Redding School District

Partnership Educators,

Educators, at least the ones that I know, have always held the premise that educational attainment is the great equalizer.  People from all walks of life can get where they want to go by using learning as the vehicle to get them there.

I remember wanting to be a professional baseball player as a young child.  I was a fairly good player.  I was a shortstop and hit the ball well enough to make all-star teams.  I was confident, and I have to admit, a bit cocky in my approach towards my sport.  Looking back, I really didn’t understand what it took to be a professional baseball player.  I just knew I liked doing it, I was fairly good at it, and I thought as most kids do about future plans, that if you were good enough you just become one.   No surprise to you but I didn’t become a professional baseball player. 

Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania researcher, would say that this is the difference between motivation and volition.  Think of it this way,  I was extremely motivated to becoming a professional baseball player.  Playing a game for a living, traveling, and making lots of money;  “Ok that sounds great, let’s do that.”  However, I didn’t have the volition, will power or self-control to put in the necessary 10,000 hours of training, Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, that it would take to achieve my dream.  Gladwell’s work might further suggest that I also didn’t have the access to be able to fulfill the 10,000 hours of training it would take.  Nor did I understand the pathway to get there.  

Another example is my never-ending journey to keep my weight down.  I am highly motivated, to do so because I run and carrying around extra weight doesn't make it easier.  However, I don’t seem to possess the necessary volition to keep my weight down, because I order greasy foods when we go out to eat. So the following questions are; A.Why is it the case that we can’t follow our motivation? B. How might this inform our practices?  If our premise is correct, about education being the great equalizer, then we should consider some very compelling information about how to help kids have hope, skills, and learning techniques that can help their motivation go beyond unfulfilled statements.

Character Education became vogue in the ’90s with President Clinton’s call for character education in our schools.  Some of us practice monthly character traits at our sites, we give rewards and awards to kids who demonstrate those traits.  I know, like many of you, I have not seen a great amount of personal evidence that this way of teaching character actually works in the long run.  I don’t think it is harming kids and definitely gives them words for some successful behaviors.  It also helps build a visually pleasing environment, but the characteristics of students are about the same as they were in the ’90s.  The field of social psychology states “that much of how we act and who we are reflects the situations in which we find ourselves.”  Set kids up for extended competitions with high stakes and you will elicit increased aggression and/or cheating. If people move to smaller towns, they will be more likely to help a stranger.  In fact, so common is the tendency to attribute to an individual’s personality or character what is actually a function of the social environment that social psychologists have dubbed this the “fundamental attribution error.”  It is about creating an environment that supports those traits that lead to high rates of success.

The late W. Edwards Deming, an author lecturer, is mostly associated with Total Quality Management ideas.  The heart of what Deming said is that the “system” of an organization largely determines the results.  Every system is built to get the exact results that they are getting.  In fact, the educational arm of Deming’s work trains on using strong relationships, learned self-reliance and data to transform classroom behaviors.   Deming, along with social psychologists, might suggest that transforming our school systems to support behaviors rather than to try and remake the students themselves is the way to build stronger character in our students.

Paul Tough’s book, How Children Succeed, talks about Martin Seligman’s work with learned optimism.  He frames it around the KIPP academy’s work in inner-city schools.  If you are not familiar with the KIPP program it is a college-preparatory, public charter program that was originally aimed at extremely low performing populations.  I can’t say I agree with all that they are doing, but it is relevant within this discussion.  David Levin, the founder of KIPP Academy, found that 

I am a runner.  Not someone who runs well but I do enjoy to run.  I have found that I struggle with getting out there on the trails and roads at various times of the year.  Most of the time I say it is too cold or too hot.  That’s right, excuses abound when it comes to actually practice my sport.   I am also a negative runner.  When I run I tend to count down what’s left rather than count up what I have already accomplished.  What I have found is that I do have long periods of time when I will dedicate myself to improvement.  These times come when I set a goal for my running and I have support in accomplishing it.  I ran a half-marathon about two years ago.  I practiced a lot, and at first, my mind kept asking, why I was torturing myself like this.  I couldn’t sustain the long runs, and I would just stop.  I wanted to quit many times, but I had a supportive group of people and coaches online who kept telling me I could do it.  Along the way, I had various setbacks, shin splints if I had to name one.  I also had some high points, I ran from Simpson College to the Shasta Lake City fountain one day and that was thrilling.  All along the journey, I had people supporting me, helping me and they believed I could do it.  Because of that supportive environment, I believed I could do it, even when my original workouts kept telling me I couldn’t.  Finally, it was the little successes all along the way that gave me greater hope that I could do it.  Carol Dweck’s work might say that I was developing a growth mindset towards my running.  During the half-marathon, I fell 10 minutes short of my time goal, but I made the finishing goal.  Now I register for running events throughout the year to keep myself motivated and running.  For those of you who are looking at me saying, “He’s a runner?” remember my earlier struggles with foods?  I am working on it.

Hope is an interesting construct.  None of those things discussed above are directly related to hope but they are all components of why people have hope.  The definition of hope is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.”  The late Dr. C.R. Snyder, professor of social psychology and leading specialist in hope, represents hope as an ability to conceptualize goals, find pathways to these goals despite obstacles, and have the motivation to use those pathways.  To put it simply we feel hope when we a) know what we want, b) can think of a range of ways to get there, and c) start and keep going.

My current belief around helping students achieve better behavior and/or character, for that matter higher learning, in our schools, revolves around students' abilities to have a future hope.  When “we know what we want”, the first condition of hope, we set goals around those interests or we start to make a personal identity that we have for ourselves.  What might that look like?  We need to help kids learn about themselves and set goals around who they are.  Using character building as the main focus of lessons and building experiences that help kids grapple with the concepts you are exploring is important.  Making these character concepts as important as the content that you are teaching might make a difference in the outcomes of both things.  Putting kids in experiences where they are forced to work together and work through conflict only helps them get better at working through conflict.  We need to truly teach character like we teach reading.  Some students come with these skills, techniques and this knowledge but many more don’t.  We also may need to engage kids in the discussion of what effort means and then have them actively evaluate their own effort as compared to their achievement.  Maybe that is an effort rubric that students and staff develop together?  

The second condition is thinking of ways to get to the goals.  What did David Levin say about KIPP kids who were successful college completers?  They were students who “persisted” had “optimism” and “resilience” and would seek “extra help”.  As we learned above, these are all learnable skills for students.  Fully implementing an environment where we are connecting to kids using Capturing Kids Hearts can help students develop resilience and persistence.  But we also need to give them the academic words to use when trying to work on their character.  How can we use our connections to help students learn to deal with failure for moving forward?  The effort rubric study might help students use the term “not yet” when students don’t seem to demonstrate learning.  Teaching students what seeking help looks like, and how they can know when they are getting help.  Conan O'Brien, a writer comedian, said, "I really hated getting feedback on my writing when I first started and I realized really quickly that I couldn't be a writer if I didn't like feedback."  Learning by experience is the only way, but Conan notes that it was the conversations with his mentor, Lorne Michaels, who first told him this.  

The last condition is starting and to keep going.  The motivation of students is about little successes and feedback tied to mindset.  Students who see failure as a learning opportunity and actually believe the school can help them change their learning outcome will keep them going.   The Schlechty Center on engagement would say that students need to see that the effort is worth the accomplishment and that they still feel that they can accomplish it with help and guidance.

Deming’s work suggests that in order to help all students learn these important life lessons the system must change.  The lessons from social psychology say that our character is “actually a function of the social environment we are in.”  Building a strong supportive environment that truly changes the construct of social behavior on a campus will not only help the behavior we face each day, but it will help students achieve more on the content they are charged with.  It is going to take continued trial and error of focused educators studying those skills, attitudes, techniques, and knowledge that students need and then coupling them with work that they find value in doing.  We will make mistakes and have some profound successes while we work to build a system that supports all students learning, and build those attributes within our students that will truly make a difference.  We can’t change kids into who we want them to be.  All we can do is create a social environment that helps them choose those behaviors that will get them to where they want to go.  

We will be rolling out the "Portrait of a Graduate" traits that we developed through a four-month process with 75 community members involved.   These are traits that I know you will agree we can start focusing on for our students and find ways for them to learn them through our learning processes at our schools.  More to come on that.

Have a fantastic week off.

Rob