is something scientists are currently studying, especially because she didn’t know much about climate change before this lesson.
Ben Kravitz, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University, chats with high school students DeWayne Murphy and Emerald Yee during a class at Bloomington High School South. (Chris Elberfeld/WFYI)

She was saddened to learn how humans have contributed to climate change and its effects on the planet, but she says she’s leaving this lesson with a newfound sense of hope.

“Because rather than the old generation leaving something broken for us to fix, we’re also getting help from that generation. And so that way, we’re all helping each other out and fixing what we have caused,” she says.

Emerald Yee, a senior in Milks’ class, has been concerned about climate change for a while. She has a family member with a chronic health condition that’s exacerbated by heat.

“So for me, I’m mainly just worried about [their] safety when it comes to climate change and global warming,” Yee says. She says this lesson gave her the tools to “really think about climate change and how we can change it and make it better for not just our generation, but the younger generations, our younger siblings, or even our kids and grandkids.”

For Kravitz, fostering climate optimism is a big part of this lesson. And he says hearing students’ ideas for solutions always makes him feel better.

“The neat thing about seeing all of these ideas come out of the classroom is it’s not I can’t do it. It’s we can do it. Humans, when they get together, can do amazing things. And that’s what gives me hope.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit
https://www.npr.org. />

http://dlvr.it/TBX5Z0

A Historic New Law Would Protect Kids Online and Hold Tech Companies Accountable

2024-08-05T07:34:00.001-07:00

Kristin Bride lost her 16-year-old son, Carson, to suicide in 2020. She says shortly before he took his own life he was bullied on the social media site Snapchat.

“Carson received over 100 harassing and sexually explicit texts from his high school classmates through an anonymous messaging app on Snapchat,” Bride says. “The last search on his phone before he ended his life was for hacks to find out who was doing this to him.”

Shortly after her son’s death, Bride joined Parents for Safe Online Spaces, an organization of families who lost their children after they were exposed to toxic online content. Some died by suicide after cyberbullying or sextortion; others after participating in viral challenges involving self-harm or taking drugs sold by online dealers.

Bride is also part of an ongoing effort on Capitol Hill to craft legislation that would hold social media sites and other tech companies accountable for keeping minors safe online.
Kristin Bride lost her 16-year-old son, Carson, to suicide in 2020. She says shortly before he took his own life he was bullied on the social media site Snapchat. “Carson received over 100 harassing and sexually explicit texts from his high school classmates through an anonymous messaging app on Snapchat. (Erika Layne Salazar)

Last year, a group of bipartisan senators introduced the Kids Online Safety Act, a groundbreaking piece of legislation addressing growing concern from parents about the impact of online and social media platforms on children and teens.

The legislation passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support earlier this week, and the measure now heads to the Republican-led House.

New law will require companies to limit harmful content

The last time Congress passed a law to protect children on the internet was in 1998 — before Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and smartphones. The legislation would require tech companies to implement measures to help protect kids from exposure to harmful content.

For example, companies would be prohibited from using algorithms to push content that underage users did not specifically search for. This addresses a huge concern of parents and advocates: that kids are targeted with content that promotes harmful behavior, such as eating disorders, sexual exploitation and substance abuse.

The bill would also raise the maximum age of children covered under the law to 17; ban companies from collecting data from minors, including biometric indicators such as fingerprints, voiceprints and facial imagery; and improve parental controls.

Josh Golin is the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit working to protect kids from marketing and dangerous online content from Big Tech.

“For the first time ever, social media and other online platforms will have a legal responsibility to consider how they are impacting children,” Golin says.

Golin says it’s important for online platforms and members of Congress to recognize that regulating the use of social media for their kids has become overwhelming for families.

No parent is looking for “another full-time job,” he says.

“We need to put the responsibility back on where it belongs, which is on these companies who are the ones controlling what these kids are seeing. We need to ensure that these kids are not being sent down such dangerous rabbit holes,” says Golin.

Advocates hope new law will help fight cyberbullying

Parent advocates of the bill say the new requirements will make it easier to protect their kids from becoming victims of cyberbullying. They say more parent-friendly user settings will make it easier to control what their kids are exposed to online.

Kristin Bride says the anonymous messaging feature on Snapchat ultimately led to her son’s death.

“I absolutely believe that my son would be alive if this legislation was in place at the time,” she says.

While cyberbullying is not directly called out in the legislation, its impacts — anxiety, depression, suicidal and self-harming behaviors — are addressed, says Vaishnavi J., founder of Vyanams Strategies, an organization that advises companies on how to create safer tech products for children.

“Cyberbullying is a really challenging issue to navigate because it’s so coded and it’s constantly evolving,” says J.

J. notes that cyberbullying disproportionately impacts girls and young women of color.

“They are typically under-represented from marginalized communities. They aren’t getting the range of societal support they deserve,” J. says. “That tends to extend to online as well.”

J. also says boys are under-represented in the research when it comes to cyberbullying, something that she says isn’t talked about enough.

Boys “don’t tend to tell you that they’re being harassed or bullied. Instead, they choose to suffer in silence … and that’s a real problem,” she says.

All 50 states have laws against bullying, and every state — except Wisconsin and Alaska — include specific references to cyberbullying. Currently, there are no federal laws that criminalize cyberbullying.

More challenges lie ahead

Along with the safety bill, the Senate also passed online privacy legislation that would prohibit online companies from collecting personal information from kids under the age of 17 without their consent.

Even though the online safety bill has broad bipartisan support, some lawmakers argue that the legislation could violate free speech rights. Others are concerned that the new regulations could prevent some kids from accessing information on LGBTQ+ issues or reproductive rights.

Social media companies including Microsoft, X and Snapchat have voiced support for the measure, while TikTok and Meta have called it unconstitutional.
Maurine Molak is among the families who worked with the Senate to get the bill passed. She lost her 16-year-old son, David, to suicide after months of relentless online threats and cyberbullying. (Erika Layne Salazar)

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says there’s still more work to be done to regulate online protections for kids, but the new online safety law would be a step in the right direction. The bill now heads to the Republican-led House where Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled support for the legislation.

Maurine Molak is among the families who worked with the Senate to get the bill passed. She lost her 16-year-old son, David, to suicide after months of relentless online threats and cyberbullying. Molak is urging every House member to vote in favor of what she says is a game-changing bill.

“It’s game-changing for young people. It’s game-changing for families,” she says. “I hear it over and over again that it’s like a game of Whac-A-Mole. As soon as parents figure out to keep their kids safe on one platform — three more pop up.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit
https://www.npr.org. />

http://dlvr.it/TBWjSb