Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Helping anxious students move forward

The December 2017/January 2018 edition of Educational Leadership includes an article by Jessica Minahan, "Helping Anxious Students Move Forward," that suggests implementing strategic accommodations in order to help anxious students be successful. A quarter of teenagers suffer from some anxiety disorder, with less than half being identified and receiving treatment (see here). This means our schools are full of students struggling to handle day to day existence.
Minahan identifies four common executive function  skills that students with anxiety often struggle with: accurate thinking, initiation, persistence, and help seeking. She then suggests some interventions that might help these young people become more successful.
  • Accurate thinking- virtually all people with anxiety disorders and depression suffer from issues around accurate thinking. It may range from all-or-nothing thinking (ex. either I am a star or a failure) to catastrophic thinking (ex. I don't know the answer. I am so stupid I will never graduate.) to just constant negative thinking (ex. I cannot be successful, complete the project, have a friend...). The trick is to work at transforming this maladaptive thinking into accurate thinking. Possible interventions include
    • rating a task before and after completion and comparing ratings.
    • charting the aspects of a task and categorizing the elements as neutral, like or don't like (writing a paper- using proper capitalization, spelling, discussing the idea with someone, completing a graphic organizer, typing, writing in complete sentences...). Students can be shown that while there are aspects of the task that are disliked, it is not all bad.
    • reframing language- It is "I cannot do this yet" or "I need help to know where to go" or "Everyone needs help with ___ at first."
  • Initiation- I like the comment that she uses on page 48, "It isn't realistic to ask negative thinking, anxious students who lack initiation skills to begin work independently." We need to get these students started. If we assist within 30 seconds of assigning materials, it can dissuade negative thinking. Admittedly, with a class of  25 kids, 8 or more of whom are anxious, this is a challenge, but small groups, partner work and using co-teachers, paraprofessionals, and volunteers effectively can help.
    • Students can preview assignments with teachers earlier in the day or the night before.
    • Chunking material- one page at a time, limiting the number of problems, sheets with some problems already complete rather than totally blank- can help.
    • Provide sentence starters to get them off and running on a writing assignment.
    • Whiteboards to make it not a permanent feature.
    • Ask for help to start. Skip the problem you are stuck on and move on.
    • Change seats to limit distractions.
    • Positive self-talk- if I work for 3 minutes I can take a break, do the first five problems then take a break, I can do this.
  • Persistence- The author suggests using the Dweck statement, "Every time you push out of your comfort zone to learn hard things, your brain grows new connections and you get smarter" (p. 48). Some useful strategies for developing persistence include:
    • skipping the hard problems and doing the easy ones first,
    • working with a classmate,
    • check the problems that are completed,
    • take a quick break,
    • pair the task with something pleasant (ex. comfy chair, soft pleasant music),
    • picture the completed project, have a checklist to mark off the completed portions of a task (children with executive function challenges often have difficulty with visualization so model projects, papers and assignments can help them to approach the task),
    • set a reward for completing a task (Grandma principal- do your work then have a cookie).
  • Asking for Help- So many kids struggle with this. They may not recognize the need for help early enough, they may feel stupid if they ask for help, they may not have enough initiative to ask.
    • Normalize the request process- everyone gets a red cup (I need help) and a green cup (I'm good).
    • Provide options for asking- raise a hand, show a card, catch an eye and nod,... Then require a specific ask. Not I need help, but I cannot find the answer to number five, or I do not understand what the question is asking for when it says____, or I do not remember the formula. Often merely solidifying the question can lead them to being able to solve it themselves.
    • A teacher can also respond with strategies to help answer the questions. Where did you find the answer to question four? It should be after that. Look at the subtitles. Do they give us any clues? What part of the question is challenging? Let's look in the glossary/dictionary for what that means and see if we can figure it out. Where is your formula sheet? I bet it has the one you need. This takes more time than- on page 76 halfway down, it is asking you to tell all about the three branches- what does the legislature do? the judicial? the executive? The formula is f=ma.
    • Some students will need a check in. They may show a pattern of not following directions so have them restate them. They may need reinforcement after each section or activity. Let them ask for a check-in to see if they are on the right track.
    • Reinforce common strategies like raise your hand, ask three then me (peers may be easier to ask than adults), hand the teacher a note, look in your notes/notebook/binder/book for help, ask to work with a classmate.

Provide a  self-monitoring sheet with strategy options. This helps with preventing dependence. Teaching strategies and self-monitoring is an essential step toward independence. Specifically labeling challenges and identifying interventions helps avoid all or none thinking. Prompting to refer to a checklist might be enough to get the child going.

In reading we talk about independent, instructional and frustration level material. In many ways this applies to all academic tasks. If students are being asked to work at an independent level when the demands of the task are at their frustration level, the result is not going to be pretty. If the reading to too challenging (Common Core rigor can be to challenging for some) student will not be able to independently use the material. If his writing skills are at a second grade levels, asking for a five paragraph essay is beyond his independent ability. If you want students to work independently, they need to be doing tasks they can complete independently. If they need check ins then they cannot perform independently. If it is crazy beyond their capacity, they need alternate work (ex. draw a picture of what happens, do three paragraphs not five, use a video rather than a text, do two digit multiplication rather than 3), modified materials/responses  (ex. chunk the reading into smaller sections, larger font/fewer questions on a page to make it less distracting and appear easier, audiobooks, voice to text technology, oral reports, sentence starters, multiplication charts, lower reading level texts), or lots of scaffolding and support. These strategies and others are often used to help students with learning disabilities. They also can help those with mental health issues.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Schmoker's Focus

Watching a webinar led me to a video where Mike Schmoker presented a keynote at a conference. Google will find many of his conversations and presentations for you to explore if interested. His book, Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, was published about the same time as the Common Core standards (CCSS) were. Mike's main thrust is that we need to do less to improve performance. We need to focus on what we teach, how we teach and authentic literacy.

What we teach- He argues that the curriculum is impossibly loaded with concepts and ideas that cannot possibly be taught in a year. In looking at the CCSS, the designers would tell you they addressed this issue. They reduced the number of standards and required more depth in instruction. On the face this is true. At a presentation around the roll out of the standards, I was shown the previous and new math standards for fifth grade, at the elementary level where the most standards had been removed in New York. They removed 10% of the content, but were going to require considerably more depth of understanding. Unfortunately when you look at the international standards that they were trying to emulate, 75-50% fewer standards were present. Schmoker would argue that at least 50% of the curriculum should be eliminated to have room for high quality instruction and focus. At a school level, he would suggest that the staff get together, identify their 50% most important standards by dot voting or another polling activity and then focus there. He proposes that the clear, focused curriculum is essential to achievement. Repeatedly we have demonstrated that merely test practice focused instruction raises test scores so far and then plateaus. What is worse is that performance on international tests remains stagnant in the face of improving local or state scores where this approach is the norm. In order to significantly improve performance, we need to teach fewer concepts better.

How we teach- Mike suggests that literacy pervade every lesson. Reading as the access to material. Writing is a key way to improve thinking and learning. He suggests removing fancy technology lessons, and embedding traditional whole group instruction into the classroom. Going back to Madeline Hunter's plan of anticipatory set, model instruction, guided instruction, independent practice and closure accompanied with frequent checks for understanding provides a framework that dramatically improves results. All too often tech lessons have lots of bells and whistles and engagement, but little learning. For our Smartboards to increase performance they need to do two things- increase opportunities for feedback and increase opportunities to respond. Clickers or other personal response systems are key; without them you just have an expensive projector.

Schmoker presents two lesson templates for instruction:
  1. Interactive lecture- Lecture is used because of its ability to convey lots of information quickly. By itself, however, much goes in one ear and out the other of our students. The key is to make it interactive. Every 5-7 minutes there needs to be a break for student response. It could be a question answered with a personal response device; a request to summarize a key piece of information from the segment either orally, in writing or both; a request to try a problem either in a small group or alone; a request to use a nonlinguistic representation to demonstrate understanding; or another idea. While students spend 3-5 minutes on the activity, the teacher circulates, addressing misunderstandings and planning whether to move on or provide more guidance on the segment of knowledge. 
  2. Authentic literacy- He includes three components to this: close reading/underlining and annotating the text, discussion of the text and writing about the text informed by the text. He suggests preteaching key vocabulary, establishing a purpose, modeling the task at the beginning and gradually releasing responsibility to the students as formative assessments would suggest prudent. He stresses the importance of pair-share activities, group sharing and then quick writing.

Both of these templates can be used in every classroom. It would have been nice for him to include blank templates rather than just describing them.

Authentic literacy- He argues that students should spend at least 100 minutes a day on literacy activities. Students should read for 60 minutes and write for 40 minutes. Since students often do not read at home, this should be reading spent in class. We know that the only way to get better at reading is to read and the only way to get better at writing is to write, but are reluctant to devote the time to this because of all we need to do. I have worked with classes where students are not expected to read- everything is read to them. I know that low level readers are going to be unable to approach texts that are far to high above their reading level. Perhaps what we need to do is pick different texts. Most classics have abridged and lower reading level versions. If we need to provide two separate texts that are readable to the students in order for them to read, we should do it. Simply reading to them does not increase their skill. Having them read along will increase reading skill, but all too often in these classrooms books are closed and students are zoning out.

What Schmoker seems to ignore is classroom management and organization. These two items are critical for any learning to occur. It seems that he takes these items for granted. Unfortunately, like in many teacher prep programs, management is a sidelined item. Discussion requires
that teachers have control of their classes- they can keep students on topic and minimize behavior problems.

Although this book has been around for a while, it is valuable in its insights around how to improve learning and preparation for the future.