Food for Thought Reinventing Education Part 2

Dear all,

Attending the Grade 12 final assembly made me realize how close we are to the end of another year at ISHCMC and there still feels as if we have a great deal to do. Thanks to everyone for another good week.

This week's food for thought is a continuation of the World EducLead conference and focuses on one of the strands that emerged; assessment. What I will do is try and capture the key thinking of a few of the speakers on this topic. It was clear amongst the 1200 in audience that some found it hard to release learning to students so that they can inquire into their own content and still be able to give their traditional tests and assessments. As Heidi Jacobs bluntly pointed out to one question she was asked, " I think that you may be missing the point with your question."

Professor Guskey made it clear that from his research the assessment that makes the most difference to student learning is that which takes place in every class and is primarily formative in nature. His work has led him to believe that its is essential that we learn from what was done to us when we were students. His four key point were:

• Assessment must be a source of information for students and teachers. We need to move away from making assessment a guessing game for students. Assessment, what ever form it takes should never be a surprise to the students. If it is it will teach our students that their hard work and effort with revision is a waste of time and that they should not trust their teachers. He suggested that at the end of every lesson students should be asked what have your learned in the lesson and the teacher should use this information for planning the next lesson
• Assessment must be followed by high quality corrective instruction. Every conversation with a student about assessment should provide strtaegies for the student to improve in the future. Deb Masters and her work with Hattie further emphasized this point.
• Students must be given a second chance to show improvement. Professor Guskey was very strong on this point when he raised this criteria for successful assessment in a school. He asked the audience how many had driving licences, how many failed their test first time and how they would feel now if that meant they could never drive? He talked about creating live long learners which means learning by doing. He pointed out that none of us are perfect and therefore we should be encouraging our students to develop resilience and grit which is built around learning from mistakes. He shared research that students learn more from making mistakes than getting it right first time. He used the Roger Staubach quote, " Spectacular achievements are always proceeded by unspectacular preparation," to further illustrate the futility of having assessment as a one off shot. He concluded by saying that all students should be given the opportunity to re do assessment task, but not the same one, one that is parallel so they can demonstrate how they have learned from their mistakes......and it should be this result that is recorded. When you stop and think about all the literate around resilience and like long learners this approach makes sense although it runs contrary to how we were treated in school.
• We must ensure that students enjoy early assessment success. He started to talk about this by asking the audience how many of us started our course with a hard assessment to show that our course is tough and let the students know that they will have to work hard to be successful. He showed research that clearly shows students are quite malleable when they start a new course until the first assessment. This first assessment, for the majority, becomes self predicting of their future achievement. The first assessment defines how they feel they will do in the future and becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for the majority. Hence, Guskey stressed that we should use the first assessment to create early success and that this will produce greater confidence, engagement and effort from our students. this approach is very similar to the use of kind words as part of the achievement culture in our mission. (This is further supported by Hattie because it creates student expectation which has an effect size of 1.44 compared with an average learning impact of .53)

In this session with Guskey he added one more important point that certainly applies to us as an IB School with a focus on AtL skills. It is one that I have never heard raised before. I did try and research it but there appears to be a great deal of information but not related exactly to what Guskey stated. The concept raised was categorical perceptions which he said explains why when students learn soft skill in one subject they do not automatically transfer these skills as we would hope and imagine to other classes. Guskey said that for skills to be transferred they have to be deliberately taught and linked in each subject. This certainly merits additional thinking and would have an impact upon how we think about soft skill acquisition across the school.

If you would like to read more detail about Guskey's work here is a link to ascd article linked to one of his books.

Dr Heidi Hayes Jacobs was without doubt the most provocative of the speakers at the conference. Here are just a few of the provocations that she raised in her first session.

" Everything should be for students not our old habits"

" We must be preparing our learners for the future not the past"

"Students must be taught the three new literacy's, Digital, Media and Global."

" We must make learning spaces that create responsive environment for students"

" All decisions regarding school should focus on pedagogy"

" We all need the courage to break the boundaries that need breaking and replace with fresh relevant solutions."

This short video catches many of the things that Heidi was talking about in her sessions. it is full of her ideas from http://www.curriculum21.com/  a great site to visit.

As this is a great deal to absorb and think about I will save the sessions on Hattie till next week's Food for Thought. Deb Masters provided many interesting findings that we need to be reflecting upon in order to develop our classroom teaching strategies across the school.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours

Adrian

Food for Thought: Reinventing Education conference Part 1, Intro to speakers

Dear all,

I hope you are all having an enjoyable and relaxed Easter weekend.

Last week I spent two days at the INTASE World EDULEAD conference in Singapore listening to some incredibly inspiring educational thought leaders and researchers discussing reinventing education. The two days were very reaffirming for our mission and vision for education and the direction that we are moving at ISHCMC, although there is some fine tuning needed and a few things that we need to learn and improve upon. I left feeling in no doubt that our ISHCMC students are and will be well served by the direction that ISHCMC is developing as a learning community. There was so much interesting thinking raised that I want to share with you, that I have decided to use my next three Food for Thoughts to firstly introduce you to the speakers and then provide you with the key points that they were making about education today.

The speakers were:

Sir Ken Robinson ( Live from L.A.) the most viewed TED speaker with over 300 million views of his TED talks. This was like a private TED session and he spoke and answered questions for over 2.5 hours. It was clear from what he was saying that a great deal of his thinking today is captured in his tow most recent books; "The Element" and "Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education"

Dr Heidi Hayes Jacobs, is the founder and President of the Curriculum Designers group that provides professional services to schools and organizations internationally to upgrade curriculum and support teaching strategies to meet the needs of 21st century learners 

Sir John Jones, ex- Head teacher at three secondary schools over 17 years is now working for the UK government as part of the Governments Polcy action Team as well as being a resident expert for Educational Leadership at Mancester University. 

Dr Marcia Tate, is the founder and CEO of Developing Minds. she had a 30 year career in classrooms and as an administrator and won awards for her contributions to staff development. Today she is very much focused on ensuring that teachers have pedagogical  strategies that allow students the opportunity to achieve in their classrooms. Her latest work is around Formative Assessment and Brain- compatible classrooms: focusing on how we know students are learning.

Prof Tom Guskey, is Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Kentucky, he has written over 20 books on education and in this conference focused very much on assessment and the need to create well designed assessments tasks as part of the instructional process.

Deb Masters, works very closely with John Hattie and his research into visible learning. her talks were very much based around the efffect size findings of Hattie's research and what we should be discussing in schools that has the biggest impact upon student learning.

Deb Masters summarizes Visible Learning Plus from Cognition Education on Vimeo.

Now you know something about all the speakers that I was privileged to have listened to last week. next week i will try and synthesize some of the thoughts that they shared.

I want to end with something that has been talked about before at meetings and that is the introduction of a management information system at ISHCMC. We were due to be installing iSAMS for August 2016 but during its delay we have been investigating more appropraite systems for our school and have moved to introducing PowerSchool instead.  We believe this will be far more useful to us and allow a gradual move to a single platform for the majority of our work with students as well as providing immense capacity for tracking student progress.  As I said last Monday Michelle had to pick an admin project for her Head training that covered collaboration, change management and school systems and she deiced that the area she could help most in was our move to PowerSchool as ISHCMC's Management system.

So just to whet your appetite her are two short videos that introduce PowerSchool. the first is 2 minutes and is an advert from Powerschool. the second 5 minutes is a more in depth coverage of what PowerSchool provides.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: The need for revolution not just change

Dear all,

On Friday I was giving an interview to Oi magazine about the new secondary school campus and our vision for education in the new facility. The interviewer asked me how I could be so certain that our approach of inquiry, constructivism and individualized learning opportunities is better than traditional educational methodology. I suggested that he comes and visit ISHCMC and witness the release of learning that is prevalent across the School and speak to our students about what they are learning and why. I'm not sure if he will come or not.

Yet again I can start my weekly Food for Thought by pointing out that we have enjoyed another wonderful week of 'out of the box' activities at ISHCMC; an excellent music showcase, IB Diploma Art Exhibition, KG Mini Ex and Grade 5 students testing out their entrepreneurial skills in two different markets places. The diversity of the activities we are providing for our community is excellent and the way that our students are demonstrating their individuality is exactly what we are aiming for as we challenge the traditional model of schooling. The last month has clearly shown that our mission and vision for education is raising the quality and standards of our students ability to articulate their understanding and learning in an energetic and engaging manner

Two years ago I went to the World Educational Leadership Summit in Singapore and was fortunate to  attend a day long masterclass with Yong Zhao. I believe his articulation of education makes a great deal of sense and aligns closely with our vision and what we are doing at ISHCMC. So, my Food for Thought this week is to watch this Yong Zhao TED talk, where he amusingly and cleverly uses the case of Rudolph to describe his view of where education is and where it should be going in the future. For many of us this will be a positive reinforcement of what we are trying to achieve as we disrupt the model of traditional schooling at ISHCMC.

Enjoy.

Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: Teaching for Understanding Part 2

 Dear all,

Another awesome week at ISHCMC closes with HCMC STEAM Fair, Open House in Lower Primary, and Senior Football Teams in Thailand. So many good things going on around the school in all areas of student learning that it is impossible to record them all here.

This Food for Thought builds upon the ideas expressed last week and further reinforces our mission and vision for education. This article from Edsurge was shared with me following last week's post and discusses the important difference between Static and Dynamic knowledge. 

As Karen Cox points out in her blog Celebration education

"Not all learning is equal. Covering the material does not mean understanding, finishing a textbook does not indicate mastery. No real learning takes place until it moves from
surface knowledge to dynamic knowledge, to not only "know about" the information, but to be able to apply the skill or concept to real life accomplishment.
Surface/ Static  Knowledge
Surface knowledge is static and motionless, as when a student is exposed to facts or information, they then "know about" it, and they may even memorize it and pass a test where they repeat back the information, but there is no real understanding or application to life. Such surface knowledge diminishes the probability that long-term retention will occur. Yet this is the model that permeates modern education.
Dynamic Knowledge
Dynamic knowledge steps beyond just "know about" and steps into performance. It isactually doing something with the information, working with it, building skills and understanding on a deeper level. Dynamic knowledge is to gain a feel for something, to internalize information and have it become real and active in the learner's world. Students gain dynamic knowledge by experience. It takes more effort, but it reaps greater rewards."


Yet again this article paints a picture of a changing world in which jobs that require static knowledge are being replaced easily by technology and algorithms whereas those the involve dynamic knowledge a slightly harder to remove. 

“Over the past three decades, almost all job growth has come from the two categories of work that are nonroutine. … While routine jobs have gone nowhere over the past three decades, the number of people in knowledge work jobs has more than doubled, and there are no signs of that trend slowing. This strongly suggests that even though technology is eliminating some jobs, it’s creating even more in different fields.”


I refer again to the work of Yong Zhoa where her clearly articulates a changing world in which compliant labour based around static knowledge is no longer required and will be replaced. The article builds upon Zhoa's work with the complimentary work of Seth Goldin, again I have shared before, and his accusation that education today is stealing the dreams of the generation of students it is graduating, who are ill prepared for the world they face. His call for change is consistent with our movement to build a constructivist environment for learning and one in which students have the opportunity to create their own learning, relate to the real world and present to authentic audiences.

The article concludes by looking at the failings of universities and asks the important question; that if, as is characteristic of much of the learning in further education, it is built around the acquisition of static knowledge, is attending college/ university a worthwhile learning exercise for many of our students? Would they be better advised to be creating their own entrepreneurial projects, volunteering and interning in businesses? Simply is it time not only to rethink Primary and Secondary education but also further education?

One last thing to think about on the teaching for understanding strand. In the article last week it talked about the importance of embedding the learning skills and the need for consistent repetition before it became embedded. This interesting short video about riding a bike and how changing one fundamental aspect of this skill can completely disorientate our thinking. I believe the conclusion is clear that younger minds are more adaptable and that we must not miss the opportunity to develop creative, open minded and innovative thinkers as they journey through ISHCMC.

Have a good weekend,

Yours

Adrian

Food for Thought: Back to our Mission

Dear all,

My goodness, if ever there has been a week where we demonstrated our growth as a school and seriously pushed the idea of being the best school in the universe, it has to be the last six days. MYP Personal Project exhibition followed by the Grade 4 and Grade 1 mini exhibitions demonstrated how well our students cannot only articulate their learning outcomes but also the processes they have been through whilst learning. The confidence with which 6 year old through to 15 year old students expressed themselves was very impressive. In addition to this we had awesome learning take place in classrooms all over the school, with students proud to show off their learning to the passing Head of School. GIN conferences to attend, hosting swimming tournament, football fixtures and SISAC local gymnastics tournaments. Definitely something for every student to get involved with in the school.

Whilst, working on the CIS accreditation for the past two weeks I thought that it might be good to return our minds to our school mission. 

As an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School, International School Ho Chi Minh City (ISHCMC) constructs a culture of achievement in an environment where students are energized, engaged and empowered to become active participants in their communities.

When you walk around the school it is obvious that the key action words in the mission, Energized, Engaged and Empowered are being emphasized and deliberately developed in our students. Behind these three words lies a foundation that when delivered well allows the three key action words to flourish in our classrooms. In this Food for Thought I would like to focus on one other word that is so important and drives the pedagogy around the school: constructs.

Thinking about our mission for CIS I returned to some notes that I made when I first came to ISHCMC in 2013 about constructivist teaching. The following paragraph was taken from, "Teaching for Understanding" by  Blumenfeld et al and is the conclusion to that section, page 869. Rereading it now it helps me put into context many of the changes that I now see around our school in our students, the classrooms and their public performances.  Please read the following as it is so relevant to who we are today and what we are aiming to do with our teaching and learning.  

"Recent insights from studies of everyday learning have resulted in new emphases on social rather than individual influences on learning. They have highlighted the cultural and situated nature of knowledge and of learning. Newer social constructivist theories have assured that understanding is contextualized and a function of social interaction with others. The tasks undertaken, the tools employed, and the immediate context that reflects the culture in which ideas are developed and used.

These approaches have not spawned a specific set of prescribed behaviors for teachers. Instead, there are some general guidelines that can be derived; consequently, classroom enactments might vary considerably and still be commensurate with the theory. The teacher’s role is like that of a master craftsman, creating a situation where the student apprentice is inducted into the ways of knowing in the discipline and its important ideas. The teacher helps create an environment and selects areas of inquiry for students to engage while investigating, solving problems, and exploring ideas using technological tools as aids. The emphasis is on discourse and collaboration so that students can learn from each other and from others with greater expertise. The teacher scaffolds learning via modelling cognitive processes, coaching, providing feedback, breaking down tasks and- as students gain proficiency- gradually releasing responsibility. The teacher assesses what students understand using alternatives to standardized short answer tests. The stress is on authenticity, on creating an environment where students must demonstrate mastery of concepts and of disciplinary ways of inquiry through various means such as public presentations or demonstrations which preferably have meaning beyond the confines of the classroom."

This all ties in beautifully with what Wiggins and McTighe promoted in their excellent article, Teaching for Understanding where they say,  “Students can only be said to have fully understood if they can apply their learning without someone telling them what to do and when to do it. In the real world, no teacher is there to direct and remind them about which lesson to plug in here or there. Transfer is about intelligently and effectively drawing from their repertoire, independently, to handle new contexts on their own”.

Quite simply this can be summed up as follows: 

• Constructivism encourages us to see learning as an active, constructive process.
• The learner is an information constructor. Learners actively construct or create their own subjective representations of reality.
• New information is linked to prior knowledge thus mental representations are subjective.
• Constructivists shift the focus from knowledge as a product to knowing as a process.
• Constructivism recognizes that students bring with them a rich array of prior experiences, knowledge, and beliefs that they use in constructing new understandings. 
• Allowing students to make meaning from their learning leads to greater student engagement
• Teachers are encouraged to release the process of learning to their students
• A constructivist approach engages and empowers the learner by valuing the part they play in creating meaning.

Finally, this links perfectly with what researchers are discovering more and more about how we all learn and how teaching should be delivered. This recent Tim Elmore post from , Growing Leaders, one of my daily reads, emphasizes in a short conversation with Britt Andreatta a thought leader in leadership and learning. this conversation again emphasizes the reduces role of the sage at the front of the class releasing the embedding of the learning to the students through carefully designed activities. It is clear that some cultures and individual students would prefer to be given all the information however we now know that this does not lead to embedded deeper learning and the growth in capacity of the student to truly learn and understand information and concepts.

Tim Elmore: In your first book, Wired to Grow, you explore the brain science of learning. So what are some of the key takeaways that you would offer from this book?

Britt Andreatta: What became clear to me was that learning actually occurs in three phases, and different parts of the brain play a role in each of these phases. The first phase is when we actually sit down to learn something. The hippocampus is the brain structure that takes what we are listening to or watching and puts it into our short-term memory. What is really interesting about the hippocampus is it needs to process content every 20 minutes or so to move it effectively into our memory.

The second phase is to remember. We have got to get the information into our long-term memory so that we can get back to it weeks or months or even years from now. There are actually very specific strategies we can use to do that. The most effective—and this is what good teachers learned how to do a long time ago— is when we attach it to something that the learner already knows or has experience in. The idea of attaching new information to a cluster of neural-wiring that already exists in the learner’s brain is called schemas. The other big “aha” moment was around the concept of retrievals. Back in the day, when we were younger, it was all about repetition. Keep doing those math problems, over and over. Keep writing, over and over. What we are learning is that to get it into long-term memory, it is really about pulling it back out again—retrieval. Quizzing yourself, retrieving the information, is kind of the sweet spot. It turns out that through three retrievals—spaced with sleep—is where the magic happens. So if you are a teacher, ask your students to summarize it or take a quiz on it so they have to reach back into their brain and pull it out. Three retrievals spaced with sleep is really the key element to getting things into long-term retention, long-term memory.

The third phase is to do, which is about changing behaviors. Most of professional learning today (which is where I am working these days) is about driving some specific behavior change. The research on how our brain forms a habit was what really informed me in this area. Turns out the brain structure is the basal ganglia, and when we repeat something over and over again, it’s what turns something into a habit. It takes about 40-50 repetitions of a new behavior before it really gets synced as a strong neural pathway or a habit.

Have a relaxing Sunday,

Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: Should we differentiate more for gender at ISHCMC?

Dear all,

Differentiation has become common place in our classrooms, so much so that it is hardly ever raised these days at job interviews and is taken as a non negotiable. However, I would like to raise the question through this week's Food for Thought in a different context, that of gender performance. There can be no argument that there is an increasing disparity between boys and girls performance at school, that this is impacting the work place and society in general. We come face to face with it every time we hold academic award ceremonies, as the clear majority of students winning awards for both achievement and engagement are girls. But what are we doing to address this increasingly important issue? Through this provocation my intent is not to initiate a gender war but rather to encourage us to think of strategies that will encourage all our students to be energized, engaged and empowered by their school experience.

Apart from our recent secondary awards ceremony which made the disparity very obvious, this topic was further ignited in my consciousness when I read this recent NY Times article which partially aligns the political support that Donald Trump received as a consequence of boys failing in education. As the article acknowledges, despite all the data about females increased position and power in the workforce there is still a disparity at the very top of the wealth and CEO charts in favour of males. Hopefully this will be addressed over time. However, it is what is taking place at lower levels in society that make this topic important for us in education as we prepare our students for their futures.

Across the Atlantic in this article from the Guardian newspaper in the UK, 'Our schools are failing boys, which is bad news for Britain,' Lincoln's MP Karl McCartney identifies the same trends and raises the question about why aren't schools doing more to address this issue.

"But there is hardly anything being done to tackle it. It was almost as though the problem had not permeated the Westminster or Whitehall “bubble”, even though it is clearly an equalities and fairness issue. Why has there been such little action on the issue? If the genders were reversed, I am almost certain this would not be the case. Indeed for well over 25 years, taxpayers’ money has welcomely and successfully been spent on encouraging female applications for science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses in higher education. Yet, there is no or little reciprocal focus on men becoming doctors (two in every three new GPs are female) or lawyers (over three in five trainees are female).

It is due to the lack of focus on this issue from successive governments of all colours, from policymakers and from the education sector, that I am leading a parliamentary debate today on the educational underperformance of boys and the gender education gap.

This gap in attainment is stark, starts young and is not new. At Key Stage 2 (in old money, 11 years old) the gap is six percentage points. For GCSEs, the gap for five A*-C grades, including English and Maths, is nine percentage points in England and more than seven in the other three home nations. Its impact is also stark. Annually 30,000 fewer boys than girls are becoming apprentices, 60,000 fewer go to university every year (460,000 fewer over the past decade) and more young men are not in education employment or training (NEETs). Fewer men are entering nearly all of the professions and between the ages of 22 and 29, young men earn less per hour on average than women, in both full-time and part-time roles."

Many years ago when I was preparing to give a workshop on gender differences in education I discovered  Philip Zimbardo 5 minutes TEDTalk about the demise of guys. Whilst writing this Food for Thought I found this newer and longer TED (24 minutes) in which he presents more research on the subject of boys failing and encourages us to think about what we can do to create a better future. There are some quite alarming statistics in this talk that need to be reflected upon if we are to develop the school experience to improve boys engagement. In the last third of the talk Zombardo gives plenty of strategies that can be evolved to help address some of these issues, some of which we are already touching on at ISHCMC

Here is another talk, shorter at 12 minutes, that raises some of the same issues that are emerging regarding boys and ends with a lovely story that involves John Lennon.

I don't think there is an easy solution for education and this recent trend in boys performance. Of course there has been much debate about single sex schools and how they are better or worse for boys and girls. This article from the Daily Telegraph captures this discussion very well, providing the pros and cons of both systems. However, for ISHCMC there are not any plans to become a single sex school so we have to look at how we can make our co-educational environment optimal for both genders. In my reading for this post I read a synopsis of an experiment that involved looking at gender performance in Math and Languages. It's conclusion perhaps points us in a direction that encourages gender differentiation in certain subjects and not others.

"In sum, single-sex schooling improves the performance of female students in mathematics classes but not in language classes, suggesting that reducing gender-based stereotype threat has real effects on academic performance. Moreover, female students who demonstrated high pre-existing ability on the entrance exam benefitted the most from single-sex classrooms, which underlines the relationship between the beneficial effects of all-girls schooling to the absence of gender-specific stereotype threats."

I hope this post has given you Food for Thought. There is obviously no easy solution to the trend of boys failing in school and the workplace. It is also clear that not all the solutions lie within schools and that parents and society in general have to play their part. The question for us is to listen to what researchers are saying and perhaps adjust what we are doing to assist both boys and girls fulfilling their full potential at ISHCMC.

Have a good weekend,

Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: What should we be teaching our students?

Dear all,

Hope you are all having a wonderful weekend, This will be a relatively short post because last week I asked quite a bit of you all. I have just spent a few days away with our U14 girls football teams and it has been an interesting insight into how the malleable minds of this age group are being formed in, to them, a world of dramas which everyone feels obliged to get involved in whether in real time or through social media. I was quite surprised at their lack of social and emotional awareness and their failure to see problems as solvable challenges rather than threatening dramas.

Hence, this weeks Food for Thought focuses on the question what do we need to be teaching our students in school. This old rap song which I shared with you several years ago questions called "Don't Stay in School" by Boyinaband, is doing the rounds again and quite validly for most school's raises questions that are not being thought about or answered. This is further reinforced by PrinceEA, in his rap ballad, "I Just Sued the School System"again already shared in an earlier post. Being an IB school we have an advantage when it comes to adjusting the priorities of our curricular because the child sits in the middle of our model and thinking.

It has become clear to me that it is more and more important that we teach our students to be socially and emotionally aware. This article from TED Ideas, Should Emotions be Taught in school? encourages us to think more deeply about topic.

Who taught you how to identify and manage your emotions, how to recognize them when they arose and navigate your way through them? For many adults, the answer is: No one. You hacked your way through those confusing thickets on your own. Although navigating our inner landscape was not something that was taught to us in school, it should be, contend a number of researchers. They believe emotional skills should rank as high in importance in children’s educations as math, reading, history and science.

Why do emotions matter? Research has found that people who are emotionally skilled perform better in school, have better relationships, and engage less frequently in unhealthy behaviors. Plus, as more and more jobs are becoming mechanized, so-called soft skills — which include persistence, stress management and communication — are seen as a way to make humans irreplaceable by machine. There has been a growing effort in American schools to teach social and emotional learning (SEL), but these tend to emphasize interpersonal skills like cooperation and communication.

Kids are often taught to ignore or cover over their emotions. Many Western societies view emotions as an indulgence or distraction, says University of California-Santa Barbara sociologist Thomas Scheff, a proponent of emotional education. Our emotions can give us valuable information about the world, but we’re often taught or socialized not to listen to them. Just as dangerous, Scheff says, is the practice of hiding one emotion behind another. He has found that men, in particular, tend to hide feelings of shame under anger, aggression and, far too often, violence.

How does one go about teaching emotions? One of the most prominent school programs for teaching about emotions is RULER, developed in 2005 by Marc Brackett, David Caruso and Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. The multiyear program is used in more than 1,000 schools, in the US and abroad, across grades K-8. The name, RULER, is an acronym for its five goals: recognizing emotions in oneself and others; understanding the causes and consequences of emotions; labeling emotional experiences with an accurate and diverse vocabulary; and expressing and regulating emotions in ways that promote growth.

As a strategy, children are taught to focus on the underlying theme of an emotion rather than getting lost in trying to define it. When an emotion grips you, explains Stern, understanding its thematic contours can help “name it to tame it.” Even though anger is experienced differently by different people, she explains, “the theme underlying anger is the same. It’s injustice or unfairness. The theme that underlies disappointment is an unmet expectation. The theme that underlies frustration is feeling blocked on your way to a goal. Pinning down the theme can “help a person be seen and understood and met where she is,” says Stern.

RULER’s lessons are woven into all classes and subjects. So, for example, if “elated’ is the emotional vocabulary word under discussion, a teacher would ask students in an American history class to link “elated” to the voyage of Lewis and Clark. Instruction reaches beyond the classroom, too; kids are prompted to talk with their parents or caregivers about when they last felt elated. Researchers at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has found RULER schools tend to see less-frequent bullying, lower anxiety and depression, more student leadership and higher grades. So why isn’t emotional education the norm rather than the exception?

Surprising fact: While scientists and educators agree on the need to teach emotions, they don’t agree on how many there are and what they are.RULER’s curriculum consists of hundreds of “feeling words,” including curious, ecstatic, hopeless, frustrated, jealous, relieved and embarrassed. Other scholars’ lists of emotions have ranged in number from two to eleven. Scheff suggests starting students out with six: grief, fear, anger, pride, shame and excessive fatigue.

While psychology began to be studied as a science more than a century ago, up to now it has focused more on identifying and treating disorders. Scheff, who has spent years studying one taboo emotion — shame — and its destructive impact on human actions, admits, “We don’t know much about emotions, even though we think we do, and that goes for the public and for researchers.” Or, as Virginia Woolf so beautifully put it, “The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.”

Parents can start to encourage their kids’ emotional awareness with a simple prompt “Tell me about some of your best moments,” a phrase Scheff has used to initiate discussions with his university students. But he and Stern agree that schools can’t wait until academics have sorted out the name and number of emotions before they act. “We know we have emotions all day long, whether we’re aware of them or not,” Stern points out. Let’s teach kids how to ride those moment-by-moment waves, instead of getting tossed around.

Whilst thinking about this topic and reading relevant posts I came upon this useful short video on Edutopia that discusses the 5 Keys to Social and Emotional Learning Success.

I would also recommend that you visit http://www.casel.org if you want to further your reading and the work you do with students as a advisory/ homeroom teacher. I believe it is more and more important that we all become skilled in SEL as an integral part of creating a safe environment in which our students can learn.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours

Adrian

PS a great thing about blogs is that when someone sends something of additional  interest it can be added with a resend. I have just been sent this Atlas of Emotions which I hadn't seen before and think would be very interesting for advisers and homeroom teachers to introduce to their students.

"The Atlas of Emotions is an interactive tool designed to build emotional awareness. The site invites you to visualize, identify and explore five primary emotions (and their related feeling states, actions, triggers and moods) in order to gain a better understanding of how they influence our lives. Although we can’t always choose what emotions to feel or when to feel them, by building emotional awareness, it may be possible to choose how we respond to what we’re feeling. The Atlas began when the Dalai Lama asked prominent emotion researcher Paul Ekman to create a map of the emotions that could help people learn to have more constructive emotional experiences. Ekman, an expert in the field, had previously consulted on a wide range of emotion-related projects, including the popular Pixar film Inside Out. With his daughter, scholar Eve Ekman, he created the Atlas of Emotions in response to the Dalai Lama’s request."

http://atlasofemotions.org

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