Tag Archives: Kindergarten

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 Primacy of Relationships

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The first of the essential variables of the education equation are the relationships between students and their teachers. A universal truth can be said to be that “the quality of one’s life is a function of the quality of our relationships with the people in our lives.” We often hear of individuals blessed with wealth and fame only to learn their lives are consumed by broken relationships and one or more devastating addictions. We are sad to learn how many of these lives come to a tragic end.

When it comes to young children in school there is nothing more important than secure, nurturing and enduring relationships with one or more teachers. This is particularly true of five- and six-year-old children who arrive for their first day of kindergarten, but it is just as true when students move, at the beginning of a new school year, to a new teacher whom they have never met.

It is my assertion that the heart is a portal to the mind and that our best chance to be successful in helping students experience academic success, emotional growth, and good behavior is a close and enduring bond with one’s teacher.

What we know about the remarkable brains of our children is that they are programmed to soak up the world around them and can learn whatever is available to be learned—even after deprivation, illness, and injury—with a little help from its friends, of which teachers are among the most important. Often teachers are the most important.

Yes, we all know how much it helps if parents are involved and accept responsibility for their children, but we also know parenting has never been more difficult than it is today. Whether a child has wonderful relationships with parent(s) or a relationships that are toxic, their teachers and classrooms provide a safe and caring oasis in what is an otherwise difficult and hectic life.

For many of us thinking back on our years in school we are lucky to remember one or two favorite teachers who, for one year, made a difference in our lives. For those of you reading these words who are teachers, how many favorite students, over the course of your career, are peaking around the curtains of your memory, and still bring a smile to your face.

During the first few weeks of the school year, the development of special relationships must be our highest priority, one that is sacrificed for nothing, at any time. A sad reality in our schools throughout the U.S. is that, at the end of every school year, we sever many of the special relationships we were successful in forging over the previous two semesters. It can be equally distressing for students to find that friend(s) whom they looked forward to seeing every day, will be in a classroom down the hall at the beginning of a new and often frightening new school year. Just another routine practice creating distress for kids.

In a June 1, 2022, article in EdWeek, by Hayley Hardison, with the title, “Looping with Students: When it Works and When it Doesn’t.” Citing a 2018 study she concludes that, “. . . looping with elementary students resulted in improved student test scores with the benefits greatest for students of color.”[1]

Not all agree and there are exceptions to almost everything in life. What I have endeavored to do in the development of The Hawkins Model© is, first, to develop some strategies to facilitate the formation and duration of these relationships, and second to make the model adaptive, seeking alternate approaches when students and teachers found this strategy to be counterproductive.

The development of long term, positive relationships between classmates also creates advantages for teachers as they strive to manage both the power of peer relationships, whether positive or negative, and the behavioral issues that often disrupt our classrooms.

In a subsequent blog post we will describe what I believe to be the best way to capitalize on this idea of the “primacy of relationships.”

The existing education process almost totally discounts what I believe to be the single most important variable in the education equation.

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[1] https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/looping-with-students-when-it-works-and-when-it-doesnt/2022/06

If You Believe All Kids Can Learn, Open your Hearts and Minds to Change!

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The Hawkins Model© is constructed on several variables that are essential to a quality education. The most essential is the quality of teacher and student relationships.  My education model is constructed to facilitate the forging of such relationships and sustaining them for longer than a single school year.

Another essential variable is giving kids time to learn. Our education model changes time from a constant to a variable resource available to teachers and students in whatever quantity their success requires.

The third variable is that learning is the only thing that counts. To ensure a child learns we must get them off to a good start, which means taking the time to assess what children know when they arrive for their first day of kindergarten and what they have not yet learned. From what we learn from such assessments we will tailor an academic plan to each child’s unique needs. This determines the starting point for each student’s academic journey.

We choose to accept nothing less than a student’s best. This necessitates ending the practice of stopping a lesson; administering a test; recording whatever grade we assign based upon the number of mistakes each child makes; and then sending our students on to a next lesson, ready or not. For many kids, as a pattern of not being ready develops, it sentences them to a future in which they must deal with the challenges of life in a world they cannot fully understand.

My education model does not utilize tests to determine a grade but rather to confirm whether or not the student has mastered a given lesson or needs more help. We will modify the instruction process so that if the outcome of a test is unacceptable, we go back and reteach the lesson, giving the student the time, practice, help, and affirmation they need to learn from their mistakes. When we deem them ready, we administer a “do-over” exam and when a student achieves success we record that achievement and send the child onto the next lesson, not with a C, D, or F, but rather with an A or B and armed with the prerequisite knowledge and skills future lessons and life will require.

If the child still struggles their teachers’ job is unfinished. Consider that we do not stop teaching kids to ride a bicycle until they ride off down the street.

We interpret success as demonstrating proficiency. We celebrate each student’s academic success because it will help instill the powerful motivation that success can provide and with the development of healthy self-esteems.  

We need to disregard the expectations in the academic standards that all students have two semesters to demonstrate readiness for first grade and, instead, establish the expectation that we have twelve semesters to prepare them for middle school. All students do not begin at the same starting line. What matters is that they get to the finish line. Once a student learns, how long it took them is no longer relevant.

As students gain confidence in their ability to learn, we anticipate an acceleration of their pace in learning. We need not worry they will fall hopelessly behind, which is the case with the existing process. Students fall behind only when the education process does not permit them to finish.

Once we document a student’s success it becomes part of their record until we make a point to verify their mastery on that lesson, which we will make part of the instruction process. Once verified, state testing becomes irrelevant and an unjustifiable use of time.

We accomplish all this by changing the classroom structure from one in which there is one teachers for 25 to 35 students, to  a structure in which we have a team of three teachers for no more than 45 students.

Having a team of three teachers allows them to support one another, collaborate, and to manage a classroom with students progressing at different speeds. This also enhances the ability of teachers to forge relationships of the quality we seek.

The model keeps that classroom of teachers and 45 or fewer students together through the full primary phase of their education, which we define as what we formerly viewed as kindergarten through fifth grade. This eliminates the need to sever teacher/student relationships at the end of every school year and then require them to start over with a new teacher in the fall.

Nothing less than success is acceptable because a child’s success in learning is more important than any arbitrary schedule. We believe this process can substantially improve the probability that every child will experience success in pursuit of whatever goals they set for themselves.  Helping a student develop a pattern of success changes everything and sets them on a path to agency.

With respect to implementation, if a school has three kindergarten classrooms, each with one teacher and 30 students, which requires a total of three teachers, we will need to add three additional teachers to staff two classrooms with teams of three teachers and forty-five or fewer students.

If we assume that the average teacher salary is $65,000, three teachers will require an investment of $195,000 to serve the needs of 90 students at a single grade level. This gives us a per student cost of $2,166. Consider Indiana, as an example. In 2025 they expect to spend over $6,300 per student on vouchers to enable 95,000 students to attend  charter schools or faith-based schools. We believe the probability of student’s success, having learned in the innovative learning environment we are proposing to be significantly greater than sending students to charter schools that, currently, are not performing as well as the community public schools they were created to replace.

Our students, teachers and their communities are winners. The funds invested to add teachers goes right back into the local economy to improve our intellectual infrastructure. As they go about their lives, teachers contribute to the local, state and federal tax bases. Who knows where the money invested in vouchers will end up?

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Students Are Struggling More than Ever. Choose To Lead the Way!

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By now we have all heard the news that test scores from the 2022/23 school year show a significant decline in every subject area, at every grade level, almost everywhere. However much we might like to believe otherwise we cannot change the reality of test scores until we are willing to change what we do.

Business as usual can no longer be an option or the “school choice” movement sweeping across the nation will cause the foundations of community public schools to crumble.

For superintendents of public school districts, testing The Hawkins Model© in just one of their struggling elementary schools is simple and straightforward. Nationwide, we will need to have a minimum of five public school districts testing our model. It is simply a question of who wants to lead the way and in which school a superintendent will choose to begin. There are tens of thousands of struggling elementary schools from which to choose.

In just one school you can:

  • test the model in the kindergarten, first, and second grades for up to a maximum of ninety (90) students in each grade level, or
  • test it in just the kindergarten and first grade classrooms or even,
  • test it in only two kindergarten classrooms..

Since implementation of the model requires only a reorganization of teachers, students, and classrooms and some minor modifications to the way you teach to academic standards, the authority to act is within a local school board’s purview. What does a school district or its leaders have to lose?

Some districts might be worried they will find students falling behind, but the reality is those students are falling behind, already. Under our model, kids may start out slowly, but their achievement against academic standards will begin to accelerate and by the time they are ready to move from one school year to the next, progress will be readily apparent. By the time students are ready for middle school their academic achievement will have surpassed students in every other school in their community.

Implementation is easy because teachers already know how to teach. What they must learn is how to work together on behalf of their students under a new model, how to stay focused on purpose, and how to avoid slipping back into the patterns of the past. Remember, success is as much fun for teachers as it is for students.

The model is available for free to public, publicly funded charter, and faith-based schools. In one day of training, teachers and administrators can be ready to go when school opens in the fall. It will be just teachers and their students in an environment in which the only focus is on helping each child achieve success by learning as much as they are able at their own best pace. Let me reiterate, the only revenue I hope to generate is from royalties from my book, upon publication, with a little help from each of you,

I ask the leaders of each school district to select a small group of innovative teachers and administrators and have them read the first twenty pages of my book The Hawkins Model©: Education Reimagined, One Success at a Time. It is available by clicking on the tab at the top of this page. There you will also find a tab for my bio that will explain what qualifies me to offer this model to you.If you like what you read, I can provide a PDF copy of the manuscript in just a couple of keystrokes.

Think about how you will feel when you read about the success of schools in communities throughout the U.S. and know you could have been among the first to lead the way?

“Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

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These words were shouted at the great Shoeless Joe Jackson when news of the 1919 Black Sox scandal hit the press. Shoeless Joe’s fans did not want to believe that their star could have been involved in throwing the 1919 World Series between Jackson’s Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds.

As we prepare for the 2017/2018 school year it is business as usual for both private and public schools throughout the U.S. Having made no substantive changes in the education process, we can expect the same disappointing outcomes that we have seen in previous years, for as long as any of us can recall. Sure, there are many schools where kids do well and this lulls us into a false sense of security that all is well with public education. However, in schools serving large populations of disadvantaged kids, a disproportionate percentage of whom are black or other minorities, are failing in great numbers. This is an American tragedy of historic proportions and as a fan of public school teachers, I do not want to believe that they will permit this American tragedy to continue. These are children who will suffer their whole lives because we are not willing to change what we do and how we teach.

“Say it ain’t so, teachers!”

Beginning now and over the next several weeks, a whole new class of five and six year-olds will be starting Kindergarten just as others have done in the past. Wherever their public schools may be, they will be greeted by professional teachers who will give their best effort on behalf of their students—our nation’s children. The fact that there is a cavernous disparity in terms of the academic preparedness of the children who will be arriving for their first day of school will not alter the teaching plans that have been developed and approved to help prepare these boys and girls for the first grade.

People underestimate how much of an adverse impact this disparity has on the academic performance of these children. Some of the more advanced students are already reading, can count and maybe do some basic arithmetic. Students on the other end of the academic preparedness continuum may not know or be able to recognize the letters of the alphabet and may not know numbers, colors, or shapes. The challenge to get such a diverse population of students ready to move on to first grade by the end of the school year is formidable. Fortunately, in most states, teachers need not yet worry about high stakes testing, which adds greatly to the pressure to move kids quickly.

Kindergarten teachers do their best to prepare their students for first grade but giving each and every student the time and attention they need in order to learn is neither a priority nor an expectation against which teacher performance will be evaluated. In classrooms where all students are relatively well-prepared, the year will go smoothly. In classrooms where few, if any, are well-prepared things will not be so easy and teachers will struggle to give each child the attention they require. There are just too many of them. When they do move on to first grade, this latter population of students will be as ill-prepared to meet first-grade expectations as they were when they began Kindergarten.

By the third grade when high stakes testing rears its ugly head, the number of students who are struggling will have grown and the results of their first competency exams will reflect that lack of preparedness. Already, there will be many students who are beginning to give up on themselves because they are not learning to succeed, they are learning to fail.

Three years later, when these kids arrive at middle school, the majority will have already stopped trying and will have lost hope. Don’t take my word for it. Pull up the websites of any state’s department of education and you will find that in poor urban and rural school districts, roughly 75 percent of black, middle school students will have been unable to pass both math and English language arts components of that state’s competency exams. In those same schools you will often see that as many as 50 percent of white kids are unable to pass both math and English language arts components.

What you will find in these schools is a cultural disdain for education that transcends both racial and economic boundaries. By the time these kids move from middle school to high school the one lesson they have learned best is that they are unable to learn and that learning is not worth the effort. Let me rephrase that statement. This is not a lesson they have learned on their own, it is the lesson they have been taught simply because the education process has allowed them to fail. We allowed it because teachers were unable to give these kids the time and attention they require and because those same teachers were unwilling to shout out at the tops of their lungs that what they are being asked to do does not work for disadvantaged kids.

Is it any wonder that education reformers are essentially abandoning public schools in our nation’s distressed communities in favor of charter schools? It is unfortunate that reformers lack the insight to recognize that they are making the same mistakes as those made by the leaders of underperforming public schools. At present, charter schools are no more successful in meeting the needs of disadvantaged kids than any other school.

Now, ask yourself how we can go from 25 to 50 percent of middle school students unable to pass state competency exams in math and English language arts to 90+ percent graduation rates from the high schools to which these middle school students will be going. If you think we were able, somehow, to turn these students around during four years of high school, then think again. It would take an extraordinary effort on the part of teachers and students, with the full support of parents, to make up in four years what these kids were unsuccessful at learning during their first nine years of school. Most teachers would be willing to make that effort but that is not what they are being asked to do; it is not the way the education process has been designed to work.

Ninety percent of these young men and women will leave high school, after four years, with a diploma in hand but, for many, it is a meaningless piece of paper. The real world in which these young adults must now make their way is unforgiving and intolerant of shoddy effort and performance. These young people will be confronted with the stark realization that they are unqualified for all but the most menial jobs and they will find this to be true whether they seek work in civilian life, or seek to enlist in the Armed Services.

And, we wonder why education reformers have lost faith in our nation’s public schools. As long as public school superintendents, principals, teachers, and advocates are unwilling to open their eyes, hearts, and minds to the reality that is happening around them, reformers will continue to work, with great zeal, to put public schools out of business. If we allow that to happen the tragedies that the poor and minorities endure, today, will pale in comparison to the consequences of a world in which a quality education is not even available to them. Ours will have become an elitist society and there will be precious little any of us can do about.

Say it ain’t so, Joe!