We understand that we can’t change school policy in this book (we’ll save that for the next one), but we can give parents information that will help them be effective advocates for their kids. We can also give educators—who we very much hope will be reading this chapter—some concrete actions to change a child’s educational experience even if they can’t change the system as a whole. So while this chapter isn’t a comprehensive treatment of school policy issues, we believe that recognizing the importance of a sense of control can guide our thinking about the all-important place where our kids spend upwards of seven hours a day nine months of the year.
Get Them Engaged
One of the greatest challenges educators and parents face is getting students engaged in their own learning. Particularly in middle school and high school, a large segment of students is doing as little as possible to get by. Even some top students take what Ned calls a “station-to-station” attitude, refusing to do anything that doesn’t contribute to a grade.2 We’re not raising curious learners who are motivated to develop their own minds. We’re raising kids who are overly focused on metrics and outcomes.
The best thing you can do to facilitate engagement in the classroom may be to give your kid autonomy outside of it. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, whose self-determination theory we discussed in Chapter Five, found that parents who were more supportive of their kids’ autonomy had children who “reported more well-internalized regulation for schoolwork and more perceived competence and were rated by their teachers as having greater self-motivation, competence, and classroom adjustment.”3 They also received better grades and performed better on standardized tests.
What happens inside the classroom matters, too, and supporting autonomy within the teaching environment doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be as simple as encouraging teachers to give their students choices (“Do you want a pajama party or a special show-and-tell day?” “Would you prefer an in-class essay or a take-home essay?” “Do you want to work on this in class or at home?” “Do you want to work on this individually or with a partner?”). It also helps to offer more than one way to demonstrate mastery of material, seek student feedback, encourage them to explore strategies that work for them, and more generally explain why they’re being asked to do things and what you hope they will gain from them.
We know that if a kid connects with his teacher and relates to him or her, he will try harder and do better. We also know that there are some good teachers, some great teachers, and some not-so-good teachers. Not every teacher will connect with every kid. And then there are teachers who don’t really connect with any kids. Part of the problem stems from the fact that teachers themselves often have little autonomy, making many grumpy and dissatisfied. There is evidence that teachers teach better and feel less stressed when they have a choice about what they teach and how they teach it. Unfortunately, recent research has indicated that teacher autonomy has reduced in the past decade.4
As a parent, there are several things you can do if you feel the student-teacher relationship is not gelling. For starters, you can try to help your kid connect with his teacher, urging him to start a conversation about something he’s studying in class or to ask the teacher about his own interests as a kid. If it’s a really bad match, you can speak to the principal about moving your child out of that teacher’s class, though doing so can be tricky. But perhaps the most effective thing you can do is to emphasize to your child that he is responsible for his own education. It’s not his teacher’s job, it’s not his principal’s job, and it’s not your job. If he doesn’t have a handle on sixth grade math but needs to know certain things to be able to do prealgebra in seventh, the fact that he had a crummy sixth grade math teacher will be of little consolation. We’re not suggesting that you tell your struggling son that it’s his fault. Rather, acknowledge that only 10 percent of teachers will be in the top 10th percentile, and tell him that you can’t expect to have the Teacher of the Year every year in every subject. Help your child strategize as to how he can take control of his own learning, with or without the teacher’s help. Otherwise he’s in a frustrating situation, knowing he isn’t learning and feeling helpless to change it.
What will make your child want to learn even if he doesn’t connect with his teacher? Will he decide to do well in order to prove his teacher wrong? Great. Will he decide to do well so as never to have to take a class from that teacher again? That’s great, too. Emphasize that he doesn’t have to be limited by a poor teacher. School aside, this is an important life lesson.
You can also offer practical help. If your child isn’t learning, try to find a tutor or educational games to engage him in math or science. For middle school and high school kids, you could encourage them to check out the Khan Academy or other online tutoring sites to help them master material they’re being taught in class. You could even encourage them to learn some of the material before the teacher addresses it in class, so they feel “I’ve got this” during the next lesson. That’s a much better place to be than having to play catch-up to unscramble the confusion of the day’s lesson. You can also encourage your kids to learn on their own and to teach what they’ve learned to someone else—a parent, a sibling, or a fellow student. This builds self-esteem, is empowering, and is the best way to truly master complex material.
Reduce Academic Stress and Pressure
In Chapter One, we talked about what stress does to the brain’s emotional functioning. Here we want to talk about stress specifically as it affects learning.
One of the first things Ned noticed in his tutoring career was that kid after kid would do very well on practice tests, and less well when they took the actual SAT or ACT (American College Test). He read widely and talked to scientists and psychologists to understand why this was, and this is how he came to discover the Yerkes-Dodson Law. In the early 1900s, two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, proposed that performance increases with physiological and mental arousal up to a point, after which it starts to decline. We need a certain level of arousal—from curiosity, excitement, or mild stress—to reach our optimal level of mental acuity. But when we’re too stressed, we can’t think straight. Our brains become inefficient. The different approaches Ned’s students took to their term papers offers a perfect illustration of the Yerkes-Dodson Law in action. Girls have, on average, a curve that shifts to the left, and boys one that shifts to the right. What this means is that optimal levels of stress for girls often isn’t enough to motivate boys, and optimal stress for boys can be overwhelming for many girls. (Remember, these are averages—every kid is different. Some girls are more boylike and vice versa.) As a parent, it is worth remembering that what works to motivate you may not work for your kid, and what seems like no big deal to you may be really overwhelming for your child.
If you consider the Yerkes-Dodson curve in relation to school, you may see a third of kids in the optimal state of learning, called “relaxed alertness,” a third overstressed, and a third bored to sedation. Over the years, the Yerkes-Dodson Law has been supported by research studies again and again.5 Students learn and perform best in an environment that offers high challenge and low threat—when they’re given difficult material in a learning environment in which it is safe to explore, make mistakes, and take the time they need to learn and produce good work. When students know it’s all right to fail, they can take the kinds of risks that lead to real growth. They can develop brains that are capable of performing at a high level, and of being happy.
Many of the kids we see aren’t learning in this environment. They’re learning in a brain-toxic environment, where their days consist of stress and fatigue, often accompanied by high levels of boredom. You know that classical description of war as “interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror”? Many schools have become pastel versions of this. As a result, many students aren’t learning well and are suffering from stress-related symptoms.
Too much stress floods
the prefrontal cortex, which we introduced in Chapter One as the fussy Goldilocks of the brain. The prefrontal cortex needs a delicate balance of dopamine and norepinephrine to run effectively. Without a fully operational prefrontal cortex, students lose their ability to focus and sustain attention, and their three core executive functions—inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility—are impaired.6
Working memory is probably the most crucial of all the executive functions when it comes to learning. It’s what allows you to hold information in mind while manipulating or updating it. Working memory allows you to relate the present to the past and future, enables you to make connections, and is key to creativity. You could say that working memory is learning. Some experts say that working memory will become the new IQ—because it predicts academic success and life outcomes better than IQ.7 When kids are stressed and their working memory is impaired, it’s hard for them to integrate information and to grasp and retain the thread of a narrative. Think of the brain like the RAM memory in a computer that lets programs run (rather than storage on the hard drive). A large cognitive load—too many things on your mind—is like having too many browsers open. At some point, the computer starts to slow down or to crash. Too many stresses, and so does the brain.
Ned has a clever little math trick that he plays with kids (try it yourself if you’d like but do it in your head, not on paper) to demonstrate working memory. He says quickly, “Take 1000. Add 40. Okay? Add another 1000. Add 30. Add 1000. Add 20. Add 1000. Add 10. What’d you get?” When he asks people what number they got, most everyone says 5000. (The answer is 4100.) Ned has a friend who’s a bond trader on Wall Street—so a real math geek—and she, too, said 5000. This has nothing to do with math but rather with how brains work, and how hard it is under the best of circumstances to keep multiple pieces of information in our head while building on it. Add stress in there, and you’re toast. Some while ago, Ned worked with a family whose daughter was really struggling. School was tough, but the ACT was hell. Suffice it to say, stress was swamping her. Ned prefaced the above trick by telling her he had a math trick that “everyone fell for” (trying to make it safe for her) and would like to show her the kind of mistake we often make on tests, mistakes that test makers create by deliberately tricking us. He didn’t even get halfway through the above numbers before her eyes filled with tears, as math—really anything tied to school—had become so deeply threatening. Calm, not calculations, was what her brain most needed.
Remember, we’re not supposed to be able to think clearly and logically when we experience a threat. We’re supposed to run like hell, to stand and fight, or to play dead. If your kid is terrified that his strict teacher is going to call on him and he’ll be embarrassed in front of the class, he’s not thinking at all about whatever she may happen to be teaching at the moment. Survival will always trump learning.
Although we want schools to challenge our kids, they should do so in an environment that feels accepting and encouraging. What this looks like will vary depending on the circumstances, but the questions are the same: Do our kids feel safe in school, physically and emotionally? Do they have a sense of control over what they’re doing in the classroom? Is it safe for them to make mistakes?
Also, remind your children that what’s important is that they develop themselves, not that they get perfect grades. As we discussed when we covered Hermiones in Chapter Five, help your child keep perspective. Finally, one of the best things you can do to minimize academic stress is to not take it on yourself. And if you do, apologize, as the mom of one of Ned’s students did. She wrote a letter to her daughter that was so moving that we asked if we could include it in the book. It said:
Tonight I failed you, and I would like to ask your forgiveness. I know my actions cannot be justified, but I would like to explain what happened.
This afternoon I saw one of your classmates’ moms, and she questioned me about your performance on the math test yesterday. I shrugged and said that I did not know about a math test. When she shook her head disapprovingly at me, I felt the shame of a negligent mom. My ego got tangled up and confused. When I came home, I fired questions at you about test prep and results. I told you I wanted to check your homework and see your grades. Incredulous, you stared at me with tears in your eyes.
You have always been an intellectually curious and creative child. You are helpful and inclusive, diligent but noncompetitive. I allowed a mom who was trying to ascertain if her child had better results than my child get in the way of my relationship with my child.
I promise that I will never again ask how you scored on a test, never check your homework or grades online, and never even look at your report card unless you choose to show me that.
You are not a number or a letter to me; you are my dear gift who deserves my respect. I hope I can re-earn your trust and respect.
I love you.
Mom
We also think it’s important for students and adults to work together to make school less stressful. We support the creation of stress-reduction teams that include students, teachers, administrators, and parents—with the goal of exploring ways to make school less stressful for everyone. (The first time Bill lectured a school faculty about the effects of stress on the brain, the assistant head of school cornered Bill after the workshop and voiced concern about his own brain, given how stressful life as a school administrator was.) These teams can focus on ways of increasing student and teacher autonomy, creating more opportunities for downtime during the school day, and modifying homework policy (like removing homework requirements during vacations).8
Homework: Inspire—But Don’t Require
We have seen hundreds of kids who feel crushed by homework. In the last thirty years, there has been an enormous increase, especially for children in the early grades.9 A recent study found that students from kindergarten through third grade had up to three times more homework than was recommended by the National Education Association and the National PTA, with kindergarteners averaging thirty-five minutes per night.10 Teenagers at elite high schools averaged over three hours of homework every night, while middle schoolers came in at two and a half hours. Yet only 20 to 30 percent of the students surveyed reported that they perceived their homework to be “useful or meaningful.”11 Why are young kids piled up with homework when, despite ninety years of research, there is no compelling evidence that homework contributes significantly to learning in the elementary school years? And why are high schoolers expected to put in so many hours when research shows that homework’s efficacy is limited at best? Small amounts of homework (one to two hours a night) can contribute to academic achievement for middle and high school kids, but any more than that backfires when it comes to actual learning.12
When kids are tired and stressed, they do more but accomplish less. Homework often creates tension between kids and their parents, almost invariably weakening their relationship and undermining the kids’ sense of autonomy. It confuses the means and the ends. Bill routinely sees kids who ace their tests and clearly master the material—but get Cs and Ds because they don’t turn in their homework.
Our motto is “Inspire—but don’t require.” We want teachers to inspire kids to want to learn outside the classroom. Several studies have shown that when kids have some control over the topics they study, they’re more likely to be engaged in the work and to complete it, a compelling reason for most homework to be voluntary and ungraded.13 We believe in recommending assignments and encouraging kids to do them—or an alternative task that would contribute to mastering the objectives—but not requiring or grading them. When teachers offer assignments, they should explain how students will benefit from doing them and should seek their students’ feedback and suggestions. This is a very different approach from “Read pages 20–50 of textbook B by tomorrow and answer the ten study questions.” In the best of all possible worlds, teachers would say, “If you can work on this for twenty minutes at s
ome point after school, your brain will make new connections when you sleep tonight that will help you understand and remember what you’ve learned. But if you’re too tired or stressed, do something else. You can always turn back to it when you feel fresher.”
Finnish students—who have among the highest educational outcomes in the world—have the lightest homework requirement, rarely receiving more than a half hour per day.14 The most prominent spokesman for Finnish education, Pasi Sahlberg, reports that many primary and lower school students finish most of their homework before leaving school and that fifteen-year-old students in Finland do not use private tutors or take additional lessons outside of school.15 He points out that this makes the performance of Finnish students even more astonishing, as students in many Asian countries who perform comparably in reading, math, and science spend much of their time outside of school being tutored and taking additional classes.16
Over the years, Bill has spoken to many teachers who either don’t assign homework, make it optional, or assign it only if the students are not keeping up. These include teachers in Montessori schools, public middle school teachers, and an International Baccalaureate economics teacher who, ten years ago, started recommending weekly readings but not requiring homework assignments. His students have performed at least as well in the last ten years as they did with homework (and have continued to perform above average on their IB exams). Ned deliberately assigns very little homework. He has no interest in busywork. He wants the kids he is seeing to work hard on what they believe helps them. If they arrive for tutoring and tell Ned they didn’t have time to complete their homework, he thanks them for their honesty, expresses his belief that they must have had more important uses of their time, and lets them know he is happy to help them schedule time to complete the work, if they wish.
The Self-Driven Child Page 18