How do you make your students feel?

Research is starting to show pretty conclusively that the answer to this question can have a profound effect on the learning that occurs within your class or school. More specifically, children who are anxious about their learning, about their abilities, about their homework…about just about anything, will have elevated levels of cortisol, the hormone associated with stress. Though cortisol has its benefits, a perpetual state of elevated cortisol levels, or even regular spikes in levels are damaging to the body in numerous ways, including impaired cognitive abilities.  Studies also show that increased instances of elevated cortisol levels leads to lowered cortisol levels down the road, which is also problematic. The other, more immediate effect is that the physiological energy needed for the body to regulate stress hormone levels detracts from the energy available to focus on learning.

We’ve all seen children in obvious states of emotional distress, and it’s well known that students in such a state are incapable of much learning. But students with less visible, perhaps lower levels of stress or anxiety are also affected. The notion of stress in this case is very broad, and many kids, parents (and educators) are unaware of the effects of these stressors. Things like too much video game time, too little breakfast or tension in the home can have profound effects on students’ levels of stress which can mean an imbalance of cortisol.

As educators we need to not only be cognizant of how our behaviour and expectations are affecting our students, increasingly we need to work to counteract the effects of outside stresses which may hinder success in the classroom. Of course we have no way of discerning the emotional state (and thus the readiness to learn) of each of the students in front of us. But with ever increasing numbers of kids who have difficulty self regulating most teachers can bet on the fact that some (or many) of the students in front of them on any given day are in either a hyper-aroused or hypo-aroused emotional state. Here are 5 simple things that teachers can do to help students self regulate.

1)   Monitor the Physical Surroundings

Avoid clutter, including too much visual stimulation in the form of bright colours and other visual distracters. Yes it’s great to have some decoration, and displaying student work is a must, but avoid having your classroom space look too “busy”.

2)   Allow for Movement and Fidgeting

Sitting still simply isn’t an option for some kids, and for many others it’s doable, but at a high cost in terms of attention and focus. Some teachers have had great success experimenting with exercise balls instead of seats, disc cushions or simple “fidget toys”.

3)   Reduce Extraneous Noise

Some noise is good, it’s productive and rhythm exercises are great for development. But some kids shut down in the presence of “disorganized” noise.  Reduce the number of hard reverberative surfaces where possible, and keep the music area to one corner of the classroom, with a simple divider where possible, so that those not participating can focus on other tasks.

4)   Build in Time for Transitions

Most teachers area aware of, and do this, intuitively. But sometimes we try to hurry from one activity to the next. Kids who have difficulty up regulating from a “lighter” activity to something requiring more focus, or down regulating from a busy activity, can get lost in the shuffle if we don’t allow time (and perhaps provide a little guidance).

5)   Make Your Students Aware of Their Own Mindset

Tools like The Alert Program encourage students to be aware of their own readiness to learn. Young kids will always need some guidance and help to self regulate, but if students are made aware of how they’re feeling, and if teachers are aware of how they (and their classroom environment) are affecting students, classroom management issues will be reduced and student learning will be improved.

Recent findings in neurophysiology and psychology (to name but two) are emphasizing the importance of self regulation in children. For a reasonably comprehensive and very practical resource on this topic check out Dr. Stuart Shankar’s “Calm, Alert and Learning”.

The Habits of Effective Administrators

1.    Balance management with leadership.

School administration involves both management duties and leadership opportunities. The management side tends to be the stuff that one has to do. Leadership is the stuff that one chooses to do. It’s very important as an educational administrator (especially a rookie) to remember these two things i) to be a leader you need followers and ii) to gain followers one must complete management duties in a timely and efficient manner. Teachers will not care what you have to say about educational leadership if you don’t manage effectively.

2.  Envision the ideal, but focus on the doable.

Effective school leaders have a vision of what their “ultimate” school looks like. This vision helps create the culture and atmosphere of the schools in which they work. But a clear path directly to this goal is rarely, if ever, discernible. Leaders must pick their way toward this goal one small step at a time, focusing on ideas and changes that can be implemented now, ones that may take a year or two and ones that may take 5 years. The ideal is never achieved because it always evolves, but it’s the incremental changes made working toward the ideal that improve learning for students.

3. Act as a representative for the missing voice.

A big part of being an administrator is helping sort out other people’s conflicts. Parents will come to complain about teachers, teachers about kids, kids about teachers etc. With interpersonal issues, getting one side of the story never suffices in shedding enough light on the situation, of course it’s imperative to get views from all possible sides in these matters. But in the interim, while listening to the initial report of any conflict, effective leaders try to understand the missing person’s point of view, and keep that in their mind as the discussion progresses. Adopting and, where necessary, representing the missing person’s point of view helps in keeping the discussion focused and moving toward settlement. Too readily accepting the initial complaint at face value often leads to more awkward situations later on.

4. Listen and interpret.

People will usually say what they mean, but often mean more than what has actually been said. Often they’re simply shy about “sharing everything”. A student who admits to going to bed too late can be expressing numerous things, from anxiety issues to more esoteric ailments like “screen addiction”. A teacher complaining about too much marking may be asking for help in planning or looking for ways to work more efficiently. Effective administrators pick up on this and, using communication techniques such as paraphrasing, try to elicit the full meaning of what is being communicated. It’s only after frank discussions with all necessary information available that effective feedback, and help where necessary, can be provided.

5. Reflect constantly.

After every action, interaction and decision, the best administrators will always ask “How could that have been done better?” Whether something has gone extremely well, or the flaws in planning and/or execution were evident for all to see, a cycle of constant reflection upon their work allows these administrators to improve their practice every day.

6. Plan for your own departure.

It’s nice to think of one’s self as indispensible, but the aim of an effective administrator should be the opposite. After all, the essence of true leadership is building capacity within an organization.  If there’s a process or procedure that’s important to the running of a school, strong administrators will ensure that they are not the only people within the building capable of completing the task.  Whether it’s something as mundane as turning off the bells for a holiday or as complex as building a timetable, building redundancy into the system is a critical part of creating a robust and sustainable leadership structure.

7. Improving student learning is our sole guiding principle.

This may seem like a truism, but nevertheless we often find ourselves asking “What’s best for ________?”. I’ve seen this simple question work miracles, from diffusing extremely tense conversations with both teachers and parents, to kick-starting what seems like a stalled professional development conversation. Everyone in the field of education works from the premise that we’re here to help students, we all just need to be reminded once in a while.

The Ideal of Intrinsic Motivation for All Learners

Here's a question we don't think about often enough. "What motivates students to be engaged at school?"  The answers to this vary dramatically and have a huge impact on each and every student.

Let's start with the obvious line of answers. "everyone goes to school," or "everyone needs an education in this day and age".  Though there is a certain amount of truth to these cliched responses I would posit two thoughts.  First, though yes, most jobs do now require at least a high school education or the equivalent, there are ever increasing ways to achieve "the equivalent" without spending days in the traditional bricks and mortar secondary school.  Second, and most importantly, if one of these "'cuz everyone does it" type of responses is the best reason a young person can present for going to school, it's no wonder these same kids do not engage and simply do school because school is the done thing.

Senior students often invoke the "I have to do well at school in order to get into university" mantra when asked about reasons for attending and doing well.  This can be a genuine motivational factor, especially around here where the familial and social expectation is academic and career success.  But again, is this the answer we really want when we pose that question?  Doing well simply to get to the next level is fine when playing video games, but it hardly seems inspirational as an educational goal for a secondary school student.

There are myriad other reasons students give for attending school, all of them valid.  As with any question around motivation, answers to this question can be divided into two categories: intrinsic reasons for attending school and extrinsic reasons.  By now many people will have read Dan Pink's book Drive or at least viewed the related TED Talk, so most people understand that extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are not equal.  Intrinsic motivators have a profoundly greater effect on engagement, it's through intrinsic interests that people achieve great things, including great learning.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this phenomenon of total intrinsic engagement in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  The ideal class would have every student engaged in productive, stimulating and interesting work 100% of the time.  Of course that's purely an ideal, but ideals can act as guides and though I believe that with the BCEdplan we're headed in the right direction here in British Columbia, there are many education systems which still rely too heavily, and to an increasing degree, on extrinsic motivators to entice kids to engage in school.

Prevalent assessment practices are probably the most obvious example of how we rely too heavily on extrinsic motivators.  As long as we evaluate more than we assess and as long as we provide grades more often than we provide feedback, student motivation will come from the collection of this "currency" that we call marks.  Those richest in this currency will be afforded the best opportunities come the end of high school...an unfortunate but true fact of life as things stand.  We've all run across the students who are "mark sharks" these are the kids who focus solely on their grades, often to the detriment of true learning.  But they're simply the ones who have truly taken to heart our message that good grades, as opposed to quality learning, are the primary goal of our systems.

There are also more subtle ways in which our current paradigms hinder the incubation of intrinsic motivation.  Whether it's being forced to teach to standardized tests or being bound by overly prescriptive curricula, teachers are often restricted in what they do in the classroom.  Prescribing curricular content any more than absolutely necessary robs teachers, and students, of the freedom to choose material that truly engages and inspires them.  Rather than demanding that teachers "cover" material, to be of much relevance for the future our goals must be focused around higher order thinking outcomes, leaving as much of the choice of course material as possible to the teachers, and the students to decide for themselves.  This will facilitate far greater engagement and hence far greater intrinsic motivation amongst students.


Lack of motivation is the reason that any of us quit anything, school is no exception. Extrinsic motivation is far preferable to no motivation at all, we've all needed it to get us through one thing or another.  But extrinsic motivators don't get student truly engaged in their learning.  They make school analogous to a job...it's something that has to be done.  If we want our systems to be as strong as they can possibly be we need to talk about and explicitly foster an intrinsic motivation in each of our students.  Only students who are intrinsically motivated to be engaged in school will end up truly challenged, enriched, energized and ultimately fulfilled by their experience.  Yes it's an ideal, but it's worth keeping in mind.

The BCEdplan: I like what I've seen so far.

For the people of BC, particularly those in education, the existence of the BCEdplan is old news by now.  After getting off to a bit of a shaky start thanks to some unfortunate timing (the roll out coincided with teacher job action)  and the premature publication of some tentative and unrealistic timeline goals (which have since disappeared) the plan seems to be gaining genuine momentum.  Most tellingly, people and bodies who had initially been skeptical of the plan (many of them reflexively) have been increasingly silent as time has passed.  I can't help but take this as a sign that the open and collaborative approach being taken by the ministry is gaining converts.

The ministry has been actively seeking feedback using discussion forums on the web as well as hosting a series of feedback gathering sessions in numerous regions across the province.  Having helped organize the session in Richmond, and collate the feedback, I experienced first hand the genuine interest of our community in the directions that public education will be taking in the future.  All the feedback gathered so far has been summarized here.  Reading this report, I realized that the silence from those who had previously been naysayers in this process stems from the fact that the ideas expressed and the proposals being aired make sense.  In other words, there's been precious little to argue against.  I'm particularly heartened by this sentence from the "Next Steps" section;

"We recognize that transforming our education system involves more than just giving you a space to talk and then writing fancy reports. We must also act on what you’ve told us.  And we’re doing that."

Those who know me understand that it's my nature to be, shall we say, "suspicious" of government initiatives, especially as they pertain to education.  With that on the table I do have to admit that I've been very impressed thus far with the openness and candour with which the Ministry of Education has approached this initiative.  And though I don't often use "the T word" the direction that the ministry is taking promises to be truly transformational for the education system and for future students in the province.

The wholly unofficial word on the street is that it will be at least another two years before this plan is presented as a cohesive whole, and that's a good thing.  Reimagining and transforming something as large as a public education system, particularly given the stubborn tenacity of some of our industrial age structures and paradigms, does not come quickly or easily.  There are still far more questions than there are answers, and given the ever changing nature of society's expectations of education, I don't imagine that we'll ever have all the answers.  But if the ministry remains dedicated to this process, as the quote above would seem to indicate, then whatever's coming promises to be challenging, exciting and, to some "traditionalists", a little worrying.

6 Common Misunderstandings About Assessment and Evaluation

Over the past two decades there has been a lot written, and much discussion, around the use effective use of assessment in the classroom.  Unfortunately many educators, particularly at the secondary school level, continue to cling tenaciously to “traditional” practices which are, at best ineffective and at worst, counterproductive to the goals of modern education.  Here are six common misconceptions about assessment and evaluation that we need to abolish.

1.    “Assessment and evaluation are the same.”  No they’re not! Too many people, particularly those not employed in the field of education, conflate these two and too often within the field we evaluate student work and tell ourselves that what we’ve done is assessment.  Assessment involves timely, detailed  feedback based around clearly defined learning outcomes.  Evaluation is “giving a grade” to a piece of work, usually based on normative criteria, but too often in comparison to the work of other students.

2.    “Most assessment is summative.”  Well, unfortunately that may still be true in many quarters, but it should not be.  As we’ve learned over the past two decades or so assessment can be a very powerful learning tool in and of itself.  As Dylan Wiliam has been saying for years, we need to constantly assess both student work and our own teaching, adjusting as we go, such that by the time we get to the end of a unit of study students have already had an opportunity to rethink and revise their work.  There are still far too many teachers who rely too heavily on one single summative assessment at the end of each unit and then move onto another topic no matter the outcomes.

3.    “Assessment is one way communication, the teacher gives feedback on student work”.  Well, yes that’s true, but the most productive assessment should be a dialogue.  In traditional assessment and evaluation models students complete a task, the teacher assesses the work and tells the student how they’ve done and, in formative cases, how to improve the work.  But when students engage with the teacher to discuss work, talk about what they’ve done and why, both student and teacher stand to gain far more from the experience.  Modern technology makes two way communication between teacher and student much easier and far more ubiquitous, let’s start using it more effectively.

4.    “Assessment is for grading purposes.”  This is one of the most pervasive and potentially damaging holdovers from bygone eras in education.  Yes, final grades should reflect some of what has gone on between student and teacher regarding assessment.  But the “collecting of marks” to arrive at the final grade is counterproductive in many ways, here are just two.  First, the collation marks too often includes work which was done before students had mastered the material.  As has been said by others, when we redo things like driving tests we don’t “average” the results, why do we do this with school work.  Secondly, every teacher, especially in secondary schools, is aware of how the pursuit of ‘marks’ often distracts students’ focus from the work at hand.  This is doubly damaging because neuroscience is telling us that brains under stress from external stimuli can have significantly diminished learning capacity.

5.    “Student work should be given a mark”.  In summative situations, or where marks are necessary, this assertion is true.  But too often we put a mark on student work when we’re hoping to use the work formatively, which is a mistake.  As soon as students see a grade on a piece of work, be it a letter or number grade, the focus is immediately taken off of any meaningful feedback and, in the student’s mind, that piece of work is complete.  It’s time to move on.  No matter what the teacher intends grades imply a finality that’s hard to overcome in students’ minds.

6.    “If assignments are late I deduct marks.”  There is no pedagogically defensible reason for doing this.  This is simply trying to modify behaviour using coercion through grades.  There is nothing wrong with having some consequence for late work, but the assignment of grades (when necessary) should reflect student learning, nothing more.  Put another way, if a student hands in work worthy of an A today, is that work somehow different if it were handed in tomorrow?

My experience has been that when teachers rethink and reform their views about what assessment is about, and what its primary purposes are, their feedback is invariably positive.  When we pry the “mark book” out of the collective hand of those in the teaching profession, and allow individual teachers the freedom to use assessment in more productive ways, we find that assessment becomes far more authentic and fruitful and far less about the drudgery (and judgment) of marking.

"B+, great work"...or Is There More to It?

Like many schools across North America, especially here in BC, our school is wrestling with assessment and evaluation.  The differences between the two and how each is best used seem to be the general theme of many of our conversations.  As school staffs go ours is fairly well versed and quite open minded about discussing, rethinking and restructuring our practices to make assessment more useful and more meaningful for students.    Our teachers are starting to genuinely understand the differences between assessment and evaluation and, more importantly, are beginning to use more authentic forms of assessment, and evaluating only when necessary.  Given what research has told us over the past three decades about learning and motivation, "Assessment for Learning" and "Assessment as Learning" need to become our primary focus when assessing, with evaluation best left for when it's time for something more summative.

There's some exciting stuff going on here at Steveston-London.  Our science department has been relying primarily on formative assessment based around their 7 "Essential Learning Outcomes" for science 8-10 for some years now.  It's only when the students move onto the more content heavy and more closely prescribed curricula of the senior sciences that our teachers move to more "traditional" grading practices (i.e. actual grading rather than more meaningful feedback).  Our English Department is moving in this direction as is our ESL department (which I've written about before), who are trying to get away from "grades" at the lower levels altogether.  We've also recently received some money from our district to allow interested departments some release time to revise their thinking and implement authentic assessment models of their own design.  Our Social Studies teachers are keen to get started with this, and fingers crossed, they'll have developed an authentic assessment model of their own in time for implementation next school year.

We all have our idealized model of assessment and evaluation in mind, and for most of us it's a long way from where we are now.  There are many more discussions to be had and a lot more thinking that must go into this vital topic.  For instance, one thing I believe that needs to be addressed is the possibility and the flexibility of having completely different models and grading schema to better account for the differences between subject areas.  There's nothing wrong with a 7/10 on a mathematics assignment where a student clearly had 7 correct answers and 3 incorrect, but 7/10 is essentially meaningless feedback for a piece of writing.  All around me people are having truly meaningful discussions and rethinking their own concepts of "assessment" and "feedback".  Let's encourage this and help keep things moving in the right direction.

“A majority of students are telling us they are nervous or anxious all the time,”

The title is a quote from Maria Yau, research coordinator for a study that was recently released by the Toronto District School Board.  The study asked 103,000 students questions about various aspects of their lives, including their daily levels of stress and anxiety.  However, stress and anxiety were merely one aspect of the comprehensive census, the results of which are summarized here in a powerpoint.  Now, I would agree that it's rather disquieting (though not necessarily shocking) that today's teens are as stressed out as they are, and I will get back to more thoughts about that later.  But looking at all the findings of the study, I was struck by the irony inherent in how the results were presented in the media.  Virtually every news story about the census focused almost exclusively on the 'stress and anxiety' findings, but a visit to the TDSB site reveals these other findings;

• 92% of students feel safe at school
• There's been a 10% increase in students eating a proper lunch, thanks in part to school food programs put in place because of the 2006 survey
• There been a 14% increase in attendance at parent teacher interviews
• Over 90% of students feel that their background is respected by adults in the school

So where's the irony?  Does focusing solely on stress and anxiety, while completely ignoring positive findings from the same survey not increase the level of stress and anxiety?  Given the full scope of the survey results, it's more than just a little disingenuous for the various news people to go all "chicken little" over this narrow band of findings.  Yes it's worrisome that stress levels are so high, but would it not serve the public interest better to also include some information about what schools, and students, in the 21st century are doing better at than they've ever done in the past?  Let's celebrate kids' (and schools') successes, and let's be aware of elevated anxiety levels, but let's not exacerbate anxiety issues in the service of selling papers.

So teenagers are stressed, that in itself is not necessarily a good or bad state, it depends on the source of the stress.  Findings in neuroscience indicate that stress can have either a positive effect or a negative effect on learning, it seems to depend on the source of the stress.  Generally speaking, a brain that's stressed by the material at hand (i.e. a kid worrying about the content on a test or a difficult assignment) has its learning capacity slightly enhanced by the anxiety.  But a brain under stress from external sources (i.e. a kid worrying about her home situation or worrying about grades rather than the material at hand) will have diminished learning capacity.  This last point makes intuitive sense, we've all experienced trying to learn while being distracted by negative forces in our lives, it tends not to go very well.  Unfortunately, the overall results of this census would seem to indicate that it's the external stressors that are affecting young people today.  Indeed, the census indicates that students seem to be pretty happy with the way things are going at school.  It's the rest of the world that's having the deleterious effects on student anxiety levels.  The chart below has some thought provoking numbers.

There's no doubt that we live in a stressful world, but surely we can do better than to create a culture where learning is disrupted by the level of anxiety in young people's lives?  That external anxiety is anathema to learning is not a new idea, Csikszentmihalyi, Vygotsky and many others have come to the same conclusion. We need to start using this knowledge to design educational systems that do everything within their power to reduce stresses on students.  Worrying about "marks" is one area in which we could make improvements, and at our school we're tackling that (slowly).  Post secondary direction is another area in which we should do more to alleviate worries.  We need to convince more kids that it's okay to not be a "white collar" professional.  (In fact, it's very arguable that skilled trades are some of the few professions that simply cannot be outsourced).  Of course there are external pressures on today's teenagers that we can do precious little to change.  But we need to always be mindful that the more external stress we put on young brains, the less learning we can expect them to achieve.