Ben Kestner
Thoughts on Education
You Get What You Give
This is one of my favorite phrases/proverbs/maxims. I use it a lot at school to explain the importance of being caring, respectful and encouraging to all around. I was wondering how many other similar phrases there are. I thought of “Give a little love and it all comes back to you” and “You reap what you sow”.
Older readers may remember the song with this name by the band ‘The New Radicals’ in the 90s.
Unconditional Teaching
We all went into education because we care passionately about kids. We want to help them to grow and gain experiences which help them to understand themselves and where they fit in to the world around them. Teenage kids are on a path of discovery. They are becoming more and more reliant on personal relationships with friends outside their family and they are continuing to learn about relationships with adults in terms of effective ways to communicate.
It is vital that kids know and understand that we care about them. That we as educators have their well being and success at the forefront of our minds during our daily interactions. As soon as they know we care, we have a chance that they might learn something.
I’d like to talk about two teachers I had in the past. I studied the flute at Music college in London and then in Berlin. Both professors were renowned flute players and highly respected in their field, so I consider myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to study with them.
My teacher in London had a quiet demeanor and spoke to me calmly. She showed through the questions she asked, that she cared about me as a person. My teacher in Berlin had a different approach. A more straightforward-in your-face approach I suppose. A particular example of how the two differed was the task of memorizing music, which, quite frankly I wasn’t very good at. If I arrived at a lesson having not memorized the music, my teacher in Berlin would get angry, tell me that I was wasting his time and stomp around. In stark contrast, my teacher in London would ask questions. “Did you have difficulty learning this piece?”, “How can we make things easier?” etc.
O.K. sometimes I just didn’t do the work that week. If this was the case, my teacher in Berlin would accuse me of wasting his time, stomp around etc. My flute teacher in London would say “Ben, I’m worried that if you can’t find the time to practice, you’re not going to be able to reach the standard I know you are capable of”
What effect did these two approaches have on me? The teacher in Berlin tried to instill fear into me. The teacher in London shared her feelings with me. I really feel that because I know that she genuinely cared about me, it had a much bigger impact on my learning. When she spoke to me calmly about her feelings of disappointment, it hit me in the face like a sledge hammer. Because I really cared about her and I knew she really cared about me. It made me think. The Berlin approach just got me angry.
In my opinion, shouting at students doesn’t achieve very much except showing them that the teacher can shout. It’s a way of showing dominance over a student and it doesn’t teach them a very caring way of interacting with others. In my experience, simply listening and talking to students about their actions, their feelings and your feelings goes a long way to help them to understand and change.
This is one of my favorite quotes about education:
“ In education, it is my experience that those lessons which we learn from teachers who are not just good, but who also show affection for the student, go deep into our minds. Lessons from other sorts of teachers may not. Although you may be compelled to study and may fear the teacher, the lessons may not sink in.
Much depends on the affection of the teacher.
The XIV Dalai Lama
What Would Alfie Kohn Say?
Gender Inequality
Following Larry Summer’s (President of Harvard University) comment that biological differences could explain why fewer women become proffessors of Maths, this new report says that gender inequality is to blame.
Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
Are You Feeling Sleepy?
One of the most common issues middle school parents face is that their kids have trouble getting up in the morning during the week and stay in bed a long time at the weekend. There is also a common assumption that teenagers find it easier to concentrate in class in the mornings than in the afternoons.
Well it will be a surprise to some parents to learn that scientific research into the brains of your teenage kids show that their natural biological sleep pattern at this age shifts toward later times for both sleeping and waking, meaning it is natural for a teenager not to be able to fall asleep before 11pm. Research also shows that adolescents need approximately 9.5 hours sleep, which creates a problem for parents. If a parent tells their child to go to bed at 9pm, there is a good chance that they may not be able to fall asleep until 11 or 12pm. If they then rise at 06:30am, they certainly have not had enough sleep.
Schools could also take note of this research. Many people think that lessons that require more writing or ‘thinking’ should be in the morning and other lessons such as Art and PE should be in the afternoons. But in fact many teenagers feel more tired in the morning because they are actually in the middle of their natural biological sleeping pattern.
Also, ideally, school for middle and high school kids based on research, should start at 10am or 11am. Not possible at the moment but interesting nevertheless!
What can we do to help our teenagers get through the school week more effectively?
Here’s some advice for teenagers from the American National Sleep Foundation:
- Take Naps.
- Keep your bedroom cool, quiet and dark
- Try to establish a routine which you try to keep to it as much as possible at weekends
- Eat and drink and exercise
- Don’t drink caffeine (esp. within two hours of bedtime)
- Eat a good breakfast and don’t skip lunch.
Have a look at the following website for more information:
http://www.sleepfoundation.org
Other interesting news articles:
Head Teacher Urges Lie in for students
Cook Eat and Learn!
Homework. You either love it or you hate it. Most students you talk to hate it.
Avid readers of this blog will already know my views of homework for middle school students. If it is Relevant, Interesting and Personal then there’s a good argument for it. If it’s Boring, Repetitive and Impersonal then it can be painful and probably is not helpful to your child. (Not just my opinion. See Alfie Kohn, Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish and others)
Here’s an activity you can try at home with your child which is Relevant, Interesting and Personal and it’s not homework. It’s called cooking. Yes cooking. Usually the role of the parent is to provide meals for their hungry teenagers, how about encouraging them to take part in the process?
The process of cooking uses some of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and can lead to many of the components encouraged in an inquiry based education programme.
Start with a recipe. Ask your son or daughter to look at the recipe, get the ingredients together and follow a process. This will presumably involve measuring, weighing, and mixing. It may also involve converting. Whilst doing this, you can be talking to him about nutrition and diet etc.
Laying the table and coming together to eat is also an important part of the process.
As your son or daughter becomes more used to the idea of maybe cooking once a week or fortnight, why not then introduce the design cycle into the process?
- investigate
- design
- plan
- create
- evaluate.
Look in your fridge and investigate what you have in terms of ingredients. Design a meal for the family. Plan the process, create the meal and then, very importantly evaluate the meal!
Now what better way to spend a chunk of the evening with your children? Admittedly you might get some resistance to the idea at first, but I bet they’ll end up enjoying being sociable and learning at the same time!
Making Good Choices
Children of middle school age are going through many changes.
They are reaching a stage of their life where they place increasing importance on being noticed and accepted by their peers and this is a time when peer pressure becomes a major influence in the many choices a child faces.
The school/parent relationship has a very important role to play in terms of helping children make good choices in terms of being healthy, safe and respectful to others.
What are ‘good choices”? They are choices which keep students safe and healthy and they are choices which give them opportunities for friendship and self confidence.They are also choices which show responsibiltiy towards the environment and each other. It is very important for us to help students take responsibility for the choices they make and take responsibility for the things they choose to involve themselves in.
When parents have the luxury of being able to choose a school, they do so for many reasons. I wonder how many ask to see the school’s mssion statement? The mission statement at the school I am principal at the moment, emphasizes respectful, caring and encouraging behavior within a diverse community as the backbone of who we say we want our community to be. But we can’t achieve this without parents help. There was a famous Rabbi who once said “Educating children without parental involvement is like heating a house with the windows open.
Families have a set of values which are defined through traditions and moral or sometimes religious beliefs, which are sometimes known as ‘family values’. Our school’s mission statement is a living document which declares what we value as a community. It is a statement of our ‘family values’. For the parent/school partnership to work most effectively we need to have shared values. Schools have an impossible task ahead of them in terms of helping students make ‘good’ choices if the values or definition of what good choices are differ.
An interesting activity each family reading this could try would be to sit down at home and come up with a family mission statement– A statement that defines the families’ values and goals. Once this statement is agreed upon and written down, the family could take out the school’s mission statement and compare.
What things are the same what are different?
The choices we make have an effect on others and it is important for us all to be able to reflect on these and move on. It’s also important for us to reflect on what we do to support the communities’ shared set of values at school and at home.
Learning in the Classroom. Classroom ‘Discipline’
Classroom Discipline
Here’s what the definition of Discipline is according to merriam-webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com)
Ben Kestner 