Bestselling author Katie Novak is back with an engaging primer for parents that shows them how to support and advocate for learning opportunities that leverage their children's strengths and interests.
Utilizing Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework prominently featured in the US Department of Education's Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, Let Them Thrive will show you the most effective strategies for supporting your children based on research and best practices in the learning sciences.
Why is this important? Because, as Katie writes in her introduction, "as parents, we can use all the help we can get. Parenting is exhausting, and sometimes thankless work, but it's also the most rewarding job in the world when we get things right. Although our kids are wildly different from one another, we are all working toward the same goal: children who grow up to be happy and successful adults."
Bestselling author Katie Novak is back with an engaging primer for parents that shows them how to support and advocate for learning opportunities that leverage their children's strengths and interests.
Utilizing Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework prominently featured in the US Department of Education's Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, Let Them Thrive will show you the most effective strategies for supporting your children based on research and best practices in the learning sciences.
Why is this important? Because, as Katie writes in her introduction, "as parents, we can use all the help we can get. Parenting is exhausting, and sometimes thankless work, but it's also the most rewarding job in the world when we get things right. Although our kids are wildly different from one another, we are all working toward the same goal: children who grow up to be happy and successful adults."
Let Them Thrive: A Playbook for Helping Your Child Succeed in School and in Life
170
Let Them Thrive: A Playbook for Helping Your Child Succeed in School and in Life
170eBook
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Overview
Bestselling author Katie Novak is back with an engaging primer for parents that shows them how to support and advocate for learning opportunities that leverage their children's strengths and interests.
Utilizing Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework prominently featured in the US Department of Education's Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, Let Them Thrive will show you the most effective strategies for supporting your children based on research and best practices in the learning sciences.
Why is this important? Because, as Katie writes in her introduction, "as parents, we can use all the help we can get. Parenting is exhausting, and sometimes thankless work, but it's also the most rewarding job in the world when we get things right. Although our kids are wildly different from one another, we are all working toward the same goal: children who grow up to be happy and successful adults."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781930583177 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | CAST, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Series: | UDL Now! |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 170 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
DIFFERENT KIDS, DIFFERENT SIZES
When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
— Alexander Graham Bell
On Valentine's Day, 1876, a stern-faced lawyer hurriedly approached the U.S. Patent office gripping detailed documents of an invention that would forever change human communication. Fifth in line, Alexander Graham Bell's attorney applied for the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone. The Bell basic patent — No. 174,465 — was issued three weeks later. It changed the world. With the ability to transmit the human voice over electrical wire, Bell's Large Box Telephone was constructed of a wooden frame, about the size of a modern microwave. By the time of his death in 1922, telephones were in use all over the industrial world.
Today, phones are powerful computers that enable us to place wireless calls around the world, video chat, read digital books, pay bills, listen to navigation directions, watch live TV, take professional photos and videos, and so much more. And the Large Box Telephone is a mere artifact, an obsolete museum piece that no one would want or need to use. Why? The answer, of course, is progress. Science and innovation have given us better tools. Furthermore, our needs have changed.
With this enormous change in perspective on the understanding of communications technology, let me ask you to consider another kind of reframing. Think about how the education of young people has also undergone a dramatic evolution.
Until recently, students were educated using traditional models of education that were static and were focused on teachers providing a "one-size-fits-all" curriculum to all students. Teachers had a textbook or a curriculum, and they worked their way through that curriculum at a pace predetermined by the teacher, school, or district while students sat quietly in rows. Students were considered receptacles; knowledge was "deposited" into the brain, as if the brain was passive and receptive and teachers were the deliverers of such information. When assessments suggested that the knowledge wasn't deposited appropriately, attention often focused on the student, and his or her shortcomings. There was a sharp emphasis on "fixing" students so they could fit into this outdated mold.
We know now that if we want all students to be successful, they need a more flexible school environment; teachers must understand and appreciate student differences; and parents should be aware of their role in supporting schools and this new idea of "personalized" education. A personalized education is not one designed specifically for each student. Rather, it's an education designed from the outset to provide all learners with various ways to learn and have a meaningful learning experience.
Think for a moment about what your children are learning in school. It could be about the life cycle of a plant, the Civil War, how to use figurative language effectively, or how to solve equations. A textbook or curriculum program is delivered in a way that expects that students will learn the material using the same resources, at the same pace, and share what they know in the same way. Often, a whole class is expected to complete a multiple-choice test, write an essay on the same topic, or complete worksheets. When students "get it," they are considered to be good students. When they don't, they are sometimes moved into a different setting, or they fail, retreat, or rebel. This setup is an example of an educational system that is "one-size-fits-all." Students often don't have a choice about how they are going to learn or how they will express what they know, and their differences are not valued; indeed, they are judged often unfairly and inaccurately.
To personalize this process, teachers can provide additional options for students. For example, instead of asking students to read chapters in a textbook and listen to a lecture to prepare for a multiple-choice test (the traditional education trifecta!), teachers could provide a menu of options. Students could still have the choice to read silently from their book, but they could also listen to an audio version, view a video that focuses on the same content, research the concept on their own on the Internet, or sit with the teacher for a small-group presentation. Once they are done building their understanding, they could apply what they learned in an authentic way. Some students may choose the multiple-choice test, whereas others could write an essay, a blog, or a series of social media posts, and still others may choose to record a podcast, give a class presentation, or create an app or video that would allow other students to learn the material. In this scenario, all students are learning and working toward understanding the same content, but because they are given choices, they can personalize their journey. In this scenario, the student-teacher relationship evolves as education is moving from being teacher directed to student directed. When students don't have the opportunity to personalize their education, they may end up thinking that it's just not possible for them to be successful learners because they struggle with reading, or attending to the lecture or multiple-choice tests, or all of the above. This incorrect assumption might make them think that education just isn't for them. And research supports that many students feel that way.
For example, less than half of the eighth-graders in the United States are proficient readers. Over 1.3 million students drop out of high school each year — a sure sign that these young people don't think that success in school seems attainable. The outcomes are even more sobering for students with learning and attention issues. Across the United States, only 63 percent of students with disabilities graduated from high school in 2014 — a rate 20 percent lower than the national average. And how about the fact that only half of students surveyed in a Gallup poll note that they are hopeful or engaged in their education? That's not acceptable anymore. It's time that schools fit themselves to students and move away from a practice that begins to look a little like Bell's Large Box telephone. We need an educational framework that provides us with better outcomes for all students, and to do this, we need to transition to student-directed learning, where teachers guide student decision making, provide feedback, and become coaches on their personalized learning journeys. If we can work together to drive these changes, more students will be hopeful about school and engaged in their education, and will persist until graduation, and beyond. The outmoded framing of how kids learn is getting in the way of so many students not being successful learners.
As new research is published, we learn more about the best way to engage all students and increase their academic outcomes. When numerous research studies suggest there are concrete strategies we can use to ensure our kids have better chances of success, we should try to understand what those strategies are, why they are important, and most important, how they can be implemented in the classroom.
That's what this book is about. Let Them Thrive aims to provide parents with the most effective strategies for supporting kids to set them up for success in school and in life. The purpose of this is twofold. First, it's because, as parents, we can use all the help we can get. Parenting is exhausting and sometimes thankless work, but it's also the most rewarding job in the world when we get things right. Although our kids are wildly different from one another, we are all working toward the same goal: children who grow up to be happy and successful adults. How do children grow to be happy and successful? They learn to be self-motivated, go after what they want in life, and rebound after setbacks or disappointments. Successful adults are resourceful and knowledgeable enough to find what they need to make their lives enjoyable and meaningful. How do we instill these skills in our kids now?
Successful adults are also strategic, because in our world it's not our thoughts or dreams that define us but what we accomplish. Can we, as parents, help our kids become more strategic thinkers and doers? Makers and creators? We can, when we learn about the best practices in education and try to incorporate them into our parenting repertoire. When you know what happens in the brain when kids learn, you'll be able to reflect on how to "personalize" parenting for your kids and help them to build critical skills for their future.
The second purpose of this book is to give parents like yourself the information you need to understand how to maximize your children's school experience. What steps can you take to ensure that your child and all students get the most out of a school environment to better their chance of success? And by school environment, I'm not talking about the architecture of the building, a school's flashy technology, or the size of the class — these elements don't predict how well our kids will do in their future. I'm talking about how to think about what teachers do (or don't do) in classrooms to design curriculum and instruction that matters to all students and provides them with opportunities to practice the skills they will need in their future. I am by no means blaming teachers here. I am a teacher myself and hold this profession in the highest of esteem. My problem is with how teachers are often still trapped by how schools deliver education. So many well-meaning teachers and administrators are hamstrung by the old framing of how kids learn and the restrictive school environment that comes from outdated beliefs about how students should learn.
I've never met a teacher who wasn't receptive to implementing new innovative practices to personalize the education of all students. In fact, teacher conferences are more like rock concerts than professional development seminars, because when teachers understand how flexible and accessible education can be for them and their students, they become incredibly energized. However, getting to this place of understanding involves barriers that prevent teachers from providing all students with options to personalize their journey toward rigorous standards. Knowing more about what teachers are up against will help you become an ally and partner with them so all of our kids can access authentic, meaningful learning opportunities that will help them realize their own definition of success, regardless of their variability.
Before we discuss the challenges that teachers face every day, we all have to remember one thing: teachers are our partners and they truly want the same thing we do for our kids. All parents want their kids to succeed, and teachers want that too. We all know that teachers have a mix of strengths and weaknesses, just like we do as parents, but in order to ensure that all teachers become expert teachers, schools and parents need to value them for who they are and create environments where all they can be successful. Teaching and learning are alterable variables, and best practices in education can be taught. Whether or not your child's teacher is currently providing options for students to personalize their education, you have to give them credit for their commitment to our kids' futures.
To put teaching in perspective, I want to start out by saying that every single one of them would put his or her life on the line for your child. We have all heard the stories of teachers shielding students from bullets in school shootings, teachers carrying students away from flooded buildings, and teachers donating their own paychecks to purchase kids what they need.
In 2013, I attended NBC Education Nation as a teacher. During the live broadcast, they showed a video that still gives me chills today when I think about it. They shared the coverage of the tornado that ravaged Plaza Towers Elementary School in Oklahoma and killed seven students. One first responder, in tears, said, "We had to pull a car off a teacher in the hallway. I don't know what that lady's name was, but she had three little kids underneath her. Good job, teach." (Those children survived, as did the teacher.)
When we are talking about improving teaching and learning, it's important that we value the work and effort that teachers commit to our kids on a daily basis. Before we dive into what may not be happening in classrooms, it's important to know that teachers are doing the best they can with what they have, and if we want them to improve, we have to advocate for systems that value them and give them the opportunities to personalize teaching and learning so they can meet the needs of all of our kids. They guard and educate our kids with their lives, and they deserve our appreciation, respect, and support.
Step back for a moment, as a parent, and consider that as adults, we are all learners just as much as our children. If there is something that we don't do well, it's because we haven't learned how to do it yet. As an example, I don't ski. In fact, Imay argue that skiing for me would be impossible, and that I could never possibly ski with my husband, who in his heyday could ski double black diamond trails (or so he says ...). When schools and teachers say they can't meet the needs of all students, they are in the same place that I am when I'm staring up at a snowy mountain. We, as a society, have to change the lens and realize that we can't do it yet, but with the right support and training, anything is well within our reach. This is true for our kids, our teachers, and us.
Our teachers are up against a lot. Understanding the struggle that teachers face daily in the classroom is important, so we can see the classroom through their eyes and become partners in educating our kids. The shift to student-directed, personalized learning requires significant effort and change on the part of teachers, schools, and families.
UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING: OPTIMIZING EDUCATION FOR ALL
To optimize access to quality education for all our kids, the lines between our homes and schools need to be erased. What is best for our kids is best for them in our homes and within their classroom walls. We all want our students to set meaningful goals and strive for them. We want them to feel fulfilled and be happy, and we want them to learn how to go after what they want in life. To do this, both parents and teachers need to provide them with options so they can personalize their journey to achieve great things. Never before has there been such an opportunity for collaboration between these two worlds. This opportunity is possible because of an educational framework, based on scientific research that provides us with common language.
A tremendous amount of research exists that demonstrates the old way of teaching is simply not working for all students. Lecturing, textbooks, and multiple-choice tests are not the best tools at a teacher's disposal, just like Bell's Large Box Telephone is not on display at the Apple Store. Making the kind of impact needed to give our children equal opportunities at success requires a personalized approach to teaching and learning.
To do this, we need to think differently about schools and our roles as parents in supporting teachers and teaching. Effective schools empower all learners — teachers, students, and parents — to focus on teaching and learning. John Dewey, one of the greatest thinkers in education, in his book How We Think in 1910,4 said, "Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much so as selling and buying. One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought, as to say that he has taught when no one has learned." Using this lens, when our kids haven't learned, we as parents and teachers haven't taught. This gives all of us an incredible opportunity to learn more about best practices in education, so we are armed with the knowledge and resources to transform teaching and learning in schools and at home.
This framework, called Universal Design for Learning (UDL), provides a foundation to show schools and teachers how to meet the needs of all of our children while also teaching them important skills for the future, like self-direction, creativity, and problem solving. These strategies give all students a voice in the design and delivery of their own learning, and as they change and evolve as learners, their education will change and evolve with them, challenging them to reach further and accomplish more. In short, we don't set out to fix students. We set out to fix our schools.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Let Them Thrive"
by .
Copyright © 2017 CAST, Inc..
Excerpted by permission of CAST, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Different Kids, Different Sizes
Chapter 2: Turning On the Brain So It Can Learn
Chapter 3: The Value of Variability
Chapter 4: Why Choice Isn't Just Nice, It's Necessary
Chapter 5: What Teachers Are Up Against
Chapter 6: UDL in Action
Chapter 7: Raise Those Expectations
Chapter 8: A Call to Action
Endnotes
For Further Information
Index