Parents Have Homework Too.
“No gift is too costly (or too hard to obtain) for a parent to give his child.”
No parent would choose to give his or her child an inferior gift, or a gift that would be harmful in any way. The gift of a good education is a most valuable one. What can parents do to contribute their part to this gift? The teachers (school) have one very important part. The child has a very important part. Parents have an equally important part. Without the parent’s part, the education will not measure up.
In short, parents have homework. The home is where it all begins. Parents are the head of the home. The head of the home provides, teaches, reinforces, and enforces. If the head of the home does not fulfill its obligations, no other agency can fill in the gap. The child carries with him/her everything that is absorbed in the home. First of all, parents must supply the basic needs of the infant, including food, shelter, clothing, love, and security. By the time the child has reached school age, parents have done lots and lots of “homework.” However, the assignment is just beginning.
When the child begins school, the parent’s role takes on a new dimension, that of enhancing the “formal education.” That is, the education that is provided by the school. A parent’s role in the education of his child has many dimensions. A parent’s “homework” carries with it many responsibilities. These responsibilities include keeping the proper attitude toward education and school, supporting/helping your child, setting healthy priorities, consistency in discipline, rewards and consequences, open communication, helping with work missed during sickness, being active in school matters, and controlling your child’s school attendance.
Attitude. It begins with attitude. If you have a positive attitude toward school in general, your child will also have a positive attitude. If you have concerns about the school or the teacher, be very careful how you voice these concerns in front of your child. Your child will pick up on your attitude, adopt it as his or her own, and take it to school. Negative and apathetic attitudes are at the root of a large portion of discipline problems at school.
Support. Your child cannot go it alone. When he or she has a particular assignment that may require special help or supplies, you are the one s/he turns to for help. Be there with all the support and help possible. There may come a time when your child will need extra help on school work. If you cannot provide this help, speak to your child’s teacher about it. There may be some remedial materials, or the teacher may be able to help you and your child work through the problem. You may consider outside help, such as a tutor. Arranging the schedule in the home to accommodate quality “homework” time/place is one aspect of support. Your child will need to feel secure in the fact that you will be there helping.
Priorities. In order for education to come out on top, it must be given top priority. This must be a true commitment in light of the many interesting and beneficial activities that are available for the youngsters. These include sports, scouts, music/dance lessons, and other activities. Too many activities will bring down the educational level of your child. This should be closely monitored during the school year.
Consistency. Whatever your methods of discipline, consequences, and household management, consistency is the key. When you promise a consequence, follow through. Be firm. Try not to be influenced by your child’s persuasive tactics. Children consistently test authority. Be prepared to follow through each time. Results, while not always immediate, will be forthcoming. Children are just that – children. Although they are learning to accept some responsibility, they are not yet adults, and should not be treated as such. This is their time in life to learn things like consistency and priorities, and it is your “homework” to instill these qualities in your child. Children need to know that their poor choices create consequences.
Rewards and Consequences. Worthwhile rewards may help reinforce responsible actions. However, rewards do not have to be in the form of costly material gifts. Rewards may be in the form of time spent together, a special word of praise, or a chance to skip a chore. Just let your child know how proud you are of him/her. Consequences should fit the misbehavior as much as possible, and should be done immediately, when possible. Try not to become emotional when you discipline your child, and be sure to let the incident go. “Forgive and forget.” If you remain hostile toward your child after disciplining him/her, you are distancing yourself from your child. Make sure you are still “available” to your child.
Communication with your child. Talk with your child. Listen to your child. Make casual comments about what he/she is saying to show that you are listening. Do not “put words” in his/her mouth about what went on in class. If your child has an unpleasant story to tell you, do not make it worse for him/her by becoming visibly upset. This will only upset the child even more. Let your child tell the story in his or her own way, in his or her own time. If you resort to an “interrogation”, you will likely get the story from a biased point of view. If the problem persists, call or write the teacher.
Communication with your child’s teacher. Keep the lines of communication open. Check your child’s agenda daily. This is the teacher’s best method of communicating with you. Always go to the teacher with any problems before going to the principal. You and the teacher are on the same side – the side of your child. The teacher wants your child to succeed. Make a friend of the teacher.
Missed Work. If your child is absent due to an illness, he or she may need extra attention from you in order to get caught up on assignments missed. Your child most likely has a given number of days to get the work done and turned in. If the illness is prolonged, you may call the school for assignments, but be sure to make every effort to see that the work is actually done. This extra effort on the part of your child’s teachers is very time consuming, and the time is taken from their planning or from their classes. This practice is one that is encouraged if you plan to see that your child does the work. If you have an occasion in which your child cannot complete a daily assignment because of a family emergency, write a note to the teacher asking for a one day extension. It is likely that your child will have consequences at school for missing work. “Homework” for the parents is to instill the importance of school assignments in your children.
Be involved. Show your child that you want to be involved in his or her school. Whenever you get notification of a school meeting, or a school need, show that you are interested. Participate in various activities at school. If there is a school event, show up with your child.
Child’s Attendance. You, as the parent have the power to control your child’s attendance, including being on time. Poor attendance and tardiness directly affect a child’s school success in numerous ways, emotionally as well as scholastically. Please understand that signing out is the same as being absent. Your child will miss vital instruction. Instruction continues up until dismissal. When you sign your child out unnecessarily, you are telling your child that school doesn’t matter. Restrict sign outs to sickness of the child, or a true family emergency. “Homework” for you as the parent is to keep your child in school.
Yes, parents have “homework”. Your homework continues as long as you are responsible for your child. Without your part, your child’s school experience will not be all that it can be. Together, let’s prepare the “Gift” of education for your child!
Read more at http://www.smartclassroommanagement.com/2010/06/26/classroom-management-plan/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Showing posts with label Child. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Child. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary
Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ordinary and extraordinary lately. All year, my sons’ school newsletters were filled with stories about students winning prizes for university-level scientific research, stellar musical accomplishments and statewide athletic laurels.
I wonder if there is any room for the ordinary any more, for the child or teenager — or adult — who enjoys a pickup basketball game but is far from Olympic material, who will be a good citizen but won’t set the world on fire.
We hold so dearly onto the idea that we should all aspire to being remarkable that when David McCullough Jr., an English teacher, told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts recently, “You are not special. You are not exceptional,” the speech went viral.
“In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement,” he told the students and parents. “We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.”
I understand that Mr. McCullough, son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is telling these high school seniors that the world might not embrace them as unconditionally as their parents have. That just because they’ve been told they’re amazing doesn’t mean that they are. That they have to do something to prove themselves, not just accept compliments and trophies.
So where did this intense need to be exceptional come from?
Madeline Levine, a psychologist, said that for baby boomers, “the notion of being special is in our blood.” She added: “How could our children be anything but? And future generations kept building on that.”
More recently, parents seem to be increasingly anxious that there just isn’t going to be enough — enough room at good colleges or graduate schools or the top companies — for even the straight-A, piano-playing quarterback, and we end up convinced that being average will doom our children to a life that will fall far short of what we want for them. As Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work and author of the book “The Gifts of Imperfection” (Hazelden, 2010) said, “In this world, an ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life.”
And that’s a problem. Because “extraordinary is often what the general public views as success,” said Jeff Snipes, co-founder of PDI Ninth House, a corporate leadership consulting firm. “You make a lot of money or have athletic success. That’s a very, very narrow definition. What about being compassionate or living a life of integrity?”
Ordinary and normal smack too much of average. It seems that we all want to live in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average.
Ms. Levine said she was once scheduled to give a talk on parenting the average child at a school in Marin County, Calif. Although she usually packs in the audiences, not one person showed up.
“Apparently no one in the county has an average child,” said Ms. Levine, the author of the forthcoming book, “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success” (HarperCollins).
While there are some extraordinary children out there, the myth is that all children in high school will be like that, she said. And that, Ms. Levine said, is putting enormous stress on students.
Most people, she said, have talent in some areas, are average performers in many areas and are subpar in some areas.
The problem is that we have such a limited view of what we consider an accomplished life that we devalue many qualities that are critically important.
“We would do kids a great service if we opened the tent a little more,” Ms. Levine said.
The Toronto Star did that in March 2012 when it printed a column about Shelagh Gordon, who recently died of a brain aneurysm, with the headline, “Shelagh was here — an ordinary, magical life.” At the same time, The Star ran online interviews with more than 100 people whose life had been touched by the 55-year-old Ms. Gordon.
Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/your-money/redefining-success-and-celebrating-the-unremarkable.html?_r=1&ref=education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ordinary and extraordinary lately. All year, my sons’ school newsletters were filled with stories about students winning prizes for university-level scientific research, stellar musical accomplishments and statewide athletic laurels.
I wonder if there is any room for the ordinary any more, for the child or teenager — or adult — who enjoys a pickup basketball game but is far from Olympic material, who will be a good citizen but won’t set the world on fire.
We hold so dearly onto the idea that we should all aspire to being remarkable that when David McCullough Jr., an English teacher, told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts recently, “You are not special. You are not exceptional,” the speech went viral.
“In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement,” he told the students and parents. “We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.”
I understand that Mr. McCullough, son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is telling these high school seniors that the world might not embrace them as unconditionally as their parents have. That just because they’ve been told they’re amazing doesn’t mean that they are. That they have to do something to prove themselves, not just accept compliments and trophies.
So where did this intense need to be exceptional come from?
Madeline Levine, a psychologist, said that for baby boomers, “the notion of being special is in our blood.” She added: “How could our children be anything but? And future generations kept building on that.”
More recently, parents seem to be increasingly anxious that there just isn’t going to be enough — enough room at good colleges or graduate schools or the top companies — for even the straight-A, piano-playing quarterback, and we end up convinced that being average will doom our children to a life that will fall far short of what we want for them. As Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work and author of the book “The Gifts of Imperfection” (Hazelden, 2010) said, “In this world, an ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life.”
And that’s a problem. Because “extraordinary is often what the general public views as success,” said Jeff Snipes, co-founder of PDI Ninth House, a corporate leadership consulting firm. “You make a lot of money or have athletic success. That’s a very, very narrow definition. What about being compassionate or living a life of integrity?”
Ordinary and normal smack too much of average. It seems that we all want to live in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average.
Ms. Levine said she was once scheduled to give a talk on parenting the average child at a school in Marin County, Calif. Although she usually packs in the audiences, not one person showed up.
“Apparently no one in the county has an average child,” said Ms. Levine, the author of the forthcoming book, “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success” (HarperCollins).
While there are some extraordinary children out there, the myth is that all children in high school will be like that, she said. And that, Ms. Levine said, is putting enormous stress on students.
Most people, she said, have talent in some areas, are average performers in many areas and are subpar in some areas.
The problem is that we have such a limited view of what we consider an accomplished life that we devalue many qualities that are critically important.
“We would do kids a great service if we opened the tent a little more,” Ms. Levine said.
The Toronto Star did that in March 2012 when it printed a column about Shelagh Gordon, who recently died of a brain aneurysm, with the headline, “Shelagh was here — an ordinary, magical life.” At the same time, The Star ran online interviews with more than 100 people whose life had been touched by the 55-year-old Ms. Gordon.
Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/your-money/redefining-success-and-celebrating-the-unremarkable.html?_r=1&ref=education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Why Your Kid Is Not Creative
Why Your Kid Isn't Creative.
Most parents want their kids to be inventive and clever -- perhaps even the next Steve Jobs. But parents also want their kids to perform well by the standard measures of success. Prioritizing one of those pathways, it turns out, may close off the other.
In the new bestseller Imagine: How Creativity Works, journalist Jonah Lehrer synthesizes the latest scientific research into creativity and offers tips for how ordinary people can become more creative. It's a timely subject. Businesses increasingly value workers who can devise customized solutions to complex problems. And improvisation is a key skill for people who want a career of their own design, instead of one dictated by an increasingly cutthroat corporate sector.
The good news is that most people start out with healthy creative instincts, and virtually anybody can improve their creativity if they want to. The bad news is that our education system and social mores discourage creativity. "We're very good at killing creativity in kids," Lehrer told me in an interview. "We kill it with ruthless efficiency. The schools have twelve years to sculpt your mind, and they end up convincing kids that they're not creative."
There's nothing new about the way pragmatic concerns and conformity displace playfulness and originality as kids mature. "Every child is an artist," Pablo Picasso once said. "The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
What is new is the emphasis schools place on rote learning, memorization, and especially standardized tests, which generate a kind of assembly-line uniformity to what kids learn in school. Creativity, by contrast, requires qualities that schools tend to discourage, such as daydreaming, uninhibited curiosity, hands-on experimentation and an unstructured, permissive environment.
Lehrer profiles one highly successful school, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where there are no textbooks or lectures, and kids spend most of their time working with music, art, theater or whatever their vocation is. Most schools don't operate that way, of course. It's also worth pointing out that many parents would be uncomfortable sending their kids to such an unorthodox place.
Lehrer also highlights one important theme I came across while researching my own book, Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success: the importance of letting kids fail. He describes a phenomenon known as the "fourth-grade slump," a point at which students suddenly start to censor their creative impulses. What happens is kids become more self-aware as they mature, and more eager to conform to social norms. They'd rather avoid something difficult than risk the embarrassment that might come from failing at it. They start to regard improvising as risky, suppressing their creativity. "This is why it's so important to practice letting ourselves go," Lehrer writes.
There are solutions, of course. Many parents instinctively want to "fix" the schools so that they do everything well: Teach the skills that society values most, while also teaching the creativity that will let kids stand out as adults. But that's not realistic. Most schools are appendages of a bureaucracy that serves many interests. They're capable of doing some things competently, but expecting excellence for all is a stretch.
This might be one job parents should handle themselves, instead of outsourcing it to the schools. We can start by tolerating, even encouraging, the kind of daydreaming and intellectual meandering that we too readily label attention-deficit disorder, as if it's a defect. Sometimes it's not. Parents who don't feel they're personally creative can find creative mentors for their kids outside the schools - -writers or artists or designers who seem to have an inventive knack. And exposing kids to many different things is crucially important, since creativity often happens when people connect seemingly disparate ideas, the way the Wright Brothers got the idea for an airplane by wondering if a bicycle could fly.
Lehrer invokes a maxim popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth: Choose easy, work hard. That means giving kids the freedom to discover something they truly love, while making sure they know it takes diligence and grit to succeed at their passion. "It's going to involve failure," says Lehrer. "You have to be able to put in the work." The rewards may be well worth it.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-newman/creativity_b_1451850.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Most parents want their kids to be inventive and clever -- perhaps even the next Steve Jobs. But parents also want their kids to perform well by the standard measures of success. Prioritizing one of those pathways, it turns out, may close off the other.
In the new bestseller Imagine: How Creativity Works, journalist Jonah Lehrer synthesizes the latest scientific research into creativity and offers tips for how ordinary people can become more creative. It's a timely subject. Businesses increasingly value workers who can devise customized solutions to complex problems. And improvisation is a key skill for people who want a career of their own design, instead of one dictated by an increasingly cutthroat corporate sector.
The good news is that most people start out with healthy creative instincts, and virtually anybody can improve their creativity if they want to. The bad news is that our education system and social mores discourage creativity. "We're very good at killing creativity in kids," Lehrer told me in an interview. "We kill it with ruthless efficiency. The schools have twelve years to sculpt your mind, and they end up convincing kids that they're not creative."
There's nothing new about the way pragmatic concerns and conformity displace playfulness and originality as kids mature. "Every child is an artist," Pablo Picasso once said. "The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
What is new is the emphasis schools place on rote learning, memorization, and especially standardized tests, which generate a kind of assembly-line uniformity to what kids learn in school. Creativity, by contrast, requires qualities that schools tend to discourage, such as daydreaming, uninhibited curiosity, hands-on experimentation and an unstructured, permissive environment.
Lehrer profiles one highly successful school, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where there are no textbooks or lectures, and kids spend most of their time working with music, art, theater or whatever their vocation is. Most schools don't operate that way, of course. It's also worth pointing out that many parents would be uncomfortable sending their kids to such an unorthodox place.
Lehrer also highlights one important theme I came across while researching my own book, Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success: the importance of letting kids fail. He describes a phenomenon known as the "fourth-grade slump," a point at which students suddenly start to censor their creative impulses. What happens is kids become more self-aware as they mature, and more eager to conform to social norms. They'd rather avoid something difficult than risk the embarrassment that might come from failing at it. They start to regard improvising as risky, suppressing their creativity. "This is why it's so important to practice letting ourselves go," Lehrer writes.
There are solutions, of course. Many parents instinctively want to "fix" the schools so that they do everything well: Teach the skills that society values most, while also teaching the creativity that will let kids stand out as adults. But that's not realistic. Most schools are appendages of a bureaucracy that serves many interests. They're capable of doing some things competently, but expecting excellence for all is a stretch.
This might be one job parents should handle themselves, instead of outsourcing it to the schools. We can start by tolerating, even encouraging, the kind of daydreaming and intellectual meandering that we too readily label attention-deficit disorder, as if it's a defect. Sometimes it's not. Parents who don't feel they're personally creative can find creative mentors for their kids outside the schools - -writers or artists or designers who seem to have an inventive knack. And exposing kids to many different things is crucially important, since creativity often happens when people connect seemingly disparate ideas, the way the Wright Brothers got the idea for an airplane by wondering if a bicycle could fly.
Lehrer invokes a maxim popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth: Choose easy, work hard. That means giving kids the freedom to discover something they truly love, while making sure they know it takes diligence and grit to succeed at their passion. "It's going to involve failure," says Lehrer. "You have to be able to put in the work." The rewards may be well worth it.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-newman/creativity_b_1451850.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
The Global Search for Education Is Your Child an Innovator?
The Global Search for Education: Is Your Child an Innovator?
“The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation.” — President Barack Obama, January 25, 2011
Welcome to the Innovation Age. Today’s world will reward the most innovative young people. World leaders, business executives, educators, and policy makers have joined in the global debate on how we create the next generation of innovators. Even parents are asking themselves the question: “Is my child an Innovator?”
How do you train an innovator? Which schools are doing it better than others? Are teachers equipped with the new skills required to educate students in this decade? Are curricula incorporating the essential content that will help young people become more innovative? Are parents playing their part so as to ensure their children can face tomorrow’s challenges and ultimately lead richer, fuller lives?
In his must read new book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (Scribner, April 17, 2012), Dr. Tony Wagner, Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center, Harvard University, addresses these issues. I had the pleasure of chatting with him about the most talked about subject in education today.
There seems to be a wide range of what constitutes innovation, and innovation can also be a matter of degree. How do you define an innovator?
There are different kinds of innovation — incremental and disruptive — and so there are different degrees of the capacity to innovate. Not everyone can create brilliant “disruptive” products — products that transform a market as Steve Jobs and Apple have done. But many young people, given the right encouragement, can bring something extra to whatever they do — that spark of imagination and curiosity, which can lead to the creation of better products, services, and ideas. At its simplest, an innovator is someone who is a creative problem solver.
How do you train an Innovator?
We are born curious. We are born with imagination. The first challenge is to ensure that these very human qualities are not schooled out of us, as Sir Ken Robinson says. Beyond that, in my research, I identified five essential education and parenting practices that develop young people’s capacities to innovate:
1. Learning to work collaboratively (innovation is a team sport!).
2. Learning to understand problems from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
3. Learning to take risks and learn from mistakes.
4. Focusing on creating versus consuming.
5. Reinforcing the intrinsic motivations of play, passion, and purpose versus the extrinsic carrots and sticks.
Information may be free but knowledge also includes understanding, problem solving, communication, and collaboration, none of which is free. Many schools “teach” these aspects of human endeavor to some degree. How much of this is relevant to your model for creating innovators?
Knowledge has become a commodity and is free, like air or water. Knowledge is also changing and growing exponentially. Based on the old premise of knowledge scarcity, the assumption is that it is the job of the teacher to transmit knowledge to students. When only a few people had the knowledge, that model made some sense, but because knowledge has become a commodity, the world no longer cares what you know. That is, there is no competitive advantage today to knowing more than the person sitting next to you. The competitive advantage for someone going out into the world is what they can do with what they know. And this kind of learning needs to take place at all levels. Right now it is more common in some elementary schools where students do projects. The problem arises as students move up through school. While there is a lot of professed interest in teaching the so-called 21st century skills you mentioned, which I wrote about extensively in The Global Achievement Gap, in fact most teachers feel compelled to teach to the tests for accountability purposes—and increasingly so as their jobs may depend on students getting good test scores.
Some examples you’ve seen in better schools to nurture this kind of learning?
In Creating Innovators, I profile schools and colleges that are doing an outstanding job of educating young people to become innovators. In the better schools I visited (both high schools and colleges), in every single course, students have to produce real products for a real audience as a significant part of their academic experience. In one high school I visited, every student is required to do a team-based service learning project: to go out into the community, research a problem and then figure out a way to solve it. One student I interviewed was a part of a team that discovered there was a local food pantry that had a problem storing all of the food donated to it. And so the team went back to school and used a computer assisted design program to design a new storage system for the pantry. Then they returned and actually built it. What students need is practice in applying their learning to new situations, not just in the classroom, but in the community. Another example at the college level is the Olin College of Engineering, which requires students to spend an entire year working in teams to solve a problem in a corporate setting. It is what they call their Senior Capstone Project in Engineering. These approaches demand a radically different approach to teaching. Teaching students to apply what they have learned requires relinquishing a degree of teacher control, relying far less on textbooks, and encouraging students to take initiative and be responsible for their own learning. Teachers are no longer the experts; they must become coaches. Many teachers find these transitions very hard to make.
Teachers follow the accepted process required to get kids into good colleges — the colleges their parents and the kids think they should go to. Thoughts?
Things are changing more quickly than most people realize. Three points:
1. The Advanced Placement curriculum is already radically transforming all AP tests, beginning with AP Biology this year and then AP US History next year. They are moving towards students having to demonstrate that they can apply knowledge learned and not merely regurgitate it. So AP tests, which are themselves considered a gold standard, are redefining what is “rigor” and students will need a different kind of teaching to do well on these new tests.
2. There are now 750 colleges and universities that do not require any kind of test scores for admission. Last year, Tufts University became the first in the country to encourage students to submit YouTube videos with their applications, and they were stunned at the quality of work that was produced and how much more they learned about their applicants.
3. If you look at the CEO’s of most major companies, the majority did not go to an Ivy League school for undergraduate. What matters much more are what graduate school you go to and having had work-based internships where you have had to apply what you have learned. Being preoccupied with getting kids into top colleges, I think, is misplaced. Admission into “name brand” schools is more and more a matter of luck and no longer offers the competitive advantages it did 20 years ago. The push to get all A’s distorts the purpose of school and distracts from acquiring the skills that will give kids a real competitive edge.
For my new book I interviewed Joel Podolny, Vice President of Human Resources at Apple, who has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and he told me that to get into these kinds of schools you learn to play a game. A game of getting perfect scores, building a resume, etc. The problem is, if you have not learned how to collaborate, to take risks and learn from your mistakes, to create as opposed to consume — all the qualities that matter in the world of innovation — then companies like Apple will have no use for you.
To what extent is innovation capability a function of family and external influences?
These days, young people become innovators in spite of their schooling, rather than because of it. In my research, I found both parenting and teaching practices that strengthen the capacity to innovate — emphasizing discovery-based play, limiting screen time, encouraging young people to find and pursue their passion, take risks and learn from mistakes, and instilling a sense of the importance of “giving back” — these were all things that parents and teachers of young innovators encouraged.
What overall rating do you give the US Public School system for training innovators?
A grade of F. But it is not the teacher’s fault. They are not encouraged to innovate, and there is no funding for educational R&D. We must prepare teachers differently and develop lab schools for 21st century learning and teaching. Mostly importantly, we need to begin using much better assessments, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Assessment drives instruction, and having the wrong metric is worse than having none at all. Multiple choice, computer-scored test results tell us nothing about the quality of teaching or students’ college, career, and citizenship readiness. Every student should have a digital portfolio as a cumulative record of the development of his or her innovation skills. Finally, instead of preaching that all students should be “college-ready,” we should instead establish the goal of all students being “innovation-ready.” Young people don’t necessarily have to go to college to learn to innovate. Nearly half of Finland’s high school students choose a career and technical education track, rather than an academic track, and Finland has a higher innovation standing than the US.
Read more at http://www.educationnews.org/k-12-schools/the-global-search-for-education-is-your-child-an-innovator/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
“The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation.” — President Barack Obama, January 25, 2011
Welcome to the Innovation Age. Today’s world will reward the most innovative young people. World leaders, business executives, educators, and policy makers have joined in the global debate on how we create the next generation of innovators. Even parents are asking themselves the question: “Is my child an Innovator?”
How do you train an innovator? Which schools are doing it better than others? Are teachers equipped with the new skills required to educate students in this decade? Are curricula incorporating the essential content that will help young people become more innovative? Are parents playing their part so as to ensure their children can face tomorrow’s challenges and ultimately lead richer, fuller lives?
In his must read new book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (Scribner, April 17, 2012), Dr. Tony Wagner, Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center, Harvard University, addresses these issues. I had the pleasure of chatting with him about the most talked about subject in education today.
There seems to be a wide range of what constitutes innovation, and innovation can also be a matter of degree. How do you define an innovator?
There are different kinds of innovation — incremental and disruptive — and so there are different degrees of the capacity to innovate. Not everyone can create brilliant “disruptive” products — products that transform a market as Steve Jobs and Apple have done. But many young people, given the right encouragement, can bring something extra to whatever they do — that spark of imagination and curiosity, which can lead to the creation of better products, services, and ideas. At its simplest, an innovator is someone who is a creative problem solver.
How do you train an Innovator?
We are born curious. We are born with imagination. The first challenge is to ensure that these very human qualities are not schooled out of us, as Sir Ken Robinson says. Beyond that, in my research, I identified five essential education and parenting practices that develop young people’s capacities to innovate:
1. Learning to work collaboratively (innovation is a team sport!).
2. Learning to understand problems from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
3. Learning to take risks and learn from mistakes.
4. Focusing on creating versus consuming.
5. Reinforcing the intrinsic motivations of play, passion, and purpose versus the extrinsic carrots and sticks.
Information may be free but knowledge also includes understanding, problem solving, communication, and collaboration, none of which is free. Many schools “teach” these aspects of human endeavor to some degree. How much of this is relevant to your model for creating innovators?
Knowledge has become a commodity and is free, like air or water. Knowledge is also changing and growing exponentially. Based on the old premise of knowledge scarcity, the assumption is that it is the job of the teacher to transmit knowledge to students. When only a few people had the knowledge, that model made some sense, but because knowledge has become a commodity, the world no longer cares what you know. That is, there is no competitive advantage today to knowing more than the person sitting next to you. The competitive advantage for someone going out into the world is what they can do with what they know. And this kind of learning needs to take place at all levels. Right now it is more common in some elementary schools where students do projects. The problem arises as students move up through school. While there is a lot of professed interest in teaching the so-called 21st century skills you mentioned, which I wrote about extensively in The Global Achievement Gap, in fact most teachers feel compelled to teach to the tests for accountability purposes—and increasingly so as their jobs may depend on students getting good test scores.
Some examples you’ve seen in better schools to nurture this kind of learning?
In Creating Innovators, I profile schools and colleges that are doing an outstanding job of educating young people to become innovators. In the better schools I visited (both high schools and colleges), in every single course, students have to produce real products for a real audience as a significant part of their academic experience. In one high school I visited, every student is required to do a team-based service learning project: to go out into the community, research a problem and then figure out a way to solve it. One student I interviewed was a part of a team that discovered there was a local food pantry that had a problem storing all of the food donated to it. And so the team went back to school and used a computer assisted design program to design a new storage system for the pantry. Then they returned and actually built it. What students need is practice in applying their learning to new situations, not just in the classroom, but in the community. Another example at the college level is the Olin College of Engineering, which requires students to spend an entire year working in teams to solve a problem in a corporate setting. It is what they call their Senior Capstone Project in Engineering. These approaches demand a radically different approach to teaching. Teaching students to apply what they have learned requires relinquishing a degree of teacher control, relying far less on textbooks, and encouraging students to take initiative and be responsible for their own learning. Teachers are no longer the experts; they must become coaches. Many teachers find these transitions very hard to make.
Teachers follow the accepted process required to get kids into good colleges — the colleges their parents and the kids think they should go to. Thoughts?
Things are changing more quickly than most people realize. Three points:
1. The Advanced Placement curriculum is already radically transforming all AP tests, beginning with AP Biology this year and then AP US History next year. They are moving towards students having to demonstrate that they can apply knowledge learned and not merely regurgitate it. So AP tests, which are themselves considered a gold standard, are redefining what is “rigor” and students will need a different kind of teaching to do well on these new tests.
2. There are now 750 colleges and universities that do not require any kind of test scores for admission. Last year, Tufts University became the first in the country to encourage students to submit YouTube videos with their applications, and they were stunned at the quality of work that was produced and how much more they learned about their applicants.
3. If you look at the CEO’s of most major companies, the majority did not go to an Ivy League school for undergraduate. What matters much more are what graduate school you go to and having had work-based internships where you have had to apply what you have learned. Being preoccupied with getting kids into top colleges, I think, is misplaced. Admission into “name brand” schools is more and more a matter of luck and no longer offers the competitive advantages it did 20 years ago. The push to get all A’s distorts the purpose of school and distracts from acquiring the skills that will give kids a real competitive edge.
For my new book I interviewed Joel Podolny, Vice President of Human Resources at Apple, who has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and he told me that to get into these kinds of schools you learn to play a game. A game of getting perfect scores, building a resume, etc. The problem is, if you have not learned how to collaborate, to take risks and learn from your mistakes, to create as opposed to consume — all the qualities that matter in the world of innovation — then companies like Apple will have no use for you.
To what extent is innovation capability a function of family and external influences?
These days, young people become innovators in spite of their schooling, rather than because of it. In my research, I found both parenting and teaching practices that strengthen the capacity to innovate — emphasizing discovery-based play, limiting screen time, encouraging young people to find and pursue their passion, take risks and learn from mistakes, and instilling a sense of the importance of “giving back” — these were all things that parents and teachers of young innovators encouraged.
What overall rating do you give the US Public School system for training innovators?
A grade of F. But it is not the teacher’s fault. They are not encouraged to innovate, and there is no funding for educational R&D. We must prepare teachers differently and develop lab schools for 21st century learning and teaching. Mostly importantly, we need to begin using much better assessments, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Assessment drives instruction, and having the wrong metric is worse than having none at all. Multiple choice, computer-scored test results tell us nothing about the quality of teaching or students’ college, career, and citizenship readiness. Every student should have a digital portfolio as a cumulative record of the development of his or her innovation skills. Finally, instead of preaching that all students should be “college-ready,” we should instead establish the goal of all students being “innovation-ready.” Young people don’t necessarily have to go to college to learn to innovate. Nearly half of Finland’s high school students choose a career and technical education track, rather than an academic track, and Finland has a higher innovation standing than the US.
Read more at http://www.educationnews.org/k-12-schools/the-global-search-for-education-is-your-child-an-innovator/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Thursday, April 26, 2012
An Adult Child With Autism
Next Steps For An Adult Child With Autism.
This week began with World Autism Awareness Day, created five years ago by the group Autism Speaks as a locus for fund-raising and spreading the word. It comes at the start to National Autism Awareness Month, which was created by Congress back in the 1970s. In commemoration of both, Huffpost Parents is looking at autism through the eyes of parents all this week. Each day we will run an essay about a next stage of parenting a child with autism, starting with the moment of diagnosis, and going through school years, and teens, and entry into the adult world.
I don't know how to do this.
There's no book for taking the next step. No Fiske Guide to Colleges. No Barron's. When our son Jonathan was preparing to leave home for college, we had a whole shelf of books to guide our family.
There's no book for our autistic son Mickey, who is turning twenty. No U.S. News and World Report ranking best vocational opportunities; no handbook rating residential programs for developmentally disabled young adults. We're making it up as we go.
Graduation fever is spreading through Mickey's class. Parents and students are itching to leave the security - and the restriction -- of our public high school's self-contained life skills class. Most are opting to send their children to residential programs far away. I'm feeling coerced into making decisions I'm not ready to make; I roil with fear and uncertainty.
Petitioning the state for legal guardianship of our own child before he turned 18 was heartbreaking. Getting him Supplemental Security Income and entering the labyrinth of federal bureaucracy was nightmarish. But this step - preparing to leave high school, and the world of what the government promises every disabled child, a "free and appropriate public education," isn't just unnerving. It's terrifying.
Mickey too has caught the fever. He has been a twelfth grader for three years, and he is asking to leave. Loud and clear. "I'm not going back to high school next year. I don't want another yearbook. I'm graduating."
He has always loved his yearbooks, memorizing the name and face of every person in the building so that when he walks down the hall he can greet everyone by name. I have secretly ordered a yearbook for him. Just in case he changes his mind.
"Everyone is ready to go to college at a different time," my husband Marc and I tell him.
"I'm going to college!" he insists.
Does he even know what college means? He knows his brother and cousins have gone; he sees classmates leaving. He understands college is the step that comes after high school. "What do you think you do at college?" I ask him.
"I don't know."
"Do you go to class?" I persist.
"I. Don't. Know."
Does he think it consists of eating out, hanging with friends and watching televised sports in the student union, as we did when we visited Jonathan? Or perhaps he views it as extended sleep-away camp?
"Can we look at colleges this week, Dad?" he persists.
"Sure, Mick," Marc says. Later he tells me, "What do you think he's expecting to see?"
"I don't know that it's anything specific," I say. "I think this is his way of telling us he wants more freedom."
We say, "College." But it won't be. He's too cognitively challenged for that. "College" will be what we call whatever he does next.
Mickey is legally entitled to one more year. Parents of older children with disabilities advise us to keep him in school as long as we can. "Take whatever the public school system can still give you and hold them accountable," one advises us. Another warns us that once a child turns 21 and exits school, services for disabled adults are abysmal. "In school you're used to having people with master's degrees working with your kid," cautions another parent. "Once you leave school, you're getting people making $10 an hour."
"But they have high school degrees, right?" I ask.
She laughs ruefully. "If you're lucky."
Marc and I aren't ready to take off the training wheels yet. "Residential placement seems so permanent," Marc says. "Camp is one thing. Kids get really grubby there, but we always know we're going to pick him up and clean him up again. His voice cracks as he asks, "Would you pack a six year old off to boarding school?"
But Day Hab sounds like a dismal option. The programs are funded by Medicaid. I've heard parents describe it as "glorified babysitting." I think about the first special needs preschool class we ever visited. Seventeen years ago, and I can still see that impassive teacher who never left her chair or looked at us. How bored she'd looked. Is that what day hab offers? I picture a warehouse. Indifferent, untrained staff. Keep-busy activities. Coloring. Stringing beads. A room full of disabled adults, parked in front of a TV for hours.
Adolescence and the onset of epilepsy have made him emotionally labile. He can be belligerent when thwarted. Are these normal adolescent mood swings, or the harbinger of a seizure? We're never sure. Anger and irritability can occur hours or even days before one strikes, like the hissing whistle of a sky rocket before it explodes. We've learned how to manage him, knowing how quickly he can flare up and spin out to that angry place, and how difficult it is to reel him back. But the world isn't going to tiptoe around Mickey. It is he who must learn to control his temper.
To this end, we enlist the aid of the school psychologist. "Mickey is intelligent," he says. "He really has some insight into his behavior." It makes me teary. No one else at our public high school has ever said my child is intelligent.
Intelligent despite the terrible standardized test scores; despite profound language deficits that even now cause him to mix up his verb tenses or use scripted speech; despite three sedating anti-epileptic drugs that dull him down. We no longer question whether he is innately intelligent. We know he is. We hear it in the observations he makes, in the questions he asks, in the way he cuts to the emotional core of things. After the death of a great-aunt, he tells us, "I feel so sad. All our people are disappearing." When his class throws a party for him, he tells the teacher, "I feel loved."
And he is. Even when he isn't easy to be with, he is still lovable.
We have felt cushioned and cocooned by school the past sixteen years. We haven't always been happy - in fact we've been profoundly angry at times. But being in school has meant that we've known where he is every day, and that he is safe.
And that's the crux of our fears. We can't keep him safe anymore. We know our son needs to be stretched and challenged. But the world isn't safe. How will we protect him, when we are no longer there to absorb the blows?
Does Mickey realize that he will never be able to go out into the world unattended? Never ride a bus or train alone? He will never drive a car; epilepsy has seen to that. Living with seizures is like living with the threat of terrorism. You have to stay vigilant, because you could be struck anywhere, any time. A seizure leaves him so profoundly disoriented that he will walk into oncoming traffic. More than once I've cradled him in my arms after one of those episodes, only to have him ask me, "When are my parents coming to pick me up?"
Other parents look forward to their empty nests, to reconnecting as a couple. We have micromanaged every hour of Mickey's life for nearly 20 years. How do we ever shut off our dependency on his dependency?
Will we feel free? Or unmoored?
Then we get lucky. A space suddenly opens at an autism school half an hour from home that has a transition program. They will take him for his last year of formal schooling. They want him immediately. They will work on cooking. Laundry. Emailing. Office skills. Money management. Travel training. Our school district will bus him there. We describe it to Jonathan.
"Is this a marriage of convenience?" Jonathan asks.
"This is a good place," Marc assures him. "And it buys us breathing room."
We cross our collective fingers. Mickey glows when we tell him he has done so well at high school that he is graduating into a program that helps kids get ready for college. We make the switch.
After his first week in the new program, Mickey writes Marc an email.
-------------------------
Dear dad
Yesterday I went to gym and do volleyball. Then I went for a walk.
Then I worked on the computer. I feel great about my new class
Love
Mickey
-------------------------
When a baby is born, someone cuts the umbilical cord for you. How can we possibly loosen the thousands of threads that bind him to us? It's an endless unraveling, this process of letting go.
But we must. And we will figure out what comes next. We will do this just as we have done everything else these past twenty years. Pulling together as a family.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liane-kupferberg-carter/adult-child-autism_b_1390123.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
This week began with World Autism Awareness Day, created five years ago by the group Autism Speaks as a locus for fund-raising and spreading the word. It comes at the start to National Autism Awareness Month, which was created by Congress back in the 1970s. In commemoration of both, Huffpost Parents is looking at autism through the eyes of parents all this week. Each day we will run an essay about a next stage of parenting a child with autism, starting with the moment of diagnosis, and going through school years, and teens, and entry into the adult world.
I don't know how to do this.
There's no book for taking the next step. No Fiske Guide to Colleges. No Barron's. When our son Jonathan was preparing to leave home for college, we had a whole shelf of books to guide our family.
There's no book for our autistic son Mickey, who is turning twenty. No U.S. News and World Report ranking best vocational opportunities; no handbook rating residential programs for developmentally disabled young adults. We're making it up as we go.
Graduation fever is spreading through Mickey's class. Parents and students are itching to leave the security - and the restriction -- of our public high school's self-contained life skills class. Most are opting to send their children to residential programs far away. I'm feeling coerced into making decisions I'm not ready to make; I roil with fear and uncertainty.
Petitioning the state for legal guardianship of our own child before he turned 18 was heartbreaking. Getting him Supplemental Security Income and entering the labyrinth of federal bureaucracy was nightmarish. But this step - preparing to leave high school, and the world of what the government promises every disabled child, a "free and appropriate public education," isn't just unnerving. It's terrifying.
Mickey too has caught the fever. He has been a twelfth grader for three years, and he is asking to leave. Loud and clear. "I'm not going back to high school next year. I don't want another yearbook. I'm graduating."
He has always loved his yearbooks, memorizing the name and face of every person in the building so that when he walks down the hall he can greet everyone by name. I have secretly ordered a yearbook for him. Just in case he changes his mind.
"Everyone is ready to go to college at a different time," my husband Marc and I tell him.
"I'm going to college!" he insists.
Does he even know what college means? He knows his brother and cousins have gone; he sees classmates leaving. He understands college is the step that comes after high school. "What do you think you do at college?" I ask him.
"I don't know."
"Do you go to class?" I persist.
"I. Don't. Know."
Does he think it consists of eating out, hanging with friends and watching televised sports in the student union, as we did when we visited Jonathan? Or perhaps he views it as extended sleep-away camp?
"Can we look at colleges this week, Dad?" he persists.
"Sure, Mick," Marc says. Later he tells me, "What do you think he's expecting to see?"
"I don't know that it's anything specific," I say. "I think this is his way of telling us he wants more freedom."
We say, "College." But it won't be. He's too cognitively challenged for that. "College" will be what we call whatever he does next.
Mickey is legally entitled to one more year. Parents of older children with disabilities advise us to keep him in school as long as we can. "Take whatever the public school system can still give you and hold them accountable," one advises us. Another warns us that once a child turns 21 and exits school, services for disabled adults are abysmal. "In school you're used to having people with master's degrees working with your kid," cautions another parent. "Once you leave school, you're getting people making $10 an hour."
"But they have high school degrees, right?" I ask.
She laughs ruefully. "If you're lucky."
Marc and I aren't ready to take off the training wheels yet. "Residential placement seems so permanent," Marc says. "Camp is one thing. Kids get really grubby there, but we always know we're going to pick him up and clean him up again. His voice cracks as he asks, "Would you pack a six year old off to boarding school?"
But Day Hab sounds like a dismal option. The programs are funded by Medicaid. I've heard parents describe it as "glorified babysitting." I think about the first special needs preschool class we ever visited. Seventeen years ago, and I can still see that impassive teacher who never left her chair or looked at us. How bored she'd looked. Is that what day hab offers? I picture a warehouse. Indifferent, untrained staff. Keep-busy activities. Coloring. Stringing beads. A room full of disabled adults, parked in front of a TV for hours.
Adolescence and the onset of epilepsy have made him emotionally labile. He can be belligerent when thwarted. Are these normal adolescent mood swings, or the harbinger of a seizure? We're never sure. Anger and irritability can occur hours or even days before one strikes, like the hissing whistle of a sky rocket before it explodes. We've learned how to manage him, knowing how quickly he can flare up and spin out to that angry place, and how difficult it is to reel him back. But the world isn't going to tiptoe around Mickey. It is he who must learn to control his temper.
To this end, we enlist the aid of the school psychologist. "Mickey is intelligent," he says. "He really has some insight into his behavior." It makes me teary. No one else at our public high school has ever said my child is intelligent.
Intelligent despite the terrible standardized test scores; despite profound language deficits that even now cause him to mix up his verb tenses or use scripted speech; despite three sedating anti-epileptic drugs that dull him down. We no longer question whether he is innately intelligent. We know he is. We hear it in the observations he makes, in the questions he asks, in the way he cuts to the emotional core of things. After the death of a great-aunt, he tells us, "I feel so sad. All our people are disappearing." When his class throws a party for him, he tells the teacher, "I feel loved."
And he is. Even when he isn't easy to be with, he is still lovable.
We have felt cushioned and cocooned by school the past sixteen years. We haven't always been happy - in fact we've been profoundly angry at times. But being in school has meant that we've known where he is every day, and that he is safe.
And that's the crux of our fears. We can't keep him safe anymore. We know our son needs to be stretched and challenged. But the world isn't safe. How will we protect him, when we are no longer there to absorb the blows?
Does Mickey realize that he will never be able to go out into the world unattended? Never ride a bus or train alone? He will never drive a car; epilepsy has seen to that. Living with seizures is like living with the threat of terrorism. You have to stay vigilant, because you could be struck anywhere, any time. A seizure leaves him so profoundly disoriented that he will walk into oncoming traffic. More than once I've cradled him in my arms after one of those episodes, only to have him ask me, "When are my parents coming to pick me up?"
Other parents look forward to their empty nests, to reconnecting as a couple. We have micromanaged every hour of Mickey's life for nearly 20 years. How do we ever shut off our dependency on his dependency?
Will we feel free? Or unmoored?
Then we get lucky. A space suddenly opens at an autism school half an hour from home that has a transition program. They will take him for his last year of formal schooling. They want him immediately. They will work on cooking. Laundry. Emailing. Office skills. Money management. Travel training. Our school district will bus him there. We describe it to Jonathan.
"Is this a marriage of convenience?" Jonathan asks.
"This is a good place," Marc assures him. "And it buys us breathing room."
We cross our collective fingers. Mickey glows when we tell him he has done so well at high school that he is graduating into a program that helps kids get ready for college. We make the switch.
After his first week in the new program, Mickey writes Marc an email.
-------------------------
Dear dad
Yesterday I went to gym and do volleyball. Then I went for a walk.
Then I worked on the computer. I feel great about my new class
Love
Mickey
-------------------------
When a baby is born, someone cuts the umbilical cord for you. How can we possibly loosen the thousands of threads that bind him to us? It's an endless unraveling, this process of letting go.
But we must. And we will figure out what comes next. We will do this just as we have done everything else these past twenty years. Pulling together as a family.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liane-kupferberg-carter/adult-child-autism_b_1390123.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
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