The Meeting of the Minds

Hmmm….Parent Teacher Conferences??

They appear to be straightforward and simple.  You show up, ask a few questions, listen to the teacher, ideally review some of your child’s work.

If you’re lucky, you already know your child’s teacher and really like him or her.

If not, you know his her name, and can possibly pronounce it correctly.  You may be familiar with his or her visual cues, such as  hairstyle, choice of dress, and tortoise rimmed glasses that remind you of Mrs. Pinchbeck, your favorite fourth grade teacher.

She greets you at the door. If in an elementary school, you get stuck sitting on a blue chair no bigger than your six year-old’s bottom.  At a middle school, you have the luxury of sitting in a larger seat, but it’s a cold metal chair, prompting you to transform your wool jacket into a makeshift pillow.  Within moments, you are sitting face to face with an adult who spends as much, if not more, time with your child than you do each day.

Given the nature of the event, the conference can easily gloss over what you are “really” thinking and feeling.   You are not, after all, sitting across from your therapist or best friend.  I’ve mentioned one of my favorite books on parent-teacher conferences, Essential Conversation by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot.   In her seminal study of parent-teacher conferences across the nation, Lawrence-Lightfoot (2003) found that parents come to the table with “ghosts in the classroom” – experiences of their own childhood when they were the student sitting in the chair, beholden to the teacher’s expectations and judgments.

There is an element of power to a parent-teacher relationship.  She grades your child’s schoolwork, is the official arbiter of the curriculum, and has the power to discipline your child during the school day, or at least in her class.  You, however, know your child in a different way than she ever will – throughout time, from birth to present day – and are the eyes and ears of what your child is experiencing at home.  You both want your child to learn and do well.  Yet neither of you have the power to live your child’s life.

“I stand here ironing,” writes Tillie Olsen after receiving a phone call from her daughter’s teacher, “and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.”  In this story, Olsen narrates the inner life of a mother who like the teacher wants the best for her daughter.  The mother does not assume that she has the magic key for supporting her daughter, and she wants to protect herself from what she sees as the teacher’s judgment of her parenting.  The story continues with excerpts of the phone call interspersed with the mother’s self-talk:

“I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about
your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a
youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”

“Who needs help.” . . . Even if I came, what good would it do? You

think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you

could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that

life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.”

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

I will start and there will be interruption and I will have to gather it all together again.

Or I will be engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what

cannot be helped. (Tillie Olsen, 1953 , pp. 9-21)

For over fifteen years, I have been on the side of the “teacher” in parent-teacher conferences, and have benefited from stories such as the one by Olsen above to knock me out of my comfort zone to experience the needs, struggles and dreams of someone other than myself….of someone who also cares deeply about my students’ education and well-being: my students’ parents.

So, what are parents to do?  What are the three key things we can do to ensure a productive parent-teacher conference?  When meeting with teachers about our child(ren), we are bringing together an array of experiences, values, and voices.  It’s essential that we do not discount our own life experiences since we, too, are learning and growing in “this thing called life.”  Acknowledge those feelings, those memories, those assumed expectations.  Label them.  Talk about them with friends and/or write them down in a parent journal.

Next, follow the Three P’s:  Prepare, Propose, Plan.

My blogs are getting too long…so let’s save the details for next time.  Ahh, what a lovely tendency of mine – always thinking in the big picture, with lots of pondering about what things “really” mean. The details are important, though..I know that, trust me.  I learned as a teacher that I couldn’t really “wing it” if I were going to teach a fabulous class.  I think through what I want for my students, specifically…what I want them to learn, what I want them to show me, how I want them to ENGAGE in important material.  I plan for the details ahead of time before each Tuesday class at CU too.  And now – it’s off to those plans.  Great class last week, btw!

Acronyms, Part 2 – Whose Definition of Normal?

Anyone figure out yet how many acronyms it takes to educate a child?  How many you know the meanings of, and don’t know the meanings of?  How many you’d prefer to throw out the window, so that teachers talk to and with you when providing you with reports about your child in school?

You know your child better than any teacher ever will – or at least in a different way!  You held her as a baby, laughed with her as a toddler, and swung with her on the playground.  You hear what she says in the car, and notice how she changes when she interacts with different peers.  But is the particular way in which you know your child appreciated – or even acknowledged – in parent-teacher meetings?

Numerous studies (e.g. Compton, 2009; Lightfoot, 2003; Mehan, 1993; Ware, 1994) have suggested that parent-teacher conferences gloss over what is “really” in the hearts and minds of teachers and parents alike.  In Lightfoot’s study of parent-teacher conferences across the nation, for example, she noticed that parents come to the table with “ghosts in the classroom” – experiences of their own childhood when they were the student sitting in the now-tiny chair surrounded by colorful posters on the wall.  These emotional experiences are hidden from view, and are not something that teachers (nor parents) explicitly bring to the conversation.  Mehan’s study, on the other hand, analyzed the words that adults do indeed use when talking to each other about a student. Basically, he found that:

• Parents: Talk about their child in historical terms (e.g. “she used to sit on my lap when I read to her” or “she rushed through her math homework in second grade too”)

• Teachers:  Talk about a student in sociological terms, such as where the student sits in the classroom, and with whom she does or does not work (e.g. “when reading alone at her desk she…”)

• Psychologists:  Talk about a student using statistical markers that reference other students no one has ever met (e.g. “her verbal reasoning IQ is 112” and “she scored in reading at 4.1”).

That there are three distinct ways of framing a child’s learning in (and out) of school is not surprising given the different experiences each adult has with the child.  What’s frightening is that educational psychologists are rarely if ever questioned by parents and teachers during school meetings.  In his landmark study of IEP meetings, Mehan showed that parents and teachers asked each other to clarify what they meant by something (e.g. what an acronym means or what a teacher means by a child being an “independent thinker”), but neither parents nor teachers asked the psychologists to clarify any of their terms.  It’s as if the psychologists were speaking a privileged language – one that should not be tampered with since it supposedly speaks “the truth.”

Acronyms are not what we have to “watch out for” when collaborating with teachers about our children.  Instead, it’s the technical terms and scales (e.g. “test age was 7.0 to 7.5”) that de-humanize children, placing them into a social laboratory for the sake of objective comparison and study.  Reading levels are particularly troubling.  While knowing your child’s “reading level” can offer a guide for selecting some books out of the school’s library, it offers little in terms of information about your child’s imagination, ability to empathize with others, problem-solve or make connections: key cognitive skills of comprehension!

Furthermore, the ways in which a student’s “reading level” is determined differ according to the assessment used.  Fry’s Readability Formula, for example, references syllables, words and sentences, but does not take into account topic selection or genre, let alone a reader’s interests and background knowledge. Schools might show parents charts indicating where a child’s test score falls in comparison to thousands of other same-age students on supposedly “normed” tests.  As the term implies, however, norm-referenced assessments are graded along a normal curve and thus it is statistically impossible for everyone at a certain age to read “at grade level.” I can go on and on about the myths and misunderstandings of reading development at a later date….

At this point, let me just beg and plea… acronyms save educators time when talking to one another and writing progress reports about students.  Parents can ask for clarification, and teachers can work toward eliminating jargon in their communication with parents.  But technical terms that have little to do with the day-to-day life of a child within his own classroom, own school, own family at home must be seen for what they are: a way to position a child according to someone else’s definition of “normal.”

How many acronyms does it take to educate a child?

Dear Parents,

How many acronyms does it take to educate a child?  S.A.T.’s…I.E.P.’s… A.C.Ts?  P.T.O.’s?  I.L.P.s?  Each industry has its own “industry talk,” and it’s important to “talk the talk” when conversing with someone in that field.  The over-reliance on acronyms in education, though, can be dizzying for parents – and teachers.  It often seems as if educators and policy makers concerned with education started texting long before teenagers started hiding cell phones under their desks, typing away!

I teach a course at the University of Colorado, for example, on D.I.  In that course, the students learn about instructional strategies for E.L.L.s using a research-proven model called the S.I.O.P..  They also learn the ins & outs of SPED programs, including the recent adoption of R.T.I. in secondary schools, and practice effective strategies for teaching students with L.D.,  R.D., ADHD, and a myriad of other high-incidence and low-incidence disabilities.  Huh?

Educational jargon includes more than just multi-lettered terminology, too.  One of my favorite stories about this topic is told in William Zinsser’s book, On Writing Well.  (As a side note, he was my writing instructor in New York…a few years after he had left his post at Yale).  A wealthy school district in Connecticut had hired him to ‘dejargonize’ the materials schools sent out to parents.  The superintendent sent Zinsser samples of letters and memos, and Zinsser started the sorting process of good and bad examples.  Overly wordy, dehumanized language…the bad pile had it all.  “Enhanced learning environments,” for example.  What the heck are those? And “modified departmentalized schedule.”  Why not just say a modified schedule?  Zinsser then asked the teachers, curriculum coordinators, and principals to re-write some of the samples.  They scribbled, tore up paper, sat in silence, tried again.  As Zinsser puts it, they were beginning to look and sound a lot like writers.

I applaud those teachers, principals, and curriculum coordinators who had the guts to think through the words they use when communicating with families.  The language we use to talk about our children is important; it frames how we want others to see and thus interact with our sons and daughters.  How would you prefer to be talked about – as a daydreamer or as someone who is creative, innovative and imaginative?  As hyperactive or as energetic?  As aggressive or as an assertive person who won’t let others take advantage of you? The first options shed people in a negative light while the second options have a positive tone to them.

Educational jargon is no different.  It has the power to frame or reframe how we think about and interact with children in school.  Using acronyms that parents do not use in their daily lexicon can also create a distance between a teacher and a parent.  It’s as if the parents are not “in the know” when, in actuality, they know their child better than any teacher ever will – or at least they know their child in a different way than a teacher ever will know him or her (or them!).

The teachers, principals, and curriculum coordinators at Zinsser’s finally got it.  They wrote in the first person.  They used active verbs.  They replaced long words and vague nouns with a description of what they were really trying to say.  For one group, “Evaluative procedures for the objectives were also established based on acceptable criteria” became “At the end of the year, we will evaluate our progress.”  Another group wrote, “We will see how well we have succeeded.”  The writing – and thus the talk – was clearer, more personable, more real.

How well is your child’s school succeeding at de-jargonizing its communication to you?  What are terms you can’t stand since they are so vague and don’t really tell you anything about your child, his school, the curriculum?  Which words paint your child and his or her school in a positive light?  Which ones are negative?  Let’s pay attention…together, we can work toward humanizing the educational system in which our children (and we!) are a part.

Take care,

Dr. K

A Pool for my Birthday

My husband bought me a gym membership for my birthday.  There’s a hint of irony wrapped into the gift, as there’s little need for me to workout anywhere other than where I already do – our family’s Martial Arts school with a high-aerobic kickboxing class and Bootcamp sessions using Russian kettlebells under the tutelage of the best – if not the best – and knowledgeable fitness trainers, my husband.  What Scornavacco Martial Arts Academy offers far surpasses what any gym could offer – hands down.

The idea of a husband buying his wife a ticket to a year of workouts also exudes a bit of male snobbery or maybe its male control and protection too – although, knowing Brad and his dedication to health, that’s just me reading too much into it.  I have flashbacks of my upbringing in Connecticut with trophy wives getting in and out of sleek sports cars and Volvo wagons on the way to or from their personal trainer at the gym.  My mom, bless her heart, was never one of those ladies. Her trophy?  She earned it at the church and in her real estate office, working her butt off to please the ladies so they’d buy a house from her and she’d have more money to put away for family trips and her daughters’ colleges.   One gym membership – and all these imagined apparitions?  Yep.

It’s not an ordinary gym membership.  We’re talking a sleek, sweet place.  The walls are curved. A spa adjoins the women’s locker room. There’s a hot tub the size of our living room. Most of all, and this is what the martial arts school cannot provide, there’s a pool.  Three of them.  I slid into one of those pools – the 25 meter one with five lanes and water that was cool, not-frigid and not hotel-pool-warm.  For the next half hour I was doing laps in the pool of my private estate. There was no one around until a couple guys plopped into a lane next to me, likely training for a triathlon judging by their suits that looked like bike shorts and the fact that they hopped out of the pool every four or so laps to do push-ups.  The best feature of this pool was the windows.  An entire wall of glass.  The Colorado sun streaming through it, and I was in heaven.

So maybe it’s not a gym membership Brad bought me, neither was it a trip down memory lane.  I have no idea if the other women in the club were as vapid as I imagined the trophy wives from my childhood to be, and the pool didn’t even come close to the 25 and 50 meter pools that I basically lived in as a kid. Those pools had an overdose of chlorine, multiple coaches barking orders, and cement walls.  This was – and will continue to be – an entirely different place altogether.  The next step will be to take the pool and move it alongside our Martial Arts school on Sunset Avenue.

Dr. Karla

“You got to be tough or the world will get you.”

“You got to be tough or the world will get you.”

I grew up hearing those words from my father over and over again.  He’s a man of sayings.  There was the lighthearted one, “you’re alright, half left, but all right;” the thankful one, “great meal Leanne” and the pragmatic one, “I’m not cheap; I’m frugal.”  Whether we were alone in the car or with friends at a dinner party, my father found a way to interject one of his mantras into the conversation.  Just after my first daughter’s birth, I overheard my dad talking to our newborn by the bedroom window, rocking the crying baby to sleep in his arms.  “You got to be tough,” he started.  I knew what was coming next, and stood at the doorway, astounded by his persistence.

“You got to be tough or the world will get you.” What does that mean anyway!?  To my dad, it means that you’ve got to survive the world no matter what it throws at you.  My father lost his parents when he was fifteen years-old.  He was in the backseat of the car when it was struck by a drunk driver – so were his twin brother and younger sister, Suzanne.  His mom died on the spot, and his father died soon after of heartbreak – the moment when he asked about the status of his wife, and a doctor answered honestly.  “You got to be tough,” he learned – and sought to cement that point into the brains of his children over and over again.

While I don’t full heartedly embrace my dad’s tough-mantra, I can’t help but hear it when I run into difficult situations.  On the surface, the saying is empty and crass – devoid of context and dismissive of healthy alternatives for moving through emotionally taxing experiences.  But I didn’t critique the saying as a child.  My siblings and I simply heard it – again and again.   We never learned to analyze it; that would have been like analyzing my dad’s arm.  His sayings were a part of him – an appendage to life.

When is it acceptable to stop and think about what we hear over and over again?  How do we best do this, especially in terms of our own, inner dialogue?  Humans talk to themselves, and that inner speech is a powerful tool of self-control.  Negative self-talk such as “I’m never going to finish this” or “no one ever helps me” can stop someone in her tracks, preventing her from reaching a dream.  Positive talk, on the other hand, can free someone of undue obstacles, offering her an open door into a promising possibility.  Psychologists and educators alike have created ways to help people observe and take charge of their self-talk.  My father has never had the privilege of working with someone to guide him in this process.  I wonder what such a self-talk coach would say to him.  What would you ask him?

Being “tough” is my father’s way of being optimistic, but not naïve.  You have to know my father to know that he’s not just about “toughing it out.” He seeks support and talks through his emotionally taxing situations with friends and family.  He is one of the sweetest people I know.  But he’s acquired this saying that he repeats again and again – and, for better or worse, allows him to get through whatever it is that is standing in his way.  He recently bought a bike, pedals the few blocks to my sister’s house, and plays with his grandkids in Virginia each day.  He just walked a half marathon, and sent pictures of himself in the paper to all his four children.  He was beaming with pride.  His favorite saying might not capture all there is to know about my father’s zest for life, but it does remind me of something extremely important about parents: they, too, talk to themselves and that self-talk lives on in their children.

So, what is it that you say to yourself over and over again?

What is the Quality of your Questions?

“How are you doing in school?” Steve asked innocently.  

“Good,” Emma said, looking down at her feet.

Steve was a friend of the family, 50 years-old.  Emma was an eleven year-old girl who cried herself to sleep because she was so behind her friends in reading.  Steve knew Emma had trouble reading.  He knew she had a tutor, was in a special reading group in school, and that she – like his own daughter – was making great strides.  He cared about Emma, and hadn’t seen her in three months, as he and his family lived 400 miles away in the fun town of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Steve was curious about Emma at this amazing time of her pre-adolescent life.  His question, though, led to silence.

How are you doing in school?  There’s so much wrapped into that question.  Grades, friendships, a need to fit in, to name a few.  There are also personal histories and family expectations as well as personal interactions and a school’s curriculum.   I was intrigued by Emma’s answer: a simple “good” followed by silence.  She didn’t even keep the conversation going with her eyes. She went somewhere else in her head.  To where, we’ll never know. I’ve seen so many teenagers and young children look away when asked such a question.

SMAA’s Powerful Word of the Month is Empathy – an act that requires us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to understand body language, to predict other people’s feelings in advance, to get a sense of additional life circumstances, etc. A great deal of interpretation goes on in the “empathy process.”  Just like we will never really know what Emma was feeling and thinking when being asked the question about her experiences in school, we will never know – exactly – what our own kids are feeling and thinking when they come home from school, elated about something new, or just darn sad about something that seems mysterious to us as parents.  We can ASK – and it is important to do just that if we are going to strive for empathy as well as work toward an honest, dynamic relationship with our children.  

What to ask? There is nothing inherently bad or wrong by Steve’s question, how are you doing in school?    The question itself led me to think about other question to ask.  Let me share some questions that have worked wonders for me in the past as a teacher, tutor, aunt, surrogate parent or friend – questions that prompt conversation and/or help me “walk in the shoes” of the teens and children with whom I am coaching (academically).  With these questions, I am better able to venture into a journey of empathy and healthy relationship-building as an integral part of the learning enterprise.

•    If I were a fly on the wall (in your math classroom, English classroom, etc.) what would I see you doing in class?
•    Do you think your grades reflect how well you are doing in school?
•    Do you think your grades reflect how much effort you put into your school work?
•    What classes (at school) do you feel most comfortable in?  What do you do in those classes?  Tell me a bit about the teacher and the students in those classes.
•    When do you feel you are able to do your best work and concentrate best? (e.g. In a particular class?  In the morning?  After sports practice?)
•    What kinds of things distract you in class?
•    If your parents (or your teachers) had all the money in the world to build a perfect study space for you, what would it look like?  What would be in it?
•    Is there anyone in school with whom you feel you can get your best work done?  (Not necessarily your best friends – but with whom you can get paired up and work your best?)
•    What’s the biggest misperception people at school have of you?

And my favorite…thanks to my husband Brad:

•    What’s one thing that people don’t know about you that you wish that they did?

In the case of Steve reuniting with eleven year-old Emma, he may have chosen a question from this list, a version of one of the questions, or an entirely different question that taps into the experiences Steve and Emma already have with each other. Emma, are the kids and teachers at your school getting to see and know the wonderful Emma that I know?  Who makes you laugh the most at school?  Do they make you laugh as much as I do?  What kind of questions have you been asking in school?  What have you been wondering about?

There’s a myriad of questions to ask a kid.  The child or teen may or may not “open up” right away.  He or she may not want to engage in conversation at that moment.  Timing and luck has something to do with the art of conversation – as does practice and a genuine interest in the person with whom we’re speaking.  We can use dull moments in conversations (or, better yet, times when we’re doing all the talking!) to check-in with ourselves.  What are we doing – as a parent, teacher, tutor, friend, etc. –  to put ourselves in the shoes of this child?

Distractions

What is our mind doing when it selects information relevant to our goal while ignoring a barrage of irrelevant stimuli?  What about when driving?  When asking a classmate out on a date?  When interviewing for a dream job?  I often joke that I’m not going to let my daughters drive until they are 22 or 24 years old.  It’s not until then that the pre-frontal cortex of their brains will be fully formed.  This is the part of the brain that’s job is to sort through multiple bits of information, including internal thoughts and external stimuli, in accordance with a particular goal.  It’s the area of the brain most activated when multitasking, planning for and following through with set objectives.  Given this biological fact (that, I admit, I am oversimplifying for brevity’s sake), my daughters will be more prepared for taking on the demands of driving when they are older.

The same can be said for dealing with the demands of long-term assignments at school – for figuring out what to do in order to complete a science lab, for example, or a research paper or, heck, even as second graders, to tell stories about their summer on the first day of school.  The mental processes at work are connecting past experience with present action and future goals; they are planning, organizing, and managing time and space.  These nearly instantaneous processes are seemingly so easy and fluid for some, but a cause of much turmoil and struggle for others.

It’s our job as educators – whether as parents or school teachers – to teach students how to prepare and execute plans for reaching goals.  It doesn’t matter if these goals are externally given (e.g. a due date on a homework assignment) or internally driven (e.g. a strong desire to get to a friend’s house). The question is – how to teach these skills.  With over 15 years in the education field, I’ve learned a lot of “tricks of the trade.” I’ve also learned that a lot is at stake when someone has a goal in mind.  What if you don’t’ reach the goal?  What if you don’t reach the goal “in time?”  Some of you may flippantly answer, “ah, who cares?  Move on.”  Such flippancy, however, demands a great deal of self-confidence…or downright denial.  Constant struggle, continuous failure, frequent looks of disapproval from people in authority can wear a kid down – and exhaust his parents (and teachers) as well.  Most of all, it’s not necessary.  There are solutions.

I Love New Beginnings

I love new beginnings….especially when I feel safe and self-assured.  I am thankful for the times when my curiosity for what-is-to-come prompts me to make new lists, pull out the calendar and envision a new life for myself, my husband, and now my kids, Siena Rose and Petra Lucia.  Fear subsides when I – and others – remind me of my past creations, accomplishments, joys.  Those are the positive experiences from which any new beginning can start…that have shaped me, changed me, provided opportunities for me.  The New Year is often a time of such introspection and goal setting – a time of new beginnings at a time when, thankfully, the days in the northern hemisphere are beginning to lengthen, getting brighter with each start to a new day.

Interestingly, the Powerful Word of the Month, EMPATHY, supports the goal-setting process that comes along at the end of each December.  Dr. Robyn Silverman, creator of the Powerful Word program, points out that the best goals are ones that consider other people.  She prompted me to consider how meaningful goals are not just SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, & Timely); they also result from thinking through ways the goal itself impacts others and/or in whose support is needed to reach the goal.

This goal-empathy connection is at the heart of parenting.  Mr. Brad and I, for example, have goals for our children: grandiose yet general ones such as wanting them to be kind, curious people who can communicate well, and more specific, short-term ones such as wanting to shorten the bed time routine to less than an hour for a week straight without having Siena digress into a temper of yelling for one of us to return to her room.  Our children also have and will continue to create their own goals.  For Petra, it’s mostly about nursing and sleep.  For Siena, it’s largely about play – more time to play and certain friends and family with whom to play.  She also wants her treats – lollipops and mints, for example.  As a surrogate parent at a boarding school, I also did a goal-empathy dance with the teens in the dormitory, and continue to have my own goals for my college students while also trying to understand how they feel and what they want out of my class with them.

In celebration of the New Year, a ripe time of goal-setting, I invite you to consider the ways in which your goals for your children impact them, and who you need to call to your side to help you in reaching those goals with your children (e.g. karate instructors, teachers at school, the neighbor at the bus stop).  What are your goals as a parent this year?

A first step to start fresh and prepare for your parenting goals is to be at peace at what transpired during 2009 – what you did, what you were proud of, what was disappointing about what you did or did not do.  Write out your answers and/or speak to a friend about them. Give your 2009 Parenting Year a Name – a theme, a focus, a title.  Was it the year of experimentation?  The year of “tough love?”  The year of reaching out?  Letting go?  Humility?  Self-care?  Whatever it is, give it a name.  Then, in honor of this Mondo Beyondo exercise, stand up and say it proud, “2009 is my Parenting Year of….” Are you indeed feeling proud – truthfully proud?  Are you being honest?  A critic, but not the toughest, unreasonable critic out there…not one who unnecessarily discounts your achievements?  Welcome a genuine feeling of pride – just like you will welcome into your house when your children walk through the door in 2010.

Dr.K

Karla Scornavacco PhD Ed.