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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38197\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Motivation.gif\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-38197\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Motivation-640x360.gif\" alt=\"iStock\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">iStock\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Barry Schwartz laughs as he describes the little girl next door who suddenly dove into reading after a substitute teacher took over her elementary school classroom. For every book they read, recalls the Swarthmore College psychology professor, students received a point, which they later cashed in for prizes. The girl then started to read a book an hour. The only catch was that she picked her books based on the number of pages and type size, and “she couldn’t tell you anything about any of them,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schwartz shared this story about the binge-reading neighbor during a conference call with Yale University associate professor Amy Wrzesniewski explaining their \u003ca href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/111/30/10990.full\">research on motivation\u003c/a>. The scholars have been carrying out a longitudinal study of more than 10,000 cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to determine the relative success of those who were motivated by intrinsic rewards versus those driven by “instrumental,” or extrinsic rewards.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“If you start kids the wrong way — say, by rewarding them with pizza — then their intrinsic motives will vanish.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>They assumed that some combination of internal and external motives would lead to the most success, as measured by the officers’ willingness to stay beyond the five-year commitment to the Army and to graduate and become commissioned officers. In fact, they found that cadets who expressed the most intrinsic motivation were more successful than those who showed mixed motives to serve. In other words, those driven to attend West Point motivated in part by internal forces, like the wish to become a fine officer, were more successful in their pursuits than those driven by extrinsic rewards, such as the desire to get a good job after graduation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same subtle interplay between motivation and rewards is also at work when it comes to education and learning, say Schwartz and Wrzesniewski. Rewarding students for getting their schoolwork done with prizes, snacks and even grades, as most schools do, can have the unintended effect of dismantling a child’s drive to learn for its own sake. The intrinsic rewards that come from exploring interests in depth, and mastering difficult concepts and problems, can be smothered by a reward system that focuses on grades, say, rather than understanding. It also signals what’s important to the teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you dangle Burger King in front of kids’ noses, you are telling them what kind of consequence matters, and what motive to pay attention to,” Schwartz says. “And education will suffer.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In Elementary School\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How can teachers promote the intrinsic benefits of learning in school systems that depend on grades as a way to measure progress?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every teacher wishes their entire class was intrinsically motivated,” says Kathy Branchflower, a veteran fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Lincoln-Hubbard School in Summit, New Jersey. Branchflower says that our cultural inclination to praise and reward kids, often for minimal achievement, has contributed to the decline in kids’ intrinsic motivation. Another culprit in reducing inner drive is kids’ overly structured lives, Branchflower adds, because children lose confidence and motivation when adults make the decisions for them. To build it back, she reminds her students that they are responsible for their own learning, adding that she is a mere facilitator to their education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"kt8jfnWEqRH8zpnkc5xSbkATARuBXx19\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My job is to empower them to help them become independent young learners,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a practical matter, this means stopping short of answering questions that the kids are capable of figuring out on their own. Children are also given as much choice as possible in the layout of the classroom. “I say to the kids, ‘This is your classroom, let’s structure it so it works best for you.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Branchflower expects a lot of her students, but praises their effort rather than their results and works to make the lessons fun. In teaching them about the Oregon Trail, for example, she assigns everyone new names and ages in keeping with those times, so the kids feel like characters in history rather than detached observers. In another exercise, she divides the class into eclectic groups, gives each a box of Legos, and challenges every group to build the tallest tower—-all without saying a word to anyone else on their team.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you make it fun, they’re more inclined to embrace it -- it helps them develop curiosity,” she says, which drives enthusiasm for learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In Middle School and Beyond\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Randy Wallock, a seventh-grade language arts teacher at the Lawton C. Johnson Summit Middle School, also in New Jersey, uses similar approaches to encourage learning for its own sake among his students: They’re given choice and autonomy and the freedom to work at their own pace. He also tries to build what he calls “little cultures within the classroom to encourage learning;” teenagers are responsive to social expectations, and creating environments where curiosity is cool invites more self-directed learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Cary Mallon, who has taught algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, and geometry over the last 22 years at Hood River Valley High School in Oregon, stimulating the internal drive to solve math problems has proved difficult. “With math, there’s a lot of students who loathe it,” he says. Whereas younger students are more intrinsically motivated, many older kids complete their assignments for the sake of the grade, and are content to understand just one way to solve a problem, Mallon says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In a lot of ways, our system trains the students to be this way,” he says. He is hopeful that moving away from a curriculum that focuses on minutiae and abstract equation -- what Stanford University professor of mathematics education Jo Boaler calls “school math”—and toward one that focuses on practical problem-solving and logical reasoning might inspire more kids to study and enjoy the subject.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students bring up the classic adolescent lament -- when will I ever use this equation in real life? -- he tells them that understanding math is part of being a well-rounded person, just as learning an abstruse poem may someday inform their appreciation for life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Generating enthusiasm for learning among college-age kids will be tough if they’ve grown up to expect pats on the head and perfects grades in exchange for their labor, Schwartz says. “If you start kids the wrong way -- say, by rewarding them with pizza -- then their intrinsic motives will vanish,” he says. Still, he and Wrzesniewski believe that a thoughtful and attentive college professor has the power to affect how students are motivated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As a teacher, you have a choice of what you respond to,” says Wrzesniewski, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. “Do you pay attention to students who have their laptops out, or do you pay attention to students who are asking intelligent questions?” she asks. Making those kids who ask intelligent questions feel “valued, responded to and celebrated,” she says, brings more of that out in others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schwartz agrees, but warns that sending out these kinds of signals must be done slowly and subtly. He adds, “You have to be careful you’re not making this another instrumental reward.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38197\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Motivation.gif\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-38197\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Motivation-640x360.gif\" alt=\"iStock\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">iStock\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Barry Schwartz laughs as he describes the little girl next door who suddenly dove into reading after a substitute teacher took over her elementary school classroom. For every book they read, recalls the Swarthmore College psychology professor, students received a point, which they later cashed in for prizes. The girl then started to read a book an hour. The only catch was that she picked her books based on the number of pages and type size, and “she couldn’t tell you anything about any of them,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schwartz shared this story about the binge-reading neighbor during a conference call with Yale University associate professor Amy Wrzesniewski explaining their \u003ca href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/111/30/10990.full\">research on motivation\u003c/a>. The scholars have been carrying out a longitudinal study of more than 10,000 cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to determine the relative success of those who were motivated by intrinsic rewards versus those driven by “instrumental,” or extrinsic rewards.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“If you start kids the wrong way — say, by rewarding them with pizza — then their intrinsic motives will vanish.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>They assumed that some combination of internal and external motives would lead to the most success, as measured by the officers’ willingness to stay beyond the five-year commitment to the Army and to graduate and become commissioned officers. In fact, they found that cadets who expressed the most intrinsic motivation were more successful than those who showed mixed motives to serve. In other words, those driven to attend West Point motivated in part by internal forces, like the wish to become a fine officer, were more successful in their pursuits than those driven by extrinsic rewards, such as the desire to get a good job after graduation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same subtle interplay between motivation and rewards is also at work when it comes to education and learning, say Schwartz and Wrzesniewski. Rewarding students for getting their schoolwork done with prizes, snacks and even grades, as most schools do, can have the unintended effect of dismantling a child’s drive to learn for its own sake. The intrinsic rewards that come from exploring interests in depth, and mastering difficult concepts and problems, can be smothered by a reward system that focuses on grades, say, rather than understanding. It also signals what’s important to the teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you dangle Burger King in front of kids’ noses, you are telling them what kind of consequence matters, and what motive to pay attention to,” Schwartz says. “And education will suffer.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In Elementary School\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How can teachers promote the intrinsic benefits of learning in school systems that depend on grades as a way to measure progress?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every teacher wishes their entire class was intrinsically motivated,” says Kathy Branchflower, a veteran fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Lincoln-Hubbard School in Summit, New Jersey. Branchflower says that our cultural inclination to praise and reward kids, often for minimal achievement, has contributed to the decline in kids’ intrinsic motivation. Another culprit in reducing inner drive is kids’ overly structured lives, Branchflower adds, because children lose confidence and motivation when adults make the decisions for them. To build it back, she reminds her students that they are responsible for their own learning, adding that she is a mere facilitator to their education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My job is to empower them to help them become independent young learners,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a practical matter, this means stopping short of answering questions that the kids are capable of figuring out on their own. Children are also given as much choice as possible in the layout of the classroom. “I say to the kids, ‘This is your classroom, let’s structure it so it works best for you.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Branchflower expects a lot of her students, but praises their effort rather than their results and works to make the lessons fun. In teaching them about the Oregon Trail, for example, she assigns everyone new names and ages in keeping with those times, so the kids feel like characters in history rather than detached observers. In another exercise, she divides the class into eclectic groups, gives each a box of Legos, and challenges every group to build the tallest tower—-all without saying a word to anyone else on their team.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you make it fun, they’re more inclined to embrace it -- it helps them develop curiosity,” she says, which drives enthusiasm for learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In Middle School and Beyond\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Randy Wallock, a seventh-grade language arts teacher at the Lawton C. Johnson Summit Middle School, also in New Jersey, uses similar approaches to encourage learning for its own sake among his students: They’re given choice and autonomy and the freedom to work at their own pace. He also tries to build what he calls “little cultures within the classroom to encourage learning;” teenagers are responsive to social expectations, and creating environments where curiosity is cool invites more self-directed learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Cary Mallon, who has taught algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, and geometry over the last 22 years at Hood River Valley High School in Oregon, stimulating the internal drive to solve math problems has proved difficult. “With math, there’s a lot of students who loathe it,” he says. Whereas younger students are more intrinsically motivated, many older kids complete their assignments for the sake of the grade, and are content to understand just one way to solve a problem, Mallon says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In a lot of ways, our system trains the students to be this way,” he says. He is hopeful that moving away from a curriculum that focuses on minutiae and abstract equation -- what Stanford University professor of mathematics education Jo Boaler calls “school math”—and toward one that focuses on practical problem-solving and logical reasoning might inspire more kids to study and enjoy the subject.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When students bring up the classic adolescent lament -- when will I ever use this equation in real life? -- he tells them that understanding math is part of being a well-rounded person, just as learning an abstruse poem may someday inform their appreciation for life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Generating enthusiasm for learning among college-age kids will be tough if they’ve grown up to expect pats on the head and perfects grades in exchange for their labor, Schwartz says. “If you start kids the wrong way -- say, by rewarding them with pizza -- then their intrinsic motives will vanish,” he says. Still, he and Wrzesniewski believe that a thoughtful and attentive college professor has the power to affect how students are motivated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As a teacher, you have a choice of what you respond to,” says Wrzesniewski, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. “Do you pay attention to students who have their laptops out, or do you pay attention to students who are asking intelligent questions?” she asks. Making those kids who ask intelligent questions feel “valued, responded to and celebrated,” she says, brings more of that out in others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schwartz agrees, but warns that sending out these kinds of signals must be done slowly and subtly. He adds, “You have to be careful you’re not making this another instrumental reward.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "How Standing Desks Can Help Students Focus in the Classroom ",
"title": "How Standing Desks Can Help Students Focus in the Classroom ",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38173\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/iStock-Standing-and-reading.gif\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/iStock-Standing-and-reading-640x360.gif\" alt=\"iStock\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38173\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">iStock\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The rise of the standing desk may appear to be a response to the modern, eat-at-your-desk, hunched-over worker chained to her computer, but history paints a different picture: Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson all stood while they worked. Donald Rumsfeld had a standing desk, and so did Charles Dickens. \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/business/stand-up-desks-gaining-favor-in-the-workplace.html\">Workplaces\u003c/a> are moving toward more standing desks, but schools have been slower to catch on for a variety of reasons, including cost, convenience, and perhaps the assumption that \"sit down and pay attention\" is the best way to learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mark Benden, Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at Texas A&M Health Science Center, is looking to change all that. Too much sitting is bad for our health, he said, and students are now facing a host of challenges that may stem in part from too much time in a chair, including obesity and attention disorders. So five years ago, Benden and his team began studying what happened to students when they got out of their traditional seats and moved to standing desks.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“When schools tell children to sit still and be quiet, you’ve almost wounded them. They want to be wiggling and fidgeting and moving.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Their findings, \u003ca href=\"http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/11/9/9361\">published in a new piece\u003c/a> in the \u003ci>International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health\u003c/i>, come from a group of 374 elementary school students in College Station, Texas. Students divided into a (traditional desk) control group and a standing desk group were equipped with biometric monitors - what Benden described as “research-level Fitbits” - attached to their arms, which tracked several measurements, like heart rate and intensity of movement, and then calculated their caloric burn. The desks were designed and built locally at \u003ca href=\"http://www.stand2learn.com/\">Stand2Learn\u003c/a>, an A&M faculty-led startup of which Benden maintains part ownership.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We quickly realized they [the students] are more active, they are burning more calories, at the standing desks,” Benden said. “And they’re not necessarily standing the whole time. There’s a stool, too, but even sitting in a stool is different from sitting in a chair. It’s really not sitting or standing - because it opens up your trunk-thigh angle, you’re able to breathe better, and you’re able to swing your legs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38174\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Stand-2-Learn-Standing-desk-1.jpeg\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Stand-2-Learn-Standing-desk-1-300x450.jpeg\" alt=\"A Stand2Learn standing desk and stool. (Courtesy of Stand2Learn)\" width=\"300\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-38174\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Stand2Learn standing desk and stool. (Courtesy of Stand2Learn)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Benden said they found that children in the study who were overweight or obese burned more calories at the standing desks than their normal-weight peers, a result he found surprising. “It’s interesting,” he said. “When you’re thinking about intervention, the children who are normal weight don’t experience a significant change from being in a seated classroom. But overweight kids get a bigger bump, and they’re the ones who need it the most.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In reality, Benden said it’s not about either sitting or standing all the time, but instead about keeping moving. He wants to spread the “gospel of movement,” where kids and adults understand they need to be up and active, free to move around. For the modern student or office worker, standing for part of a day is a good way to keep moving. “We used to be more active, but over time we got conditioned to being inactive,” Benden said. “It’s not normal, and it’s not how we were intended to be. When schools tell children to sit still and be quiet, you’ve almost wounded them. They want to be wiggling and fidgeting and moving.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Impact of Standing on Learning\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While burning calories is certainly important, the real question in classrooms is whether standing desks improve learning. Benden said he brought in Texas A&M’s educational psychology department through a special grant to study whether students were more engaged with the teacher and with their work when they were standing. The psychologists, who were blinded to the study, sat in classrooms for two years watching students and measuring their attentiveness and engagement using a series of markers like how many times students looked at the teacher, how often they wrote on their papers, and how often they were distracted by a neighbor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The results of the study, to be published later this fall, were significant: students were more engaged in activity permissive learning environments than in traditional seated environments. And once again, the children who were overweight and obese showed larger improvements in attention than normal-weight children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you look at overweight, and especially obese, children in the study, they were twice as engaged in activity permissive learning environment classrooms,” Benden said. “And that amount of engagement was actually higher than normal-weight peers in normal classrooms. And that just doesn’t happen, this was kind of eye opening.” He mentioned a limited \u003ca href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/14/health/obesity-affect-school-performance/\">body of research\u003c/a> showing that obese students may get lower grades than normal-weight students; the standing desks may have an opportunity to alter that. “Maybe those overweight kids aren’t less capable academically,” he said. “Maybe they just need to be more active.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Standing Desks in the Classroom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38177\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Sandor-Weisz-Standing-Desk.gif\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Sandor-Weisz-Standing-Desk-300x300.gif\" alt=\"A family of standing desk users at home. (Courtesy of Sandor Weisz)\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-38177\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A family of standing desk users at home. (Courtesy of Sandor Weisz)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Educator Katie Caritey has two standing desks for her 24 second graders, but believes that all her students would benefit from using them. She dreams of having more. The desks were provided by a grant six years ago at Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, and for now students take turns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I have found the standing desks to be a fabulous tool for students that tend to be more active, fidgety or even more tired,” Caritey said. “Movement breaks are an essential part of learning in my classroom, and I have found that the best learning takes place when students are able to move their bodies throughout the day, consistently and frequently.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Caritey’s 7- and 8-year-old students get two 15-minute recesses per day, and 30 minutes of physical education twice a week. Each day, Caritey chooses the students who are particularly energetic or are having a challenging time completing their work to use the standing desks. She also interviewed her students for this story so they could explain how they felt about having them in their classroom. She reports:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“In the words of my second grade students, the standing desks ‘help me concentrate without even thinking about what others are doing.’ They also help because ‘being able to stand or swing my legs helps me calm down my brain so I can think better.’ In the words of a more serious, less active student, ‘I would be perfectly fine without the standing desks, but when I can sit at one, it makes the time go by faster and my work gets finished right away.’ Another child reported that ‘when I get to school in the morning, my brain is tired and not ready for learning yet. When I sit at the standing desk, it wakes up my brain and helps me get ready for thinking.’”\n\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>But what if standing desks -- and yoga balls, \u003ca href=\"http://www.fastcoexist.com/3036607/this-school-has-bikes-instead-of-desks-and-it-turns-out-thats-a-better-way-to-learn\">bicycle desks\u003c/a> and movement breaks -- are only part of the solution? What if they won’t fix the underlying problem, that today’s children don’t get enough whole body movement to be attentive and engaged in school?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom has railed against what she calls the “constant upright position” in which children spend too much time, limiting their ability to pay attention because their core muscles aren’t developed enough to keep from fidgeting. “It is rare to find children rolling down hills, climbing trees, and spinning in circles just for fun. Merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters are a thing of the past,” she opined in \u003ca href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/08/why-so-many-kids-cant-sit-still-in-school-today/\">The Washington Post\u003c/a>. According to Hanscom, one of the keys to maintaining attention in school is the development of the vestibular, or balance system, located in the inner ear. “In order to develop a strong balance system, children need to move their body in all directions for hours at a time,” she wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whole body movements like spinning in circles and rolling down hills do much more than burn calories; Hanscom said that they engage the hair cells in the inner ear, helping to develop balance, vision and attention. All three are desperately needed for kids if they are expected to pay attention to learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Standing can be just as bad as sitting,” Hanscom said about students using standing desks. “From an OT standpoint, it’s still an issue -- if you’re just standing, you’re not getting rapid vestibular movement. You need to move your head in all different directions. If you’re standing still, you’re not moving your head left and right.” Until children get meaningful movement, and lots of it -- she recommends multiple hours a day, whether in or out of school -- their attention will not improve.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mark Benden doesn’t disagree. “There is no replacement for running and playing. Motor skill development is so critical for young children, and it’s very vital that that happen, no question about it,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38173\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/iStock-Standing-and-reading.gif\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/iStock-Standing-and-reading-640x360.gif\" alt=\"iStock\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38173\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">iStock\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The rise of the standing desk may appear to be a response to the modern, eat-at-your-desk, hunched-over worker chained to her computer, but history paints a different picture: Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson all stood while they worked. Donald Rumsfeld had a standing desk, and so did Charles Dickens. \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/business/stand-up-desks-gaining-favor-in-the-workplace.html\">Workplaces\u003c/a> are moving toward more standing desks, but schools have been slower to catch on for a variety of reasons, including cost, convenience, and perhaps the assumption that \"sit down and pay attention\" is the best way to learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mark Benden, Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at Texas A&M Health Science Center, is looking to change all that. Too much sitting is bad for our health, he said, and students are now facing a host of challenges that may stem in part from too much time in a chair, including obesity and attention disorders. So five years ago, Benden and his team began studying what happened to students when they got out of their traditional seats and moved to standing desks.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“When schools tell children to sit still and be quiet, you’ve almost wounded them. They want to be wiggling and fidgeting and moving.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Their findings, \u003ca href=\"http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/11/9/9361\">published in a new piece\u003c/a> in the \u003ci>International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health\u003c/i>, come from a group of 374 elementary school students in College Station, Texas. Students divided into a (traditional desk) control group and a standing desk group were equipped with biometric monitors - what Benden described as “research-level Fitbits” - attached to their arms, which tracked several measurements, like heart rate and intensity of movement, and then calculated their caloric burn. The desks were designed and built locally at \u003ca href=\"http://www.stand2learn.com/\">Stand2Learn\u003c/a>, an A&M faculty-led startup of which Benden maintains part ownership.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We quickly realized they [the students] are more active, they are burning more calories, at the standing desks,” Benden said. “And they’re not necessarily standing the whole time. There’s a stool, too, but even sitting in a stool is different from sitting in a chair. It’s really not sitting or standing - because it opens up your trunk-thigh angle, you’re able to breathe better, and you’re able to swing your legs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38174\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Stand-2-Learn-Standing-desk-1.jpeg\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Stand-2-Learn-Standing-desk-1-300x450.jpeg\" alt=\"A Stand2Learn standing desk and stool. (Courtesy of Stand2Learn)\" width=\"300\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-38174\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Stand2Learn standing desk and stool. (Courtesy of Stand2Learn)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Benden said they found that children in the study who were overweight or obese burned more calories at the standing desks than their normal-weight peers, a result he found surprising. “It’s interesting,” he said. “When you’re thinking about intervention, the children who are normal weight don’t experience a significant change from being in a seated classroom. But overweight kids get a bigger bump, and they’re the ones who need it the most.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In reality, Benden said it’s not about either sitting or standing all the time, but instead about keeping moving. He wants to spread the “gospel of movement,” where kids and adults understand they need to be up and active, free to move around. For the modern student or office worker, standing for part of a day is a good way to keep moving. “We used to be more active, but over time we got conditioned to being inactive,” Benden said. “It’s not normal, and it’s not how we were intended to be. When schools tell children to sit still and be quiet, you’ve almost wounded them. They want to be wiggling and fidgeting and moving.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Impact of Standing on Learning\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While burning calories is certainly important, the real question in classrooms is whether standing desks improve learning. Benden said he brought in Texas A&M’s educational psychology department through a special grant to study whether students were more engaged with the teacher and with their work when they were standing. The psychologists, who were blinded to the study, sat in classrooms for two years watching students and measuring their attentiveness and engagement using a series of markers like how many times students looked at the teacher, how often they wrote on their papers, and how often they were distracted by a neighbor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The results of the study, to be published later this fall, were significant: students were more engaged in activity permissive learning environments than in traditional seated environments. And once again, the children who were overweight and obese showed larger improvements in attention than normal-weight children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you look at overweight, and especially obese, children in the study, they were twice as engaged in activity permissive learning environment classrooms,” Benden said. “And that amount of engagement was actually higher than normal-weight peers in normal classrooms. And that just doesn’t happen, this was kind of eye opening.” He mentioned a limited \u003ca href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/14/health/obesity-affect-school-performance/\">body of research\u003c/a> showing that obese students may get lower grades than normal-weight students; the standing desks may have an opportunity to alter that. “Maybe those overweight kids aren’t less capable academically,” he said. “Maybe they just need to be more active.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Standing Desks in the Classroom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38177\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Sandor-Weisz-Standing-Desk.gif\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Sandor-Weisz-Standing-Desk-300x300.gif\" alt=\"A family of standing desk users at home. (Courtesy of Sandor Weisz)\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-38177\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A family of standing desk users at home. (Courtesy of Sandor Weisz)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Educator Katie Caritey has two standing desks for her 24 second graders, but believes that all her students would benefit from using them. She dreams of having more. The desks were provided by a grant six years ago at Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, and for now students take turns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I have found the standing desks to be a fabulous tool for students that tend to be more active, fidgety or even more tired,” Caritey said. “Movement breaks are an essential part of learning in my classroom, and I have found that the best learning takes place when students are able to move their bodies throughout the day, consistently and frequently.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Caritey’s 7- and 8-year-old students get two 15-minute recesses per day, and 30 minutes of physical education twice a week. Each day, Caritey chooses the students who are particularly energetic or are having a challenging time completing their work to use the standing desks. She also interviewed her students for this story so they could explain how they felt about having them in their classroom. She reports:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“In the words of my second grade students, the standing desks ‘help me concentrate without even thinking about what others are doing.’ They also help because ‘being able to stand or swing my legs helps me calm down my brain so I can think better.’ In the words of a more serious, less active student, ‘I would be perfectly fine without the standing desks, but when I can sit at one, it makes the time go by faster and my work gets finished right away.’ Another child reported that ‘when I get to school in the morning, my brain is tired and not ready for learning yet. When I sit at the standing desk, it wakes up my brain and helps me get ready for thinking.’”\n\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>But what if standing desks -- and yoga balls, \u003ca href=\"http://www.fastcoexist.com/3036607/this-school-has-bikes-instead-of-desks-and-it-turns-out-thats-a-better-way-to-learn\">bicycle desks\u003c/a> and movement breaks -- are only part of the solution? What if they won’t fix the underlying problem, that today’s children don’t get enough whole body movement to be attentive and engaged in school?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom has railed against what she calls the “constant upright position” in which children spend too much time, limiting their ability to pay attention because their core muscles aren’t developed enough to keep from fidgeting. “It is rare to find children rolling down hills, climbing trees, and spinning in circles just for fun. Merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters are a thing of the past,” she opined in \u003ca href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/08/why-so-many-kids-cant-sit-still-in-school-today/\">The Washington Post\u003c/a>. According to Hanscom, one of the keys to maintaining attention in school is the development of the vestibular, or balance system, located in the inner ear. “In order to develop a strong balance system, children need to move their body in all directions for hours at a time,” she wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whole body movements like spinning in circles and rolling down hills do much more than burn calories; Hanscom said that they engage the hair cells in the inner ear, helping to develop balance, vision and attention. All three are desperately needed for kids if they are expected to pay attention to learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Standing can be just as bad as sitting,” Hanscom said about students using standing desks. “From an OT standpoint, it’s still an issue -- if you’re just standing, you’re not getting rapid vestibular movement. You need to move your head in all different directions. If you’re standing still, you’re not moving your head left and right.” Until children get meaningful movement, and lots of it -- she recommends multiple hours a day, whether in or out of school -- their attention will not improve.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mark Benden doesn’t disagree. “There is no replacement for running and playing. Motor skill development is so critical for young children, and it’s very vital that that happen, no question about it,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "How Can Students Have More Say in School Decisions? ",
"title": "How Can Students Have More Say in School Decisions? ",
"headTitle": "MindShift | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38125\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-1.png\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-38125\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-1-640x360.png\" alt=\"A principal is consults with Student Voice Collaborative students about how to use the organization's rubric to assess and improve her school. (Courtesy Ari Sussman) \" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A principal works with Student Voice Collaborative students on how to use the \u003ca href=\"http://nebula.wsimg.com/a8bfbb41d72ec1b4838f6d885f59c73b?AccessKeyId=477CBFF51112C7C068EE&disposition=0&alloworigin=1\">organization's rubric\u003c/a> to assess and improve her school. (Courtesy Ari Sussman)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Two years ago, Zak Malamed and a few friends held their first Twitter chat for students who were feeling frustrated about how little say they had in the school reform debates going on all around them. At the time, Malamed and two other friends were still in high school, and one friend was in college. But when they formed Student Voice, the group that rose out of that first chat, they agreed that “Revolutionizing education through the voices and actions of students,” in whatever form that would take, would be their mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"\u003cspan style=\"color: #222222\">Students want to achieve in school. They want to find purpose being in school.\" said Malamed. \"They want to discover their talents. Without students having a voice, we cannot collectively ensure that this will all happen for every student.\"\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group has grown in numbers and visibility, recently moving from grassroots effort to official nonprofit. Their now-popular \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/StuVoice?src=hash\">#StuVoice\u003c/a> Twitter chats have included education heavyweights, like U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The group also hosted Student Voice Live, their recent all-student produced event in New York City, which gained sponsorship from Dell and Microsoft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The event hosted 230 ninth through twelfth graders as well as the dozen-plus members of the Student Voice “executive staff,” and featured student-led panels like “Redesign: STEM Diversity,” and “Think Tank: The Power of Diverse Learners.” Big names headlined, like Amanda Ripley, author of \u003cem>The Smartest Kids in the World\u003c/em>, and teen cancer researcher Jack Andraka. Malamed said that what began as a social media awareness campaign to promote the “philosophy of student voice in education” has become a way to connect students who long to be a part of the education process with the tools and organizations they need to get there.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“Here’s what the students told us: when they feel a sense of self-worth, they’re five times more likely to be academically motivated.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Student Voice clearly has students’ attention - at least the ones who are interested in changing their schools - but trying to nail down what students really want is trickier, and varies from school to school. Malamed said that there will always be the kids who want to change things through student government, but his plans go beyond student council. “Student government represents an important vehicle,” Malamed said, “but there’s a certain kind of student who goes for student government. What about the underrepresented students who don’t necessarily sign up for student council?” He said that the traditional role of students coming to the institution saying, ‘this is what we want,’ should be flipped. According to Malamed, in a world where the student voice matters, the institution comes to students to say, ‘what can we do to improve this school?’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asking Students What They Want\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Professor Russell Quaglia, founder of the Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations and author of \u003cem>Student Voice: Instrument of Change\u003c/em>, says that the student voice in education is ‘the elephant in the room’ - the missing piece to the puzzle of how to reform schools. He has been studying and advocating for student voice for over 30 years - for much of that time feeling like the “the guy with the long hair who ranted” about how students needed to play a bigger role in their education. But now he sees, with the rise of groups like Student Voice and \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/10/how-dream-coordinators-at-schools-help-students-reach-goals/\" target=\"_blank\">The Future Project\u003c/a>, that students are taking notice and tides are beginning to turn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I became a professor at the University of Maine, I kept on hearing that the kids were the problem, and we needed to fix them” said Quaglia. “I just got tired of hearing it. I wasn’t a great student, but I wasn’t broken! I flipped the whole thing on its head, and started looking at students as potential and not the problem.” He founded the institute to study how student voice affects both student achievement and schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Quaglia surveyed 66,314 sixth through twelfth-grade students across the country as well as conducted focus groups in order to put together the \u003ca href=\"http://www.qisa.org/dmsView/My_Voice_2013-2014_National_Report_8_25\">2014 My Voice National Student Report\u003c/a>, an in-depth look at what it takes for students to feel like they matter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I look at the data [from the survey],” he said, “two things jump out at me: we’re missing about half our students. Half the students are engaged, have a sense of self-worth. The other half isn’t dropping out, but they don’t feel a part of anything, either.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The other thing students told him in the survey is that they want teachers to value them as individuals and as a group, but also that teachers matter to them. “Students want adults to know, ‘You matter to me.’ You’re a hero, a role model, whether you want to be or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"SrzeGwHqUgc5HOPmeLuqmf4QrOwGGPjq\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using students’ answers, Quaglia and his researchers created an odds analysis to try to predict school behaviors. “Here’s what the students told us: when they feel a sense of self-worth, they’re five times more likely to be academically motivated,” Quaglia said. According to the report, students who feel “engaged” are 16 times more likely to want to do well; “having a sense of purpose” makes them 18 times more likely to be academically motivated. For Quaglia, it’s clear: students who feel respected and have a sense of control and purpose over what they do at school have a much greater chance of doing well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet Quaglia is beginning to understand one of the issues to bestowing self-worth and engagement on students - the teachers. “The more I talk about student voice, I realize the teachers need to have a voice as well,” he said. “If teachers have confidence that they’re being listened to, then student voice won’t become just another fad or cute idea.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38127\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-3.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-38127\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-3-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"At Landmark High School, students organized a school improvement campaign to improve attendance and engagement. The result was a peer mentoring program and a retreat. (Courtesy of Ari Sussman)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">At Landmark High School, students organized a school improvement campaign to improve attendance and engagement. The result was a peer mentoring program and a retreat. (Courtesy of Ari Sussman)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Applying Voices in the School\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we first started, we didn’t have the clearest, widest vision of what we were looking for,” said Ari Sussman, founder of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.studentvoicecollaborative.com/\">Student Voice Collaborative\u003c/a> (SVC), a progressively-minded project started by the New York City Department of Education five years ago to help students learn how to bring improvement to themselves and their schools. The initial project began as an experiment in five city high schools; it has since expanded into seventeen high schools across five school networks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were just doing good projects in schools, trying to make an impact here or there. Over the last five years, in order to make real, sustainable change in schools, we go beyond projects, and are trying to find a way to systemize student voice in schools.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first thing high school kids who sign up for the voluntary, after school program are shown is how the system already works. Students’ first assignment is to interview school leaders, then make a one-page map showing how decisions get made in their school. The SVC then gives them the tools to navigate decision-makers with their ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Considering how little time and capacity schools have, the goal is, in order to make the most change, you make the little change,” said Sussman. “Rather than creating new groups, students see they don’t have to run around and flag people down each time they want to make a change.” Sussman wants to show students they can bring change by working within the existing system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Student Voice Collaborative consists of four parts. First, kids interview key officials in the Department of Education in order to see the landscape and how they fit into the bigger picture. Then, members of the SVC are invited along on ‘quality reviews’ - one of the two forms of school accountability for the city, where students get paired with a quality reviewer and see how schools are judged according to officials. Next, students conduct research and identify a challenge in their school, and come up with a student-led campaign to address that challenge. Finally, they’re asked to set a city-wide agenda - things that will benefit all students, not just the ones at their school. One group, Sussman said, came up with six recommendations for New York City schools and sent them in a letter to Carmen Fariña, the New York City Schools Chancellor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38126\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-2.png\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-38126\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-2-640x360.png\" alt=\"Student Voice Collaborative participants present their proposal for school improvement: a forum where students provide regular feedback to teachers to improve communication and instruction. (Courtesy of Ari Sussman)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Student Voice Collaborative participants present their proposal for school improvement: a forum where students provide regular feedback to teachers to improve communication and instruction. (Courtesy of Ari Sussman)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But even if districts and schools don’t have the resources for an attempt at a system-wide overhaul like SVC, Malamed said they can take action with small steps. To that end, Malamed and his partner, Carnegie Mellon senior Adil Majid, created \u003ca href=\"http://stuvoice.org/box/\">Student Voice in a Box\u003c/a>, a series of posts and videos made for students and teachers to give them ideas on how to incorporate student voice into classrooms. Malamed said he thinks of the Box like “a student voice rubric.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ideas from Student Voice in Box include: detailed instructions on how to, and the benefits of, \u003ca href=\"http://stuvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Class-Project-5-Policy-Papers.pdf\">assigning the writing of policy papers\u003c/a> for students; a class project in which students \u003ca href=\"http://stuvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Class-Project-6-Conferences-v4.pdf\">organize a conference\u003c/a>; how to set up a student voice-friendly classroom environment; and even how to create a \u003ca href=\"http://stuvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Class-Project-8-Comedy-Routines-v4.pdf\">stand up comedy project\u003c/a>, which Student Voice describes as a way to “deliver social commentary in an accessible manner.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sussman brought some of his students to Student Voice Live so they could get an up-close look at the work of Malamed and his partners. Sussman's students were able to see a college student like Malamed connect, network, and create important partnerships. “It was a really cool event - and I think it will only get better,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Administrators, educators and students are discovering ways to include students in the programs that affect them most. Some programs help students speak directly to the people in charge. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38125\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-1.png\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-38125\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-1-640x360.png\" alt=\"A principal is consults with Student Voice Collaborative students about how to use the organization's rubric to assess and improve her school. (Courtesy Ari Sussman) \" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A principal works with Student Voice Collaborative students on how to use the \u003ca href=\"http://nebula.wsimg.com/a8bfbb41d72ec1b4838f6d885f59c73b?AccessKeyId=477CBFF51112C7C068EE&disposition=0&alloworigin=1\">organization's rubric\u003c/a> to assess and improve her school. (Courtesy Ari Sussman)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Two years ago, Zak Malamed and a few friends held their first Twitter chat for students who were feeling frustrated about how little say they had in the school reform debates going on all around them. At the time, Malamed and two other friends were still in high school, and one friend was in college. But when they formed Student Voice, the group that rose out of that first chat, they agreed that “Revolutionizing education through the voices and actions of students,” in whatever form that would take, would be their mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"\u003cspan style=\"color: #222222\">Students want to achieve in school. They want to find purpose being in school.\" said Malamed. \"They want to discover their talents. Without students having a voice, we cannot collectively ensure that this will all happen for every student.\"\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group has grown in numbers and visibility, recently moving from grassroots effort to official nonprofit. Their now-popular \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/StuVoice?src=hash\">#StuVoice\u003c/a> Twitter chats have included education heavyweights, like U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The group also hosted Student Voice Live, their recent all-student produced event in New York City, which gained sponsorship from Dell and Microsoft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The event hosted 230 ninth through twelfth graders as well as the dozen-plus members of the Student Voice “executive staff,” and featured student-led panels like “Redesign: STEM Diversity,” and “Think Tank: The Power of Diverse Learners.” Big names headlined, like Amanda Ripley, author of \u003cem>The Smartest Kids in the World\u003c/em>, and teen cancer researcher Jack Andraka. Malamed said that what began as a social media awareness campaign to promote the “philosophy of student voice in education” has become a way to connect students who long to be a part of the education process with the tools and organizations they need to get there.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“Here’s what the students told us: when they feel a sense of self-worth, they’re five times more likely to be academically motivated.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Student Voice clearly has students’ attention - at least the ones who are interested in changing their schools - but trying to nail down what students really want is trickier, and varies from school to school. Malamed said that there will always be the kids who want to change things through student government, but his plans go beyond student council. “Student government represents an important vehicle,” Malamed said, “but there’s a certain kind of student who goes for student government. What about the underrepresented students who don’t necessarily sign up for student council?” He said that the traditional role of students coming to the institution saying, ‘this is what we want,’ should be flipped. According to Malamed, in a world where the student voice matters, the institution comes to students to say, ‘what can we do to improve this school?’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Asking Students What They Want\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Professor Russell Quaglia, founder of the Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations and author of \u003cem>Student Voice: Instrument of Change\u003c/em>, says that the student voice in education is ‘the elephant in the room’ - the missing piece to the puzzle of how to reform schools. He has been studying and advocating for student voice for over 30 years - for much of that time feeling like the “the guy with the long hair who ranted” about how students needed to play a bigger role in their education. But now he sees, with the rise of groups like Student Voice and \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/10/how-dream-coordinators-at-schools-help-students-reach-goals/\" target=\"_blank\">The Future Project\u003c/a>, that students are taking notice and tides are beginning to turn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I became a professor at the University of Maine, I kept on hearing that the kids were the problem, and we needed to fix them” said Quaglia. “I just got tired of hearing it. I wasn’t a great student, but I wasn’t broken! I flipped the whole thing on its head, and started looking at students as potential and not the problem.” He founded the institute to study how student voice affects both student achievement and schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Quaglia surveyed 66,314 sixth through twelfth-grade students across the country as well as conducted focus groups in order to put together the \u003ca href=\"http://www.qisa.org/dmsView/My_Voice_2013-2014_National_Report_8_25\">2014 My Voice National Student Report\u003c/a>, an in-depth look at what it takes for students to feel like they matter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When I look at the data [from the survey],” he said, “two things jump out at me: we’re missing about half our students. Half the students are engaged, have a sense of self-worth. The other half isn’t dropping out, but they don’t feel a part of anything, either.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The other thing students told him in the survey is that they want teachers to value them as individuals and as a group, but also that teachers matter to them. “Students want adults to know, ‘You matter to me.’ You’re a hero, a role model, whether you want to be or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using students’ answers, Quaglia and his researchers created an odds analysis to try to predict school behaviors. “Here’s what the students told us: when they feel a sense of self-worth, they’re five times more likely to be academically motivated,” Quaglia said. According to the report, students who feel “engaged” are 16 times more likely to want to do well; “having a sense of purpose” makes them 18 times more likely to be academically motivated. For Quaglia, it’s clear: students who feel respected and have a sense of control and purpose over what they do at school have a much greater chance of doing well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet Quaglia is beginning to understand one of the issues to bestowing self-worth and engagement on students - the teachers. “The more I talk about student voice, I realize the teachers need to have a voice as well,” he said. “If teachers have confidence that they’re being listened to, then student voice won’t become just another fad or cute idea.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38127\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-3.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-38127\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-3-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"At Landmark High School, students organized a school improvement campaign to improve attendance and engagement. The result was a peer mentoring program and a retreat. (Courtesy of Ari Sussman)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">At Landmark High School, students organized a school improvement campaign to improve attendance and engagement. The result was a peer mentoring program and a retreat. (Courtesy of Ari Sussman)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Applying Voices in the School\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we first started, we didn’t have the clearest, widest vision of what we were looking for,” said Ari Sussman, founder of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.studentvoicecollaborative.com/\">Student Voice Collaborative\u003c/a> (SVC), a progressively-minded project started by the New York City Department of Education five years ago to help students learn how to bring improvement to themselves and their schools. The initial project began as an experiment in five city high schools; it has since expanded into seventeen high schools across five school networks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were just doing good projects in schools, trying to make an impact here or there. Over the last five years, in order to make real, sustainable change in schools, we go beyond projects, and are trying to find a way to systemize student voice in schools.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first thing high school kids who sign up for the voluntary, after school program are shown is how the system already works. Students’ first assignment is to interview school leaders, then make a one-page map showing how decisions get made in their school. The SVC then gives them the tools to navigate decision-makers with their ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Considering how little time and capacity schools have, the goal is, in order to make the most change, you make the little change,” said Sussman. “Rather than creating new groups, students see they don’t have to run around and flag people down each time they want to make a change.” Sussman wants to show students they can bring change by working within the existing system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Student Voice Collaborative consists of four parts. First, kids interview key officials in the Department of Education in order to see the landscape and how they fit into the bigger picture. Then, members of the SVC are invited along on ‘quality reviews’ - one of the two forms of school accountability for the city, where students get paired with a quality reviewer and see how schools are judged according to officials. Next, students conduct research and identify a challenge in their school, and come up with a student-led campaign to address that challenge. Finally, they’re asked to set a city-wide agenda - things that will benefit all students, not just the ones at their school. One group, Sussman said, came up with six recommendations for New York City schools and sent them in a letter to Carmen Fariña, the New York City Schools Chancellor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38126\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-2.png\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-38126\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Student-Voice-Collaborative-2-640x360.png\" alt=\"Student Voice Collaborative participants present their proposal for school improvement: a forum where students provide regular feedback to teachers to improve communication and instruction. (Courtesy of Ari Sussman)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Student Voice Collaborative participants present their proposal for school improvement: a forum where students provide regular feedback to teachers to improve communication and instruction. (Courtesy of Ari Sussman)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But even if districts and schools don’t have the resources for an attempt at a system-wide overhaul like SVC, Malamed said they can take action with small steps. To that end, Malamed and his partner, Carnegie Mellon senior Adil Majid, created \u003ca href=\"http://stuvoice.org/box/\">Student Voice in a Box\u003c/a>, a series of posts and videos made for students and teachers to give them ideas on how to incorporate student voice into classrooms. Malamed said he thinks of the Box like “a student voice rubric.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ideas from Student Voice in Box include: detailed instructions on how to, and the benefits of, \u003ca href=\"http://stuvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Class-Project-5-Policy-Papers.pdf\">assigning the writing of policy papers\u003c/a> for students; a class project in which students \u003ca href=\"http://stuvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Class-Project-6-Conferences-v4.pdf\">organize a conference\u003c/a>; how to set up a student voice-friendly classroom environment; and even how to create a \u003ca href=\"http://stuvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Class-Project-8-Comedy-Routines-v4.pdf\">stand up comedy project\u003c/a>, which Student Voice describes as a way to “deliver social commentary in an accessible manner.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sussman brought some of his students to Student Voice Live so they could get an up-close look at the work of Malamed and his partners. Sussman's students were able to see a college student like Malamed connect, network, and create important partnerships. “It was a really cool event - and I think it will only get better,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "How Students Lead the Learning Experience at Democratic Schools",
"title": "How Students Lead the Learning Experience at Democratic Schools",
"headTitle": "MindShift | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38040\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-1.png\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-1-640x360.png\" alt=\"Courtesy of Fairhaven School\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38040\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Fairhaven School\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">While teaching at Catholic and public schools in the 1990s, Mark McCaig and his wife, Kim, grew increasingly frustrated with the amount of time they were having to devote to managing behavior and teaching material that didn’t interest students. They started reading about different approaches and were intrigued by the \u003ca href=\"http://sudburyvalleyschool.com/\">Sudbury Valley School\u003c/a>, a democratic school in Massachusetts where students are in charge of what and how they learn. After paying a visit, they quit their teaching jobs to create a Sudbury-type school in Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.fairhavenschool.com/\">Fairhaven School\u003c/a>, which opened its doors in 1998, has no tests or grades, and no assigned homework. Its goal is to help students develop two core traits: agency and autonomy. (In response to one of the most common questions posed by prospective parents, one parent and former staffer wrote a blog post explaining \u003ca href=\"http://www.fairhavenschool.com/ok-so-youre-sort-of-like/\">how a democratic school differs\u003c/a> from other alternative approaches to education.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To foster those traits, the school aims “to strike that balance between freedom and responsibility,” McCaig says, which he sees as two sides of the same coin. The institutional framework -- rules and community responsibilities and related meetings -- “provides a sense of order that is vital, but around that, students have a lot of liberty to shape their day.” They have at their disposal a large meeting hall, a workshop, two kitchens, several smaller meeting rooms, a library, and rooms dedicated to art, computer gaming, digital arts, and play. The grounds include a stream, a forest, playing fields, a basketball court, a playground, and lots of porches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How it Works\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Designed to be an affordable, “green” learning space with a heterogeneous student body, the school is in a racially diverse, middle-class suburb of Washington, DC. Today about 15 percent of the students are non-white, and the school provides grants or reduced tuition to low-income families. The only entrance requirement is a trial week to ensure prospective students are interacting positively with others and not endangering anyone, including themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The roughly 60 students range in age from five to 18, with a fairly even distribution of ages, except for a recent uptick in 11-year-old boys who have transferred there from conventional schools. The children and adults mix freely, creating the \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/harnessing-childrens-natural-ways-of-learning/\">essential “scaffolding” experiences\u003c/a> for the younger members of the community. All of the children, regardless of their ages, “know what they want to do, and learning is a by-product of what they do,” McCaig says. “Learning is the result of doing, not vice versa.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Five-year-olds who haven’t been exposed to formal classrooms are in many ways better prepared for this ‘discovery learning’ approach, because they are more attuned to this “natural way of interacting,” says David Bjorklund, a professor at Florida Atlantic University who specializes in developmental psychology. “Children begin as explorers—they explore the environment around them, watch others, and try out what peers as well as adults are doing. … What they need to acquire, they are able to acquire quite proficiently through ‘discovery learning.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38042\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-3.jpg\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-3-640x426.jpg\" alt=\"Courtesy of Fairhaven School\" width=\"640\" height=\"426\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38042\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Fairhaven School\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Newcomers respond to this environment in different ways, reflecting their varied personalities, interests and needs (students who enroll at Fairhaven are not necessarily any more self directed to start with than other children, McCaig says, especially if they’ve grown accustomed to having lots of restrictions). Those who crave more structure, he says, create it for themselves. Some exult in their newfound freedom and immerse themselves in previously curtailed activities such as playing video games, but eventually “they figure out how to manage that part of their lives,” he notes. On the other end of the spectrum, there are students who have become so accustomed to doing what they’re told and being praised by teachers, that they find it harder to adjust to the freedom than to the responsibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most significant responsibility at the school is that “you are responsible for what you make of your life,” McCaig says. To graduate, students write and defend a thesis that they have “prepared themselves to become effective adults in the larger community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students’ endeavors are supported by five adult staff members, who bring varied skills and interests to the table: two are former schoolteachers; one is an artist; another is a former nature center interpreter; and the third is a movie sound technician. (The former schoolteachers also had some “unlearning” to do in order to work there effectively, McCaig says, including himself.) They help students clarify and achieve their goals, handle administrative matters, and serve as mentors or “village elders -- people with life experience who know some interesting things and can help in a crisis,” as McCaig puts it. The entire school community -- staff and students alike -- votes each year to decide whether or not to extend each staffer’s contract.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The adults facilitate but don’t drive anything for the students, McCaig explains. “The hard work [the students] do here is learning how to become agents of their own lives and how to make things happen, whether it’s something academic, or organizing a fundraiser, or another event.” Technology, he says, “has increased efficiency and opportunity for our students; nevertheless, the liberty, respect, and community the school provides seem far more important and valuable than laptops or smart phones.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The staff members organize classes when students request them. Staffers will teach the classes or hire someone else. Some of the classes are just one to one. If students lose interest in the subject and stop coming to class, there is no penalty, but there is a consequence. “I will say we’re done,” McCaig explains. “I don’t want to spend time preparing for something and not have the social contract met. … That is part of our job, to give students the reality of how to do things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One staffer, he notes, describes Fairhaven as a place to “practice life.” Students are given the opportunity to “practice the skills that one succeeds in life with, such as communicating with people, taking on jobs, learning how to cook. Academics may be just a part of that.” He adds: “A lot of what happens seems almost invisible. … Play and conversation, broadly defined, are the two most common categories of activity here, and seldom do these ‘look like school.’ Nevertheless, our students are constantly practicing life itself, and the rewards of this practice are as profound as they are difficult to measure.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some students shift their main focus to academics after they leave Fairhaven, or during the hours they’re not in school. “We’ve had people go on to college who did few academic things when they were here, to study all sorts of subjects,” ranging from social work to biology and creative writing, McCaig says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38041\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-2.png\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-2-640x360.png\" alt=\"Courtesy of Fairhaven School\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38041\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Fairhaven School\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Pluses and Minuses of a Democratic School\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The freedom of democratic school does not translate into license to do whatever students wish. There is a “thick law book,” McCaig says, that has been developed over the course of 17 years at the “School Meeting,” where each staff member and student gets an equal vote. (Among other things, it describes the level of skill students need to demonstrate before being able to use expensive or potentially dangerous equipment, such as workshop tools or microwave ovens.) The students are required to participate in judiciary committees, follow the school rules, and record their hours of attendance. Students must attend school for a minimum of five hours each day, though many stay longer. The school’s governance system is explained in more detail \u003ca href=\"http://www.fairhavenschool.com/about-us/\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Freedom is relative -- some families who are accustomed to homeschooling find the rules at Fairhaven too constraining, and also don’t like the fact that, like all schools, it’s cloistered from the surrounding community. There are also those who prefer to be exposed to more adult-initiated activities. A small school such as Fairhaven is also limited by its size, McCaig notes. It doesn’t have a completely stocked science lab, for example, or a large faculty to consult. “Some students arrange those kinds of experiences for themselves off campus,” he adds. “They get internships or jobs, or take community college classes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What the students do have at Fairhaven is “basic freedoms, like freedom of movement,” McCaig says, and the ability to devote themselves to projects for as long as they want. The responsibilities that are attached to the freedoms help the students mature, he adds: “To be exposed to a place where there is so much responsibility leads to responsible people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The school culture and the transparent and democratic judicial system have made bullying almost non-existent, he says, but “we are not immune to the normal challenges life presents. People have conflicts. … The young people here are working on figuring out what to do with their lives, and answering this question and discovering how to make it happen can involve difficult work. People struggle here from time to time, and we expect this. What’s empowering is that we do not have to label or assess their struggles; rather, we are present to support and witness the students as they overcome life’s challenges.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Leaving Fairhaven For Other Schools And College\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A significant number of students (including the younger of McCaig’s two teenage daughters) eventually opt to transfer to a larger school, to meet more people, take advantage of the academic or extracurricular offerings, or just see what else is out there. “The macro issue is that students should be in charge of what they do, and if that means they want to go to public school, more power to them,” McCaig says. “It feels like a different thing than compelling them to do so.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Long-time students often “want to see if they measure up, because we don’t evaluate them,” he adds. “They treat [the conventional high school] like college. They take it seriously, they know what they want, and they are there to master it.” Many have to really apply themselves at first and get additional support to catch up academically, he says, but most go on to make the honor roll within a year. “A significant number then come back,” he adds, “because they decide they find it boring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fairhaven alumni have not experienced any particular difficulties getting into colleges, especially if they can distinguish themselves by going for interviews or submitting video interviews, McCaig says. But students with very specific goals -- such as attending a technical college with less flexible requirements—“need a conscious plan,” which often involves taking specific community college classes on the side while they’re enrolled at Fairhaven.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alumni have gone on to careers as varied as helicopter technician in the military, organic farmer and social worker. McCaig gauges the success of the school in terms of whether the alumni are satisfied with their lives: “Are they happy and thriving, doing something they want to do, and making a living?” Fairhaven has not collected hard data on its alumni, but the staffers do keep in touch with them, and McCaig says their experiences are comparable to \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/09/how-do-unschoolers-turn-out/\">those documented by Peter Gray\u003c/a> and by the Sudbury Valley School in its book, \u003ca href=\"http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/legacy-trust\">Legacy of Trust\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watch the trailer for “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse” below, a 2005 documentary about Fairhaven School by Danny Mydlack:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgpuSo-GSfw&w=420&h=315]\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The Fairhaven School, which opened its doors in 1998, has no tests or grades, and no assigned homework. Its goal is to help students develop two core traits: agency and autonomy. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38040\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-1.png\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-1-640x360.png\" alt=\"Courtesy of Fairhaven School\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38040\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Fairhaven School\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">While teaching at Catholic and public schools in the 1990s, Mark McCaig and his wife, Kim, grew increasingly frustrated with the amount of time they were having to devote to managing behavior and teaching material that didn’t interest students. They started reading about different approaches and were intrigued by the \u003ca href=\"http://sudburyvalleyschool.com/\">Sudbury Valley School\u003c/a>, a democratic school in Massachusetts where students are in charge of what and how they learn. After paying a visit, they quit their teaching jobs to create a Sudbury-type school in Maryland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"http://www.fairhavenschool.com/\">Fairhaven School\u003c/a>, which opened its doors in 1998, has no tests or grades, and no assigned homework. Its goal is to help students develop two core traits: agency and autonomy. (In response to one of the most common questions posed by prospective parents, one parent and former staffer wrote a blog post explaining \u003ca href=\"http://www.fairhavenschool.com/ok-so-youre-sort-of-like/\">how a democratic school differs\u003c/a> from other alternative approaches to education.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To foster those traits, the school aims “to strike that balance between freedom and responsibility,” McCaig says, which he sees as two sides of the same coin. The institutional framework -- rules and community responsibilities and related meetings -- “provides a sense of order that is vital, but around that, students have a lot of liberty to shape their day.” They have at their disposal a large meeting hall, a workshop, two kitchens, several smaller meeting rooms, a library, and rooms dedicated to art, computer gaming, digital arts, and play. The grounds include a stream, a forest, playing fields, a basketball court, a playground, and lots of porches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How it Works\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Designed to be an affordable, “green” learning space with a heterogeneous student body, the school is in a racially diverse, middle-class suburb of Washington, DC. Today about 15 percent of the students are non-white, and the school provides grants or reduced tuition to low-income families. The only entrance requirement is a trial week to ensure prospective students are interacting positively with others and not endangering anyone, including themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The roughly 60 students range in age from five to 18, with a fairly even distribution of ages, except for a recent uptick in 11-year-old boys who have transferred there from conventional schools. The children and adults mix freely, creating the \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/10/harnessing-childrens-natural-ways-of-learning/\">essential “scaffolding” experiences\u003c/a> for the younger members of the community. All of the children, regardless of their ages, “know what they want to do, and learning is a by-product of what they do,” McCaig says. “Learning is the result of doing, not vice versa.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Five-year-olds who haven’t been exposed to formal classrooms are in many ways better prepared for this ‘discovery learning’ approach, because they are more attuned to this “natural way of interacting,” says David Bjorklund, a professor at Florida Atlantic University who specializes in developmental psychology. “Children begin as explorers—they explore the environment around them, watch others, and try out what peers as well as adults are doing. … What they need to acquire, they are able to acquire quite proficiently through ‘discovery learning.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38042\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-3.jpg\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-3-640x426.jpg\" alt=\"Courtesy of Fairhaven School\" width=\"640\" height=\"426\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38042\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Fairhaven School\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Newcomers respond to this environment in different ways, reflecting their varied personalities, interests and needs (students who enroll at Fairhaven are not necessarily any more self directed to start with than other children, McCaig says, especially if they’ve grown accustomed to having lots of restrictions). Those who crave more structure, he says, create it for themselves. Some exult in their newfound freedom and immerse themselves in previously curtailed activities such as playing video games, but eventually “they figure out how to manage that part of their lives,” he notes. On the other end of the spectrum, there are students who have become so accustomed to doing what they’re told and being praised by teachers, that they find it harder to adjust to the freedom than to the responsibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most significant responsibility at the school is that “you are responsible for what you make of your life,” McCaig says. To graduate, students write and defend a thesis that they have “prepared themselves to become effective adults in the larger community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students’ endeavors are supported by five adult staff members, who bring varied skills and interests to the table: two are former schoolteachers; one is an artist; another is a former nature center interpreter; and the third is a movie sound technician. (The former schoolteachers also had some “unlearning” to do in order to work there effectively, McCaig says, including himself.) They help students clarify and achieve their goals, handle administrative matters, and serve as mentors or “village elders -- people with life experience who know some interesting things and can help in a crisis,” as McCaig puts it. The entire school community -- staff and students alike -- votes each year to decide whether or not to extend each staffer’s contract.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The adults facilitate but don’t drive anything for the students, McCaig explains. “The hard work [the students] do here is learning how to become agents of their own lives and how to make things happen, whether it’s something academic, or organizing a fundraiser, or another event.” Technology, he says, “has increased efficiency and opportunity for our students; nevertheless, the liberty, respect, and community the school provides seem far more important and valuable than laptops or smart phones.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The staff members organize classes when students request them. Staffers will teach the classes or hire someone else. Some of the classes are just one to one. If students lose interest in the subject and stop coming to class, there is no penalty, but there is a consequence. “I will say we’re done,” McCaig explains. “I don’t want to spend time preparing for something and not have the social contract met. … That is part of our job, to give students the reality of how to do things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One staffer, he notes, describes Fairhaven as a place to “practice life.” Students are given the opportunity to “practice the skills that one succeeds in life with, such as communicating with people, taking on jobs, learning how to cook. Academics may be just a part of that.” He adds: “A lot of what happens seems almost invisible. … Play and conversation, broadly defined, are the two most common categories of activity here, and seldom do these ‘look like school.’ Nevertheless, our students are constantly practicing life itself, and the rewards of this practice are as profound as they are difficult to measure.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some students shift their main focus to academics after they leave Fairhaven, or during the hours they’re not in school. “We’ve had people go on to college who did few academic things when they were here, to study all sorts of subjects,” ranging from social work to biology and creative writing, McCaig says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38041\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-2.png\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/Fairhaven-2-640x360.png\" alt=\"Courtesy of Fairhaven School\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38041\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Fairhaven School\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Pluses and Minuses of a Democratic School\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The freedom of democratic school does not translate into license to do whatever students wish. There is a “thick law book,” McCaig says, that has been developed over the course of 17 years at the “School Meeting,” where each staff member and student gets an equal vote. (Among other things, it describes the level of skill students need to demonstrate before being able to use expensive or potentially dangerous equipment, such as workshop tools or microwave ovens.) The students are required to participate in judiciary committees, follow the school rules, and record their hours of attendance. Students must attend school for a minimum of five hours each day, though many stay longer. The school’s governance system is explained in more detail \u003ca href=\"http://www.fairhavenschool.com/about-us/\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Freedom is relative -- some families who are accustomed to homeschooling find the rules at Fairhaven too constraining, and also don’t like the fact that, like all schools, it’s cloistered from the surrounding community. There are also those who prefer to be exposed to more adult-initiated activities. A small school such as Fairhaven is also limited by its size, McCaig notes. It doesn’t have a completely stocked science lab, for example, or a large faculty to consult. “Some students arrange those kinds of experiences for themselves off campus,” he adds. “They get internships or jobs, or take community college classes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What the students do have at Fairhaven is “basic freedoms, like freedom of movement,” McCaig says, and the ability to devote themselves to projects for as long as they want. The responsibilities that are attached to the freedoms help the students mature, he adds: “To be exposed to a place where there is so much responsibility leads to responsible people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The school culture and the transparent and democratic judicial system have made bullying almost non-existent, he says, but “we are not immune to the normal challenges life presents. People have conflicts. … The young people here are working on figuring out what to do with their lives, and answering this question and discovering how to make it happen can involve difficult work. People struggle here from time to time, and we expect this. What’s empowering is that we do not have to label or assess their struggles; rather, we are present to support and witness the students as they overcome life’s challenges.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Leaving Fairhaven For Other Schools And College\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A significant number of students (including the younger of McCaig’s two teenage daughters) eventually opt to transfer to a larger school, to meet more people, take advantage of the academic or extracurricular offerings, or just see what else is out there. “The macro issue is that students should be in charge of what they do, and if that means they want to go to public school, more power to them,” McCaig says. “It feels like a different thing than compelling them to do so.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Long-time students often “want to see if they measure up, because we don’t evaluate them,” he adds. “They treat [the conventional high school] like college. They take it seriously, they know what they want, and they are there to master it.” Many have to really apply themselves at first and get additional support to catch up academically, he says, but most go on to make the honor roll within a year. “A significant number then come back,” he adds, “because they decide they find it boring.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fairhaven alumni have not experienced any particular difficulties getting into colleges, especially if they can distinguish themselves by going for interviews or submitting video interviews, McCaig says. But students with very specific goals -- such as attending a technical college with less flexible requirements—“need a conscious plan,” which often involves taking specific community college classes on the side while they’re enrolled at Fairhaven.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alumni have gone on to careers as varied as helicopter technician in the military, organic farmer and social worker. McCaig gauges the success of the school in terms of whether the alumni are satisfied with their lives: “Are they happy and thriving, doing something they want to do, and making a living?” Fairhaven has not collected hard data on its alumni, but the staffers do keep in touch with them, and McCaig says their experiences are comparable to \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/09/how-do-unschoolers-turn-out/\">those documented by Peter Gray\u003c/a> and by the Sudbury Valley School in its book, \u003ca href=\"http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/legacy-trust\">Legacy of Trust\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watch the trailer for “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse” below, a 2005 documentary about Fairhaven School by Danny Mydlack:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Many parents have pushed for a later start to the school day for teenagers, with limited success. But parents just got a boost from the nation's pediatricians, who say that making middle and high schoolers start classes before 8:30 a.m. threatens children's' health, safety and academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We want to promote safety with kids,\" says \u003ca href=\"http://www.seattlechildrens.org/medical-staff/Cora-Collette-Breuner/\">Dr. Cora Breuner\u003c/a>, an adolescent medicine specialist at Seattle Children's Hospital. \"We truly believe that our teenagers are getting six to seven hours of sleep a night, and they need eight to 10.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a \u003ca href=\"http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/08/19/peds.2014-1697.full.pdf+html\">policy statement\u003c/a> calling on school districts to move start times to 8:30 a.m. or later for middle and high schools, so that students can get at least 8 1/2 hours of sleep a night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's making a very powerful statement about the importance of sleep to health,\" says \u003ca href=\"http://childrensnational.org/choose-childrens/find-a-provider/judith-owens?sc_lang=en\">Dr. Judith Owens\u003c/a>, a sleep researcher at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote a \u003ca href=\"http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/08/19/peds.2014-1696.full.pdf+html\">review of the scientific evidence \u003c/a>on teen sleep needs that accompanied the recommendation. \"School start time is a cost-effective way to address this public health issue.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it's a change that most school districts have yet to embrace. Right now just 15 percent of high schools start at 8:30 or later, and 40 percent start before 8 a.m.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The doctors know they're leaping into an already tense conflict between parents and school districts. \"It's been fraught with controversy,\" Breuner tells Shots. \"It's horrifically challenging to move these start schedules up and back.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Letting teenagers sleep later typically means an earlier start for elementary schools, and sets off a cascade of adjustments. Teachers have to change their schedules, times shift for after-school activities and jobs, and older siblings who sit younger ones might no longer get home first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this is one area of health where the evidence is unequivocal, the pediatricians say. As children become teenagers, their sleep-wake cycle shifts two hours later, so it's difficult, if not impossible, for them to go to sleep before 10:30 p.m.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a result, a National Sleep Foundation poll found that 59 percent of middle schoolers and 87 percent of high schoolers are getting less than the recommended 8 1/2 to 9 1/2 hours of sleep a night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There's a price to pay for that,\" Owens says. Studies have found that lack of sleep in teenagers increases the risk of traffic accidents, and makes them more vulnerable to depression and obesity. Teens who get more sleep do better academically, with better standardized test scores and better quality of life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Caffeinating to get through the day or sleeping more on weekends doesn't make up for the sleep deficits, the doctors note. \"It's not simply about getting teenagers to go to bed early or removing electronics from the bedroom,\" Owens says. \"Those are important things, but the biology trumps a lot of these environmental factors. The average teenager can't fall asleep at 11.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As someone who had to rouse a bleary-eyed middle schooler at 6:20 Monday morning, I'm praying that our school district will reconsider its recent decision to punt on later start times. I know that science doesn't necessarily sway policy. But how about a nice bump in standardized test scores?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Hopefully this policy statement will get the dialogue started in those school districts that haven't started, and be ammunition for those that are in the throes of making the decision,\" Owens says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Pediatricians+Say+School+Should+Start+Later+For+Teens%27+Health+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\" alt=\"\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*This post was updated to remove the accompanying photo. You can find the original NPR post with the photo \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/08/25/343125751/pediatricians-say-school-should-start-later-for-teens-health\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Many parents have pushed for a later start to the school day for teenagers, with limited success. But parents just got a boost from the nation's pediatricians, who say that making middle and high schoolers start classes before 8:30 a.m. threatens children's' health, safety and academic performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We want to promote safety with kids,\" says \u003ca href=\"http://www.seattlechildrens.org/medical-staff/Cora-Collette-Breuner/\">Dr. Cora Breuner\u003c/a>, an adolescent medicine specialist at Seattle Children's Hospital. \"We truly believe that our teenagers are getting six to seven hours of sleep a night, and they need eight to 10.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a \u003ca href=\"http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/08/19/peds.2014-1697.full.pdf+html\">policy statement\u003c/a> calling on school districts to move start times to 8:30 a.m. or later for middle and high schools, so that students can get at least 8 1/2 hours of sleep a night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's making a very powerful statement about the importance of sleep to health,\" says \u003ca href=\"http://childrensnational.org/choose-childrens/find-a-provider/judith-owens?sc_lang=en\">Dr. Judith Owens\u003c/a>, a sleep researcher at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote a \u003ca href=\"http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/08/19/peds.2014-1696.full.pdf+html\">review of the scientific evidence \u003c/a>on teen sleep needs that accompanied the recommendation. \"School start time is a cost-effective way to address this public health issue.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it's a change that most school districts have yet to embrace. Right now just 15 percent of high schools start at 8:30 or later, and 40 percent start before 8 a.m.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The doctors know they're leaping into an already tense conflict between parents and school districts. \"It's been fraught with controversy,\" Breuner tells Shots. \"It's horrifically challenging to move these start schedules up and back.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Letting teenagers sleep later typically means an earlier start for elementary schools, and sets off a cascade of adjustments. Teachers have to change their schedules, times shift for after-school activities and jobs, and older siblings who sit younger ones might no longer get home first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this is one area of health where the evidence is unequivocal, the pediatricians say. As children become teenagers, their sleep-wake cycle shifts two hours later, so it's difficult, if not impossible, for them to go to sleep before 10:30 p.m.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a result, a National Sleep Foundation poll found that 59 percent of middle schoolers and 87 percent of high schoolers are getting less than the recommended 8 1/2 to 9 1/2 hours of sleep a night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There's a price to pay for that,\" Owens says. Studies have found that lack of sleep in teenagers increases the risk of traffic accidents, and makes them more vulnerable to depression and obesity. Teens who get more sleep do better academically, with better standardized test scores and better quality of life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Caffeinating to get through the day or sleeping more on weekends doesn't make up for the sleep deficits, the doctors note. \"It's not simply about getting teenagers to go to bed early or removing electronics from the bedroom,\" Owens says. \"Those are important things, but the biology trumps a lot of these environmental factors. The average teenager can't fall asleep at 11.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As someone who had to rouse a bleary-eyed middle schooler at 6:20 Monday morning, I'm praying that our school district will reconsider its recent decision to punt on later start times. I know that science doesn't necessarily sway policy. But how about a nice bump in standardized test scores?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Hopefully this policy statement will get the dialogue started in those school districts that haven't started, and be ammunition for those that are in the throes of making the decision,\" Owens says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Pediatricians+Say+School+Should+Start+Later+For+Teens%27+Health+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\" alt=\"\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*This post was updated to remove the accompanying photo. You can find the original NPR post with the photo \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/08/25/343125751/pediatricians-say-school-should-start-later-for-teens-health\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37930\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-37930\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1.jpg\" alt=\"Eastern seniors pose out front on the first day of school (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eastern seniors Mia Brown and Tonay Denny pose out front on the first day of school. (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Principal Rachel Skerritt was in the middle of one of the busiest parts of the year, planning for students’ return to Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C. this fall. With her hands full juggling agendas, making sure teachers knew where they were supposed to be and coordinating the all-school assembly, she hadn’t had much time to think about how students would feel about returning to school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Voncia Monchais had been mulling over that question all summer, especially since the Class of 2015 will be the first senior class Eastern has graduated since reopening as a turnaround school* with a new principal and staff. Monchais wanted to roll out the red carpet for the senior class and get them excited about their last year. So she did. The first day at Eastern featured a red carpet leading up to the front door, crowns for every senior, a DJ out front and an overall festive atmosphere.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'The Future Project invests in the most significant way that you can in a school, which is with human capital.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“I’ve never seen so many smiles on the first day,” Skerritt said. It’s a good thing, because unexpectedly the mayor, school chancellor and the press all showed up to do \u003ca href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-school-year-starts-with-a-dance-party-at-eastern-senior-high-school/2014/08/25/788559e8-2c71-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">first-day-of-school coverage\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That energy from day one really propelled us through the first couple weeks, which are some of the hardest weeks of a school year,” Skerritt said. Despite shuffling schedules and broken technology, kids remained optimistic about the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monchais is now bringing that same creative energy to back-to-school night, trying to think of ways to welcome parents into the school and make them feel part of the community. It’s all part of a program called the \u003ca href=\"http://www.thefutureproject.org/what/\" target=\"_blank\">Future Project\u003c/a>, a nonprofit organization that pays Monchais’ salary as the school’s dream director -- her mission is to help students identify their passions and connect them with resources to turn them into realities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After a year at Eastern, Monchais has created a “Dream Team” of students who represent student voices in school activities and plan events to unify the student body. “I knew it would take students who were inspirational, who were role models, who had good standing with teachers, who could talk to people,” Monchais said of the group she selected. Some of the students were recommended by teachers, while others had that rare leadership quality but were disengaged from school. The key thing Monchais was looking for was commitment, so joining the team had to be an opt-in choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"ykGjI3LeLKHxYqlQrwlSQ3I9nbgsNo6R\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There were a lot of conversations about how we can give students more voice in the school,” Monchais said. One of the first things the group did was take over planning the honor roll assemblies. Instead of a stiff reading of the honor roll names each quarter, the events have become entirely student-run and presented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students choose modern music, invite younger inspirational guest speakers and coordinate performances by other students as a way to highlight the talent of the student body. The Dream Team also wanted to make sure passionate Eastern students got recognized who were involved in interesting activities but didn’t meet the academic requirements for honor roll. They started doing a “Rambler callout” during the honor roll assemblies to credit students who excelled in other areas. They also recognized teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the biggest innovations was allowing each honor roll honoree a VIP guest at a special luncheon. Those student guests got to sit in a special cordoned-off area of the assembly hall. After starting this tradition, many more students made the honor roll the following quarter. “You are a celebrity because you did the right thing,” Monchais said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GROWING LEADERS\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThe Dream Team is passionate about improving the school climate at Eastern. Its members have become leaders of the student body. “The [students] that have been on her specific team have shown incredible growth,” Skerritt said. During the first year of the Future Project, Eastern was trying to incorporate hundreds of new students from a nearby high school that had been closed by the district. Skerritt worried it would be hard to create a cohesive school culture in that environment. Monchais invited some of the new students to be part of the Dream Team. “Everyone knows them, it’s like they’ve always been here,” Skerritt said. “Some of the things that were student-designed projects have become traditions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37935\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/FutureProject5.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-37935\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/FutureProject5-300x369.jpg\" alt=\"Eastern students like Javon Jones-Williams have many more chances to showcase their talents now that the Dream Team is organizing events (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\" width=\"300\" height=\"369\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eastern students, like Javon Jones-Williams, have many more chances to showcase their talents now that the Dream Team is organizing events. (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As a turnaround school, Eastern is in the process of building its identity and the school traditions that will go with it. The Dream Team has helped shape the school’s trajectory. Its members took the lead organizing a Black History performing showcase, events to talk about self-esteem and a girls empowerment day. While these types of activities aren’t unique to Eastern, asking students to design the programs that will get their peers excited, while helping to make their vision a reality, is less common.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One student, Aniya Young, identified a passion for fashion last year. Monchais helped send her to New York to meet with fashion designers and then supported her as she put on her own fashion show at the high school. Young says she still has the contact information for those designers and that she’s been in touch with one about doing some work over the summer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I feel accomplished and that I’m a mentor to other kids who are above me, and they look to me to see how a real scholar is supposed to be, a real dreamer,” Young said of her time on the Dream Team. While she’s always been a natural leader, she said, in eighth grade she didn’t really enjoy school. Now she’s excited to arrive at Eastern every day because she’s respected and sees the Dream Team as her family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>SUPPORTING TEACHER DREAMS\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThe Future Project has dream directors in several public high schools across the country, including New York, New Haven, Newark, Washington, D.C., Detroit and San Francisco. “The Future Project invests in the most significant way that you can in a school, which is with human capital,” Skerritt said. All of her teachers want to help make their students’ dreams become realities, but they also have to focus on covering their curriculum and inspiring their students academically. Having a devoted staff member in the building every day -- who knows the schedule and personalities but whose job is to focus on engaging students as leaders while helping them reach their goals -- is invaluable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monchais is one of the few dream directors who used to be a classroom teacher. She taught AP Government and African-American History in Miami for eight years. “I was one of those teachers who came early and stayed late every day,” Monchais said. “Even with all the time I put in, there was so much I wanted to do that I just didn’t have the capability to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That perspective has made her a great resource for Eastern’s teachers, many of whom have ideas they’d like to try but no extra bandwidth to get them done. “As a teacher it is awesome when someone else comes in and takes something off your plate,” said Crystal Gordon, who coordinates the evening credit recovery program for students who have fallen behind. “It creates space for you to come and cheer and support the kids.” If Monchais is the Dream Team “Momma,” Gordon calls herself the team’s “Auntie.” Monchais helped Gordon reach her own dream of starting an after-school dance club.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37971\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Tyrea-Covington.png\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-37971\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Tyrea-Covington-640x426.png\" alt=\"Tyrea Covington passes out crowns to seniors on the first day of school. \" width=\"640\" height=\"426\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tyrea Covington passes out crowns to seniors on the first day of school. (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“[Dream Directors] are not just these outside entities working with the students, but rather it’s pervasive throughout the school,” Monchais said. “The hope is that by the time we are done at the end of each year, we have ignited so much passion in teachers and students that there has become a culture of pursuing your passion.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eastern’s music teacher took advantage of Mochais' energy to break away from the rigid curriculum he was asked to teach. He wanted to give students a way to showcase their talents that wasn’t dictated by a test or a rigid format. Monchais helped him and Gordon put on a music and dance show highlighting their students’ talent. Monchais had the time to get approval, coordinate studio space, work on lighting and hold after-school auditions -- all those time-consuming tasks crucial to getting a new program off the ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a time when most adult energy in a school is focused on the academic performance of students, it’s easy to forget about the spirit of the school. Skerritt said it's hard to tie academic gains to the Future Project specifically, although she does think the student-centered approach to events and focus on school culture have helped create a motivating atmosphere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Without that capacity of someone with her energy and connection to this group of students, a lot of the amazing things that happened this past year would not have happened,” Skerritt said. Gordon believes Monchais’ work has helped students mature, become leaders and create a positive school climate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Future Project brings the fact that there’s joy in life to school,” Gordon said. “The kids look forward to coming to school because they know the Dream Team will have something exciting going on.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This year, Monchais is trying to broaden the group of students she works with, reaching out to less engaged students and encouraging current Dream Team members to mentor other students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*The original version of this story erroneously stated that Eastern closed in 2010 and reopened the following year. The school never closed. Seniors graduated in June of 2011 and a new set of 9th graders started the turnaround school that same summer. We regret the error.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37930\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-37930\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1.jpg\" alt=\"Eastern seniors pose out front on the first day of school (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Future-Project1-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eastern seniors Mia Brown and Tonay Denny pose out front on the first day of school. (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Principal Rachel Skerritt was in the middle of one of the busiest parts of the year, planning for students’ return to Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C. this fall. With her hands full juggling agendas, making sure teachers knew where they were supposed to be and coordinating the all-school assembly, she hadn’t had much time to think about how students would feel about returning to school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Voncia Monchais had been mulling over that question all summer, especially since the Class of 2015 will be the first senior class Eastern has graduated since reopening as a turnaround school* with a new principal and staff. Monchais wanted to roll out the red carpet for the senior class and get them excited about their last year. So she did. The first day at Eastern featured a red carpet leading up to the front door, crowns for every senior, a DJ out front and an overall festive atmosphere.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'The Future Project invests in the most significant way that you can in a school, which is with human capital.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“I’ve never seen so many smiles on the first day,” Skerritt said. It’s a good thing, because unexpectedly the mayor, school chancellor and the press all showed up to do \u003ca href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-school-year-starts-with-a-dance-party-at-eastern-senior-high-school/2014/08/25/788559e8-2c71-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">first-day-of-school coverage\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That energy from day one really propelled us through the first couple weeks, which are some of the hardest weeks of a school year,” Skerritt said. Despite shuffling schedules and broken technology, kids remained optimistic about the school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monchais is now bringing that same creative energy to back-to-school night, trying to think of ways to welcome parents into the school and make them feel part of the community. It’s all part of a program called the \u003ca href=\"http://www.thefutureproject.org/what/\" target=\"_blank\">Future Project\u003c/a>, a nonprofit organization that pays Monchais’ salary as the school’s dream director -- her mission is to help students identify their passions and connect them with resources to turn them into realities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After a year at Eastern, Monchais has created a “Dream Team” of students who represent student voices in school activities and plan events to unify the student body. “I knew it would take students who were inspirational, who were role models, who had good standing with teachers, who could talk to people,” Monchais said of the group she selected. Some of the students were recommended by teachers, while others had that rare leadership quality but were disengaged from school. The key thing Monchais was looking for was commitment, so joining the team had to be an opt-in choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There were a lot of conversations about how we can give students more voice in the school,” Monchais said. One of the first things the group did was take over planning the honor roll assemblies. Instead of a stiff reading of the honor roll names each quarter, the events have become entirely student-run and presented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students choose modern music, invite younger inspirational guest speakers and coordinate performances by other students as a way to highlight the talent of the student body. The Dream Team also wanted to make sure passionate Eastern students got recognized who were involved in interesting activities but didn’t meet the academic requirements for honor roll. They started doing a “Rambler callout” during the honor roll assemblies to credit students who excelled in other areas. They also recognized teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the biggest innovations was allowing each honor roll honoree a VIP guest at a special luncheon. Those student guests got to sit in a special cordoned-off area of the assembly hall. After starting this tradition, many more students made the honor roll the following quarter. “You are a celebrity because you did the right thing,” Monchais said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>GROWING LEADERS\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThe Dream Team is passionate about improving the school climate at Eastern. Its members have become leaders of the student body. “The [students] that have been on her specific team have shown incredible growth,” Skerritt said. During the first year of the Future Project, Eastern was trying to incorporate hundreds of new students from a nearby high school that had been closed by the district. Skerritt worried it would be hard to create a cohesive school culture in that environment. Monchais invited some of the new students to be part of the Dream Team. “Everyone knows them, it’s like they’ve always been here,” Skerritt said. “Some of the things that were student-designed projects have become traditions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37935\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/FutureProject5.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-37935\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/FutureProject5-300x369.jpg\" alt=\"Eastern students like Javon Jones-Williams have many more chances to showcase their talents now that the Dream Team is organizing events (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\" width=\"300\" height=\"369\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eastern students, like Javon Jones-Williams, have many more chances to showcase their talents now that the Dream Team is organizing events. (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As a turnaround school, Eastern is in the process of building its identity and the school traditions that will go with it. The Dream Team has helped shape the school’s trajectory. Its members took the lead organizing a Black History performing showcase, events to talk about self-esteem and a girls empowerment day. While these types of activities aren’t unique to Eastern, asking students to design the programs that will get their peers excited, while helping to make their vision a reality, is less common.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One student, Aniya Young, identified a passion for fashion last year. Monchais helped send her to New York to meet with fashion designers and then supported her as she put on her own fashion show at the high school. Young says she still has the contact information for those designers and that she’s been in touch with one about doing some work over the summer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I feel accomplished and that I’m a mentor to other kids who are above me, and they look to me to see how a real scholar is supposed to be, a real dreamer,” Young said of her time on the Dream Team. While she’s always been a natural leader, she said, in eighth grade she didn’t really enjoy school. Now she’s excited to arrive at Eastern every day because she’s respected and sees the Dream Team as her family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>SUPPORTING TEACHER DREAMS\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThe Future Project has dream directors in several public high schools across the country, including New York, New Haven, Newark, Washington, D.C., Detroit and San Francisco. “The Future Project invests in the most significant way that you can in a school, which is with human capital,” Skerritt said. All of her teachers want to help make their students’ dreams become realities, but they also have to focus on covering their curriculum and inspiring their students academically. Having a devoted staff member in the building every day -- who knows the schedule and personalities but whose job is to focus on engaging students as leaders while helping them reach their goals -- is invaluable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monchais is one of the few dream directors who used to be a classroom teacher. She taught AP Government and African-American History in Miami for eight years. “I was one of those teachers who came early and stayed late every day,” Monchais said. “Even with all the time I put in, there was so much I wanted to do that I just didn’t have the capability to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That perspective has made her a great resource for Eastern’s teachers, many of whom have ideas they’d like to try but no extra bandwidth to get them done. “As a teacher it is awesome when someone else comes in and takes something off your plate,” said Crystal Gordon, who coordinates the evening credit recovery program for students who have fallen behind. “It creates space for you to come and cheer and support the kids.” If Monchais is the Dream Team “Momma,” Gordon calls herself the team’s “Auntie.” Monchais helped Gordon reach her own dream of starting an after-school dance club.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37971\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Tyrea-Covington.png\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-37971\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Tyrea-Covington-640x426.png\" alt=\"Tyrea Covington passes out crowns to seniors on the first day of school. \" width=\"640\" height=\"426\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tyrea Covington passes out crowns to seniors on the first day of school. (Courtesy Voncia Monchais)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“[Dream Directors] are not just these outside entities working with the students, but rather it’s pervasive throughout the school,” Monchais said. “The hope is that by the time we are done at the end of each year, we have ignited so much passion in teachers and students that there has become a culture of pursuing your passion.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eastern’s music teacher took advantage of Mochais' energy to break away from the rigid curriculum he was asked to teach. He wanted to give students a way to showcase their talents that wasn’t dictated by a test or a rigid format. Monchais helped him and Gordon put on a music and dance show highlighting their students’ talent. Monchais had the time to get approval, coordinate studio space, work on lighting and hold after-school auditions -- all those time-consuming tasks crucial to getting a new program off the ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a time when most adult energy in a school is focused on the academic performance of students, it’s easy to forget about the spirit of the school. Skerritt said it's hard to tie academic gains to the Future Project specifically, although she does think the student-centered approach to events and focus on school culture have helped create a motivating atmosphere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Without that capacity of someone with her energy and connection to this group of students, a lot of the amazing things that happened this past year would not have happened,” Skerritt said. Gordon believes Monchais’ work has helped students mature, become leaders and create a positive school climate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Future Project brings the fact that there’s joy in life to school,” Gordon said. “The kids look forward to coming to school because they know the Dream Team will have something exciting going on.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This year, Monchais is trying to broaden the group of students she works with, reaching out to less engaged students and encouraging current Dream Team members to mentor other students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*The original version of this story erroneously stated that Eastern closed in 2010 and reopened the following year. The school never closed. Seniors graduated in June of 2011 and a new set of 9th graders started the turnaround school that same summer. We regret the error.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "With the Right Technology, Can Children Teach Themselves?",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37867\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/xprize-big.jpg\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/xprize-big-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"A boy plays with a solar-powered computer tablet on Mount Wenchi, Mirab Shewa Zone of the Oromia Region of Ethiopia. (Courtesy of Tim Freccia/Xprize)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-37867\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A boy plays with a solar-powered computer tablet on Mount Wenchi, Mirab Shewa Zone of the Oromia Region of Ethiopia. (Courtesy of Tim Freccia/Xprize)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">A rural tribe is living peacefully in the Kalahari desert, free of contact with the modern world. One day, a Coke bottle drops from the sky, falling from a passing airplane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The villagers find many uses for this unfamiliar new technology: a fire starter, a musical instrument, a stamp for printing on cloth. But because of its very uniqueness, they start to fight over it, and one of the villagers decides that to preserve harmony, it's best to return this \"gift\" to the gods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Gods Must Be Crazy,\u003c/em> a South African comedy, was a global smash hit in the early 1980s. It's only in the past decade, though, that its plot — or at least, the setup — has been adapted as a playbook for transforming education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The idea: Some previously unknown technology could, all by itself, catalyze a revolution in children's learning, especially in the developing world.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'We don't know if this is going to work, but if it does, it's transformative, and why not try?'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>The latest incarnation of this idea was announced this week. The $15 million \u003ca href=\"http://www.xprize.org/grand-challenges/learning\">Global Learning XPRIZE\u003c/a> is being billed as the largest-ever technology competition in the private sector, to \"revolutionize global education.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>XPRIZE is a nonprofit organization led by tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis. Previous XPRIZE contests produced the world's first private space flight, a new method for \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141481055/revolutionary-oil-skimmer-nets-1-million-x-prize\">cleaning up oil spills in the ocean\u003c/a>, and a \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128652416\">hyperefficient 100- mile-per-gallon car\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winning team of the Global Learning XPRIZE, organizers say, will \"develop a free, open-source and scalable software solution in 18 months that can enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.\" The software, says the challenge's director, Matt Keller, will be designed to be deployed on very low cost Android tablet computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>THE READING PROJECT\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keller explains that the idea emerged from his previous work with the One Laptop Per Child project. Announced in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, One Laptop Per Child has distributed \u003ca href=\"http://one.laptop.org/map\">over 2.4 million\u003c/a> of its specially designed \"XO\" laptops and tablets around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the majority of these have gone to school systems, Negroponte and Keller ran a side experiment called \u003ca href=\"http://blog.laptop.org/tag/reading-project/\">The Reading Project\u003c/a>, where solar-powered computers with literacy apps were distributed directly to children in remote areas of Ethiopia. The children were given no instruction in how to use them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The initial experimental sites chosen were villages with no schools, no libraries, no printed material, even without road signs. \"We tested the supposition that kids could teach each other how to read,\" Keller says. \"The theory was, if you had the right kind of application and design for self-learning, you could conceivably see a breakthrough.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"fbFTVuOpGhhpXENuINp2UfsA0v6KhZ1X\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, has been researching the outcomes of the project, now called the \u003ca href=\"globallit.org\">Global Literacy Project\u003c/a>, with sites in Uganda and the rural American South. She says that while the children haven't learned to read, they have learned the English alphabet from the tablets alone. \"Our data serves as a kind of germinating first round of evidence that this approach can really help many children,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Global Learning XPRIZE grows from this seed. According to the press release for the XPRIZE, it aims to prove \"that through technology a child can learn \u003cem>autonomously.\u003c/em>\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keller says this is important because an estimated 250 million children around the world lack basic literacy, and 58 million are not in school. Schools are overcrowded and teachers are undertrained.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I did a lot of work in Afghanistan,\" he says. \"Teachers there are often just one grade more educated than the kids, and sometimes they're not literate at all.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But why not just spend the money to train teachers or build schools?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Even just to get the kids that are out of school into school, you need to train 3 million more teachers and build 1.1 million more schools, which is going to take a really long time,\" Keller says. \"You can say you're looking at a model that has arguably failed many, many, many kids. We're not in the business of looking back.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says the time is ripe to gamble on new approaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>NO GIRLS ALLOWED\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Payal Arora is not so sure. A media and communication professor at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication in the Netherlands, she has studied a similar attempt at technologically driven self-learning, the Hole in the Wall project in India.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Started by Sugata Mitra, \u003ca href=\"http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/\">Hole in the Wall \u003c/a>simply places computers with an Internet connection in locations where they will be accessible by children. Mitra's concept of \"minimally invasive education\" won the 2013 TED Prize, given to a \"visionary leader\" with a \"high-impact wish for the world.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Findings.html\">positive research\u003c/a> on Hole in the Wall comes from Mitra himself and his collaborators. There are reports of children acquiring basic computer literacy and researching topics like genetics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arora visited \u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01078.x/abstract\">a few such sites\u003c/a> in the Himalayas and found very different results. \"The two most popular things are porn and video games,\" she says. \"The boys download them and take over. It becomes a male domain, and daughters don't want to go there.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mitra has \u003ca href=\"http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/sugata-mitra-slum-chic-7-reasons-for.html\">responded publicly\u003c/a> to Arora's claims, calling them \"armchair debate.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arora says the Global X Prize, like Hole in the Wall and One Laptop Per Child, represent not an evidence-based approach but an ideology: the belief that \"Human resources are so deeply flawed that investments in technological resources will be much more effective.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in reality, she argues, \"learning is never 100 percent self-directed. Of course we want children to be agents of their own learning, but no one in their right mind would say let's get rid of human input, from parents, schools, or communities.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arora says that before we continue to sway resources toward a quick technological fix, she'd like to see \"substantive evidence that self-directed learning autonomous from human mediators can be a stand-alone tool.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keller says his prize, if it works as designed, will generate exactly that evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike previous XPRIZE challenges, the final phase will be a controlled trial. Applications developed by the five finalist teams will be distributed to a few thousand children in West Africa, and the program deemed most effective at raising the kids' basic literacy and math scores from a baseline will be called the winner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We don't know if this is going to work,\" he says. \"But if it does, it's transformative, and why not try?\" \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+%2415+Million+Space+Race+For+Education&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37867\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/xprize-big.jpg\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/xprize-big-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"A boy plays with a solar-powered computer tablet on Mount Wenchi, Mirab Shewa Zone of the Oromia Region of Ethiopia. (Courtesy of Tim Freccia/Xprize)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-37867\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A boy plays with a solar-powered computer tablet on Mount Wenchi, Mirab Shewa Zone of the Oromia Region of Ethiopia. (Courtesy of Tim Freccia/Xprize)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">A rural tribe is living peacefully in the Kalahari desert, free of contact with the modern world. One day, a Coke bottle drops from the sky, falling from a passing airplane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The villagers find many uses for this unfamiliar new technology: a fire starter, a musical instrument, a stamp for printing on cloth. But because of its very uniqueness, they start to fight over it, and one of the villagers decides that to preserve harmony, it's best to return this \"gift\" to the gods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Gods Must Be Crazy,\u003c/em> a South African comedy, was a global smash hit in the early 1980s. It's only in the past decade, though, that its plot — or at least, the setup — has been adapted as a playbook for transforming education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The idea: Some previously unknown technology could, all by itself, catalyze a revolution in children's learning, especially in the developing world.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'We don't know if this is going to work, but if it does, it's transformative, and why not try?'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>The latest incarnation of this idea was announced this week. The $15 million \u003ca href=\"http://www.xprize.org/grand-challenges/learning\">Global Learning XPRIZE\u003c/a> is being billed as the largest-ever technology competition in the private sector, to \"revolutionize global education.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>XPRIZE is a nonprofit organization led by tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis. Previous XPRIZE contests produced the world's first private space flight, a new method for \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141481055/revolutionary-oil-skimmer-nets-1-million-x-prize\">cleaning up oil spills in the ocean\u003c/a>, and a \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128652416\">hyperefficient 100- mile-per-gallon car\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winning team of the Global Learning XPRIZE, organizers say, will \"develop a free, open-source and scalable software solution in 18 months that can enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.\" The software, says the challenge's director, Matt Keller, will be designed to be deployed on very low cost Android tablet computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>THE READING PROJECT\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keller explains that the idea emerged from his previous work with the One Laptop Per Child project. Announced in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, One Laptop Per Child has distributed \u003ca href=\"http://one.laptop.org/map\">over 2.4 million\u003c/a> of its specially designed \"XO\" laptops and tablets around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the majority of these have gone to school systems, Negroponte and Keller ran a side experiment called \u003ca href=\"http://blog.laptop.org/tag/reading-project/\">The Reading Project\u003c/a>, where solar-powered computers with literacy apps were distributed directly to children in remote areas of Ethiopia. The children were given no instruction in how to use them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The initial experimental sites chosen were villages with no schools, no libraries, no printed material, even without road signs. \"We tested the supposition that kids could teach each other how to read,\" Keller says. \"The theory was, if you had the right kind of application and design for self-learning, you could conceivably see a breakthrough.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, has been researching the outcomes of the project, now called the \u003ca href=\"globallit.org\">Global Literacy Project\u003c/a>, with sites in Uganda and the rural American South. She says that while the children haven't learned to read, they have learned the English alphabet from the tablets alone. \"Our data serves as a kind of germinating first round of evidence that this approach can really help many children,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Global Learning XPRIZE grows from this seed. According to the press release for the XPRIZE, it aims to prove \"that through technology a child can learn \u003cem>autonomously.\u003c/em>\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keller says this is important because an estimated 250 million children around the world lack basic literacy, and 58 million are not in school. Schools are overcrowded and teachers are undertrained.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I did a lot of work in Afghanistan,\" he says. \"Teachers there are often just one grade more educated than the kids, and sometimes they're not literate at all.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But why not just spend the money to train teachers or build schools?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Even just to get the kids that are out of school into school, you need to train 3 million more teachers and build 1.1 million more schools, which is going to take a really long time,\" Keller says. \"You can say you're looking at a model that has arguably failed many, many, many kids. We're not in the business of looking back.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says the time is ripe to gamble on new approaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>NO GIRLS ALLOWED\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Payal Arora is not so sure. A media and communication professor at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication in the Netherlands, she has studied a similar attempt at technologically driven self-learning, the Hole in the Wall project in India.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Started by Sugata Mitra, \u003ca href=\"http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/\">Hole in the Wall \u003c/a>simply places computers with an Internet connection in locations where they will be accessible by children. Mitra's concept of \"minimally invasive education\" won the 2013 TED Prize, given to a \"visionary leader\" with a \"high-impact wish for the world.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Findings.html\">positive research\u003c/a> on Hole in the Wall comes from Mitra himself and his collaborators. There are reports of children acquiring basic computer literacy and researching topics like genetics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arora visited \u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01078.x/abstract\">a few such sites\u003c/a> in the Himalayas and found very different results. \"The two most popular things are porn and video games,\" she says. \"The boys download them and take over. It becomes a male domain, and daughters don't want to go there.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mitra has \u003ca href=\"http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/sugata-mitra-slum-chic-7-reasons-for.html\">responded publicly\u003c/a> to Arora's claims, calling them \"armchair debate.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arora says the Global X Prize, like Hole in the Wall and One Laptop Per Child, represent not an evidence-based approach but an ideology: the belief that \"Human resources are so deeply flawed that investments in technological resources will be much more effective.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in reality, she argues, \"learning is never 100 percent self-directed. Of course we want children to be agents of their own learning, but no one in their right mind would say let's get rid of human input, from parents, schools, or communities.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arora says that before we continue to sway resources toward a quick technological fix, she'd like to see \"substantive evidence that self-directed learning autonomous from human mediators can be a stand-alone tool.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keller says his prize, if it works as designed, will generate exactly that evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike previous XPRIZE challenges, the final phase will be a controlled trial. Applications developed by the five finalist teams will be distributed to a few thousand children in West Africa, and the program deemed most effective at raising the kids' basic literacy and math scores from a baseline will be called the winner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We don't know if this is going to work,\" he says. \"But if it does, it's transformative, and why not try?\" \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+%2415+Million+Space+Race+For+Education&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_39724\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/moyix/106883993/in/photolist-arNTt-arNTR-2j18Yv-2j18we-2j5xcQ-2j18Pn-2j5wPE-2j18AF-5GXx5K-8SyPTT-6qUmnV-5H9nD1-5H54yc-5H9nXs-6qRRFB-4QR1Sn-6qXfkh-8mEkfw-8mEjA9-8mBdsa-8mEjVf-8mBd5n-6qXe7d-6qXcmh-6qSZ96-6qVENW-4QVe1Y-6qVHLW-6qRyWK-6qVFYw-6qVCfh-6qVAiU-8SyPBX-6qVQuE-6qRxaP-6qVSVu-6qW1to-6qRFDg-6qVY5o-6qRHZp-6qW5kE-6qRSUz-6qRKfc-6qRD1T-6qVMpy-6qRPaa-6qVWNd-6qRVjx-6qRrAH-6qRAbK\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/WesleyanUniv-640x455.jpg\" alt=\"Wesleyan University (Brendan Dolan-Gavitt/Flickr)\" width=\"640\" height=\"455\" class=\"size-large wp-image-39724\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wesleyan University (Brendan Dolan-Gavitt/Flickr)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Parents have worried about their kids getting stereotypically \"useless\" degrees like philosophy and English for a long time. But as the job market gets more competitive and the price of college skyrockets, the argument for a practical degree like computer science or engineering is even more persuasive to both students and parents. The national preoccupation with specialization has liberal arts colleges defending the value of a well-rounded degree.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The problem is we have this polarized discourse around education, where people think that somehow a utilitarian, marketplace-oriented education has to take place at the expense of a broad and contextual one,\" said \u003ca href=\"http://www.wesleyan.edu/president/biography/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Roth\u003c/a>, president of Wesleyan University, on \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201406111000\" target=\"_blank\">KQED's \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> program\u003c/a>. \"I think that's a big mistake.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'The economic challenges are not going to be met by becoming more and more narrow. They're going to be met by becoming more and more innovative.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Roth argues that a pragmatic liberal arts education gives students the tools to critically investigate all life's challenges, no matter what field of work they pursue. \"Liberal education is really about learning how to learn,\" Roth said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He doesn't argue against the value of teaching students skills like programming, but he wants college graduates to be able to place that knowledge within a broader framework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Teach [those skills] in such a way so that as citizens, and as thinkers, we can understand them in their social and political context,\" Roth said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The debate about whether education should be utilitarian and accessible to all has been part of the national conversation since the early days of the country. \u003ca href=\"http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/92uva/92facts1.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Thomas Jefferson argued\u003c/a> that members of the underclass, who seemed the least likely to succeed in university, should be given the opportunity to raise themselves up through education. \"Because otherwise wealthy people will protect their wealth and make it harder and harder for anyone else to enter the higher echelons of any society,\" Roth said, summarizing Jefferson's argument.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/etc/road.html\" target=\"_blank\">similar debate\u003c/a> between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois occurred following the Civil War, when both men sought the best path to improve the economic and social positions of newly freed African-Americans who had lived much of their lives in slavery. Washington favored training people in practical trades, while Du Bois insisted African-Americans deserved the kind of liberal arts education white academics received.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"zsQ82d9sWk7tw6FByNHRJQ3LCpmPngXi\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"What Du Bois argued is that we need to have practical skills, but we don't need to track people into professions or activities that limit their horizons in advance of seeing what they can do and what they can learn,\" Roth said. He worries that the current national preoccupation with gaining specific skills will limit students before they have time to explore the many possibilities for their lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I do think it's our responsibility as leaders of liberal arts institutions and colleges to make sure our students are equipped to compete in the marketplace when they leave our campuses,\" Roth said. \"But you don't want to prepare for the worst job you'll ever have.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He thinks college should prepare students for their first job -- likely their worst job -- but also ready them for a lifetime of meaningful work that contributes to making the world a better place. Emphasizing an education that provides a basis for critical thinking and analysis throughout life makes learning a specific programming language, which will likely become outmoded in a few years, seem less valuable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth is well aware that his altruistic view of a college education, which helps form an engaged and active citizenry, is being undermined by the intolerable amount of debt many graduates from elite institutions like Wesleyan now face. Recognizing that fact, some small liberal arts colleges are working to reform their financial aid packages to prevent students from taking on that kind of debt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth agrees that students need to be pragmatic about their education and look ahead to their future while in school, but he's passionate about the fact that a liberal arts education can provide students both applicable skills and the tools to interpret and impact the world around them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's very important to recognize these economic challenges,\" Roth said. \"But the economic challenges are not going to be met by becoming more and more narrow. They're going to be met by becoming more and more innovative.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wesleyan is experimenting with interdisciplinary learning as one way to equip its students with real-world skills. The College of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan requires students to get dual degrees in relevant subject areas, including the sciences and arts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"These environmental issues, issue of global climate change, are not going to be confined to any specific discipline,\" Roth said. \"We need the cooperation of people who are engaged in inquiry. We have to give our students the ability to move among these disciplines, to translate from one form of knowledge to another.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without the experience of a liberal arts education, where students are asked to make connections between classes and content areas, Roth worries universities aren't preparing students to face the complex challenges that face them.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_39724\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/moyix/106883993/in/photolist-arNTt-arNTR-2j18Yv-2j18we-2j5xcQ-2j18Pn-2j5wPE-2j18AF-5GXx5K-8SyPTT-6qUmnV-5H9nD1-5H54yc-5H9nXs-6qRRFB-4QR1Sn-6qXfkh-8mEkfw-8mEjA9-8mBdsa-8mEjVf-8mBd5n-6qXe7d-6qXcmh-6qSZ96-6qVENW-4QVe1Y-6qVHLW-6qRyWK-6qVFYw-6qVCfh-6qVAiU-8SyPBX-6qVQuE-6qRxaP-6qVSVu-6qW1to-6qRFDg-6qVY5o-6qRHZp-6qW5kE-6qRSUz-6qRKfc-6qRD1T-6qVMpy-6qRPaa-6qVWNd-6qRVjx-6qRrAH-6qRAbK\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/WesleyanUniv-640x455.jpg\" alt=\"Wesleyan University (Brendan Dolan-Gavitt/Flickr)\" width=\"640\" height=\"455\" class=\"size-large wp-image-39724\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wesleyan University (Brendan Dolan-Gavitt/Flickr)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Parents have worried about their kids getting stereotypically \"useless\" degrees like philosophy and English for a long time. But as the job market gets more competitive and the price of college skyrockets, the argument for a practical degree like computer science or engineering is even more persuasive to both students and parents. The national preoccupation with specialization has liberal arts colleges defending the value of a well-rounded degree.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The problem is we have this polarized discourse around education, where people think that somehow a utilitarian, marketplace-oriented education has to take place at the expense of a broad and contextual one,\" said \u003ca href=\"http://www.wesleyan.edu/president/biography/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Roth\u003c/a>, president of Wesleyan University, on \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201406111000\" target=\"_blank\">KQED's \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> program\u003c/a>. \"I think that's a big mistake.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'The economic challenges are not going to be met by becoming more and more narrow. They're going to be met by becoming more and more innovative.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Roth argues that a pragmatic liberal arts education gives students the tools to critically investigate all life's challenges, no matter what field of work they pursue. \"Liberal education is really about learning how to learn,\" Roth said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He doesn't argue against the value of teaching students skills like programming, but he wants college graduates to be able to place that knowledge within a broader framework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Teach [those skills] in such a way so that as citizens, and as thinkers, we can understand them in their social and political context,\" Roth said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The debate about whether education should be utilitarian and accessible to all has been part of the national conversation since the early days of the country. \u003ca href=\"http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/92uva/92facts1.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Thomas Jefferson argued\u003c/a> that members of the underclass, who seemed the least likely to succeed in university, should be given the opportunity to raise themselves up through education. \"Because otherwise wealthy people will protect their wealth and make it harder and harder for anyone else to enter the higher echelons of any society,\" Roth said, summarizing Jefferson's argument.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/etc/road.html\" target=\"_blank\">similar debate\u003c/a> between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois occurred following the Civil War, when both men sought the best path to improve the economic and social positions of newly freed African-Americans who had lived much of their lives in slavery. Washington favored training people in practical trades, while Du Bois insisted African-Americans deserved the kind of liberal arts education white academics received.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"What Du Bois argued is that we need to have practical skills, but we don't need to track people into professions or activities that limit their horizons in advance of seeing what they can do and what they can learn,\" Roth said. He worries that the current national preoccupation with gaining specific skills will limit students before they have time to explore the many possibilities for their lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I do think it's our responsibility as leaders of liberal arts institutions and colleges to make sure our students are equipped to compete in the marketplace when they leave our campuses,\" Roth said. \"But you don't want to prepare for the worst job you'll ever have.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He thinks college should prepare students for their first job -- likely their worst job -- but also ready them for a lifetime of meaningful work that contributes to making the world a better place. Emphasizing an education that provides a basis for critical thinking and analysis throughout life makes learning a specific programming language, which will likely become outmoded in a few years, seem less valuable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth is well aware that his altruistic view of a college education, which helps form an engaged and active citizenry, is being undermined by the intolerable amount of debt many graduates from elite institutions like Wesleyan now face. Recognizing that fact, some small liberal arts colleges are working to reform their financial aid packages to prevent students from taking on that kind of debt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth agrees that students need to be pragmatic about their education and look ahead to their future while in school, but he's passionate about the fact that a liberal arts education can provide students both applicable skills and the tools to interpret and impact the world around them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's very important to recognize these economic challenges,\" Roth said. \"But the economic challenges are not going to be met by becoming more and more narrow. They're going to be met by becoming more and more innovative.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wesleyan is experimenting with interdisciplinary learning as one way to equip its students with real-world skills. The College of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan requires students to get dual degrees in relevant subject areas, including the sciences and arts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"These environmental issues, issue of global climate change, are not going to be confined to any specific discipline,\" Roth said. \"We need the cooperation of people who are engaged in inquiry. We have to give our students the ability to move among these disciplines, to translate from one form of knowledge to another.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without the experience of a liberal arts education, where students are asked to make connections between classes and content areas, Roth worries universities aren't preparing students to face the complex challenges that face them.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37808\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/parent-teacher-conference.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-37808\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/parent-teacher-conference-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"LA Johnson/NPR\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">LA Johnson/NPR\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>By Elissa Nadworny\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">So you finally get the chance to meet one on one with your child's teacher — now what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like a good Boy Scout, be prepared: Educators agree that doing your homework before a parent-teacher conference can make a big difference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Harvard Family Research Project's \u003ca href=\"http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/Parent-Teacher-ConferenceTipSheet-100610.pdf\">Tip Sheet for Parents\u003c/a> suggests reviewing your child's work, grades and past teacher feedback. Ask your child about his experience at school and make a list of questions ahead of time to ask during the conference. \u003ca href=\"https://www.care.com/a/20-questions-to-ask-during-a-parent-teacher-conference-1309201640\">Care.com\u003c/a> — a website that matches up parents and child caregivers — created a list of questions to print out and take with you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A good parent-teacher conference, experts say, should cover three major topics: the child, the classroom and the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Child\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most experts suggest telling the teacher about your child: Describe what they're like at home, what interests and excites them, and explain any issues at home that may be affecting your child at school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Often times we don't have any understanding of what happens when a child leaves school,\" says Amanda Wirene, a reading specialist at the Montessori School of Englewood in Chicago. \"Often parents are our only way to know what's going on at home.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Be thorough, but do be aware of the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"You always get that one parent who wants to stay forever and tells you in great detail all about their child,\" says Colleen Holmes, assistant principal at Lincoln Elementary School in Erie, Pa. Share information, she says, and if you need to talk more, schedule another time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Classroom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ask about what's happening in the classroom — both academically and socially.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Parents have more access to student information than ever before,\" says Scot Graden, superintendent of Saline Area Schools in Saline, Mich. \"Chances are, anything that's going to come up at parent-teacher conferences, the student will already know about it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By talking to your child in advance, you can ask more specific questions about grades or behaviors, says Graden.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Don't be afraid to ask the teacher to clarify what assessment or grades actually mean.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Teachers can sometimes use educational jargon that may seem alien to you,\" Karen Mira writes in \u003ca href=\"http://sg.theasianparent.com/10-things-parents-shouldnt-do-during-parent-teacher-conferences/3/\">The Asian Parent\u003c/a>, a parenting magazine in Singapore. \"Don't be shy to ask your child's teacher to explain what a certain educational word means.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If teachers bring up areas for improvement, don't get defensive, says Holmes, the elementary school assistant principal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And don't let the meetings be a dumping ground for pent-up concerns or frustrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We don't want parents to load up on things they've wanted to discuss and are looking to have a sort of 'gotcha' moment,\" says Graden.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same holds true for teachers: Lindsay Rollin, a second-grade teacher at Teachers College Community School in New York, says conferences should never be the first time parents are hearing about problems their child is having.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I am not dropping bombs on anybody,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the meeting is over, you should be sure you're clear on the teacher's expectations for your child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's important for everyone to understand what the goal is at the end of the year,\" says Graden, the school superintendent. \"That way you all have a stake in that success.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Future\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spin the conversation forward and ask what you can do to help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parent-teacher conferences are no longer a once-a-year check-in; they can provide useful insight for immediate and clear next steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Conferences are now a progress report timed so parents can actually do something about what they learn from teachers,\" says Heather Bastow Weiss, founder and director of the Harvard Family Research Project.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To get the most out of the conversation, she says, both the teacher and the parent should know what comes next. Brainstorm with the teacher to come up with ways to solve challenges your child faces. Ask for concrete examples of things you can do at home to help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Go in looking for an opportunity to get involved with supporting your child,\" advises Holmes, who taught for 16 years before becoming an administrator. Parents should leave knowing the resources that are available to them, says Holmes, such as teacher or school websites and assignment calendars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ask if the teachers can recommend resources outside of school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There are many out-of-school programs that can help kids improve their success in school,\" says Weiss. \"The nonschool learning experience should be part of the conversation at conferences.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Concrete next steps are essential, says Graden. If parents feel as though they didn't get answers to all of their questions, he recommends trying to connect with the teacher again within a week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We want both the teacher and the parent to have a positive experience,\" he says. \"When parents and teachers work together, the results are always better.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Copyright 2014 NPR\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37808\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/parent-teacher-conference.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-37808\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/parent-teacher-conference-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"LA Johnson/NPR\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">LA Johnson/NPR\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>By Elissa Nadworny\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">So you finally get the chance to meet one on one with your child's teacher — now what?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like a good Boy Scout, be prepared: Educators agree that doing your homework before a parent-teacher conference can make a big difference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Harvard Family Research Project's \u003ca href=\"http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/Parent-Teacher-ConferenceTipSheet-100610.pdf\">Tip Sheet for Parents\u003c/a> suggests reviewing your child's work, grades and past teacher feedback. Ask your child about his experience at school and make a list of questions ahead of time to ask during the conference. \u003ca href=\"https://www.care.com/a/20-questions-to-ask-during-a-parent-teacher-conference-1309201640\">Care.com\u003c/a> — a website that matches up parents and child caregivers — created a list of questions to print out and take with you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A good parent-teacher conference, experts say, should cover three major topics: the child, the classroom and the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Child\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most experts suggest telling the teacher about your child: Describe what they're like at home, what interests and excites them, and explain any issues at home that may be affecting your child at school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Often times we don't have any understanding of what happens when a child leaves school,\" says Amanda Wirene, a reading specialist at the Montessori School of Englewood in Chicago. \"Often parents are our only way to know what's going on at home.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Be thorough, but do be aware of the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"You always get that one parent who wants to stay forever and tells you in great detail all about their child,\" says Colleen Holmes, assistant principal at Lincoln Elementary School in Erie, Pa. Share information, she says, and if you need to talk more, schedule another time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Classroom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ask about what's happening in the classroom — both academically and socially.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Parents have more access to student information than ever before,\" says Scot Graden, superintendent of Saline Area Schools in Saline, Mich. \"Chances are, anything that's going to come up at parent-teacher conferences, the student will already know about it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By talking to your child in advance, you can ask more specific questions about grades or behaviors, says Graden.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Don't be afraid to ask the teacher to clarify what assessment or grades actually mean.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Teachers can sometimes use educational jargon that may seem alien to you,\" Karen Mira writes in \u003ca href=\"http://sg.theasianparent.com/10-things-parents-shouldnt-do-during-parent-teacher-conferences/3/\">The Asian Parent\u003c/a>, a parenting magazine in Singapore. \"Don't be shy to ask your child's teacher to explain what a certain educational word means.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If teachers bring up areas for improvement, don't get defensive, says Holmes, the elementary school assistant principal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And don't let the meetings be a dumping ground for pent-up concerns or frustrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We don't want parents to load up on things they've wanted to discuss and are looking to have a sort of 'gotcha' moment,\" says Graden.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same holds true for teachers: Lindsay Rollin, a second-grade teacher at Teachers College Community School in New York, says conferences should never be the first time parents are hearing about problems their child is having.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I am not dropping bombs on anybody,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the meeting is over, you should be sure you're clear on the teacher's expectations for your child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's important for everyone to understand what the goal is at the end of the year,\" says Graden, the school superintendent. \"That way you all have a stake in that success.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Future\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spin the conversation forward and ask what you can do to help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parent-teacher conferences are no longer a once-a-year check-in; they can provide useful insight for immediate and clear next steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Conferences are now a progress report timed so parents can actually do something about what they learn from teachers,\" says Heather Bastow Weiss, founder and director of the Harvard Family Research Project.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To get the most out of the conversation, she says, both the teacher and the parent should know what comes next. Brainstorm with the teacher to come up with ways to solve challenges your child faces. Ask for concrete examples of things you can do at home to help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Go in looking for an opportunity to get involved with supporting your child,\" advises Holmes, who taught for 16 years before becoming an administrator. Parents should leave knowing the resources that are available to them, says Holmes, such as teacher or school websites and assignment calendars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ask if the teachers can recommend resources outside of school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There are many out-of-school programs that can help kids improve their success in school,\" says Weiss. \"The nonschool learning experience should be part of the conversation at conferences.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Concrete next steps are essential, says Graden. If parents feel as though they didn't get answers to all of their questions, he recommends trying to connect with the teacher again within a week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We want both the teacher and the parent to have a positive experience,\" he says. \"When parents and teachers work together, the results are always better.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Copyright 2014 NPR\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Measuring Students' Self-Control: A 'Marshmallow Test' for the Digital Age",
"title": "Measuring Students' Self-Control: A 'Marshmallow Test' for the Digital Age",
"headTitle": "MindShift | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37747\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-37747\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/googly-marshmallow.jpg\" alt=\"Credit: Dana Nelson\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/googly-marshmallow.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/googly-marshmallow-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/googly-marshmallow-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Credit: Dana Nelson\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The \"marshmallow test\" invented by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel and colleagues in the 1960s is \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/magazine/we-didnt-eat-the-marshmallow-the-marshmallow-ate-us.html\">famously known\u003c/a> as a measure of willpower. The experiment gave preschoolers the option of either eating one mini-marshmallow right away or waiting 15 minutes to get two mini-marshmallows. \u003ca href=\"http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/2/252.full\">Decades later\u003c/a>, those who were better at delaying gratification, and resisted immediately snarfing the treat, ended up with stronger SAT scores, higher educational achievement and greater self-esteem and capacity to cope with stress in adulthood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now other psychology researchers have come up with a test that challenges the willpower of schoolkids to resist the brain-candy of today’s \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/12/age-of-distraction-why-its-crucial-for-students-to-learn-to-focus/\">digital distractions\u003c/a> -- the YouTube videos, Instagram and mobile gaming apps like Angry Birds. Some people are calling it a \"digital marshmallow test,\" although it's tailored for an educational context and doesn't involve any sweets or near-term rewards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Officially known as the \"academic diligence task,\" the new computer-based test offers students a choice between doing math or watching videos or playing a video game. The test was created by postdoctoral research fellow Brian Galla and associate psychology professor Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, with Sidney D’Mello of the University of Notre Dame, as a better (and free) research tool for measuring self-control. The researchers hope this new tool will advance their studies of ways to improve academic perseverance in students.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\"Some students would turn it into a game for themselves.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X14000502\">A report\u003c/a> recently published online by the team documents the test's reliability and validity and shows that performance on the task predicts academic achievement -- including whether high school seniors graduate on time and enroll in college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's a really creative and interesting approach to measuring an aspect of self-control,\" said Smith College psychologist Philip Peake, who has worked with Mischel on the longitudinal follow-up of participants in the Stanford \"delay of gratification\" studies. The new diligence task is quite different from the marshmallow experiment, so they can't be equated, he said, but both are research tools that can contribute to our understanding of the processes that underlie self-control. And both have the advantage of measuring how people actually behave, not just what they say or think they do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's not just people filling out a questionnaire that says, 'Oh, I tend to persist in things' or 'I work hard at things,' \" Peake said. It's assessing real behavior. \"And you can see that that behavior has some consequential relations to real-life outcomes.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Studying Self-Control in the Face of Digital Distractions\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recent work by the Penn and Notre Dame psychologists is part of their ongoing national study of the role that non-cognitive factors such as \"grit\" and self-control play in students' persistence in school. That endeavor, which is funded by the Gates Foundation, is following about 1,800 high school seniors over six years to track who enrolls in and finishes college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Duckworth is known for \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/10/how-important-is-grit-in-student-achievement/\">her work on grit\u003c/a>, which she defines as a tendency to pursue long-term challenging goals with passion and perseverance. Self-control or \"self-regulation,\" on the other hand, is more about the short-term exercising of self-discipline in the face of momentary diversions, an ability that also feeds into perseverance. The research team needed a standardized way to assess self-control, but most of the existing measurement tools were self-report questionnaires, which can give biased results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"Mo3P7onQPy6KNMOC9QoKybmiR1UrdWKB\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So they devised a task that uses behavioral responses to measure academic diligence, which they define as \"working assiduously on academic tasks which are beneficial in the long run but tedious in the moment, especially in comparison to more enjoyable, less effortful diversions.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rationale behind the test is that with many subject areas or skills, such as mathematics, the basic process of building fluency and mastery involves a lot of practice. It requires \"hard work that is perceived as tedious, even though people know it's immensely important,\" D’Mello said. \"But that's just the reality.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With math, for instance, that means \"studying your multiplication tables, solving equations, again and again and again,\" which is essential for building more complex numerical knowledge. However, \"in the digital age, it's so hard to focus,\" D'Mello said. In psychology-speak, students are faced with having to \"regulate\" their emotions and impulses to overcome boredom and concentrate on homework instead of something more fun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To measure this skill in a scenario simulating real life, D'Mello, who is an assistant professor of computer science and psychology, designed the diligence task with a split computer-screen interface (click here for \u003ca href=\"http://174.129.19.201/~sdmello/DiligenceTaskDemo/DiligenceTaskDemo.html\">a demo\u003c/a>). On the left side, students can choose to do a series of boring skill-building math problems -- simple, single-digit subtraction. On the right side, they can play Tetris or watch short, entertaining YouTube video clips of movie trailers or sports highlights. The test is delivered online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Road-Testing the Test\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Galla, Duckworth and their colleagues took the diligence task into two large, ethnically diverse public high schools in Philadelphia, where they enlisted 921 seniors in early 2013. The students were instructed to answer as many math problems as they wanted, as fast as they could, in five consecutive four-minute sessions. They could take a break at any time to watch videos or play the game. The instructions informed them that practicing basic math skills could improve their problem-solving abilities for the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In total, the teens spent about half the time on math skill-building, answering an average of 244 problems, D'Mello said. Overall performance on the task consistently correlated with individual differences in conscientiousness, self-control and grit (which were also assessed in the students through questionnaires), just as the psychologists had theorized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kids who solved more math problems tended to have higher senior-year GPAs, better scores on standardized math and reading tests, and were more likely to graduate on time; they were also more likely to be enrolled in college at the end of the following fall semester, almost a year later. About 98 percent of the pupils who spent more than 17 minutes doing the math problems successfully graduated, compared with 95 percent of students who spent four minutes or less on math. While that's a small difference, it was interesting to see it even after the researchers adjusted for other factors, including intelligence, gender, ethnicity, interest in math and whether the kids were in the free lunch program, Galla said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37741\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/the-test.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-37741\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/the-test-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"Demo of the "academic diligence task" created by Sidney D'Mello.\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demo of the \"academic diligence task\" created by Sidney D'Mello.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The diligence test \"was able to pick up a signal in college enrollment, and this was above and beyond things like cognitive ability, socioeconomic status -- things that we know tend to correlate with or predict later college success,\" he said. So it isn't just IQ or braininess that matters for academic achievement, but self-control as well. Yet, unlike IQ, the researchers believe self-control in schoolwork is a skill that can be taught and developed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The correlation between performance on the diligence task and academic achievement is modest, but it is significant and important, commented Peake of Smith College. Whether the task predicts long-term consequences, and whether those are limited just to academics or apply more broadly to other aspects of self-control, are interesting questions to further explore, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Staying on Task\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The results held some surprises. \"I was really shocked that some people actually stayed entirely on the math problems the whole time,\" D'Mello said. \"It's a really difficult task. I can't do it myself, frankly.\" One super-diligent student did 966 math problems; a few kids did none at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The teens used a range of tactics to resist the distractions. \"Some students would turn it into a game for themselves,\" Galla said. “So they want to just see how many problems that they can solve in the four-minute task blocks.\" Others did math until they needed a break, then switched to the fun stuff, which is \"very healthy behavior,\" D'Mello said. \"We all know there's advantages to taking a break. ... It's just that if you do that too much, then you get into trouble.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research team will track the students through the six-year national college persistence study, and is updating their diligence task to include verbal and spatial reasoning problems. \"The hope is that by giving a good measure, you could really inspire a lot of science,\" said D'Mello. At this point, the researchers say they don't envision the test as something teachers would routinely use to assess students in the classroom; it isn't designed or validated for that purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Different Takes on Willpower and Grit\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not everyone believes the growing focus on individual students' responsibility to demonstrate self-control or grit is the best way to support academic achievement. Some progressive education experts worry low-income or minority kids who are struggling in school might be blamed for lacking grit as the primary reason for underperformance. Those critics point out that in many schools, poverty and an inequitable lack of resources are much bigger roadblocks to teaching and learning that need to be addressed.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\"It sort of plays into the mythology of the American dream. It sounds good, but it may be more relevant to some folks than to others.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>This viewpoint identifies an economic, social and racial overtone to the notion that if students \"would just put their nose to the grindstone harder and work harder, and be more diligent and more resilient, that they will do better,\" said Grant Lichtman, education consultant and author of \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.grantlichtman.com/edjourney-a-roadmap-to-the-future-of-education/\">#EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, who moderated an \u003ca href=\"http://learningpond.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/does-grit-need-deeper-discussion/\">impromptu heated discussion\u003c/a> on this issue on his blog. \"It sort of plays into the mythology of the American dream. It sounds good, but it may be more relevant to some folks than to others,\" Lichtman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It's absolutely necessary to structurally address the income inequalities in society, said psychologist David Yeager of the University of Texas in Austin. \"Increasing diligence is no replacement for that.\" But he believes cultivating skills like diligence and grit in students can still be valuable. Yeager points to high-performing urban charter high schools in the poorest areas that boosted their graduation and college enrollment rates with substantial financial investment, yet still find that 60 to 70 percent of their graduates drop out of college. At several such schools where Yeager worked with Duckworth in studying low-income students in their senior year, kids’ performance on the academic diligence task predicted their likelihood of dropping out of college a year later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Diligence still matters when [students] make transitions to the next setting,\" Yeager said. And the unfortunate and unfair reality is that it matters more for pupils who are disadvantaged than for those with ample resources, he added. When rich students fail at self-control and make poor choices, they can fall back on family support or finances to keep them pushing through school. In contrast, \"disadvantaged kids simply have fewer opportunities to make up for poor decisions,\" Yeager said. But a \"\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/08/how-a-bigger-purpose-can-motivate-students-to-learn/\">sense-of-purpose\" mindset intervention\u003c/a> and other strategies that boost self-control and academic perseverance might help to narrow the inequality gap in education, he said. And, he points out, teachers and schools could start these interventions tomorrow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Debate Over Drudgery\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the research on self-control and the diligence task also raise broader questions about drudgery and the definition of success in education. \"If you had done this study with the metaphorical Bill Gates in his senior year in high school,\" Lichtman said of the diligence task, \"he would have gone to the other side of the screen\" -- skipping the math problems -- \"or he would have tried to start hacking into the computer.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37739\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-37739\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/marshmallow-test-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"Screenshot of Marshmallow Test video. (FloodSanDiego/YouTube)\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Screenshot of Marshmallow Test video. (FloodSanDiego/YouTube)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Lichtman is one of many progressive educators who think schools need to teach content in ways that are more engaging and relevant to students' lives, rather than just drilling them with monotonous math practice sets. More and more teachers, parents and students believe that academic success should be measured not by repetitive regurgitation of facts, high test scores or even a college degree, he said, but rather by whether kids learn skills like collaboration, creativity, communication, empathy, and, yes, persistence and resilience, too. Instead of trying to make the assembly-line education system work better by turning up kids' self-control, Lichtman says it's time to focus on alternatives such as the deep, project-based learning experiences offered at \u003ca href=\"http://elschools.org/\">Expeditionary Learning\u003c/a> schools, among others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We all support a forward-looking view of education and are excited to see the future of learning,\" said D’Mello in response. The research on the diligence task is an attempt \"to study how learning occurs today for better or for worse,\" he said. Not everything taught in schools can be fun and easy, he said -- that's why he and his colleagues are focusing on \"boring but important\" skill-building tasks -- and a lot of research has demonstrated the merits of impasse-driven learning, \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/whats-the-sweet-spot-of-difficulty-for-learning/\">desirable difficulties\u003c/a> and productive failure in promoting deep learning. \"I'm in favor of doing what it takes to make learning more engaging and intrinsically motivating when appropriate, and fortifying kids with the appropriate mindsets, emotion regulation strategies and cognitive strategies when things get difficult and tedious,\" D'Mello said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Regardless of one’s educational philosophy, there’s no question that diligence is universally necessary for anyone to accomplish something important in life that they really want to do. Any job, career or project, no matter how inspiring, will at times require the self-discipline to resist distractions and plod through some drudgery -- whether it's proofreading a book chapter for the umpteenth time or hand-pipetting hundreds of samples of reagents for a molecular biology experiment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While diligence may be an independent factor that contributes to academic success, \"it's really important to know it's just one contributor,\" Peake said. \"And it's not going to determine by itself whether or not kids do well in college -- there are so many other factors that are playing into this.\" The relationships between self-control and positive outcomes are correlations, \"not determinative kinds of things.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was certainly true for the pre-schoolers who couldn't wait to gobble the marshmallow in the Stanford experiments, Peake said: \"There are many, many kids who didn't wait, who by all the standards that you put out there do perfectly well in life.\"\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Researchers hope that being able to accurately measure how well students resist digital temptations will help them learn about how \"academic diligence\" features in later life success.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37747\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-37747\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/googly-marshmallow.jpg\" alt=\"Credit: Dana Nelson\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/googly-marshmallow.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/googly-marshmallow-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/googly-marshmallow-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Credit: Dana Nelson\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The \"marshmallow test\" invented by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel and colleagues in the 1960s is \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/magazine/we-didnt-eat-the-marshmallow-the-marshmallow-ate-us.html\">famously known\u003c/a> as a measure of willpower. The experiment gave preschoolers the option of either eating one mini-marshmallow right away or waiting 15 minutes to get two mini-marshmallows. \u003ca href=\"http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/2/252.full\">Decades later\u003c/a>, those who were better at delaying gratification, and resisted immediately snarfing the treat, ended up with stronger SAT scores, higher educational achievement and greater self-esteem and capacity to cope with stress in adulthood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now other psychology researchers have come up with a test that challenges the willpower of schoolkids to resist the brain-candy of today’s \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/12/age-of-distraction-why-its-crucial-for-students-to-learn-to-focus/\">digital distractions\u003c/a> -- the YouTube videos, Instagram and mobile gaming apps like Angry Birds. Some people are calling it a \"digital marshmallow test,\" although it's tailored for an educational context and doesn't involve any sweets or near-term rewards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Officially known as the \"academic diligence task,\" the new computer-based test offers students a choice between doing math or watching videos or playing a video game. The test was created by postdoctoral research fellow Brian Galla and associate psychology professor Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, with Sidney D’Mello of the University of Notre Dame, as a better (and free) research tool for measuring self-control. The researchers hope this new tool will advance their studies of ways to improve academic perseverance in students.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\"Some students would turn it into a game for themselves.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X14000502\">A report\u003c/a> recently published online by the team documents the test's reliability and validity and shows that performance on the task predicts academic achievement -- including whether high school seniors graduate on time and enroll in college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's a really creative and interesting approach to measuring an aspect of self-control,\" said Smith College psychologist Philip Peake, who has worked with Mischel on the longitudinal follow-up of participants in the Stanford \"delay of gratification\" studies. The new diligence task is quite different from the marshmallow experiment, so they can't be equated, he said, but both are research tools that can contribute to our understanding of the processes that underlie self-control. And both have the advantage of measuring how people actually behave, not just what they say or think they do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's not just people filling out a questionnaire that says, 'Oh, I tend to persist in things' or 'I work hard at things,' \" Peake said. It's assessing real behavior. \"And you can see that that behavior has some consequential relations to real-life outcomes.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Studying Self-Control in the Face of Digital Distractions\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recent work by the Penn and Notre Dame psychologists is part of their ongoing national study of the role that non-cognitive factors such as \"grit\" and self-control play in students' persistence in school. That endeavor, which is funded by the Gates Foundation, is following about 1,800 high school seniors over six years to track who enrolls in and finishes college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Duckworth is known for \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/10/how-important-is-grit-in-student-achievement/\">her work on grit\u003c/a>, which she defines as a tendency to pursue long-term challenging goals with passion and perseverance. Self-control or \"self-regulation,\" on the other hand, is more about the short-term exercising of self-discipline in the face of momentary diversions, an ability that also feeds into perseverance. The research team needed a standardized way to assess self-control, but most of the existing measurement tools were self-report questionnaires, which can give biased results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So they devised a task that uses behavioral responses to measure academic diligence, which they define as \"working assiduously on academic tasks which are beneficial in the long run but tedious in the moment, especially in comparison to more enjoyable, less effortful diversions.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rationale behind the test is that with many subject areas or skills, such as mathematics, the basic process of building fluency and mastery involves a lot of practice. It requires \"hard work that is perceived as tedious, even though people know it's immensely important,\" D’Mello said. \"But that's just the reality.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With math, for instance, that means \"studying your multiplication tables, solving equations, again and again and again,\" which is essential for building more complex numerical knowledge. However, \"in the digital age, it's so hard to focus,\" D'Mello said. In psychology-speak, students are faced with having to \"regulate\" their emotions and impulses to overcome boredom and concentrate on homework instead of something more fun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To measure this skill in a scenario simulating real life, D'Mello, who is an assistant professor of computer science and psychology, designed the diligence task with a split computer-screen interface (click here for \u003ca href=\"http://174.129.19.201/~sdmello/DiligenceTaskDemo/DiligenceTaskDemo.html\">a demo\u003c/a>). On the left side, students can choose to do a series of boring skill-building math problems -- simple, single-digit subtraction. On the right side, they can play Tetris or watch short, entertaining YouTube video clips of movie trailers or sports highlights. The test is delivered online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Road-Testing the Test\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Galla, Duckworth and their colleagues took the diligence task into two large, ethnically diverse public high schools in Philadelphia, where they enlisted 921 seniors in early 2013. The students were instructed to answer as many math problems as they wanted, as fast as they could, in five consecutive four-minute sessions. They could take a break at any time to watch videos or play the game. The instructions informed them that practicing basic math skills could improve their problem-solving abilities for the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In total, the teens spent about half the time on math skill-building, answering an average of 244 problems, D'Mello said. Overall performance on the task consistently correlated with individual differences in conscientiousness, self-control and grit (which were also assessed in the students through questionnaires), just as the psychologists had theorized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The kids who solved more math problems tended to have higher senior-year GPAs, better scores on standardized math and reading tests, and were more likely to graduate on time; they were also more likely to be enrolled in college at the end of the following fall semester, almost a year later. About 98 percent of the pupils who spent more than 17 minutes doing the math problems successfully graduated, compared with 95 percent of students who spent four minutes or less on math. While that's a small difference, it was interesting to see it even after the researchers adjusted for other factors, including intelligence, gender, ethnicity, interest in math and whether the kids were in the free lunch program, Galla said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37741\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/the-test.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-37741\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/the-test-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"Demo of the "academic diligence task" created by Sidney D'Mello.\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demo of the \"academic diligence task\" created by Sidney D'Mello.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The diligence test \"was able to pick up a signal in college enrollment, and this was above and beyond things like cognitive ability, socioeconomic status -- things that we know tend to correlate with or predict later college success,\" he said. So it isn't just IQ or braininess that matters for academic achievement, but self-control as well. Yet, unlike IQ, the researchers believe self-control in schoolwork is a skill that can be taught and developed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The correlation between performance on the diligence task and academic achievement is modest, but it is significant and important, commented Peake of Smith College. Whether the task predicts long-term consequences, and whether those are limited just to academics or apply more broadly to other aspects of self-control, are interesting questions to further explore, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Staying on Task\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The results held some surprises. \"I was really shocked that some people actually stayed entirely on the math problems the whole time,\" D'Mello said. \"It's a really difficult task. I can't do it myself, frankly.\" One super-diligent student did 966 math problems; a few kids did none at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The teens used a range of tactics to resist the distractions. \"Some students would turn it into a game for themselves,\" Galla said. “So they want to just see how many problems that they can solve in the four-minute task blocks.\" Others did math until they needed a break, then switched to the fun stuff, which is \"very healthy behavior,\" D'Mello said. \"We all know there's advantages to taking a break. ... It's just that if you do that too much, then you get into trouble.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research team will track the students through the six-year national college persistence study, and is updating their diligence task to include verbal and spatial reasoning problems. \"The hope is that by giving a good measure, you could really inspire a lot of science,\" said D'Mello. At this point, the researchers say they don't envision the test as something teachers would routinely use to assess students in the classroom; it isn't designed or validated for that purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Different Takes on Willpower and Grit\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not everyone believes the growing focus on individual students' responsibility to demonstrate self-control or grit is the best way to support academic achievement. Some progressive education experts worry low-income or minority kids who are struggling in school might be blamed for lacking grit as the primary reason for underperformance. Those critics point out that in many schools, poverty and an inequitable lack of resources are much bigger roadblocks to teaching and learning that need to be addressed.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\"It sort of plays into the mythology of the American dream. It sounds good, but it may be more relevant to some folks than to others.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>This viewpoint identifies an economic, social and racial overtone to the notion that if students \"would just put their nose to the grindstone harder and work harder, and be more diligent and more resilient, that they will do better,\" said Grant Lichtman, education consultant and author of \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.grantlichtman.com/edjourney-a-roadmap-to-the-future-of-education/\">#EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, who moderated an \u003ca href=\"http://learningpond.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/does-grit-need-deeper-discussion/\">impromptu heated discussion\u003c/a> on this issue on his blog. \"It sort of plays into the mythology of the American dream. It sounds good, but it may be more relevant to some folks than to others,\" Lichtman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It's absolutely necessary to structurally address the income inequalities in society, said psychologist David Yeager of the University of Texas in Austin. \"Increasing diligence is no replacement for that.\" But he believes cultivating skills like diligence and grit in students can still be valuable. Yeager points to high-performing urban charter high schools in the poorest areas that boosted their graduation and college enrollment rates with substantial financial investment, yet still find that 60 to 70 percent of their graduates drop out of college. At several such schools where Yeager worked with Duckworth in studying low-income students in their senior year, kids’ performance on the academic diligence task predicted their likelihood of dropping out of college a year later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Diligence still matters when [students] make transitions to the next setting,\" Yeager said. And the unfortunate and unfair reality is that it matters more for pupils who are disadvantaged than for those with ample resources, he added. When rich students fail at self-control and make poor choices, they can fall back on family support or finances to keep them pushing through school. In contrast, \"disadvantaged kids simply have fewer opportunities to make up for poor decisions,\" Yeager said. But a \"\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/08/how-a-bigger-purpose-can-motivate-students-to-learn/\">sense-of-purpose\" mindset intervention\u003c/a> and other strategies that boost self-control and academic perseverance might help to narrow the inequality gap in education, he said. And, he points out, teachers and schools could start these interventions tomorrow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Debate Over Drudgery\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the research on self-control and the diligence task also raise broader questions about drudgery and the definition of success in education. \"If you had done this study with the metaphorical Bill Gates in his senior year in high school,\" Lichtman said of the diligence task, \"he would have gone to the other side of the screen\" -- skipping the math problems -- \"or he would have tried to start hacking into the computer.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_37739\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-37739\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/marshmallow-test-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"Screenshot of Marshmallow Test video. (FloodSanDiego/YouTube)\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Screenshot of Marshmallow Test video. (FloodSanDiego/YouTube)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Lichtman is one of many progressive educators who think schools need to teach content in ways that are more engaging and relevant to students' lives, rather than just drilling them with monotonous math practice sets. More and more teachers, parents and students believe that academic success should be measured not by repetitive regurgitation of facts, high test scores or even a college degree, he said, but rather by whether kids learn skills like collaboration, creativity, communication, empathy, and, yes, persistence and resilience, too. Instead of trying to make the assembly-line education system work better by turning up kids' self-control, Lichtman says it's time to focus on alternatives such as the deep, project-based learning experiences offered at \u003ca href=\"http://elschools.org/\">Expeditionary Learning\u003c/a> schools, among others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We all support a forward-looking view of education and are excited to see the future of learning,\" said D’Mello in response. The research on the diligence task is an attempt \"to study how learning occurs today for better or for worse,\" he said. Not everything taught in schools can be fun and easy, he said -- that's why he and his colleagues are focusing on \"boring but important\" skill-building tasks -- and a lot of research has demonstrated the merits of impasse-driven learning, \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/whats-the-sweet-spot-of-difficulty-for-learning/\">desirable difficulties\u003c/a> and productive failure in promoting deep learning. \"I'm in favor of doing what it takes to make learning more engaging and intrinsically motivating when appropriate, and fortifying kids with the appropriate mindsets, emotion regulation strategies and cognitive strategies when things get difficult and tedious,\" D'Mello said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Regardless of one’s educational philosophy, there’s no question that diligence is universally necessary for anyone to accomplish something important in life that they really want to do. Any job, career or project, no matter how inspiring, will at times require the self-discipline to resist distractions and plod through some drudgery -- whether it's proofreading a book chapter for the umpteenth time or hand-pipetting hundreds of samples of reagents for a molecular biology experiment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While diligence may be an independent factor that contributes to academic success, \"it's really important to know it's just one contributor,\" Peake said. \"And it's not going to determine by itself whether or not kids do well in college -- there are so many other factors that are playing into this.\" The relationships between self-control and positive outcomes are correlations, \"not determinative kinds of things.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A recent MindShift article about how \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/09/how-do-unschoolers-turn-out/\" target=\"_blank\">\"unschoolers\" turn out\u003c/a> has sparked a lot of debate among readers. Unschooling is a category of homeschooling in which kids have the freedom to direct their learning based on their interests, not by any set curriculum. In a recent \u003ca href=\"http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Unschooling-The-Case-for-Setting-Your-Kids-Into-the-Wild.html\" target=\"_blank\">Outside Magazine article\u003c/a> Ben Hewitt explains in detail what unschooling looks like for his two children, why he chose it and what has convinced him that he and his wife made the right choice for their sons. He writes:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"This is what I want for my sons: freedom. Not just physical freedom, but intellectual and emotional freedom from the formulaic learning that prevails in our schools. I want for them the freedom to immerse themselves in the fields and forest that surround our home, to wander aimlessly or with purpose. I want for them the freedom to develop at whatever pace is etched into their DNA, not the pace dictated by an institution looking to meet the benchmarks that will in part determine its funding. I want them to be free to love learning for its own sake, the way that all children love learning for its own sake when it is not forced on them or attached to reward. I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-education\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A recent MindShift article about how \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/09/how-do-unschoolers-turn-out/\" target=\"_blank\">\"unschoolers\" turn out\u003c/a> has sparked a lot of debate among readers. Unschooling is a category of homeschooling in which kids have the freedom to direct their learning based on their interests, not by any set curriculum. In a recent \u003ca href=\"http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Unschooling-The-Case-for-Setting-Your-Kids-Into-the-Wild.html\" target=\"_blank\">Outside Magazine article\u003c/a> Ben Hewitt explains in detail what unschooling looks like for his two children, why he chose it and what has convinced him that he and his wife made the right choice for their sons. He writes:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"This is what I want for my sons: freedom. Not just physical freedom, but intellectual and emotional freedom from the formulaic learning that prevails in our schools. I want for them the freedom to immerse themselves in the fields and forest that surround our home, to wander aimlessly or with purpose. I want for them the freedom to develop at whatever pace is etched into their DNA, not the pace dictated by an institution looking to meet the benchmarks that will in part determine its funding. I want them to be free to love learning for its own sake, the way that all children love learning for its own sake when it is not forced on them or attached to reward. I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>http://www.outsideonline.com/1928266/we-dont-need-no-education\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
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"masters-of-scale": {
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},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"morning-edition": {
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"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
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"onourwatch": {
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"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"order": 11
},
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"on-the-media": {
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"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
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},
"pbs-newshour": {
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"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
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},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
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"order": 14
},
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"planet-money": {
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?mt=2",
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},
"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 5
},
"link": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e0c2d153-ad36-4c8d-901d-f1da6a724824/political-breakdown",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
"meta": {
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
"subscribe": {
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
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