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What's the difference?

Thoughts on making a real difference in the lives of learners...

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Retaining Staff in a high rent market

3/23/2016

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This week I am hiking, biking and swimming with my family in Palm Desert. Travelling away from the Lower Mainland always gives me a chance to reflect on some of the seemingly unique challenges that we face as school and school district leaders in our corner of the continent. Having said that, the more that we travel, the more evident it becomes that some issues are more universal than you might think.

Yesterday I picked up a newspaper (yes they still actually print them!) and read the following headline: "For teachers in pricey enclaves, paying the rent a tough assignment". Wait a minute, I thought, is this article about my own staff? Every year I lose teachers and support staff for the simple reason that they can't afford to live within a reasonable commuting distance from the school. They search out and find positions farther afield, away from the crazy prices and low vacancy rates of the Greater Vancouver area, or they desert the province altogether. Even the ones who stay, are worn down by the long commutes or crippling rents that have a huge impact on their quality of life. An individual school like ours can't do much to mitigate this problem, but it would appear from the above mentioned article, that a number of school districts in the United States have taken up the challenge in a creative and effective way.

The solution, in an era of declining enrolments and under utilized schools has been, not to sell of property, but to convert it to subsidized housing for staff! In San Francisco for example, the school district has announced that they are going to build 100 housing units on district property and implement rental subsidies and forgivable housing loans to help to retain younger faculty and staff.In Silicon Valley, the district is converting a closed elementary school site to 200 rental units and offering them to staff at below market rates. Rather than selling off property to developers, they are using it to attract and retain high calibre staff. Universities have been doing the same thing for years in order to attract professors to areas with high costs of living. Independent schools, especially those with boarding, offer faculty housing as an additional incentive to getting the best people to relocate. This is not a new idea, it just hasn't been actively applied in our public school districts.

Perhaps now is the time for some creative thinking. This is a project that school districts, the province, and employee unions should be able to get behind. Rather that disposing of property as a one time cash grab, how about using it to invest in the long-term stability of the system, and the maintenance of high quality and less stressed staff?

​It's a win/win for everyone!

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Is your memory working for you?

3/3/2016

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All of our parents come through our doors armed with a recent psycho-educational assessment. In many cases, they have invested significant resources to get it done for their child in order to have a better understanding of the challenges that she or he is facing in school. Unfortunately, the product is often a dense and mystifying document that cites norms and variances, spews a wide range of scores in numerous sub-tests, assigns rankings (high average, low average, much below average, etc.); and, concludes with a series of categories (ASD, LD - mathematical reasoning, ADHD, OCD, etc.) which the psychologist has deemed as having a possibly significant impact on the learning abilities of the child. The best reports are written in plain language and have been delivered with considerable care and explanation to the family; the worst are heavy on data and light on analysis; and, the majority are somewhere in between.

One area that invariably baffles our parents is that of Working Memory. Often confused with short-term memory, working memory is not just about not forgetting to put the recycling out before going to school, but rather refers to the "ability to keep information in mind and work with this information" in some immediate task or problem-solving situation. All of us have only a limited capacity for working memory and can only retain a finite amount of information for a short period of time (literally seconds) before it decays. A simple example would be the ability to look up a phone number and then dialling it while you still retain the digits in your mind. For most of us, (thank goodness for redial!), if we didn't connect and then waited 15 minutes to try again, we would have to look the number up a second time. The fleeting nature of working memory, in general, is intended for us to retain or retrieve data just long enough to complete a necessary task. 

Working memory is the cognitive function responsible for keeping information online, manipulating it, and using it in your thinking. It is the way that you delegate the things you encounter to the parts of your brain that can take action. In this way, working memory is necessary for staying focused on a task, blocking out distractions, and keeping you updated and aware about what’s going on around you.

Working memory has a huge impact on reasoning ability, self-regulation, attention and focus. Consequently it has an impact of the success of all students with respect to academic skill applications particularly in reading and mathematics. Research has shown that a measurement of working memory capacity can be a fairly reliable predictor of academic success in future years.

So, if working memory is a challenge for some students, what can be done to support them in developing strategies to work around it? Common strategies used in working memory training include repetition of the tasks, and the gradual adjustment of the task difficulty and complexity with each stage of mastery. Often, classroom teachers and tutors will use techniques such as front loading, rehearsal of material, chunking, scaffolding, pairing mental images with the material,  mnemonics
, and other meta-cognitive strategies. Unlike working memory training, the concrete techniques taught to students are learned strategies that kids can deliberately apply to a given situation.

At KGMS, we also help students develop their working memory through the use of Cogmed Working Memory training. Students, for whom this has been identified as a potential intervention, complete a six week training course online, monitored by their tutor. The results are then analyzed by our SLP and shared with parents. There is a follow-up six months after the training to determine the level of retention of the improvements noted in working memory. A 2015 study on the impact of direct working memory training showed both definite improvement, and retention of working memory capacity which correlated with statistically significant increased performance in learning outcomes, particularly in reading and math, more than two years after the training.


Improving working memory, like improving reading and math performance, is part of the process of helping students to develop new pathways to success. It is always a work in progress!


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What happened to the teaching part of teaching and learning?

3/3/2016

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This past week I had the pleasure of spending a day at Camp Jubilee, on Indian Arm north of Deep Cove, with our Grade 7s. A 20 minute boat ride takes you from the hustle and bustle of urban life into the edge of the backcountry and gives students the opportunity to try new experiences and test their limits in a safe and supportive learning environment. From high ropes to kayaking to archery to trekking through the bush our students were constantly challenged and rose to the occasion. Taking part in these activities, I was reminded of what a critical role teachers play in this learning process. One episode in particular stands out for me. One student, after completing his first climb up a cliff face, was sitting dejectedly on the prep bench. He was clearly upset and done with the process. Rather than letting him sit and watch his classmates, his teacher sat down with him and helped him work through the issue that was bothering him about his first climb. After a few minutes of quiet conversation and processing, the student agreed to give it another try. He would go on to scale the cliff five more times and by the end of the session, was beaming! Experiential learning is not just about the learner. The teacher plays an essential part in making it work.

One of the most popular oxymorons that currently dominates educational circles is the phrase "growth mindset". Given the fact that "mindset", by definition, is a fixed set of beliefs, then the flexibility and potential for change and growth would actually mean that a learner had no "set mind" or mindset about learning at all! The use of terms such as "mindset" or "grit" or "moxie" is just a trick for taking schools off of the hook, and placing the blame for a failure to connect squarely on the shoulders of the student. In actual fact, it is our job as educators to change attitudes about learning.  What we are really talking about is nurturing a young mind to embrace new experiences and challenges, supported by a low-risk learning environment, and dedicated to student growth and continued success. It doesn't just happen. We educators and parents have to make it happen. We have to help students to take a systematic approach to learning. Sometimes it means focusing less on content and more on attitude. It challenges us to ask: How can we create a culture of success? How can we help students to see challenging themselves is not risky, but is actually interesting and rewarding? 


A number of years ago, in another professional life, I was engaged by the Japanese Ministry of Education to review the delivery of their educational programmes, their teacher training, and their five year plan for moving forward. I spent a month touring schools; meeting with teachers, parents and students; consulting with university and Ministry personnel; and sitting in dozens of classes.

One experience during this time still stands out for me. I was in a classroom in a university laboratory school in Hiroshima. At the front of the class was a senior mathematics teacher – back to the room – scribbling formulas on the whiteboard and muttering fairly incomprehensibly about what he was doing. At the back of the class were ten student teachers furiously copying down everything that he wrote on the board so that they could someday use it in their own classrooms. In between were forty Grade 12 students who were paying no attention whatsoever. There were lots of conversations going on, some outstandingly artistic doodles being created, and a number of people catching up on an obvious lack of sleep – but no-one was actually learning mathematics. In my post-class focus groups, I discovered two things. To begin with, the teacher felt that it was his responsibility to teach, but not to ensure that anyone actually learned.  Secondly, the students felt that it was their responsibility to learn, but that the venue for that was not school, it was at home or at an after school cram session where they would spend hours self-teaching and practicing problems. It was this disconnect that the government was trying to address. The challenge was, that the issue was more cultural than pedagogical.

You know what Neil Postman would say, “I taught it, it’s just that they didn’t learn it” is akin to hearing a car salesperson say “I sold it, it’s just that they didn’t buy it”. We know that effective teaching and learning is an interactive process, and that to be meaningful, both partners have to actively engage in it. The transmission culture that brought us radio and television is rapidly being supplanted by the interactive culture that uses Google and Wikipedia and invites the user to engage and generate knowledge, not just receive and record it.

At Kenneth Gordon, like most schools, we sometimes fall into the trap of assigning what we feel should be a simple task and finding that a student has become paralyzed and unable to proceed. Even with the luxury of small class groupings and daily individual instruction, we are constantly presented with a variety of learning puzzles. Why did this student balk at this task when the nine who came before breezed through it? What necessary steps did I leave out, that account for my inability to engage this particular learner in a fashion that would enable her or him to feel confident in their ability to take this on?

This is a pivotal moment in the teaching/learning process. We can just shrug and pat ourselves on the back for a 90% success rate, or we can double down and become learning detectives, committed to finding the piece of the puzzle that eludes us. The response to this challenge is a window into the culture of a school. All students have a unique approach to learning. Most fall within a broad range that is typically addressed in school, but many are outliers. They have great, untapped potential that needs to be coaxed to the surface, nurtured and reinforced. It is hard work, for both educator and learner, but the possibilities are endless. Part of our challenge is to make students understand this correlation between work and performance, between perseverance and progress.

In all of the superficial discussions about "mindsets" and "learning styles" there is still a fundamental truth. If an educator is unable to convince a student to open her or himself up to the possibility of learning then no amount of instruction will result in a positive and productive outcome.

​This is the true art of teaching.

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    Dr. Jim Christopher is recently retired Head of Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School and Maplewood Alternative High School in North Vancouver. A parent, author and long-time teacher, and educational administrator across Canada, he has been actively involved in the drive to differentiate learning experiences to meet the needs of all learners.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

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