Monday, September 21, 2020


New Classroom Priority: Social Skills, Emotions

There may be no more critical time than now to teach children to regulate their emotions. And yet there’s probably no time more challenging, as districts around the country begin the school year remotely.

Social and emotional learning- the process by which children learn to understand and manage feelings, develop empathy for others and acquire problem-solving skills-has been gaining traction in schools.

Research has shown that students who control their emotions do better in school and face fewer disciplinary actions. Many kindergarten through 12th-grade classes have daily breathing exercises and lessons for defusing conflict.

50% reduction in principal’s-office visits at J.P. Ryon school after use of SEL

But the nationwide shift to distance learning during the coronavirus pandemic has created obstacles to delivering SEL, as it is called. According to a July report from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, SEL was largely absent last spring when schools scrambled over to remote learning. Nearly all surveyed educators said students will need more social and emotional support this year and are vowing to do better.

As with other classes that went online abruptly, a challenge for SEL has been getting lessons from third-party providers online. And because SEL attempts to address children’s emotional issues in a class, its effectiveness could be blunted when everyone is separated by screens and social distances. In many cases, the distance prevents kids from being able to discuss their feelings at all.

“Many times, school is a safe place where kids know they can speak freely,” said Melinda Johnson, principal of J.P. Ryon Elementary School in Waldorf, Md., which receives federal funding due to its high level of students in poverty. “In cases where a kid may not have a safe place at home and the teacher is the person who represents their safe space on a screen, they might not be able to say much out loud.”

Some SEL curricula providers, including the Committee for Children, a nonprofit that serves more than 30% of U.S. public schools, have completely overhauled their programs for virtual learning. School districts have had to figure out how to fit the instruction into a new type of school day. Some districts in low-income areas that are still struggling to get laptops, tablets and wireless hot spots to students have had to get creative about delivering SEL to students.

The J.P. Ryon school has been sending parents and guardians text messages with links to SEL videos it licenses from a curricula provider called Move This World. Dr. Johnson said most families have smartphones, and she feels SEL is important enough to ensure maximum reach.

Short videos from Move This World focus on topics such as resilience, kindness and self-awareness. In a lesson for elementary students on giving and receiving compliments, instructors explain how sharing positive reinforcement helps build trust and respect.

The instructor tells the viewers to close their eyes and think about a time someone gave them a compliment and how it made them feel. Then they are asked to recall a time they gave someone a compliment and how that made them feel. The kids are then meant to find a partner and take turns giving compliments.

The goal for many schools is to make SEL part of the daily routine.

“You wouldn’t exercise once and say you’re fit,” said Sara Potler La- Hayne, founder and chief executive of Move This World, which has provided SEL material to approximately 150 school districts, charter schools and private schools nationwide. “We think of social-emotional skills as skills that need to be practiced,” she said.

A major impediment to virtual SEL instruction is that teachers can’t always see their students.

Many districts encourage students to keep their cameras on so teachers can engage with them, but some children are embarrassed about their living situations. They might be homeless, logging in over McDonald’s Wi-Fi or from a shelter or motel, and don’t want their teacher and classmates to see. Teachers in some districts are requesting private one-on-one Zoom meetings to get a feel for students’ home environments.

Dr. Johnson said her staff is planning to have a “safe word” students can say or type into the chat function of video calls to indicate there’s a problem at home. If a teacher sees the word, or notices a child isn’t participating, a counselor would follow up with a call to the home.

At first, teachers were apprehensive about starting the new SEL program, Dr. Johnson said.

But because it relies largely on videos and class discussion, the teachers don’t have to spend time planning lessons.

The J.P. Ryon school began piloting Move This World in January, and the program was fully up and running when the school had to close in March. It was already showing results, including a 50% reduction in referrals to the principal’s office for behavioral problems between January and March, before pandemic-related school closures. Some parents see an impact at home.

Inthanong Watrous, an instructional assistant at J.P. Ryon whose two young children attend the school, recently noticed they were using the techniques when they got into arguments. “I’ve heard them say, ‘Remember to walk away quietly’ or ‘Remember to breathe,’” she said.

Her fifth-grade daughter has been using the techniques more since remote school started. She has run into tech problems that left her feeling frustrated. “I can tell she wants to cry but instead… she counts to 10 and breathes, or she walks away from the laptop and comes back,” Ms. Watrous said.

What You Can Do at Home

Here are resources to help develop social and emotional skills.

OK Play: A free app, developed with UCLA scientists and meditation app Headspace, is meant to help children ages 3 to 6 learn to regulate emotions through guided activities. okplay.co

Mightier: A biofeedback game system developed by Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital displays the player’s heart rate. As it increases, games get more challenging. Players earn rewards for remaining calm as they play. Suggested age range is 6 to 12. mightier.com

Generation Mindful: Educational products are designed to build social and emotional skills through “positive discipline.” Parents can buy stuffed animals, posters and notecards to create a calming space for 3- to 6-year-olds. There are products for older children too. genmindful.com

The Imagine Neighborhood: The Committee for Children recently created a podcast of 10- to 20-minute episodes, each tackling a topic such as backto- school nerves or staying focused on tasks. It is available on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify. imagineneighborhood.org

SOURCE

1776 Unites Curriculum Rejects 1619 Project’s Victimhood Narrative

Personal narratives are powerful and often serve to empower others. The African American community is full of stories of men and women who overcame slavery, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination.

The 1776 Unites movement, founded by Bob Woodson, has just released a school curriculum to tell the stories of black success throughout American history, stories that The New York Times’ 1619 Project has chosen to ignore.

The curriculum features “stories and lesson plans that celebrate black excellence, reject victimhood culture, and showcase African Americans, past and present, who have prospered by embracing America’s founding ideals of free enterprise, family, hard work, entrepreneurship, and faith,” Ian Rowe, a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center, said Wednesday at a media briefing to unveil the curriculum.

The Woodson Center is a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that says its mission is to “transform lives, schools, and troubled neighborhoods from the inside out.”

The free lessons look back at America’s past with honesty, but also look forward to what can be achieved through hard work and wise choices, said Rowe, who is also an experienced charter school leader and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a D.C.-based public policy think tank.

The first installment of the curriculum is already available on the 1776 Unites website and features lessons from the life of Elijah McCoy, who, despite being the son of an escaped slave, was a successful investor, and Biddy Mason, a woman who was born into slavery but died a millionaire.

The downloadable lesson on Mason begins by telling her compelling story. A slave from birth, Mason was born in Mississippi in 1818, but won her freedom in court as an adult after her owner took her to California, a free state.

As a free woman, Mason worked as a midwife to earn enough money to buy property in Los Angeles. She bought and sold a number of properties and eventually became one of the most prominent landlords in the city. Her philanthropy earned her the title of the wealthiest African American woman west of the Mississippi, accumulating $300,000, the equivalent of $8 million today.

After Mason’s story, the curriculum details activities that teachers can undertake with their students, such as researching real estate properties in their own community to determine the cost of housing and what properties might be good investments.

New lessons will be added to the online curriculum every month. Each lesson is meant to supplement history and literature curriculums and can be used in the classroom, at home, or “anywhere character formation of children is happening,” Rowe said.

The 1776 Unites curriculum was launched in response to the school curriculum being pushed by the 1619 Project, because “no nation or individual should be defined by its birth defects or what it used to be in the past,” Woodson, the CEO of the Woodson Center, said during the Wednesday briefing.

“America should be defined by its promise,” he said.

In contrast to the 1619 Project, the goal of 1776 Unites, he explained, is to bring Americans together, no matter their skin color, and to “desegregate poverty and deracialize race.”

The curriculum doesn’t seek to cover up the horror of slavery, but it does highlight the success and values of the African American community because people’s very nature is to improve when they are inspired, Woodson said.

SOURCE

Teaching the world why kids need to connect

In a classroom in Boston, one man is fighting for the future emotional health of our children.

Adam Lewis in an Australian educator, now working as principal of Boston College High School, a Jesuit school for 1400 boys in Boston, Massachusetts. He has previously served as director of the senior campus at Xavier College in Melbourne, and deputy principal at Riverview, Sydney.

Like most teachers, Lewis does not believe that remote learning is any substitute for the relationship built between student, teacher and school in a face-to-face environment. And so, in Boston, he has ­become a passionate advocate for reopening schools, even as the ­battle against the coronavirus continues to rage.

Unlike most Australians, Lewis has seen the impact of the virus up close. Massachusetts has, in his words, been “smashed” by COVID-19. To illustrate: at the time of writing, Victoria, with a population of 6.6 million, had 19,943 cases and 737 deaths. Massachusetts, with a comparable population of 6.8 million, had 123,425 cases and 9225 deaths.

“We had losses in our community,” Lewis told The Weekend Australian by Zoom this week. “One of the boys lost his ­father … some of the boys have parents who work on the frontline. So we have boys who have seen it, and felt it, first-hand.”

The school also lost a boy to suicide just before the lockdown began. In the aftermath, Lewis ­decided early on that the best approach was to try to get all his boys back to school as soon as it was possible to do so safely.

“I worry about the mental health aspects of staying closed,” he said. He was also worried about the long-term effect of the erosion of the relationships between students and their teachers, after the school was forced to close in March. He was determined to be one of the first to reopen.

The City of Boston laid down strict guidelines: no child, or teacher, in any school is allowed to be within 2m of any other person for a period greater than 15 minutes. That hurdle alone was too high for some schools, but Boston College High decided to give it a go.

Along with his staff, Lewis has over the past few months developed a unique “hybrid” model that may in time be adopted by schools worldwide. The system involves having half the class back at any one time, while the other half of the class Zooms in from home.

In practice, this means 700 kids at school, and 700 at home. In any given classroom, it means 13 kids at desks, and 13 on the screens.

The school spent $US1.2m ($1.6m) on the necessary upgrades, including installing Perspex screens on cafeteria tables. To meet the other guidelines, Lewis found himself going from classroom to classroom, saying things like: “If we can push that cupboard back, if we open that space more, we can get one more desk in here, and one more desk in there.”

Reopening the school called for delicate negotiations with teachers, some of whom were frightened to come back. But he was heartened to see Boston families rushing to try to enrol their boys.

“Enrolments are up,” he says. “We can’t take any more.”

In part, it’s because most parents know from recent experience that remote learning is a crock, and it’s not because the sound drops out, or the picture on the screen goes funny. It’s because you can’t make a proper connection with another human being through a screen. Yes, it works for a while, and okay it’s better than nothing,` but human beings need not only to see each other but to be together.

That’s particularly true for the current generation of adolescents, whose idea about relationships was already corrupted by technology. “Even before all this, I actually don’t think it’s ever been harder to be a young person,” Lewis says. “They’re connected in ways we never were, and yet they’re so disconnected. They believe that you can have a relationship through a screen, through social media. Our kids would say, that’s what a relationship looks like to them.

“But a relationship is more than a text message, or Instagram. It’s a connection. It’s about the heart. They were already living in an age that is increasingly superficial, increasingly different, increasingly secular — and now add the pandemic to that.”

Lewis says the relationship between students, and between students and teachers, needs to be nurtured with regular contact. It can’t at the moment be physical, but it at the very least needs to take place in the same space, with human looking at human, no screen in between.

“The relationship must come first. Everything else flows from that,” he says. “It’s about the heart.”

Lewis was thrilled to find that the boys agreed. Upon returning to school earlier this week, he found them “so happy to be back in the building — even through the Plexiglass, even in a classroom (with desks) precisely six feet (1.8m) apart, even with masks on, where they struggle to even see the expression of the other person, where they’re reading each other’s eyes, they were still coming up to me, as principal, to say: ‘We are so happy to be back! Thank you so much for getting us back!’”

They missed school that much? Yes. But mainly, they missed each other.

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This is a moment for universities to shine. Instead they’re in crisis

Well before the coronavirus outbreak it was apparent Australia’s under-25s were in danger of becoming the first generation in many decades to have lower living standards than their parents’ generation.

Years of wage stagnation, high rates of under-employment and high housing costs mean living standards have improved far less for younger people than for older age groups. Now the pandemic has exacerbated the problem.

Grattan Institute chief executive Danielle Wood, who co-authored a recent study on generational inequality, says: “We were on the cusp of saying we’ve got a generation that’s going to fall behind the one that came before it, but I think we’re certainly going to be in that world now.”

Confronted with the weakest jobs market in memory, more young people than usual are opting for vocational or higher education. Applications for university next year have surged as school leavers respond to the recession by signing up for more study. The University Admissions Centre, which processes applications for admission to tertiary courses mostly in NSW and ACT, has received 21 per cent more applications from year 12 students wanting to attend university in 2021 than at the same time a year ago.

Many older workers will likely choose to upskill or retrain during the downturn. Education is a smart choice with the labour market so tight and travel restricted.

The spike in demand for post-school education is a national opportunity. Australia can use the pandemic to invest in our collective know-how. A more educated young workforce will help drive the recovery from the coronavirus recession.

So this should be a moment for Australia’s world-class universities to shine. Instead, the sector is in crisis.

The National Tertiary Education Union says more than 11,000 university jobs have been lost this year and more staff reductions are anticipated. Some institutions have slashed the number of courses available to students in a bid to save money.

The job losses and reduced course offerings mean a lower quality of tertiary education for young Australians. Many university students already complain about overcrowded tutorials and limited contact with academic staff.

University leaders say they’ve had no choice but to make cuts. They seem preoccupied with the decline in international student numbers due to COVID-19 border restrictions and the effect that has had on balance sheets.

The federal government, which funds universities, has added to the upheaval with a controversial overhaul of university fees now before Parliament. The “job-ready graduates” package proposed by Education Minister Dan Tehan will reduce student contributions for some courses, including engineering, health and science, while significantly increasing fees for many popular subjects, such as humanities (apart from languages), law and business. Tehan says his reforms will “grow the number of university places for domestic students by 39,000 in 2023”, although tertiary sector experts have queried that claim.

Professor Andrew Norton, a higher education analyst at the Australian National University, warns the government’s changes are “not going to deal” with the challenges now facing universities. In a submission to a Senate inquiry into the job-ready graduates legislation, he says problems with it “are too fundamental to be fixed by amendment. The bill should be rejected.”

Danielle Wood is even more scathing. She says the government’s proposed changes lack coherence and threaten to exacerbate the financial challenges faced by the higher education sector because of the pandemic.

“I honestly think it’s one of the worst-designed policies that I have ever seen,” Wood says. “Even if you accept its stated rationale, it doesn’t go anywhere near achieving it.”

To make matters worse for school leavers, Norton warns 2021 is shaping as a “competitive year” for university hopefuls. Under current policy settings, universities may turn away thousands of potential students as applications spike but the number of available places remains fixed. Many who miss out will likely end up on JobSeeker.

Over the past decade universities have been increasingly portrayed as export businesses rather than places of learning and scholarship.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison likes to speak about universities with the language of big corporations and commerce. Asked in July why universities were being denied access to the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme, Morrison said they were like other “large businesses” negotiating the coronavirus crisis.

“We should remember, these are very large organisations with billion-dollar reserves and they’ve got multi-million-dollar CEOs and they’re making decisions about how they’re running their own organisations, just like many large businesses are going through this,” he told ABC television.

But opinion polls suggest voters value the public good that universities provide, not just the export earnings. A recent Ipsos survey found 78 per cent of Australians viewed universities as crucial in solving the world’s biggest challenges. And 76 per cent agreed that access to universities should be expanded while only 7 per cent disagreed.

Young people typically bear the brunt of any economic downturn. Research shows age groups entering the workforce during past recessions have suffered long-term “economic scarring” including higher rates of underemployment and lower incomes.

Access to top-notch tertiary and vocational training is one way to offset the damage. We know higher levels of post-school education boost workforce participation, productivity, and national wellbeing. It will pay long-term dividends as an increasing share of employment becomes knowledge-based.

The deep economic downturn caused by the pandemic demands a renewed focus on the needs of young Australians.

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