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 incomprehensively about what he was doing. At the back of the class were ten student teachers furiously copying down everything that he wrote 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 2008, author Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Outliers, looked at predictors for success in international, standardized mathematics examinations.   It was his rather astounding discovery, that there was a direct correlation between how students filled out their demographic information with how they performed on the test. Those students who were disciplined enough to complete the two pages of identifying data (birth date, gender, level of education, etc.) did significantly better on the exam than those students who rushed through the “boring” demographics and jumped feet first into the problems. Gladwell concluded that the issue in math performance in this instance was not pedagogy or even natural ability but, rather self-discipline and, ultimately, culture.

Helping students take a systematic approach to learning pays off. 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 that hard work and application is not boring but actually interesting and rewarding? How can we make our students understand that, just as they know that they have to spend hours practicing skating or soccer or dance or the saxophone in order to be proficient, the same is true in reading, or mathematics? I said earlier that teaching and learning is a partnership. But it is not just between school and student. It is a three- way commitment, with parents playing a crucial role, to build a culture of learning that becomes a norm for all of our children.

When I was growing up in the era of roof-top antennas, (that is before cable, before satellite dishes, before streamed video, dvds, or even video tapes!) once a year The Wizard of Oz used to be shown on television (usually around Easter). The big moment, when Dorothy walked out of her black and white Kansas house into a technicolour Oz was a bit lost in my family’s living room, where we only had a black and white television. But the wonder was there all the same.

 I got thinking about those days recently as I watched ads for the CBC’s “Over the Rainbow” contest and wondered why, in all the years that I had watched the movie, that it had never dawned on me that there was a fundamental contradiction in the story. You remember that the lion had no courage, the tin woodsman – no heart, the scarecrow (of course), no brain and Dorothy, no way home. But, as it turned out: the lion was the bravest; the tin man the most sensitive; the scarecrow the brightest; and Dorothy could have clicked her heels and gone home any time she wanted. In actual fact, what they lacked wasn’t courage, or a heart, or a brain, or ruby shoes, what they lacked was a belief in their own abilities.

In his ground-breaking book Self Concept and School Achievement published back in 1970, William Purkey found that there was an “inevitable relationship” between self-esteem and academic success. As parents and educators, this really comes as no surprise. At Kenneth Gordon, we welcome a wide range of students whose first main obstacle to learning is a strong conviction that they just can’t do it! To some extent this has been drummed into their collective psyches by a series of personal “failures”, led by a “failure” to read as quickly and fluently as their peers. On another level, this sense of a lack of self worth has been subtly (and not so subtly) reinforced on them by well-meaning adults who prod and poke them and then scratch their heads when the traditional “one size fits all” instructional techniques don’t work – somehow the onus gets put on the learner for this “failure” rather than the unsuccessful educator whose task it was to make it happen. 

As a result, the first critical step for us as teachers and tutors and parents is to break down those barriers to learning and to build the child’s belief in his or her own abilities back up. The “I can’t learn” mindset has to be supplanted by the “I can learn, only I do it differently” self-revelation. Until students turn that corner in their own minds, the learning curve remains too steep for even the most proficient educator “sherpas” to get them to the top! But, unlike the lion, the tin woodsman and the scarecrow who get their self-deprecating laments turned upside down in an instant by a benign wizard, for our students it takes a lot of work, a lot of support, and a healthy dose of patience on everyone’s part.

But after all, isn’t that what we are all here for? The main focus of our Social/Emotional Learning programme – three hours per week – is to rebuild and reinforce the belief in our students that they can, and will succeed.


As Bill Purkey once told me: “Everything worth doing, is worth doing poorly the first time.” We have to ensure that our students do not see that poor performance as failure, but rather as the first step on the journey to mastery.

Last Friday one of our students came into my office and asked whether or not the kids in her class could wear pink on Monday as a memorial to Amanda Todd, the Port Coquitlam student who committed suicide in response to relentless cyber bullying by her peers. Newspapers might editorialize about the issue; politicians pronounce and debate; and even Heads of School write blogs like this one, but our students are the ones that really understand. They are the ones who live this day in and day out. Many children at our school arrive on our doorstep having been subtly (or painfully obviously) put-down or ridiculed for their academic failings. Their self-esteem has taken a beating, they are often anxious, and nervous about opening up to others. While we try to make school a refuge from the worst of this harassment, the reality is, we can control only a tiny fraction of our students’ universes. As much as we watch out for them, many of their real challenges lie in cyberspace, not on the playground.

In 2005, I ran a national conference in Montreal on the topic of “Cyber-bullying”. We had excellent guest speakers, a panel of experts, and a parade of educators and parents speaking about the problem and how it was being addressed. It was an emergent problem, and we were going to face it head- on. Seven and a half years later, we are no closer to getting a handle on cyber bullying. In fact, it has become a far more sophisticated and ingrained practice than it was then.

What are the key characteristics of cyber bullying? Basically it is the use of electronic communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated and hostile behavior by an individual or group that is intended to harm others. Unlike traditional bullying, victims don’t ever feel safe because they can be bullied in their cars, their homes and even in their own bedrooms. Early cyber bullying centered around texting and emails. Unlike the passing of notes in class by my generation, an email or text can reach a wide-ranging audience and the victim might not even realized that she or he is being maligned or gossiped about until the rumour is repeated so often and shared by so many people that it becomes “fact” and it becomes impossible to dislodge. For years, probably some of the most outlandish abuse of electronic communication was to be found in personal email. In the public education system in North America, fewer than 5% of teachers and administrators communicate with parents by email (this compares with 95% of independent school educators). The reason is simple. Any exchange by email is open to misinterpretation and abuse. Both teachers and parents can be guilty of sharing comments and insights that were meant to be kept confidential. Words that might be spoken in haste, and retracted later, are preserved, white hot, in the body of an email. To be clear, it is not necessarily bullying behavior to lose your temper in an email exchange, however, if one party decides to selectively use the other’s comments out of context to slander or belittle them with a wider audience, you have the makings of a cyber disaster.

So why has cyber bullying become so insidious and pervasive in the second decade of the twenty-first century? One of the main reasons has been the rapid and generally uncontrolled spread of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. A quick, vicious posting or tweet can go viral among friends, acquaintances and eventually total strangers with little or no hope of ever undoing the damage. And, although the media consistently shocks us with stories of young people getting caught in this cyber web, the ugly truth is hardly ever mentioned that, in fact, the main perpetrators are not children, but rather their adult role models.

Many adults have become masters at cyber bullying (although they might not perceive it as such). They use selective sharing of emails and the unbridled use of social media sites in order to cement their views of the world, and of particular individuals in the collective minds of their “friends”. I have a Facebook “friend” who likes to not so subtly brag about her social calendar. If she is invited out with a friend or to a relatively exclusive party—she very deliberately makes all of the arrangements on her “wall” rather than by personal email. What should be a one to one correspondence (what time do you want to meet? what can I bring? what are you wearing?) becomes a public proclamation of her perceived popularity and enviable social life. If the event is more impromptu with no opportunity for pre-publicity, then you can be sure that we will all hear about it the next day. (“Hey Heidi, didn’t we have a great time last night! etc.) It’s remarkably immature, and mildly entertaining from thousands of kilometers away, but you can be sure that there are specific individuals left out of her self-proclaimed in-group that are being specifically targeted and quietly bullied. And while it says more about the fragile self-esteem of the bully than about anything else, that doesn’t make it any easier on the intended victims.

I found it ironic to hear this week that Parliament intends to debate the issue of bullying. There is probably no other forum in the country today that is so rife with bullying and harassing behaviour. Many of our elected representatives engage in petty name calling, and over the top hyperbole such as accusing people of “siding with the pornographers” if they oppose online surveillance, or “soft on crime” if they are against mandatory sentencing. Over the past decade we have had two political leaders have their careers destroyed by electronic campaigns of character assassination. This is characterized as “effective politics” but what it really is, is electronic, and very public bullying. As adults, we should recognize that we have “seen the bully, and it is us”. As Amanda Todd has so graphically reminded us, society can no longer afford to sit back and shake our collective heads. Two many lives (physical and emotional) are at stake.

What we are really talking about is deliberate harassment. Somehow, describing it as “bullying” seems to make it seem less serious, almost childish. It conjures up an image of pushing and shoving on the playground, or minor shake-downs for lunch money (which used to be called “taxation” when I was a Head in Montreal), or the “funny” practice of shutting students into lockers. But, as we saw this week, it is actually deadly serious.

Moreover, the insurmountable challenge of cyber bulling, especially through social media or forwarded emails, is that once this Pandora’s box has been opened, the ripple effect is impossible to predict. What might be intended as a very pointed and narrow audience spirals out of control and even the bully may be remorseful (often too late) about the impact of her or his actions.

So, as I walk down the halls this Monday morning, wearing my only pink shirt, I have to wonder that, given our own weaknesses in this area, how are we to effectively encourage our kids to take a higher road? Part of the answer is access (no cell phones or pda’s at school; monitoring of Facebook and email accounts by parents at home, including having your children access their computer only in “public” areas of the house; etc.)

External controls help, but the real answer is to help our children to instill internal controls, self-policing, and a solid values-based understanding of the potential negative impact of their actions. This week, the news is full of Amanda’s story along with those of other children who have suffered in this way. And, it may eventually be that the media themselves will provide us with enough of these apocryphal stories to bring us collectively to our senses.

But we can’t afford to wait. In the meantime, we have to reflect on our own behaviours and to talk openly and frankly with our children, because this is a war that will be won not on the internet, but by families sitting face to face at the dinner table.

Don’t be confused, this is not a quote from one of your children. This is a quote from you and me and every other parent who has had to hover over their daughter or son sitting motionlessly at a recently cleared kitchen or dining room table with pencil poised over a blank page.

For most of us, who endured years of our own homework purgatory, there is a cruel irony about listening to our parents’ voices come out of our own “enlightened” mouths as we encourage, cajole and threaten the next generation about the consequences of unrequited homework expectations.
One of the issues that haunts children who struggle with a learning difference is the volume and frequency of homework. It has come to be conventional wisdom that the watershed of learning is a child's ability to complete any and all assigned tasks sent home by their school. Parents will often wade into the process; researching, scribing, editing, even completing their child's homework rather than have them face the imagined wrath of their teacher if they arrive at school in the morning with a blank or half-completed page. There are even educators and schools that claim to have "high standards" based upon the height of the mountain of homework that they pile on each evening. The successful completion of this work, relevant or not, is seen as a clear indicator of future academic success!

Having said all of that, the traditional approach to homework is not the sacrosanct institution that we sometimes believe. There is considerable research evidence to indicate that years of school-assigned homework may not have had the impact on the teaching and learning process that we once thought.

For example, a recent study  in the United States found the following discouraging statistics:  65% of homework assigned is unnecessary and marginal (at best) to student learning; 45% of all homework is never referred to again in class; 75% of overnight work is not marked, shared or evaluated in any way to ensure accurate completion or to address concerns; 80% of “taken up” overnight homework is peer reviewed to ensure completion or accuracy but there is not meaningful analysis to aid in student understanding; 35% of all submitted homework is never marked or returned; and, 67% of of what is returned is not done so in a timely fashion.

Are you depressed yet?

Given these stark statistics, should homework simply be scrapped? The answer, obviously, is “no”, but what is clearly necessary is a rethinking of how we use homework to enhance learning, the extent to which the homework that is assigned reflects the academic priorities and philosophy of the school, and, the establishment of a truly collaborative approach to the assigning and completion of homework that involves on-going discussions both among educators, and between home and school.

According to the research, homework definitely has a role in a number of specific instances: when reinforcement of a newly  learned concept is clearly necessary; when time (as in “there isn’t enough in the school day!”) is a factor; and, when you want to actively engage parents in the learning process.  So, what can schools do to ensure that students and their parents appreciate the value of doing work beyond the end of the school day? To begin with schools have to ask themselves so hard questions: Is what we are assigning essential? Is it better done at home than at school? Is it effectively integrated into our programme plan for the next day? Clearly, some things simply must be done at home in the evening or on the weekends: completing work not finished in school; review and revision of written work; test preparation; assigned reading; project work; research that is beyond the resources of the school; in short, almost anything that can’t be accomplished within the constraints of a regular school day. At Kenneth Gordon, we try to minimize the amount of homework and keep it only to essentials. Our students work hard enough during the day without piling in on in the evening as well.  Our goals are: to monitor the type of tasks that we assign for students to do; to prune the unessential, prioritize the rest; and, to maintain collaborative discussions among staff to guard against inconsistencies and overloading.

What are we asking of you in our drive for more effective homework?  Be involved. Sit at the same table as your child and do some of your own "homework". Read with them and take the time to ask them about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Please try to remember to monitor your children’s assigned work and look to see not just “how much” but also “how valuable”; and, let us know if you think that it is out of whack. And finally, if it becomes too angst-ridden a process, tell them to put it away and let it go.

One request from every educator and every school is to try not to negotiate away your child’s responsibilities for homework with a late night email to the teacher. We are a flexible  bunch, but let your child take ownership of the situation. We will work it out with them.

In the final analysis, we are all working in concert to manage the learning process at school and at home in a way that is meaningful and respectful to the needs of each and every child. Homework should always be a bridge between home and school and never a battleground!

A few months ago I visited an independent school in Ontario that defined its curriculum in terms of pre-packaged “programmes”. There was a math programme, a spelling programme, a reading programme and even a remediation programme. Teaching, for some of the staff members, was a bit like cooking. The students were the ingredients, the recipe for learning was the programme; and the results were “guaranteed” no matter what the quality of the chef. The desired end result was straightforward – students had to complete the programme. Consequently, disruptions like field trips or drama productions or sports competitions or special assemblies were seen as irritants that interfered with “real” learning and led to complaints that with so many interruptions, the students would never get to the last chapter of the textbook.

But good schools are not fast food franchises, and good educators are not chefs. Schools must be studios of creative learning experiences and the staff must be artists in residence. Artists who have a vision of the future for their students and seek to create the means to have them realize it.

Some do it intuitively but the best do it deliberately. They are the “backcasters” in our midst.

What is a backcaster? Well, to begin with, you might think that it is just the opposite of a forecaster, in other words, a predictor of future events. But that would mean that teachers are only good at predicting past events, as in “I taught it, but they didn’t learn it” (Assuredly not a really useful skill!)

In actual fact, “backcasting” takes “forecasting” to a new level. Where forecasting looks at current trends and tries to analyze what they mean for future conditions (like a weather forecast); backcasting looks at a possible future and then works backwards to determine what factors or interventions will be necessary to construct the future that we desire.

Environmentalists use both methods, constructing models of future degradation based upon business as usual and contrasting that with the preferred future and determining the actions that society needs to take to get there.

In a “macro” educational environment, that is called “backwards curriculum design”. You identify desired outcomes and then work backwards to create assessments, develop resources, and determine teaching strategies that will get your students where you want them to go.

At Kenneth Gordon we also engage in “micro” curriculum design through developing individual education plans (IEPs) for each of our students. We “backcast” from where we want them to be, through reverse steps, back to where they are now. Along the way we establish benchmarks and assessment criteria to measure progress (and help with mid-course corrections) and then when it is all in place, we reverse direction and begin to move forward to our preferred future for each child.

Not surprisingly, this is more complex and challenging than simply implementing a packaged programme or slavishly following one single methodology for teaching and learning. It requires continuous training, reflection, and reinvention as we continuously adjust to an ever-changing learning pathway.

When we accept students into our school, we don’t compartmentalize them according to a “diagnosis” or label. We backcast. We know our desired outcomes, we understand the child’s current strengths and weaknesses and we decide whether or not we can build an individualized programme that can get her or him from where they are, to where they need to be. If the answer is yes, then we welcome them with open arms, regardless of what label someone else might affix to them.

Ironically then, an effective backcast is the most effective and proactive forecast of student growth and achievement. So next time you see us looking over our shoulders – you know where we are coming from – and where we are going!