Solving Problems Collaboratively in the Classroom

Here's how I used Ross Greene's Approach (Plan B) with a student.

Dylan is a very active grade 2 boy who was reading The Lorax on the iPad. Dylan can't read independently yet and that's ok. He's very young. The good news is that he sometimes still gets excited about reading with an adult. The iPad works well because it allows him some autonomy while it reads to him. Plus it's interactive which is great because it keeps Dylan engaged. (Please note that the iPad does not replace reading with an adult -- it merely supplements)

After he finished the book, I showed him how to take screen shots of his favorite parts of the book. He placed them in Keynote and, with some assistance, he wrote a couple sentences that explained what was happening in the picture.

After three pictures and three text boxes, Dylan made it clear that he was ready for a break, so I sent him for a walk down the hall. When he came back I had him choose a little journal for him to keep. I asked him to write down his name, the date and something about what he did this morning.

All of a sudden, Dylan crossed his arms, knitted his brow, hung his head and huffed. It took me all of a half second to see something was wrong. It's at this point that too many adults engage in Plan A. Plan A is where the adult places an expectation on the child and when the child doesn't comply, the adult imposes their will to make them comply.

In Dylan's case, my problem was that I wanted him to write in his journal but he wouldn't. Plan A might take any number of forms including threats, bribes, punishments, consequences and other forms of manipulation and coercion.

Plan A solves the problem, right?

Well, sort of but mostly no.

Plan A does solve a problem. Plan A is the best way to solve the adult's problem while almost always completely ignoring the child's problem. Because Plan A never bothers to engage the child, the best it can ever gain us is short-term compliance. We gain expediency and efficiency at the cost of sustainability.

This is as unacceptable as it is ineffective.

Plan B is where we engage collaboratively with the child to solve problems. Here are the steps:

1. Identify the lagging skill and unsolved problem.

2. Engage the child in an empathetic conversation in an attempt to gather information about their perspective of the problem.

3. Identify both problems (yours and theirs).

4. Invite them to come up with solutions and agree on one that is mutually satisfactory and durable.

Here's what Plan B looks like for Dylan:

After I resisted Plan A, I quickly identified Dylan's lagging skill: he has difficulty handling transitions and shifting from one task to another. The unsolved problem here is that Dylan is having difficulty starting his journal writing after reading on the iPad.

Here's how I started the conversation:

Hey Dylan, I've noticed your having difficulty starting your journal writing, what's up?

I waited.

Dylan avoided eye contact.

I waited some more.

Dylan still looked away.

I waited even more.

Then Dylan shifted in his seat and dropped his crossed arms. He wasn't avoiding me. He was thinking. It was really important that I say nothing so that he could think. Dylan then said something that made me go aha!

I'm hungry.

This aha! moment made sense. It was 20 minutes to twelve and even I was getting hungry.

There is only one person in this world who could provide me with this invaluable piece of information, and that person is Dylan. If I don't take the time and effort to engage in a conversation with him, then I guess I could hypothesize and theorize why he's having difficulty (he hates writing or me) -- or I could skip all the speculation and just ask Dylan for what's up (he's hungry).

Quick sidebar: If I speculate about what Dylan's problem is, I'm likely to unilaterally impose a solution which will likely solve my problem while ignoring his which will likely lead to more unsolved problems, leading me to impose more unilateral consequences. In other words, Plan A begets Plan A.

Once I had my aha! moment, I asked Dylan:

I wonder if there is a way for you to write in your journal without being hungry.

I waited.

He said nothing.

I waited longer.

After I watched him think in silence, Dylan said:

I can wait until lunch.

Sometimes kids are great at telling us what we want to hear. Sometimes this is true because they have grown accustomed to having their needs trumped by adults. Keeping this in mind, I decided that Dylan's suggestion was neither mutually satisfactory (I don't think he really believed he could wait) nor sustainable (I didn't really believe he could wait) so I said:

That's an idea, but are you sure you can wait? What if you got a super quick snack now and then came back and wrote in your journal?

His smile told me all I needed to know about whether this solution was mutually satisfactory. And it was proven durable when three minutes later he returned from his snack and went straight to his journal.

For those who say this sounds like too much work, I'll say this: while it's true that learning how to do Plan B takes a long time, this post took me longer to write than my actual interaction with Dylan.

Standardized testing is like tobacco

Paul Thomas writes some remarkable posts for the Daily Kos. In his his post The Education Games: Reform as Doublespeak, he writes about how we should frame the debate around standardized testing.

High-stakes standardized tests. The doublespeak around high-stakes standardized testing is one of the most powerful weapons used today by Duncan. The Obama administration has produced mountains of evidence that claiming to reject and decrease testing is a cloak for the inevitability of more testing and more corrosive accountability for teachers. But that debate is masking a deeper problem with confronting high-stakes standardized tests: Many educators are quick to reject the high-stakes element while adding that standardized testing is being misused. And here is where educators are failing the debate. 

The high-stakes problem is the secondary problem with standardized testing. Yes, high-stakes create inexcusable outcomes related to testing: teaching to the test, reducing all course content to what-is-tested-is-what-is-taught, reducing teacher quality to test scores, reducing student learning to test scores, and cheating. But rejecting or even calling for removing the high-stakes ignores that standardized tests are flawed themselves. Standardized tests remain primarily linked to the race, social class, and gender of students; standardized tests label and sort children overwhelmingly based on the coincidence of those children's homes. 

The standardized testing debate is the cigarette debate, not the alcohol debate. Alcohol can be consumed safely and even with health benefits; thus, the alcohol debate is about the use of alcohol, not alcohol itself. Cigarettes are another story; there is no healthy consumption of cigarettes so that debate is about the inherent danger of tobacco. 

Educators must expose the double-speak calling for less testing while increasing the testing and the stakes for students and teachers, but we must not allow that charge to trump the need to identify standardized testing as cancerous, to state clearly there is no safe level of standardized testing.

Self-worth

I came across this from a friend who saw it circulating on Facebook. I use this with my students to discuss the idea of self-worth. Many of the children I come across in the hospital setting have a very little self-worth and self-esteem. The paradox here is that while many of these kids can't see any value in themselves, they are able to see value in others.

A well-known speaker started off his seminar holding up a $20.00 bill. In the room of 200, he asked, "Who would like this $20 bill?" Hands started going up. He said, "I am going to give this $20 to one of you but first, let me do this." He proceeded to crumple up the $20 dollar bill. He then asked, "Who still wants it...?" Still the hands went up in the air. "Well," he replied, "What if I do this?" And he dropped it on the ground and started to grind it into the floor with his shoe. He picked it up, now crumpled and dirty. "Now, who still wants it?" Still the hands went into the air.  

"My friends, we have all learned a very valuable lesson. No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because it did not decrease in value. It was still worth $20. Many times in our lives, we are dropped, crumpled, and ground into the dirt by the decisions we make and the circumstances that come our way. We feel as though we are worthless. But no matter what has happened or what will happen, you will never lose your value.  

Dirty or clean, crumpled or finely creased, you are still priceless to those who DO LOVE you. The worth of our lives comes not in what we do or who we know, but by WHO WE ARE. You are special-Don't EVER forget it." Consider passing this on as you may never know the lives it touches, the hurting hearts it speaks to, or the hope that it may bring.

School should not feel like this

The best and worst curriculums

The best teachers understand that curriculum is not something that some distant authority publishes and mails to the school so that the teacher may merely deliver it to the students.

Instead, the best teachers understand that the best curriculums are co-created with students so that they may construct an understanding for themselves from the inside while interacting with their environment.

This is precisely why curriculum guides should be exactly that -- a guide. Never doubt that a thoughtful teacher and an engaged student can learn together; indeed, it's the only way real learning has ever really happened.