Thanksgiving reflections

When I taught fifth and sixth grades, my students and I used to get together with younger children for cross-age activities.  I always prepped my students by reminding them that the younger students looked up to them and watched them closely all the time. 

“Remember, they are learning from everything you do – even when you don’t want them to,” was my mantra, and more than once one of my students learned the hard way that their preschool buddies were eager to copy all their behaviors, not just the positive ones. 

As a beginning teacher in my mid-twenties, I learned that this is the case for older children too.  One of my close friends had a younger sister who was a student in my fifth grade class.  Their family had a home daycare and took care of several preschool aged children.  My friend told me with great joy one day that her sister’s favorite activity was to play school with the children in the daycare, and that she always played the teacher – ME!

To my great embarrassment, when we got together with our friends, my friend loved to share how I sounded as a teacher – as played by her sister.  It was flattering to know that she wanted to be like me.  And some of the things that came through in her play were just how I hoped I came across as a teacher.  But some of it made me cringe – she indeed sounded just like me, even at my most unflattering!

I share that not to make us even more self-conscious than we already are as parents.  All of us have had that jarring experience of hearing how we sound or seeing our gestures and expressions through our children.  But as conscientious parents who care about their children’s learning, it is a good reminder that while trips to museums and educational toys are wonderful gifts we give our children, we can also rest assured that the times when we are just “hanging out” as a family are valuable learning experiences as well.

Seabury is blessed with parents who value learning and who support their children’s education each and every day.  Teachers at Seabury know that when papers go home, parents will look at them and talk with their children about what they are learning. They take their children to interesting places and recognize learning doesn’t just happen at school. They want to make use of each and every moment – to do parenting “right.”

As we approach a long Thanksgiving weekend, I encourage parents to consider how much your children are learning from the everyday moments when you are just hanging out or doing “regular” things.   From seeing a working mom or dad take time to slow down and read a book or take a bubble bath.  From spending time watching a fun movie or playing a game together.  From going grocery shopping and trying to figure out how much pumpkin pie Grandpa is going to eat this year.  From watching you orchestrate how to get the turkey and the potatoes to be done at the same time. 

In our children’s lives, whether they are in preschool or middle school, each moment is a learning moment – not just those we plan to be intentionally educational.  As parents who care deeply about our children’s learning, we sometimes put a great deal of pressure on ourselves to plan educational activities for our children and feel guilty when we aren’t doing something “valuable” with their time.  While those moments are wonderful and important, we can give ourselves permission to just be with our children as well. 

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!  Enjoy time with your children.  And take time to read a good book - your children will benefit and so will you!

- Sandi Wollum

It’s hard to see your child struggle. As a parent, one of the biggest challenges we face is how to handle those moments when our children are unhappy, uncomfortable, frustrated, angry, hurt or overwhelmed. From the time they are born, we worry about them, try to make the right decisions about what they will eat and where they will go to school, and do all we can to help ensure that they can grow up to have the life we dream of for them.

Perhaps it’s that I’m the parent of an eighth grader who is getting ready to head to high school at the end of this year. But I have found myself reflecting recently on the experiences my son has had as he has grown, and especially on those that seem to have had the biggest impact on his development. I am so thankful that he has been able to be at Seabury from the time he was a prekindergarten student. I’m grateful he has been in a place where he has developed strong friendships with amazing children who will, no doubt, be lifelong friends. A place where he has felt safe and supported every step of the way.

But if I look more closely and am really honest about it, many of the experiences and relationships that have had the biggest impact (both in and out of school) on making him the responsible, well-rounded, incredible young man he is becoming were those that were the hardest. The times when someone was mean to him on the playground. The time he left his science fair experiment to the last minute and then couldn’t get it to work. The time he had to work on a group project with kids he didn’t like working with. Situations that made him mad or frustrated or hurt or angry or profoundly sad. They were (and are) the events that have been catalysts for some of the most profound growth in his life.

As a parent, those times were (and are) hard. Even though I knew he was in a safe environment at school, that his teachers cared about him, that he had good friends to talk to and family who loved him, it was still heartbreaking to see him struggle. My impulse was to rescue him. To make it easier. To fix what was wrong for him. To take the hurt away and make it all better.

I’m most thankful for the times I was able to make myself resist. Because I realize that many of the traits that serve him best now – leadership, responsibility, confidence, for example – were developed as he found his way through those difficult times. And that rescuing him not only would have deprived him of those opportunities for growth, but would have sent the message that I didn’t wasn’t confident he could handle whatever challenges faced him – exactly the opposite of what I intended. Of course in life, there are sometimes situations that require me to step in because they are too far beyond what he is ready for, but those are few and far between compared to those that required me to step back tag along for the ride while he worked through the challenge and made mistakes along the way.  

Someone once told me that self esteem doesn’t come from being told you are great. It comes from coming up against something you don’t think you can do, making up your mind to take it on, making mistakes and dealing with setbacks along the way, and then finally succeeding. The doubt and fear and pain and worry and frustration that are part of the journey are what make the accomplishment so sweet – and build confidence for the next time.

As parents, we need to hold each other up, because parenting is hard. We need to help each other have the courage to watch our kids struggle. To walk through difficult situations with them. To give them the chance to solve problems for themselves. To experience the natural consequences of their choices – even when those consequences are hard to take. Because it’s in the times of struggle that they grow most profoundly.

- Sandi Wollum

Links:

The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, by Wendy Mogel

Parenting with Love and Logic, by Foster Cline and Jim Fay

The Parents We Mean to Be, by Richard Weissbourd

Collaboration

After years of working with gifted children, I’ve come to the conclusion that they have two main things in common.

First, they are all different. And not just “every person is unique” different. In spite of the common characteristics they share as gifted people, they have huge variations in their interests, strengths, challenges, skills, social/emotional/physical development, and more. It’s what makes working with them (and parenting them) such an incredibly rich, and sometimes incredibly difficult, experience.

Second, they are intense. It may be intensely reflective or emotional or curious or funny or interested in quantum physics … The list goes on and on. But whenever I talk to parents about their gifted children, the word “intense” seems to resonate more than any other.

So how do we meet the wide ranging interests, abilities, needs and challenges we see when we bring a group of intense, unique gifted children together in one classroom?

One important strategy that plays a key role in Seabury’s classrooms is collaboration. It might seem counter-intuitive that one of the best ways to meet individual needs is through grouping for work and play, but we have seen, and research has supported, that gifted children who get to work, learn and play with other gifted children have better academic achievement, stronger social skills and more self confidence than those who work in isolation or those who don’t get to spend all or part of their day with their intellectual peers.

Our children thrive when they have people who “get them” that they can share ideas with, create with, and be challenged by. Their giftedness makes them different enough from typically developing kids their age that the gap between the way they think and they way typical kids think can be too wide to bridge – especially at a young age. A six-year-old who thinks like a 10-year-old but has the motor skills of a four-year-old doesn’t fit well with the six-year-olds or the 10-year-olds or the four-year-olds. When we put that six-year-old together with other gifted children, they find their “true peers.” However, even then, each of our children is still unique and has a wide range of abilities and interests. So at Seabury, we provide a variety of opportunities for collaboration so that they can find their true peers in a variety of situations.

Some examples.

This year, our prekindergarten, kindergarten and first grade teachers are using a common theme in their classes, and are bringing their children together from time to time during the week to share a story or activity that serves as a launching point for further study and discussion in their classrooms.

They are using Simms Taback’s book The House that Jack Built as the catalyst for classroom discussions and activities related to their theme, “Interconnections.” Last week, after reading the book and spending time with a page that showed lots of different houses with “classified ads” advertising them for sale, each of the students drew their own fantasy house and wrote their own ad. The students did this as part of a large, multiage group and had lots of conversation and sharing of ideas along the way – a collaborative activity. And yet because of the open-ended nature of the activity, each child approached it at his/her skill and developmental level. You will see the prekindergarten students with pictures and ads that are much more concrete in nature. First grade students were much more elaborate in their drawings and ads, and showed higher abstract thinking ability in their descriptions of things not shown in their pictures (like coffee makers or video games). As you look within each class, you will see evidence of each child’s advanced intellectual abilities for their age (vocabulary, level of detail, etc.) and you will also see evidence of their developmental level (dictated vs. written ads, detail in drawings, etc.). Within that activity, or the house building activity they participated in today, the children were able to laugh and talk and think with others who could stretch their imaginations and relate to their creative ideas, no matter what their age was.

Multiage, open-ended activities like this are incorporated into every classroom at Seabury. At the middle school, all students might be assigned the same project and essay, but expectations and results are typically much different for a sixth-grader than an eighth-grader, or for a student who is gifted in writing than a student whose gifts are in a different area. This allows for intellectual collaboration while still meeting individual academic needs.

Flexible grouping is another way we give children the opportunity to collaborate with those who can stimulate thought, creativity and growth.

Another example. At the beginning of the year, teachers spent time assessing students to see where they were in reading, writing, math, etc. These assessments were used to do initial groupings and placements. But unlike the way it was when I went to school, those placements were just a beginning point.

Day by day and week by week, placements, groupings, and expectations are reassessed and revised as needed. The use of flexible groupings within and between classrooms allows teachers to continually place students in an appropriate community of learners for a particular subject, unit or activity.  Our children tend to absorb and retain everything they are exposed to, especially in their areas of giftedness. But they have not typically been exposed to all things equally. So a student who is gifted in math may have had a particular interest in or a great deal of exposure to a particular concept like computation, for example, but may have had little or no exposure to another concept like measuring angles or place value.

Flexible grouping for math allows teachers to regroup students as they start each new concept, and to tailor expectations within a group to the needs of individual students on any given day. So the students get the benefit both of individualized programming and working as part of a group.

Collaboration in the classroom and between classrooms also gives students the chance to learn to work with a variety of people: those who are easy to work with and those who are more challenging. As adults, we know that we don’t always get to work with those who are easy to get along with. And we need strategies for dealing with those challenging situations.

At Seabury, we believe it is our responsibility to provide children with the tools they need to develop those strategies when they are young and have supportive adults around to help them navigate.

As a parent of an eighth-grader, I remember times when my son was younger and when I was worried about him having to deal with a difficult child on the playground or in a group setting. I wanted him to be happy and to have fun. It was hard to see him frustrated or angry or hurt. But looking back, those were the times when he learned the most. And believe it or not, those are times I am now grateful for. He learned how to work with lots of different people. He learned that there are caring adults around to support him. He learned he has a lot of internal resources and strength. And he learned that life isn’t always easy or neat. What great lessons for him to begin to learn at a young age, so he can continue to grow in his ability to collaborate with others as he gets older.   

Our children are wonderful. They are unique and they are intense. Our goal is to help them discover their passions and develop their gifts. To help them grow emotionally, physically, intellectually and socially. It is a complicated task. And ironically perhaps, it is in bringing these very unique children together that we give them the best opportunities to do just that.

If you have additional questions about this topic, or want to know more about how collaboration looks in your child’s classroom, please contact your child’s teacher or me.

References:

http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/reports/rbdm9102/rbdm9102.pdf

http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=382

http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/instrctn/in500.htm

Looking Back...Looking Forward

As we approach the end of the school year, we find ourselves looking both backward and forward. How have our children grown this year? What are our successes? What do we wish we had done differently? What are the next steps we want to take next year? What are our hopes and dreams for our children?

Today, as our staff gathered for inservice, we spent time talking about our successes this year. Many of us were brought to tears as stories were recounted of children who are have taken off in reading or math, who have matured and grown in their social skills or their organizational skills, who have made amazing discoveries… the lightbulb moments that make teaching such a rewarding experience.

As I reflect on this year, and begin thinking about the year to come, both as an educator and as a parent, I find myself remembering that learning and growing is often a painful experience. As a parent, it is difficult to see my child go through hard times. He has coped with disappointments and challenges and frustrations that were hard to walk through with him. It is hard to see him sad or frustrated. But I recognize, if I am honest, that it is those very times that have been the catalyst for his greatest moments of growth. That have made him the incredible young man he is becoming. And the challenges he faces today are the growth opportunities of tomorrow.

As you look back on this year, delight in your child’s accomplishments. Celebrate the incredible leaps your child has made in learning and growing and friendships, and more. But look at the circumstances that led to that growth. Was there pain involved? Was growth sometimes uncomfortable? For your child? For you?

As you prepare to thank your child’s teachers for the year, consider thanking them not only for the happy, fun times. Consider thanking them for the hard times as well. For the times they pushed and prodded and held your child accountable. For the times when you struggled to be on the same page and questioned whether this was the right path. My guess is that those are the times that allowed your child to grow the most.

Growing and learning can be hard. I am grateful that my child been able to grow at Seabury where he is loved and supported and nurtured and challenged – even when it is hard!

A Case for Creativity

I was recently reading a post in the blog, This Creative Moment, by my friend, Eric Ode, a local children’s singer, songwriter, poet and writer who has visited Seabury as an artist in residence and periodically as a substitute teacher. Eric is one of the most creative people I know, and his blog explores the idea of creativity and where it comes from.


Eric refers to a recent article in Newsweek magazine about a study indicating that creativity is in decline among America’s youth. The article refers to a longitudinal study by Dr. E. Paul Torrance, that found a high correlation between a child’s creative thinking ability as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking and the child’s success in college and adult careers. The article states that, “the accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful… To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).” Highly creative children more often grow up to be CEOs, entrepreneurs, college presidents, inventors, and diplomats based on Torrance’s research.

Eric talks about his observation of how two different teachers handled a moment in which a five year old tried to take a creative step in a classroom project. One allowed the child to take a creative step, and another shut the child down with a “we’re not doing that now” comment.

As an educator, I am concerned about the ways in which education is being more narrowly defined as a series of discreet skills rather than a broader focus on learning to observe, think, analyze and create. I talk often with parents inquiring about Seabury, and am heartbroken when I hear stories about how their child’s vivid imagination and insatiable curiosity seem to be shut down in programs that focus on the one “right” answer.

As I read Eric’s blog post, I was reminded that what we sometimes describe as the “magic of Seabury” lies partly in the big things like the fact that we are committed to process as much as to product in our students’ work and learning. Our thematic curriculum and creative projects immerse students in both convergent and divergent thinking every day. But the “magic of Seabury” also lies in the little things our teachers do, almost unconsciously, every day.

Just this morning, a third grade student walked in and announced to her teacher she had brought three encyclopedias to school today because she had gotten interested in a particular topic and just wanted to do some research on it. The teacher, rather than telling her that wasn’t part of the plan for the day, celebrated her passion for learning and made time for her to explore her interest.

As a teacher of gifted children, I found that one of the most difficult things facing me daily was deciding what was negotiable in each lesson. “Take out a pencil for this lesson,” was always followed by, “How about a pen? Colored pencil? Chalk?” Lessons that were intended to go one direction could easily end up heading an entirely different way as students began to ask their own questions and as their interests guided discussions. Sometimes I had to do more steering to get us where we needed to be. But the magical times were those when we could follow the interests and inclinations of students and see where they took us. It was always an adventure.

At Seabury, one of the gifts we give our children is the room to wonder, to ask questions, think about possibilities, and to recognize that problems in real life don’t always have neat A, B, C or None of the Above answers. Our curriculum is designed to develop that kind of creative and analytical thinking. But our teachers also encourage creative thinking in a hundred little ways every day. By letting another way of doing something be a possibility. By taking time to say, “I don’t know either – let’s figure it out.” By valuing the process of learning as much as the product.

The next time you watch your child’s teacher work with your child, pay attention to the many ways, large and small, the teacher is encouraging your child’s creativity. You will be amazed – and grateful – as I am!

Beyond the Basics

At Seabury, we know that learning goes far beyond rote memorization and basic skills. Foundational skills are just the launching point for exploring big ideas, making connections, analyzing information and much more. A program that encourages the development of creativity, imagination, and critical thinking allows students to take what they have learned and apply it to new situations, to innovate, to create and to reason.


In this age of educational standards, sometimes learning is reduced to what can be learned rotely and repeated – on creating students who score well on standardized tests rather than students who are thinkers and creators.

A recent article in Slate, Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School: New research shows that teaching kids more and more, at ever-younger ages, may backfire, by Alison Gopnik, points out the limitations of learning that is confined to direct instruction and rote learning. It is a great reminder of the value of the kind of learning we provide in our classrooms. Learning that promotes the development of a strong foundation of skills, but that uses those skills as a launching point for going farther and deeper, for taking learning in new directions, for promoting inquiry, and for developing creative, inquisitive minds.

One of the greatest joys of being at Seabury is seeing where our students take the material we give them. Students in fourth grade who studied revolutions in their classroom earlier this year, looking at the similarities and differences between revolutions happening currently and throughout history, nearly staged their own revolution when they felt they had been treated unjustly at a competition several of them participated in. Second grade students learning about the human body regularly use medical terms in conversation to talk about what is going on with them, or to describe what part of their brain is working on a particular activity. Preschool students who appear to “just” be building with blocks are having complex discussions about working together, engineering, transportation, and much more.

Learning in an environment that values the questions as much as the answers, that provides opportunities to go beyond the basics, that promotes exploration and discovery is at the heart of Seabury. Miracles happen every day as our students make discoveries, get excited about new ideas, and make new connections. It’s what makes our school such an exciting place to be!