bisoroblog - Tumblr blog

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

How Mindfulness Can Help Teachers and Students Manage Challenging Situations

Skillful Responding: The Mindful Way of Dealing with Challenges

Mindfulness, the awareness that is right here and right now, nonjudgmental, and open, sounds relaxed, calm, and actually pretty great. Many moments invite mindful savoring, such as when we begin our long-awaited vacation, when we enjoy a delicious meal, or when we score the winning points for our team. But what happens when we really don’t want to be in this particular moment? For most teachers and students, it’s an experience we know all too well. Let’s imagine that this is the moment a parent challenges you in a meeting or the moment you learn that a colleague was diagnosed with a serious illness. For students, maybe this is the moment you make a mistake in class, do something awkward in front of your friends, or learn that you were left out of a social gathering. These examples illustrate the range of human experience. Much of our daily experience is less emotionally charged, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s work with the examples above.

A vacation, a good meal, and a win are very pleasant, so we might meet these moments with anticipation and delight. We typically want to have more experiences like these. Dealing with difficult people can make us anxious, and we gear up for the possibility of a parent-meeting confrontation. Hearing bad news unnerves us, and we find all manner of reasons to put off calling the sick colleague. The in-class mistake, the public display of awkwardness, or the exclusion from a peer group can also upset students, who may feel like running away and hiding.

Each moment comes with its own feeling quality—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—even if we’re not always aware of it. The basic attitude we humans share about experience is that we want more of the pleasant variety and less (or none) of the unpleasant. In fact, “stress” could be just another name for “unpleasant.” It’s important to note that there’s no advantage in seeking out unpleasant experiences and nothing wrong with enjoying, sustaining, and appreciating the pleasant ones. In fact, mindfully savoring positive experience promotes resilience (Smith & Bryant, 2016). But, when we have problems coping without drama when the inevitable difficulties of life arise, or when we voluntarily add to our own stress burden, some balance needs to be restored.

Fueled by the expectation that we can make unpleasant things go away, we often try very hard to manage our stress or unpleasant experience by trying to fix it. After one round of a diet regimen, we regain most of the weight, and move on to another diet, and then another, with the same results. We use alcohol and other substances to help us relax and fix our troubles by forgetting, only to wake up in the middle of the night with the problems racing around in our heads. We become chronically irritable and overcontrolling toward a student who has a knack for getting on our nerves, anticipating her every annoying move in advance. There’s a cyclical quality to our stress management, characterized by repeated efforts to transform unpleasant situations into those that suit us better. Sometimes we manage to make this strategy work, but in the long term we usually end up facing the same problems over and over again, frustrating ourselves in the process.

It is sensible and intelligent to apply the skills of fixing and problem solving to those things that are amenable to change. Certainly, there’s no advantage in mindless acceptance of that which is inefficient or harmful to oneself or others. This is why we teach students to plan, reason, and problem solve (Elias & Tobias, 1996; Kendall & Braswell, 1982). For the most part, such approaches rely on logical thinking and are most successfully applied to well-defined problems with well-defined solutions, such as how to study, solve math problems, and eat healthfully. But not all teacher or student problems are well-defined (Kitchener, 1983). Some of the very real challenges of life and the classroom are ill-defined problems that have emotional underpinnings and no clear-cut answers. How can I handle my angry students? How can I manage to sustain empathy for parents who are uninvolved? How can I maintain my sense of balance when I’m constantly being asked to do more? Mindfulness offers another way to approach the difficult, ill-defined problems and uncomfortable feelings of real life, both for teachers and students. It begins by recognizing that uncomfortable feelings may be a signal that you need to act in some way, but that feelings are not, in themselves, the problem.

Many of the risky and potentially dangerous behaviors of adolescents—procrastination, disruptiveness, disordered eating, cutting, drinking, violence, taking drugs, technological addiction, and so on—have a common denominator. They likely involve avoiding unpleasant emotional experience by trying to make it go away. The extent to which we do this is a measure of our distress tolerance (García-Oliva & Piqueras, 2016; Simons & Gaher, 2005). We all have our limits, but individuals who are highly intolerant of distress and unable to cope adaptively have quick triggers and are more likely to suffer from a range of psychological and behavioral problems (Zvolensky & Hogan, 2013). We know that we are primed to react consciously and unconsciously to threat. High levels of stress or trauma can sensitize people to stress, making the slings and arrows of life more difficult for them to bear. Sometimes, risky behavior like drug abuse can start as an attempt to silence the memories of past pain. But our generally allergic reaction to unpleasantness can also be manifested in more ordinary ways, like avoiding boring homework, cutting classes, or misbehaving. Student behaviors that attempt to make unwanted, uncomfortable feelings like inadequacy, boredom, restlessness, or anxiety go away are common, and they are also supported by certain implicit assumptions. Specifically, we appear to endorse the culturally reinforced belief that unpleasant things should go away. When we can’t make the unpleasant parts of life go away, we often pile on some judgment, criticizing ourselves and others for life’s imperfect circumstances.

It bears repeating that it’s not harmful to try to fix problems or make things better. This is just common sense. The problem is that without some awareness of our knee-jerk inclination to perceive unpleasant things as threatening, our attempts to fix certain things can make them worse. Imagine this hypothetical scenario. A student is walking up the school stairway surrounded by classmates. He stumbles badly, falls and hits his knee, dropping the athletic equipment and books he is carrying, and lands face downward on the stairs. The rest of the kids turn to see what happened. Some ask if he’s okay; others start to giggle and poke fun at him. His face feels flushed, his heart races, and his knee really hurts. He hurriedly pulls himself together and moves along as quickly as he can. From the outside, it looks like he’s recovered. But on the inside, his mind races: They must think I’m really stupid. Come on, don’t be a baby. Suck it up and get back up. Don’t show them you got hurt. I know someone tripped me. I’ll show them.

The mental chatter resumes later as he thinks about his friends’ teasing, fueling his internal distress. Every time he passes that stairway, he remembers himself sprawled on the stairs. He’s sure everyone else remembers it, too. Ruminative processing about how he could be so clumsy plays out in an endless mental loop. He attempts to avoid and suppress the embarrassment of the incident by placing the blame on others and plotting some revenge. Not only is the fall unpleasant in terms of the physical sensations in the body, but his discomfort is amplified by his evaluative stream of thoughts. Mental elaboration sustains the unpleasantness of the physical injury, creating emotional distress. Pain is felt in the knee, but suffering is in the mind. It’s a double whammy. His automatic thoughts and emotions trigger the physiological cascade associated with the stress response. His mind continues its playback loop in an effort to justify his experience and avoid feelings of shame and helplessness. And, perhaps most importantly, these efforts are largely ineffective, because the painful memory surfaces again and again. Students are not the only ones who handle perceived threats by trying to avoid uncomfortable feelings. Similar thought streams (e.g., I shouldn’t have to put up with this. Things shouldn’t be so hard) might also sound familiar to teachers.

You might be wondering what the alternative is, given our ingrained human habit of trying to change or avoid the unpleasant. Maybe it’s not too surprising that contemporary researchers have recognized what many traditional approaches to well-being have long stated: avoidance of negative or uncomfortable emotions is usually not helpful, let alone possible (Hayes, 1994). While avoidance of unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and sensations may produce some immediate gratification, chronic avoidance is associated with a number of problematic outcomes when it becomes a coping style (Spinhoven, Drost, de Rooij, van Hemert, & Penninx, 2014). This knowledge might be particularly important for adolescents, whose brains are especially sensitive to emotional experience and whose habits of coping are becoming established.

Adolescents report more daily experience of negative affect from ages 10 to 18 (Larson, Moneta, Richards & Wilson, 2002) but have more difficulty identifying and sorting out their feelings of anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and upset compared to younger children and adults (Nook, Sasse, Lambert, McLaughlin & Somerville, 2018). Presumably, the adolescent experience of negative affect involves co-occurring emotions that are more complex than those experienced in childhood and that pose greater coping challenges. As described in the hypothetical example, commonly used adolescent strategies for coping with distress (e.g., emotion avoidance, emotion suppression, and rumination) are maladaptive and related to more problems down the line. Although avoidance of emotional experience may offer short-term relief, the longer-term consequences can include depression, anxiety, restricted opportunity, and poor social relationships (Eastabrook, Flynn, & Hollenstein, 2014). Rumination, or the repetitive focus on negative events, thoughts, or feelings in order to reduce the pain of a situation, is a well-known risk factor for depression and anxiety among youth and adults (Rood, Roelofs, Bögels, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schouten, 2009). A recent examination of multiple studies showed that the maladaptive strategies many youth employ to manage their emotional distress actually play a causal role in the development of subsequent problems (Schäfer, Naumann, Holmes, Tuschen-Caffier, & Samson, 2017). Many major mental disorders have their start in adolescence, and less severe symptoms of disorders like anxiety and depression are alarmingly common (Lee et al., 2014; Spear, 2009).

The mental advances that secondary school teachers recognize in their students, such as the ability to reason abstractly or to take the perspective of others, also come with a price. Because youth can think abstractly, they can also engage in hypothetical thinking (e.g., What if I were richer or thinner, like her?) and can reach counterfactual conclusions (e.g., Then I would be happier). The very same mentalizing skills that allow students to take the perspective of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, allow them to imagine and mull over what their peers and teachers are thinking about them (Blakemore & Mills, 2014). Social media offers a ready platform for comparing oneself to others, a process called social comparison. Social comparison processes, already elevated during adolescence, are exacerbated by excessive media use and linked to depressive symptoms (Nesi & Prinstein, 2015). Cyberbullying is perceived as especially threatening to adolescents because one’s shaming is on public display, comparison with others is exposed, and social isolation is threatened (Nilan, Burgess, Hobbs, Threadgold, & Alexander, 2015).

Overall, despite many obvious advantages, adolescent changes in cognitive and emotional development can lead to increased rumination and emotional distress for some youth. Just as educators work diligently to prepare students with academic knowledge and skills for the next stage of their life, so, too, should we prepare them with other life skills related to healthy emotion regulation. The importance of this social and emotional skill set can’t be overestimated for adolescents, who are at an age when emotionality increases and adult patterns of emotion regulation are beginning to be consolidated (Paus, Keshavan, & Giedd, 2008).

How Mindfulness Helps Regulate Emotions

A major developmental advance during adolescence is the increasing ability to reason, make decisions, and think abstractly. These kinds of cognitive processes are rational and logical, referred to as “cool cognitions” (e.g., These are the factors that led to the civil war, or Here are some steps I can take to break down this project), and they are often taught in decision making and study skills courses (Bergmann & Rudman, 1985). When thinking and decision making are done in an emotional context, as in a group of peers, cognition can be less rational. The so-called emotional or “hot cognitions” can distort thinking and underlie many impulsive acts (e.g., Forget about that homework. Let’s party!). It’s difficult for most of us, but especially for adolescents, to override powerful emotions in order to think coolly and rationally, even if we know better. The student who keeps checking her phone in class can’t seem to resist seeing her best friend’s messages despite her teacher’s disapproval. The student who fell on the stairs may not easily let go of his angry thoughts. In an effort to feel more of the pleasant things, like excitement, and fewer of the unpleasant things, like rejection or shame, adolescents may behave in ways that prove unproductive, especially if these behaviors ultimately become well-established patterns.

Mindfulness gets to the root of these tendencies by encouraging exploration and acceptance of all feelings, without judgment. Mindful awareness of one’s thoughts and emotions includes not just being present and curious about pleasant experience, but about all experience. This is a hard but crucial truth. Mindfulness is not about feeling a certain way; it’s about feeling whatever is present in your life right now in order to have greater discernment about how to respond. This involves changing our relationship to feelings, perhaps especially to unpleasant ones. Rather than trying to escape as soon as we notice them, we actually acknowledge them, and perhaps even make some peace with them. This is what the practice of awareness and nonreactivity fosters.

Some studies show that simply being focused on observing thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations is not helpful and may even add to anxiety (e.g., Oh no, here comes that anxious thought again!). Importantly, it’s how we observe—nonjudgmentally, with curiosity, and without reactivity—that promotes emotion regulation (e.g., Where is the anxiety in my body right now? Can I be curious about it? Can I simply watch the anxious thoughts come and go?) (Baer et al., 2008; Desrosiers, Curtiss, Vine, & Klemanski, 2014).

The process of observing emotions and thoughts nonreactively offers us a glimpse into the operations of our mind. Instead of being caught up as the lead performer in our mental drama, we have a front-row seat for the play. This permits greater perspective and deeper understanding. It also tempers the fear we often have of feeling our own feelings, because there is less automatic avoidance. If we are avoiding something, we notice that as well, but without commentary and without judging. Emotions become more tolerable because we have the courage to feel them, and from our new vantage point, we can see that they ebb and flow. There is less pressure to fix them and greater acceptance of our basic human experience.

Dispassionate observation and acknowledgement of experience, both pleasant and unpleasant, is a lot easier to do when the focus is on the breath or on some activity like eating. This is why teachers often start there. But the rubber really hits the road with stress. Compassionate acknowledgment of our unpleasant feelings and our typical ways of coping with them (e.g., harsh self criticism, lashing out, mental brooding, gossip, bullying, self-harm) is the doorway to reducing our reactivity and lessening our stress overall. We notice the inner mental and emotional experience, and, as best we can, we let it be. This practice has an interesting effect: It releases us from trying to solve the problem of unpleasant emotions. We struggle and stress less. We find less reactive and more regulated ways of working with difficult, ill-defined problems. We pull the plug, metaphorically speaking, to deactivate the stress cascade.

A Mindful Approach to Challenges

We know, at some deep level, that feeling our fear, anger, shame, irritation, anxiety, and sadness is better than masking it. But because it’s not what we usually do, we need to practice. You can try a mindfulness experiment when you next experience something unpleasant (i.e., stress). Maybe your child is cranky before school and you have to rush to get yourself to work. Unpleasant. Perhaps a person who was supposed to help you with a project doesn’t show up. Unpleasant. Perhaps your back pain returns or a student disrupts your class and you can’t finish your lesson. Unpleasant. We can’t escape all stress, but we don’t need to make it worse. Remember that no one is advocating we deliberately try to make ourselves uncomfortable or search out unpleasant experiences in order to suffer more. There are plenty of naturally occurring events throughout the day when we don’t get our own way. Simply acknowledging the affective quality of our experience (i.e., pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral) and the accompanying bodily sensations, thoughts, and feelings adds a different perspective to the experience, building resilience and grit (Duckworth, 2016). This kind of emotional resilience can protect adolescents from being overwhelmed by intense feelings of anger, sadness, or other distressing emotions that can lead to destructive actions.

Teachers are natural caregivers whose instincts are often oriented to making things better, so mindfulness of one’s own tendency to avoid discomfort is also a good starting point. When it comes to emotions, not everything can be fixed or made pleasant, and we can’t use performance-based thinking for emotional issues. Many adolescents have come to believe that only pleasant emotions are acceptable and that uncomfortable emotions are a sign of personal weakness or substandard performance in life. This fallacy presents a great but avoidable mental burden. It is critically important that students learn to recognize their uncomfortable feelings in the moment and understand that they do not have to like these feelings if they are to regulate distress in a balanced and wholesome way.

Teachers can help students understand their own tendency to cover up unpleasant feelings by modeling emotional balance. For example, teachers might respond to student pressure or complaints about schoolwork by acknowledging the obvious dissatisfaction without fixing or confrontation. It may be possible, when there is clearly something causing stress in the classroom, to recognize it openly, nonjudgmentally, and in the moment, thus modeling for students a mindful approach to unpleasant circumstances. The practices included in this chapter can provide the foundation for this emotional skill.

Sometimes pressures related to time or performance demands, fatigue, restlessness, and boredom build up in the classroom, and students react in negative ways. Simply avoiding the obviousness of the circumstances by pressing ahead can make matters worse. Allowing students to take a few mindful breaths or engage in some movement can demonstrate acceptance of the situation (e.g., I know we’ve been working hard, and you’re feeling tired) and provide tools for stress management. Simple recognition of the body and feeling its sensations (e.g., noticing feet on the floor, tension in the shoulders) without changing anything can be a particularly effective antidote to stress. Body awareness or interoception helps students regulate their stress because it grounds attention in the physical body and reduces the amplification of distress caused by spiraling thought streams and emotional reactivity (Roeser & Pinela, 2014).

While classroom “peace corners” or places where students can go to self-regulate are becoming more popular for younger children (Lantieri, 2002), they are not usually available to adolescents. The purpose of a classroom peace corner is to provide students a safe place where they have an opportunity to handle strong emotions by recognizing them, accepting them, and restoring balance. They can then find a responsible way to act without hurting themselves or others. The opportunity to take a voluntary break to restore emotional control is certainly something adolescents need. Offering some nondisciplinary means for this process in secondary education settings could help adolescents develop better self-regulation and ultimately improve learning.

Patricia Broderick, PhD, is a research associate at the Penn State Prevention Research Center. She is a licensed psychologist, certified school psychologist, certified school counselor, and the author of a mindfulness curriculum. She is the author of “Mindfulness in the Secondary Classroom: A Guide for Teaching Adolescents.“

How Mindfulness Can Help Teachers and Students Manage Challenging Situations published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

3 razones para agregar cursos en línea a tu currículum y cómo hacerlo

Al buscar un nuevo empleado, diferentes empleadores buscan cosas diferentes, pero todos intentan responder a la misma pregunta : ¿puede este individuo agregar valor a mi negocio? Puede ser una tarea difícil diferenciarse de la multitud pero mostrar el estudio de cursos en línea relevantes, es un excelente punto de partida. Con esto en mente, aquí hay tres razones por las que debe agregar esta educación a tu currículum:

1) Hace una mejor entrevista

Los empleadores utilizan las entrevistas para evaluar el valor que puede agregar a su compañía, y es importante diferenciarse de los demás solicitantes. No todos los días un entrevistador ve un MOOC en un currículum (aunque es cada vez más común).

Agregar cursos en línea relevantes realmente puede ayudarlo a sobresalir. Se trata de una experiencia única que denota experiencias e invita nuevas preguntas, por lo que es importante prepararse para responder a ellas. A continuación, algunas de las preguntas que puedes esperar:

¿Qué te llevó a inscribirte en estos cursos y mejorar tu educación?

¿Qué conocimiento obtuviste de los cursos?

¿Qué puedes hacer ahora que no pudiste hacer antes?

Uno de nuestros estudiantes de edX, Akshay, que consiguió un trabajo en Microsoft, explica cómo la discusión de sus cursos en línea lo ayudó a ser contratado: “Con la estrategia de cambio de Microsoft hacia la nube, la mayoría de las preguntas de la entrevista se referían a la computación en la nube y cuánto entendíamos…. Les conté sobre los cursos que había tomado y que también fui un asistente de clase durante el curso edX. Estaban tan impresionados que, mientras que otros candidatos fueron interrogados durante horas con preguntas técnicas, mis entrevistas fueron cortas y en su mayoría basadas en recursos humanos”

2) Muestra un conjunto relevante de habilidades

Los solicitantes a menudo tienen dificultades para transmitir lo que realmente pueden hacer por una empresa. Hablar con confianza sobre un conjunto de habilidades que ha desarrollado puede ayudar a guiar a los entrevistadores en la dirección correcta.

Akshay, por ejemplo, utilizó los MOOC para desarrollar un conjunto de habilidades valiosas que luego agregó a su currículum. Dio un ejemplo práctico de lo que podía hacer exactamente y pudo transmitir el alcance de su conocimiento durante la entrevista. Con un conjunto importante de habilidades relevantes, los entrevistadores sabían que era un buen candidato.

3) Muestra carácter

Perseguir la educación profesional no solo ayuda a desarrollar importantes habilidades, sino que también muestra un buen carácter.

Completar un curso en línea, en sí mismo, es impresionante. Demuestra motivación y disciplina personal, madurez intelectual, curiosidad y una gran voluntad de aprender: todo lo cual es importante para los empleadores.

Es difícil para los entrevistadores medir siempre estas cualidades, pero es lo que están tratando de hacer. Quieren ver que estás dispuesto a hacer un esfuerzo adicional, porque eso indica pasión, y pasión indica valor. Sin embargo, tenga en cuenta que esto solo se aplica si realmente ha completado el curso y puede hablar sobre lo que aprendió y cómo es relevante para la posición.

Por ejemplo, si está solicitando un trabajo de ingeniería de software, no mencione un curso que tomó sobre la Griego Clásico como experiencia laboral relevante. Algo como Programación en Java o Programación en C es mucho mejor, siempre y cuando puedas hablar con conocimiento de lo que has aprendido. Si no puede hablar de ello, mejor es no incluirlo.

Pero, ¿cómo deberías agregar estos MOOC a tu currículum?

Una de las mejores maneras de incorporar MOOCs en tu currículum es mediante una carta de presentación. Este es un requisito bastante estandarizado en la mayoría de los países, que además te permitirá conectarte con un reclutador o gerente de contratación a nivel personal.

La carta, es un excelente lugar para analizar las habilidades profesionales que ha adquirido y cómo se relacionan con el puesto. Si está enviando su currículum de forma electrónica, incluso puede vincularlo a los perfiles del curso.

Una segunda opción es crear una sección completamente nueva, como “habilidades y objetivos”, “avance personal” o “desarrollo profesional”. Otra ruta sería incluir sus cursos en la sección de educación de su currículum. Esto puede ser especialmente útil si no ha completado un programa de grado, o si está solicitando un trabajo que no está relacionado con su título.

En cualquier caso, solo incluya los cursos que completó y las principales conclusiones de cada uno. No te vendas corto, pero tampoco exageres. Se conciso y asegúrate de que todo lo que incluyas sea relevante para el trabajo.

No olvides actualizar tu perfil de LinkedIn con todos los certificados de cursos que hayas obtenido. edX tiene una útil función que puedes utilizar para esto y que además está incorporada en el panel de control; esta función te permitirá agregar certificados directamente a tu perfil.

The post 3 razones para agregar cursos en línea a tu currículum y cómo hacerlo appeared first on edX Blog.

3 razones para agregar cursos en línea a tu currículum y cómo hacerlo published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

How Schools Can Help Teachers Understand and Address Racial Bias

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As first period gets underway at Cambridge Street Upper School, veteran math teacher Stephen Abreu leads a small-group discussion. But the conversation isn’t about middle school algebra, and Abreu isn’t talking to students. Seven of his fellow teachers, nearly all of them white women, are sitting across from each other talking about race, white privilege and how their own biases affect their relationships with students.

“Am I just always going to be wrong?” one teacher wonders about her interactions with students of color.

“Black kids need to know they’re not being singled out,” says another, during a conversation about making sure that her students see she isn’t playing favorites when it comes to classroom discipline.

Another colleague confesses her surprise at how often teachers of color have reported experiencing racial bias in their own interactions in the building.

Each of Cambridge Street’s staff members participate in meetings just like this one every week. They’re known as cultural proficiency seminars and attendance is mandatory. Teachers describe these 45-minute sessions as candid and, more often than not, uncomfortable. But they say the discussions are helping them to become better educators within a system in which predominantly white staff teach in schools with significant numbers of black and Latino students.

The move toward cultural proficiency, also known as culturally relevant education or culturally responsive teaching, has been gaining momentum in urban school districts throughout the country. The goal is to better serve low-income students of color by acknowledging and addressing inequities built into aspects of curriculum design, classroom discipline and even student-teacher relationships. Many educators cite these as contributing factors in the long-standing academic achievement gap between low-income students of color and their more affluent white peers. The first step, cultural proficiency proponents say, is for white teachers simply to acknowledge the role that racial and cultural bias plays inside the building and classrooms. It’s a step that doesn’t come easily.

Cambridge Street Upper school math teacher Stephen Abreu is also a trained facilitator for weekly discussions among teachers about race and bias. (Kate Flock for The Hechinger Report)

In New York City, the nation’s largest public school system, a $23 million initiative is underway to combat implicit bias, the unconscious attitudes formed about racial and cultural groups different from one’s own. The centerpiece of the effort, as it has been outlined by the department to date, is a mandatory daylong implicit bias training for every teacher and administrator. But even advocates for such trainings caution that all they can really do is raise awareness of educators’ personal biases. Mitigating the effects of implicit bias on student behavior and performance requires teachers working closely with their peers, and school leaders making those efforts a priority. This isn’t a quick fix. The effort must be ongoing.

“There’s no evidence to show that a one-day training for teachers and staff will foster change,” says Circe Stumbo, president of West Wind Education Policy, an Iowa-based group that provides analysis of school equity policies. What’s needed, she says, is a schoolwide commitment to making cultural proficiency a priority, with systems in place for continual personal reflection and accountability.

That’s precisely what’s taking place at Cambridge Street, a diverse neighborhood school in which nearly 60 percent of its roughly 250 students identify as black, Latino or multiracial and more than half of all students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch, a national measure of poverty. Attendance is nearly 95 percent, the number of students meeting or exceeding academic standards in English is on par with statewide levels and the school reported zero suspensions in 2018.

These successes are happening largely due, teachers say, to the persistent efforts of school principal Manuel Fernandez, who draws from his own experiences as a student of color in all-white schools.

“Being the only black kid in school … nobody saw my intellectual potential,” says Fernandez of his childhood in Brockton, a Boston suburb. “Everything I had ever been told about myself was that I was intellectually inferior to white folk.”

Cambridge Street Upper School principal Manuel J. Fernandez talks with students between classes, March 29, 2019, in Cambridge, MA.f (Kate Flock for The Hechinger Report )

In a career that spanned both community organizing and stints in the corporate world before becoming a school administrator, Fernandez always looked to make racial and social equity a priority. And when the chance presented itself to lead Cambridge Street in 2012, he made his intentions clear.

“I told the superintendent we’re going to deal with issues of race and culture. We’re going to deal with it every day. We’re going to deal with it in every way possible,” he says.

From the start of his tenure, Cambridge Street’s professional development sessions were peppered with cultural proficiency topics and activities. Teachers were reading books on race and education, listening to guest speakers and meeting regularly in sessions led by Fernandez. While some teachers embraced the approach, results at the school were limited, Fernandez says. He came to realize that his role in facilitating those meetings, not just as the principal but as a black man addressing a largely white staff about a topic as fraught as race, was inhibiting the type of honest and fruitful discussion necessary for meaningful change. The solution, he realized, was for teachers to be guided by their peers. Today, Fernandez says that 14 members of the school’s staff serve as facilitators in the weekly cultural proficiency meetings.

That has made the discussions more productive, teachers say, and often more difficult. Voices crack, faces flush with emotion and tears are not uncommon.

“Acknowledging as a white person that you have caused harm at some point and that you also remind a lot of our scholars of everyone who has caused harm to them up until this point, it’s hard,” says Karolyn Maws, a 20-year teaching veteran who took a job at Cambridge Street precisely because of its work around cultural proficiency.

“What we’re trying to have teachers see here,” says school counselor and cultural proficiency facilitator Kini Udovicki, “is that white people have benefited their whole lives from white supremacy and now they’re in a position of power in a classroom setting and so you have to recognize what that dynamic looks like.”

While these conversations can be awkward, teachers say they play an essential role in helping them become better at their jobs.

“In our meetings we talk about real stuff that happens around race because it happens all the time in the classroom,” says math teacher Kendal Schwarz. “Teachers want and need a space to talk about this. It feels useful. You feel the practicality of it.” This kind of dialogue, she said, was largely absent from her graduate school teacher-training program, where issues of race and bias were rarely mentioned.

Henderson Inclusion School statistics teacher Russell Thompson works with students Keran Torres (l) and Briana Manning, March 29, 2019 in Boston, MA. (Kate Flock for The Hechinger Report )

The discussions have prompted teachers to change the way they plan classes and how they interact with students. Autism specialist Rebecca Flanagan says she makes sure that the images and photographs she uses as teaching aids reflect the diversity of her students. School librarian Norah Connolly recalls learning from a group of students about their interest in Japanese manga. Recognizing the dearth of literature written from a nonwhite perspective, Connolly was quick to add dozens of titles to the library.

When science teacher Donna Peruzzi has the opportunity to bring in guest speakers, she makes a conscious choice to seek out people from a range of different backgrounds, “so the kids can see that science is not just a white male thing.”

The payoffs are perhaps most evident in how students feel and talk about their school.

“Just walking around the halls, the energy you feel here is that no matter your background, religion, skin tone, sexuality, it doesn’t matter because we’ll love and accept you anyways,” says eighth-grader Clio Bildman. She recalls a much different experience at a previous middle school she attended that was nearly all white. “One of the boys I was friends with, he was African-American. I would see him walk into school and his facial expression would change. That’s how toxic the environment was.”

Students also say they’ve been able to build strong relationships with teachers based on trust, not simply whether they share the same background or culture.

“Kids at other schools talk about how their teachers are a little bit racist, or they don’t get help from their teachers,” says eighth-grader Mariam Ziro, who is originally from Kenya. “We get the same amount of help as a white student.”

That isn’t to say that the school has magically bridged what can be significant gaps in cultural and life experiences. Teachers recall recent incidents when their comments or actions made students feel they were being singled out, often because of race. But now when these incidents occur, teachers say they feel better equipped to respond.

“Before we really focused on this, I think when students would say ‘That’s racist’ or ‘You’re saying that because I’m black,’ I would have jumped to defensive mode,” says Peruzzi. “These [cultural proficiency] conversations have helped us really reflect on what our biases are.”

Viewing education through a racial and cultural lens is not new. Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 work, “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” was an early critique of the education system’s exclusive reliance on dominant white culture to design curriculum and set standards. Afrocentric schools that began to form in the decades that followed were built on the idea that black children are best served by black educators.

Yet, urban districts serving primarily black and Latino children still face a lack of diversity in their teacher force. A growing number of schools are looking for ways to build stronger student-teacher relationships, a prerequisite, they assert, to narrowing achievement gaps in academic performance. A push is underway that draws on growing, if contested, research around implicit bias. Studies have examined the role of racial bias in everything from higher incidents of lethal force by police officers, to disparities in health care spending, to home valuations in black neighborhoods.

Across the Charles River from Cambridge Street, Boston Public Schools is now at the forefront of efforts to take a districtwide approach to fighting cultural insensitivity and bias. Three years ago, the school system’s Office of Opportunity Gaps — created to boost the academic performance of low-income students of color — began to ramp up its work around cultural proficiency. Today, with a nine-person staff and a budget of more than $4 million, it offers cultural proficiency training to every school principal and a small but growing share of the city’s teachers. Beginning in 2017, the office’s leader, Colin Rose, made cultural proficiency a component of every school’s annual accountability reports — essentially forcing schools to address bias and inequity.

Maureen Costello, director at Teaching Tolerance, an Alabama-based nonprofit that provides anti-bias training for schools, says the district’s approach to equity is “one of the most systematic” in the country. She says by making cultural proficiency mandatory, “leadership is signaling that this work is important. You can’t have it only be voluntary or else you’re only preaching to the choir.”

But the district leaves it up to individual schools to figure out how they’ll achieve cultural proficiency. School leaders say they appreciate that flexibility, but it can also translate into extra work.

“I was really unhappy with Colin when he did not give us the ‘how,’ ” says Patricia Lampron, principal of Boston Public Schools’ Henderson K-12 Inclusion School. “But what it forced us as a school to do is to think. It’s the process that’s the real important part of this work as opposed to just checking off boxes. It’s the thinking, it’s the ownership of cultural proficiency work that really forced the change.”

But she says progress hasn’t always come easily in her school, where two-thirds of students are black or Latino and the majority of its teachers are white.

There are teachers who just aren’t ready to challenge their assumptions about race, privilege and culture, Lampron says. But she doesn’t let that stop the work: “I didn’t ask anyone if they were on board. I said you’re either on the bus or you’re under the bus.”

History teacher Samuel Texeira has been a mentor for young black students at Henderson K-12 Inclusion School. (Kate Flock for The Hechinger Report )

As at Cambridge Street, Henderson K-12 began its cultural proficiency work with teacher discussions on race and privilege. One immediate result was that teachers began going through titles in their classroom libraries, adding books they felt were more reflective of their students’ experiences and interests. A mentoring program for young men of color, spearheaded by history teacher Samuel Texeira, has become a source of pride for school leaders. The school has adopted a curriculum framework designed by author and educator Zaretta Hammond, a pioneer of culturally responsive teaching practices.

“Cultural proficiency is no longer a separate thing we do once a month. It’s at the center of what we do,” Lampron says.

With the emphasis on creating awareness of racial bias and privilege among white teachers, a big challenge for Cambridge Street and Henderson K-12 is not to neglect the needs of their nonwhite teachers.

“I’m a woman of color so I feel like intuitively, culturally I already understood a lot of those things,” says Stephanie Okwudi, who teaches math at Henderson.

It’s a sentiment shared by other teachers of color.

“Do I think that diversity discussions are geared and targeted towards white people? Absolutely,” says Ariel Carmichael, a music teacher at Cambridge Street. “Do they help black people? For me they have not because I already know what it’s like,” she says of a childhood often spent as the only black kid in all-white classrooms.

But teachers at both schools say that the focus on implicit bias has made it easier for them to speak candidly with colleagues when they witness or experience racist incidents in their buildings. And at Cambridge Street, in addition to their weekly cultural proficiency meetings, teachers also meet monthly in affinity groups, organized by race. While that may seem antithetical to the whole idea of cultural proficiency, teachers of color say this gives them the opportunity to focus on their needs and concerns, which are less about building awareness of privilege and more about navigating a system that is still overwhelmingly white.

“It is an uphill battle,” says Carmichael. “Sometimes you move back five steps to move forward one. But there’s been tremendous growth. I love this school.”

This story about culturally responsive teaching was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

How Schools Can Help Teachers Understand and Address Racial Bias published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

Eight Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any Classroom

NPR/IPSOS did a national poll recently and found that more than 8 in 10 teachers — and a similar majority of parents — support teaching kids about climate change.

But in reality, it’s not always happening: Fewer than half of K-12 teachers told us that they talk about climate change with their children or students. Again, parents were about the same.

The top reason that teachers gave in our poll for not covering climate change? 65% said, “It’s not related to the subjects I teach.”

Yet at the same time, we also heard from teachers and education organizations who are introducing the topic in subjects from social studies to math to English language arts, and at every grade level, from preschool on up.

Which raises the question: Where does climate change belong in the curriculum, anyway?

The “reality of human-caused climate change” is mentioned in at least 36 state standards, according to an analysis done for NPR Ed by Glenn Branch, the deputy director at the National Center for Science Education. But, it typically appears only briefly — and most likely just in earth science classes in middle and high school. And, Branch says, that doesn’t even mean that every student in those states learns about it: Only two states require students to take earth or environmental science classes to graduate high school.

Joseph Henderson teaches in the environmental studies department at Paul Smith’s College in upstate New York. He studies how climate change is taught in schools, and believes it needs to be taught across many subjects.

“For so long this has been seen as an issue that is solely within the domain of science,” he says. “There needs to be a greater engagement across disciplines, particularly looking at the social dimensions,” such as the displacement of populations by natural disasters.

At the same time, there’s a tension in pushing more educators to take this on. “I worry a lot about asking schools to solve yet another problem that society refuses to deal with.”

As a potential response to this criticism, the nonprofit Ten Strands follows an “incremental infusion” model in California. In other words, environmental literacy becomes part of subjects and activities that are already in the curriculum instead of, the organization says, “burdening educators” with another stand-alone and complex area to cover.

We also heard from teachers who say they are searching for more ideas and resources to take on the topic of climate change. So, here are some thoughts about how to broach the subject with students, no matter what subject you teach:

1. Do a lab.

Lab activities can be one of the most effective ways to show children how global warming works on an accessible scale.

Ellie Schaffer is a sixth-grader at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C. She’s done simulations on greenhouse effects in science class, using plastic wrap to trap the sun’s heat. And she’s used charcoal to see how black carbon from air pollution can speed the melting of ice.

These lessons have raised her awareness — and concern. “We’ve ignored climate change for a long time and now it’s getting to be, like, a real problem, so we’ve gotta do something.”

Many teachers we talked with mentioned NASA as a resource for labs and activities. The ones in this outline can be done with everyday materials like ice, tinfoil, plastic bottles, rubber, light bulbs and a thermometer.

On the Earth Science Week website, there’s a list of activities and lesson plans aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. They range from simple to elaborate.

2. Show a movie.

Susan Fisher, a seventh-grade science teacher at South Woods Middle School in Syosset, N.Y., showed her students the 2016 documentary Before the Flood, featuring Leonardo diCaprio journeying to five continents and the Arctic to see the effects of climate change. “It is our intention to make our students engaged citizens,” Fisher says.

Before the Flood has an action page and an associated curriculum. Common Sense Media has a list of climate change-related movies for all ages.

The 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth and its 2017 sequel, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power have curricular materials created in partnership with the National Wildlife Federation.

3. Assign a novel.

Rebecca Meyer is an eighth-grade English language arts teacher at Bronx Park Middle School in New York City.

She assigned her students a 2013 novel by Mindy McGinnis called Not a Drop to Drink.

“As we read the novel, kids made connections between what is happening today and the novel,” Meyer says. “At the end of the unit, as a culminating project, students choose groups, researched current solutions for physical and economic water scarcity and created PSA videos using iMovie about the problem and how their solution could help to combat the issue.”

She described the unit as a success. “They were very engaged, they loved it,” she explains. “A lot of them shared this information with their families. When parents came in for parent-teacher conferences they mentioned their kids had been talking to them about conserving water.”

Not A Drop To Drink belongs to a subgenre of science fiction known as “cli-fi” (climate fiction) or sometimes eco-fiction. You can find lists of similar books at websites like Dragonfly.eco or at the Chicago Review of Books, which has a monthly Burning Worlds column about this kind of literature.

Looking for English topics for younger students? EL Education covers environmental topics, including water conservation and the impact of natural disasters, in its K-5 English language arts curriculum.

4. Do citizen science.

Terry Reed is the self-proclaimed “science guru” for seventh-graders at Prince David Kawananakoa Middle School in Honolulu. He’s also spent a year sailing the Caribbean, and on his way, he collected water samples on behalf of a group called Adventure Scientists, to be tested for microplastics (spoiler: even on remote, pristine beaches, all the samples had some).

He has assigned his students to collect water samples from beaches near their homes to submit for the same project. He also has them take pictures of cloud formations and measure temperatures, to see changes in weather patterns over time. “One thing I stress to them, that in the next few years, they become the voting public,” he says. “They need to be aware of the science.”

5. Assign a research project, multimedia presentation or speech.

Gay Collins teaches public speaking at Waterford High School in Waterford, Conn. She is interested in “civil discourse” as a tool for problem-solving, so she encourages her students “to shape their speeches around critical topics, like the use of plastics, minimalism, and other environmental issues.

6. Talk about your personal experience.

Pamela Tarango teaches third grade at the Downtown Elementary School in Bakersfield, Calif.. And she tells her students about how the weather has changed there in her lifetime, getting hotter and drier: “In our Central Valley California city of Bakersfield, there has been a change in the winter climate. I told them about how, when I was growing up in the 1970’s we often had several two and three-hour delays to school starting because of dense tule fog which affected visibility. We really never have those delays in the metropolitan area. It is only the outlying areas which still have two and three-hour dense fog delays, and they are rare even for the rural areas.”

(Although the Central Valley winter has indeed become hotter and drier due to climate change, recently a University of California, Berkeley study has attributed the reduction in tule fog specifically to declines in air pollution.)

7. Do a service project.

“I teach preschoolers and use the environment and our natural resources to highlight our everyday life,” says Mercy Peña-Alevizos, who teaches at Holy Trinity Academy in Phoenix. “I stress the importance of appreciation and eliminating waste. My students understand and have fantastic ideas. We recycle and pick up around our neighborhood.”

Environmental service projects can be simple, elaborate or just for fun. Check out the #trashtag challenge on social media, for example.

8. Start or work in a school garden.

Mairs Ryan teaches science at St. Gregory the Great Catholic School in San Diego. “The sixth-graders oversee the school garden, as well as, our vermin composting bin, christened the ‘Worm Hotel’. The garden is their lab and the students ‘live and learn’ soil carbon sequestration and regenerative agriculture. Our school’s compost bin is evidence that alternatives exist to methane-producing landfills. In looking for more solutions to reduce methane, students debate food reuse practices around the world.”

Check out ThePermacultureStudent.com for resources on building school gardens with rainwater capture and compost systems to regenerate the soil. There are local and regional resources like the Collective School Garden Network in California,and Growing Minds in North Carolina, which offers basic plans for a school garden as well as lesson plans that connect gardening to Common Core standards.

Here are some more resources

After the publication of our climate poll story on Monday we heard from people all over the country with dozens more resources for climate education.

Alliance for Climate Education has a multimedia resource called Our Climate Our Future, plus more resources for educators and several action programs for youth.

The American Association of Geographers has free online professional development resources for teachers.

American Reading Company sells an English Language Arts curriculum called ARCCore that includes climate change themes.

Biointeractive, created by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has hundreds of free online education resources, including many on education and the environment, and offers professional development for teachers.

Climate Generation offers professional development for educators nationwide and a youth network in Minnesota.

CLEAN (Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network) has a collection of resources organized in part by the Next Generation Science Standard they are aligned with.

Global Oneness Project offers lesson plans that come with films and videos of climate impacts around the world.

Google offers free online environmental sustainability lesson plans for grades 5-8.

The Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility has a group of 19 lessons for K-12.

“We believe that the social and emotional skills we help strengthen in young people and adults are sorely needed to combat the fear and avoidance we and students experience around climate change,” spokesperson Laura McClure told NPR.

The National Center for Science Education has free climate change lessons that focus on combating misinformation. They also have a “scientist in the classroom” program.

The National Science Teachers Association has a comprehensive curriculum.

The Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, NY has a book called the Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change.

Ripple Effect “creates STEM curriculum” for K-6 “about real people and places impacted by climate change,” starting with New Orleans.

Ten Strands offers professional learning to educators in California in partnership with the state’s recycling authority and an outdoor-education program, among others.

Think Earth offers 9 environmental education units from preschool through middle school.

The Zinn Education Project (based on the work of Howard Zinn, the author of A People’s History Of The United States) has launched a group of 18 lessons aimed specifically at climate justice. Some are drawn from this book: A People’s Curriculum For The Earth: Teaching Climate Change And The Environmental Crisis.

Eight Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any Classroom published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

Artificial intelligence in the classroom - What do the experts say?

Artificial intelligence in the classroom - What do the experts say? published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

The Talent Behind Acquiring Talent: Meet Rose

Welcome to the latest edition of edX Insider, where we introduce you to people behind the scenes at edX. Today, we sit down with Rose, Recruiter, to chat about her best advice for edX learners, what makes a good recruiter, and more.

Quick Stats: Name: Rose Sinclair Department & Role: Recruiter, Talent Acquisition Hometown: Northfield, Vermont (Go Marauders!) Favorite Song: Don’t Stop Me Now – Queen

What do you think makes edX different? The work we’re doing is meaningful. One of the first things I noticed after starting here is that people bring their A-game to work every day and I think the mission drives that.

What’s your favorite part of working at edX? There’s a lot to be done as we are growing and scaling. This allows for edXers to have a core function but also dive into other areas that help us as we grow, and there’s opportunity for experimentation. I’ve been lucky enough to be empowered on my team to learn more about recruitment marketing, for example, and integrate it into my role.

What would you say are the top 3 most important traits of a recruiter? It’s important to be inquisitive and ask good questions. Recruiters should also be adaptable and resilient.

Best advice for edX learners? I’ve taken one course, Business Communication from RITx, and I think the best advice I have is to commit to a schedule. Block time on your calendar like you would an on-campus class.

One thing your colleagues may not know about you? I worked on a 30 acre wholesale organic farm in central Vermont throughout summers in college. We did it all – washed and packed hundreds of boxes of romaine lettuce for Whole Foods in Boston every week, planted Christmas trees, picked strawberries, and cut cilantro. Eat local!

The post The Talent Behind Acquiring Talent: Meet Rose appeared first on edX Blog.

The Talent Behind Acquiring Talent: Meet Rose published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

Drowning In Parenting Advice? Here’s Some Advice For That

At my baby’s six-month appointment a few months back, I got a one-pager from the pediatrician titled “Starting Solid Foods.”

“It is critical that the baby develop a taste for rice cereal at the beginning, to offset the loss of iron from formula or breast milk,” it reads.

Sounds serious. Then come the all caps: “THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF FEEDING GIVE RICE CEREAL ONLY.” That is followed by advice to introduce pureed vegetables before fruits so the baby doesn’t develop a sweet tooth.

I obediently went out and bought some sand-textured baby cereal. (Organic, of course.)

“Oh no, we’re not doing that.” My spouse pointed me to a parenting book we had on the shelf.

“There’s no need for cereals alone; they are bland and bulky and their iron benefits are overstated,” it reads. “The idea that you should introduce vegetables before fruits to avoid creating a sweet tooth is just an unfounded myth. A carrot has virtually the same amount of sugar as an apple.”

Welcome to early parenthood’s barrage of contradictory advice. It tends to be detailed, with convincing internal logic. “Studies” are often invoked. And the stakes feel so high — like, if I do this wrong, will my baby be malnourished or end up a picky eater or not succeed in life somehow?

Enter Brown University economics professor Emily Oster and her new book, Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth to Preschool. It’s the follow-up to her first book, Expecting Better, a deep look at the data behind pregnancy advice, which has a bit of a cult following. (I am in this cult.)

In her new book, Oster ticks through big and small parenting dilemmas. She uses her training as an economist to look at the relevant research for each of them and to assess how much stock we should put in the findings.

“What I do in the book is actually try to comb through these studies and figure out which of them are giving us the best information,” Oster says. “So then you can make these choices having the best information, not just the first thing that comes up when you Google it at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

OK, so what about my solid-food dilemma? Yea or nay on rice cereal? Veggies first?

“It turns out there isn’t any evidence to suggest that is a particularly important way to introduce foods or not,” she says.

The answer to this one: You do you. Keep the food mushy, and don’t stress about it too much.

This wasn’t my only point of confusion that this book cleared up, even though I’m nearly four years into parenthood. Here are a few of my personal takeaways.

Nipple confusion is not a thing — you don’t need to wait three weeks after birth to give a pacifier or bottle. (This makes me feel better about giving my firstborn a pacifier on day two.)

Baby milestones have a wide normal range, so don’t obsess. (Still vaguely worried that by nine months my baby should be clapping.)

Breastfeeding does not help mom lose weight. (Crushed.)

A lot of the other takeaways are kind of nuanced. They don’t give you a clear-cut answer, so much as information to help you make your own decision. One reason for that is designing a good study of the risks and benefits of a parenting decision is really hard.

Take, for example, Chapter 4: “Breast Is Best? Breast Is Better? Breast Is About the Same?” Oster provides a path through the maze of conflicting advice by sifting out the convincing studies from the questionable ones.

“Most of the studies on this are done by comparing the kids whose moms breastfeed to the kids whose moms don’t,” Oster says. “The issue with that is that the kind of moms who breastfeed are different than the moms who don’t, on average. So, in the U.S. in particular, moms who breastfeed tend to be better educated, higher income, more likely to be married.”

(It’s unclear why that demographic breastfeeds more, Oster says, but the timing for the trend is connected to the public health push away from formula that began in the 1970s.)

Now, let’s say you want to find out the impact of breastfeeding — and not of these demographic differences — on things like IQ and obesity.

“When we narrow in on some studies that are better — like, for example, studies that compare siblings, where one sibling is breastfed and one sibling is not — those studies do not show the same kinds of impacts on long-term things like obesity or IQ,” Oster says.

For the record, she found that there are some health benefits to breastfeeding, but they’re more limited than the hype. If it works for you and your family, Oster concludes, great; if not, formula is a good option.

So, even if you’ve made a decision about how to introduce solids and whether to breastfeed or bottle-feed, there are so many other ones to make! What about baby nap schedules, how to potty train or the financial impact of choosing a nanny versus day care versus staying at home?

As an economist, Oster advocates for taking some of the angst out of it.

When making a parenting decision, she says, “Step one is to kind of really figure out what the best evidence says about the choice.” Look for randomized studies and big sample sizes.

“But then there’s a really important second step, which is to combine that with what is going to work for your family,” she says.

For instance, when she first brought her baby daughter home, she knew the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that your baby sleep in your room, ideally for the whole first year, as part of its safe infant sleeping environment guidance.

“My husband did one day with our older daughter, and he was like, ‘I can’t believe it’s making those noises.’ He just couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t sleep,” she says. Room sharing for a full year was just not workable for her family.

With Cribsheet, Oster is trying to make parents less confused, more confident in their choices and less judgmental of other parents who make different choices. Reading the book makes that feel surprisingly achievable. Laying out the research really strips these decisions of their drama, and you end up wondering why it all felt so overwhelming in the first place.

When the time came to break out the solid foods with my baby, we did mashed sweet potato. A few months into it, emboldened by Oster’s book, we’ve gotten adventurous: This weekend at our Seder, baby even had a bit of brisket smushed up with horseradish.

Drowning In Parenting Advice? Here’s Some Advice For That published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

3 habilidades que necesitas para triunfar en el 2019

A medida que la tecnología revoluciona la economía digital, estamos redefiniendo lo que significa tener éxito en el trabajo. Aparte de las competencias técnicas, los estudios muestran que los empleados también necesitarán una combinación versátil de habilidades humanas o soft skills, habilidades para facilitar los negocios y habilidades Digital Building Block o de bloques de construcción digital. De hecho, de acuerdo con los resultados de una encuesta de edX del 2018, solo una quinta parte de los encuestados considera que la educación de su especialidad universitaria la llevan a su campo actual.

Pero, ¿qué combinación de habilidades significará el éxito? Burning Glass Technologies, en asociación con Business-Higher Education Forum, examinó 150 millones de ofertas de trabajo para determinar las habilidades que los empleadores buscan en el mercado laboral actual. En su investigación, encontraron que tres categorías clave de habilidades, llamadas “Nuevas Habilidades Fundamentales”, serán esenciales para la movilidad laboral y el éxito a medida que el mercado laboral continúe evolucionando. Tener elementos de uno o dos de estos conjuntos de habilidades es deseable, mientras que los tres son una combinación ganadora.

Las tres habilidades

1) Habilidades humanas o “habilidades blandas”: son aquellas habilidades en las que se aplican el pensamiento social, creativo y crítico. Estas habilidades son el camino hacia la innovación y la colaboración y le permite a los equipos trabajar de manera cohesiva.

Cursos para ayudarte a desarrollar habilidades blandas:

Comunicación efectiva para el líder actual

Liderazgo y comportamiento organizacional

Pensamiento crítico: toma de decisiones razonadas

Liderazgo para mandos intermedios

Gestión participativa: motivación y liderazgo organizacional

2) Habilidades habilitadores de los negocios: permite que otras habilidades salgan a relucir en situaciones prácticas. Este conjunto de habilidades permite a las personas conectar las capacidades de las tecnologías digitales con objetivos comerciales más amplios.

Cursos para ayudarte a desarrollar tus habilidades de habilitación empresarial:

Cómo implantar grupos de mejora de procesos

Introducción a la gestión de proyectos

Lánzate a la Innovación con Design Thinking

Diseño de Estrategias Exitosas y Acciones Incontenibles

3) Digital Building Block: estas habilidades son el enfoque de la mayoría de los programas destinados a cerrar la brecha de las habilidades digitales. Las habilidades digitales aprovechan la tecnología para agregar valor y alinearse con los dominios funcionales que son críticos para la economía de la información.

Cursos para ayudarte a desarrollar tus habilidades de bloques de construcción digital:

Aprendizaje automático y ciencia de datos

Big Data sin misterios

Transformación digital en las empresas

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)

La versión original de este artículo fue publicada en Forbes.

The post 3 habilidades que necesitas para triunfar en el 2019 appeared first on edX Blog.

3 habilidades que necesitas para triunfar en el 2019 published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

Transitioning from a ‘Teacher-centric’ to a ‘Student-centric’ Classroom through Digital Learning

“(Technology) is not making teaching obsolete. If anything, it is making the craft of teaching more important” … The Economist, 22nd July 2017

It all began in November, 2014 when I attended the edX Global Forum in Boston. All through the dreary eighteen-hour flight from Bangalore (where I live and work) to Boston, I was restless and unsure, perhaps even skeptical, about MOOCs and the role of technology in education; would I ever tune in to that mode of teaching and learning?

Three days later, when I flew out of Boston at the conclusion of the edX Global Forum, that dilemma had vaporized. My mind was made up, digital learning and more specifically the ‘flipped classroom’ was the way to go! In hindsight, a panel-discussion at the edX Global Forum in which a group of students from edX partner institutions shared their experience about the flipped classroom and how they benefited from it was the ‘inflection point’!

During my flight back to Bangalore and in the days that followed, I chanced upon a few reinforcing statements (unable to recall the source): (1) “Do not confine your students to your own learning, for they are born in another time” (Chinese Proverb?) and (2) “…today’s students are the YouTube and What’s App generation. If their expectations are not met in the classroom, they will resort to the Internet and YouTube to learn!”

Ever since my ‘tryst’ with edX in November 2014, I built and deployed three MOOCs on edX.org in the ‘Banking and Financial Markets’ domain during 2015-16 based on the courses I teach MBA students at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-Bangalore). By the winter of 2016 those three MOOCs had reached nearly 30,000 students from over a hundred fifty countries on the edX platform. The feedback from the learners was very flattering indeed!

Buoyed by that experience, and recalling the panel discussion on ‘flipped classroom’ at the edX Global Forum in the winter of 2014, I decided to relaunch the courses I teach in the MBA Program at IIM-Bangalore in the ‘flipped classRoom’ format, embedding my 100+ MOOCs videos into those courses. In the ‘flipped classroom’ pedagogy, students watch 3 to 4 videos each of 8 to 10 minutes duration before coming to class, to comprehend the concepts and theories in their own time and at their own pace. In the classroom session that follows, I engage in a Q&A interaction with the students for the first half hour to ensure that they have indeed viewed the videos and grasped the concepts and theories. In the following one hour, the deliberation in the class is taken to the next level when students apply those concepts and theories by solving problems, working on spreadsheets, discussing short cases, etc. I also revisit ill-understood concepts and facilitate peer- to-peer interaction and learning.

Students have, in their course feedback stated that their overall learning experience and knowledge intake had significantly enhanced in the ‘flipped classroom’ pedagogy.

This mode of teaching and learning won the ‘Teaching Innovator’ award from the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India in 2016.

Later, when edX launched with Professional Certificate Programs, my course team and I significantly enhanced the contents (and the rigor) in the original three MOOCs and turned them into a Professional Certificate Program titled ‘Risk Management in Banking and Financial Markets’ comprising five MOOCs and a proctored exam. The first run of the program was launched in August 2018 and successfully concluded in February 2019. Over 25,000 learners from around the world register for the program and 300+ cleared the exam which is testimony to the depth and rigor of the program, both in terms of contents and the evaluation process.

A repeat delivery of that Professional Certificate Program commenced on 5th April 2019 and will go through to end-September, 2019.

If you are currently working in (or wish to get employed) in a bank, brokerage firm, mutual fund or an information technology company and would like to enhance your knowledge and skills in risk management, this Program will be of great value. Click Here for more details.

The post Transitioning from a ‘Teacher-centric’ to a ‘Student-centric’ Classroom through Digital Learning appeared first on edX Blog.

Transitioning from a ‘Teacher-centric’ to a ‘Student-centric’ Classroom through Digital Learning published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

Most Teachers Don’t Teach Climate Change; 4 In 5 Parents Wish They Did

More than 80% of parents in the U.S. support the teaching of climate change. And that support crosses political divides, according to the results of an exclusive new NPR/Ipsos poll: Whether they have children or not, two-thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats agree that the subject needs to be taught in school.

A separate poll of teachers found that they are even more supportive, in theory — 86% agree that climate change should be taught.

These polls are among the first to gauge public and teacher opinion on how climate change should be taught to the generation that in the coming years will face its intensifying consequences: children.

And yet, as millions of students around the globe participate in Earth Day events on Monday, our poll also found a disconnect. Although most states have classroom standards that at least mention human-caused climate change, most teachers aren’t actually talking about climate change in their classrooms. And fewer than half of parents have discussed the issue with their children.

When it comes to one of the biggest global problems, the default message from older generations to younger ones is silence.

Parents and the general public

Laine Fabijanic, a mother of three living in Glenwood Springs, Colo., says her part of the country is feeling the effects of climate change, from an unusually snowless winter last year to scary fires. She and her family recycle and eat organic; they are even installing solar panels on the house.

Still, she says she hasn’t talked about the big picture of climate change with her young daughters. “I don’t think we’ve talked much about it at all,” she said in an interview. “Probably because it hasn’t come up from them.”

About 3 in 4 respondents in our nationally representative survey of 1,007 Americans agreed that the climate is changing. That figure is in line with previous results from Ipsos and other polls.

Parents are even more likely than the general public to support teaching students thoroughly about climate change, including its effects on our environment, economy and society. Among parents with children under 18, 84% agree that it should be taught in schools.

A plurality of all parents support starting those lessons as early as elementary school. And though it may be a controversial subject, 65% of those who thought climate change should be taught didn’t think parental permission was necessary. Among Republicans, the corresponding figure was 57%.

However, parents like Fabijanic aren’t necessarily holding these conversations themselves. Just 45% of parents said they had ever discussed the topic with their own children.

Teachers support teaching climate change more in theory than in practice

If they don’t hear about it at home, will kids learn about climate change in school? To answer this question, NPR/Ipsos also completed a nationally representative survey of around 500 teachers. These educators were even more likely than the general public to believe in climate change and to support teaching climate change.

In fact, 86% of teachers believe climate change should be taught in schools. In theory.

But in practice, it’s more complicated. More than half — 55% — of teachers we surveyed said they do not cover climate change in their own classrooms or even talk to their students about it.

The most common reason given? Nearly two-thirds (65%) said it’s outside their subject area.

Let’s not forget that teachers are busy, and often underresourced and overworked. When asked to rank the importance of climate change, it fell to near the bottom of a list of priorities for expanding the curriculum, behind science and math, basic literacy and financial education.

Parents seen as obstacles to teaching climate

But there are other factors at work, too, in the decision of whether to cover climate change.

For example, almost a third of all teachers say that when it comes to teaching climate change, they worry about parent complaints.

In our poll, teachers who do not teach the subject were allowed to choose more than one reason. They named many obstacles.

17% say they don’t have the materials.

17% also say they don’t know enough about the subject to teach it.

4% say their school does not allow the subject to be taught.

Moreover, there also seems to be a divide in terms of resources, attitudes and support between teachers who cover climate change in their classrooms and those who don’t.

Mallory Newall of Ipsos said for some teachers, maintaining that it’s not their job to teach climate change “may just be a way to rationalize why they’re not talking about it.”

That’s because teachers who do talk about climate change are also more likely to say:

There should be state laws that require teaching it (70% versus 38% of teachers who don’t talk about climate change).

They have the resources they need to answer students’ questions about climate change (77% versus 32%).

Their students have brought up climate change in the classroom this year (78% versus 14%).

Their school encourages them to discuss climate change (64% versus 18%).

In our NPR Ed newsletter, we did a callout to teachers to find out more about how they teach climate change. Some teachers we heard from mentioned the divisiveness of the issue and the difficulty in dealing with students whose parents are deniers of climate change.

“There’s so much political jargon around climate change that I would either have to dismiss their concerns that they bring up or burn a lot of time talking about something that is outside my content area,” said Jack Erickson, a science teacher at Cienega High School in Vail, Ariz., in response to our callout.

Some teachers get creative in teaching climate change

On the other hand, about 42% of teachers in our survey said they are indeed finding ways to address climate change in the classroom.

In our callout, we heard from far more than just science teachers. Preschool, English, public speaking, Spanish, statistics, social studies teachers — even home economics teachers and librarians — all are finding ways to approach the topic.

For example, Rebecca Meyer is an eighth-grade English language arts teacher at Bronx Park Middle School in New York City. Meyer’s students researched water scarcity and then read a “cli-fi” (or climate-fiction) novel by Mindy McGinnis called Not a Drop to Drink.

“The main character, Lynn, lives in a version of the U.S. where physical water scarcity is the norm. As we read the novel, kids made connections between what is happening today and the novel,” she told NPR. “They were very engaged; they loved it. They learned so much they didn’t know.”

Debra Freeman teaches family and consumer science — what used to be called home economics — at McDougle Middle School in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her curriculum includes healthy food choices.

“Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health is directly connecting the overconsumption of animal products to our global warming dilemma,” she says. “We also touch on the role of food waste (a huge problem in the U.S.) and its effect on climate change. Students in middle school are at a pivotal age for developing a multifaceted lens for thinking, evaluating and problem-solving. I place great hope in them!”

Erin Royer’s mixed-age classroom at Steele Elementary School in Denver comprises fourth- and fifth-graders. Does she cover climate change in elementary school? “Hell yes!” she says. “If you teach from a problem-based learning style, students will repeatedly arrive at climate change as the cause and effect of many problems/issues in their world.”

Whether the topic is animals, energy, or hurricanes and wildfires, “When they read information, through their research, put out by reliable scientists, they arrive at climate change again and again.”

And Lily Sage teaches “really little people” at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education’s nature-focused preschool in Philadelphia. “It’s a little above their heads, but we talk about Earth changes and ways we can avoid the ones that are causing mass extinctions. Because dinosaurs are accessible to them, that is often the framing for that conversation.”

State school policies mostly include climate change

Since 2013, 19 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, created by a consortium of states and science authorities to strengthen the teaching of science. The standards instruct teachers to cover the facts of human-caused climate change beginning in middle school. According to an analysis done for NPR Ed by Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, 36 states in total currently recognize human-caused climate change somewhere in their state standards. But, he says, “the fact that human-caused climate change is included in a state’s science standards doesn’t mean that teachers in that state do teach it,” and vice versa.

Moreover, this year alone, there have been numerous bills and resolutions introduced in statehouses that would restrict the teaching of climate change.

In Connecticut, a recent bill would have cut climate change materials from the state’s standards. An Iowa bill would have directly repealed the state’s use of Next Generation Science Standards.

Others — including in Arizona, Maine, South Dakota and Virginia — would prohibit the teaching of any issue included in a state political party platform, on the grounds of anti-indoctrination. Florida’s bill prescribes “balanced” teaching for “controversial” science subjects.

While most of these bills were tabled or failed to pass (Florida’s is still live), Branch sees them as part of a concerted and continuing effort to block the teaching of mainstream science. For example, some of these bills resemble model legislation created years ago by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that brings businesses together with lawmakers to write bills that are often industry-friendly.

Students are feeling the effects

As the political debate continues, more and more students don’t have to wait to learn about climate impacts in the classroom. That’s because they are experiencing them in their daily lives.

NPR Ed found in an analysis that in just one semester, the fall of 2017, for example, 9 million U.S. students across nine states and Puerto Rico missed some amount of school owing to natural disasters — which scientists say are becoming more frequent and severe because of climate change.

The Schools for Climate Action Summit in Washington, D.C., in March, was instigated by students in Northern California whose communities were ravaged by wildfires. They also brought together students affected by Hurricane Harvey in Houston and by agricultural droughts on tribal lands in New Mexico to lobby at the Capitol.

High school junior Celeste Palmer holds a burned piece of paper that drifted into her neighborhood during the California Tubbs Fire in 2017. (Olivia Sun/NPR)

Celeste Palmer, a high school junior, came to the summit with scraps of burned paper that had drifted into her Santa Rosa, Calif., neighborhood from the Tubbs Fire in 2017. She calls climate change “a generational justice issue for my generation in particular … because it’s affecting us now.”

Most Teachers Don’t Teach Climate Change; 4 In 5 Parents Wish They Did published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

How Your Teacher-Librarian Can Be An Ally When Teaching With Inquiry

This article was originally published by Canadian School Libraries, a registered non-profit charitable organization dedicated to professional research and development in the field of the school library learning commons in Canada. It is republished here with permission.

By Trevor MacKenzie

We teachers are constantly reflecting on our practice and professional growth. We want to make sure we are doing the best for our students despite the demands of constant assessment, unanticipated curricular changes and continually changing student needs and demographics. Combined with our own desire for excellence, this is so overwhelming. I’ve attended really inspiring professional development, only to figure out that teaching materials, specialized training and additional technology are out of reach for most school budgets. Where can teaching professionals go for support as we try to improve?

I have discovered rich support and learning in my own backyard when I have collaborated with my teacher-librarian. This educational professional is often under-utilized in a school environment. Many teachers see the librarian interact only with students, but they are invaluable resources for teachers as well.

Collaboration with a teacher-librarian creates a rich inquiry practice for classroom teachers that can easily be implemented with students. If we develop the habit of accessing this great resource as a regular class routine throughout the year, we will see the kind of progress and success we are looking for.

Teacher-Librarians Have More Flexible Schedules

The librarian’s schedule and workday provide more flexibility so they can be available to help teachers. The door is open, why not come in? Also, it is my experience that teacher-librarians love having discussions with teaching colleagues–they get to play an active role in student progress and success. I have often stopped by the library unannounced, with the intention of just asking a quick question. What starts out as a two minute query ends up in a rich, inspiring discourse that goes well beyond “a quick question.”

Sometimes I have an underdeveloped idea for an inquiry project and I need a sounding board. How do I figure out a starting point? What will be our goal? What steps should we take to get there? How do I keep things student-centered? During our conversation, the teacher-librarian is willing to listen to me, assess my students’ needs, reflect on an array of resources and learning materials to support us, and then supply them in a timely and easy manner. They ask questions I hadn’t yet thought of, and they direct me toward objectives I had not previously considered. They want to make realizing my lesson goals as easy and seamless as possible.

This type of personalized help makes me feel supported when I sometimes feel like I’m teaching “on an island.” The Teacher-librarians’ unique training gives them a way to assist me in my teaching goals and help me in ways I had not previously envisioned. The flexibility continues. As our inquiry work progresses, the teacher-librarian follows up with us, visiting our classroom to see how the work is coming along, asking questions, making observations, and offering up next steps of support. Students begin to see the teacher-librarian as a “learning partner” — a more authentic support of what’s happening in the classroom.

Teacher-Librarians Strengthen Support

As committed as I am to the inquiry method of learning, and though I have published work to help teachers in the practice, I still have areas of weakness. Mine in particular is the research component. This is where the teacher-librarian is a great partner. They develop a collaborative alliance with me and discover my teaching strengths and weaknesses objectively, without judgement. Because of their training, they have a knack of offering up just the right support in ways that lift up or elevate my teaching practice. They complement my instruction with their own when working with students to assist in the research phase of inquiry.

Teacher-librarians employ their unique expertise as they walk students through the learning library and demonstrate how to navigate databases and locate resources. They also sharpen research skills by helping students understand the validity of information and evaluate it by recognizing bias and persuasion in various sources. This is difficult for both teachers and students to master. I have been so thankful to have teacher-librarians who offer help in this area that I find extremely challenging. It balances out the inquiry experience for my students and provides them (and me) with the support necessary to follow through with our big ideas and meet our learning goals.

A True Teaching Partner

The teacher-librarian is truly a second teacher in inquiry, an additional support for all of my students as we embark on more personalized learning structures and objectives. The more I include my teacher-librarian, the more I find that they are able to help students with inquiry: the collaboration becomes a powerful cycle of support that gains momentum and benefits the students, the teacher, and the culture of learning in the school.

Students can also visit the library to seek out support from the teacher-librarian on their own time outside of class, because they now see that person as “in on the learning” and someone who understands the inquiry and can provide support and help. The teacher-librarian knows the resources in the library, how to locate them, and how to empower students in this process. Students then become more competent independent researchers and learners themselves.

Just as I intentionally nurture a culture of inquiry that gradually releases control over learning to the student, so too does the teacher-librarian partner with the teacher in their support of the student. Now there is a collaborative team dedicated to meeting the needs of the students. Each learner has access to learning and materials based on their learning strengths challenges. The teacher-librarian also gets to know each learner’s topic and can help personalize inquiry much better than I could if I worked alone. The end result is a collaborative team that reinforces independent learning.

Teachers everywhere struggle with meeting student needs even though we have few resources. We also struggle with the breadth of our own learning and practice. We have to get creative. But what if a truly great resource is at our own school, right under our noses? A teacher-librarian is the ideal partner for inquiry – they are flexible and can make time for us and our students. They are a great sounding board to help inquiry projects take shape, make authentic progress and meet meaningful objectives. They build meaningful relationships with students and help them hone their inquiry skills while taking responsibility for their own learning.

Teachers do not need to teach “on an island” with little support when there is such a rich resource in the library–not just for us, but for our students as well. Teachers also don’t have to know everything about a practice from the start: they can learn with their students along the way. It will make them better teachers. Students do better in general when they have more adults on campus they know have concern for them. The teacher-librarian can become a valuable support for teacher practice and student academic growth, as well as their emotional health. Why not make use of this amazing school asset?

Trevor MacKenzie is an award winning English teacher at Oak Bay High School in Victoria, BC, Canada, who believes that it is a magical time to be an educator. Trevor is the author of Dive into Inquiry: Amplify Learning and Empower Student Voice as well as Inquiry Mindset: Nurturing the Dreams, Wonders and Curiosities of our Youngest Learners, co-authored with Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt.

How Your Teacher-Librarian Can Be An Ally When Teaching With Inquiry published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

How Selective Empathy Can Chip Away At Civil Society

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump’s characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren’t all criminals, he said. “What about those who have come here for reasons of need?”

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of “the fathers, the mothers, the children” who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy’s appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone’s-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the ’70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other’s eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an “empathy pill” so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: “It’s not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help” or “Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.”

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It’s strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that’s what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.

So, for example, when the wife of white nationalist Richard Spencer recently told BuzzFeed he had abused her, the question debated on the lefty Internet was: Why should we care that some woman who chose to ally herself with a nasty racist got herself hurt? Why waste empathy on that? (Spencer, in a court filing, denies all her allegations.)

The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your “enemies,” but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That’s practically a taboo.

And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.

In the past 20 years, psychologists and neurologists have started to look at how empathy actually works, in our brains and our hearts, when we’re not thinking about it. And one thing they’ve found is that “one of the strongest triggers for human empathy is observing some kind of conflict between two other parties,” says Fritz Breithaupt, a professor at Indiana University who studies empathy. “Once they take the side, they’re drawn into that perspective. And that can lead to very strong empathy and too strong polarization with something you only see this one side and not the other side any longer.”

A classic example is the Super Bowl, or any Auburn, Alabama game.

But these days in the news, examples come up every day: the Kavanaugh hearings, emergency funding for a wall, Spike Lee walking out of the Oscars, the Barr report, Kirstjen Nielsen, every third thing on Twitter.

Researchers who study empathy have noticed that it’s actually really hard to do what we were striving for in my generation: empathize with people who are different than you are, much less people you don’t like. But if researchers set up a conflict, people get into automatic empathy overdrive, with their own team. This new research has scrambled notions of how empathy works as a force in the world. For example, we often think of terrorists as shockingly blind to the suffering of innocents. But Breithaupt and other researchers think of them as classic examples of people afflicted with an “excess of empathy. They feel the suffering of their people.”

Breithaupt called his new book The Dark Sides of Empathy, because there’s a point at which empathy doesn’t even look like the kind of universal empathy I was taught in school. There is a natural way that empathy gets triggered in the brain — your pain centers light up when you see another person suffering. But out in the world it starts to look more like tribalism, a way to keep reinforcing your own point of view and blocking out any others.

Breithaupt is alarmed at the apparent new virus of selective empathy and how it’s deepening divisions. If we embrace it, he says, then “basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.”

We can’t return to my generation’s era of empathy innocence, because we now know too much about how the force actually works. But we can’t give up on empathy either, because empathy is “90 percent what our life is all about,” Breithaupt says. “Without it, we would be just alone.”

In his book Breithaupt proposes an ingenious solution: give up on the idea that when we are “empathizing” we are being altruistic, or helping the less fortunate, or in any way doing good. What we can do when we do empathy, proposes Fritz, is help ourselves. We can learn to see the world through the eyes of a migrant child and a militia leader and a Russian pen pal purely so we can expand our own imaginations, and make our own minds richer. It’s selfish empathy. Not saintly, but better than being alone.

How Selective Empathy Can Chip Away At Civil Society published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

20+ helpful professional development resources for teachers

20+ helpful professional development resources for teachers published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

Conoce los programas de Certificación Profesional disponibles en español

Los programas de Certificación Profesional de edX son una serie de cursos a demanda, diseñados para desarrollar habilidades críticas para una carrera específica. Creados por los líderes de la industria, las mejores universidades y las grandes organizaciones, para ayudar a desarrollar las habilidades y los conocimientos prácticos necesarios para los trabajos actuales, a través de una experiencia de aprendizaje en línea flexible y accesible.

Cuando compras un programa de Certificación Profesional o un MicroMasters®, obtienes un 10% de descuento, ahorras en el precio de cada curso. Elige las sesiones de los cursos que se ajustan a tu horario y completa tu compra de forma sencilla.

Para obtener más información y una lista completa de las ofertas de programas de Certificación Profesional, visita https://www.edx.org/es/professional-certificate.

Los programas de Certificación Profesional en español en los cuales te puedes inscribir son:

Empresas familiares: emprendimiento y liderazgo para trascender

TecdeMonterreyX (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Introducción a la programación en Java

UC3Mx (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Upper-Intermediate English

UPValenciaX (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Economía, comercio e inversión en América Latina: Tendencias y horizontes emergentes

IDBx (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Introducción a la programación en C

UAMx (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Marketing digital y redes sociales

GalileoX (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Excel para los negocios

UPValenciaX (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Gestión Pública para el Desarrollo

IDBx (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Sustentabilidad energética y la smart grid

TecdeMonterreyX (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Colaboración organizacional y redes de valor

LOGYCAx (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Inteligencia de negocios

GalileoX (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Diseño de software para la toma de decisiones organizacionales

URosarioX (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

Fundamentos TIC para profesionales de negocios

UPValenciaX (Cursos abiertos para inscripción)

The post Conoce los programas de Certificación Profesional disponibles en español appeared first on edX Blog.

Conoce los programas de Certificación Profesional disponibles en español published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

For Kids With Anxiety, Parents Learn To Let Them Face Their Fears

The first time Jessica Calise can remember her 9-year-old son Joseph’s anxiety spiking was about a year ago, when he had to perform at a school concert. He said his stomach hurt and he might throw up. “We spent the whole performance in the bathroom,” she recalls.

After that, Joseph struggled whenever he had to do something alone, like showering or sleeping in his bedroom. He would beg his parents to sit outside the bathroom door or let him sleep in their bed. “It’s heartbreaking to see your child so upset and feel like he’s going to throw up because he’s nervous about something that, in my mind, is no big deal,” Jessica says.

Jessica decided to enroll in an experimental program, one that was very different from other therapy for childhood anxiety that she knew about. It wasn’t Joseph who would be seeing a therapist every week — it would be her.

The program was part of a Yale University study that treated children’s anxiety by teaching their parents new ways of responding to it.

“The parent’s own responses are a core and integral part of childhood anxiety,” says Eli Lebowitz, a psychologist at the Yale School of Medicine who developed the training.

For instance, when Joseph would get scared about sleeping alone, Jessica and her husband, Chris Calise, did what he asked and comforted him. “In my mind, I was doing the right thing,” she says. “I would say, ‘I’m right outside the door’ or ‘Come sleep in my bed.’ I’d do whatever I could to make him feel not anxious or worried.”

But this comforting — something psychologists call accommodation — can actually be counterproductive for children with anxiety disorders, Lebowitz says.

“These accommodations lead to worse anxiety in their child, rather than less anxiety,” he says. That’s because the child is always relying on the parents, he explains, so kids never learn to deal with stressful situations on their own and never learn they have the ability to cope with these moments.

“When you provide a lot of accommodation, the unspoken message is, ‘You can’t do this, so I’m going to help you,’ ” he says.

Lebowitz wondered if it would help to train parents to change that message and to encourage their children to face anxieties rather than flee from them.

Currently the established treatment for childhood anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy delivered directly to the child.

When researchers have tried to involve parents in their child’s therapy in the past, the outcomes from studies suggested that training parents in cognitive behavioral therapy didn’t make much of a difference for the child’s recovery. Lebowitz says that this might be because cognitive behavioral therapy asks the child to change their behavior. “When you ask the parents to change their child’s behavior, you are setting them up for a very difficult interaction,” he says.

Instead, Lebowitz’s research explores whether training only the parents without including direct child therapy can help. He is running experiments to compare cognitive behavioral therapy for the child with parent-only training. A study of the approach appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry last month.

Jessica Calise received 12 weeks of Lebowitz’s parent training as part of a follow-up study, the results of which are not yet published.

Jessica and Chris Calise sit in their living room with their son, Joseph Calise. (Christopher Capozziello for NPR)

Once a week, she drove from Norwalk, Conn., to Yale University for an hourlong session with a therapist. Like all the parents who went through Lebowitz’s training program, Jessica began forming a plan with the therapist on how she and her husband would stop swooping in when Joseph became anxious.

The key to doing that, Lebowitz says, is to make children feel heard and loved, while using supportive statements to build their confidence. Parents need to “show their child that they understand how terrible it is to feel anxious,” he says. They need to accept that their child is “genuinely anxious and not just being attention seeking,” he adds.

The next step is to tell children that “they can tolerate that anxiety and they don’t need to be rescued from it.” This helps give them the strength to face their fears, Lebowitz says.

This approach was hard at first, says Joseph’s father, Chris Calise. He’s a construction equipment operator, roughly 6 feet tall, with a frame as solid as brick. “The hardest hump for me was the way I was brought up,” he says, rapping his fingers against the kitchen table. “I always thought the way you do things [is to say], ‘Get over it. You’re fine. Suck it up.’ But it was obvious what we were doing wasn’t working.”

So, the parents committed themselves to a plan to get Joseph to feel comfortable sleeping and showering alone.

“It was baby steps first. I’d say, ‘I’m not going to stay [outside the bathroom], but I’ll come back and check on you in five minutes,’ ” Jessica says. “Then I would say, ‘I know it’s scary for you, but I know that you can do it. You’re going to do great.’ Just acknowledging the anxiety and providing the reinforcing statement.”

It was slow at first, Jessica says. But each time, as she’d been trained, Jessica would praise Joseph when he managed to pass the time on his own. “[We’d] say like, ‘Wow, you’re a rock star! You were nervous and scared, but you did it, and you can do it,’ ” she says.

And, slowly, Joseph started to spend longer amounts of time by himself, eventually sleeping on his own all night. “It was about halfway through when you really started noticing big differences,” Chris recalls. “He was becoming more confident. He just did things on his own without us having to ask or tell him.”

Many parents in Lebowitz’s recently published study had a similar experience. Nearly 70 percent of the 64 children who were assigned to the parent-training arm of the experiment had no anxiety by the end of the study.

“It is amazing. It is really exciting. These children had never met a therapist and were as likely to be cured of their anxiety disorder as the children who had 12 sessions of the best therapy available,” Lebowitz says of the results of his recently published study.

The parent training seems to work because it lets children confront their anxieties while parents provide love and support from afar, says Anne Marie Albano, a psychologist at Columbia University who did not work on the study.

“You coach the child a bit but don’t take over. It’s helping the child stumble into their own way of coping and ride whatever wave of anxiety they’re having,” she says. “That ultimately builds their confidence.”

Joseph brushes his teeth before bedtime. (Christopher Capozziello for NPR)

That suggests this parent training has a lot of potential to advance childhood anxiety treatment, Albano says. “It is preliminary, but this paper is very exciting to me as someone who worked for 30 years in this field,” she says. “This treatment brings in the parents, finally, and focuses on the ways parents need [to stop] taking over, to break the cycle of anxiety in kids.”

Lebowitz’s parent training is theoretically similar to traditional therapy, says Muniya Khanna, a psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and director of the OCD & Anxiety Institute in Philadelphia, who was not involved with the work. “But, this gets at it from a different angle,” she says. “It targets lifestyle change and says, yes, if you change lifestyle and family life, it can have almost the same effect as changing the child’s theoretical understanding about [anxiety].”

Khanna thinks that combining this parent program with traditional therapy might yield even better results, particularly for children who haven’t responded to behavioral therapy alone. “It’s encouraging for families where kids may not be developmentally or emotionally ready to take on cognitive behavioral therapy,” she says.

The study leaves many unanswered questions, Albano adds. “This is only a short-term outcome. We need to follow up [with] the kids at six months, 12 months, even several years,” she says. Not only does it remain to be seen if the benefits from the parent training persist as the child gets older, but more research will also need to be done to see if the same techniques will continue to work as children age into teenagers.

Jessica Calise checks on Joseph as he gets ready for bed. Joseph used to be afraid to sleep alone, but he has learned to be OK with it since his mother learned new parenting approaches. (Christopher Capozziello for NPR)

Jessica and Chris Calise say that they even use the techniques they learned through the parent-training program with Joseph’s twin sister and older brother, Isabella and Nicholas. “It’s important to validate your kids’ feelings and show them that we care,” Jessica says. “I think this taught us to communicate better. I think it made us better parents, quite honestly.”

Joseph says he no longer feels anxiety about being alone. He doesn’t enjoy it, “but I’m OK with it,” he says. He has learned to banish the frightening thoughts that would come when he was by himself and that kept him up at night. “If I get a nightmare, I just change the subject to something happy,” he says. “Then I’m fine.”

New fears come up from time to time — like a recently discovered fear of heights. But with his parents’ support, Joseph says, he’s learning to face these too. “I think I’ll be OK,” he says. “I’ll just try to do it.”

Angus Chen is a reporter based in New York City. Follow him on Twitter: @angRchen.

For Kids With Anxiety, Parents Learn To Let Them Face Their Fears published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bisoroblog · 6 years ago

Text

How Do We Get Middle School Students Excited About Science? Make It Hands-On

Eighth-grader Liam Bayne has always liked math and science — that’s one reason his family sent him to The Alternative School For Math and Science (ASMS). But he was surprised and excited when his sixth-grade science class started each new topic with experimentation, not lecture or textbook learning.

“I was really excited because the first thing we did was experiments and hands-on stuff, which is my favorite part,” Liam said. At ASMS the teaching philosophy centers around giving students experiences that pique their interest to know more. Their science curriculum is based on a program called Full Option Science System (FOSS), but has changed over time as teachers bring new ideas to the curriculum and focus on meeting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

“It’s really based on the idea that students learn science by doing science,” said Kim Frock, co-founder of ASMS. Kids ask questions, make observations, manipulate data, analyze, “and really through that process develop deep conceptual understanding of what they’re doing.”

This style of learning can feel foreign to many ASMS students at first, whether they come from a private or public elementary school, but with time and support they often come to see its value. Kids talk with one another, and ASMS kids know this isn’t how a lot of friends at other area middle schools are learning.

“We’re learning similar things in science except they have the facts memorized, but they don’t really know them,” said Carolyn Heckle, an ASMS eighth-grader. “Here if you have something in your brain, it’s because you did something that made it a memory.”

For example, Carolyn clearly remembers an earth science unit about how different sedimentary rocks form, in which she and her partner, Liam, made sedimentary layers of shale, limestone and sandstone. They recreated the geological processes using sand, a sodium silicate solution, clay, plaster of Paris, oyster shells and water, slowly building up sedimentary layers and discussing their structures along the way. Heckle said watching rock formations form crystallized her learning about geology.

Both Liam and Carolyn admit group work was one of the hardest things to get used to at this school. But now, three years in, they can see just how much they’ve learned from peers. Liam described a sixth-grade engineering challenge that required student teams to design a spaceship that could pick up items and drop them off at a predetermined distance. No one in his group knew how to start. Liam asked a shy person in the group if they had an idea.

“They came up with an idea that we stuck with the whole time,” Liam said. “ I thought, wow, I could actually learn from them. That was the first time I started to ask other people for their opinion rather than asking for help for my opinion.” THE TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AT ASMS

The Alternative School for Math and Science started 15 years ago when co-founder Kim Frock was startled at data showing only about half of eighth-grade students in her region, near Corning, New York, were meeting standards in math and English. In contrast, almost all the fifth-grade students were on track, “so it was pretty clear where the system was starting to break down,” she said.

The science curriculum at ASMS encourages students to work collaboratively to solve the roadblocks that real scientists face when developing experiments. (Courtesy of The Alternative School for Math and Science)

The data prompted Frock to start the independent school in a space made available by Corning Incorporated, a global company responsible for inventing products like Pyrex, the gorilla glass on smartphones and the ceramic in a catalytic converter. Corning is a small, rural community with a median income of about $50,000, but Corning Inc. draws many highly educated scientists who want good local schools.

Corning donates to its local public schools, but ASMS has a special relationship, getting free facility space and annual funding for financial aid. While the school is private, Frock said it doesn’t use academics to determine admissions and every child’s education is heavily subsidized, although some receive more than others. She also said the school has more kids with special needs than the public schools and draws students from over 10 local districts.

“If you want to bring physicists and scientists to the area you have to have a top-notch education,” said Jenna Chervenic, an eighth-grade science teacher at ASMS who used to work at Corning Inc. as a fiber optics mechanical engineer. She left that job to become a high school math teacher, but later joined the ASMS staff.

“What I love about this job is I get to do both,” Chervenic said. “I put a lot of engineering tasks into the science curriculum.”

When they started the school, Frock knew they needed to teach science differently. She didn’t think the “canned experiments” many schools do, where students walk through a step-by-step process and get a predetermined result, was a good representation of what real scientists do. It’s too controlled, and doesn’t have enough room for the types of failures and setbacks that professional scientists face everyday.

“That’s not learning and it’s not engaging for kids,” Frock said. “Here, instead, we have inquiries for them to do and general guidelines, but they’re really asking their own questions and discovering their own knowledge.”

At each grade level students do three big units focusing on Life Science, Earth and Space Science, and Physical Science. At the end of each unit they do an engineering challenge designed to fill gaps in the curriculum and to get students applying what they’ve learned throughout the unit.

“It’s very few tests until they get to eighth grade,” Chervenic said. “There’s just a lot of authentic evaluation and looking to see what students have learned, and if they didn’t get it we don’t just keep moving on. We figure out how to put it back in our teaching so we make sure every kid has a level of proficiency and that they have felt success.”

Teaching this way requires small class sizes and teachers with a deep grasp of their subject matter. The teachers have to be comfortable with students pursuing their own areas of inquiry and guiding them to continue asking questions, iterating, researching and experimenting until they’ve come up with some conclusions.

This process was frustrating for Liam and Carolyn at first. Liam was worried people would think he wasn’t smart if he “failed” at something.

“Even just the word failure gives a negative connotation,” he said. “I remember I failed at something and then my teacher said, ‘Now we know one way not to do it.’ ”

He’s gradually become comfortable with the idea that when he hits a roadblock in a project, that’s a chance to re-evaluate and try something else. It’s led him to always be asking “why” in everything he learns, whether that’s social studies, earth sciences or chemistry.

In addition to science class at each grade level, students are required to complete an independent project or compete in a national science competition. All sixth-graders do a controlled experiment answering a question they’ve designed. Questions range: Does putting food coloring in a muffin change the taste? If I drop different sized balls off a bridge, will the crater size change? It’s a science experiment, but done at school without parental help. And even if students come up with questions the teacher knows they won’t be able to prove, educators let kids pursue the idea anyway. It’s part of the learning process.

“If you can create that safe environment where kids are willing to take a risk, they can present a whole experiment, even if they didn’t get an answer or didn’t get the answer they were looking for,” Chervenic said.

When students get to seventh and eighth grade they have more options to meet their science requirements. They can do another controlled experiment if they want or they can participate in six different national science competitions: First Lego League robotics, Rube Goldberg machines, eCybermission, Exploravision, Future Cities and 3M Young Scientist.

“We want kids to be doing the work independently and we want them to be doing the work here,” Frock said. The expectations are high, but teachers want students working through their own problems in a place where they can get just the right support from a teacher. Work on science competitions is almost always collaborative, so staying at school is logistically easier for kids whose homes are spread out across the region. Teachers also encourage students to attend study hall and homework club after school so they can get work done at school before heading home to rest.

“We’ve created an environment where they come in expecting to work hard, but there’s that internal reward,” Chervenic said. “It creates that environment where they’re excited to get into class everyday, and what the day is going to hold, so you don’t have to do a lot of redirecting and stuff like that.”

The collaboration teachers work hard to promote throughout their students’ learning is evident in the adult work at ASMS as well. Teachers regularly visit one another’s classrooms to make sure, for example, that they’re using the same language to talk about an algebraic concept in science as they are in math class. If the English teacher notices students are weak on their writing, then in science class they may also spend extra time writing strong conclusions. Teachers here recognize that without all school disciplines working together, students won’t become well-rounded or see how big questions in life are interconnected.

HIGH SCHOOL

After three years at ASMS, most students have gotten good at solving their problems independently and collaborating in groups. Many have discovered a deep love for science and a desire to know much more about why the world works the way it does. And then most go off to the public high school where class sizes are bigger, some teachers are more traditional, and they take regular tests and receive grades. It’s very different from ASMS and it can be a shock.

“The feedback we got was that they weren’t prepared to take tests and do notetaking all year long,” Frock said. These insights came out of a survey Frock conducted with early graduates. To rectify those holes, eighth-graders now spend the last trimester learning some basics about how other schools work. They practice opening a locker, discuss how to advocate for themselves to teachers, and take practice tests. They even read class syllabi together and play around with a mock gradebook to understand how grades are weighted and what scores on different items on the syllabus could do to a final grade.

“The transition wasn’t that bad,” said Gracie Speicher a ninth-grader at Corning Painted Post High School. “I really like my classes. I have really good teachers.”

She says grades and tests are different from her learning experience at ASMS but not necessarily bad, and the transition class helped her know what to expect. She says she knows who she is as a student now, and feels comfortable asking for what she needs. On some assignments she’ll stick to the rubric, but on others, when she’s passionate about something, she goes above and beyond. She recently built a scale model of the Globe Theatre, an idea her teacher was skeptical she could complete in time, instead of presenting a slideshow about Shakespeare like many of her classmates.

“The project work that was very interesting and engaging helped me in the long run because it got me engaged in middle school so enjoying learning in high school is easier,” Gracie said about the transition from ASMS to high school. And she learned valuable lessons about collaboration there, something that was hard for her, since she often prefers to work individually.

Kim Frock, co-founder of ASMS, is proud that over 70 percent of kids who went to ASMS have gone on to pursue college degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees. And, she says, that’s not because they are screening for 10-year-olds who already know they want to be scientists or mathematicians. In fact, many students come in hating the sciences, but they leave excited about them. To her, that’s proof that the learning experience students get in middle school at ASMS is sticking with them, making an impact well beyond the three years students spend in her building.

She knows that a private school like ASMS, with financial support from Corning Inc., gives her freedom to offer exactly the kind of education she believes all kids need, and to do so for families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. But she also thinks middle school is such a crucial time to get students excited as learners that other schools can learn from the success they’ve had.

“We’ve known how to do education right for probably 40 years, but there are very few schools that have been able to implement it,” Frock said.

For her, it starts with hiring teachers that share a particular education philosophy.

“In order to teach here, our teachers really have to believe that every kid can be successful,” Frock said. “And I would say that’s not the attitude I’ve seen from every public school educator.”

How Do We Get Middle School Students Excited About Science? Make It Hands-On published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

0 notes