Reflection

To set the scene, imagine that you are in your classroom. You are getting the kids started on one of your standing assignments that everyone in the room knows will come each week:

You: All right, let’s all get started on (insert that assignment that your students hate to do).

Class: Collective groaning. From the back you can hear one student say “Why do we always have to do this?”

You find yourself wondering why the reaction is like this – you might think to yourself “they loved doing this earlier in the year!” Fast forward to the due date. As you are collecting the assignment, you see that the students who play school well completed the assignment, but it’s clear that they put forth the minimum amount of effort possible. You also notice that some of your students did not complete the assignment, and no amount of effort from you is going to get them to finish the task – you could have them work in the hall, take away recess, call parents, etc. – nothing is going to make a difference for those students.

As a teacher we have all experienced this. So here’s the question – why do we keep asking our students to complete assignments that they hate? Why do we keep giving assignments that students don’t put forth much effort, or simply don’t do the assignment at all? Why do we keep giving assignments that put the effort on us to run down the missing assignments when the students are putting no effort into the assignment?

When I was writing last week’s post, I inserted the HSE²¹ Best Practice Model. As I put it into the post, something jumped out to me in a different way than ever before. Look at the Best Practice Model above – in this blog I have spent a lot of time talking about the boxes on the outside: Student-Centered Approaches; Cognitive Curriculum; Fundamental Classroom Conditions; and Transfer of Learning. Last week for some reason, the purple circle that connects them all jumped out at me – in particular the word at the top “Reflection.” Given that New Year’s Day is approaching, I would guess that a lot of us are taking time to reflect on the last year, and many of us think first of our personal life, however reflection is an important aspect of teaching as well. What better time to take a few moments for reflection than to do so over the 2 week winter break?

Think about how your year has gone so far. What’s working well? What isn’t? Do you often have situations like the one that I referenced at the top? How could you adjust your assignments so that they don’t get stale? Even the most engaging activity today may get old and stale to our students if we do the same thing every day or every week over a long period of time. Find some ways to mix up what you are doing in your classroom to increase student engagement. For me, an important part of reflection is also getting feedback and ideas from my colleagues. If you have an activity that has gotten stale, talk with your colleagues – see if anyone has an idea of how you could spice up that activity and make it more engaging to your students. Or maybe you will just decide to let that activity go for a while – replace it with something else that might serve the same purpose.

If you never take the time to reflect, you may miss out on opportunities for growth as a teacher, as well as opportunities to help your students grow. As I reflect on this school year, one of the things I am most disappointed in is the amount of time I have had to spend in my office rather than out and about during the school day. One of my resolutions for the new school year is to spend more time out in our classrooms seeing the awesome things that you all do on a daily basis with our students. Please help hold me accountable to this goal!

What resolutions have you set for yourself? Personal or professional, share them in the comments below. We can all help hold each other accountable to our goals and resolutions.

Choosing to Cheat

There have been periods in my career in education where I felt as though I was living at school. Back in my coaching days I would often arrive at school around 6, work on grading, planning, or whatever else needed to be done, teach a full day, coach my team, come back to my room to do more work, head home for a quick dinner, grade something else, go to bed, and do it again tomorrow. In those days I was cheating my other priorities – my family, my friends, and my health. How many times have you looked at your to-do list and felt that there was no way you could get it all done? I know that there are days that I walk in to my office with 3 things on my to-do list that are left over from yesterday. Over the course of a day I may add several new items to it, but am not able to cross anything off my list. In those moments, I choose to cheat. I can’t do it all. There are 24 hours in a day, and 168 hours in a week. Sometimes there are things we can’t make it through.

Do you ever feel like your to do list looks like this?!?!

We all have important things in our life that take up some of those 168 hours in a week, and while we are all professional educators, there are other priorities in everyone’s life. Here’s the thing about choosing to cheat though: we have to be strategic in the ways that we choose to cheat. I keep to-do lists (some are on my phone in the reminders app, some are jotted on scraps of paper in my office) and when I create them, I also prioritize them. Certain things can only be done when there are students here, others can be done first thing in the morning, or after my afternoon bus duty. Phone calls to parents – that can happen anytime (thank goodness for *67 and the speakerphone feature so that I can call while I’m in the car). When you look at the things that you are doing in your classroom, prioritize them. Think about the needs of your learners – are you doing things to help the students in your classroom grow? If you can’t emphatically say yes, then that may be something you need to choose to cheat on. Keep in mind, cheating isn’t about slacking off, but rather it’s about making sure you are intentional in how you use the time you have.

Use this to help guide your thinking and the areas where you may choose to cheat.

Throughout the process of HSE²¹, one of the messages that Danielle and I have always tried to share with you is that we don’t expect you to do it all right now. When our teaching and learning team (Jan Combs, Phil Lederach, and Stephanie Loane) came to present a few weeks back, one of their slides talked about “More of this” and “Less of this.” Take a look at that slide to the right. If you’re spending a lot of time in the less of column, that may be something that you need to reexamine. It’s also important to look at the HSE²¹ Best Practice Model (below) to guide our intentional thinking about what is best for the learners who walk into our classroom every day.

Think about the things that you value most. Do you devote your time accordingly? If not, you are probably stressed out, unhappy, and might feel unsuccessful. To be a good teacher, you have to be in the right mental place. Think about the choices you make and how they are benefitting you and your students. If you are making choices that don’t benefit you and your students, try to find a way to make a change. Be willing to set aside things that do not hold as much value, and instead focus on the things that are most valuable to you and the students in your class.

What are some of the ways you choose to cheat? Are there things you have given up, or maybe don’t do as often? Maybe there are things you focus on for a while, then let fall out of focus, only to come back to later. Share in the comments below how choosing to cheat has helped you to be a better teacher and a more rounded person.

Importance of student feedback

A couple weeks ago I had a post on how to influence students (click here to see it again). This weekend I was reading a post by A.J. Juliani on his blog titled “The Future of Learning” and I saw an article that related to my previous post, but he looked at things from a slightly different perspective.

What are the best ways to give feedback to our students?

Through reading Juliani’s blog, I ended up reading a research paper written by a team of psychologists from Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and several other well known schools to look at the type of feedback that is given to students. In this study the authors were testing to see if the type of feedback given on an essay written by 7th graders could result in greater effort (as measured by an increased number of revisions), and improved quality of final drafts.

While there have been many studies on how to provide praise to our students, there has been limited research in how to provide meaningful criticism that will result in improvements for students. Many of us place our criticism in the format of 3 stars and a wish (or something of this nature) to boost self-esteem before delivering the criticism.

The reality is, self-esteem is not the key to being able to hear criticism, but rather trust is the key. Boosting self-esteem will not always boost trust. When trust exists, we are able to see criticism as information to help us improve.

In the experiment, some students received “wise feedback” while other students received “neutral feedback” on their papers. Simply through the type of feedback that was given to a student, there was a marked improvement in students choosing to revise their paper (a 40% increase in student effort) and improvement in overall performance on the final paper (you can see the study here).

So, what was the magical feedback that led to such extreme improvements? What note was written on the top of each paper with similar feedback below? The experimental phrase was:

“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”

That’s right – 19 words written on the top of the paper. In other aspects of the study, these words helped develop greater trust between the student and the teacher, which in turn provided students with a sense of belonging and connection.

For the students who were in the control group, the note at the top of the page looked very different. It simply said “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.”

Remember that feedback tells us about the relationship that we hold together. Feedback like what you see in bold above gives the students some clear messages: you’re part of this group; we have high standards; and I believe you can reach those standards. So what lessons can we as teachers take away from this? In the post from Juliani that led me to this research study, he referenced an article by Daniel Coyle, the author of The Talent Code. His lessons from this study are as follows:

Connect: As John Wooden said, they can’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Highlight the group: Seek ways (traditions, mantras, fun little rituals) to show what it meas to belong in your crew.
Don’t soft-pedal high standards: Don’t pretend that it’s easy – do the opposite. Emphasize the toughness of the task, and your belief that they have what it takes!

Have you found success in sharing feedback in this manner? If so, share with us how you let students know that they are part of the group, the group has high standards, and your belief that the students can reach those standards.

Sometimes our feedback can be a little misguided... — Sometimes our feedback can be a little misguided…

Enhancement or Transformation?

Being that we are in the second year of a 1:1 program, we all know that adding technology to education comes at a cost – money, time, and effort. If it’s done well, technology can transform teaching and learning. If it’s done poorly, our students are left holding a “$1,000 pencil” according to George Couros (@gcouros), a Canadian principal and education speaker. As I said last week, our pedagogy must drive our technology. Don’t use tech just because our kids have an iPad; instead use tech to create a learning experience that would not have been possible otherwise. Remember, we want to integrate tech where it works. Hopefully the rest of this post will provide some ideas about how to transform education for our students.

Most of us have seen the SAMR model (to the left) as a framework to help you evaluate the best technology in your classroom. This framework is developed from the bottom up. As you see in the graphic, the creator of SAMR places Substitution and Augmentation in the Enhancement group (think of enhancement as the most basic change – it may improve the lesson, but maybe not the thinking). Then there is a dashed line before you get to Modification and Redefinition which fall in the Transformation group (think of transformation as a thorough change in the form of education – it will improve the lesson and the thinking). Many teachers find that dashed line to be a tall fence to climb. In essence, to get over that fence, teachers sometimes have to throw previous activities out the window and create something new, and other times it requires a complete redesign of the activity. In order to make that jump from augmentation to modification, here are some ideas:

Know your goals – don’t think task or app, think learning outcome.
Think about things you’ve done in the past and identify their strengths – what experiences were important for students, and what were the areas of growth from those experiences?
Find a tool that can meet your goals and has similar strengths – with a quick Google search you can find websites and apps that might work. Scan their features to see if something does what you need it to do.
Keep an open mind – don’t eliminate a tool just because you’ve never used it before.
Generate several ideas for activities – make a list of possible tools. Cross out the ones that you don’t think will work.
Put the plan into action – remember that the best way to learn new tech is to play with it. If you don’t know a tool yet, don’t feel like you can’t let students use it. I have yet to have a student tell me “I can’t use this, we haven’t had PD on it!” Students are just as capable of playing with an app or website to figure out what it can do, and if they’re really stuck, they’ll use Google or YouTube to help them figure it out. Plus, if it’s new, students will be more excited and engaged!
Be ready to adjust on the fly – remember, failure is part of the learning process. If something doesn’t work, go back to the drawing board. Sometimes our willingness to model failure will help our students accept the idea that we learn and grow in times of failure.

One other idea that may help you to transform education for your students is through collaboration. Don’t feel like you have to redevelop everything you are doing on your own. Get together with others who teach the same subject as you and pick a topic. Bring some of your favorite activities that fit that topic, and collaborate to find a way to make the jump from enhancement to transformation. Then, after you try something, come back together to talk about what worked well, what didn’t, and what you would do next. And if meeting together is not possible, use tech to collaborate – create a shared planning document in Office 365, or Facetime with your colleagues to plan when you both are free but cannot be together.

On Matt Miller’s website there is an excellent article titled 10 ways to reach SAMR’s redefinition level. Follow the hyperlink for some great ways to take it up a notch!

Where are you in terms of the SAMR model with the tech you are using in your room? Do you feel you are sticking to the enhancement zone, or have you jumped the fence into the transformation zone?

Sometimes it’s ok to ditch the tech too!

In a previous post I talked about the misconception that some have about HSE²¹ being all about the device. Just a reminder here – IT’S NOT! Technology can allow us to do some really cool things, it can help us be more efficient, we can collaborate more easily, you can create and carry out awesome formative assessments, and you can use technology to help you grade papers more quickly. There are many more things that technology can help us with, but there are also times it gets in the way. Remember that the HSE²¹ best practice model is about so much more than an iPad. It’s also important to remember that just because you are using an iPad for an activity, it doesn’t mean you are “doing” HSE²¹.

Sometimes an app doesn’t work the way we expect it to. Sometimes wifi issues prevent our students from being able to access what we need them to get to. If you’re using a computer in the lab, the amount of time it takes for a student to log in can take away from their ability to be productive.

Ultimately, our pedagogy must drive our technology, not the other way around. Good teaching will always trump a good tool. Someone could put me in a wood shop with every imaginable tool, but without the knowledge of how to use those tools, anything I built would not be something I would want to put into my room (except maybe in the back corner of the garage!).

You all know that I love technology. I consider myself an early adopter of most types of technology, quick to try things out to see if it can fit into my life. Anymore I can’t go for a run, bike ride, or sometimes even a walk, without my GPS enabled device to tell me how far I went, what my average heart rate was, and the average speed or pace I was traveling. However, when we look at the classroom, learning has to be the focus. While I would love to see a classroom where everything is being done digitally, sometimes due to challenges that method is not efficient. There is nothing wrong with an exit slip that is actually on paper, or a quick formative assessment of thumbs up or down. Don’t be afraid to try to integrate tech where it works, but don’t do it at the sacrifice of helping our students to learn and grow into the best they can be.

What are some times you have chosen to ditch your tech and had a positive outcome? Share a few of your experiences in the comment section below!

Reading as a way of learning

When posting on the blog this year, I have mentioned several books that I have read in connection to my topics. A few of you have asked me questions along the lines of “how do you find time to read that much?” The reality is that I, much like any of you, have a pretty busy schedule with lots of things to do. If I wanted to, I could work all day on things in my office and never truly feel done, however if I did that, I would be stressed, overworked, and unhappy. Outside of school I have responsibilities too; my family, my friends, and my own fitness and health. With all of these things, it would be easy to say that I don’t have time to read, but I’m not willing to do that! I love reading!

Reading is one of the things I really really love!

So, with all those responsibilities, how do I find the time to read as much as I do? There are a couple of ways. First is at the beginning of the day. Most days I arrive here at school, log into my computer, and before doing anything else, I pick up a book and read for 10-15 minutes. I try to make sure that reading is professional in nature. If you expand that over the course of a school year, 10-15 minutes a school day turns into 30-45 hours of reading in a school yer! Give me that much time and I can knock out a ton of books and learn so much! In addition to those 10-15 minutes, I always have a book in iBooks that I am reading. That means I have it on my phone and I can pick it up anytime – waiting at the shop for them to finish my oil change? I could waste my time on Facebook or Twitter, or I could read some of my book. I also try to take a little bit of time at the end of the day before bed to read. It helps me wind down my day and clears up any stress I may have previously felt. I know a lot of people love to get on their favorite social media site at the end of the day, but that just doesn’t do it for me. I’m intentional in my practice of finding time to read. I could watch a random basketball game, or another episode of whatever I’ve been watching on Netflix, and sometimes I do, but often I end up feeling like I’m wasting my time.

I'd love to have a room that looks like this! — I’d love to have a room that looks like this!

So then the question comes, how do you pick a new book? I’m always looking for book ideas. One book I am currently reading was mentioned during a conference I was at. Another book I saw on a colleague’s bookshelf, and a third book I’m reading because I heard an awesome interview of the author on the radio. I get book ideas from people I follow on Twitter, blog posts I read, conversations with friends and colleagues, or just going to Amazon and looking at the “Customers who bought this item also bought” for books that I might like.

Ultimately I see my reading as my own best form of PD. While many of the books I read are not tied directly to education, I can often find connections in my reading. Below I’m going to list a few of the books that I am currently reading, as well as some of the ones I have finished reading recently. Maybe it will inspire you to pick up a new book over Thanksgiving Break, or add it to your wish list. The books I read are things that I am interested in, but also things that I feel help me grow as an educator. And they help me keep my sanity!

My current reading list:

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In his research, Kahneman has studied how the human brain works, and he breaks it down into 2 systems. System 1 is our fast, intuitive, and emotional part of the brain, while system 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Most of us would believe that the slower more deliberate part of the brain rules most of our choices, but based on the research, System 1 is much more in control than we might realize. Understanding the 2 systems and how they interact can help us be more intentional in our thought processes.
Great by Choice by Jim Collins & Morten T. Hansen. In this follow up to Good to Great and Built to Last, Collins looks at why some companies are able to thrive in times of chaos and uncertainty when others are not. In the book Collins compares companies that find the way to be successful in difficult times with comparison companies were not able to be as successful (think Intel vs. AMD, or Microsoft vs. Apple, or Progressive vs. Safeco). While there are no direct ties to education, some of his theories on success could be used in creating the mission or vision for our schools.
The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. This book combines 2 of my personal passions: Science and Cooking; and it has proven to me that you can truly “read” a cookbook. This book is much more than just a cookbook. Each chapter or section talks first about the science of cooking – a couple of nights ago I read about the pros and cons of brining a turkey, and have decided that I am going to try a dry brine for our bird this year – and then it gets into the recipe. I love understanding the science behind the steps I am taking, and seeing new ways to achieve some of my family’s favorite recipes!

And now for some of my recent reads (I included some fiction too, because sometimes you just have to read for fun!):

Ditch that Textbook by Matt Miller
Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess
David & Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton
Gray Mountain by John Grisham
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
King and Maxwell by David Baldacci
Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly
A Song of Ice and Fire (series) by George R. R. Martin

I’m curious! What books are you reading? What have you read? What are you learning about from your reading? Share in the comments below so that others can add your ideas to their reading list!

Know your kids – Love your kids

Growing up, the mother of one of my closest friends was an elementary school teacher. When I graduated from college with a brand new teacher’s license in hand, she gave me a couple of books and some unsolicited advice. One of the books was The First Days of School by Harry and Rosemary Wong. The advice was “don’t smile until at least Thanksgiving.”

From Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Days-School-Effective/dp/0962936022

The First Days of School was a great resource in setting up my first classroom, and knowing that this person was a great teacher, I tried to follow that advice. The only problem… I really like kids! I couldn’t not smile at them. They were curious, they were funny, and most of all, I knew they were going to be with me for a whole year. Building a relationship with them was really hard if I couldn’t smile!

Some of you may be of the opinion that if you are a good teacher, it doesn’t matter whether or not the kids like you, as long as they respect you. Let me ask you this… How many people that you don’t like do you truly respect? Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like. Kids will learn from people they feel a strong relationship with.

Matt Miller: https://www.flickr.com/photos/126588706@N08/14726101996/in/album-72157645530010989/

Going back to our belief statements, building positive relationships is one of our top priorities. It’s easy to have a relationship with the kids who do really well in your class and seem motivated to learn. Those are the kids who know how to play school and probably have the most positive relationships. Those kids are probably the ones who need you the least because they can build relationships easily. The ones who need you the most are the ones who seem to not be motivated, or seem to not do well. What have you done to build relationships with those students who don’t play school well?

The next time you look at your class, see who it is that you know the least about. Seek out an opportunity to learn something about them. Have a 2 minute conversation that has nothing to do with school or your class. What are their interests? What do they like to eat? What did they do last night? What do you know about their family? Do this as often as possible until you know a few new things about each of your kids, then start again!

Remember the first day of school this year. I asked you to do 2 things – Know your kids, and love your kids for who they are. What steps have you taken this year to be able to know your student better? Share in the comments below some of your successes.

Matt Miller: https://www.flickr.com/photos/126588706@N08/14746751544/in/album-72157645530010989/

Make it fun

What makes one professional development opportunity great, while another may be bland and boring? Some of the best PD that I’ve had felt that way because the presenter somehow made things fun. In your classroom, the students are the audience, and while making sure they are having fun is not your primary goal, we all know they are going to pay a lot more attention if the activities that we are doing are more fun. What are some ways we can incorporate fun into our classrooms?

Kevin Jarret - https://www.flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/7070563247 — Kevin Jarret – https://www.flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/7070563247

STICKERS – I am continually amazed by what a fifth or sixth grader will do for a sticker (haven’t you noticed the Ham & Cheese stickers that end up on our students foreheads?). Want some more participation? Pull our the foil stars, ask a question, and give out a star for good answers, or to integrate tech, give a foil star to the best response or question on Today’s Meet (see the post on Getting ALL our students to participate in the classroom).
Make it silly – before students hand in a paper, have them do something silly, make a sound like a pirate, do a little dance, etc. Adding a little silliness will up the fun factor by at least 10% (and even more important – if you are being silly with them, they will be even more engaged!).
In a content area, retell a story and make your students the stars of the story (think about last week’s post on titled Put your students into your materials).

When kids walk out of this building, the fun they want is pretty much on demand. Between social media, streaming video and music, video games, and more, our students have tons of ways to do something fun. If we want them to be as engaged in our room as they are with their Minecraft world, we have to be willing to bring in some of the fun.

Matt Miller: https://www.flickr.com/photos/126588706@N08/14562457739/in/album-72157645530010989/

Think of some lesson you have done in the past that was a bust (even the best of us have had one!). How could you add some fun and silliness to help the students be more engaged? What things have you included that were fun and did help students remain engaged? Share some of your ideas in the comments section below.

Student Behaviors

Robert Temple Ayers - https://www.flickr.com/photos/42787780@N04/4975296555 — Robert Temple Ayers – https://www.flickr.com/photos/42787780@N04/4975296555

I have recently been reading the book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m not sure if any of you have ever read anything by him, but he often picks a story to share, and then spends the rest of the book talking about the psychology behind what “really” happened. He does a ton of research, interviews a wide variety of people on a wide variety of topics, and then puts it all together in a way that ties back to his original message.

If you remember the story of David and Goliath from ancient Palestine, you will remember that David miraculously felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a pebble and a sling. Now, any rivalry game where one team is hugely favored and the underdog wins is often referred to as a battle of David and Goliath. What I have taken away as one theme of the book is that sometimes there are times that the win by David is not as improbable as you might have suspected.

Let's hope your class doesn't look like this!!! http://gatheringbooks.org/2011/05/10/miss-nelson-is-missing/ — Let’s hope your class doesn’t look like this!!!
http://gatheringbooks.org/2011/05/10/miss-nelson-is-missing/

In one portion of the book, Gladwell is talking about classroom management skills. He describes walking into a classroom that appears to be absolutely in chaos. The teacher is at the front of the room doing a read aloud. One student is standing next to her and they are taking turns reading from the story. Kids are making faces, one girl is doing cartwheels, and several students have turned their back on the teacher. The situation is unpacked a little more greatly in the book, and it becomes obvious that the teacher in this situation is using some very poor classroom engagement strategies which lead to the classroom management issues, but something that Gladwell said struck a chord with me:

“We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella’s classroom, however, suggests something different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.” (Gladwell, pg 339)

A view of some of the projects in Brownsville - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Qbridgenycha.JPG — A view of some of the projects in Brownsville – https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Qbridgenycha.JPG

In the same chapter, Gladwell then shifts to a story about a program based in Brownsville, a residential neighborhood in eastern Brooklyn, NYC. If you were to visit, you might be inclined to refer to this area as the projects. In 2003, a police officer took charge of the city’s Housing Bureau, and their primary responsibility was the Brownsville projects. In an effort to try something new, they started trying to help the troubled youth in the area. They identified all the juveniles in Brownsville who had been arrested in the previous year. They reached out to those kids and their families. Kids who were brought into the program were told that the cops in this group (called the Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program – J-RIP) would do everything in their power to help. They would get them back in school to get a diploma, bring them needed services for their family, find out what’s needed in their household, provide job opportunities, educational opportunities, medical – everything they could. The program would work with the kids, but there was one circumstance. The criminal conduct had to stop. Kids were told that if they got arrested for anything, the cops would do all they could to keep them in jail.

The cops in the J-RIP program seemed to be everywhere these 106 kids went. They’d show up at their home, find them hanging out in other parts of the city, walk up to Facebook friends and talk to them about what they’ve been up to. These cops lived in the world of these kids. Initially things did not go well. The kids didn’t want to interact, the families didn’t want to interact. The cops had the best of intentions, but they weren’t getting anywhere. Finally they had a breakthrough one November. One of the cops decided it would be a great idea to help out one of the kids they were most worried about losing. One the Wednesday before Thanksgiving this officer went out and bought a Thanksgiving dinner for the kid’s family and delivered it. They knew they might not be able to get through to the main target, but maybe they’d have a breakthrough with the kid’s seven siblings. That year, through the efforts of the commander of the unit, they were able to get funds to be able to deliver a turkey to the home of every kid that was on their list for Thanksgiving.

The reason they were so persistent in trying to meet the families was because police in Brownsville were not seen as legitimate. A large percentage of the families in Brownsville had only had negative interactions with the police, and multiple people in most families had spent time behind bars. By taking turkeys to the families of the J-RIP kids, the cops were saying to the families “we really do care about you and your family, and we want to help you make the most of yourself, and most important, we want you to have a good Thanksgiving.”

After this, things in Brownsville began to turn around. The trend line on all crime in Brownsville dropped significantly in the following 5 years. Kids who were in the J-RIP program went from a total of over 350 arrests in the year before being added to the program, to less than 40 arrests. Gladwell argues that what this proves is that

“the powerful have to worry about how others think of them – that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.” (Gladwell, pg. 356)

As teachers, we are clearly in a role of power. Some of our parents are scared to be involved in school because they may have had bad experiences when they were in school, or maybe their child has had bad experiences in the past. Some of our students are nervous in the classroom because of things beyond our control, maybe a bad experience in another class, or their perception of the teacher. As people in power, what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that we as the powerful do – or don’t do – to establish legitimacy. When power is not seen as legitimate, it can often have the opposite of the intended effect.

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We are dealing with the minds of 10, 11, and 12 year olds. Sometimes they struggle to understand the things we say, the jokes we make, or the ways we interact with them. Things like sarcasm and a sense of humor that may make perfect sense to the adults in our building will fly right over the heads of our kids, and instead they will feel that you are actually being serious, or possibly making fun of them. For some of our kids, the direct approach doesn’t work because it only leads to a shutdown.

Think about what you do to build legitimacy with our students. Keep in mind that what works with one kid may not work with another. Also keep in mind that without legitimacy, our students may not see us as people who care for them, but rather as the person who’s trying to keep them down. If you want to build better legitimacy with your kids, give them a voice. Also, give them the time to talk about their interests. Think about the J-RIP program – they took a small group of kids living in Brownsville and truly showed those kids that the cops cared about them, and many of them changed their ways. It also had a larger effect of changing the culture of crime in the entire neighborhood. Who are the kids that you would identify as needing to know you care? How can you show them that you care? How can you build greater legitimacy so that your power has the intended effect, and doesn’t lead to unintended consequences?

Mindsets

What is your mindset? Do you see the glass as half empty, or half full? Attitude and mindset are two of the greatest determinants of success. Having our minds open to new approaches can allow huge changes in schools, which in turn could make life easier for all of us. In the coming weeks we’ll be talking about various mindsets that may be affecting us in our classroom, and by extension be affecting our students.

Today I wanted to share a short YouTube video that shares the results of a study on praise and mindset. The video has a run time of just under 5 minutes.