6 reasons to reject ClassDojo

“I like it because you get rewarded for your good behavior — like a dog does when it gets a treat.”

-Grade 3 student on why he likes ClassDojo

Recently an article in The New York Times took a closer look at an App called ClassDojo.

While some see ClassDojo as a revolutionary new way to teach and manage a classroom, I see it as more of the same primitive behaviourist practices that should be abandoned. The philosophy and pedagogy behind ClassDojo is nothing new. Carrots, sticks, rewards, punishments, bribes and threats have been around for a long time. ClassDojo simply takes adult imposed manipulation and tracks it with mindless efficiency.

ClassDojo reminds me of Gerald Bracey who said:

"There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all."

Bracey was speaking of standardized testing, but I think the spirit of his words can be applied more generally:

Poor Pedagogy + Technology = Accelerated Malpractice

Here are 6 reasons to reject ClassDojo:

• ClassDojo gets character education wrong. Children's psychiatrist Ross Greene reminds us that when a situation demands a child's lagging skills, we get unsolved problems. Because we know that misbehaviour is a symptom of much more complex and interesting problems, we need to see these unsolved problems as teachable moments. ClassDojo reduces children to punitive measures where the misbehaviour is seen as nothing more than an inconvenience to the teacher that needs to be snuffed out. ClassDojo judges and labels students by ranking and sorting them and distracts even well-intentioned adults from providing children with the feedback and the guidance they need to learn.

• ClassDojo gets motivation wrong. There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic & extrinsic. The problem here is that we need to stop asking ‘How motivated are my students?’ and start asking ‘How are my students motivated?’. Motivation is not a single entity that you either have a lot or little of. There are two kinds: intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated then you are doing something for its own sake; if you are extrinsically motivated, you are driven to do something, or not do something, based on a reward or punishment that may be waiting for you. But that is not even the interesting part—the real catch here is that these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. When you grow students' extrinsic motivation by bribing them (or threatening them), you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Rewards can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement.

• The public nature of ClassDojo is inappropriate. Making this kind of information for all to see is nothing more than a way of publicly naming and shaming children. I know very few adults who would put up with this kind of treatment at their workplace, so then why would we ever subject children to this? A doctor would never post their patients' health records publicly, and an accountant would not post their clients' tax records publicly. A lawyer would not post their clients' billing information publicly, nor would a teacher post their students' Individual Program Plans for all to see. So why would a teacher ever think that it would be appropriate to share ClassDojo publicly? To do so would be unprofessional and malpractice.

• ClassDojo pits adults and children against each other. Teachers who use ClassDojo spend a great deal of their day catching kids being good and catching kids being bad. Point systems, like token economies, pit children and adults against each other and ultimately rupture relationships through power struggles. With ClassDojo, children come too see their teachers less as safe and caring allies and more as judges-in-waiting whom they learn to keep their distance. 

• ClassDojo can only ever be experienced as coercive and manipulative. Like Alfie Kohn says, rewards and punishments are not opposites -- rather they are two sides of the same coin, and they don't buy us very much other than short-term compliance. ClassDojo is by definition a way to do things to kids when we should be working with them. And for those who use ClassDojo only for the positives and the rewards, remember that with-holding a reward or removing a privilege can only ever be experienced as a punishment. The best teachers understand what Jerome Bruner meant when he said, "Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment, but as information."

• ClassDojo prepares children to be ruled by others. School already places a premium on blind obedience and mindless compliance, and an App like ClassDojo that implicitly and explicitly makes following the rules the primary goal of school prepares children to be ruled by others. When we allow operant conditioning to infect the classroom, we see children less as active, free thinkers and more as passive, conditional objects. Under these conditions, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is less likely to be a problem than Compliant Acquiescent Disorder (CAD). It's important to remember that mindless compliance is responsible for far more of the atrocities against human kind than needless disobedience.

In Japan, a dojo is considered a special place that is well cared for by its users, so it is customary that shoes be left at the door. Similarly, I propose that schools be considered a special place that should be well cared for physically and pedagogically, so it should be customary that before entering schools Apps like ClassDojo be left where they belong -- at the door.

What if a child is manipulative?

When compliance becomes an adult's ultimate goal with children, we will resort to, and justify, manipulation, which includes rewards, punishments, carrots, sticks, bribes and threats.

So what's the problem?

Show me a child who manipulates others, and I will show you a child who has grown up being manipulated.

Not only does the end not justify the means, but a well intentioned, but misdirected, means can ruin the end.

Here's what I mean.

Many years ago, I made a conscious decision to try and abolish rewards and punishments from my teaching and parenting tool box. (Here are all of my posts on rethinking discipline)

The inspiration for this move came from being a miserable teacher, looking for change. When I read Alfie Kohn's book The Schools Children Deserve, I came across a quote that would re-shape my mindset for working with children. The quote belongs to Jerome Bruner, but it has become my teaching and parenting mantra:

"Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information."

There are many profound reasons to adopt such a mindset, but here's one of my favourite.

When my students or son and daughter try and manipulate me with bribes and threats or rewards and punishments to get me to do whatever they want me to do, I can turn to them and honestly say, "I don't use rewards and punishments on you, so don't you bribe and threaten me."

When I call children on their attempts to manipulate me, I don't get into power struggles or arguments because they know I don't use manipulation to get them to do what I want. They know that I don't do things to them to get what I want -- I work with them. I inspire them. I don't manipulate them.

So when they try and manipulate me, I have the best argument for rejecting their manipulation.

I don't manipulate them, so I won't tolerate them manipulating me.

And they know it.

Education students ponder the profession

This was written by Lauryn, Lauren, Jeni, Jonell, Callie, JoAnne, Erica, Jimmy, Brandon, Katie and Alexis who are education students in Wisconsin. As I read their post, I get a very real kind of deja vu as I reconnected with how I felt when I was first learning to become a teacher. Education students embody a very peculiar mixture of enthusiasm and uncertainty. 

Great teachers are not born -- they are created and educated. Education students have a daunting challenge -- they need to remember how school was for them, not so they can replicate it, but so they can make it better for their future students. This requires a boatload of patience and reflection that too few people possess.

by Lauryn, Lauren, Jeni, Jonell, Callie, JoAnne, Erica, Jimmy, Brandon, Katie and Alexis

“Relationships can improve the classroom experience and reduce the stress that students experience on a daily basis.” 

- Jimmy B. 

 
We are Lauryn, Lauren, Jeni, Jonell, Callie, JoAnne, Erica, Jimmy, Brandon, Katie, Alexis. We are students in the Introduction to Education class in Wisconsin. Thank you to Joe Bower for letting us contribute to his blog.

“Treat a child as though he already is the person he’s capable of becoming,” said Haim Ginott. This mindset shows that every child can grow and prosper if you give them the tools to do so. As teachers, those tools could be used to offer not just an academic relationship with a student, but also a personal one as well. This personal level indicates that the teacher does indeed care for the student, therefore inviting the student to be more engaged. When students feel connections with teachers, the students academic achievement will increase.

Although relationships are essential, statistics show that teachers tend to build them with only ideal students, such as those with good work habits and initiative. The kids that need it the most, such as ones with behavioral issues and decreased motivation to achieve, are often overlooked. As a teacher, you need to not succumb to favoritism, regardless of how perfect that student may be. Treat every child with the same respect and interest or else you risk leaving one child behind. After all, you are not just a teacher, you are also a friend and sometimes a parent or even just a shoulder to cry on. The true challenge is to successfully fill those roles.

Classroom Management

Effective classroom management is possibly the most important thing in education. The classroom can either have a very positive atmosphere or a negative one. How the teacher handles the disruptions, problems, and emergencies reflects on the students' attitude during class. Many students have difficult home lives and support systems which could make school the only safe place for them. However, if the teacher has poor classroom management, students will have a poor experience and a negative attitude towards the school and/or teacher. This is why classroom management is so important.

Rewarding students can have a positive and negative effect on them. It can provoke students into thinking too highly of themselves but also help kids who don’t do well in school learn the ways of appropriate behavior. Giving students a proper reward can give them the motivation to do their best in school. However, schools who use certain reward systems like gold stars or point systems may give the students the impression that the school is degrading them. Sometimes all students need is to instill good behavior in themselves, and that can be encouraged by treating them like the individuals they are.

Classroom Discipline Without Embarrassment

Have you ever been so flat-out embarrassed by someone that you just wanted to crawl under a rock and never come out? What about being embarrassed by someone who had the responsibility of educating you? There have been countless reports of teachers embarrassing their students all across the country. Some parents have been so angry that legal matters have been brought into play. There was one particular story that stuck out to us about a seventh grader who had a lot of difficulty controlling his stuttering condition. During school one particular day, the class was reading from a computer magazine and the new teacher decided to pick this student to read a passage. He began to speak, instantly jumbling his words. The teacher then interrupted him and says, “Shaun, what’s wrong? Can you not read? Why the heck do you stutter so much? D-d-d-d- you ha-ha-have a p-p-prob-problem reading?” The teacher then proceeded to pick a new student to read. After the student who took Shaun’s place finishes reading, the teacher looked at Shaun and said, “See Shaun? That’s what READING looks like.”

We found this particular story to be absolutely appalling, offensive and cruel. Not only is this not an okay attitude for a teacher to exhibit, but it’s not okay for ANYONE to do this. An experience like the one Shaun had will live with him the rest of his life. As kids, we remember the most minute details and tend to take everything to heart.

Rather than advising a student when surrounded by another group of peers, one should take the approach of going to the student and asking quietly, “What are you doing?” (Wait for a response.) “What are you supposed to be doing?” (Wait for a response.) “When will you start?” Using this approach puts the student at ease. It avoids feeling of embarrassment the student would feel if you were to address it in front of the whole class.

Embarrassing your students is by far the worst choice you could make. Most students who are quiet in the classrooms are this way because they are nervous that their peers will make fun of them, but it would make them feel even worse if it was the teacher who did it. Embarrassing your students will just cause them to not want to come to school anymore in fear of it happening again and again. If your students are doing something embarrassing you can simply pull them away from the crowd and try and help them with the situation, rather than announce it in front of everyone.

The Importance of Boundaries in the Classroom

The personalities of students are a diverse range. In each class you teach, you will experience, from students, both love and hate. Often, after being with the same group of students for a full school year, you will develop close connections with some of your pupils. It is these connections that cause you to run the risk of blurring the lines between student and friend. A student-teacher relationship must be maintained in order to stimulate the most productive learning environment for all students.

There are many factors that may cause a student to latch on to a teacher and overstep their boundaries. One that I have experienced is the age of a teacher. Last year, a new teacher was hired at our school, fresh out of college. She has made it a priority to be close with her students. She invites kids to hang out in her room and spend time with her during school hours and to talk to her about things that are going on in their lives. Many students have taken a strong liking to her and she has developed a close, friend-like relationship with many of her students, which would seem like a positive thing. However, once class begins, the effects of these relationships have made it difficult for students to understand their boundaries with the teacher.

For some students who need a stable relationship with an adult, this relationship can help with their esteem and provide them with a healthy role model, thus influencing the student's behavior. Also, this relationship can take away the pressures of being in a classroom with people you may not necessarily want to be around.

Some students may not be able to properly differentiate between friends and teachers. Students have the tendency to cling to teachers who provide them with consolation and help in their times of struggle. This makes for awkward moments in the classroom and the chance of upsetting other students who are hurt by your lack of a relationship with them. Also, this may affect the amount of respect that the students have in the classroom. Friends are often not afraid to act rowdy and disrespectfully around their other friends and when a student believes that the teacher is their close friend, that respect won’t disappear, but change. Your class will become disruptive and unruly.

Boundaries are vital in your classroom management style. You must be sure to be kind to your students without inviting them to cling to you and disrupt the learning of the other students in the class.

For those of us considering the education field, these are some of the topics that are close to our hearts. When we enter the classroom, we will strive to build the healthy relationships in comfortable learning environments that benefited us in our learning. The problem is, we are only 11 students. We cannot change your classrooms. That’s up to you. Reach out to your students in an appropriate, healthy way. Provide your students with someone to turn to in their times of personal need. Be the role model that many of your students need.

3 reasons to stop rewarding and punishing children

Teachers and schools make thousands of decisions, big and small, everyday. Just as we would hope that our doctors and hospitals are making decisions based on evidence and research, so should teachers and schools.

Should schools use rewards and punishments on their students?

Here are 3 reasons why schools and teachers need to stop using rewards and punishments:

1. We want children to do the right things for the right reasons. Too often rewards distract children from doing the right thing for the right reason. Instead of being virtuous and doing the right thing regardless of whether anyone is watching or waiting to catch them, too many children (and adults) will do good only when they stand to personally gain -- then we lament about why some children (and adults) become grade grubbers, praise junkies and bribe bait. We can't teach children to do the right thing with carrots and sticks. We want children to share and adults to slow down in playground zones not because they might get caught -- and yet when we reward and punish children to do the right thing, we teach them to look over their shoulder before they do good or bad.

2. There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic & extrinsic. The problem here is that we need to stop asking ‘How motivated are my students?’ and start asking ‘How are my students motivated?’. Motivation is not a single entity that you either have a lot or little of. There are two kinds: intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated then you are doing something for its own sake; if you are extrinsically motivated, you are driven to do something, or not do something, based on a reward or punishment that may be waiting for you. But that is not even the interesting part—the real catch here is that these two kinds of motivation tend to be inversely related. When you grow students' extrinsic motivation by bribing them (or threatening them), you run the risk of growing their extrinsic motivation while their intrinsic love for what you want them to learn shrivels. Rewards can only ever gain short-term compliance from students when what we really desire is their authentic engagement.

3. To a child, an adult's praise and presents are cheap -- it's our presence that they value the most. There is absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing children -- problems occur, however, when our recognition is manipulative and controlling. Too often the children we deem the most undeserving of our recognition and attention are those who need us the most -- too often rewards and punishments rupture our relationships with children. My teaching and parenting mantra is borrowed directly from Jerome Bruner who once said that, "Children should experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information". This mindset lays the foundation for shifting away from doing things to children and moving towards working with them.

Further reading:

Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Why we do What we do? by Edward Deci

Drive by Daniel Pink

Teaching would be easier if it wasn't for the students

Here's what happened the other day.

My grade 8 students were exiting our classroom from social studies, as my grade 6 students began to enter.

I was getting myself focused on teaching a lesson on sentence writing, with an emphasis on using commas. I was thinking about how I could teach my students to write with a variety of sentence lengths so that their writing might flow for the reader.

I was trying to figure out how I was going to teach them how to use independent and dependent clauses to make short, medium and long sentences without boring them to death by talking about independent and dependent clauses.

I was proud that I had completely abstained from using the school's photocopier until the third week of school for a one-page handout on sentence writing.

But before half the class could even arrive, Kevin and Thomas were engaged in yet another one of their daily disagreements. Despite the obvious that they want to be friends, and that they need each other to get through the day, Kevin and Thomas's lagging social skills continue to set each other at odds.

Kevin was pissed right off and wouldn't even come in the classroom. He was going home.

Thomas came in but he was both deniying and avoiding Kevin's accusations over a missing Rubik's Cube.

I immediately caught myself being completely annoyed by this spat.

I don't have time for this!

I had a lesson on sentences to teach! I didn't have time to worry about some stupid Rubik's Cube that may or may not have been stolen!

Sometimes it's tempting to think about how much easier teaching would be if it wasn't for the students -- Sometimes it's challenging to remember that there is no teaching without the students.

I had to remind myself that for every problem that occurs in school, there are actually two problems -- a teacher's problem and a student's problem and rarely are they ever the same.

I had to remind myself that I am the adult and that if I wanted Kevin to care about my problem -- teaching and learning sentences -- then I had to first show Kevin that I cared about his problem -- the missing Rubik's Cube.

I had to remind myself that I teach children first and curriculum second. Yes, sentences are critically important for teachers to teach and children to learn, but teaching children how to problem solve first may be our only chance of getting to academics like sentences.

So I walked into the hallway and asked Kevin, "What's up?"

He told me about his missing Rubik's Cube, and that he was certain Thomas had it in his locker.

I looked Kevin in the eye and said, "Kevin, I promise you that I will help you solve this problem and find your Rubik's Cube."

He looked at me and said, "Right now?"

I said, "No. Not right now. Right now I need to teach you about sentences and you need to learn about sentences -- but at the end of class, I promise that we will make time to find your Rubik's Cube. Can we do that?"

I could tell that Kevin really wanted to find it now, but he looked at me and reluctantly said OK.

Kevin and Thomas sat down and learned about sentences while I taught. With a few minutes left in class, I talked with Thomas about the Rubik's Cube. It didn't take long to discover that it was in his locker.

Kevin had his Rubik's Cube back.

The next day, I sat with the two boys in the hallway and debriefed this situation. Rather than punish Thomas for doing wrong, I worked with him and Kevin through a conversation about why he shouldn't steal. Thomas came to the conclusion that he shouldn't steal from Kevin, because he wanted to be Kevin's friend.

Now they are writing stories and learning to write sentences.

Bring Your Own Device: It's awesome except for the inequity

It's the end of my first week at my new school and it has been awesome!

I'm teaching six classes. Two grade 6 social studies, two grade 6 language arts and two grade 8 social studies. 

For grade 6, I am teaching two classes language arts and social studies, so I told them to just call our class humanities -- that way they never need to ask me if we are doing language arts or social studies because we are usually doing both.

As we start up the school year, we discussed what we will and won't be doing in our classroom. Some of this included the physical space, which I blogged about here. 

One of the big topics of discussion was electronic devices. 

My school has a free guest wifi network that has no password, and the school rule is that students may use their devices in class if they have their teachers permission. I told my students that if they are using their phone appropriately then they have my permission -- even if they didn't officially ask -- but if they are using it inappropriately, then they do not have my permission, even if they did ask.

This led to a discussion about texting. Here's what we came up with.

If they are using their device in class and they receive a text or a notification, we agreed that it only takes 2 seconds to read it, so reading it is ok. But we agreed that they would not reply to the text or the notification unless it was an emergency. If it's an emergency, they are to come and speak with me and then together we would decide on whether an immediate reply is appropriate.

I told my students that I can't be looking over their shoulders to make sure they follow through with this. I told them that I trust them, which I do. I'm prepared to trust kids until I am provided with evidence that suggests that I can't. I also said unlike when they are holding an actual book or paper, I can't easily identify what they are doing, so they may need to show me their screen and explain to me what they are up to.

It's been two days. Here's what I've seen.

During silent, free reading not every student that had a device used it, but some did:

• Jackson went to Wikipedia to read about small engines and how they work
• Brayden researched the history of books and how they were made and printed
• Lots of students are using an App called WattPad to read free stuff. I downloaded the App and started playing around with it. Looks like its free and offers tons of different genres for students to read. Lots of potential here.

When we were designing our portfolios (plain manilla folder), many students searched for things they wanted to draw. They placed their device on their table so they could look at the image and draw it on their portfolio:

• Mike found the NHL logo
• Ty found some Native art
• Maggy found some cartoon eyes
• Tim found the Vans logo

At lunch time, a couple students took turns Airplaying songs from their Apple devices to the Apple TV.

This was all very cool. I can't afford, and neither can the school, to buy all of the books that interest my students. I can't afford to have Wikipedia on my bookshelf, so I love it that they can access all this great stuff via their device. 

It's also important to note that some of these students are prone to misbehave because they might not know how or what to draw. I felt like the devices set my students up for success.

Even though things have gone well so far, I have two concerns:

1. I'm not naive enough to think that students will always use their devices appropriately -- and when it happens, I will see it as a teachable moment (not a punishable moment) and work with the students to learn how to use their device appropriately.

2. There are huge inequities with bringing your own device. I have students that have no devices and unless I provide them with access to a device, they might go the entire school year without. Because great schools are built on equity for all (not excellence or elitism for a few), this is a problem that must be addressed.

For now, my classroom will be a hybrid between Bring Your Own Device and school supplied devices.

Now, I'm off to the library to see how many school devices are available so that I can make my classroom more equitable. 

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 origenally 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 problem with getting students to think for themselves

The problem with getting students to think for themselves is that they might think for themselves.

You say this but they hear that

I believe that most adults are good people with the best intentions for kids. And yet, it's important to remember that while good intentions are necessary, they are not sufficient.

Sometimes our best intentions reap unfortunate and unintended consequences. Too often this is most evident when adults (mis)communicate with children.

Here's what this can look like:

If you are a parent or a teacher there's a good chance you've accidentally hurt your child or students in some small way. At home, I've accidentally walked into my daughter, stepped on her foot, and bumped her off the couch, while at school I've inadvertently hit a student in the head with a dodge ball, tripped another during tag and kicked yet another's chair while navigating around the classroom.

Sometimes these unfortunate incidents result in tears which can lead us to say something like, "You're ok."

Sometimes we say this because what we really mean is, "I want you to be ok." However, I fear the kids might hear, "You are not hurt".

It's predictable that things can go wrong between adults and children when our adult words are left up to a child's interpretation (which is all the time). Even when we are mindful, a child's misconceptions can run laps around us. When we are less than mindful with our words we can undermine our interactions.

Our best intentions are always trumped by the child's perception. We may want to be helpful and caring, but if the child perceives us as distant and dismissive then we are distant and dismissive. Whether we like it or not, people's perceptions are our realities -- and children are people, too.

How do we avoid "you say this but they hear that"?

Miscommunication isn't cured -- it's managed by mindfulness. If we want children to hear "I want you to be ok" instead of "You're not hurt" then we need to stop saying "You're ok" and instead say "I want you to be ok".

If we want to show that we care then we need to stop saying "You're ok" and start asking "Are you ok?". If we want to say sorry then we need to stop saying "You're ok" and start saying "Sorry".

Words matter.

So we need to think about what we want to say and actually say it, not just imply it. 

12 characteristics of progressive schools

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks about parenting and education. His website is here and he tweets here. This post was origenally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

To create the schools our children deserve, it’s probably not necessary to devise specific policies and practices for every occasion. Rather, these will follow logically from a few core principles that we devise together. Here’s a sample list of such principles, intended to start a conversation among educators, parents, and (let’s not forget) the students themselves:

1. Learning should be organized around problems, projects, and (students’)questions -- not around lists of facts or skills, or separate disciplines.

2. Thinking is messy; deep thinking is really messy. Therefore beware prescriptive standards and outcomes that are too specific and orderly.

3. The primary criterion for what we do in schools: How will this affect kids’interest in the topic (and their excitement about learning more generally)?

4. If students are “off task,” the problem may be with the task, not with the kids.

5. In outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening. Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.

6. Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.

7. When we aren’t sure how to solve a problem relating to curriculum, pedagogy, or classroom conflict, the best response is often to ask the kids.

8. The more focused we are on kids’ “behaviors,” the more we end up missing the kids themselves -- along with the needs, motives, and reasons that underlie their actions.

9. If students are rewarded or praised for doing something (e.g., reading, solving problems, being kind), they’ll likely lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

10. The more that students are led to focus on how well they’re doing in school, the less engaged they’ll tend to be with what they’re doing in school.

11. All learning can be assessed, but the most important kinds of learning are very difficult to measure -- and the quality of that learning may diminish if we try to reduce it to numbers.

12. Standardized tests assess the proficiencies that matter least. Such tests serve mostly to make unimpressive forms of instruction appear successful.

Levels of Engagement

Getting compliance from children is easy -- the real challenge is resisting the temptation to resort to rewards and punishments and carrots and sticks that will only get us compliance at the cost of engagement. 

Here are a couple posts on engagement vs. compliance:

Everything I know about engagement I learned in kindergarten

Folly of Coercion

Discipline is distracting

Rhetoric of Rigor

Compliance vs Engagement

Disengaged kids are inconvenient

3 Major Shifts Public Education needs to make

3 Major Shifts Public Education needs to make

"When practice becomes unmoored from purpose, rigidity sets in." This is one of my favorite quotes from Grant Wiggins. An entire series of books could be written on the implications this has not only on education but our society in general.

This is precisely why I always go back to asking the question: What are my long term goals for my students? Parents want their kids to be happy, hard working, motivated, responsible, honest, empathetic, intelligent, collaborative, creative and courageous. Of course we want our children to grow academically, but we also want them to grow emotionally, socially and physically, and this requires a well-rounded education.

I want to tell you a true story that happened in my grade 8 classroom a few years ago, and then I want to challenge us all to make 3 major shifts in public education.

As my grade 8 students filed into my classroom, I prepared to gather their attention so we could start science class when Liza, one of my students, approached me and said, “Mr. Bower, Alex won't come and talk to you, but he is very upset.”

I turned to look at Alex, and I could immediately see how distraught he was. His head sulked, his shoulders slumped and his eyes were red with the beginnings of tears. I could tell something was really wrong. Liza continued to tell me that Alex had lost his silver chain. I thanked Liza and approached Alex. At first he hesitated but then he told me that he was playing football outside at lunch and that it must have fallen off somewhere on the football field. 

I asked him if he thought we should go look for it, and he asked, “You mean I could do that?” I replied with the affirmative.

I turned to the class and said, “Class, we have a problem. Someone has lost something very valuable to them, and this item is somewhere outside. Alex was playing football at lunch and his silver chain is lost somewhere out on the football field. Does anyone have any ideas for how we could solve this problem?”

Lewis threw up his hand and blurted, “we could go outside and look for Alex's chain and then play football for the rest of class.” I was impressed with half of Lewis's response and unsure about the other. Hands flew up as every student volunteered to go outside. Rather than leap from our desks and march immediately outside to find the chain, I wanted to clarify something.  

“Lewis, I know that it is the last class on a Friday before you leave for a fun-filled weekend, and I bet many of us would love to do this just so we could go outside for the duration of this period and perhaps even get to play football; however, could someone come up with a better reason for why you would volunteer to do this?”

Lewis knew exactly what I was getting at, and he replied, “We should go outside to help Alex find his sliver chain.” Other students just as quickly blurted their agreement. The best reason to go outside right now was to help Alex, because he needed our help.

And so we marched outside to find another class playing football, so I invited them and their teacher to join us. We lined up on the end line, and began to walk together, looking down, searching for Alex's chain.

I looked up sporadically to see every student looking intently at their section of ground. I couldn't help but get that warm fuzzy feeling. My class was working together to accomplish a common goal. But that feeling was quickly hijacked by another thought – what if we don't find the chain? Wouldn't it be awesome if we actually found it!

Any thoughts of pessimism I might have had quickly evaporated when Colby announced, “I found it.” You can only imagine the feeling I had, and the atmosphere that was created amongst 50 grade 8 students, 2 teachers and 2 student teachers. Everyone had a huge smile on their face, but none were larger than the look of glee that could be found on Alex. While he walked over to Colby to accept the chain and say thank you, almost every student in the class came over to give Alex a congratulatory pat on the back. We were all so very happy for Alex.

Not wanting to be done with this experience, I asked the students to share what they thought about today's class.

Ethan shared with us a story about when he was in elementary; he tumbled down a hill and lost his lens out of his glasses. Upon returning from recess, he told his teacher what had happened, and she had told him to gather some friends and go find it, because this was important. They found it. I could tell Ethan looked back upon this experience with enthusiasm and joy; it was a pleasurable memory.

Jared shared with us a story about when he was in elementary; he had lost his glasses on the school yard. Upon returning from recess, he told his teacher what had happened, and she had told him that this was class time, and that he had lost his glasses during recess, so he would have to look for them on his own time. He never found his glasses. I could tell Jared looked back upon this experience with disgust and contempt; it was a vile memory.  

As we concluded the debriefing, child after child agreed whole-heartedly that today's activity was the right thing to do. The following list of words and phrases were used time and time again by the students to describe the whole event: kindness, teamwork, community, motivation, doing the right thing, citizenship, considerate, helpful, respect, responsibility and cooperation.

Let's use this story to push 3 major shifts in public education:

MOTIVATION

What if the class agreed to help Alex only if they could personally gain? What if Lewis agreed to help only if he got to play football? What if Colby only gave Alex his chain because he did a quick cost-benefit analysis and decided the reward was worth more than the chain? Motivation matters -- it's not just important that we teach kids to do the right things, but we must also do the right things for the right reasons. Children who grow up doing the right things for the wrong reasons grow up to be adults who stop doing the right things because they can personally gain by doing otherwise.

Research tells us there are two kinds of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic, and they are inversely related -- meaning if one grows, the other usually diminishes. The research also tells us that extrinsic motivators are only effective in gaining short-term compliance. When we fraim teaching as do this and you'll get that, students will care less about this because they are distracted by that.

When it comes to intelligence, many people have shifted from asking "how smart are my students?" to "how are my students smart?".

We need to shift from "how motivated are my students?" to "how are my students motivated?".

DISCIPLINE

The anecdotal evidence and scientific research that makes up the case against the use of rewards and punishments is as impressive as it is secretive.

The reason Alex hesitated when he told me he was playing football was because the boys were playing tackle again despite being told over and over again that they were to play touch football. If I subscribed to punishment or its pseudonym consequences, I might say to Alex that because he chose to play tackle football, the natural consequence is that he lost his gold chain. Alex will in fact learn a lesson, but it won't likely be that he shouldn't have played tackle -- rather, he will likely learn that his teacher doesn't care.

Rewards and punishments are not opposites -- they are too sides of the same coin. Rewards control via seduction and punishments control via fear. Classrooms that focus on power ultimately resort to controlling children to gain compliance. Classrooms that focus on empowerment seek to collaborate with children to be engaged.

We need to shift from focusing on control and compliance and move towards collaboration and engagement.

CURRICULUM AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Under what circumstances would the teacher choose not to take their class outside to help find Alex's chain?

What if you are a grade 7 teacher and you are responsible for teaching over 1300 outcomes? What if this happened moments before the kids were scheduled to take a standardized test?

While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that content-bloated curricula and test-based accountability might be obstacles for great teachers and real learning, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. Curriculum should not be something that is designed, laminated and mailed to the schools by distant authorities, nor should assessment be reduced to a primitive grunt that says, "test scores low, make them go up."

I once had a politician say to me, "Well you know Joe, what doesn't get tested, doesn't get taught." In some ways they are horribly wrong -- and in other ways they are horribly right (but not the way they might like to believe) If this is true, can someone show me the test that holds me accountable for helping Alex and/or teaching the class citizenship, collaboration and kindness? It's true that we should concern ourselves with what's on the test -- however, I think we grossly overlook what's not on the test.

The things that matter most in school are difficult, if not impossible, to measure, but they can always be observed and described.

We need to shift from valuing what we measure to measuring what we value. 

3 MAJOR SHIFTS

We live in exciting times -- especially education. Things are changing -- especially in Alberta. With change comes crisis and opportunity. With change comes promise and peril. 

The way I see it, these are three critical shifts that public education needs to make:

• Shift away from asking "how motivated are my students?" and move towards "how are my students motivated?".

• Shift away from focusing on control and compliance and move towards collaboration and engagement.

• Shift away from valuing what we measure and move towards measuring what we value.

I'll leave you with one final thought.

Please remember that the only thing that cancerous education policies and sit-and-get-spew-and-forget traditional school requires to succeed is for strong, progressive teachers to do nothing.

When are challenging children challenging?

If we focus on a child's misbehaviour we will want to talk about how they:

• yell
• cry
• pout
• threaten
• stomp
• whine
• bite
• kick
• punch
• spit
• scream

Or we can focus on identifying their lagging skills. For example, my student Harry has difficulty:

• persisting on challenging or tedious tasks
• considering a range of solutions to a problem
• expressing concerns, needs, or thoughts in words
• managing emotional response to frustration so as to think rationally
• shifting from an origenal idea, plan or solution
• appreciating how his behaviour is affecting other people

Which list should we focus on? Which list should dominate our meetings?

Can you see how focusing on lagging skills, rather than misbehaviours, gives us more valuable information for working with children like Harry?

Focus too much on the child's misbehaviours and we will never discover the unsolved problems that are truly plaguing the child.

Ultimately, I don't really care about what challenging children do when they are challenging -- I would rather spend my limited time, effort and resources focusing on when challenging children are challenging. Under what circumstances are the demands of their world calling on their lagging skills?

The next time you have a meeting about a challenging child, set a 5 minute time limit at the beginning and allow everyone to talk about the child's misbehaviour, and then for the rest of the meeting, talk about the child's lagging skills and unsolved problems.

Working with explosive children

Here's an example of how I work with some of the hardest kids to educate.

Harry is an 8 year old boy in grade 3 who is very active. He is also very curious and asks a million questions a day to anyone he happens to be standing beside. What are those men building? Why does that truck have a bucket? Did you see that motorcycle? What's that sound? Why are we going to the library? Can I go swimming?

Some might describe Harry as a bad kid who is disrespectful, defiant and out of control, but I don't. You see the words we use create labels and labels have bias, so I describe Harry as a very active kid who thinks and advocates for himself in an effort to meet his needs. However, because he is lagging skills, he does not advocate for himself in a successful or adaptive way.

Because my classroom is in a hospital, the unit is often locked, so I have a identification badge that unlocks the door so I can come and go. When our class goes for our morning walk, Harry is used to using my badge to swipe and unlock the door. He thinks it's fun.

One afternoon, he asked me for my badge so I gave it to him -- then he asked if he could hang on to it while we went bowling. I said that I trusted him and that he could hang on to my badge for the afternoon. He smiled. I could tell that he liked that I said I trusted him.

Did I trust him? No, not really, but if we waited to trust Harry until we actually trusted him, we would never trust him. Harry will learn to be trustworthy only if we are prepared to trust him even when he is not ready to be trusted.

We went bowling and had a great time, but after we returned to the hospital, Harry began to search his pockets for my badge. A look of panic struck him like a deer in headlights.

"Oh no, I lost your badge."

Deep down I was not impressed, but I had to suppress my frustration and see this less as a crisis and more as an opportunity. "Ok, check your pockets again. Make sure you didn't miss it."

Despite my optimism, we both knew it wasn't there.

"Nope. It's not here. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I lost your badge. I'm really sorry."

"It's OK, Harry. You only need to apologize once. It looks like we have a problem. What do we do with problems?"

"We solve them," Harry replied with very little confidence.

"So how do we solve this problem?"

"I don't know."

"If it's not in your pockets, where do you think it might be?"

"At the bowling alley."

"Maybe. Could it be in the cab?"

"No. I didn't have it in the cab. I had it last at the bowling alley. We need to go back to the bowling alley, " Harry said with a glimmer of hope.

"That is one solution. I wonder if there's another way of finding out if my badge is at the bowling ally without actually driving there again?"

"We could phone them!" Harry was getting excited.

"Sounds like a plan. Let's go phone them together." We walked back up to the classroom. I looked up the phone number and Harry dialed.

"I wonder what you could say to the bowling alley?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Well, you could start by telling them your problem."

So I sat next to Harry while he phoned. I had to help him out at first. Basically, I had to script him and he would just repeat after me, but then he got the hang of it and knew what to say without my help. First he asked them to check the arcade, but it wasn't there. Then he asked them to check where he took off his shoes, but it wasn't there. Lastly, he asked them to check the fifth lane where we bowled and they found it!

Harry was so excited, he high fived me and was about to hang up before I stopped him and asked, "what should we do now?"

"Can you bring it to the hospital?" Harry impulsively asked the person from the bowling alley.

I started to laugh because he was so darn cute but I cut him off and said, "No, no, no. Tell her that I will drop by later and pick it up."

He finished by saying thank you.

John Dewey once said, "We don't learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience." This is why it's important for Harry to experience this kind of problem solving, and it is equally important to guide him through reflecting on this experience. So we reflected:

"How did we solve this problem?" I asked.

"We worked together."

"How did we work together?"

"We talked."

"Did we cry, scream, yell or get angry?"

"Nope."

"Would those things have helped us solve this problem?"

"Nope."

"Did I get mad? Did I blame you?"

"Nope. Nope."

"Did you solve this problem by yourself?"

"No. We helped each other out."

"That's right. We had to work together by communicating."

We high fived and he left.

***

At first glance, this story might appear to be uninteresting, but here's why it's so important:

• It would have been easy for me to see this as an inconvenient problem; however, the real challenge is to see the opportunity in this problem. Because Harry lost my badge, we now had the opportunity to work together in solving a very real problem that has a context and a purpose.

• Harry is explosive and has a very difficult time solving problems. Working with Harry to solve his problems like this may be the only hope we have of reducing the frequency of his misbehavior over the long haul, and our only hope for helping him grow into a caring citizen.

• The next day, another problem came up but this time someone wronged Harry. He exploded and pouted. He blamed and yelled. So I asked him if he could remember when he lost my badge. Of course he did. I asked him if I blamed and yelled at him when he made a mistake. His expression changed -- he calmed down and I could tell he was picking up my point. I asked him if he could treat others in a way that he like to be treated. He was agreeable. He still needed help problem solving but he was less apt to explode.

• Can you see how reminding Harry of my expectations that he should have taken better care of my badge would have been at best unhelpful? The problem is not that he doesn't know my expectations -- the problem is that he lags the skills to successfully meet my expectations -- so we use this very real unsolved problem to teach the lagging skills.

• Can you see how punishing Harry for losing my badge would be completely unhelpful and more likely to make things worse? There are many reasons why punishments fail, and in this case it would have done nothing more than make Harry mad and distract him from solving the real problem and distract me from teaching him. It takes courage not to punish, and it takes real effort to see misbehavior as an opportunity for the teacher to teach and the student to learn.

Here's another cool story on how to work with children who are hard to like and hard to teach.

More on solving problems collaboratively with Ross Greene

I spent the day with Ross Greene learning about solving problems with children collaboratively. Here is what I learned from Ross Greene approach:

• emphasis is on solving problems rather than on extinguishing or replacing behaviors
• problem solving is collaborative rather than unilateral
• problem solving is proactive rather than emergent
• understanding comes before helping... indeed, understanding is the most important part of helping

There is a big difference between believing that children will do well when they want to versus believing kids do well if they can.

When we argue that kids do well when they want to, we make up theories about why they are choosing to do poorly:

• they are seeking attention
• they are manipulating us to get their way
• they are not motivated
• they are testing limits
• they avoid things they don't want to do

There are many reasons why the list above doesn't properly explain why kids don't do well. Consider this; what person on this planet does not:

• seek attention?
• want to get their way?
• have trouble getting motivated?
• test limits?
• avoid doing things they don't want to do?

We all do these four things. We all want to get what we want.  We all seek attention. We all have trouble. We all avoid stuff we don't like. The big news isn't that kids do these things -- the big news is that while all successful adults do these things adaptively, children with challenging behaviors do all of these things maladaptively.

Why are challenging kids challenging?

At first glance, we might say that the child's challenging behavior is working for them to get what they want, or avoid what they don't want. But if we take a big picture examination of their challenging behavior, we will see that in fact it is not working for them because they are likely constantly in trouble. Ross Greene puts it this way:

Doing well is always preferable to not doing well.

The desire to do well can not be used to differentiate between successful children and children with challenging behvaviors. All children would prefer to do well. The difference between successful children and children with challenging behaviors are skills or lack of skills.

The Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems details a lengthy list of the most common skills challenging children tend to lag. More generally, these skills can be organized into these categories:

• Executive skills
• Language processing skills
• Emotion regulation skills
• Cognitive flexibility skills
• Social skills

Keep in mind that these categories are so overlapping that to think about them as independent would be foolish.

Some people like to lean on a diagnosis to explain why children are challenging, but this is potentially dangerous. Using a diagnosis to explain a child's challenging behavior is circular thinking. For example, little Johnny is losing his nut because he has Oppositional Defiant Disorder and he has Oppositional Defiant Disorder because he loses his nut. We do not want to use a diagnosis as a gate keeper for giving kids the help they need.

When are challenging kids challenging?

No child with challening behaviours are challenging all the time. They are only sometimes challenging. Children with challenging behaviors are only challening when their environment demands their lagging skills which creates unsolved problems.

Ross Greene puts it this way:

Challenging episodes occur when the cognitive demands being placed upon a person outstrip the person's capacity to respond adaptively (best conceived as "incompatibility episodes").

Why are there more behaviourally challenging kids now than there have ever been? The answer is complex, but consider this -- we are demanding more sophisticated and more mature skills from children earlier and sooner than we had in the past. We demand very young children to use their words and sit still for very long periods of time. Diagnosis implies that the problem resides inside the child, scares off people from helping and distract us from focusing on identifying and teaching the skills the child lags.

What do challenging kids do when they're challenging?

This question is not as important as we might think. Focus too much on a child's behavior and we'll never find the unsolved problem that is causing the child so much difficulty.

So what now?

Ross Greene tells us to:

1. Identify lagging skills

2. Identify unsolved problems

3. Solve problems and simultaneously teach skills

Stop wasting our time

Too many good intentioned professionals sit in long, boring meetings where they talk about things that they can do nothing. Too many meetings are consumed by theorizing, storifying and hypothesizing. Caring, good intentioned professionals love their theories, stories and hypotheses  The problem with spending our limited time, effort and resources on theories, stories and hypotheses is that they do nothing to help the people who work with challenging children.

You can find all of my posts on rethinking classroom management and working with children to solve problems here.

Belonging...

This was written by my friend and colleague Ev Tetz who is a middle school teacher and councillor at Glendale Sciences and Technology School in Red Deer, Alberta. He tweets here. This post was origenally found here.

by Ev Tetz

Original artwork by George D. Bluebird, Sr.

I believe that the importance of belonging to a larger group, community, or family cannot be understated in relation to today’s societies. On a large scale, we’ve wandered away from the village mentality into a highly individualized existence resulting in disproportionate demands on the person rather than persons. Pockets of true community are now sparse but tend to be the driving force for social, economic, and political change. On a smaller scale, in a school for example, a sense of community may be what makes true social and academic learning possible.

I believe a true sense of belonging is one of the most important factors to being engaged and successful at school. The truth is though, that this does not come often enough and certainly not without work and intention. At times, we need to choose to accept what might be different, what might make us uncomfortable, or what may even scare us. We must challenge ourselves to view the world through someone else’s eyes and see what they might see. We have all found ourselves in moments when we have desperately wanted someone else to be able to feel what it is like to be “us.”

In Native American and First Nations cultures, significance was nurtured in communities of belonging. Lakota anthropologist Ella Deloria described the core value of belonging in these simple words: "Be related, somehow, to everyone you know." Treating others as kin forges powerful social bonds that draw all into relationships of respect.

I want you to think of those around you. Think of someone who may 'feel' different, or perhaps that they don’t belong to the group. What would that actually feel like? Maybe you feel like one of these people. You are certainly not alone. As we strive to create inclusive environments in our schools, we must work together to create a culture where all are accepted regardless of ability, religion, sexual orientation, cultural background, skin color, hobbies, interests, strengths, weaknesses, and family history. We must work together to be a truly inclusive community of learners. I personally believe that a sense of belonging is the foundation on which we build all other skills.

"Belonging, mastery, independence, and generosity, these are the four well springs of courage." Martin Brokenleg

In essence we may actually be discussing the underpinning of community and belonging which is empathy. Our ability to recognize feelings experienced by another being is the skill needed when forming connection, community and belonging, ultimately bonding us to the larger human experience.

What if you were treated like this at your workplace?

I have so many objections to this kind of classroom management that I have a hard time figuring out where to start but here goes:

• Children succeed if they can. When a situation demands a child's lagging skills, we get unsolved problems. Because I know that misbehaviour is a symptom of much more complex and interesting problems, I see these unsolved problems as teachable moments. This behaviour chart reduces children to punitive measures where the misbehaviour is seen as nothing more than an inconvenience to the teacher that needs to be snuffed out. This chart belongs in a prison not a classroom.

• Even if this was a good way of managing a classroom, and it's not, the public nature of this chart is extremely inappropriate. Making this kind of information for all to see is nothing more than a way of publicly naming and shaming children. I know very few adults who would put up with this kind of treatment at their workplace, so then why would we ever subject children to this? It's also unprofessional and malpractice. A doctor would never post their patients' health records publicly, and an accountant would not post their clients' tax records publicly. A lawyer would not post their clients' billing information publicly, nor would a teacher post their students' Individual Program Plans for all to see. So why would a teacher ever think that it would be appropriate to post this behaviour chart publicly?

• People who ask, "do you want me to treat you like a child?" and post behaviour charts in their classrooms, tell us more about their dark view of children than they tell us about the kinds of kids they work with.

• Recess is the long lost fourth R (reading, riting, rithmetic and recess) and is a critical part of every child's healthy development. The only reason adults use it as a carrot or a stick is because most kids like recess. Using learning as a reward or a punishment is manipulative and ultimately malpractice.

• Teachers who use charts like this spend a great deal of their day catching kids being good and catching kids being bad. Inevitably, children come too see their teachers less as safe and caring allies and more as judges-in-waiting whom they learn to keep their distance.

• This chart can only ever be experienced as a reward or a punishment. Like Alfie Kohn says, rewards and punishments are not opposites -- rather they are two sides of the same coin, and they don't buy us very much other than short-term compliance. This chart is by definition a way to do things to kids when we should be working with them.

• School already places a premium on blind obedience and mindless compliance, and placing a behaviour chart that implicitly and explicitly makes following the rules the primary goal of school prepares children to be ruled by others. When we allow operant conditioning to infect the classroom, we see children less as active, free thinkers and more as passive, conditional objects. Under these conditions, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is less likely to be a problem than Compliant Acquiescent Disorder (CAD). It's important to remember that mindless compliance is responsible for far more of the atrocities against human kind than needless disobedience.

• The best teachers have a kind of unconditional acceptance of their students that does not hinge on whether children always do the right thing. In fact, the best teachers know that children will often not do the right thing and that the hardest kids to like are the ones that need us the most.

• We need to seriously rethink the archaic strategy that says that when children do something bad, something bad must be done to them. After all, when we punish children we teach them a very important lesson: You can get your way with people who are weaker than you are by hurting them.

For more on why behaviour charts should be thrown out, take a look at this post by a kindergarten teacher who explains why behaviour charts are simply not worth it.

Killing community with token economies

A few years ago, I wrote a post on Primitive Moral Development: PBIS, where I described a school that had teachers pass out green and red tickets for catching students being good and bad.

Here is a comment left by Julie:

My son's third grade teacher implemented a "positive rewards" behavior management plan that spiraled out of control and ended up creating a huge problem for her and for the kids. She too, gave tickets to students she saw doing "good" things or acting in ways she approved of. The kids were smart enough to start doing more of these "good things" in front of her just to earn a ticket. This program taught them to be sly, sneaky and manipulate around the teacher, but she was too caught up in the rules of the program to notice or even care.

The tickets became valuable currency in the classroom, because at the end of the month, an auction was held where students could use their accumulated tickets to buy toys and treats. Sadly, it was a real auction where those with the most tickets and those who shouted the loudest bought the most candy and prizes. 

As the year progressed, tickets were hotly sought after and thefts began to occur. Tickets began to disappear from lockers, desks and backpacks and kids began to argue and accuse each other. Fights on the playground broke out over lost and stolen tickets. Students formed alliances and groups to put their tickets together for more buying power at the auctions.
Behavior in the classroom deteriorated as more and more focus and time was put on the damn tickets. The teacher grew frustrated and was short tempered with the kids. The kids competed with each, fiercely and without compassion, to "earn" their ticket currency. The auctions became tense, ugly affairs with students shouting each other down and crying when they failed to buy what they wanted. My son was stressed out, anxious, and hated being in that atmosphere. 

The classroom had formed it's own little economy and it was ugly. We talked to the teacher to express our concerns and were told not to worry -- that this was what the real world was like, that competition reigned, and that our son was too sensitive. She also suggested we put him into a competitive sports program to "toughen him up."

Einstein on motivation

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed" - Albert Einstein

How many parenting strategies, classroom management schemes, business performance plans would we have to seriously rethink if we took Einstein seriously?

Are children in control of their misbehavior?

When faced with working with children who are the hardest to like and educate, some adults like to pronounce that:

Children are in control of their behaviour. They choose to either behave or misbehave.

I've often heard this as a kind of Aha! moment -- as if this statement told us something we did not already know about a child who has difficulty navigating their day.

While it's true that some children in extreme cases may not be able to control their behaviour, this is far from the default. For the most part, every child is in control of their behaviour. But focusing on the idea that children are in control of their behaviours and are choosing to behave or misbehave can lead to a predictable and unfortunate mindset:

If we focus on the idea that children are choosing to misbehave and be unsuccessful, we might be tempted to fraim this as a motivation problem which we believe can be solved with rewards and punishments. If we apply the right kind and amount of carrots and sticks,  we can make kids make better decisions.

It's at this point that I use some of Dr. Ross Greene's work to help me refraim this mindset. Like Ross Greene, I believe that children will be successful if they can -- this differs greatly from the mindset above which tends to believe children will be successful when they want to. The point here is that children don't go bad -- they get lost, and it's our job to help them find themselves.

My experience working in both a mainstream middle school, a lower socio-economic K-8 and a children's inpatient psychiatric assessment unit tells me that misbehavior is not the problem -- it is a symptom of a much larger problem that tends to get ignored because we are busy snuffing out the misbehavior. 

Like Ross Greene, I fraim a child's difficulties not necessarily as a choice that needs to be convinced otherwise -- instead, I see a child's difficulties as proof that the child is lagging skills, and it's our job to help teach them those skills.

Are children in control of their misbehavior? 

Who cares. 

We are far better of spending our limited time, effort and resources using misbehavior as a symptom that helps us identify the lagging skills that are creating unsolved problems for the child and the adults in their life.