Tag Archive for: education

Tip for Parents and Educators (and Coaches and Mentors and …)

Human beings co-regulate our nervous systems with each other. We know that it is much easier to down-regulate our anxiety or fear or emotional pain with someone who is calm and welcoming than it is with someone who is feeling upset or nervous or in a hurry.

Because of the unique attributes of the adolescent brain, most of the information that is received by youth this age is processed through the emotional centers of the brain (the amygdala). This is also the center of fight/flight/freeze responses, so many adolescents walk around in some state of activation all day long. When they encounter an adult who speaks to them with urgency or gives off that urgency vibe (“Hurry up, sit down, everyone, we have a LOT to cover today!” or “Quick, get in the car! We only have 15 minutes to get to X before we’re late” or “I don’t have a lot of time, but if you can tell me what you need in the next five minutes, I can help you”), their nervous systems kick up a notch and that primes them for irritability, frustration, and even to start anticipating some sort of catastrophe or danger (or at least start looking for it).

Part of the problem with this is that when we are in fight/flight/freeze, the language processing portion of our brains goes offline. So if you’re feeling anxious to get this kid to hear you or follow directions or pay attention, you’ve actually just put them in to a state where they literally cannot do any of those things well. And they can also struggle to articulate what is going on for them because speaking clearly is hard when we’re in a heightened emotional state.

If you want to have smoother interactions with adolescents – either on the drive home from school or when you’re in the classroom or working with them 1:1 – take a minute to get out of urgency first. It’s not always possible; sometimes we are in a hurry, but even speaking that truth can help calm things down. “Sheesh, the traffic today was horrible and I’m feeling like I might miss the first 15 minutes of this really important meeting now.” As the adults who aren’t subject to the same emotionality as teens, it is incumbent upon us to get ourselves to a place of calm so that we can be present for the youth we are interacting with. The more we can down-regulate our own nervous systems, the more likely we are to be able to help kids do the same.

A Two-Podcast Week!

I’ve had some really wonderful conversations with folks lately about the new book

This week, two podcast conversations aired and I’m so excited to share them with folks. The first one is Zach Beach’s Learn to Love podcast. He is all about love and the transformational aspects of it and we spent some time talking about why it’s sometimes hard to love teens, but why it’s so important. Check it out here.

The second podcast is from the Conscious Family Project, which is all about and for home schooling families. Ally and I talked about teens and motivation and we had such a great time that she invited me back for a second round to talk about teen social relationships. That one will air soon, but for now, even if you aren’t a home schooling family, you might find some good information here (plus, Ally is an absolute delight to talk to because she is so enthusiastic).

Stay tuned for some more good conversations and please, let me know if you’ve read the book and it has spurred any good talks on your end (or good questions).

Can We Talk about “Learning Loss”?

empty classroom with chalkboard in the forefront and wooden desks

Honestly, my stomach clenches when I even think that phrase. And I don’t want to position myself as some sort of expert on par with some of the folks who spoke with Meghna Chakrabarti today on NPR’s On Point but I do take exception to the wildly upsetting information that is being put out there without what I think is proper context.

The premise of today’s show on NPR was aUNICEF report titledThe State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery. 

It detailed some of the global reactions to the pandemic, including the length of time that school children were kept from their classrooms and what the effects of those measures seem to be. While it is probably indisputable that children didn’t maintain the educational momentum they would have, had the lockdown not happened, I take exception to the phrase “learning loss.”

These youth did not lose brain cells or the capacity to learn during the lockdown.

Children all over the world continued to learn while they were at home. They may have learned things like how to navigate technology, whether or not online learning is something that they are adept at, and what it is like to manage social relationships when everyone in your household is at home at the same time every day. And those things are valuable, even if there isn’t a standardized test that measures them. But it is important to note that, while these kids may not have been learning the kinds of things that teachers in classrooms teach them in a structured, rigorous way (how to read, how to solve complex math problems, etc.), they haven’t missed the opportunity to ever learn those things.

We know from looking at adult literacy programs that people who are 40 or 50 or 60 can learn to read, so sounding the alarm because a group of four or five or six-year olds didn’t learn to do it in the last two years feels disingenuous. Just because your child missed out on an opportunity to learn algebra during the 2020-21 school year doesn’t mean they can’t learn it this year or next. It is important that we recognize that the timelines we are measuring kids by are altogether arbitrary. Someone in the United States decided that the majority of structured, classroom learning of particular subjects ought to be done by the time most kids are 18, after 12 or 13 years of formal schooling. Someone in the UK decided that it ought to be done by year 10 or 11 and then kids can specialize in certain subjects. Other countries have decided that eight years of school are sufficient. And the way we structure the school year in this country has more to do with historical agricultural calendars than brain science. Meaning that just because kids didn’t take pre-calculus in 10th grade doesn’t mean they are doomed to failure, that they’ve missed the window of time they could learn it, and that they have “learning loss.” The human brain is a magnificent organ that is capable of learning pretty much forever.

More offensive than these kinds of pervasive conversations, though, are the things we’ve chosen to ignore that affect a child’s ability to learn more than their not being in a classroom with peers. (Also, it’s fair to note that many intelligent folks have been home-schooled or “unschooled”).

We know that poor nutrition affects our ability to learn. So does not having our basic physiological needs met. And yet, we have tens of thousands of children in this country alone who lack a stable housing situation, food security, and a supportive, loving adult in their lives, but we don’t talk about that as if it’s a crisis.

We know that learning takes place more effectively in relationship and yet our public school system is set up to cram as many kids in a classroom as possible and deprive teachers of the resources they need to adequately build relationship with their students.

We know that the human brain wasn’t designed to take in vast amounts of disparate information all day without breaks to integrate and make meaning and build understanding, and yet we subject middle and high school kids to anywhere from five to eight different classes per day with just ten minutes in between to get from one to the other.

I could go on, and on, and on, but I won’t. My point is that when the media focuses on things like this report, they are reinforcing the notion that the lockdowns were harmful to children in a way that isn’t accurate. Many children suffered socially and emotionally during the last two years, to be certain, and I wonder how much of that is due to the expectations that we as adults continued to have of them to “keep up,” as well as the isolation from their peers. We could be talking about the things that are much more impactful and important, like figuring out how to really meet the physiological, social, and emotional needs of children all around the world as a way to create the optimal circumstances for learning, but we aren’t. Instead, we are continuing to put pressure on kids and teachers to ramp up their efforts and make up for lost time and, frankly, that is only going to cause more harm than we already have. Please, can we stop talking about “learning loss”?

Nine Days to Launch

Pre-orders are available now here and here

I am really thrilled to have this work out in the world, especially now when adolescents are living through their second year of disrupted school and social relationships. Just as they’re beginning to pull away from family of origin a little bit and develop their own, unique identity, many of them are cut off from peers and social situations that would normally do the important work of mirroring and providing opportunities to test out different ways of being. The good news is, with intention and care, parents and educators can shift how they interact with pre-teens and teens to create supportive, caring connections and help with this development.

Please share with your networks and hit me up on email or social media with your questions about parenting and/or teaching adolescents.

How Are We Making Learning Harder for Ourselves (and what can we do about it…)?

 

picture of a van overloaded with bags and a mattress

I was talking with a friend today who is a therapist and she was telling me how surprised she is by the number of adult clients she has who fit the criteria for ADD. Individuals who haven’t been previously diagnosed with it, who struggle with anxiety as well. As is my wont, I wondered aloud how much of that has to do with the way we have set up society and the expectations we have of people – many of which have been exacerbated in the last two years. She stopped walking, poked me in the shoulder, snort-laughed and said, “All of it. 100%.”

We both laughed and continued walking and talking, but this is something I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately – not ADD specifically, but the way we have work and school set up in direct opposition to the way the human brain is designed to learn.

Our brains aren’t supposed to be like empty vessels, primed and ready to dump vast amounts of information in, and immediately turn them in to meaningful connections. We aren’t trash-compacters, but that’s how we have set things up for ourselves in the name of “efficiency” and “productivity.”

In a workshop this week, I was speaking with parents about screen time and how we can manage it for our children so that it isn’t overwhelming or harmful. One parent lamented that her child has a hard time transitioning from screen time to other things – bedtime or naps or outside time – and that it often becomes a power struggle or fertile ground for a tantrum. Many other parents nodded their heads vigorously. This is a prime example of how we aren’t honoring our brain’s need for processing. Even when it looks like we aren’t doing anything (watching YouTube videos or TikToks or bingeing episodes of our favorite show), our brains are taking in information, and for kids, that’s a lot of stimulation. Especially for young children (under the age of ten or so), their brains are designed to be soaking up input on a vast scale, but in order to learn, they need time to integrate that information. Watching four episodes of Dora the Explorer back to back before having to dash off to school or soccer practice or bed doesn’t give them the opportunity to find context, make meaning, process the information they just stuffed in their head.

While I don’t have the same brain as a five year old, my brain needs that, too. I told the parents at the workshop that I don’t ever schedule back-to-back meetings anymore for that very reason. [I realize what an enormous privilege that is, and also, I really want more companies to normalize that as a practice] If my calendar is full of one meeting after the next all day long, the group of folks who I see at 2:30pm are going to get a shell of my former self. They will get someone who has massive decision-fatigue, whose head is buzzing with ideas and information from all of the other interactions I’ve had that day, and the things that happened in earlier meetings are likely to get shoved out of my head before I have a chance to really fully process and integrate them. If, instead, I have time in between meetings to talk to folks casually about what I learned (learning happens in relationship, after all), doodle, make notes and dig a little deeper on my own, I am much more likely to have creative ideas about how to implement things or understand how they apply to other contexts.

This is why I think middle and high schools are getting it wrong with kids on a massive scale. Asking kids to spend an eight-hour day switching from one subject to the next with only a five or ten minute break to physically move from one place to the other is not conducive to deep contextualizing. It doesn’t allow them to really sit with the history lesson they were just presented with (even if your school is one that has a “block schedule” with longer periods that happen fewer times per week) or talk to a peer about what it means that the Fibonacci sequence shows up everywhere in nature. The way we have set up schools, we have virtually guaranteed that kids won’t retain or be able to frame much of what they’re taught, at least not until they are in college where classes are spaced out in time somewhat.

My oldest daughter noticed when she went to college that if she studied until ten or eleven pm and then went to work out or take a bath and get rest the night before a test, she did much better on the test than her peers who stayed in the library until four in the morning, cramming as much as they could into their brains, and then took the test at eight am. That’s because rest allows us to daydream, it allows our minds to wander and make connections we wouldn’t otherwise make while we’re busy stuffing more data into them. Many of us know this already. The studies have been done. And yet, we continue to prioritize meeting after meeting as though that is some evidence of productivity.

Creativity is where innovation comes from, but if we don’t give ourselves time to daydream and contextualize, we can’t be creative. Letting your child watch one episode of Dora and then asking them to draw a picture of what they watched or build a Lego representation or simply tell us about it – all of it; the colors, what struck them the most, what made them laugh or worry, how it compares to other episodes – provides their brains space to make meaning of it, to learn from it in a much more holistic way. And, because learning happens in the context of relationship, it means the impact of that one show will be much bigger. The bonus is that they won’t need to “relieve” their nervous system of the sensory overload of bingeing four episodes in a row by throwing a tantrum. This works with older kids, too. Encouraging them to talk to us about the video game they love or the YouTube account they follow can help build a deeper understanding of what’s exciting about it, where their own passions lie, and place it firmly within the realm of the human.

Perhaps the most beneficial part of all of this is that it builds relationship. Taking time to talk with others about the things we’re experiencing – especially our kids – normalizes these kinds of conversations and allows us to see life through different perspectives that add dimension to our lives. And honoring the way our brains were designed to absorb new information means that we are more likely to be able to pay attention to the next thing that comes along and be in the habit of thinking about it more deeply.

I am beginning to believe that people who struggle with ADD are often fighting against the systems that expect us to be able to rapidly switch between tasks without contextualizing them, and for good reason. There is a way in which we’ve socialized ourselves from a very young age to believe that multi-tasking is a good thing (and that it is even possible) and that we should be able to absorb vast quantities of information in any given day. We don’t teach children to focus and we don’t set up systems to enable focus, but we growl in frustration when they can’t. What if a person’s tendency to switch their locus of attention mid-stream is the brain’s attempt to protect itself from sensory overload? There is no doubt that the world in which I grew up was much less overwhelming than the world in which kids are growing up now. I am lucky enough to be able to put systems into place that help me avoid being bombarded with too much input that I can’t process, but most people aren’t.  As parents, how can we create some of this for our kids? As employers, how can we do this for the people we work with?

Shame Rebel Podcast Interview

 

I had such a wonderful time talking with Katie for her new podcast, Shame Rebel, where she explores different ways we carry and inflict shame on each other people. We talked about relationship, parenting, teaching, and how to stop shaming yourself. Check out all of the episodes and stay tuned for more news about the book that’s forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield for parents and educators of teens.

When Having a Suicide Prevention Protocol isn’t Enough

wooded area with footpath to a small stone temple

A friend who is a middle-school educator and the parent of two adolescents shared with me this morning that she learned about a student her son’s age who took his own life last week. As expected, it has shaken her and caused her to examine how to respond, both as a teacher and as a parent. She said that the school district has deployed its suicide prevention protocol and, while she is grateful there is one in place, she told me that it feels “mechanistic.” It is definitely important for schools to have a set of tasks and supports available in the event that a tragedy like this happens, but the truth is, it isn’t enough, and without those protocols being grounded in secure relationships that already exist between staff and students and families, it will always feel like a checklist instead of a true, heartfelt response.

We can’t hope to deploy these resources and talking points after the fact in any effective way if we haven’t put in the effort to create strong relationships before something painful happens. Even if we as adults are sincere in our offer to be available for students and families who are grieving and frightened and angry, if we haven’t established – through a pattern of behavior they can trust – a connection before, it is unlikely that those who are in the most pain will feel comfortable coming to us. And if we haven’t processed our own grief and pain, or at least identified them, we will appear to be unsympathetic or simply going through the motions.

My friend noted that, over the years, this particular student had been noticed by many different teachers who wanted to find a way to help him. All too often, protocols and standard practices serve to prevent us from creating caring relationships with students who could use our support. Whether it is a culture that encourages school staff to see certain things as their purview (education and behavior management inside the school setting or hours) and assign others to families (deeper emotional and adjustment issues), or one that encourages them to be hands off for fear of liability, those things stand in the way of building truly supportive connections with students. It may be that class sizes prevent teachers from being able to connect with all of their students or a lack of resources means that there isn’t a skilled, trained staff member who could build a relationship with a student and their family. Whatever the barriers are, if we aren’t working to be in relationship with our students and their families or caregivers, when something like this happens, we won’t be able to provide the kind of support that is most profound and meaningful, even with a list of well-researched actions and scripts in our back pocket.

We know that students learn best when they feel as though they are in connected relationships with their teachers. We also know that they learn best when they are supported at home. Having a suicide prevention protocol might look good from the outside, but if we aren’t using it in the context of foundational relationships with students and families who believe that they can trust us and speak honestly about their struggles, it doesn’t amount to much. It is up to us to do the hard work of creating connections between teachers and students and families so that when there is a tragedy, we can rely on our relationships to hold us all as we grieve.

Going Deeper with Non-Violent Communication

Many parents and educators will have some familiarity with the idea of Non-Violent Communication (NVC), and many will not. It is something that I have drawn on to create both parent and youth curricula through The SELF Project, and I believe it’s an important concept to explore in regards to relationship and community-building. If you’re interested, I recommend checking out The Center for Nonviolent Communication‘s website where they offer basic training, information, and opportunities to connect with others exploring this work. For now, though, I’ll simply include their definition of NVC here:

Nonviolent Communication, (NVC), is based on the principles of nonviolence– the natural state of compassion when no violence is present in the heart. NVC begins by assuming that we are all compassionate by nature and that violent strategies—whether verbal or physical—are learned behaviors taught and supported by the prevailing culture.

NVC also assumes that we all share the same, basic human needs, and that all actions are a strategy to meet one or more of these needs. People who practice NVC have found greater authenticity in their communication, Increased understanding, deepening connection and conflict resolution.

The NVC community is active in over 65 countries around the globe.

The most basic rule of NVC asks that we try to focus our interactions around conflict and disagreement on our needs, rather than the tactics we’re using to get those needs met. Meaning, that you and I might be arguing about a political idea but what lies beneath our opposite positions is that we both want to feel safe and taken care of by our society. If we can peel back the layers of conversation so that we are able to acknowledge that we actually both want the same thing, the idea is that we can begin to connect on a more human level and expand our ability to have compassion for each other. But sometimes, that concept is trickier than others and here is why I think that happens:

Even if you and I both have the same basic need (ie. feeling safe and heard), it is important to recognize that what that looks like for each of us may be very different. You might feel safest if I don’t challenge you or disagree with you, while I might only feel safe if I am allowed to challenge your ideas or disagree with you. This generally happens in situations where one person has more power or agency than the other – say, in a classroom or a home where the disagreement is between a teen and their parental figure. If there is a power imbalance, it is important to address that before we can expect an honest conversation to happen.

In relationships that have been challenging or have established a dynamic where one person routinely sublimates their own needs or desires in order to keep peace (ie. feel safe), NVC may not be an option until there is significant repair of the relationship. If I have been told more than once that my needs are frivolous or imagined, it might be unrealistic to expect me to be honest with you about what I think I need in this situation, and if I can’t be honest, NVC won’t work.

Often, attempting to focus on what the other person needs can bring up some difficult emotions and thoughts, and this can happen for a variety of reasons. If it does, it’s a great opportunity to explore the relationship dynamic and look for a power imbalance, whether or not you generally feel safe with that person, and if there is mutual positive regard (ie. you trust each other and think the best of the other person’s intentions). It can take many conversations over a long period of time to establish a relationship dynamic that allows for non-violent communication techniques. It isn’t something you can simply flip on and have it work. Often, the work starts with us and our willingness to get really clear on our own needs and what they look like. For example, we may say we need to feel respected, but we also should be able to describe what that would look and feel like to us – does that mean you don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking? That you don’t try to explain away my needs or ideas as frivolous or over-reacting? That you are able to mirror back to me what I just said so that I know you were actively listening? It turns out that often, our idea of being heard or respected or safe is very very different from what other people think it is.

I do think it is important that educators and parents practice NVC with adolescents, both as a way to strengthen relationship and also to model it for them. I also know that it takes practice and intent and a willingness to spend some time looking at how we’ve managed those relationships in the past and what our needs are before we dive headlong in to challenging conversations.

Tips for educators: cultural responsiveness and student-centered work

I spent three amazing, brain-busting days in Chicago at the CASEL SELXChange conference two weeks ago and I know that the lessons and conversations will continue to reverberate in my brain for a long time to come. It was an extraordinary gathering of folks who are interested in the well-being of children and how we can fix the broken education system to serve children better.

There are so many places to focus attention and shine a light, but the one I’ve chosen to dig further in to this week is the idea of cultural differences and what they mean and how they affect the experiences of students every day. The first thing I did was pick up Zaretta Hammond’s book “Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain.”

As commonly happens in my world, things started to converge. When I read her explanation of “cultural archetypes,” in particular, the distinction between collectivism and individualism, I was reminded of a quote I’ve heard over and over again from Peter Drucker:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Of course, he was referring to the culture of a company, but it’s true in the case of schools, too. We can have the best educational strategies around, but if they don’t take in to account the cultural background of the kids we’re teaching, they will fall flat. Hammond talks about the fact that many kids will come to school from families whose beliefs and values center around collectivism, and if we have our classroom norms set up around individualism, those kids will struggle to find resonance.

Even if we put kids in to groups to do projects or explore concepts, our bedrock in most cases is individualism – we talk about leaders (singling out one student in each group) and emphasize grades and don’t take the time to explore what each student is bringing to the table as far as cultural viewpoints.

As my amazing, insightful friend Jen Lemen says, “the way we hold individuality and the idea of contribution to a group puts a lot of weight on our personal preferences and experiences and a lot of weight on the group being a certain way. If the groups aren’t a certain way and I don’t feel good myself, I have to hyper-individualize or hyper-conform or squash some part of myself. After doing that for a while, either you crack or the system cracks.”

Encouraging kids to do group work without really talking about what that means and exploring the responsibility of each member to themselves and the others is asking a lot. As I talked about in my last post, we can’t assume that everyone is coming to the work in the same way, and if our classrooms and systems are set up to reward individualism, then the kids who have been steeped in that culture will naturally thrive while the ones for whom individualism is alien and challenging will not. Simply calling something “group work” or “collective” is not enough. We have to really understand what that means to each student and acknowledge the barriers it throws up for some.

The kids who are coming to us with completely different world views are already working harder. If our systems trigger big questions of values and identity for them, the work they do to conform derails the work they’re doing to learn the material we present. And for some of those kids, behavior issues are a result of hyper-individualizing or cracking. When the system is bigger than you and supported by the dominant culture, it’s more likely that you’ll crack than the system. But as more and more children from diverse backgrounds enter our school system, what we are seeing is the system beginning to fall apart. Rather than panicking and trying to shore it up, I believe we need to see it as an opportunity to radically re-think how we serve kids.

We’ve centered the system for far too long. It’s time to start centering the students and their well-being. There are many ways to do that, and one incredibly powerful one is for folks to find Hammond’s book and hold it up against the practices and priorities we have in our educational systems right now to see where we can do better.

Effective SEL Practices for Educators (and Parents), Part 1

You can have a curriculum or a set of ideas in front of you and still not know where to begin when it comes to working with teens on social-emotional health and well-being. Because there isn’t an answer key, it is often intimidating to sit down with an adolescent or a room full of them and talk about hard things – things that most of us haven’t been encouraged to share. I’ve been studying Dr. Craig Elliott‘s work on social justice and racial caucusing and many of his ideas adapt well to this kind of work.

PRE-WORK – Before we start, it’s important to think about some key things that could impact how we interact with kids, especially around difficult topics.

  1. We have to examine our parenting/leadership experiences to find patterns, norms or habits we have, history or traditions we carry forward without thinking about them, and stereotypes and myths we have about teens, kids of color, gender roles, etc.
  2. It is also important to examine our relationship with leading/parenting – did we come to it with enthusiasm or not, have we internalized ideas of what it “should” or “shouldn’t” look like, are we resentful of the role itself?
  3. Next, we need to spend time thinking about our own experiences as teens – were they largely positive or negative, are there things we suffered through that we feel are “rites of passage” and we will perpetuate?
  4. And finally, be very clear on your intentions as you move forward – are you looking to help the adolescent(s) in your life come to their own conclusions or is it more important for you to impose your values and will on them, are you looking to establish your own place as an expert or do you want them to find their own expertise on themselves?

IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER – We learn best in relationship, but only if we feel safe. For teenagers, this not only means that they feel free to share their ideas and thoughts without fear of punishment, but that they feel as though they are part of the group, that they won’t be mocked or shamed for thinking out loud or expressing ideas that may not be fully formed. Belonging = survival in the adolescent brain. This means that it is incredibly important to spend more time and energy investing in community-building, especially in the beginning. Respect, safety, and accountability are all key parts of a strong relationship.

It can be incredibly intimidating to dive in, but there is no Right or Wrong answer. It is most important that we begin. We can always change course, apologize for mis-steps, and learn to do better, but we have to do the work.

Part 2 will look at qualities of effective leaders, strong groups, barriers to productive work, and expectations for leaders. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.