You’ve heard them right, those pharmaceutical commercials where everyone appears to live a better life by taking that drug?  Then I’m sure you’ve noticed the often lengthy list of side effects that are read at the end of the commercials.  I find it comical, because there’s always happy people on the screen with soft uplifting music playing as the narrator reads a long list of side effects that are often worse than life without the drug.  View this real commercial for Chantix and try not to laugh.

Ok, so we know sometimes what is intended for good can have some pretty harmful side effects.  Let’s turn that around.  I hope that our students don’t feel any harmful side effects from attending our classes or our schools, though that is something to consider.  Instead, I wonder what positive side effects would be experienced by students that attend our classes and our schools?  It’s a thought that has been on my mind a lot lately, especially as schools across the country enter standardized testing season.  There’s a lot of conversation in my PLN that would suggest the side effects could be more important than the effects that we acknowledge up front.  For example, one could imagine that students who attend my math class should leave my math class with a breadth of knowledge as determined by the content standards.  However, year after year I become more interested in those side effects and the impact those can have on student success beyond school.  It’s not that I’m uninterested in the content I teach, but I’m more in tune with the side effects that I want my students to experience as a result of attending my class.  For school leaders, what side effects do students experience as a result of attending your school?  I invite you to consider the side effects that students experience from attending your class, school, or district.  Please share those side effects in the comments section of this blog post.  Here are mine:

• increased awareness of one’s learning preferences and style
• perseverance
• empathy
• tolerance
• confidence in their ability to leverage digital sources to learn anything
• a growth mindset

My wife and I are both school teachers.  We teach in separate districts but thankfully our spring breaks fell on the same week this year.  As a result, we took a trip today to Old Man’s Cave in the Hocking Hills region of Ohio.  It is a beautiful area and I highly recommend the trip.

The entire hike surrounds you with the beautiful scenery you see above.  My daughter Miley loved the waterfalls.  I was amazed by the size of the rock that towers over Old Man’s Cave.  Story says a man lived underneath that rock and I couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to camp out under there.  Of all the wonder there was to see there, it was a small tree that stuck out the most to me.  I paused briefly to snap a picture of that tree as it literally appeared to be growing on a small outcropping of rock that made up the humongous overhang of rock known as Old Man’s Cave.

The pictures don’t do it justice to how resilient that tree must be.  I know it’s difficult to see, but above the tree is even more rock.  In fact, there was really no more room to grow, so you can see the tree just turned down and has continued to grow down over the edge of the cliff.  I wondered how it received any water, but it must receive just enough rain to survive at that location.  As soon as I saw this tree, I was reminded of my students that were born into rocky situations.  I thought of those students whose life has placed them in a situation that seems insurmountable.  I count myself extremely fortunate to have spent the first year of my career substitute teaching at a juvenile detention facility.  All of the students at that facility were court ordered.  It’s been six years since I’ve spent any significant time teaching in that setting but I remember those experiences like it was yesterday.  In fact, I can’t imagine what my career would have been like without that experience.  My commute, at the time, was 30 minutes one way.  I can recall many drives home where I left the radio off and reflected on the conversations I had with those students.  To consider that for nearly all of that population, those 9-12 months are the best months of their lives, it’s overwhelming.  The mark left by students that were leaving that facility will never heal.  The tears that landed at my feet will never dry.  See, many of those students grew up in situations similar to the tree I noticed today.  I needed the reminder that students can grow even under the most insurmountable conditions.  I think our students need that reminder too.  I can’t summarize all that I learned from my teaching experience in institutional education, but I know it allowed me to develop an intense passion for reaching those students that live in conditions that would appear to deny them of any opportunities for growth.  I wish I had a magic recipe, but I don’t.  I know it requires resilience on the part of the student and the teacher.  And I know it requires your heart.  Growth won’t occur in the absence of our heart.  Here are my suggestions on ways you can give those students your heart:

• Be sure your classroom policies and procedures take into consideration the conditions in which those students go home to each day.
• If you can’t be anything else to those students, be a smiling face and a listening ear.  You may be the only person that smiles and listens.
• Don’t allow your upbringing to shape your attitude towards those less fortunate.  Give others your heart not because they are like you but because they are unlike you.
• Colossians 4:6 has been a permanent fixture on my white board for two years now: Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, so that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.  Nothing strikes harder than the tongue.  Guard your tongue, especially when considering those students facing uncertainty at home.  Will what you say bring you closer to that student or take you further from that student?

My classroom is student-centered and instruction is blended.  I’ve got 23 Macbook Airs in my room.  I don’t know for sure but I imagine this is my students’ first experience in a student-centered blended classroom.  I say that because their reactions to my classroom indicate pretty clearly the type of classrooms from which they have previously been a part.

In a very general sense, my instruction runs in three phases: Instructional, Practice, Assessment.  It’s a lot more fluid than that, but that’s enough to understand the purpose of this post.  The instructional phase represents the time that I offer the most support.  Perhaps it’s the phase that appears most like a 20th century classroom.  I incorporate a buffet of opportunities for my students to dive into the skill or concept.  The next phase represents the biggest phase, from the standpoint of time.  During the practice phase I often gauge the level of support needed by my students by the number of hands up in the classroom.  During this time, I rarely address the entire class as a whole, rather I spend most of the time down on a knee beside one student or a group of students.  I issue the daily agenda through our learning management system, Canvas, and this allows me to spend more valuable time with my students.  As I said, during the practice phase, students generally get my attention with a raised hand or a verbal cue.  During the class, I find myself constantly gauging the level of support needed by the class, diagnosing common weaknesses, and identifying common strengths.  This means I occasionally need to stop and address the whole class.

I’m realizing, through observation and conversations with students, that the number of hands and verbal cues I’m receiving during the practice phase doesn’t necessarily indicate the level of support students need, rather it indicates the level of support students want.  Putting the problem back on the students means I have to intentionally exercise caution during my interactions with students in order to continually put the problem back on the students.  Most importantly, I have to employ the right kinds of questions when dealing with students.  Questions that require them to think, because it’s likely they would prefer that I respond in a way that liberates them from thinking.  See, the number of hands up during class more accurately indicates the lack of thinking.  The system I have put in place in my class arms each student with opportunities to learn.  In general, I’m finding that they view these opportunities, even using Google, as a way for me to stop teaching.

Ultimately, I’d like for my students to develop resilience, grit, and perseverance that empowers them to relentlessly dig at their problems before giving up and seeking support from me.  

This goal is not achieved without a teacher that is intentionally aware of the effects of each interaction with students seeking support.  It requires the teacher to act more as a coach.  A coach empowers his/her students to hone the skill of learning by putting the problem back on the students.  The right questions are key for a teacher or coach to put the problems back on the students.  For example, one of my students held her hand up for 15 minutes in class this week waiting for me to make it around to offer support.  When I made it to the student, her question was “Is this a negative sign or a minus sign?”  First, bless her heart for holding her hand up in the air for 15 minutes.  I’m afraid she worked harder holding her hand in the air than she did in solving her problem.  My response could have easily been “that number needs to be treated as a negative” and I could have walked away and moved on to the next student.  That would have done nothing to foster resilience or risk-taking in that student.  The situation that exists with this student depicts the struggles in all of my students.  She has never been empowered to take control of her learning, take risks, and accept failure.  These skills are critical to success in today’s global society, yet they are perhaps the most neglected in today’s classrooms.  Students have been conditioned to believe that arriving at the right answer is the only measurement of achievement that matters.  Risking failure or making a mistake is shameful and not something that is embraced by many of today’s classrooms.  The following tips can help you begin to empower students to embrace failure as part of the learning process.  This is critical to putting the problem back on the students.

• Be aware of your language and the impact that it has on cultivating learners.  Praise and encouragement are not the same thing.  Too often praise is given as a result of the product.  It’s more effective to provide encouragement during the process.  Be sure you’re emphasizing the process over the product.
• Questions, questions, questions.  Your questions are key to empowering students to leverage the tools available to solve their own problems.  Your questions should require reflection and risk taking.  Too often students are spoonfed the answers, rather than provided opportunities to think.
  • Can you draw a picture that may help? 
  • What would happen if you tried it? 
  • Is there a similar problem we’ve done that may help us understand this one? 
  • Have you Googled it?  Yes, that’s right.  Teach your students to leverage the tools they will use in the real world.  If you don’t want your students Googling your answers, then start asking better questions.
  • What have you tried that hasn’t worked? 
• Talk about a growth mindset.  Our students should know the term and understand that growth is not limited by prior experience or our genetic makeup.

Having spent about 4 weeks in the high school math setting, I can say with certainty that reaching those students that are hard to reach is not given enough attention in middle school, or at any level for that matter. The quality of math courses at the high school cannot endure the percentage of students sitting in those courses with monumental deficiencies.  A student that has failed 6th grade math, 7th grade math, and 8th grade math lands him or herself in 9th grade math at the high school level a high percentage of time.  That statement is not meant to condemn the practice or lack of practice of holding students back when they can’t perform to a minimum acceptable level.  The statement simply means the system places a growing percentage of students and teachers in a difficult position, to put it kindly.  This post really isn’t meant to spout statements that math teachers have been spouting for years.  Instead, I’m reminded of the importance of reaching EVERY student all the time, especially during the critical years where learning foundations are established.  More specifically, I’m thinking about what that requires.

To combat this cruel series of events that plays out every year, many schools are turning to extra periods of remediation and intervention, loss of recess, extended class periods for math, and a deluge of other techniques that really only increase the time to “learn” math.  Instead, I wish more schools, administrators, teachers, etc. placed more of the focus on improving the experience for those students in their regular math class.  I’m not talking about adding time, taking away an elective so the student can be placed in remediation classes, or doing more of the same thing only longer.  I wish more teachers considered why that student was failing their class instead of how they can get that student to spend more time doing math.  None of that is to say that more traditional means of remediation aren’t or can’t be effective.

It’s time to look at remediation from a comprehensive whole-child perspective.  I feel like we’ve completely overlooked reaching that child during class and jumped straight to “what can we do to that kid during remediation?”  The following list represents the tip of the iceberg, but I wonder what results these would yield in comparison to traditional remediation techniques.

• The failure that is occurring, by teacher and student, can only be remedied if a relationship is present.  In fact, if you’re talking remediation but the conversation doesn’t begin with “How do I get into this student’s bubble?  How do I break the shell?  What can I do to reach his or her heart?” you’re wasting your time talking strategy, technique, or pedagogy.
• Have you called home?  The first call home should be on purpose, it should be early in the year, and it should be positive.  Not sure which students need called?  Unfortunately if you just listen to the previous grade level teachers, they’ll probably indicate who needs a phone call.  The names usually follow “just wait till you have…”
• A handwritten note takes a mere seconds to write.  “Never underestimate the value of a well placed compliment. -Todd Whittaker”  The students that need the most love, the most reinforcement, and the most pats on the backs, ask for it in the most unloving ways.  Don’t let that stop you from writing a 30 second note.  This practice seems easy, but when you’re talking about these students, you have to watch for something positive, on purpose.  I know, positive behaviors may be like Bigfoot, you hear about him every once in a while, but you never see him.  If you watch on purpose, you’ll find something to write about.  Think about it, we watch for negative behaviors all day long and often find them.  Try watching for positive behaviors a while and see what happens.
• Have you given up a lunch break to eat with a student or group of students?
• Have you visited the home?
• I know what you’re thinking, “Gee Wiz Oldfield, there’s no way a person could do all these things.”  The perpetual and consistent failure that these students experience year after year acts like a huge weight on the everyone: teacher and students.  The quality of courses is not enduring this weight that is only getting heavier year after year.  The level of performance is declining and bars are lowering.  What we’ve been doing isn’t working.  Nothing great is accomplished by doing something easy.

I’ll be honest, the focus of this post came from my own frustration entering the high school math realm for the first time this year.  I was previously an 8th grade math teacher for five years.  I often wondered back then how teachers at the high school actually taught their courses at the level required by the standards without failing more students.  I thought one of two things were occurring: the teachers were extraordinary teachers of the kind of talent I could only dream about, or the teachers recognized the cavern between the instructional level of the students and the performance required of the standards and spent the year measuring student learning at the current level then stamped a grade on the report card under a course name that did not really represent what was being taught.  I believe the cure involves better reaching those students who are hard to reach.  Consider the penalty if they get left behind?  Prior to high school, the penalty is… they move on.

Now don’t get me wrong, do I believe instruction and pedagogy need to improve?  You bet I do!  I believe too many students sit in classrooms designed for a style of learning that is irrelevant and disengaging to today’s learners.  That’s for another time.