Few could argue that our children’s education is among the top most concerns of city, county, state, and federal leaders. The recent electoral cycle—both the presidential election of 2016 and the local elections of 2018—have cast a bright spotlight on important issues in education. While these issues and the remedies for them depend on who’s on the podium at any given moment, we can all agree that the challenges our schools, our administrators, our teachers and our students face today are more pressing and more complicated than ever. Rising rates of teen suicide. Rising rates of both occurrence and intensity in bullying. Escalating drop out rates. Bigger classrooms and fewer resources. The politics of finance. Not enough resource teachers, social workers, career counselors, or safety officers. The struggle to achieve genuine inclusivity and diversity. The list goes on and on.
Between 2012 and 2016, over one-tenth of Anne Arundel County residents that committed suicide were age 10 to 24 years old. During that period, 79 percent of the youth suicides were male, and 90 percent were white. Suicide attempts show a slightly different story. Youth suicide attempts comprised half of all suicide attempts for Anne Arundel County, 71 percent of which were female. In the 2015–2016 school year, Anne Arundel County school health rooms reported 134-crisis interventions specific to the threat of suicide.—Anne Arundel County Department of Health, Trends in Youth Suicide, September 2018.
These issues barely mark the tip of the iceberg. And they aren’t isolated to public schools; indeed, both public and private schools share these concerns and many others. Anne Arundel County Schools declined to comment for this article, but we recently spoke with several other thought leaders in education and childhood development about current issues in education. We identified four issues most schools have in common. We also talked about creative and innovative solutions to those issues. Here’s what we learned.
Diversity and Inclusivity
Managing classrooms and encouraging students from different backgrounds, with different needs and different levels of family support is a complex and difficult task. Why celebrate all of these differences when it’s so much easier to embrace what is familiar, comfortable, and less demanding? Why focus on diversity?
The world’s tallest building is in Dubai. The largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. The biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. The third richest family in the world is Mexican, the fourth is Spanish, and the fifth is French. The world’s largest economies include China, Japan, and Germany. Russia is the world’s largest country. Qatar is the richest per capita. Accounting, tax prep, bookkeeping, payroll services, and legal services, all available to customers through any electronic connection from anywhere in the world, are the most lucrative industries. Today’s students will not be able to thrive, much less survive if schools aren’t the standard bearers for diversity in all its forms.
Peter Bailey is the director of the Association of Independent Maryland Schools (AIMS). “We know that kids are going to operate within an increasingly global world,” he says. “Working with different kinds of people from different backgrounds, cultures, experiences and even different language groups…will be extremely important in helping kids understand themselves better and in addition understand other people better.”
Universally, administrators and faculty agree that celebrating diversity is vital for schools and for students. “Our students are going into a world where difference will be the norm and not the exception,” says John A. Lewis, IV, headmaster at The Gunston School, a private school in Centreville. “Schools need a curriculum made up of windows and mirrors: you want students to see themselves in the curriculum, but also look out into the world.”
At Gunston, diversity is apparent everywhere, whether it’s in the exchange students who make up about 15 percent of the student population, or in the less obvious statistics that show Gunston students come from a range of socio-economic backgrounds. Neither of these barometers is necessarily unusual. A better indication of how a school embraces diversity across the board is to look at their mission statement and action on the ground. Anne Arundel County Public Schools made the phrase “elevate all students and eliminate all gaps” the number one mission in their current strategic plan. “All means all,” is AACPS Superintendent George Arlotto’s battle cry.
The AACPS Board established an Office of Workplace Diversity in 2008 to support the goal of hiring teachers and staff who reflect a diverse student body. Gunston hired a Director of Global Programs and Diversity in 2011, a substantial commitment for an independent school. Professor Scott Page, in his book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies, theorizes that teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone. The Difference puts forth the idea that “progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality.”
Diversity drives groups of individuals to better understand each other and work together, but inclusivity is the key to great success. “You have diversity, and then you have inclusion,” Severn School Headmaster Doug Lagarde says. “You can be diverse and not be inclusive.” When children feel overlooked, categorized, or stigmatized, they simply cannot feel that they belong to a larger community. It’s that feeling of being excluded that can demotivate, stunt, or outright stop learning potential. “There is a script that must be delivered and modeled,” Lagarde says. “I care about you, you are a part of this group, we have high standards, I believe you can meet those standards, and I will help you meet those standards.” Without a sense that they are intrinsically included and valued, children will struggle to develop a sense of confidence.
This lack of self-confidence can snowball into an inability to be independent, to be competent, and to relate to others. To address inclusivity, Severn School formed an Inclusion Committee of students, faculty, and teachers whose goal was to write an Inclusivity Mission. That mission became an aspirational north star for the entire school, Lagarde says. “Know and Value is our bumper sticker,” he explains. “If we as adults know and value our students for who they are and what they bring to the table and their promise, they feel valued, confident, and optimistic about their future.”
“If kids don’t feel connected with teachers and with their peers, intrinsic motivation can take a hit. Then you can go down the slippery slope of trying to use all kinds of extrinsic reinforcers (rewards, praise, threats of punishment), and sense of autonomy is lost and intrinsic motivation can be undermined. All three ingredients are important to intrinsic motivation: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.” —Dr. Tim Herzog, a licensed clinical professional counselor
Health and Wellness
If you are anxious and depressed, says Lagarde, academic success is not going to follow. One significant challenge schools are facing since 2015: students are more anxious and depressed than ever before. Suicide and attempted suicide rates are rising across the country, and in Anne Arundel County specifically. Why do our children feel such depression? Answers vary. Is it related to the recent economic collapse, an innate worry about the future absorbed from parents? Is it related to the divisive nature of modern discourse? Is it fear for personal safety? When children are shot at schools just a couple of counties over, when fellow students are murdered or beat up by gangs, its difficult to feel safe, even with the most earnest of reassurances and protocols. When the 24-hour news cycle sows seeds of division and doom, it’s hard for young people to process what to believe and what to ignore.
For public schools especially, health and wellness is an issue heavily impacted by budget and politics. Funding determines access to social workers, counselors, and medical professionals. Students whose first language may not be English are especially vulnerable, so having translators (English for Speakers of Other Languages), teachers and counselors with cultural competency is especially important. The Board must agree to progress programs that address health and wellness well beyond physical education and sex education, and the county executive must agree to fund the board’s requests. The ability to create or to cut programs that can make or break student health and wellness is countered by the fact that public and independent schools have a mandate and a mission to protect and serve children.
“The emotional health and wellness of our students are as important as academic capabilities in terms of a student’s success in school, in college, and ultimately in career and life,” Bailey explains. He says one way independent schools can address health and wellness issues is to create communities where each student is known well by each teacher. “In small environments, like independent schools, we have a close eye on our students,” says Nancy Mugele, the head of Kent School, a K-8 private school in Chestertown. “We intervene when we know there is an issue and we build a culture of caring and respect where the students’ families are known and where the students are known, so that students feel safe.” This theory of care—that if children are well known, teachers might be better able to identify concerns and then find the necessary resources to help—has led many private schools to create advisories.
In an advisory, a teacher counsels a small group of children, usually across a span of grades or ages. The group is small enough that the advisor can work closely with individual children. Classwork is intimate enough for the students to learn about each other and to practice vital social skills in a safe environment. The advisor has the time and the directive to pay particular attention to each student’s well being.
Although public schools share the intention to know each student, systems as large as AACPS can’t hope to match this degree of familiarity between teacher and student when homeroom classes in some middle and high schools run well over double-digits, when students are darting between classes, activities, and even campuses, or when individual schools simply don’t have the staff to create regular one-on-one opportunities in the secondary grades. What the public schools do have is a structured health and wellness curriculum that begins in elementary and proceeds through high school. This curriculum, which covers everything from bullying and sexual discrimination to physical abuse, personal care, and sex education, provides multiple opportunities for kids to build relationships with school social workers, counselors, or mentors who might have the resources necessary to lend a helping hand.
Technology
Teaching post-Google is at the top of the list of challenges in education. The use and the repercussions of technology are complicated. What type of technology do children need to learn to use? What tools should be put in place to govern the use of technology? How much technology is enough, and how much is too much?
Lagarde has tackled this issue with vigor. He sees that the advent of technology has changed communities—family units, civic kinship, and especially student communities.
“Technology in itself can be a wonderful and essential tool, but we are acceding attention and control to technology. If we don’t take back control and become the masters and not servants, we will find that we’ve created communities that are transactional, siloed, and impersonal.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics states on its website that today’s students are spending an average of seven hours each day on some form of entertainment technology, including tablets, phones, and computers. According to Amanda Lenhart’s report Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015, 92 percent of teens report going online daily—including 24 percent who say they go online “almost constantly.” More than half (56 percent) of the teens aged 13 to 17 go online several times a day. Just 12 percent report once-a-day use and two percent less often than weekly.
The risks for this online addiction are real, and the symptoms can be severe: obesity, depression, anxiety, lack of sleep or poor sleep, vulnerability to online marketing of risky behaviors such as alcohol, drugs, and sex, and increased exposure to cyber bullying and sexting. All of these result in a lacking ability to relate to others, inability to form social skills that will guide relationships and personal success over the course of a lifetime, and, importantly, academic excellence.
Multiple reports indicate that nearly 43 percent of children have been bullied online. Only one in 10 victims will inform a parent or trusted adult about this abuse. According to dosomething.org, nearly 40 percent of all teenagers have posted or sent sexually suggestive messages. This practice is more common among boys than girls: 22 percent of teen girls report sending semi-nude or nude images, while 18 percent of same-age boys report the same.
Beside these risks, there’s the fact that time spent online creates very real addictions that mean less time spent on homework, sports, family, and friends—the essential building blocks of childhood and the ways human learn social behaviors. “New research shows dependence on your smartphone may produce brain responses similar to alcohol, drug, and gambling addictions. Smartphones are like slot machines in your children’s pocket constantly persuading them to crave more,” says the website waituntileighth.org.
And it gets worse. “To an extent, you can’t blame kids, says Dr. Tim Herzog, a licensed clinical professional counselor in Annapolis who frequently works with school-aged kids. “Social media and video games are designed to utilize principles of intermittent positive reinforcement, to get kids hooked. And it works! The neurotransmitter Dopamine floods the brain in the same manner as it would if the child were using a drug. At the same time, as [kids] text away without calling each other (a cultural norm of today), their brains produce less oxytocin, the neurotransmitter associated with emotional closeness.”
So how do schools navigate the tricky balance between enough and too much? Most schools, including public schools, pull families into the conversation about responsible use of technology. Lagarde and others say the connection between parents, students, and the school needs to be a strong triumvirate when it comes to the responsible and practical use of technology.
There are practical ways to do so. The Parent Teacher Associations at several AACPS schools have screened the movies Screenager and Kirk Cameron’s Connect: Real Help for Parenting Kids in a Social Media World for parents. Severn School hosts experts on the topic for parents and for students. Most schools draw students into becoming a part of the solution. At Severn School, Advisory Coordinator Laura Drossner, Middle School Guidance Counselor Mary Foard and Middle School Head Dan Keller developed a year-long digital–use curriculum that explored acceptable use policy, self-image and identity, cyber bullying and digital drama, and managing digital footprints. “[Technology] is a double-edged sword and we have to know that and work to control that as best we can,” Lagarde says. “We can control where and when, we can use it as an important tool, we can use it smartly and well.”
“We want our students to be good consumers of information and that’s critical for the skills they will need moving forward,” says Karl Adler, Head of St. Anne’s Middle School. “We have in house experts on the dangers and pitfalls of introducing social media to children.”
Technology is necessary for lessons that are relevant to today’s world. Students in St. Anne’s School of Annapolis’ Making the Band class use music apps to create and publish complex compositions. At Gunston, students use an online platform to dive deeper into Spanish lessons. At Severn, upper-level students can access the Malone Online Schools Network of superior online courses that enhance Severn’s existing curriculum. At West Annapolis Elementary School, students use Google Classroom and First in Math to sharpen writing and basic math skills. “Technology is a disruptor that can make some things go faster and deliver some content more quickly,” says Daniel J. McMahon, Principal of DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville. “But eventually, schools (and society) will (in the most optimistic assessment), recognize the need for relationships to be cultivated between the teacher and student and will invest in those relationships.”
Relevancy
Our children will need to be prepared for a modern world that requires the ability to absorb career and life factors that are new, unpredictable and complex. How can schools address the challenge of creating a curriculum and culture that is relevant to this new environment? How can they ensure that children who learn differently have tools they can relate to and use in their personal, academic, and professional lives? Lagarde says that children learn from their parents and teachers: “the adults who model being agile and supple with their own skills allow kids to see how they can carry that into their own life.” Other thought leaders say that relevancy is inextricably linked to brain science. “We’ve learned more about the human brain in the last 25 years then we have in the last 2,500,” Lewis says. “Studies show that a small percentage of people are born with executive functioning skills built into their DNA. We used to think this came from parents or through osmosis, but now we know there is diversity and we have to learn how to teach differently.” Mugele says that schools must be invested in professional learning so that faculty can know and understand the latest research on how the brain works, how information is processed, and how students learn best.
Both public and private schools must meet the challenge of keeping curriculum relevant by building in a degree of flexibility and creativity. Meg Bamford is the Head of School at Radcliff Creek School in Chestertown. She says that teachers and staff at Radcliff are heavily invested in the theories of neuroscience, a movement based on theories of brain variability. Her research and that of other neuroscience experts support the Myth of Average. “We know that average sizes, average abilities don’t exist”, Bamford says. “People have strengths and weaknesses. The challenge…is meeting learners where they are at developmentally and academically.” This required implementation is what Bamford calls the pillars of instruction—the overarching mission of the school and the specific programs that schools and classrooms have in place to help teachers and students address connection, feedback, communication, and personalization.
Teachers have to be connected to students, and students have to be connected to what they are learning. “At St. Anne's School, we want our students to learn with a purpose and to act with a purpose,” Adler says. Lessons have to include multi-modal, multi-sensory explicit instruction that allows for a variety of ways to express problems and solutions. Feedback in the form of instruction and assessment (tests) needs to be focused and purposeful. Because motivated learners essentially feel that what they are discovering matters both now and in the future, specific lessons and tools will require more personalization.
Bamford talks a lot about personalization. It’s a catchphrase she says many educators are using to describe meeting each student where they are developmental. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn—essentially, it’s a construct for personalizing the classroom experience. “UDL asks the question: if you design a building, what is the best way for people to get in—stairs or a ramp? The ramp is something everyone can use, but with stairs, not everyone can,” Bamford says. “If we translate that to education, we consider what are the barriers to education?” Barriers can be physical, motional, or mental. A child in a wheelchair might not be able to access materials. A child who is anxious might not be able to focus. Some children learn by listening, some orally, some visually. “These barriers have to be discovered and resolved before lessons are introduced and not after,” Bamford says. “As teachers, we have to figure out where a student is stuck, and think about how can we teach the child how to get out of it on their own.”
Both public and private schools have had to develop innovative programs to meet the challenge of implementing brain science and modern education research into school curriculums. For example, AACPS created strong Magnet, International Baccalaureate, and AVID programs for middle and high school aged students, and the Triple E program for elementary-aged learners. The system’s signature program is a 21st century workforce-relevant theme around which curricula, job shadowing, mentoring, co-curricular clubs, college courses, and internships are crafted. These types of programs bring relevancy, but take years to develop.
Private schools are inherently more flexible and able to implement more immediate and deeply felt measures. Severn School moved final exams from June to May. “Assessments need to be summative, but also formative so teachers can see the gaps in order to improve learning and skills,” Lagarde says. “By moving our final exams, students have several weeks before summer to synthesize and work through learning gaps.”
Through their partnership with the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning at St. Andrews Episcopal School in Montgomery County, administrators and teachers at Kent School decided to change the middle school schedule to include longer academic blocks and fewer transitions. Brain breaks were included in the longer classes so that students could work out restlessness and maintain focus.
Gunston took a close look at curriculum and assessments before deciding to actively implement classwork and testing that addressed a range of modalities. “Assessment used to be lecture, quiz, test. The Gunston School is moving beyond the paper test to debates and essays and a range of modalities across the course of the semester that allow students to master content and consolidate information into memory,” Lewis says.
At Radcliff, teachers consider the ideas put forth by Carol S. Dweck, PhD in her book Mindset The New Psychology of Success. Dweck’s research shows that people have either a fixed or a growth mindset. “Fixed mindset is the idea that you are born with the talent you have and that’s it,” Bamford says. “Growth mindset says that if you work at something, you can achieve it. Growth mindset celebrates risk taking.” Using this research and science, Radcliff Creek shifted teaching tools to celebrate kids taking a chance, offering an answer, and discovering what happens next. “We focus on communication, education, inspiration, and empowerment, and we use a variety of tools to help students realize these pillars of education that apply to all students.”
The challenge of relevancy requires a firm and steady vision for administrators, teachers, parents and students. The programs put in place by Severn, Gunston, Kent, Radcliffe, and AACPS, among other schools, help students better understand their individual biology, how their own brains work and how to stay motivated and curious. Above all, remaining relevant will require creativity, innovation, collaboration, flexibility and the overarching prioritization of addressing the myriad needs of every type of learner.
Developed by Ann Meyer and David Rose in the 1990s, UDL says that students need engagement, representation, action, and expression. Purposeful, motivated learners need teachers to stimulate interest and motivation for learning. Resourceful, knowledgeable learners need information and content presented in different ways. Strategic, goal-oriented learners need differentiated ways to express what they know.
