Sandler references Theodore R. Sizer’s work (late founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools) who emphasized that, for students to succeed, they must be personally known at school and have strong relationships with the people there. But Sizer is not the only one who’s talked about the importance of quality learning relationships. In fact, learning theorists and pedagogists from Piaget to Vygotsky, Briggs-Myers to Lawrence, Dewey to Comer, Sousa, Willis, and Cushman. The list literally goes on and on.

Just like the product of a child’s IQ and EQ (IQ*EQ) has a significant impact on SAT scores and career trajectory, the product of a teacher’s EQ has a significant impact on his ability to positively impact two critical dimensions of educating our children: (1) whetting students’ appetites for learning and (2) learning how to effectively work together in teams.

Read the rest of the article that Jen Lilienstein, Kidzmet Founder wrote for EdTechDigest here.

These examples are backed up by numerous recent research studies which conclude that positive teacher-student relationships have been shown to support students’ adjustment to school, contribute to their social skills, promote academic performance, and foster students’ resiliency in academic performance. (Battistich, Schaps, & Wilson, 2004; Birch & Ladd, 1997; Hamre & Pianta, 2001)

In fact, ASCD’s email newsletter just yesterday stated, “students as learners are also students as people, with hopes, fears, and needs. That’s why it’s so important to build adult-student relationships that support and encourage each student’s academic and personal growth. The frequency and perceived worth of interaction (PDF) with faculty, staff, and other students is one of the strongest predictors not only of student persistence but also of student learning.”

This belief is the foundation upon which Kidzmet is built. And it shouldn’t be something that we expect just from interpersonally gifted instructors that have an innate talent for connecting with people. We should expect a fervent attempt at true connection from EVERY teacher a child has in school. It doesn’t just benefit the students, it gives the teacher the experience of having a room full of students that are not only more engaged throughout the school year, but who wrap up the school year thinking, “s/he was the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

Throughout May, we’ll be looking for blog comments that tell stories of their most POSITIVE and most NEGATIVE teacher relationship experiences. (It can be yours or your child’s.) It can be a story of a teacher that made you love science because he presented it in a way that “clicked” for you. Or a teacher that used the *wrong* approach to motivate you and you spent the year dreaming up excuses about why you couldn’t make it to her class. Or even the story of a teacher that came highly recommended by another parent, but that just didn’t “get” your child.

Everyone who posts a story will get a Kidzmet Classroom Account gift card to pass along to a teacher, so that she can understand how each individual student in her class ticks and hit the ground running with new student relationships. Save it until you know who your child’s next teacher is in the Fall; pass it along to a sports coach, tutor or summer activities leader; or even gift it to this year’s teacher so that he is better prepared to welcome his new batch of students this Fall. It’s entirely up to you.

We’re looking forward to hearing everyone’s stories!!

To our kids’ collective success,
Jen Lilienstein
Founder
Kidzmet 

I’m still a believer that the seeds of great ideas often come from places you wouldn’t expect. And, even though many of the recommendations were recycled time and again, there were nuggets that shone brightly with a little bit of polish.

Re-reading it, I couldn’t help but think…what if teachers used this technique with students in the classroom one or two times per quarter? What kinds of insights would school leaders get as to what’s working—and what’s not with regard to how we’re educating our kids? What if we took it a step further and discussed student insights and recommendations in our weekly grade level team meetings?

I think we need to revisit this theme with respect to learning and school. So many of our policy decisions right now are based on fear of falling behind and trying to teach kids the “right” ways to do things as quickly as possible, eliminating true discovery and joyful novelty from school day learning. But we’re not just eliminating opportunities for inventive, creative self-expression during the school day by slashing recess, arts and extracurricular budgets. As parents, we’re replacing “go play outside/have a dance party/fiddle around on the piano” with soccer practice/music lessons/tutoring.

Which brings to mind this study, which found that instruction actually limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. Kids who were shown how to use a novel toy played with it for significantly less time AND found fewer different kinds of actions on the toy than kids who were just given the toy with no further instruction.

This revelation, in addition to recent self-regulation studies that have shown that kids’ executive function—or the ability to control their own emotions and behavior—has diminished since the 1940s, should set off alarm bells in our minds. Why? Because the more structured the play, the more children’s private speech declines. This means that kids aren’t getting a chance to practice the all-important skill of self-regulation/executive function. And executive function is used by adults to surmount the obstacles that we encounter countless times as we work to innovate and invent as adults. (Among a host of other incredibly important skills.) More on these studies can be found here.

If we’re going to help the next generation of kids continue to invent and innovate–not just regurgitate–we need to make sure that as parents and educators we allow opportunities for our kids to experience both structured AND unstructured learning.

Let’s change our collective mantras and our own self-talk from a fearful “what haven’t they learned yet?” to a joyful “what will they think of next?”

#letkidsplay #powerofplay #bringbackrecess

Also posted on Cooperative Catalyst

Sounds a lot like another profession I was in for a couple of decades…marketing. A marketer’s job is to take a product and make it look/sound as appealing as possible to the target audience so that they’ll listen long enough to eventually be convinced to buy it based on the messages in their packaging, advertising and brochures. The selected message and advertising vehicle for products is not the same—it needs to be tweaked, tailored and massaged based on the target demographic. Focus groups are run in which all KINDS of perspectives are heard. A/B test splits are executed. Even if the message is perfected for a certain group, it will need to be modified if it’s to effectively reach a different target.

A teacher’s job is to take a concept and make it look/sound as appealing as possible to students so that they’ll engage long enough to eventually learn it based on the messages in lesson plans, homework and breakout groups. And, just as with marketing, the selected lessons and breakout groups need to be tweaked, tailored and massaged for the class based on who’s sitting in the classroom. Even if a unit is a hit with one class, the teacher will most likely need to modify it to most effectively reach their class mix either the next year…or next period.

In fact, the teacher’s job is INFINITELY harder than the marketer’s job because, while marketers can get a pat on the back for getting just a percentage of their target audience to purchase the product…the teacher is expected to get every kid in class to “buy” the concept.

Master teachers are able to do this because they often have an innate interpersonal gift. They intuitively know how to reach very different students. They are able to convince a raucous group of teenagers why geometry is and will be important to them. They are able to contextualize history in ways that students will be able to remember so that we’re not all doomed to repeat past horrors. They work magic with student breakout groups so that students are empowered to learn from each other and admire the unique strengths of their peers. They’re able to detect when a student “learns different” and help both the student and their parent modify the ways in which homework is approached so that the child has a greater chance of success with learning.

Why’s this important? Harvard & Columbia recently released the findings of a longitudinal study of 2.5 million students over 20 years that show the dramatic impact that quality teachers can have on their students. They are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to become pregnant as a teenager.

But earning your stripes as a quality teacher is more meaningful than just for the students. It’s a much more enjoyable profession for the teacher when she feels she’s reaching or, better yet, inspiring her students. At long last, the education and EdTech sectors are beginning to take notice and calling this new ground swell Personalization 3.0. But, at Kidzmet, we feel that what EdWeek has dubbed Personalization 3.0 isn’t using a wide enough angle lens. While the teacher-student relationship is important, so is engaging the parents as a critical member of a child’s learning team…as is beginning to harness the power of compatible student groups. In short, we believe that ALL learning relationships matter in a student’s education. Parent-student, teacher-student, parent-teacher, and student-student.

What about you? Do you feel that content positioning is as important as content pacing in educating our youth?

“Finnish children never take a standardized test. Nor are there standardized tests used to compare teachers or schools to each other.”

Then, I remember the Goslin & Glass study on the social effects of Standardized Testing from 1967 that opened with, “An individual’s self-conception, at least in the United States, strongly depends on his evaluation of his intellectual abilities.”

Then, I think about the messages that American children are fed via the media, their parents, their teachers and, eventually, from their peers that in order to be successful in America, you must attend college.

Which got me to thinking…could we be inadvertently creating self-fulfilling prophecies in our youth and international rankings when our intention is to do the opposite?

The definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as defined by Wikipedia, is “in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true’…In other words, a prophecy declared as truth when it is actually false may sufficiently influence people, either through fear or logical confusion, so that their reactions ultimately fulfill the once-false prophecy. ”

Think of what this does to our kids.

For the sake of this discussion, I’m going to leave out the self-fulfilling prophecies that we know exists in many of our underprivileged kids who, because of their family’s financial position, start to believe—in many cases, before they take the first standardized test in 2^nd grade—that they won’t ever be successful because they don’t have the means to go to college. Or the period in high school when many kids realize—sometimes for the first time—that their parents cannot afford to send them to college and they are left with the choice of saddling themselves with an enormous amount of financial aid/debt to put themselves through university or entering the workforce without a college degree. A choice that they have had burned on their brain since they were in diapers means societal perception of an individual’s success or failure. But I digress…

So, all of the people and entities that kids look up to as authorities have been hammering home the message of “college attendance = success” since the child was in diapers.

Fast-forward to second grade, when mandatory skills assessment testing begins in public schools. The kids have their current impressionable mindset amplified as they start to believe they are a part of the “unsuccessful” group because of (1) their own test scores versus those of their peers, (2) messages they start receiving from their teachers as a result of these tests, and (3) whispers from parents about their enrollment in “low-performing” schools.

Lather, rinse and repeat for each consecutive year until the SATs—the “mother of all tests”—when kids are handed another score. A score which has been associated since I attended school more than 20 years ago not just as a predictor of which college you could potentially attend, but a predictor of potential success in life.

If you look at state skills assessment reports broken out by grade levels (2-6; 7-8; 9-11), the scores continue to fall as the students progress through school.

I really wonder what would happen if we once again postponed mandatory skills assessment testing until middle or high school. Would our scores start to rise as we put a damper on students’ self-fulfilling prophecies? I think so…how about the rest of this group?

To our kids’ collective success,
Jen Lilienstein
Founder
http://www.kidzmet.com

• Pet Sitter: If you are looking to start your career working with animals, consider becoming a pet sitter. Caring for a wide variety of pets can help you gauge how comfortable you are with different animals. Plus, many pet owners would rather pay someone to take care of their pets in their own homes as opposed to taking their dog or cat to a kennel.

• Animal Trainer: Everyone wants a well-behaved pet, so consider entering the field of animal training. Animal trainers can work with individual families to train dogs, work with police forces to train drug detection dogs or enter the big leagues of training animals for television and movies. Lassie didn’t learn those commands by herself!

• Kennel Manager: When families go on vacation or individuals go on business trips, someone needs to take care of their pets. Often you can’t wrangle a friend of family member to check up on your dog or cat. If you want to care for animals while their owners are away, consider working or opening a kennel.

• Dog Walker: As Americans continue to balance ever-increasing work hours with spending time with loved ones, walking the family dog is never a top priority. If you love exercising and fresh air, consider pursuing work as a dog walker.

• Pet Groomer: As the hairstylists and manicurists to man’s best friend, pet groomers help maintain a pet’s coat, nails and teeth. Some pet groomers at high end salons can earn as much as $100,000 a year.

• Wildlife Rehabilitator: A wildlife rehabilitator takes in and cares for injured or sick wild animals. The animals are then released into the wild or taken to long-term facilities. If you are nurturing, consider a career as a wildlife rehabilitator.

• Nonprofit/Advocacy Work: Maybe you aren’t interested in taking care of someone’s pet. Maybe you want to work at an animal shelter. Or make sure your state is cracking down on puppy mills. Or make sure all the pets in your area are spayed or neutered. Research what local nonprofits are in your area. Also reach out to national organizations like the ASPCA or the Humane Society. For more advice on how kids can get involved in or even be instrumental in beginning this kind of advocacy in your community, be sure to check out our Make it Your Mission series for kids.

• Lobbyist: If you are interested in fighting for animal rights on the state or federal level, consider becoming a lobbyist. Most lobbyists are lawyers, so if you are interested in fighting for individual animals or animal rights groups research going to law school.
  

• Veterinarian: If you want to be a doctor for animals, consider becoming a veterinarian. To become a veterinarian, you must go through four years of pre-med classes and then four years of veterinarian school. For certain specialties in veterinary medicine, a one-year internship or two to three year residency program is required.

• Veterinary Technician: If you are interested in caring for animals in a veterinary office, consider becoming a veterinary technician—the nurse of the animal world. To become a veterinary technician, you must graduate from a two year associates degree veterinary technician program.

Jessica Reedy is a journalism student currently working as an intern for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C.

Check out our Pinterest board of some of the Fall family favorites in our house.

We’ll be adding to the board all month… we hope you like them, too! We recommend trying some of these pre-Thanksgiving and, if the family likes one or more recipes, let your child(ren) make their own contribution(s) to your Thanksgiving table.

Obviously, this piece is of particular interest to us at Kidzmet since one of our learning preference “pillars” is VAK learning styles. Most recently, NPR ran a piece that we felt was an incomplete summary of the learning styles piece, so we’ve pulled some quotes directly from the piece to flesh out the authors’ conclusions. We hope you’ll find them both insightful and enlightening as to the more complete findings of the study.

From Points of Clarification
“Although we have argued that the extant data do not provide support for the learning-styles hypothesis, it should be emphasized that we do not claim that the same kind of instruction is most useful in all contexts and with all learners.” (p116)

“Educators’ attraction to the idea of learning styles partly reflects their (correctly) noticing how often one student may achieve enlightenment from an approach that seems useless for another student.” (p116)

“It is undoubtedly the case that a particular student will sometimes benefit from having a particular kind of course content presented in one way vs. another.” (p116)

From Everybody’s Potential to Learn
“It is undeniable that the instruction that is optimal for a given student will often need to be guided by the aptitude, prior knowledge, and cultural assumptions that a student brings to a learning task.” (p117)

As we often talk about on Kidzmet, we don’t believe that kids CAN only learn in certain ways…we believe that kids PREFER to learn certain ways and that the more we’re able as parents and educators to key into these learning preferences, the more exciting, engaging and intrinsically motivating learning can be for our kids.

Interested in our assessment of your child’s learning preferences and how you can use this information to help with homework? Take our Pairing Portrait for a spin and send yourself our Student Snapshot–it takes about 15 minutes to complete.