Tag Archives: academic preparedness

Every Human Being Needs Affirmation and Our Students Need it Most of All!

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One of the most important questions in organizational management and leadership is “who exists to serve whom?” In every organization and in every supply chain, everyone must know whom they exist to serve. They must also know on whom they rely because in addition to serving our customers, whether internal or external, we must also recognize the people on whom our success depends.

That recognition enables us to provide affirmation to the people who are important to us, whether in our workplace or in our private lives. It is, I believe, a universal truth that each of us requires affirmation from the people in our lives.

One of the underlying assertions and assumptions in Education Reimagined, One Success at a Time: The Hawkins Model©, my book-in-process, is:

“The value of everything in life is a function of the quality of our relationships with the people in our lives.”

There is no place where these principles are more essential than in education—in our schools and classrooms.

Everyone working in education exists to serve society because the future of our society is contingent upon the quality of the education we provide to our children.

Children are our society’s most valuable resource—all children, not just a fortunate few—so it follows that everything we do must serve the best interests of our children.

This makes the job of teachers, other educators, their leaders, and all the people who support them—who serve them—among the most important jobs in all of society. Our children are the foundation on which all our futures depend.

Another of my assertions and assumptions, is that:

“Education is the intellectual and cultural infrastructure of America.”

It is the most important of all investments our government and its citizens will make.

When we speak of education, we must understand that it is comprised of three components:

  • The education system
  • Its people
  • The education process.

We define the education process as “the way we structure, organize, task, staff, resource, and evaluate the performance of our schools and classrooms.”

It helps if we understand that the education process is a logical construct with which we conduct our mission and purpose. Like a manufacturing, assembly, or service-delivery process, or even a software application, the education process is the tool we provide to our people to fulfill their mission and purpose which is to make certain that every one of our nation’s children learns as much as they are able at their own best speed so they will have meaningful choices in life and will fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship.

“Learning is the only thing that counts and that should be counted.”

Is yet another of our assertions and assumptions.

To achieve this mission and purpose we must provide our teachers with an “education process” of sufficient quality and capability to meet the needs of a diverse population of children with a cavernous disparity in the levels of academic preparedness and emotional development that they bring with them when they arrive at our door for their first day of kindergarten.

The book you are about to read should be viewed as a strategic plan designed to fulfill this mission and purpose. Before we begin, let us present our biases for all the world to see.

The problems in education in America and the unacceptable outcomes of so many of our nation’s children—particularly children of color, who are poor, or for whom English is a second language, and millions of others—are not because our nation’s teachers are incapable of teaching. It is my assertion that teaching is one of the most essential jobs in all of society and that our teachers are responsible for all the good things that happen in our schools.

            Teachers are unsung American heroes who deserve our respect, admiration, and support. Blaming teachers for the problem in our schools is like blaming soldiers for the wars their nation asks them to fight.

            We will also show that the problem is not that our children are incapable of learning. A child’s brain is the most remarkable organic matter in the universe and nature has programmed it to soak up the world into which it is born. Just as teachers can only do as much as the education process enables them to do, a child’s brain can only learn what we give it the opportunity to learn.

Although they do not yet recognize this work as such, I am offering it as a gift to teachers. I have designed The Hawkins Model© to enable teachers to enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done, recognizing that they can only experience it when their students experience success in learning and are reaping the rewards that only an education of that quality can create.

My request to readers of this work is to read it not in search of reasons why it might not work but rather to imagine what it would be like for teachers to teach and children to learn in such an innovative and adaptive environment. Please open your hearts and minds to imagine a new way of thinking about education.

Remember, anything humankind can imagine human beings can do.

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Learning is the Only Thing that Counts and Time Must Be a Variable Resource

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In our existing classrooms, students are given only so much time to study a new lesson and practice its skills, while striving to learn from their mistakes. Time must be a variable resource available for teacher and students in whatever quantities students require to learn.

The administration of tests and moving students on to new lessons is driven by schedules and calendars embedded in academic standards rather than by the needs of students and teachers. In other settings we test to determine if someone or something is ready. Why not in education?

Across the U.S., today we can estimate that, when it is time for the chapter test, 30 percent or less of students will earn A’s, and B’s, while another thirty five percent, approximately, will earn C’s. The remaining 35 percent of students will post D’s and F’s. All will be moved on to subsequent lessons in each subject area, ready or not.

Only the top thirty percent will move on to new lessons in possession of the prerequisite knowledge and skills success on subsequent lessons will require. These students will learn more as they move from one lesson to the next but what about their classmates?

Somehow, we must embrace the maxim that all kids count or none of them count. Students pushed ahead without prerequisite knowledge and skills will fall behind with each lesson.

Don’t take my word for it. Examine teachers’ gradebooks. It matters little that students in a few schools and classrooms achieve at a high level because they are the exceptions, not the norm. The good fortune of the students in these schools is a function of the high level of academic preparedness and emotional development they bring with them to kindergarten. Students who are not so fortunate exist in a different reality, as do their teachers. These kids need the same opportunity to learn.

Sometimes these less fortunate classrooms are in other schools in the same community, or even other classrooms in the same school. Sadly, the existing education process—the way we structure, organize, task, staff, resource and evaluate teachers, students, and their classroom—rarely allows teachers to adapt what they do to meet the needs of students. The process is focused more on conformance and compliance than it is on success in learning. We set children up for failure, by the millions, not only in school but in life.

Kids who are pushed ahead with Cs, Ds, and Fs and who lack the prerequisite knowledge and skills on which future lessons depend, will learn less and less as they move from semester to semester. When it is time for them to sit for state and NAEP exams, we should not be surprised that their outcomes will resemble if not mirror the scores recorded in their teachers’ gradebooks.  By the time these latter students move on to middle school they will be poorly prepared and, if it has not already begun to happen, they will give up and quit trying.

If you are a middle school teacher, how many new students arrive for their first day of school who do not care about learning and do not try? How successful are you in turning these kids around? How easy does the education process make it to turn these kids around?

Despite the best and even heroic effort of teachers, giving up because of their lack of success is what students have learned during their first six years of school. Don’t you agree, we should be able to do better?

Teachers’ frustrations have been apparent for years, not only with their individual and collective voices, but also with their choices. Far too often their choice is to leave the profession.

This reality exists because the education process at work in our schools and on which we expect teachers and their students to rely has been flawed for decades.

These will be the outcomes we will get until we choose to do something different. I offer my education model as an alternate approach.  The Hawkins Model© is available for free for any school district willing to put it to the test in one of their struggling elementary schools, of which there are thousands throughout the U.S.

Please understand, this is not a problem that will fix itself. If we want better outcomes we must try something new and, for this, education leaders must accept responsibility. This is true of teachers’ unions, also.

It is not until we stop blaming others and accept responsibility for our problems that we begin to acquire the power to solve them.

——————-

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The Hawkins Model© – the Perfect Solution for the Post-Covid Challenge in Our Schools!

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What we hear on the news, night after night, is how concerned educators and parents are that their kids have fallen behind during the almost a year and a half of a pandemic that has placed the entire world in turmoil. It seems only logical we are striving to figure out how to help students catch up. The question is, catch up with what?

Educators and parents are encouraged to step back and rethink their concern about the need for students to catch up and get back to where they would have been had their lives not been so unexpectedly disrupted, for what seemed like forever. Unfortunately, none of us can go back to where we used to be or where we think we should be. Life is forcing us to create a new normal and this presents us with an incredible opportunity to change the course of history.  

Educators are preparing to make decisions that will have long-term consequences for every single one of our children, so let us be sure to make the best decisions possible. The truth is, we cannot help students catch up nor should we.

We must change our perspective so that we can understand our students are not behind—”they are where they are,” to paraphrase a popular idiom.

Our challenge must not be to return to our practice of pushing kids ahead more quickly than they are ready, which has long been one of the most devastating flaws in our existing education process. Most of our students have been pushed ahead before they were ready from one lesson to the next, since Kindergarten.

Educators worry about test results, but what test results have revealed, for decades, is whole populations of students who are behind where someone thought they ought to be. Our interpretation should be something else, altogether. What test results reveal is that what we have been doing has not worked for millions of children. Do we really want to repeat the mistakes of the past?

Let us re-clarify, for ourselves as well as for our students, that our mission is and has always been:

“to help children learn as much as they are able at their own best pace, in route to whatever future they will choose for themselves, some day.”

We must have no illusions our children will all end up in the same place on graduation day, all headed in the same direction, any more than we should cling to the illusion they should all be at the same point today, or any other day, on an arbitrary academic development track.   

Not only is it true “they are where they are!” it is equally true “what they know is what they know, not what we think they ought to know!”

It is from what they know, today, that our schools should restart the marathon, helping students along  a path to get where they will someday want or need to be, at their own best pace; not a pace designated by arbitrary standards and schedules.

A truth we already know but must be reminded of is millions of children start from behind on their first day of school and most of them never catch up; not because they are incapable of catching up rather because the education process is not structured so that helping them catch up is a priority.

The Hawkins Model© is designed to do what we should have been doing all along; determine where kids are on an academic preparedness and emotional development continuum, beginning on the day they become our responsibility, and then tailor an academic plan to help them progress, one success after another, toward whatever future they will choose for themselves, someday.

Our initial goal must be to help all students build a solid academic foundation and a healthy self-esteem on which they can create their own unique futures. It does not matter who gets where, first; what matters is learning enough to give themselves meaningful choices.

What matters, whether we are talking about reading, writing, math, science, social studies, or learning how to ride a bicycle, is not how fast they learn, or how quickly they make up lost ground. The only thing that matters is whether they have learned to ride that bike and utilize everything else they have learned to get to where they need to be or to go.  Our objective must be applied academics—how well can young people apply in real life, all they have learned.

We do our students no favor by pushing them beyond the cusp of their capabilities. Instead, we must remind ourselves, repeatedly, everything our students learn today becomes the pre-requisite knowledge and skill they will need to learn the lessons of tomorrow and all the tomorrows that follow. If they reach a point where their portfolio of pre-requisite knowledge and skills is empty, we have set them up for failure; the kind of failure from which many of them will never recover.

If we began today, by this September of 2021, we could implement the principles and practices of The Hawkins Model©, adapted for the age and grade level of every student. From that point forward, students would begin moving from one success to the next where they will always find themselves well-prepared.  

One of the exciting things about teaching kids to think of success as a process is once they master that process, their pace of learning will accelerate until the next thing we know they have progressed further than they could ever have gone had our minds been focused on catching up.