The education question we should be asking

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks on parenting and education. Kohn tweets here and his website is here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

“While we’re at it, maybe we should just design classrooms without windows. And, hey, I’ll bet kids would really perform better if they spent their days in isolation.” My friend was reacting (facetiously, of course) to a new study that found kindergarteners scored better on a test of recall if their classroom’s walls were completely bare. A room filled with posters, maps, and the kids’ own art constituted a “distraction.”

The study, published last month in Psychological Science [1] and picked up by Science World Report, the Boston Globe, and other media outlets, looked at a whopping total of 24 children. A research assistant read to them about a topic such as plate tectonics or insects, then administered a paper-and-pencil test to see how many facts they remembered. On average, kids in the decorated rooms were “off task” 39 percent of the time and had a “learning score” of 42 percent. The respective numbers for those in the bare rooms were 28 percent and 55 percent.

Now if you regularly read education studies, you won’t be surprised to learn that the authors of this one never questioned, or even bothered to defend, the value of the science lessons they used — whether they were developmentally appropriate or presented effectively, whether they involved anything more than reading a list of facts or were likely to hold any interest for 5-year-olds. Nor did the researchers vouch for the quality of the assessment. Whatever raises kids’ scores (on any test, and of any material) was simply assumed to be a good thing, and anything that lowers scores is bad.

Hence the authors’ concern that children tend to be “distracted by the visual environment.” (Translation: They may attend to something in the room other than the facts an adult decided to transmit to them.) And hence my friend’s wry reductio ad absurdum response.

Alas, “sparse” classrooms had their own problems. There, we’re told, children “were more likely to be distracted by themselves or by peers.” Even if we strip everything off the walls, those pesky kids will still engage in instructionally useless behaviors like interacting with one another or thinking about things that interest them. The researchers referred to the latter (thinking) as being “distracted by themselves.” Mark that phrase as the latest illustration of the principle that, in the field of education, satire has become obsolete.

Our attention seems to be fixed relentlessly on the means by which to get students to accomplish something. We remain undistracted by anything to do with ends — what it is they’re supposed to accomplish, and whether it’s really valuable. Perhaps that’s why schools of education typically require “methods” classes but not goals classes. In the latter, students might be invited to read this study and ask whether a child could reasonably regard the lesson as a distraction (from her desire to think, talk, or look at a cool drawing on the wall). Other students might object on the grounds that it’s a teacher’s job to decide what students ought to do and to maximize their “time on task.” But such conversations — Time on what task? Why is it being taught? Who gets to decide? — are shut down before they begin when all we talk about (in ed. schools, in journals, in professional development sessions) is how to maximize time on whatever is assigned.[2]

Those of us who are disturbed, even outraged, by what’s being done to our schools in the name of “reform” — imposing ramped-up, uniform, prescriptive standards; high-stakes testing; and pressure that’s both vertical (with kindergartens now resembling really bad first-grade classrooms) and horizontal (with little time for music and the arts, recess, student-designed projects, or any subjects not being tested) — ought to consider how this agenda is quietly supported by research that relies on test scores as the primary, or even the sole, dependent variable.

Then, too, there’s the way such research is described by journalists. Most articles inEducation Week, for example, ought to include this caveat:

Please keep in mind that phrases such as “effective policies,” “higher achievement,” “better results,” or “improved outcomes” refer only to scores on standardized tests. These tests are not only poor indicators of meaningful intellectual accomplishment but tend to measure the socioeconomic status of the students or the amount of time they have been trained in test-taking skills.

The idea that kindergarteners ought to block everything out but facts about plate tectonics reminded me of an essay called “Can Teachers Increase Students’ Self-Control?” (as usual, the question was “can,” not “should”) written by a cognitive psychologist named Daniel Willingham. He offered as a role model a hypothetical child who looks through his classroom window and sees “construction workers pour[ing] cement for a sidewalk” but “manages to ignore this interesting scene and focus on his work.”[3]

But what was the “work”? Was it a fill-in-the-blank waste-of-the-time that would lead any child to look out the window or at the wall? Or was it something so intellectually valuable that we’d be justified in saying, “Hey, this really is worth it”? I don’t know. But for Willingham, as for so many others, it apparently doesn’t matter: If the teacher assigned it, that’s reason enough to ignore the interesting real-life lesson in how a sidewalk is created, to refrain from asking the teacher why that lesson can’t be incorporated into the curriculum. An exemplary student is one who stifles his curiosity, exercises his self-control, and does what he’s told.

Is a given lesson worth teaching? I may not always be sure of the answer, but I’m pretty sure that’s the question we should be asking — rather than employing discipline, or demanding self-discipline, or pulling stuff off the walls in order that students will devote their attention to something whose value is simply taken for granted.

NOTES

1. Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin, and Howard Seltman, “Visual Environment, Attention Allocation, and Learning in Young Children: When Too Much of a Good Thing May Be Bad,” Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797614533801. Published online 21 May 2014.

2. A couple of years ago I wrote an article called “Teaching Strategies That Work! (Just Don’t Ask ‘Work to Do What?‘)”, which focused on a research review challenging the effectiveness of discovery-based learning without ever asking what constitutes effectiveness. There, too, my point was that if we don’t ask what we’re looking for and argue about the values that underlie our answers, we’ll end up by default with a goal like higher test scores — or, in the case of classroom management strategies, compliance.

3. Daniel T. Willingham, “Can Teachers Increase Students’ Self-Control?” American Educator, Summer 2011, p. 23. I offered this example in my book The Myth of the Spoiled Child (Da Capo Press, 2014) and, in the same chapter, cited a pair of studies by Angela Duckworth and her colleagues that found an elite group of middle schoolers performed better in the National Spelling Bee if they were higher in grit, “whereas spellers higher in openness to experience — defined as preferring using their imagination, playing with ideas, and otherwise enjoying a complex mental life — perform[ed] worse.” The study also found that the most effective preparation strategy was “solitary deliberate practice activities” rather than, say, reading books. Thus, if enjoying a complex mental life (or reading for pleasure) interferes with performance in a one-shot contest to see who can spell more obscure words correctly — and if sufficient grittiness to spend time alone memorizing lists of words helps to achieve that goal — this is regarded as an argument in favor of grit. But of course the unasked question once again concerns ends rather than means: How important is it that kids who are exceptionally good spellers win more championships? Should we favor any strategy or personality feature that contributes to that objective (or to anything that could be described as “higher achievement”) regardless of what it involves and what it displaces?

The trouble with calls for universal 'high quality' pre-K

This was written by Alfie Kohn. His website is here and he tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

Universal pre-kindergarten education finally seems to be gathering momentum. President Obama highlighted the issue in his 2013 State of the Union address and then mentioned it again in this year’s. Numerous states and cities are launching or expanding early-education initiatives, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has made this his signature issue. Disagreements persist about the details of funding, but a real consensus has begun to develop that all young children deserve what has until now been unaffordable by low-income families.

But here’s the catch: Very few people are talking about the kind of education that would be offered — other than declaring it should be “high quality.” And that phrase is often interpreted to mean “high intensity”: an accelerated version of skills-based teaching that most early-childhood experts regard as terrible. Poor children, as usual, tend to get the worst of this.

It doesn’t bode well that many supporters of universal pre-K seem to be more concerned about economic imperatives than about what’s good for kids. In his speech last year, for example, the president introduced the topic by emphasizing the need to “start at the earliest possible age” to “equip our citizens with the skills and training” they’ll need in the workplace.[1] The New York Times, meanwhile, editorialized recently about how we must “tightly integrate the [pre-K] program with kindergarten through third grade so that 4-year-olds do not lose their momentum. It will have to prepare children well for the rigorous Common Core learning standards that promise to bring their math, science and literacy skills up to international norms.”[2]

The top-down, test-driven regimen of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiatives in K-12 education is now in the process of being nationalized with those Common Core standards championed by the Times — an enterprise largely funded, and relentlessly promoted, by corporate groups.[3] That same version of school reform, driven by an emphasis on global competitiveness and a determination to teach future workers as much as possible as soon as possible, would now be expanded to children who are barely out of diapers.

That doesn’t leave much time for play.[4] But even to the extent we want to promote meaningful learning in young children, the methods are likely to be counterproductive, featuring an emphasis on the direct instruction of skills and rote rehearsal of facts. This is the legacy of behaviorism: Children are treated as passive receptacles of knowledge, with few opportunities to investigate topics and pose questions that they find intriguing. In place of discovery and exploration, tots are trained to sit still and listen, to memorize lists of letters, numbers, and colors. Their success or failure is relentlessly monitored and quantified, and they’re “reinforced” with stickers or praise for producing right answers and being compliant.

This dreary version of early-childhood education isn’t just disrespectful of children; decades of research show it simply doesn’t work well — and may even be damaging.[5] The same approach has long been over-represented in schools that serve low-income African-American and Latino children; indeed, it was described by the late Martin Haberman as the “pedagogy of poverty” and it continues to find favor in inner-city charter schools.[6] If we’re not careful, calls to expand access to preschool will result in more of the same for younger children whose families can’t afford an alternative.

***

Consider the basic equity argument. Proponents of universal pre-K cite research about the importance of early-life experiences, arguing that children in low-income families are at a real disadvantage in terms of intellectual stimulation, exposure to literacy, and so on. That disadvantage, they point out, can reverberate throughout their lives and is extremely difficult to reverse.

It is true that, on average, children in affluent homes hear more words spoken and have more books read to them. But, as Richard Rothstein points out, it’s not just a matter of the number of words or books to which they’re exposed so much as the context in which they’re presented. “How parents read to children is as important as whether they do, and an extensive literature confirms that more educated parents read aloud differently.” Rather than “sound[ing] out words or nam[ing] letters,” these parents are more likely to “ask questions that are creative, interpretive, or connective, such as, ‘What do you think will happen next?’ ‘Does that remind you of what we did yesterday?’ Middle-class parents are more likely to read aloud to have fun, to have conversations, or as an entree to the world outside. Their children learn that reading is enjoyable.”[7]

To oversimplify a bit, the homes of advantaged parents look more like progressive schools, while the homes of disadvantaged parents look more like back-to-basics, skills-oriented, traditional schools. It makes no sense to try to send low-income children to preschools that intensify the latter approach, with rigorous drilling in letter-sound correspondences and number recognition — the sort of instruction that turns learning into drudgery. As Deborah Stipek, dean of Stanford’s School of Education, once commented, drill-and-skill instruction isn’t how middle-class children got their edge, so “why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn’t help middle class kids in the first place?”[8]

Alas, that is precisely the strategy that tends to follow in the wake of goals offered by most politicians and journalists who hold forth on education. If schooling is conceived mostly an opportunity to train tomorrow’s employees, there’s a tendency to look to behaviorist methods — despite the fact that behaviorism has largely been discredited by experts in child development, cognition, and learning.

Lilian Katz, a leading authority in early-childhood education, once observed that we tend to “overestimate children academically and underestimate them intellectually.”[9] This is why a school that is exceedingly “rigorous” can also be wholly unengaging, even sterile. If those who favor prescriptive standards and high-stakes testing equate rigor with quality, it may be because they fail to distinguish between what is intellectual and what is merely academic. The rarity of rich intellectual environments for young children seems to leave only two possibilities, as Katz sees it: Either they spend their time “making individual macaroni collages” or they’re put to work to satisfy “our quick-fix academic fervor.”[10]

Happily, these do not exhaust the possibilities for early-childhood education. One alternative is sketched out in a wonderful book by Katz and her Canadian colleague Sylvia Chard called “Engaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach.” Here, teachers create extended studies of rich themes that resonate with young children, such as babies, hospitals, or the weather. Children might spend a month learning about such a real-life topic, visiting, drawing, discussing, thinking.

And there are other, overlapping educational models, including two with Italian roots:Montessori education and the Reggio Emilia approach, where “young children are not marched or hurried sequentially from one different activity to the next, but instead encouraged to repeat key experiences, observe and re-observe, consider and reconsider, represent and re-represent.”[11] Educators who have been influenced by Jean Piaget’s discoveries about child development, meanwhile, have built on his recognition that children are active meaning makers who learn by constructing reality – intellectually, socially, and morally. One of my favorite practical resources in this vein for early-childhood educators is “Moral Classrooms, Moral Children” by the late Rheta DeVries and Betty Zan.

All of these approaches to educating young children offer opportunities to learn that are holistic and situated in a context. They take kids (and their questions) seriously, engage them as thinkers, and give them some say about what they’re doing. The trouble is that current calls for “high-quality” universal pre-K are unlikely to produce learning opportunities that look anything like this — unless political activists begin tp educate themselves about the nuances of education.
_____________________________________________________________________

NOTES

1. See www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-union-address.

2. See www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/opinion/pre-k-on-the-starting-blocks.html.

3. Some sample headlines in Education Week over the last year: “Business Executives Push Common Core Hard,” “Business Groups Crank Up Defense of Common Core,” “Chamber [of Commerce] President Calls for Support of Common Core in 2014.” In 2009, Bill Gates defended the Common Core, a significant proportion of whose start-up costs have been paid by his foundation, for its capacity to eventually produce a “uniform base of customers.” (See http://ow.ly/pxALx.)

4. Note I say “for play” – not “for opportunities to learn by playing.” The point of play is that it has no point, and children deserve the opportunity to engage in it even if it doesn’t teach skills or anything else. See http://ow.ly/ta2uT.

5. Alfie Kohn, “Early Childhood Education: The Case Against Direct Instruction of Academic Skills.” Excerpted from The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/ece.htm.

6. Alfie Kohn, “Poor Teaching for Poor Children…in the Name of Reform,” Education Week, April 27, 2011. Available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/poor.htm.

7. Richard Rothstein, “Class and the Classroom,” American School Board Journal, October 2004, p. 18.

8. Stipek is quoted in David L. Kirp, “All My Children,” New York Times Education Life, July 31, 2005, p. 21.

9. Lilian Katz, “What Can We Learn from Reggio Emilia?” In The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education, edited by Carolyn Edwards et al. (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993), p. 31.

10. Lilian Katz, “The Disposition to Learn,” Principal, May 1988, p. 16.

11. Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George Forman, Introduction to The Hundred Languages of Children, op. cit., p. 7.

How children's play is being sneakily redefined

This was written by Alfie Kohn. His website is here and he tweets here. This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in Providence, RI, on Nov. 12, 2011 and was originally found here.

By Alfie Kohn

* Children should have plenty of opportunities to play.

* Even young children have too few such opportunities these days, particularly in school settings.

These two propositions — both of them indisputable and important — have been offered many times.[1] The second one in particular reflects the “cult of rigor” at the center of corporate-style school reform. Its devastating impact can be mapped horizontally (with test preparation displacing more valuable activities at every age level) as well as vertically (with pressures being pushed down to the youngest grades, resulting in developmentally inappropriate instruction). The typical American kindergarten now resembles a really bad first-grade classroom. Even preschool teachers are told to sacrifice opportunities for imaginative play in favor of drilling young children until they master a defined set of skills.

As with anything that needs to be said — and isn’t being heard by the people in power — there’s a temptation to keep saying it. But because we’ve been reminded so often of those two basic contentions aboutplay, I’d like to offer five other propositions on the subject that seem less obvious, or at least less frequently discussed.

1. “Play” is being sneakily redefined. Whenever an educational concept begins to attract favorable attention, its name will soon be invoked by people (or institutions) even when what they’re doing represents a diluted, if not thoroughly distorted, version of the original idea. Much that has been billed as “progressive,” “authentic,” “balanced,” “developmental,” “student-centered,” “hands on,” “differentiated,” or “discovery based” turns out to be discouragingly traditional. So it is with play: “Most of the activities set up in ‘choice time’ or ‘center time’ [in early-childhood classrooms] and described as play by some teachers, are in fact teacher-directed and involve little or no free play, imagination, or creativity,” as the Alliance for Childhood’s Ed Miller put it.[2] Thus, the frequency with which people still talk about play shouldn’t lead us to conclude that all is well.



2. Younger and older children ought to have the chance to play together. Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, points out that older kids are uniquely able to provide support — often referred to as “scaffolding” — for younger kids in mixed-age play. The older children may perform this role even better than adults because they’re closer in age to the younger kids and also because they don’t “see themselves as responsible for the younger children’s long-term education [and therefore] typically don’t provide more information or boosts than the younger ones need. They don’t become boring or condescending.”[3]



3. Play isn’t just for children. The idea of play is closely related to imagination, inventiveness, and that state of deep absorption that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dubbed “flow.” Read virtually any account of creativity, in the humanities or the sciences, and you’ll find mentions of the relevance of daydreaming, fooling around with possibilities, looking at one thing and seeing another, embracing the joy of pure discovery, asking “What if….?” The argument here isn’t just that we need to let little kids play so they’ll be creative when they’re older, but that play, or something quite close to it, should be part of a teenager’s or adult’s life, too.[4]



4. The point of play is that it has no point. I didn’t know whether to laugh or shudder when I read this sentence in a national magazine: “Kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.”[5] But I will admit that I, too, sometimes catch myself trying to justify play in terms of its usefulness.

The problem is that to insist on its benefits risks violating the spirit, if not the very meaning, of play. In his classic work on the subject, Homo Ludens, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga described play as “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being ‘not serious’ but at the same absorbing the player intensely and utterly.” One plays because it’s fun to do so, not because of any instrumental advantage it may yield. The point isn’t to perform well or to master a skill, even though those things might end up happening. In G. K. Chesterton’s delightfully subversive aphorism, “If a thing is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing badly.”

Play, then, is about process, not product. It has no goal other than itself. And among the external goals that are inconsistent with play is a deliberate effort to do something better or faster than someone else. If you’re keeping score -- in fact, if you’re competing at all -- then what you’re doing isn’t play.

Implicit in all of this is something that John Dewey pointed out: “ ‘Play’ denotes the psychological attitude of the child, not … anything which the child externally does.” As is so often the case, focusing on someone’s behavior, that which can be seen and measured, tells us very little. It’s people’s goals (or, in this case, lack of goals), their perspectives and experiences of the situation that matter. Thus, Dewey continues, “any given or prescribed system” or activities for promoting play should be viewed skeptically lest these be inconsistent with the whole idea.[6]

Such is the context for understanding well-meaning folks (like me) whose lamentations about diminishing opportunities for play tend to include a defensive list of its practical benefits. Play is “children’s work!” Play teaches academic skills, advances language development, promotes perspective taking, conflict resolution, the capacity for planning, and so on. To drive the point home, Deborah Meier wryly suggested that we stop using the word play altogether and declare that children need time for “self-initiated cognitive activity.”

But what if we had reason to doubt some or all of these advantages? What if, as a couple of researchers have indeed suggested, empirical claims about what children derive from play — at least in terms of academic benefits — turned out to be overstated?[7] Would we then conclude that children shouldn’t be able to play, or should have less time to do so? Or would we insist that play is intrinsically valuable, that it’s not only defined by the absence of external goals for those who do it but that it doesn’t need external benefits in order for children to have the opportunity to do it? Anyone who endorses that position would want to be very careful about defending play based on its alleged payoffs, just as we’d back off from other bargains with the devil, such as arguing that teaching music to children improves their proficiency at math, or that a given progressive innovation raises test scores.

5. Play isn’t the only alternative to “work.” I’ve never been comfortable using the word work to describe the process by which children make sense of ideas — which is to say, adopting a metaphor derived from what adults do in factories and offices to earn money.[8] To express this concern, however, isn’t tantamount to saying that students should spend all day in school playing. Work and play don’t exhaust the available options. There’s also learning, whose primary purpose is neither play-like enjoyment (although it can be deeply satisfying) nor work-like completion of products (although it can involve intense effort and concentration). It’s not necessary to work in order to experience challenge or excellence, and it’s not necessary to play in order to experience pleasure.

But there’s still a need for pure play. And that need isn’t being met.


NOTES

1. See the work of the Alliance for Childhood, statements by theNational Association for the Education of Young Children, and such recent books as Deborah Meier et al.’s Playing for Keeps , Dorothy Singer et al.’s Play = Learning , Vivian Gussin Paley’s A Child’s Work , and David Elkind’s The Power of Play .

2. Miller is quoted in Linda Jacobson, “Children’s Lack of Playtime Seen as Troubling Health, School Issue,” Education Week, December 3, 2008. A few years later, Elizabeth Graue, a professor of early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin, made exactly the same point: “What counts as play in many classrooms are highly controlled centers that focus on particular content labeled as ‘choice’ but that are really directed at capturing a specific content-based learning experience, such as number bingo or retelling a story exactly as the teacher told it on a flannel board” (“Are We Paving Paradise?”,Educational Leadership, April 2011, p. 15).

3. See Gray’s article “The Value of Age-Mixed Play,” Education Week, April 16, 2008, pp. 32, 26.

4. One of many resources on this topic: the National Institute for Play (nifplay.org), founded by Dr. Stuart Brown. Also, if you ever have the opportunity to see Saul Bass’s short documentary film Why Man Creates (1968), don’t miss it.

5. Paul Tough, “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?” New York Times Magazine, September 27, 2009.

6. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915/1990), pp. 118-19.

7. For example, see the reference to work by Peter K. Smith and Angeline Lillard in Tom Bartlett, “The Case for Play,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2011.

8. Alfie Kohn, “Students Don’t ‘Work’ -- They Learn,” Education Week, September 3, 1997.

Everything I know about engagement I learned in kindergarten

This was written by Doug Johnson who is a K-12 teacher who is the Director of Libraries and Technology for the Mankato, Minnesota Public Schools. Johnson blogs here. This is an excerpt from a post found here. For an entertaining read, check out Johnson's freely admitted personal biases.

by Doug Johnson

In kindergarten you get:

• Show and tell. You got to do something or bring something and then tell others about it. Secondary skill attainment measurement needs to be less about testing and more about show and tell performance-based assessment. Oh, and listening to other students is a lot more involving than listening to the old person in the room.

• Choices. As a little kid you often got to choose - your library book, your reading buddy, your activity, the subject of your drawing. People tend to choose things that interest them and interesting things are engaging. How often do we let older students choose?

• Play. Elementary teachers can make a game out of almost anything - and make just about every task feel like play. The older we get, the less we get to play and more we have to work. Just why is that? Gamification is a fancy term for putting play back into the curriculum. Look it up.

• Naps. Most adolescents I know are tired - and not because they've been up all night texting. (Well, maybe that's part of it.) We've long known that teens do better when school starts later in the morning. Tired people have a tough time staying engaged.

• To go outside. The best learning takes place in the "real world" not in the classroom. Whether it is studying bugs and leaves in first grade, marching with the band in junior high, or doing service learning as seniors, we all are more interested when it is the real world with which we are dealing.

• Colors. A blank sheet of construction paper and some crayolas have always let young learners be creative. Creativity is inherently engaging. What's the high school classroom's equivilant to scissors and paste? 

• To do it together. Reading groups. Play groups. Science groups. It's better with other kids. Social learners are engaged learners.

• Reading for enjoyment. Our elementary teachers and librarians want us to practice reading so much they let us read what we like! Do our secondary teachers want us to write so much, know so much, experiment so much, and solve problems so much that we get to do it for enjoyment?

• Learning that's important. Nobody needs to convince a little kid that learning to read, to add and subtract, or to know about firemen is important. And that you should pay attention when being taught these things. Calculus, world history, the Romantic poets, the atomic structure of non-metals, not so much. If you can't convince me what you are teaching should be important to me, teach something that is.

• Care. OK, this should have been the first one. I really believe a lot little kids are engaged because they know someone cares that they are. Yeah, the littlies are cute and cuddly and all that, but the gangly, awkward, homely teens need to know adults care too. When someone else is paying attention to you, you pay more attention yourself.

There you are - 10 simple steps to keep the engagement level from tanking.

"Daddy, I want a book buck!"

Most nights before bed, Kayley and I read together. Because she's 5, I typically do the majority of the reading to her; however, she's learning to read by looking at the pictures and watching and listening to me read. She's also starting to identify a couple words like her name. And even more importantly, Kayley already loves to read.

When I ask her if she wants to read with me, she almost always says, "yes", and when I ask her why she wants to read with me, she almost always says "because its fun!"

From the beginning, we've worked really hard to inspire a love for reading with Kayley by stocking our house full of books, modelling reading for our own enjoyment and reading to and with her almost every day, especially before bed.

But something changed.

Last night I asked, "Kayley do you want to read before bed time?"

She said, "Yes," and added, "I want a book buck."

I asked, "What's a book buck?"

She said, "If I read 5 books, I get 5 book bucks at school."

I asked, "Why do you want book bucks?"

"Because I get toys."

I decided to let this go for the moment, so we could read the book she brought from school. While I read, I could tell that she really enjoyed it. She got excited during the exciting parts and nervous during the nervous parts. We both smiled and laughed while we made our way through the book.

When we were done, I asked, "Did you like that book?"

"Yes!"

"Why did you like it?"

"Because I'm going to get a book buck! Did you like it, daddy?"

"Yes."

"Why did you like it, dad?"

"I liked it because it was fun and we spent time together reading."

"Dad, I'm going to get a book buck, and I'll get one for you, too."

She went to bed.

I didn't.

Instead, I spent the rest of the evening writing this and thinking. Here's what I thought about:

• Before Kayley went to school she said she read because she liked to read with me and it was fun, but now she says she likes to read because she wants book bucks. I'm not okay that book bucks and toys are competing for my daughter's motivation for reading with me.

• There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic; and these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. Grow someone's extrinsic motivation and watch their intrinsic motivation wither away and vice versa.

• Some claim that incentive programs can help get kids interested in reading, but even if that we're true, Kayley is already interested in reading and there is evidence that the book bucks are actually having a negative effect.

• Motivation matters. There is a big difference between wanting to read a book because the characters are cool and you can't wait to turn the page versus wanting to read a book because you can't wait to get your hands on a reward or avoid a punishment.
• We have worked really hard to inspire a love for reading with Kayley. We have the best of intentions for her.

• The school really wants to encourage parents to play an active role in helping their children read so they use incentive programs like "book bucks". They have the best of intentions for students.

• However, despite our mutual best intentions, I think it's pretty clear that there's a problem here. Does Kayley still love to read with me. Yes. Is her love for reading instantly destroyed. Of course not. However, reading for its own sake has been something that we've worked on for 5 years but now she's distracted by book bucks and toys. Is this good for Kayley?

• If the school's incentive plan undermines a child's intrinsic desire to go on reading for the sake of reading, what should a parent do?

What would you do?

Opting out of Grading (Revised)

Sometime ago I wrote a post called Opting out of Grading, and since then I have received 50+ comments. Some of the comments were supportive, some were angry, some were sympathetic, some were offended, some were dismissive, some were reflective and some were helpful.

One of the many reasons I blog is so that I can learn from others and rethink my own understandings. In light of the comments, I've revised the letter that I drafted to my children's teacher about opting them out of grading.

The first thing that I learned from the comments was that I would have a face to face conversation with my children's teacher before I would ever give them this letter. Because I plan on having a face to face meeting, I actually won't likely need to submit the letter. But I would use it as a guide for the conversation.

In light of some of the comments, I've also revised the my letter and talking points so that it takes less of an adversarial tone and more of a collaborative one.

A huge thank you to Jennifer Borgioli for helping me with many of the revisions. Here is a sample letter that could be used to guide a discussion between parent and teacher.

Dear teacher, 

Margaret loves to learn and is very excited to start school this year. I am writing to you about an issue I have wrestled with, thought deeply about, and spent hours researching and discussing. 

Because the case against grades has a wealth of anecdotal evidence and scientific research, I am requesting that when it comes time to providing Margaret feedback on her learning, I'd like to request that you rely on written or spoken feedback that focuses on her learning rather than a grade. If you need to generate a grade, I'd like to ask that you leave that grade off of Margaret's work. If feedback does not make sense, it's okay with me to send home her work with no comments or grade. I am happy to let the evidence of her learning speak for itself. 

As a family that plays an active role in our daughter's learning, the best feedback I can receive about Margaret's learning is to see her learning. 

If you are interested in learning more about the case against grades, I would be happy to provide you with these resources, and if your school's assessment and reporting policies make this request problematic, I would like the opportunity to discuss this further.

I look forward to working with you to support Margaret's natural intrinsic desire to go on learning. 

Sincerely, 

I'm nervous and afraid

Chris Lehmann tweeted:

How many of us are afraid that school will get in the way of our own children’s passions and love of learning?

My response:

I am. Kayley starts kindergarten in September. I'm nervous.

I'm still trying to formulate how I'm going to communicate my concerns about the traditional elements of school without coming across as a crazy parent.

How about you?

Holding K-12 Hostage

When I ask people to think about why we grade students, they tend to provide three reasons:

1. Motivate students
2. Rank and Sort students
3. Provide feedback for students

In short, we have no business using grades to do number 1 or 2 and grading has never done a good job of 3. I've written more about this here.

A fourth rational for grading comes up regularly. In fact, you might have even made this argument:

We need testsandgrades in K-12 so our children can get into post secondary education.

I have a couple responses:

• Some of the worst forms of teaching and learning exist in post secondary colleges and universities. The only anecdotal evidence we might need to prove this is for those who attended post secondary to remember their experiences in lecture halls that could fit 50 to 400 students at a time. Holding K-12 hostage to such pathetic standards seems irresponsible.

• While it's true that some universities look at some of the grades from a student's high school transcript, how many universities look at a student's grades from elementary? Middle school? or even grade 11? Because the only grades that post-secondary institutions look at is from the final year of high school, K-11 can and should be liberated from the clutches of post-secondary's obsession with testsandgrades.

• I know more than a couple university professors and I know a president of a local college, and I know that they would all far rather K-12 focus less on testsandgrades and more on inspiring students to have a love for learning. In other words, university folk understand that "a preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but detrimental to, a focus on learning." (Alfie Kohn). The research confirms that an orientation towards improving your learning, rather than proving it sets children up for the most success. In learning oriented classrooms, students are less worried about looking smart and more about becoming smart. The most successful teachers and students understand that proving how good you are over and over again is an inferior use of your time especially when you could be using your time getting better.

• We have a dangerous pre-occupation with preparation. College does not begin in kindergarten -- kindergarten begins in kindergarten. Children in middle school are not simply miniature versions of high school or university students. Children of all ages have their own unique, individual needs. What might be appropriate for a high school student might be developmentally inappropriate for a middle or elementary student.

• In Alberta, only one-third of students attend university. Does it make sense to mold K-12 public education, which is for everyone, in the image of post-secondary education where  two-thirds of our students will not attend.

To sum up, I'm sick and tired of being told I can't innovate and improve my assessment practices in K-12 because of post secondary's archaic grading practices.