Head of School

Fred Rogers is one of my heroes, and, today, March 20, 2018 marks his 90^th birthday.  Many of us are familiar with and fans of his television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  As “America’s Favorite Neighbor,” he dedicated his life to serving children through public television, writing articles and books about parenting, performing, and speaking.  He understood and appreciated that, underneath it all, what each of us wants is to know that we’re okay. And, because he was so good at believing that everybody was okay, he could connect with everyone’s need for empathy and hope.  His relentless commitment to all that is best in people resulted in countless honors, from induction into the Television Hall of Fame to the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Wise, insightful, kind, genuine, gentle, interested, and inspiring, there are few individuals who evoke such universal feelings of warmth.  I certainly feel that way when I remember him.

“In every neighborhood, all across our country and around the world, there are good people.”

“Please think of the children first.  If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day or night care, their health care, their education – listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them.  Think of the children first.”

“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”

“The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.”

“Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth it.”

“It came to me ever so slowly that the best way to know the truth was to begin trusting what my inner truth was…and trying to share it – not right away – only after I had worked hard at trying to understand it.”

“When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.”

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping.”

“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.”

“Transitions are almost always signs of growth, but they can bring feelings of loss.  To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere behind.”

Some fun facts about Fred Rogers:

1) Mr. Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister.  In 1962, he received a Bachelor of Divinity degree and was ordained as a minister in the United Presbyterian Church and charged with continuing his work on creating and contributing to wholesome children’s television programs, which was his passion.

2) Mr. Rogers got into TV because the first time he saw a TV show it had “something horrible on it with people throwing pies at one another…”  He stated, “I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there was some way of using this fabulous instrument to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen.”

3) Many of Mr. Rogers’ famous sweaters that he wore on the show were made by his mother.

4) The reason Mr. Rogers started wearing sneakers on the show was because they made less noise than normal dress shoes when moving around behind the sets.

5) Mr. Rogers was a vegetarian.  He didn’t smoke or drink or seem to have any major vices.  He also stayed married to the same person until his death; their marriage lasted 47 years.

6) Unlike on most children’s shows, Mr. Rogers played himself not just in name, but also in personality and mannerisms, changing nothing about how he acted off camera to how he acted on camera.  His reasons for this were that: “One of the greatest gifts you can give anybody is the gift of your honest self. I also believe that kids can spot a phony a mile away.”

Happy Birthday, Mr. Rogers, and thank you for being you.

Jessica Flaxman of Nashoba Brooks School in Concord, MA writes “Rachel Simmons’ new book presents a persuasive argument about interventions adults should make to try to alleviate some of the pressures that students in general, and girls in particular, have internalized. In the era of what Simmons calls the “College Application Industrial Complex,” school-related stakes are high for all but especially, says Simmons, for girls who “look exceptional on paper but are often overwhelmed and anxious in life.” Why do so many girls feel that no matter their accomplishments, they are still failing? Simmons identifies “role overload” – the idea that girls try to play more roles in their lives than they are able to be successful in – and “role conflict” – the fact that more often than not, these many roles are at odds with one another. What teachers and parents can do to help is quite simple, says Simmons. Rather than tell girls to stop being perfectionists, be more confident, or take more risks, Simmons suggests we engage in honest conversations with girls about the culture we all live in together and seek to redirect their catastrophizing when it occurs.”

“This book is an essential resource for educators committed to building girls’ resilience as learners.” (Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Successand Professor of Psychology, Stanford University)

“A brilliant and passionate call to action that reveals how girls and young women are suffering in our toxic culture of constant comparison and competition.  This is the book parents need to change girls’ lives and guide them to truly become happy, healthy, and powerful adults.” (Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabees)

“This book is a rare find for any parent or mentor of a girl child. It exposes the abject harm of today’s perfect-at-any-price childhood, and illustrates how a girl’s anxious, busy, self-deprecating performance strategy is entirely normal yet further harm-inducing. Packed with conversational specifics you can deploy with the teen girls in your life, this book is your chance to be who she needs you to be. Buy it. Read it. Live it. Help the girl you love realize the most important of all certainties: that she truly is enough as she is.” (Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of the New York Times bestseller How to Raise an Adult, and Real American: A Memoir)

 

These following online resources for family math nights (and school activities) were shared in this month’s edition of Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School:

Ken-Ken http://kenkenpuzzle.com

NCTM’s Figure This http://figurethis.nctm.org

NCTM’s Illuminations http://illuminations.nctm.org

YouCubed https://www.youcubed.org

Interested in learning an easy, can-play-it-anywhere math game that preschoolers and kindergarteners love, and that will promote their math foundations and concepts of numbers, ask me!

In their book, The ABCs of How We Learn, Daniel Schwartz, Jessica Tsang, and Kristen Blair (Stanford University) present 26 principles of pedagogy, matched with a letter of the alphabet. Each is accompanied by an overview of the research, how the item works, how to use it in the classroom, what it’s good for, its risks, examples of good and bad use, and a short summary. Here’s a synopsis written by Kim Marshall and presented in The Marshall Memo:

Analogy – By identifying the underlying similarity between things that have surface differences (for example, blood vessels and highways), analogies help people learn principles and apply them in new situations. “Analogies help students sort out the wheat of deep structure from the chaff of surface features,” say the authors. “Analogies can help students make a positive transfer.”

Belonging – Feeling that they belong to a learning community makes students try harder and decreases distracting thoughts of inadequacy and alienation. “Learning is social,” say Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair. “Belonging is the perception of being accepted, valued, and included. Belonging can help learning by increasing effort and decreasing negative distancing thoughts.” Teachers who explicitly create an atmosphere of respect and community boost learning and close racial and economic achievement gaps.

Contrasting cases – Noticing the difference between two or more examples that seem the same at first glance – for example, a spider and an insect. “Contrasting cases help people notice subtle but important details that they might otherwise overlook,” say the authors.

Deliberate practice – Applying focused and effortful practice to develop specific skills and concepts (for example, playing the guitar or solving physics problems) beyond one’s current abilities. “Deliberate practice automatizes skills and concepts so they become faster, more accurate, more variable, and less effortful to execute,” say Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair. “This allows people to see new patterns and frees cognitive resources so people can attempt more complex tasks.”

Elaboration – Explicitly connecting new information to prior knowledge, which increases the chances of remembering it later. “Human memory is vast,” say the authors. “Remembering depends on finding the right memory at the right time. Elaboration makes connections among memories when learning, so it is easier to find a path to the stored information later.”

Feedback – This allows people to sense a discrepancy between what they did and what they should have done, which allows them to adjust future actions. “People would have a hard time learning something new if they never knew whether they were on the right track,” say the authors. “Feedback, particularly constructive negative feedback, guides people toward what they can do to improve and learn.”

Generation – Retrieving a specific memory (like where you parked your car in a multi-story garage) given partial cues or hints improves future retrieval. Retrieval – testing yourself – increases the strength of the memory, making it easier to retrieve later on. Spreading out retrieval practice over several days enhances the effect.

Hands-on – Recruiting the body’s intelligence makes it possible to understand abstract concepts. “The perceptual-motor system contains tremendous intelligence,” say the authors. “This intelligence provides meaning for simple symbols and words… Hands-on learning recruits the perceptual-motor system to coordinate its meaning with symbolic representations.” Two risks: hands-on activities can become procedures for finding answers rather than a source of sense-making; and students may become too dependent on them.

Imaginative play – This involves creating a story that is different from the reality in front of us, letting one thing stand for another – for example, a child pretends a fork (a mother) is scolding a spoon (a child) for not eating her peas. There isn’t a lot of research evidence on the efficacy of play, but the authors say it “can serve as a great vehicle for delivering activities known to support maturation and learning.”

Just-in-time telling – Students are immersed in a simulation of a problem and are then given an explanation. “The simulation provides students with rich experiences,” say the authors, “and the debriefing provides an explanation or framework for organizing those experiences. Without the experience, the explanation would be too abstract. Without the explanation, the experiences would just be a collection of memories. Together, they produce usable knowledge.”

Knowledge – Prior knowledge enables people to make sense of new information and is essential to learning. But knowledge can also blind people to new conditions that have different patterns; for example, the vaults being set two inches lower in the 2000 Summer Olympics caused major problems for female gymnasts who had trained on a different elevation. The trick is to combine extensive knowledge with the ability to adapt.

Listening and sharing – Students may be disengaged and bored in class, trapped in their own thoughts, and lacking the skills needed to work together. Once those skills have been taught, say the authors, “students maintain joint attention, listen, share, coordinate, and try to understand one another’s points of view. This can help learners exchange information and develop a multifaceted understanding.”

Making – Producing an artifact or performance, getting feedback, and setting new goals – for example, writing a poem to perform at a local spoken-word festival. “Making has motivations that naturally produce a learning cycle that expands one’s means of production,” say the authors. “Motivations include the desire for feedback on the realization of one’s ideas, and the creation of new challenges that motivate makers to learn more skills and methods.”

Norms – These are the informal rules that regulate social interactions – for example, student-generated classroom rules or a protocol for mathematics debates. “Good norms help coordinate learning interactions,” say the authors, “both at the level of good behaviors and at the level of the way different disciplines engage their topics.”

Observation – “Human brains are wired to learn by observing others,” say the authors. Often trial-and-error is slow and inefficient, a behavior is too complex to explain verbally, and learners are not sure how to act or feel. Learning by observing and imitating other people’s behaviors and affective responses is more efficient, as is vicariously seeing the consequences of others’ behaviors.

Participation – This “provides learners with access to the goals, consequences, methods, and interpretations that render learning meaningful,” say the authors. An example: a surfing instructor tows beginners out to sea and pushes the surfboard at the right moment to catch a wave, so the novice can focus on balancing and experiencing what it means to surf. Gradually the scaffolding is withdrawn.

Question-driven – Being asked to answer a driving question increases curiosity, purpose, attention, and well-connected memories and may develop problem-solving skills. For example, a class might investigate how noise pollution affects the wildlife around their school.

Reward – Rewards, extrinsic and intrinsic, can motivate desired behaviors, and rewarding successive approximations of proficiency can help students achieve the desired level. But rewards can backfire if people already find something intrinsically motivating or if the goal is creativity and exploration. Rewards can also reduce intrinsic motivation by making people dependent on external reinforcement.

Self-explanation – Silently talking through expository material improves understanding by revealing gaps in knowledge, and forces one to fill in missing information to make a coherent explanation. The main learning problem this addresses is overconfidence.

Teaching – “Teaching is not just good for pupils,” say the authors; “it is good for the teacher, too… Asking older students to tutor younger students is an excellent example of learning by teaching. Tutors improve their understanding nearly as much as tutees.”

 

Undoing – Identifying misconceptions and faulty reasoning and replacing them with correct information; for example, a child says 13 – 7 = 14, perhaps believing that she can’t subtract 7 from 3 so she subtracts 3 from 7. The teacher needs to make this misconception explicit and teach some basic arithmetic principles to keep the misconception from becoming entrenched.

Visualization – Drawing spatial representations – maps, diagrams, sketches, graphs, Venn diagrams, matrices – helps organize complex information, make it understandable, and embed it in memory. A classic example: in the early 1900s, Harry Beck created a simplified map of the London subway system that sacrificed exact geographical detail for a structure more relevant to a subway rider. This type of map is now used in nearly every subway system around the world.

Worked examples – These are step-by-step models of how to complete a procedural task – for example, doing a long-division problem. Worked examples build on observational learning, allowing the learner to observe and imitate well-defined steps.

eXcitement – “Excitement increases psychological arousal, which focuses attention and improves memory acquisition,” say the authors. “However, too much excitement interferes with performance and learning. Arousal and anxiety combine to cause choking under pressure.”

Yes I can – Self-efficacy – believing one can succeed – makes people more willing to take on a challenging activity, persist in the face of difficulty and failure, take on more challenges, and accomplish more. This is what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset.

ZZZs – Research has established that while we sleep, recent memories are consolidated into long-term storage and integrated with prior knowledge. John Steinbeck once wrote, “A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

 

 

The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them by Daniel Schwarz, Jessica Tsang, and Kristen Blair (W.W. Norton, 2016)