By Dave Krupke and Jeff Knox Education is generally a series of adults asking questions – this has been so since the time of Socrates. Questions are asked with the hope or even expectation that the children will respond with answers that adults have pre-conceived, either by their own thoughts or based on what a subject-area curriculum tells them the answer should be. It can also be said that adults don’t ask questions for which they don’t know the answers. For adults, “sameness” is important – we want children to have the same answers as we do. Some educators feel it is important for children  to be able to explore their world and come up with their own reality. For this to happen, in the home or in a classroom, there must be a sense of shared learning – a perception on the part of both adult and child that curiosity and discovery are fun and have utility for making sense of the world. Shared learning, especially with young children, occurs when adults limit the number of direct questions they ask, such as “what’s this called . . . or what color is that?” When adults ask pointed questions, there […]

As was so aptly put by Albert Einstein, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”. Those of us in education are very good at counting and keeping track of student performance with numbers and data. We notice every error in spelling, math, writing, reading accuracy, quizzes, chapter review questions, unit tests, and standardized tests. Scores often reflect what is left after all of the errors are subtracted. I have even seen spelling and math tests returned with the “score” in red ink and a minus sign in front of the number. Wouldn’t it be better to put +17 instead of -3? Teachers rarely miss inappropriate behaviors in their classrooms, the hallways, the cafeteria, the gym, at recess or on the bus. Outside of school, parents notice when children are misbehaving much more often than when they are being “good”. That seems to be adult human nature – notice what is “bad” and frequently make a comment. How would we, as adults, like it if the only comments we heard from our boss were about our mistakes? What kind of message would result and how would we feel? Consider this thought from Dr. […]

In any relationship, all parties have choices involving whether to value or devalue others. When we consider Emerson’s thought that “the ancestor of every action is a thought”, we realize that it is our thoughts that determine our actions and our words . . . and that we do have a choice about what we think. Conventional wisdom tells us that actions are stronger than words. Yet we also know that words can be delivered “out of sync” with the actions that accompany or follow.  In addition, it is commonly known from research and practical experience that undesirable behavior can be stopped by negative comments, but changed in a lasting way only with positive ones . . . delivered frequently. There was a study many years ago (source unknown) that involved tallies of comments between parents and their children in their homes for a period of time. Results indicated that parents comments were more negative than positive – a ratio of 13 negative to every positive comment. The data gathering then shifted to a school setting, with tallies of commentary between teachers and students in a typical classroom revealed a 3:1 ration of negative-to-positive. Much better than in the home […]