Breath and the Common Core

The Common Core is back in the news today. The state senate was grilling the education commissioner, John King about the roll out of the standards. The legislators are responding to pressure from parents and educators who believe the state has moved too quickly in implementing the standards and connecting test results to teacher evaluations. The critics are also combining their protest of the standards with the state's relationship with inBloom, a data warehousing company, concerned about the security of their children's information. One senator claimed their was "... overwhelming evidence that we are moving at too fast a pace and not giving our students proper training in these new principles". 

In my career of 32 years in public education, I cannot remember ever hearing such a ruckus about standards. We have always had them, always taught to them, and always assessed them whether formally, informally, formatively, or summatively. My feeling is that some people, teachers in particular, are fed up with testing and now they have an ally in the parents. This is a dangerous combination. Teachers fearing accountability and parents worrying that their children will be stressed. 

The governor is getting involved as well, stating that "The way Common Core has been managed by the Board of Regents is flawed. There is too much uncertainty, confusion and anxiety." It's hard to argue with the second half of that statement, but he provides no evidence other than people are anxious and confused. Typically, in a show of decisive leadership, he is going to form a committee and they will remedy the situation.

In my opinion, this will all subside with time. In education, the common strategy for dealing with change is to ignore it or resist it. I hope this change isn't going away. The Common Core is more rigorous at the bottom end and perhaps, not rigorous enough at the top. But according to my friend, Heidi Bromley, who is a math consultant for Questar BOCES and involved in training teachers to implement the new standards in math throughout the state of New York, the standards are solid and well within the capabilities of students to handle K-12.

So my advice is to breathe, relax, the turmoil will settle. I have faith in the resilience of children and those who teach them. I do not have the same faith in politicians when they try to inject themselves into the education milieu.  

The Ego and Forgiveness

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” – Mark Twain

I am a Star Trek fan and one of the few quotes I remember from the series and follow-up movies is when Captain Kirk’s nemesis, Kahn, famously portrayed by Ricardo Montablán, told the newly promoted Admiral that “revenge was a dish best served cold.” Kahn’s ego had been festering for years. The comparison of Kahn to Captain Ahab was obvious throughout the movie “The Wrath of Kahn.” The ego has trouble letting go and in the extreme, dies with the flame of vengeance slowing burning out.

So what has this got to do with teaching and learning? Picture this – an angry teacher shows up at the door of the principal’s office and states, rather assertively, “I do not want to see Johnny in my class again!” “What has he done to warrant such a punishment?” the principal inquires. “Why he’s embarrassed me for the last time, that’s all!” One does not need an ego detector to know that it is operating on all cylinders in this situation. If the principal agrees to the teacher’s demand, Johnny has succeeded in pushing the “ego button” for the last time – he wins, while in reality losing. Likewise, the teacher wins, while in reality losing.

One of the most powerful traits of the great teachers I have known is the ability to reestablish contact with students with whom they have had an issue and had to perform some type of behavioral intervention, whether it  was a verbal desist or removal from the classroom. This is where ego awareness becomes something that can save the academic life of a child. The ego thrives on kids who struggle. It feeds on the power that comes from banishing them; from reporting them to a higher authority, or regaling their baseness in the faculty lounge.

In the article “The Power of Personal Relationships” my coauthor and I wrote about the need to send a message to the offending student that the incident is in the past; there have been consequences and we need to move on. One of the worst reactions to a child’s misdeeds is what I often heard that the student was not going to be allowed back into class unless he/she apologized to the teacher and to the rest of the class. This is the classic case where two egos are better than one. Typically, the administrator ends up mediating a lose-lose situation. The student may wind up back in class, but the damage is usually irreparable.

The ego believes that if we don’t show students that we are in control, all hell will break loose. “When we were in school, this kind of behavior wasn’t tolerated.” The ego loves “no tolerance” policies. There is no place for forgiveness there.

One of the toughest things a teacher has to do is to reestablish contact with a student who has experienced a negative adult-student interaction, especially if the intervention required the student to be removed from class. The ego wants revenge, retribution – the ego wants submission from the perpetrator.  Teachers have to recognize this – it is not the best way to help children. We need to reestablish a positive relationship by inviting that student back and letting him know that there is nothing personal about the incident and the subsequent consequences. Students need to not only know this, but to “feel” this. We have to put the incident behind us and focus on something positive.

Some who read this will feel their own ego start twitching. “What about the ego of the student,” they will retort. “Where is their responsibility?” This is not about them, it is about the teacher – the only person over whom we have control.  Dr. David Simon writes on the Chopra Center Blog, “With deepened awareness, we can make new choices, let go of habits that no longer serve us, and commit to doing something different. Remember, we have control over our choices, but not over the results of our choices.” In other words, it’s about “us” – to the ego, it’s about “them.”

Feeling the twinge, or stab, or in some cases the punch in the stomach is the beginning of ego awareness for teachers. If you felt it when you read this, and became aware that I was the enemy, the evil one, you have begun to travel down the path. Before we can grow, we need to become aware – what exactly was I feeling when I refused to take that student back into my class. The gap between stimulus and response – that’s where life is lived.

Chopra says it best, “Forgiveness is a powerful tool for personal healing and spiritual transformation, but it is a skill that must be learned. By practicing the steps for releasing toxic emotions, we can make forgiveness a functional part of our growth instead of just a moral dictate.” We need to be comfortable with forgiving our students!

The Ego in the Classroom

 “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” ~William Arthur Ward

Research has suggested rather strongly, that the one factor most responsible for the increase in academic achievement over time is the quality of the classroom teacher. That is why I am beginning this trek into the world of the ego with teachers for it is located in each individual the seeds for growth. As awareness grows, so will the power of each individual schoolhouse to motivate students to learn and to maximize their potential, for that is really the purpose of school. Yes, we want children to be prepared for life, but what better way to shove them out of the educational womb than with the confidence and tools to learn anything.

My first encounter with a teacher’s ego was in my first year of school. In first grade, I remember that we started the day with a prayer; I believe it was the Lord’s Prayer.  At the time, that was not offensive to the predominately Catholic and Protestant makeup of our small town.  For some strange reason, I thought God resided in the heavens, which, of course, were above us. So when instructed to pray, I looked up – this just seemed logical to me at the time. I was immediately chastised by Miss Martin, who demanded that I bow my head. That was not a problem; kids got yelled at all the time in those days – Dr. Spock’s book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was still in its first edition.

What made this event stick in my memory was when the itinerant music teacher arrived, Miss Martin, in front of the entire class, asked him what he thought of a young man who did not bow his head during prayer. I had to be embarrassed; heck, I was only six years old. I’ve often looked back on that scenario and wondered what would motivate a teacher to do that to such a young and impressionable child. Since then, I have seen much worse and for a long time, I stopped asking that question, because I thought for some, it was just human nature; a product of nature or nurture.

A teacher has power and the ego loves that. Much like a judge in a courtroom, you would hope that, intrinsically, teachers would know that they have a responsibility not to abuse that power -- not to take anything personally. But it is all personal with the ego! Putting down others is a way the ego reinforces the fact that it is better than someone else. Prejudice and bias are a byproduct of the ego and to a lesser degree this is the same cause for student maltreatment in school.

Several years ago, I coauthored an article about the power of personal relationship building, because I felt then and even more now that this is the gateway to learning. If a student feels wanted, cared for, and that his/her teacher really wants and expects them to do well, that young person will attempt anything. Likewise, if that same child feels unwanted, uncared for, and that his/her success is not something the teacher wants, that student will not achieve. In my opinion, this is the key to motivating the unmotivated; to open the door for the struggling student to enter the exciting world of learning.

The first category of this powerful teaching strategy is “knowing your students and allowing them to know you.” Think back on that teacher you felt was special. Did he or she invite you in to see a glimpse of their life outside of school? Did that person occasionally share family milestones or an event? As a student growing up in the 50s and 60s, my classmates and I often conspired to get the teacher off the subject and to tell us something personal. The motive was twofold, of course – one to get out of doing work, but the other was more under the surface – we wanted to connect with that teacher; we wanted to know that they were real, like our own parents were real to us.

We did not do this with all our teachers – as most students do, we had built in ego-meters. We knew what members of the faculty might relax a bit and share with us. For the ego is the great distance keeper in education. It unconsciously acts to form a divide that reminds us not to get to close. After all, we have the power and do not want to abdicate it or create the illusion that we are not in control.

This whole process begins on the first days of school. In my teacher education classes I often refer to the beginning of Dead Poets’ Society, where there is a vignette of three different teachers on the first day of school; one jumps right in and begins declensions of the Latin noun for farmer; a second warns what will happen if a homework assignment is not handed in; and Robin Williams character, of course, urges his students to “seize the day.” Ironically, in the end, the teacher who built personal relationships and who motivated his students to go above and beyond the curriculum gets fired; an interesting educational metaphor – one that resonates with most people who watch the film.

I encourage my veteran and prospective teachers to get to know their students in the first few days of the school year, but some resist. “But Dr. Tom,” they urge, “if I do that, they will expect me to be nice all year. They will take advantage of me. I will get fired for not being tough.” That’s the ego talking – it fears losing control. It wants to spend the first day going over the rules like the geometry teacher in the film clip. It doesn’t want to smile until Christmas. It confuses being stern and tough with “rigor.” It keeps saying, “When I was a student …” You get the picture.

Beginnings are so important – I often tell the story of my daughter, who as an elementary student had an ego barometer built in. I knew when she arrived home after that first day whether it was going to be a good year or an unproductive one. My advice to teachers, don’t let your ego dictate what kind of year a student will have. Make that first day one of promise and fun!

The Ego Unmasked

“He who dies with the most toys wins” – saying on a bumper sticker

If I want to leave my ego at the door, whether it be at the yoga studio door, the schoolhouse door, or the door to my own house, I need to know where to find it. I need to know what it looks like; the signals it gives just before it springs into action.

This is not an easy task for the ego is connected to thereptilian and limbic brains; the former is over 300 million years old and contains what we need for survival, while the latter is only 100 million years old and handles complex emotions like love and hate. In Freudian psychology, the ego is responsible for reason and sanity; it is the face of the id onto the real world. But today, spiritual instructors like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra believe that the ego is something quite different.
The ego is that part of us that identifies with what it sees in the mirror. It compares itself with what others have, what others look like. It is the “I” factor. It is constantly crying out, “what about me!”

When I was a young man in my first (swab) year at the Coast Guard Academy, we cadets were told that we were nothing; that we were lower than “whale shit” which lies at the bottom of the ocean. This was what I consider a medieval process of tearing down and building up that still goes on in military indoctrination. The concept was that our egos were transformed into a collective ego, “I am waiting for my classmates” type of group think. We looked alike, acted similarly, and were expected to all end up in the same place – an officer in the Coast Guard.

For many of us, this was a continuous struggle; the ego was resisting this control, this attempt to reconfigure itself. The ego does not like change – that’s why you often hear people both young and old, talk about the “good old days.” At the Academy, it was voiced by upperclassman, only a few years removed from the bottom of the ocean, who echoed the sentiments, “When I was a swab…” This was the rationale for perpetuating a system of degradation and mindless power over others that was uncovered in the famous Stanford prison experiment where typical college students became sadistic to their classmates when playing the role of jailor to their friends who were the inmates. Fortunately, this methodology has long been removed from the training of perspective Coast Guard Officers.

It was at the Academy that my own ego began to take control over me – it was a powerful force that was not congruent with the complicity that was required to survive at a military academy. It began to scream, “I am more than just a cadet, you know!”

It was during this first year that I experienced some success on the football field. My name was in the paper; upperclassman would stop me and ask if I was that “football player” followed by some extra hazing just to insure I remembered my place in the food chain. My friends reacted to my notoriety by drawing a picture of a football player with a tiny body and a huge helmeted head and hanging it on my door. Even though the change was invisible to me, they saw my ego growing.

It is difficult to survive in an institution that encourages compliance when there is a driving force emanating from within that is crying out for approval. It happens to all of us at some point, just in different degrees. The ego wants recognition; it is constantly reacting to those primordial urges of “I’m somebody – look at me!” My personal struggle was complicated by my introduction to alcohol. The ego loves beer. It fed mine like some sort of limbic fertilizer.

If the ego was only about recognition, it might be easy to discover in oneself. The ego is much more than that. The ego is constantly comparing, always identifying with the next “big thing.” When I was a young adult, my friends and I went out every night. There was this motivating force that we would miss something if we stayed home. It continued into my married life; then it became “keeping up with the Joneses.” My wife and I were seldom satisfied.” Look our friends are going on a cruise! Our neighbors have a new car! Why aren’t you making more money?

There was a time when I felt happiness was all about rewards. I was driven to make more money, to look good, to be a respected member of society. It wasn’t until I stopped drinking and participated in years of psychotherapy that the control my ego had over me began to diminish. It allowed me to see its power and how it was responsible for most of the suffering in my life.

Much of what we do is unconscious, automatic, and done without a great deal of awareness. Stephen Covey reported that one of his greatest discoveries while doing research for The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, was that there is a “gap or space between stimulus and response, and the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use that space” (p 310).

The ego does not like this gap, it functions at it most efficient capacity when this space is minimized. The ego is impulsive; it creates a stabbing feeling inside. It is the stimulus receptor. It keeps one from widening that gap; the gap where awareness lies.

Chopra (2006) gives what I feel is a perfect description of the ego when he writes, “Behind the curtain of your intellect and emotions is your self-image or ego. The ego is not your real self; it is the image of yourself that you have slowly built over time.  It is the mask behind which you hide, but it is not the real you, but a fraud, it lives in fear. It wants approval. It needs control. And it follows you wherever you go” (p. 81).

Approval and control – these are the two characteristics of the ego that I will try to expose in this writing. I will try to uncover the many faces of the ego, what it feels like when it begins to kick in and take over and how many of the impediments to educational improvement are because of the need for power and control that the ego requires.

Of course, this is really not about education, but of the process of waking up, of experiencing the freedom that comes when the ego does not really define who we are. I hope you will take this journey with me.

Leave Your Ego at the Schoolhouse Door

"The ego is the prison you have built around yourself, and now it holds you captive within its walls" – Deepak Chopra

I am embarking on a journey with the writing of this article, one of personal discovery and awareness that I want to share with other educators. I have been a teacher/administrator for over forty years, which does not give me legitimacy; it just means I have been long suffering, both personally and professionally.

A few years ago, I began taking yoga classes with my wife, who has become my personal life coach, and the first thing the instructor advised us was to leave our ego at the door. Wow, I thought, what a wonderful concept. I wasn’t sure of all the intricacies of that statement, but it felt right. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else – what you do in here is OK.

That day was transformative for me as it made me think back to my years in the classroom and as an educational administrator. How would schools be different if I had left my ego at the schoolhouse door and if my teachers had done the same? Would I have been more effective? Would they?

Eckhart Tolle, the author of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose believes that the ego is responsible for most of the dysfunction in the world and that becoming aware of one’s ego is the first step in dissolving the illusion that it creates.  He made me examine my own behavior and how my sense of “I” has gotten in my way of being a successful leader of others. It made me reexamine many of the leadership and teaching improvement advice I had received over the years and filter it through the perspective of one’s ego.
My conclusion, like Tolle’s, is that the ego is the biggest impediment to school change for the better. We now have a wealth of research-based strategies that work; that have been demonstrated to improve achievement when implemented with fidelity. So why are schools stilled mired in the past? Why is it so difficult to, as Wilson-Phillips sang, “To break free of those chains?”

The ego is very comfortable with the past and resists change. Some say this is just human nature, but I argue that there are many individuals who embrace change; feel comfortable with the unknown and the mysteries that it holds. Are these people anomalies; rebels who miraculously have stepped outside of their own human bondage? Perhaps, but I sense that we are all capable of these quantum leaps.

I am going to attempt to look at the literature and use my own experience as a way to bring ego awareness to others. If we can become aware of the signs, the feelings that foreshadow the ego’s intrusion into our actions, we can be the change we want to see in the world. It will also help me become the person I was meant to be.

Moon on Education Myths

There are many myths that have pervaded the schoolhouse through the years and some of them have lasted so long that their image has been transformed to one more aligned with reality. A favorite of mine is one I encountered recently on a private school website, that the purpose of school is to prepare students for life. This jumped out at me, because this is a rationale I get from many of my graduate students for retaining ineffective teaching strategies.

This often appears when we discuss grading practices, like the use of grades as punishment or giving students zeros for any reason. I use an article by Doug Reeves, entitled The Case Against Zero, to kick start our talk. It doesn’t take long before it degenerates into anger and emotional discourse. For the majority, the bottom line is that giving students zeros for cheating or for failing to complete work is teaching them a valuable life lesson – in real life, this type of behavior has consequences. Therefore, grading practices that make no sense and have no educational value, are worth retaining because students who receive these grades will be prepared for the “zero” grades in life.

Similarly, those that promote the lecture method, or the “chalk and talk” pedagogy, claim that this is readying their students for the auditorium-style classrooms of college. This university-type auditory training, would be more effectively done if teachers taught a variety of note-taking skill sessions, which is a research-based strategy known to increase achievement. Sitting and listening has no basis in the research on sound educational learning tools.

Which brings me back to the myth that the purpose of school is to prepare kids for life. The purpose of school, in my opinion, is to promote learning – we need to teach our students how to learn, to motivate them to want to learn, and to be facilitators of both – not to condition them to accept failure, to live with damaged self-esteem, or to be drained of their desire to be life-long learners.

As a high-school principal, I often heard my traditional teachers state that they were not in the “self-esteem” business; that they were in the education business – like the two were totally disconnected. The research on confidence and self-esteem as being predictors of student success is very positive. Intuitively, it makes sense that if a young person arrives at school feeling like their learning is directly controlled by their own hard work, and that they are indeed capable of doing it, the odds are good that it will happen.

But how can this happen in the way schools are currently structured – not easy, I am afraid. With our current system of lock-step learning, progressing through grades, and departmentalized subjects, it will not be an easy fix. Yet there is hope – the emphasis on teaching strategies that have been demonstrated to increase achievement is one way. We can no longer allow practices, like lecturing for long periods of time, or grading practices that do not reflect achievement, to continue in use.

We also need to become aware of ego-based practices – those customs that are rooted in our own need for approval or for satisfying innate desires of which we are not even aware. But that is a topic for another time.

Expectations and Responsibility

I am a regular Facebook user, I must confess – not that using social media is a sin, but like any other avocation, it can be abused or over-used. It’s a way I can keep up to date with my children – either texting or Facebook is their medium of choice. It is also a great way to stay in touch with old friends who I do not get to see very often.

As you would expect, being a retired public-school administrator, many of those Facebook friends are educators. Recently, one of them posted an analogy in an attempt to trivialize the new mandate that student test scores be part of every teacher’s evaluation. Is a dentist responsible for the patient who comes to him or her with a mouthful of cavities? Well, of course not, but he certainly is held accountable for when that same person leaves his office – either with several expensive fillings or a new set of teeth. Either way, the cavities should be gone!

Many of those who oppose using test scores claim that they cannot be held responsible for students who arrive at the schoolhouse door with all kind of degrees of academic exposure and carrying varying levels of emotional baggage. This is the argument that really bothers me, because if one does not accept responsibility for educating all the students sitting in class, then we have given ourselves permission to fail with some of them. Alan Blankenstein and Pedro Noguera call this “the ‘normalization of failure, in which there is a belief that the problem is that ‘our’ students simply can’t achieve.”

In my assessment classes, I have my students discuss the expectation issues at Frankford Elementary School in Delaware, before Sharon Brittingham became principal, where the excuse du jour was that “you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”  There is no wonder it was a low-performing school; you get what you expect! When Brittingham retired after eight years at the school, 100 percent of the students met state reading standards and 95 percent met the math standards.

As a neophyte high school principal, I had a building level planning team (BLPT) that took on the task of gathering data to create a school improvement plan. Because our school population was very heterogeneous, we decided to aggregate our teacher’s grades by gender. What we found was that boys in English were being graded significantly lower than girls. Very similar to the rationale for using test scores to evaluate teachers, the English department reacted with anger and accused the committee of using grades to evaluate them. They responded to the data by claiming they were not responsible for boys being poor readers and writers. The BLPT just wanted to start a discussion!

According to a recent study that looked at the value added (VA) of a teacher, or the impact a specific teacher had on test scores, the effect was significant. Good teachers produced higher test scores and over the long term, even had an impact on future earning potential. Yet even despite these findings, the authors of the study cautioned readers in its use as a rationale for teacher evaluation - that it may lead to “teaching to the test” or even worse, cheating.

A “big idea” of my assessment course is that no educational decision should be made on the basis of one test and neither should teacher evaluation. My vision of a fair evaluation would be one that uses value added assessment as a percentage, with student and parent surveys, as well as administrative observations based on a proven model. Eventually, assessment will be embedded in every classroom, computerized so students test out as they master material rather than wait until the “dreaded” two-hour testing day for a one-shot summative assessment.

But please don’t use the argument that we are not responsible for what comes through the classroom door. Let us control what we can and that’s the value a good teacher can add to achievement. You can’t control how the students come to you, but you can control how they leave! We can make chicken salad out of chicken shit!