RECENT NEWS: ARE YOU READY?

You can feel it in the quality of the air and light. Summer is ending. Children go back to school. Are you ready?

How well prepared children will be depends in large part on how they spent their summers. If those long days became a dead zone for learning, it will take that much longer to gear up. Students who have been reading and thinking will be far better prepared for the rigors of the educational system.

If we are concerned with the ongoing nature of learning, though, we need to not only connect the school year to summer vacation, but to go the other way. There is an element of learning during summertime that is applicable to the classroom: fun.

Adults often put more effort into making learning engaging and entertaining when kids are on vacation. Summer camps, family trips, and reading choices are opportunities for broadening knowledge and deepening understanding that children enjoy.

As children enter the classrooms, we should keep these sorts of creative learning experiences in mind.

There surely has to be a link between enjoying education and educational success. What makes learning an enticing prospect? What makes kids successful in school? Can we connect answer those two questions and then connect the answers?

One way is to use a framework for thinking about tutoring suggested by Stanford professor Mark Lepper. He puts forth five C’s as guidelines: control, challenge, confidence, curiosity and contextualize.

If students have some control over learning, they will be more invested in the process. During the summer, that comes with reading what you want and being given a say in camp and vacation agendas. There are many areas in education where kids can choose. Books and projects come to mind immediately.

Challenging learners can be difficult. The trick is finding at a level that is attainable. I often use the metaphor of the high jump. If a coach raises the bar a foot she’s probably not going to see the effort an inch might produce.

Another way the high jump works as a metaphor is that feedback is immediate and concretely measured. Kids love to see their progress charted in a way they understand. Doing so sends a message that the most important competition is against yourself.

Being willing to challenge yourself means having confidence. If you think you can jump over the bar, and don’t make it the first time, you’re going to try again. We need to recognize and acknowledge what kids have accomplished, and let them know that their efforts will lead to improvement.

Confidence empowers curiosity. In Po Bronson and Ashley Merryweather’s excellent essay on creativity in Newsweek, they point out, “Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day.” However, by middle school “they’ve pretty much stopped asking.”

“They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest,” Bronson and Merryweather write. “It’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.”

If educators and parents tap into children’s natural curiosity, those children will learn more. We should look for ways to present information that are novel and a little mysterious, and allow students to solve mysteries on their own.

Finally, we should seek out connections that make what students learn relevant to their lives. If kids can contextualize information by seeing how it connects to their lives and their communities, they will retain and understand it better.

But contextualizing goes beyond the personal. Kids need to connect to the big picture. What led up to new information? What is coming after? What else can you look at or listen to that will enrich your understanding?

In his easy-to-read primer on the science of cognition, Brain Rules, John Medina notes “a counter-intuitive property” of learning: “Extra information given at the moment of learning makes learning better.”

Control, challenge, confidence, curiosity, contextualize. By being aware of the sorts of methods that help students to learn, parents can offer a solid support system as the school year begins, and be better advocates for their children.

Which brings me to a last piece of advice. Don’t wait until the first parent-teacher conference to communicate with teachers. Getting in on the ground floor will not only let teachers know about your child’s strengths and weaknesses, it will help you to know about the teachers, so you can help your child develop good relationships.

One constant I have found since I started working with kids is that the first parent-teacher conferences can bring unpleasant surprises. Symptoms of low motivation and a lack of success—failure to hand in homework and poor test performance—are more problematic if they have become entrenched.
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Parents should make sure their children have well-structured times and places for doing school work, and should be checking in with their children on a regular basis. But they should also check in, if only briefly, with teachers, to insure accountability and transparency.

Learning is a team effort. Kids who know that they have a team they can depend on are kids who will be more dependable, and eventually, more independent.

Create a good environment for learning. From the start, make sure to get feedback on how effective it is. You will be on the way to a great school year.