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

What If We Were Starting from Scratch?

Posted on February 16, 2018 by admin

For the past few years I have been suggesting that if we are not getting the outcomes we need from our public schools—if too many kids are failing—it is time to go back to the drawing board. This is, also, what Chris Weber (@webereducation) has written about, when he suggests the question we should all be asking is:

“How would we design schools, classrooms, teaching, and learning if we started from scratch?”

Starting from scratch is what I have done to create an education model that I believe will enable us to give each child the quality education they deserve. In the white paper that accompanies my education model and that provides the logical foundation for it, I wrote:

“What I have endeavored to do is apply a systems’ thinking approach to examine public education in America, and the educational process at work within that system, as an integral whole. Systems’ thinking, introduced by Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (Doubleday, New York, 1990), allows one to challenge his or her fundamental assumptions and to understand how a system is structured to produce the results it gets. One also begins to see how one’s own actions, as a player within the system, contribute to its disappointing outcomes.”

And,

“Through the utilization of the tools and principles of systems thinking, positive leadership, and application of organizational principles, we need to identify clear objectives for the creation of an educational process that will produce the results we want and for creating the structure to support those objectives.”

The new process we create must be engineered to facilitate, in every conceivable way, the specific components we determine to be essential if we are to teach the whole child.

Since I have been active on Twitter the number of times educators—teachers, administrators, principals and superintendents—have been talking about the importance of building relationships with students has increased exponentially. Particularly in the aftermath of the most recent school shooting, everyone has been stressing the importance of conveying to kids that they are loved. When some students are unable to form close relationships with their teachers and other students they are at risk of becoming isolated, picked on, bullied, or even ignored. These are the kids who may feel driven to do desperate, dangerous things.

Now, think about your own school and classroom and examine where the responsibility for building warm nurturing relationship with students falls on your priority list. Think about how much of your time are you able to allocate to this activity that we understand to be so vital.

Also, think about the 5 and 6-year-old students who arrive for their first day of school. Where on their first teacher’s priority list do we find “work to develop warm, nurturing relationships with each child” and how much of that first-year teacher’s time is allocated for that purpose? Is it 100 percent? Is it 50 percent? Or, is it somewhere below 25 or even 10 percent? How does that percentage change as class size increases from 20 to 25 students or even to 35 students?

How much of a teacher’s time can be allocated to winning the trust and affection of each child? How do we find time to do all of the other things demanded of us as teachers?

As it turns out, the relationships, themselves, are key to accomplishing all that is demanded of us. If we have the relationships it makes everything else easier. Most important of all is that once we have built the relationships, everything else we do reinforces and helps us sustain them.

After we have worked so hard for an entire school year to build and solidify our relationships with our students, and have worked to lay the foundation for learning does it really make sense to sever those relationships. Is it truly in the child’s best interests to say goodbye to their favorite teacher and ask them to start all over in the fall, with a teacher who may be a complete stranger? Is this really how we teach the whole child?

If we are honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that the existing educational process was not created for this purpose and it can only be bent and stretched so far.

So, what is the answer? If we truly believe that forming these special relationships with our students is of vital importance, how do we give it the priority it deserves? And, how do we do all of the other things that our students need if they are to succeed?

The answer, today, is that we cannot do it all because the existing education process is neither tasked, structured nor supported to give the whole child what he or she needs to learn and grow.
What we must do is reinvent, re-engineer, or redesign the process in such a way that its priorities are clear.

Effective systems do not just happen, and rarely can a dysfunctional system be sufficiently repaired to do what we need it to do. Systems, organizations, and processes are designed with great attention to detail to ensure that purpose and objectives are clear and that the structure is created to support that purpose. They are complex systems of human behavior and students of the disciplines of organizational leadership have worked to understand their inner dynamics. We cannot just hope the organizations and processes we create will accomplish their purpose and produce the outcomes we are seeking. We must ensure that every activity undertaken exists to support our purpose and mission and we must provide relentless positive leadership to sustain our effort.

The education model I have created has been designed to do this and more? I urge the reader to take the time to examine the model, not it search of reasons why it will not or cannot work rather with the hope that it might. It is available for your review at https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/

Students must be able to build on success, not failure!

Posted on August 29, 2017 by admin

It is incredibly frustrating that public school teachers and administrators have been unwilling and/or unable to take seriously the education model I have developed. It is exasperating because I know teachers want to do what is best for their students. I also know how frustrated so many public school teachers are and that the prospect of burnout is something many of these dedicated men and women fear. That teachers are blamed for the problems in public education must be especially galling.

It is even more frustrating that advocacy groups for black children and other children of color seem totally uninterested in a solution that will end the failure of millions of disadvantaged kids and shut down the schoolhouse to jailhouse pipeline that is transporting these kids to a life of poverty, failure, crime, and early violent deaths.

If only all of these dedicated men and women would open their hearts and minds to the possibility of a new way to educate our nation’s most precious assets.

“This will not work in my classroom(s)!” is what public school teachers and administrators say when they first review my model. I hear it all the time.

Of course, they are correct, but this is exactly my point. In the current education process, nothing different will work because the process is flawed. To paraphrase Linda Darling Hammond, “the existing process is structured to produce the outcomes it gets and we will not get better outcomes if all we do is ask teachers to work harder.”

There are many teachers in high-performing schools who feel good about what they do but there are also many teachers in low-performing schools who are frustrated, daily, because they are unable to get through to unmotivated students.

Odd as it may seem, African-American leaders, who jump through the roof in response to symbols of oppression, do not even bother to respond to the possibility of a solution that will attack the roots of that oppression.

I ask public school educators to take a figurative step back and imagine an environment in which they are expected to give each and every student however much time they need to learn each and every lesson. Imagine an environment in which teachers are expected to develop longer term relationships with students and where the process is structured to facilitate the development of such relationships; with both students and parents.

My challenge to public school teachers and administrators is that they consider that the education process can be re-designed and re-configured to produce whatever outcomes we want.

My challenge to advocates for black children and other children of color to consider the possibility that African-American students and other disadvantaged children do not need to fail.

My education model is constructed on the premise that academic success is no different than success in any other venue. Success is a process of trial and error, of learning from one’s mistakes and applying that knowledge to produce better outcomes. Success is built upon success and the more one succeeds the more confident he or she becomes. The more confident he or she is the more successful one becomes. Success is contagious and can become a powerful source of motivation.

The key, of course, is that one cannot master the process of success until he or she begins to experience success, routinely. In school, kids learn and each lesson learned is a success. Very often, success on subsequent lessons requires that one apply what one has learned from previous lessons. When a foundation of success is laid down in school, young boys and girls approach adulthood with a wide menu of choices in terms of the kind of future that can be built on that foundation.

Imagine, however, when there is no success on which to build. When kids fail, or even learn only part of a given lesson, they are less like to learn the next lesson. A pattern also emerges in this scenario but it is a pattern of failure rather than success.

For many of these kids, failure is the only thing they know. It is only a matter of time before they give up, stop trying, and begin acting out in class. Third grade is when many states begin administering competency examinations. Right from the beginning, a significant percentage of third grade students are unable to pass both math and English language components of their state exams. Although African-American students have the lowest passage rates, the poor performance extends to a percentage of students from all demographic groups, including white students.

By the time these students reach middle school the scores are even lower. In many middle schools, as many as eighty percent of black students fail to pass both exams. Middle school teachers throughout the U.S. can attest to the incredibly low level of motivation displayed by their students. Any illusions that high schools are able to turn the performance of these students around in four years are just that, illusions; high graduation rates notwithstanding.

When they leave school, the overwhelming majority of these low-performing students return to their communities, unqualified for jobs or military service. For many, it is the final station on the schoolhouse to jailhouse line. Far too many suffer early, violent deaths. Those who live spawn a whole new generation of children who will start from behind and will never be given a realistic opportunity to catch up. They are entrapped in a maelstrom of poverty and failure.

It is an American tragedy of unprecedented breadth and scope and it is at the core of our nation’s greatest political, economic, cultural and civil rights challenges. The chasm that divides the American people is very much a function of the bitterness on the part of some citizens because of their resentment that they are asked to support our nation’s poor and infirm.

The magnitude of this reality makes public education the civil rights issue of the 21st Century. That it is a crisis that can be prevented so easily, however, is the greatest tragedy at all. The ambivalence of the people who can bring an end to this tragedy is the greatest mystery of all. Do they not care?

We can end the failure simply by making sure every child has however much time they need in order to learn. If there is a reason why we should not do this, I truly wish someone would explain it to me.

Please check out my model at https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/