Am I thinking about the media or is the media thinking for me?

Outside of the world of school, I recently witnessed a conversation between a teenager and a grown-up on the subject of politics. The adult, not having a teenager her own, wanted to know how the younger generation felt about the upcoming elections. The girl told the woman that most of her friends were likely supporting the same candidate their parents were voting for. When asked whether she had watched any of the televised debates, the teen replied, “No. I learn all I need to know from social media.”

With discomfort and suppressed horror, the adult followed up, “What do you mean?”

“I just look at what people are saying on Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter,” the fifteen-year-old replied. “If there’s something important I should know about, someone will create a hashtag.”

The implications of the conversation were that 1) if it’s important enough, someone will make a hashtag about it and 2) there’s nothing at all alarming about receiving your information about the world in bite-sized chunks that have been pre-chewed by someone else.

I realize that this particular teenager doesn’t necessarily speak on behalf of all teenagers on the planet, but I fear her response is more typical than unusual.  

It’s no revelation to say that teenagers today live in a media- and social-media-saturated world. With digital devices growing out of their hands or wrapped around their wrists at all times, young people are seldom free from the influences of media feeds, hashtags, clickbait, and memes. They read all the time, but their reading is in tiny chunks without much elaboration and with little or no fact-checking or editorial control.

I wondered after listening to the exchange whether anyone in this teen’s life had ever challenged her to think about the ways she received information--about the reliability and validity of sources, about potential bias, about primary and secondary sources. In our educational interactions with young people, media literacy and its offspring, social media literacy, should be regular topics of discussion.

You don’t have to be a media expert to talk with students about media literacy. While having some familiarity with the current media obsessions might help you seem more hip (and the very fact that I used the word “hip” probably means that I am not), the most important way to open students’ minds to the powers and pitfalls of a media-saturated world is by asking thoughtful questions and getting students to ask questions of themselves. You could start with something as simple as these:

1. Where are you getting your information about this topic?
2. What are all the potential concerns about receiving your information from this source?
3. What else might you want to learn about this, and where could you go to learn it?

How we learn about the world through various media and how that information can be used and misused are worthy discussion fodder in every classroom at some point. The teenager who is content to learn about her world by reading hashtags either misunderstands how this practice limits her learning, doesn’t realize that more comprehensive information is available elsewhere, or is satisfied with her decidedly limited scope of knowledge. I prefer not to think that the latter might be true.  

After all, children are naturally curious. Spend five minutes with any toddler, and you will know this is true.  As kids get older, that curiosity blooms in some and withers in others. Consequently, fostering curiosity through the curriculum, rather than in spite of it, should be the job of every educator, as Southwestern University President Ed Burger wrote in this outstanding op-ed piece. I wonder whether helping student learn to question the media that informs them might revive the moribund curiosity of many young people.  

Teachers need not limit their discussions to the online acquisition of knowledge. Under the broader topic of digital citizenship, teachers could conduct classroom conversations about appropriate and inappropriate behavior in online interactions, the potential dangers of entering into a hyper-connected media world, what to share and with whom to share it, and how to leave behind a positive digital footprint that won’t come back to haunt them sometime in the future.

In my experience, many schools plan their digital citizenship lessons as separate modules conducted during advisory periods, assemblies, or study halls. This practice gives the impression that the lesson isn’t related to what’s going on in class and that the school merely needed to be able to check “Yes” on some document verifying that they did indeed address the subject of digital citizenship with their students. Lessons taught out of context rarely have lasting impact. Students need to talk about digital citizenship and media literacy at the moment when they need it, when it intersects with their learning.

To some, the topics of digital citizenship and media literacy seem like just more to add to an already packed list of things we have to teach young people that they should have learned at home. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were TEKS or Common Core Standards for parenting? Even if there were, this is something students need to think about in multiple contexts. With media and technology at the forefront of nearly every waking hour of our lives, we can’t talk about this enough--not in a fake, “lessony” manner, but in ways that feel real, natural, organic, and relevant. Really, that’s how all learning should be, don’t you think?

On Community Conversations and Glitter

On Monday night, I participated in a Community Conversations event in Dallas. Though it was my first time to attend, these meetings—initially a response to the unthinkable violence in Dallas and elsewhere over the summer—have been taking place once a month since July.

For two and a half hours, a group of mostly strangers—young, old, white, black, Christian, Jewish, atheist, straight, gay, male, female—gathered to talk, to listen, to ask questions, and to seek to understand one another. That evening, we talked about our beliefs. We shared stories about violence and prejudice. We lamented the turbulent political climate. We made ourselves vulnerable, sharing thoughts many of us had never vocalized before. We faced truths about ourselves and one other. No topic was off limits: religion, race, politics, social media, education, parenting, fear, bigotry. We didn’t always agree, but we did always listen and seek to understand.

That evening was a sharp contrast to what I have seen blowing up on Facebook and Twitter in recent months with regard to the upcoming election. People on both sides are spewing opinions as if they were facts, posting and reposting videos and fake news stories as if they were truths, and ridiculing and/or attacking anyone who doesn’t share their political stance. No one is listening. No one is seeking to understand.

According to brain researchers, when people are in a state of extreme stress, fear, panic, or trauma, their brains enters a state of “fight, flight, or freeze” as a means of self-protection. The “upstairs” brain shuts down, and the “downstairs” brain takes over as they enter alarm mode. When the brain is in alarm mode, no learning occurs since self-preservation is the brain’s sole concern.

It seems as if the brains of most everyone in my social media network have shifted into alarm mode. So much anxiety, fear, and panic exist that the thinking parts of our brains have been hijacked by our downstairs brains. Calm discussion and intellectual discourse have disappeared, only to be replaced by angry rants, fearful diatribes, and vitriolic attacks. Sadly, we are hearing the same things from the candidates themselves.

As educators, our classrooms are microcosms of the world. Students of all backgrounds and beliefs gather to be educated. But so much can get the way of that objective. For one thing, many students come to us dealing with a lot of emotional noise and trauma.  Their brains aren’t ready for learning because they’re in alarm mode, always vigilant because they’re never sure where the next attack is coming from. Sometimes, the students’ trauma is due to life circumstances outside of school; other students are living the trauma in our classrooms on a daily basis as they face the cruelty of growing up in a social environment that isn’t always kind or supportive.

Students at Momentous Institute—a lab school in Dallas educating urban children from three years old to 5th grade, many of whom come from trauma backgrounds—learn about their own emotional well-being as part of their everyday curriculum. One technique the students use to help manage their stress involves a jar filled with glitter suspended in a liquid. The students are taught to think of the jar in terms of their own emotional well-being. They shake up the jars and observe the tiny specks of glitter whirling wildly, and they equate that with their own feelings when they’re in alarm mode, when stress, fear, anger, and trauma have taken over. The students learn to watch the jar mindfully and wait for the glitter to settle, just as sometimes they need to pause, take some deep breaths, and settle their own emotional glitter before they’re ready to learn.

Our nation needs to settle its glitter. Our social media feeds need to settle their glitter.

Our students need to settle theirs, too.

We can’t do much to make the myriad of issues our students face outside of school disappear, but we do have some control over what goes on while students are in our classrooms. The efforts we take to build community—to allow our students to interact with, learn about, gain respect for, and grow to trust others who may not be like them—are not wasted. When our classrooms and hallways become emotionally safe spaces for students, we open new possibilities for intellectual and personal growth.  

Since the outside world isn’t setting much of a good example of how to engage in civil discourse, how to discuss a topic, how to weigh multiple sides of an issue, how to disagree without attacking, and—perhaps most importantly—how to listen, we must teach our students these habits ourselves. If a student leaves school with a disposition for empathetic listening and a desire to understand that outweighs his need to be understood, we will have done work that will change his life forever.

My first visit to Community Conversations underscored for me my own need to have dialogue with people who are not like me. By seeking to understand others, I gain empathy for them. I may not change my mind, but I learn more about who they are and where they are coming from. And I see that, even though we may have wildly disparate experiences and be seemingly polar opposites in terms of opinions, we share many basic human needs in common.   

So many of our negative interactions with others stem from fear, ignorance, or lack of understanding. This is why creating a safe space, building community, and fostering authentic dialogue should be top priorities in every educator’s practice. If we can learn to listen to one another, to seek to understand others, and to settle our glitter, we can live and learn peacefully together in school and in the wider world.   

Brain Breaks

When you lift weights in the gym, you often need to take a break between sets to let your body rest and reset.  Similarly, when you ask your students to do "heavy lifting" mentally in your class, you should give them a brain break approximately every 15 minutes.  This allows information and skills to settle into the brain while a different part of their brain or body takes over briefly; moments later, students can return to their academic task refreshed and refocused.  

Here are examples of 10 brain breaks you could try in your classroom:

1.  Pause in your lecture every 10 minutes to allow students to explain their lecture notes to a person sitting beside them. 

2.  Brain gymnastics:  Give students five seconds to write the numbers by one as quickly as they can. "1, 2, 3, 4, 5.."  Then, ask them to write the numbers by one as quickly as they can while reciting their numbers by two as loudly and quickly as they can.  (Writing "1, 2, 3, 4." while saying "2, 4, 6, 8, 10.")  

3.  Play a quick version of Simon Says.  If you don't remember how to play, Google it. 

4.  Touch 4 Walls:  When students need a wiggle break, ask them to get up and touch 4 walls in your classroom.  As they visit each wall, they might identify something they have learned, examine something on each wall, or simply say a word or phrase as they touch the wall.

5. Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament:  Ask everyone to stand, find a partner, and challenge that person to a quick game of rock, paper, scissors.  Whoever loses sits down, and the winners challenge another winner.  Keep going until one person emerges as the victor.  

6.  Nose Goes:  This is a quick way to decide which member of a pair or group has to do something (get materials, go first, etc.).  When you say, "Nose goes!", each member of the group touches his or her nose.  The last one to do so is the one who gets to do the required task.   Kids love this.  I know.  It's crazy, right?

7.  What Did I Just Say?  Stop after (or during) giving directions or assignments and ask students to turn to a partner and tell that partner what you just told the class.  Or use other quick neighbor interaction:  (Tell your neighbor what you had for lunch.  Give your neighbor a high five.  Or a fist-bump.  Thank the person sitting behind you for coming to class today.).

8.  Activity Movement:  Place supplies or handouts in corners of the room.  Rather than handing out the papers or supplies yourself, ask students to stand up and get them.  Sometimes, I ask students to send the tallest person, the nicest person, the sleepiest person, etc. in the group to get supplies or handouts for the entire group. You're not a flight attendant; your students can fetch what they need on their own.  They'll appreciate the opportunity to move.

9.  Relaxation Exercises (or Chair Yoga):  Sometimes the brain break can involve just a moment of stretching or relaxation.  Stretching to the ceiling, looking left and right, leaning the head to either side, shrugging the shoulders for 20 seconds and then releasing them, deep breathing, or doing a spinal twist in your chair can get the wiggles out, release the tension, and focus your mind.  

10.  Stand, Sit, and Spell:  Choose a word that represents some content you are trying to teach (i.e., PHOTOSYNTHESIS).  As you spell the word aloud, ask your students to stand when you say a consonant and sit when you say a vowel.  See if you can speed it up.  Or have the males sit for consonants and stand for vowels while the females sit for vowels and stand for consonants.  Try letting them see the word on the screen or board as they sit, stand, and spell.  Then try it with the word out of sight.               

Many of the strategies above seem kind of silly and-dare I say it?-fun.  What's wrong with having a little fun in school, especially when it gets kids mentally prepared to focus back in on brain-intensive work? 

Giving Myself Feedback on Giving My Students Feedback

Imagine the worst football coach ever. He watches his team play a losing season but waits until the very end of the final game to let the players know everything they’ve done wrong in each game. As the team is getting chewed out and lectured, they feel terrible about what they’ve done. They feel like failures (though the scores on the scoreboard also have given them some hint of that all along), some want to quit and never play again, and even if they wanted to change and improve, it’s too late now. The games have been played and the record books are closed.

In my English classes, I was sometimes like that coach. I let my students work on pieces of writing, gave them little guidance beyond the initial assignment and perhaps a skills lesson at the beginning, and then collected their completed papers, which I spent hours of my outside-of-school life grading. It was like a second job, and I was the manager who was writing hundreds of scathing employee evaluations. My students received their grades--usually not as high as they’d hoped for--along with countless corrections and frustratedly scribbled comments explaining how far they had fallen short of my expectations. And that was that. No wonder many students shut down and began to view themselves as failures. I had prevented any hope of a growth mindset taking hold. Except for the most resilient and determined ones who sought help to pull their grades up, most of my students decided then and there that writing was a skill they just weren’t any good at, and they lost all hope for future improvement.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the feedback we give our students. I have yet to find one expert in the field who says that the time and effort I spent writing comments on my students’ finished papers was worth it. I should have known that already. My students had already given me the feedback I needed in the form of crumpled up essays left in the trashcan or abandoned on the classroom floor. They weren’t planning to use my comments to help them improve; mostly, they resented me for writing them.

Several things were problematic about the way I was approaching writing in my classes. First, I had created a culture where the grade was the one important goal. Learning and improvement were not on the students’ radar screens at all. Second, I didn’t realize when the feedback was necessary and welcome: along the way as the students were doing the writing. I should have been working feverishly while my students were writing, holding brief conferences with each student to pinpoint precise moves that would help that student along the way, and I should have spent much less out-of-class time scrawling comments on student papers. Of course, this was often impossible because much of my students’ writing time occurred at home where I was not available for assessment. My class time, I thought, was too precious to waste on allowing students to sit there and write. Finally, I mistakenly believed that it was my job to rewrite my students’ papers for them, to use my expert editing and revision skills to spot and correct every error and to reword, reorganize, and clarify their writing for them. It was a rigorous mental exercise for me; my students, however, learned nothing from it.  

I’m embarrassed now as I think back on some of the types of comments I wrote on student papers. Here are some of the types of things I said and what I really meant:

What I wrote: Why didn’t you [whatever thing you were supposed to have done but didn’t]? We talked about this in class!

What I meant: By “we talked about it,” I mean that I mentioned it to the class as part of my lecture on things to include in your paper. Why didn’t you do the thing I told you to do but never checked to see if you knew how nor even understood what I was saying. Though I didn’t let you do any thinking about this on your own or process this skill with other students, I am still holding you fully accountable for this concept.

_____________________________

What I wrote:  Fragment!

What I meant:  I know the difference between a fragment and a complete sentence, and I have just proven that by pointing it out on your paper. Apparently, you have not mastered this skill, and it’s probably because I didn’t spend any time allowing you to explore this grammatical concept with any guidance.

____________________________

What I wrote:  (I didn’t write any words here; I just circled a bunch of errors, added some necessary commas, and corrected some capitalization issues)

What I meant: Proofreading is the most important thing, and you don’t do it well. In fact, it’s more important than the ideas you are writing about or whether your writing communicates its intended message. Since I have clearly spent a ton of time finding every error and correcting it in red pen, you can just make the changes that I’ve made for you on your original draft and know that your paper will be better. I just hope you’re learning about punctuation and capitalization while you make those changes.

__________________________

What I wrote: Good job! Nice! Excellent!

What I meant: I have access to a thesaurus so that I can give you many positive words that are actually rather vague and don’t let you know what you have done that has met my approval. I hope you’re a mind reader so you’ll know to keep doing those things in future essays.

__________________________

What I wrote: Weak thesis.

What I meant:  You may have noticed that I wrote this on nearly every student’s paper in the class. I taught it. Why didn’t you or anyone else get it? Surely it couldn’t be my fault, right?

__________________________

What I wrote: You need to [whatever I think the student should have done instead of what the student did…].

What I meant: Obviously, I know best, and this has become my paper instead of yours. Writing is a science, not an art, and it’s full of rights and wrongs. What you did was wrong. I’m not going to make suggestions or ask you questions to help you make the best choice; I’m going to issue a commandment.  Your omnipotent teacher has spoken.  

__________________________

I could go on, but I will spare you the gory details.

In hindsight, I could have been more thoughtful about the way I worded much of my feedback in written comments and in conversations with my students. My feedback frequently took the form of “you” statements and commands (“You should…,” “Move this…,” “Don’t…”). In my writing interactions with student writers, I now try to focus on “I” statements:

• “I see what you’re trying to do here, but I’m a bit confused by what you mean.”
• “I’d love to hear more about this.”
• “I am a little unclear about how this quotation relates to the point you’re trying to make.”
• “I generally expect to find a thesis statement somewhere in the first paragraph of an essay, but I’m not sure which sentence you’re intending to be your thesis.”  

Statements such as these put the writer in the driver’s seat and make my comments seem a lot less like attacks. I’m speaking as a reader who is interested in what the writer has to say and is sharing reactions with her. I hope that my reader responses will prompt the writer to think about the choices she made and to consider making some changes to help other readers.

Improving the quality of my written feedback is one step toward improvement, but I think there are still better ways to achieve the results I wanted. If I had been more intentional about providing feedback along the way rather than at the end of the writing process, I could have had small conferences with students to address the aspects of their writing that would produce the most improvement in the moment. If I noticed that several students were experiencing the same difficulty, I could have stopped class for a bit to teach a quick  mini-lesson to address this common issue. Then I could have followed up with any students who needed some individual attention to master that concept as they practiced.

On mornings like today as I leave my car and walk into work, I see and hear the Vines High School marching band practicing on the parking lot across the street. Their director, whose comments I often hear as he addresses his students on a loudspeaker from atop his observation tower, offers excellent feedback in the moment. He’s consistently encouraging but meticulous as he pinpoints his musicians’ point of confusion, gives them some instruction or advice, and then asks them to retry the trouble spot and make the necessary adjustments. I imagine he gets exactly the results he seeks.

I wish I had been more deliberate at offering that sort of feedback for my students when they needed it most rather than waiting until the end and providing them with a lengthy list of problems to address.

Like many teachers, I struggled with assessment and providing feedback and did what I thought I was supposed to do. I wasn’t deliberately negligent and certainly put in ample effort, but I seldom saw the growth and results I hoped to achieve. I needed to remember that I was a coach too--a writing coach--and that timeouts and halftime pep talks were necessary to redirect my students, to pump them up when they were feeling defeated, and to send them back into the game with a plan to lead themselves to victory.