Madeline Levine on changing school

I am reading Madeline Levine's book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, and I also came across an article called Why Kids Need School to Change. Both feature Levine prodding us to rethink how we parent and educate our children. Levine makes a strong case for how school needs to change -- here are five of her suggestions:

• PROJECT BASED LEARNING. Project-based learning has shown to be a much more effective way to think about learning, “particularly when you live in a world that’s incredibly unclear on what content is going to be relevant in not just 10 or 20 years, but in three years,” she said. “Over and over business leaders say kids need to be collaborative, work across time zones and cultures because problems are so complex.”

• ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT. “You don’t have the opportunity to show what you know in a regular school because standardized tests that are mandated only show what some kids know, but leave out a whole bunch of kids who aren’t able to show what they know in different ways,” she said. We should have alternative criteria for gauging students’ knowledge and ability to show what they know.

• SCHEDULING. Neuroscience research on sleep is becoming more compelling by the day, particularly around depression, Levine said. “We’d always thought fatigue is symptom of depression, but now it’s looking more like lack of sleep causes depression, and that’s something looked at seriously.” Kids needs nine hours of sleep, and if schools were in synch developmentally with teenagers, should would start at 10 a.m., especially when kids enter adolescence. Teachers should also coordinate their exams with each other to ensure that students are not taking multiple tests on the same day.

• CLIMATE OF CARE. Research shows that kids do better in classes where teachers know their names and say hello to them, and when they have their own advocates or advisers at school. “Almost every private school has advisory, a person for each kid to go to,” Levine said. “But in public schools, there are just a few counselors for a thousand kids or more. By the time you’re hitting high school, you need someone apart from parents to test ideas with, to kick around problems, a go-to person who a kid feels knows them.”

• PARENT EDUCATION. Well-meaning parents are confounded with how to approach managing their kids’ times. Kids needs playtime, downtime, and family time, Levine said. “We’ve robbed kids at each stage of childhood and adolescence of tasks that belong in that particular stage,” she said. “You can’t push kids outside their developmental zone and expect them to learn. You want to push them towards the edge of it, but not over.”

One of my favourite quotes in Levine's book is this:

There’s probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom.

When we choose to openly ignore these problems we fail our children more than they could ever fail us.

Who will change school?

There are a lot reasons why school needs to change. If we're not changing, we aren't improving.

But who is responsible for making changes? I've talked to frustrated teachers who say that picky parents are the problem; I've talked to frustrated parents who say that fossilized teachers are the problem, and I've talked to students who say that neither their teachers or parents are meeting their needs.

Teachers don't lack the research and direction to improve school, but they do largely lack the courage. The public doesn't lack the courage but they do largely lack the research and direction. Together, parents, teachers and students must work together and support each other in making school a better place.

I've been a teacher longer than I've been a parent, so I have spent more time and effort encouraging teachers to make school different and better; however, I'm recently finding myself spending more time and effort encouraging parents to challenge traditional School. There are likely two reasons for this:

1. My daughter Kayley is entering Kindergarten this September and I find myself thinking a lot about how I will work with her teachers to make school different and better. 

2. For the past two years, I have taught in a children's inpatient psychiatric assessment unit where I have worked with children who are abused and neglected, and many of them have been wounded by school. During this time, I've worked with parents and teachers so that they could better meet their children's complex needs.

When I was reading Madeline Levine's book Teach Your Children Well, I found myself struck by this:

Parents are often willing to make changes faster than the institutions around them. The pace of institutional change can be positively glacial compared with the vigor of a parent who feels his or her child is in jeopardy.  

Many of us have experienced the bureaucratic friction that large systems develop. Apathy and cynicism are as predictable as they are unfortunate; however, we must remember that all revolutions are impossible until they happen. Always remember this:

"The most common way people give up power is by believing they don't have any." (Alice Walker)