Teachers: What would You Change to Produce Better Outcomes for your Students?

Posted on May 28, 2024 by admin

What are some of the outcomes you would like to change in the 2024-25 school year? Below is my list but please feel free to add, subtract, or create a list of your own. What do you want:

Academic success for all students rather than pushing some ahead before they are ready,
Better relationships with students (more opportunities to enjoy the kind of relationships you have had with your favorite students over the course of your career),
To deal with fewer behavioral issues in your classrooms and have more support from the office when you need it,
More discretion to adapt to the unique needs of students and to have more time to make such adjustments,
Better relationships with parents of your students,
Not to be blamed for disappointing outcomes of students,
To enjoy the pride of a job well-done, which comes from the success of your students.
To receive the respect and compensation teachers deserve for doing one of the most important and challenging jobs in all of society, and
To ensure your students have meaningful choices in life to provide for themselves and their families, contribute value to society, and fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship.

Few teachers can enjoy all such outcomes, routinely, and there is a reason for this. The way classrooms are structured, organized, staffed, tasked, resourced, and evaluated—which is what I refer to as the “education process”—is not designed to produce such outcomes. This existing education process is not equipped to deal with more than a few exceptions from the norm.

In many schools and classrooms there are more students who require more attention than any one teacher can handle without adversely impacting their ability to meet the needs of the rest of the class.

Ask yourselves whether any of the changes in policy, academic standards, methodologies, technologies, or reform initiatives over the past twenty years have resulted in a positive transformation of your classroom? The way teachers are asked to do their important work is a process no different, conceptually, than any other production or service-delivery process.

You know well that the “school choice” movement is not improving the outcome of students because moving teachers and students to a new building, changing the name above the door, and hiring less qualified teachers who are non-union does not help kids learn. Good teachers in an environment that allows them to adapt to the disparate needs of students is what enables students to learn.

It does not help at all when teachers are expected to try new things without adapting the education process to accommodate those changes. A juggler, for example, can successfully keep three balls moving; some can do four or maybe even five, but there is a limit to the number extra balls most jugglers can handle without dropping one.

As long as education policy makers remain loyal to the existing education process and expect teachers to teach an increasingly diverse population of students with ever greater disparity in academic preparation (which we define as lacking the prerequisite knowledge and skills), and emotional development (lack of maturity), millions of students will languish, and many thousands of teachers will feel the distress such a reality engenders.

And if that were not bad enough, teachers are expected to bear the burden of budget shortfalls? Unfavorable adjustments to teacher-to-student ratios often follow. If outcomes are disappointing no matter how hard people work or how qualified they are, the problem rests with the process.

Teachers reading this are asked to understand that all the complaints in the world, whether to administrators, or colleagues in the faculty break room or at union and association meetings, will not lead to a satisfactory solution. In any environment, if people want meaningful change, they must become advocates for new and specific, not generalized solutions.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying “we cannot solve a problem with the thinking that created it.” We must step outside the boundaries of conventional thinking.

Please examine the education model I have developed, not seeking reasons why it might not work but rather to imagine what it would be liked to teach in such an innovative environment.

This model is not offered to make teaching easier, because teaching is not easy, nor will it ever be. What this new model is designed to do is put teachers in a better position to be successful, so they can develop and practice their craft, and minimize the distractions that make teaching even more challenging than it needs to be.

While you are at my website, you are invited to explore further by reading my posts dated December 15, 2023, and January 23, 2024, respectively. The first is a 3,100-word essay summarizing the differences between the existing education process and my model. The second, is a 1,600-word summary of an experiment I conducted in a week-long sub assignment for a middle school math teacher that sparked the idea for my model.

If you want to learn more, click on the tab “Bio” at the top of this page and read why I feel qualified to develop and offer a new education model to you.

If you want to learn the full details of The Hawkins Model©, click on the tab at the top of the page that reads, “Education Reimagined, One Success at a Time – The Implementation plan.

Please consider helping me by sharing this post to spread the word about my model to your colleagues.

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Academic success, students, relationships with students, favorite students, behavioral issues, classrooms, unique needs of students, relationships with parents, pride of a job well-done, respect and compensation teachers deserve, meaningful choices, responsibilities of citizenship teachers, education process, school choice, less qualified teachers, non-union, Good teachers, disparate needs of students help students learn, education policy makers, academic preparation, prerequisite knowledge, emotional development, teacher to student ratios, teaching is not easy

Bad Days and Grumpy Moods – we all have them both Teachers and Students

Posted on August 19, 2019 by admin

A friend on Facebook recently posted a meme, published by Miramir.com, quoting author Rebecca Eanes.

“So often, children are punished for being human. They are not allowed to have grumpy moods, bad days, disrespectful tones, or bad attitudes. Yet, we adults have them all the time. None of us are perfect. We must stop holding our children to a higher standard or perfection than we can attain ourselves.”

-Author, Rebecca Eanes, posted at Miramir.com

It is a terrific message and should be read by all. Having, “grumpy moods, bad days, . . .” is a universal human characteristic. We are all like that, even kids. When kids have that kind of day at school or at home, however, they usually get into trouble. This is especially true in school because the education process demands conformance, obedience, and “respectful tones.” Anything else disrupts the classroom and interferes with the work of teachers and classmates.

Because of the way our education process is structured, we leave no room for our students to do the very things we will likely do when we get home because the behavior of students led to a bad day, left us in a grumpy mood, and feeling short-tempered. Hopefully, at home, our families and friends will back off and give us space to work through the frustration we feel. Good friends and good families are like that. They are people who love us and have no expectation that we be perfect, in fact, they love us with all our “perfect imperfections,” as John Legend’s song describes them. And, at home, we typically have places where we can get away from everyone, even if only for a moment or two.

At school, even for good teachers, it is not so easy. Good teachers care but are not allotted enough time to help students work through the frustrations that flow from dealing, in some instances, with problems at home that we can hardly imagine. There are just too many kids, too much to do, and nowhere near enough time. So, we discipline students and even send them to the office if their frustrations and acting out cause too much disruption. It’s a last resort for teachers but their responsibility extends beyond the individual child, to a classroom full of other students.

The problem isn’t just that we give kids a reprimand, time out, or trip to the office—all of which brand the child as a discipline problem–the most significant consequences that flow from such actions are related to the fact that they lose time. They miss out on lessons that are being taught and practice time that is being given, and opportunities to get in-class assistance from their teacher. Most significantly, they fall ever further behind and this this only exacerbates their situation and fuels the frustration that got them in trouble to begin with.

The combination of their frustrations from the challenges at home, combined with the hopeless feeling of falling further behind, academically, and being viewed as “a problem student” or “bad kid” pile up until a student feels overwhelmed. When kids begin to feel hopeless and powerless to extricate themselves from bad situations, the risk is that they may choose to give up and stop trying.

Think about how you feel when you have had ”meltdown” incidents. For many of us, what we feel is helplessness and hopelessness. When the episode passes, as they always do, they may have created some inconveniences with which we must deal, but we are still able to get back in the game. For our students, in similar circumstances, the game clock is ticking away and there are no timeouts as in an athletic contest, where the whole game pauses to let participants catch their breath.

The academic standards that drive teachers and classrooms function like a conveyor belt. Once a child falls off, it is difficult for them to get back on the belt, even with our help. If they get back on, they can see how much further behind they have fallen, relative to their classmates.

Those academic standards are tied to an external, arbitrary timeline that may be totally out of sync with a child’s unique internal timetable. We all know how difficult it can be to get back in sync with all that is going on in our lives, but for many children, particularly disadvantaged kids, getting back in sync seems next to impossible. Their internal and external timetables are like an event horizon in which the child finds him or herself on the wrong side, with no way to get back on track.

What I have striven to do in the education model I have developed—The Hawkins Model^©—is to eliminate external timetable so that students are never at a place in time that is out of sync with their unique developmental path. Even when schools must teach to a set of academic standards, these represent an outline of what policy makers have determined all children need to learn. We need to ask ourselves what is most important: that students learn these things, even if it takes some children longer than others, or that we strive to get them all from point to point in perfect cadence?

If we accept the premise that the two most essential variables in education are relationships and learning, what are arbitrary timetables? Are they not a “constant” that regulates relationships and learning? If we eliminate the constant variable of time, relationships and learning become independent variables that are not compromised by extraneous forces? We need an education model—education process—that ensures that such forces do not impede a child’s progress down their unique academic path.

We need a model in which the teacher is able give each student the time he or she needs to learn. Teachers often tell me, “this is not possible, there just isn’t enough time.”

Within the context of the existing education process, they are correct. This does not mean that creating time is impossible, only that the existing process and structure does not provide for it. If we are willing to alter the process and structure, we can design it to produce the outcomes we want based on the unique needs of each of our students. It all depends on how we sort our priorities and whether we are willing to question the validity of our structure and process.

In The Hawkins Model^©giving students time they need to learn and work through their frustrations, bad days, and grumpy moods is more important than keeping all students moving at the same pace down the arbitrary timelines that complicate academic standards. The fact that they may need to be separated from the class so as not to disrupt, need not impede their progress, it just delays things a bit.