Archive for the ‘Leadership Books’ Category

Test-and-Punish: How the Texas Education Model Gave America Accountability Without Equity by John Kuhn follows the history of the modern education reform movement from its roots in Texas. While the tone is strongly one-sided, John makes a compelling case for reforms that diagnose-and-support and finds a way to finance schools in a more equitable manner. If you haven’t joined his battle, it may be time. Click at the bottom of any page to purchase this powerful argument.

John Kuhn

• John Kuhn is a public school administrator in Texas and a vocal advocate for public education. His Alamo Letter and YouTube videos of his 2011 speech at a Save Texas Schools rally went viral, as did his 2012 essay The Exhaustion of the American Teacher. He has written two education-related books, 2013’s Test-and-Punish (Park Place Publications) and 2014’s Fear and Learning in America (Teachers College Press).

Prologue

• Although this book talks a lot about Texas, it is actually a book about national education policy. It’s focus is the test-and-punish craze that has dominated education policy-making in the United States since former Texas governor George W. Bush worked to introduce No Child Left Behind legislation. John sees this law and subsequent iterations as a series of big mistakes. This would include the use of data to punish schools, teachers, and students; the reduction of school quality to a simple menu of labels; vacating the concept of supports in favor of consequences; the misuse of test scores to force privatization; the implementation of accountability algorithms to attain political goals; the increasing investment of limited funding and time for the sake of standardized tests; and the sidelining of teachers in favor of lobbyists and politicians in designing accountability legislation. He takes heart in the fact that a band of passionate parents and feed-up teachers, board members, and administrators are fighting back, and he sees this push back to the reform movement spreading to other states.

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That’s Special: A Survival Guide to Teaching by Dan Henderson tells the story of a special education teacher who is still surviving in spite of some pretty wacky student behaviors he has faced along the way. Dan follows real stories in each chapter from this career with tools that other teachers can use to survive in difficult situations. If you click at the bottom of the page and buy the book, 10% will go back to local schools.

Still Surviving

• When educators tell real stories of what students do and how they deal with it, they are often told by the listener that they should write a book. Dan Henderson is one of those teachers who followed through. In addition to helping rookie and veteran teachers alike, this book will help parents understand what teachers have to deal with when faced by troubled students. In Dan’s case he was given the most troubled and thanks to his persistence and some trial and error, he is still surviving.
• The special children Dan deals with are the one’s who have not fully accepted social behavioral norms. While most are eventually classified for special education services, some are not. The trick is to socialize these students so they can learn and prosper rather than dropping out or being suspended. While Dan’s experience is limited to elementary school, I can assure you that much of it certainly applies to older students as well.
• Each of the ten chapters starts with a real story about a student Dan has worked with. While they can tear at your heart, Dan tries to see the humorous sides of their stories. When I dealt with difficult kids I tended to do the same thing, and I know it helped me survive. I can fully relate to Dan’s stories as I was a principal in a school where 20% of the students received special education services and many exhibited behaviors that would make them candidates for this book. Following the stories, Dan offers what he calls tools. This is advice will help teachers deal with and prevent the kind of behaviors described in his stories as they promote their own sanity and survival.

The Tools

• Tool 1 Conduct a student survey. This is perhaps my favorite tool. It suggests that you start the year by conducting a student survey. The goal is to find out as much as you can about a student like their interests, what they like about school, and what they don’t like. If possible find out what makes them angry and how they calm themselves down. Dan offers some specific questions you can use.
• Tool 2: Create a Behavior Management System. Dan recommends that rather than taking something away that you refuse to give them something. For these kids it is essential to take breaks that feature physical movement. (Doug: I’ve posted many pieces of advice along this same line.) Like others, Dan knows that exercise will improve mental performance. When you threaten consequences, you must follow through, but you also need to give kids a chance to redeem themselves. This allows a chance for self-regulation. Try to reinforce positive behavior and let students know that what they do is their choice.
• Tool 3: Build Routines and Respond to Needs. Dan believes that routines are important for the students he serves. He also has a system, which includes a request box, that allows students to let him know what their needs are. He even has an emergency signal for students to use. Needless to say, the routine allows for lots of movement and brain breaks and this type of student needs routines.
• Tool 4: Positive Reinforcement: Here Dan gives eight methods he uses. You might not agree with all of them, but I’m sure you will find some good ideas here.
• Tool 5: Tracking Data: Teachers need to keep track of what students know and can do. Dan recommends pretests so you know where students are starting. Your data sheets should be organized by standards. There is no mention of state test data here which makes sense as I don’t find it very useful.

More Tools

• Tool 6: Creating Centers or Stations: Centers allow kids to move and can be rigged to differentiate instruction. They also allow more time for individual and small group instruction. Technology can be involved here with computer activities, assessment, and direct instruction via videos.
• Tool 7: Differentiate Your Instruction: This is the holy grail for teachers. Ideally each student gets instruction at their own level. In addition to his centers, Dan gives many ideas here about how to reach this goal including multiple lesson plans or multiple approaches within the same lesson.
• Tool 8: Check for Understanding: If you lose a student early on, the rest of what you do is not likely to succeed. As you find out which students understand each item, it will inform your efforts to differentiate as you move forward. It is also necessary to know which students have the necessary prerequisite skills and knowledge.
• Tool 9: Higher-Order Thinking: Just because students have a special education tag doesn’t mean they can’t engage in real thinking. Open-ended questions can help. Projects can elicit thinking as well. In some cases letting students to work on projects together works.
• Tool 10: Make Your Lessons Fun! Look for good learning games and try to inject music when possible. Real-world connections can also make things fun and interesting. Make sure that students believe that their intelligence is not fixed and that you care about them personally. Be sure that the students’ best work is on display in school and on the classroom blog.

Reflections

• If you were considering a career in teaching special education students and read Dan’s stories, you might think twice. After reading about his tools, however, you should see how it can be a rewarding option thanks to his tools and your own hard work and caring. If you know anyone working with these types of students or considering it, see that they get a copy of this book.

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The Anxious Generation: Hoe the Great rewiring of Childhood I Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt warns of the harm done to children who live in a phone-based world with limited opportunity to play and connect with the real world. There is serious research to support banning phones in schools and keeping kids off of social media until they turn 16. This could well be the most important book I have summarized out of well over 200. Every principal, teacher, and parent needs to read it.

Introduction<: Growing Up on Mars

• Jonathan uses the analogy of letting your kid live on Mars or giving them a smart phone with limited or no constraints. The people of generation Z (born after 1995) are at ground zero for increased mental health problems caused by overprotection in the real world and under protection in the virtual world.
• While there wasn’t research when the tech industry foisted technology on this generation, we have it now. It shows that kids with smart phones are more depressed and depression increases with more use. It’s more harmful for girls who favor social media, but it is also a problem for boys who get lost in games and porn. Childhood has gone from play-based to phone-based.

Part 1: Tidal Wave – 1. The Surge of Suffering

• In 2010 the iPhone 4 was introduced, the first cellphone with a front-facing camera. The Android version followed the same year. That year, the Instagram app was introduced. Although it was popular, it took off when Facebook bought it in 2012. The years from 2010 to 2015 are considered to be, by the author, as the years of the Great Rewiring of Childhood.
• It was these years when rates of anxiety, depression, self-harming, and suicide increased from 67% to 134%. Anxiety happens when you perceive threats. This is normal. What isn’t normal is perceiving many threats that aren’t real. Depression is marked by sadness and not feeling pleasure. These are things that seem to happen to kids when they have constant access to the Internet.

Part 2: The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood – 2. What Children Need to Do in Childhood

• Human children grow quickly until about two years and they grow slowly until puberty. The brain is about 90% of its final size by age five. Then it spends a lot of time making new connections and losing old ones. Play is children’s work. Children deprived of play can come out socially, emotionally, and cognitively impaired. When adults are involved, play is less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Experience, not information is the key to emotional development.
• Unstructured time with friends plummeted when students moved from basic phones to Internet phones. Parent distraction with their phones interferes with the bond between parent and child. Synchronous activities are essential for development. Social media draws students into endless hours of asynchronous communication. Phone-based activity can seem more like work than play. Using social media shapes children to the culture of the sites they visit. Conformist bias motivates children to copy what they see and prestige is gained by people who pile up the most likes.

3. Discover Mode and the Need for Risky Play

• Since the 1990s, parents have tended to overprotect children from the real world and under-protect children from the online world where more dangers lurk. Human evolution has been shaped by two behavior modes. The discover mode is one where you detect opportunities and explore them. The defend mode features identifying threats and finding ways to escape them. The more time a child spends in the discover mode the happier and more sociable they will be. By overprotecting kids we doom them to lots of time in the defend mode.
• Beginning with Gen-Z, children were given less freedom including outside play. When they started showing up on campus in 2014 counseling centers were overwhelmed as students grew up spending too much time in defense mode. They hadn’t learned to deal with stress so they weren’t very strong. They lacked the risky play that would keep them in discover mode. We need to keep kids as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. They need to expect challenges from the real world. Safety-ism crushes play and the power it has.
• (Doug: You won’t learn how to deal with conflict and frustration without experience.)

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