How You Can Support Student Success

This post is first of a series based on excepts from my book on Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020). You can purchase the book from Roman and Littlefield for charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to become owners of their learning successes.

Students Must Feel Safe and Secure

If children are to be successful, they must first feel safe and supported. Maslow taught us this in 1943 through his hierarchy of needs. Yet, for some learners, life is not safe. They may live in crime-ridden neighborhoods where it’s not safe to walk home from school. Others are chronically hungry. A student named Jake qualified for free/reduced lunches, but his mother was too proud to accept help. Jake would routinely show up at the learning lab, hoping there were some leftovers from the day’s snack. The teacher always put a little aside for him, and he was always appreciative in his own shy way.

By his junior year, he had taken and did well on ASVAB (the military aptitude test) and enrolled in the Delayed Entry Program. Two years after his high school graduation, he returned to his school to tell his story and thank his teachers, counselors, and especially the principal who mentored him through the process. He was proud of his promotion to Specialist and had already earned a service ribbon. Privately, he told me that he was glad to finally be able to pay his mother back for all the sacrifices she made for him. For Jake, building foundations of food, medical care, and stability in his life were essential foundations for success.

Teachers Must Clarify Learning Intentions

Well-being in assessment comes when students have a clear understanding of the learning intentions and also have opportunities to personalize and adjust them in ways that make sense to them and support their success. This may mean deconstructing large-scale standards into actionable and measurable interim steps. For example, “Compare two decimals by reasoning about their size” (CCSS Math 4.NF.C.7) becomes “I can read and understand decimals and put them in order.” When Carlita is asked on a test which answer is true (A) 0.7 > 0.4 or (B) 0.4 > 0.7, she becomes apprehensive when she can’t remember what that the “<” and “>” symbols mean. Fortunately, when her teacher posts that “>” means “is greater than,” she has an aha moment and completes the task accurately.

Once learners’ needs for safety and well-being are met and they feel academically and emotionally secure in their classroom, inclusion and belonging is another step towards personal achievement. Standardized tests are mandatory, but may not sustain these basic needs for struggling learners. Our series of blogs will preview classroom techniques and assessments that are inclusive of all learners, relevant to the student, and aligned with learning.

Learning Assessments Must Inform and Guide Students

Informative assessment is essential for all students, especially those who may feel disenfranchised or have experienced failure. Instructionally supportive assessment relies on frequent check-ins for understanding as well as feedback that provides clarification on misunderstandings and guidance on next steps. These assessments give learners voice, such as adding annotations to their responses or asking lingering questions within the assessment. Feedback can come from teachers as well as peers with these prompts: “What you said about ___ is very clear, but I’m still confused on___” or “I see you included ___ but have you also thought about ___?”

As students mature, they develop clearer ideas about who they are and how they think. They begin to recognize their strengths as well as struggles. This development of self-awareness and self-esteem can be fostered by assessments that encourage and guide students in monitoring their learning. When students become reflective and flexible assessors, they can also personalize learning intentions. For example, when given a choice in showing understanding of event sequences, Wei decides to make an instructive video on writing a graphic novel, while Fiona wants to illustrate a user’s guide to sustainable gardens.

Students Can Define How They Learn Best

One day, Max said to his teacher, “I want to try something new for my project, but don’t want to be penalized for lack of creativity since it’s the first time I’m using Piktochart, an infographic maker.” After a brief conversation, they mutually agreed to count the content ratings of the rubric at 80% and the design ratings at 20%. With the pressure off, Max was inspired to try a new way to show his learning. In all these examples, consistency and clarity of learning objectives are central to success.

Our November 2^nd post will discuss what teachers can do to increase students’ learning successes. For more charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to own their learning, you can purchase Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020) from Roman and Littlefield.

Nurturing Our Kids’ Health and Spiritual Growth

It is important to guide children in their healthy growth by helping them select a balanced diet of fruit, vegetables, grains, dairy products, and protein foods each day. Parents can model healthy meal preparations that can have a significant impact on children’s health, academic performance, and sense of well-being throughout life. Parents must take the time to ensure that their children have time for outside daily play for healthy growth and development. Children can play at parks and participate in afterschool sports, recreational activities, and performing arts activities.

Teaching Kids About Nutrition

From an early age, parents try and provide their children with a balanced diet. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, children should eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, grains, and protein plus a side order of dairy for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and for snacks. By using a plate for portion control, fruits and vegetables should take up half the plate while grains and protein each take up one fourth of the plate. Parents can encourage their children to plan and prepare nutritional meals by having them help when preparing a nutritional meal. They can:

Organize the kitchen before cooking by wiping down counters, setting up a recycle bin, and placing recipe ingredients and utensils on the counter for a recipe.
Assemble recipes and adjust the quantities of ingredients for a larger or smaller family.
Pick vegetables and fruits from the family vegetable garden or a neighborhood community garden.
Wash fruits and vegetables and slice them in salads and for cooking as a side dish.
Help prepare meat for grilling, baking, or mixing into a recipe.
Clean up the kitchen as the meal is prepared.
Set the table while the meal is cooking.
Clean up after dinner by washing the dishes, taking out the garbage, and recycling.

Training Kids as Meal Planners

As students enter middle school, they can shop and plan for nutritional meals while using a budget. High school students can prepare nutritional meals for the family one night a week.

Added heathy living includes sharing quality time with your children each day. Activities may include outside play, a family dinner, homework time, family recreational time, time for reading, and talking to individual children each night before they go to bed. Most children cherish these times to share their personal growth successes and fears. Some families share these successes and challenges during the family dinner each night as a daily check-in activity. Families can celebrate successes and help each other problem-solve challenging situations.

Nurturing Family Recreation and Physical Fitness Activities

Family recreation and physical activities can include park days, family hiking days, and cultural experiences. Families can plan mini getaways that include camping, hiking, bicycling, and nature explorations. Middle school and high school kids can plan the family’s annual vacation by:

Researching various destinations while considering the costs for lodging, meals, and activities within a specified budget and timeline
Reviewing travel options and selecting an option when considering the budget, driving requirements, and road maps to the destination
Creating a schedule of daily activities that meets the needs of family members

Providing Moral and Spiritual Guidance

As children venture into the world of school, playdates, and community activities, they will meet children and families with different moral and ethical values. It is important that parents clarify their family values and help their children problem-solve when introduced to moral and ethical challenges. A family can identify their values by:

Convening a family meeting to discuss expectations for daily life with each family member
Having each family member share what they think are the important values for their family
Making a list of what each family member has shared and voting on four values
Creating a family symbol that artistically represents the four values that received the most votes
Framing and displaying the family values symbol in a prominent location at home

Reinforcing Family Values

Families can review their list of values weekly at family meetings and when trying to decide on activities that the family will participate in that may reinforce these values. Families can consider adding or changing values over time. For example, families wanting to raise culturally sensitive children will encourage their children to invite friends from various cultures to their home for dinner. These families may participate in a cultural exchange program while their children attend high school and host a student from another country in their home for part of the school year. Spending quality time with grandparents and seniors can provide children with expanded exposure to different lifestyles, values, and activities.

Applying Family Values to Safety Concerns

As family members share their values, they can also discuss safety concerns regarding personal care, conflict resolution, sex, drug abuse, and alcohol use and abuse. Children can learn how to respond to situations that may not be safe. The chapter describes various case studies with worksheets on how family members might respond when exposed to challenging situations. For example, some families have a policy of having their children phone home for a ride if they feel uncomfortable at a party or a friend’s home. They can have an agreement that no questions will be asked when a child phones home for a ride to leave a party early.

Modeling Spiritual Growth through Community Services

Families can model spiritual growth and their love and care for others in need through church related activities, community service days, and school service-learning days. Community service and service-learning activities help children learn about different needs of families in their communities. Activities can include:

Making cards and blankets for seniors
Creating dog toys
Collecting books, clothes, and toys for families in need
Adopting a family or senior during the winter holidays
Creating community garden decorations

May you treasure your shared healthy and spiritual growth activities with your family.

Mary Ann

How to Parent Today’s Kids for Success

Parents become anxious when considering the negative effects of becoming a tiger mama or a helicopter parent with their children during these Covid pandemic times. Although they strive to protect their children from harm, parents also want to ensure that their children are successful in today’s world. For example, dozens of parents purchased their children’s acceptances into competitive colleges by sending funds to a fraudulent checking account managed by a corrupt college counselor. The counselor used these funds to bribe college sports coaches to accept unqualified students on a college team and paid corrupt test proctors to change students’ standardized testing results. Some prospective college students may have signed their college admissions packets without understanding the implications of their parents’ actions. Others believed that their parents were being morally responsible when helping them falsify their college application documentation.

Parents’ Stressful Responses

As our children return to schools, parents are struggling with how to model effective parenting skills while juggling demanding careers, multiple jobs, and ensuring that their children are safe during the Covid pandemic, when traveling or living in crime ridden communities, and while surfing the internet. Many parents solve these challenges by:

Helicoptering their children with too many demands for their time to exhaustion
Allowing too much freedom as their children become lured into gang-related activities, online gaming, or becoming addicted to internet activities.
Forcing their children to grow up too quickly with extensive sibling care and household responsibilities while parents work more than one job to feed their family

Solutions for Managing Daily Stresses

In the next few weeks, our blogs will share:

Proven strategies for learning responsible behaviors that nurture independence, problem-solving, and resiliency skills
Best practices for healthy living, and moral and spiritual guidance
Effective partnership strategies with schools, career explorations, and planning for college and careers
Daily time management suggestions for families and when encountering life’s more difficult challenges (i.e. illness, crime, divorce, or natural disasters)

We will include skill building guidance, case studies, worksheet samples, and added resources when applicable. The various activities and examples included in each blog are collected from over 30 years of field experiences with families in schools and communities. Parents have reported that these skills provide “valuable information with many smart tips . . .” and “are a great resource . . . to maintain a positive outlook while navigating all sorts of situations with two young children.”

Teaching Children Responsible Behaviors

From the time children are preschoolers, it is important to set appropriate boundaries in how they relate to family members and how the family functions daily. Each child should start helping with household chores and sibling support by the time they start elementary school. They must learn to organize their day for personal hygiene, chores, and maintaining personal belongings. Children need loving guidance, modeling, and feedback as they grow to become self-sufficient responsible family members.

Authoritative Parenting Characteristics

There are many types of parents in the world. Some parents are very authoritative and try and manage every aspect of their children’s lives. These tiger mamas or helicopter parents tend to exhibit some of the following personality characteristics:

Are demanding about a need and will not discuss options or negotiate choices
Believe that their approach to life and daily challenges are optimal
Expect that their children will follow their rules
Can be excessively punitive or shaming when a child has misbehaved
May discipline by physically hurting the child, placing on probation for extended periods of time, or limiting access to a privilege for an extended period of time
Can be intolerable when their children express emotions, demonstrate weakness, or are fearful of change

Permissive Parenting Traits

A permissive parent does not set boundaries or consequences for their children’s misbehavior. Many permissive parents are over-whelmed with daily life or do not want to squander their children’s curiosity and passion for life. These parents tend to:

Have children care for themselves and do not provide added support for food preparation, bedtimes, homework completion, or basic hygiene.
Ignore or are excessively tolerant when their children are rambunctious and disregard the safety and care of personal possessions
Allow their children to work through conflicts and daily challenges on their own without any support or guidance
Are too busy or preoccupied with their own lives to provide quality time and guidance to their children
Allow their children to manage their own lives without consequences for misbehavior, not attending school, not caring for possessions, or planning for future careers.

Coaching and Mentor Parenting

Parents can effectively serve as coaches and mentors for their children. For example, they can consider their children’s personalities, how to provide choices when setting boundaries, and winning cooperation through effective problem-solving communications. These parents support their children by:

Effectively listening to their children’s needs and clarifying what they want to achieve when asking for freedoms and responsibilities
Helping our children identify an appropriate solution to a challenge and setting clear expectations for achieving success
Helping our children understand boundaries that must be determined to ensure their safety and success
Reassure our children feel loved and respected with their various contributions to the family and personal successes
Giving our children responsibilities and opportunities to support the family and community.

Much success as you strive to effectively mentor and coach your children.

Mary Ann

How We Can Help Each Other in Our Community

We are only in our first weeks of school and students are already prepared to give back to their communities during the ongoing Covid health and wildfire challenges. Many of our students continue to educate each other on what they should do to stay safe during the ongoing pandemic. They are very careful in wearing their masks, sanitizing their hands, and staying a safe distance from each other in the classroom and while playing outside. Many of my students have made posters of safe health practices for their homes and communities.

Community Services

Other students have been active through their church communities and continue to collect food and clothing at distribution sites for fire victims and families who have lost jobs during the pandemic. Other students have collected money through their church and community support agencies. And others volunteer by helping their siblings and friends with homework, child care, and playing on community sports teams.

Students Become Leaders

Our students learn that by being helpful and learning community leadership skills, they are able to overcome daily challenges that prepare them to effectively cope with uncertain times. Their self-esteem increases as they become capable community supporters in their schools and their neighborhoods.

What can you do to support your children in helping in your school, neighborhood, and community?

Much gratitude,

Mary Ann

How to Set Boundaries that Support Our Children’s Growth!

It is the start of a new school year and we are busy trying to help our children organize themselves for success. The warm autumn days beckon our children to play outside until the family dinner. After dinner, there are new television shows to watch. Our children want to play with their toys, look at books, and play on the family computer, phone, or tablet.

Setting Boundaries Ideas

Many parents ask us how we can set household boundaries and rules to curtail these distractions and complete homework and prepare for a new school day without arguments and negotiations. We recently asked family members for their best suggestions on setting boundaries. Summarized below are some great tips:

Plan ahead for distractions with a weekly evening schedule that defines the time for afterschool play, eating dinner with the family, completing homework, independent reading, discussing the day with parents, getting ready for bed, and preparing for the next school day.
Identify an alternative schedule when there are special events at school, dentist or doctor appointments, sporting events, and family obligations on a school night.
Work with the school to plan ahead for homework assignment completion. Most schools send out homework packs once a week for students with their parents support to complete within several days. Other schools provide an afterschool homework club that you can have your child attend for added support. Other parents plan homework sessions with friends where children can rotate their homework assignments at different households to enlist the support of an expert parent in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, performing arts, and science projects.
When children fight with others and siblings, it is important to be clear about household rules with consequences for misbehavior. When siblings hit or hurt each other, they should be removed from a situation and sit with a reflective timeout. Typically, a timeout is a minute per age. For example, a five-year old’s timeout will be for five minutes. After the timeout, discuss with the child what has happened and have them make amends with the sibling or other child.
If children continue to misbehave, they may need to return home or stay away for others as they are probably tired, overstimulated, or upset about a situation.
Limit screen time to no more than an hour a day unless it includes homework assignments. It is important to give your children time to relax and play outside.
Keep your children on a regular meal time and sleep schedule to ensure that they are well rested and ready to learn and enjoy life.
Schedule regular times that your child can play with neighborhood and class friends even if it includes scheduled afterschool activities. This ensures that your child has a support system.
Be there for your child when they are under stress or are sad and support their problem-solving skills.
Be a role model of personal healthy growth and development.

Happy first weeks of personal growth during the new school year!

Joyce