Unlearning

 

I am both a school administrator and a parent, so I have a very unique perspective on learning.  I am asked for my advice from friends often about school-related (read:  “their-child-related”) issues.  This is a challenge, and at times has put me in very awkward positions where people are looking for insider information that I cannot provide, and I am always wary of the inevitable follow up of “my friend, the principal says...”.

Schools are definitely places of learning.  What is challenging about education, however, is that everyone is an expert;  everyone has very personal experience—generally at least 13 years long—of our education system from the inside.  In no other facet of our lives, no in with any other profession, does everyone have such influential life experience.  And, that is one our biggest challenges because so many of our truths and myths about education are based in a personal experience that is emotional charged—positively and negatively—and many of factors leading up to those experiences simply do not exist anymore.

This post was inspired by something I found on the blog What Ed Said.  Edna Sackson is a teacher from Australia.  She chose to list her list of ten things parents need to unlearn without comment, to provoke her readers into making their own comments.  I have also included a few from her her top ten list of things that teachers need to unlearn.  Here is my some of advice to the question of things that parents (and educators, too) need to unlearn to truly support their own children’s’ learning:

 
Learning is best measured by a letter or a number

I guess it depends on the letter or number.  It also depends on how the letter or number is arrived at because averages can be dreadfully inaccurate.  It also depends on the student; letter grades seem to matter most for students who achieve As and Bs, and much less for students who achieve lower grades.  My question is:  If not all students respond positively to letter grades, why are we assigning them?

Product is more important than process and progress

My father-in-law best describes my idea of an answer here.  He is a uniquely stubborn individual who never, ever lost his childhood curiosity or creativity.  His way of problem-solving is outside of the box, and way outside of most of our comfort zones.  The plus side, however, is that he has a process for figuring things out that always ends up with something wonderful that few of us could accomplish—or even imagine—on our own.  I imagine that he went through a lifetime of “you can’t do it that way” at school, and that helped him to harden his resolve to be a problem solver.  Most of us would have given in, and given up, long ago.  

Children need to be protected from any kind of failure

We see this in almost every part of our lives as parents.  Parents will do almost anything—reasonable or not—to prevent their children from experiencing failure.  In fact, I would go as far as say that too many parents don’t even want their children to experience disappointment.    I was upset when my oldest children came home upset from finding out about their class placements this year.  Both felt like they wanted into another classroom and both felt like they didn’t have enough of their close friends around them.  I have to be careful how to tackle these challenges at home and make sure that my dad hat and Principal hat don’t get mixed up; there is nothing worse for my daughter than when dad, the Principal, has all the answers for all of the questions.  So, as a dad, my job was to listen and to help them to cope with the (initial) disappointment.  We talked about how to flip this situation.  My son had a male teacher for the first time, and that became something awesome.  And he decided that he could meet up with his two best buddies everyday at recess and lunch.  Problem solved.  My daughter was worried about getting the new, strict teacher.  We remembered the last them that she got the “strict” teacher and how much she thrives when there are rules, a teacher that pushes her to her potential and who holds all students accountable for their learning.  And, we kept these conversations inside our house.  We didn’t let their initial disappointment linger on at social events with friends and family.  We talked about the disappointment, discussed some opportunities that the situation created for us, co-created some strategies to cope, and then we gave ourselves some time to move on.  Guess what?  They did, and they are having terrific years with terrific teachers.

Children need to be taught how to be resilient.  They need to be taught how to problem solve, not to have all of their problems solved for them.  Life is full of disappointments, and we have to teach them how to turn these disappointments into opportunities.

The Internet is dangerous to children

So are strangers, the mall, driving in a car, not talking to your kids about drugs, alcohol and sex...

I am not a believer in massive filters, rather, I am a huge believer in teaching kids how to select appropriate (and safe) online activities.  And, I will be honest here:  my kids spent very little time online by themselves until I was absolutely confident that they could make good decisions on their own before I allowed them the opportunity to work on their own on our family computer.  Here are some of my personal pointers for online safety:

• Make computer time family time.  Have your child sit on your lap or on a chair next to you and work together. 
• Put your computer in an open and public location.  You would not believe how many parents come in to talk to me who are worried about their child’s online activity and who allow their children to have a computer in a bedroom behind a locked door.
• Choose sites that are kid-friendly and acceptable to your family standards and bookmark them in a special place for your kids to access.  Show them how to access them.
• Teach them that there are strangers who are dangerous online, and have a discussion about what they should avoid including revealing their personal information.  Most of our innappropriate-site follow up has been about people posting rude comments on YouTube.  If that is true for you, limit time on YouTube and other video collections.
• If they are not old enough for a Facebook account (or other social media site), don’t let them have an account.  My oldest is 12, and she does not have have a Facebook account.  She also knows that when she is old enough to have one that I will be her friend and be able to see what she writes, and—maybe more importantly—able to see what her friends post.  We will definitely have a conversation about posting things that your parents and friends’ parent will be able to see.
• Set up an email account with them, and teach them how to send an email.  Also teach them about what is appropriate to send electronically and how easily something inappropriate can get into the wrong hands.  Check emails with them and reviews your lessons and rules.
• Have conversations with your children about those hard topics when they are young enough to want to have those conversations with you.  It always baffles me when parents come in for advice here, and they have avoided important but uncomfortable discussions until their kids are in grade 11 or 12.  Sorry, but my experience shows me that late teens is way too late to start trying to talk to your kids about awkwards subjects such as sex, substance abuse, relationships, online safety, etc.  By this time, the kids will have filled their advice void with peer input.  Are you satisfied that this is the best source of advice for your kids?

Parents and teachers should discuss students without the learner present

Whenever we have a challenge to work through with a student, we need the child present.  There is no sense drafting up a set of commitments for a student if they aren’t there to tell us whether or not they will live up to those commitments.  

Homework is an essential part of learning

...if the homework is worthwhile.   And, completing work that was incomplete during the day isn’t homework.   

My idea of a poor homework assignment:  writing out your spelling words 20 times each.  My idea of a great homework assignment (from my son’s kindergarten teacher a few years back):  select some things at home that are meaningful to you (i.e. a collection, a special toy or photo, something from a vacation, etc.) and present them to your class in an “About Me” presentation.  Explain why these things are important to you.

Kids also need to time exercise and play.  Do not underestimate the importance of exercise and play.

The school is responsible for the child’s entire education

Parents are responsible for a huge part of their child’s education, and need to be active partners with their school in this learning process.

Your child’s perspective is the only one

One of the toughest things we do is trying to find a balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group, and one of the most difficult things to work through when these needs collide is the events that led up to them.  People, not just kids, are very good at remembering the events that led up to them being wronged or applauded in some way because memories--accurate or not--are anchored by emotional responses in our brains.  We are all good at remembering the negative experiences (the details from when we were hurt or humiliated) and the positive experiences (the details from wonderful surprises), but in remembering those parts of the events that happened we are often reluctant to see that there were likely things that preceeded our personal memories and that other people may have seen things differently.  That is not to say that one is right and the other is wrong, but that as different people have different emotional responses to shared experiences, they will remember them differently.  As parents, we need to resist the urge to believe that "he just walked right up and punched..." for no reason.  My experience tells me that while the reason might not be a great one, there is always a reason for an action like this.

Learning looks the same as when you went to school

• Learning is different.
• Assessment is different.
• School are different.
• Community expectations are different.
• Job and post-secondary prospects are different.

Focus on (and fix) your child’s shortcomings, rather than their successes

Here is a sports analogy that hits the mark:  Take the penalty kick in soccer.  The player that scores does a quick fist pump then runs back to centre to line up for the kick off.  As a good team player, they forgo the accolades and get right back into the play.  The player that misses, on the other hand, feels like they let everyone down.  They kick the ground and hang their head, reliving the missed kick over and over again, putting themselves out of the play and making them a liability to the rest of the team.  Why do we spend so much time fixating on our shortcomings instead of celebrating our successes?

Learners need to sit quietly and listen

This is more than simply a generational gap.  I really believe that our children learn differently from us.  I always needed a quiet place to learn.  It needed to be away from noise and distraction and was generally an individual endeavour.  Kids today learn together, and there is some compelling research that says music—at least some kinds of music—can stimulate the brain and actually...gulp...help...learning.  Just because that doesn’t work very well for me doesn’t mean it won’t work well for my kids.  Brain research is exposing some very intriguing knowledge about our brains and how we learn, and that knowledge is doubling about every 4 years. 

Technology integration is optional

If we don’t write letters anymore, or rely on complete sets of encyclopaedias for all of our worldly knowledge, or drive horse buggies to work, why is this even a question anymore?

Worksheets support leaning

Three points, as succinct as possible:

1. Practice supports learning
2. Emotional experiences anchor memory
3. Learning needs to have relevance to the learner

Those are three things very difficult to accomplish with a worksheet.

Tests should be surprises

Tests that surprise teach us more about how well a student can guess what a teacher wants than they do about how much a student has learned.  Let’s be honest here, if a student has to guess what is most important from what I taught in the last unit, then I didn’t do a good job teaching the unit, did I?  Each lesson should start with a very clear rationale explaining what we are learning and why (hence its importance to us), and any assessment that follows should be an opportunity to support, and demonstrate, that learning.  Do you want the parachute packer who guessed right the first time and moved on, or the one who did it wrong, was corrected, and then truly understood the importance of doing everything just right?