Suspensions were common at Webster Elementary, a San Diego school with mostly low-income Hispanic and black students. Now the school’s calm, cooperative atmosphere and good scores draw students from other neighborhoods. What happened? The new principal and teachers decided to teach students how to behave as students. Voice of San Diego reports:
(Principal) Jennifer White and her teachers crafted the Webster Way, which teaches “scholarly behaviors” such as eye contact, cleaning up your trash, and greeting teachers by name. Such skills are usually expected but not actively taught, White said.
Teachers at Webster devote 10 to 20 minutes daily to role-playing those behaviors and discussing why they matter.
After reading about poverty and the achievement gap, teachers analyzed what the school’s high achievers were doing differently.
Top achievers, they found, had mastered a behavioral code that equaled school success. They spoke up in class. They balanced when to speak and when to listen. They turned toward the speaker. Those behaviors — not their brightness — separated them from their lower-achieving peers and enabled them to absorb information. If the school explicitly taught students those behaviors, White reasoned, wouldn’t they do better?
One skeptical teacher “questioned whether the Webster Way was inappropriate for kids who came from cultures that discourage eye contact.”
“If you believe any parent would be unhappy, call them and ask,” White recalled saying. “Because otherwise, you’re perpetuating poverty. My husband the businessman will not hire you in the business world, if you don’t make eye contact.”
The time once spent on discipline can be devoted to learning. Children who have learned to listen to each other can have fruitful discussions.
It all reminds me of KIPP’s SLANT protocol: New students learn to Sit up, Listen to the speaker, Ask and answer questions, Nod to show understanding and Track the speaker. Again, teaching students explicitly how to behave saves a great deal of time.
It’s interesting how being explicit keeps showing up as a good strategy in teaching.
I have a class which just hasn’t — as ninth graders (!) — mastered how to behave, and every time I give them extremely explicit instructions I am amazed at how well they respond. (And then, of course, promptly forget, because it’s so hard to internalize that ninth graders don’t understand these things.) Go Webster.
This is unpossible. There’s no way that a strategy that is simple, direct and costs nothing to implement could possibly do anything to enhance the educational experience.
“It works because you don’t want to disappoint your teacher or yourself. That’s better than a piece of licorice or a star, at the end of the day.”
In other words it’s a cognitive approach rather than a behavioral approach.
This seems to tie in to some extent with a post over at Newmark’s Door referencing a NY Times article:
http://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2008/05/35-words-about.html
The critical 35 words are:
“Most of the kids come from broken homes,” he said. “Their parents are dead, in jail or on drugs. You can tell the kids from two-parent homes. They’re getting straight A’s, and they are respectful.”
Chris
Thanks for the great link, Chris. Touchy-feely feel-good compassionate do-gooder bleeding-heart liberalism comes with a high price tag: Destruction of the family unit. I also like what Newmark says next:
I can foresee a time when a less prosperous and more realistic public gets tired of picking up the pieces of the wrecked lives of the n’er [sic] do wells.
Then the public will demand that the kids be taken away at an early age and the trashy parents be sent to prison, or a “reeducation” camp.
Call me cynical but I see nothing but dystopia in the future. I am fairly certain western societies cannot go on the same way we have been. Something radical is going to happen.
Unlike Newmark, however, I highly doubt that anything “radical” will happen to save us. People get used to lowering their expectations and it becomes a habit.
You know, I’m not fully on board yet with dress code, but it certainly goes along the same line as this. Sometimes requiring external standards, helps to advance intrinsic motivation. It’s a lot like the old saying, “dress for success.” And, as a once-drama teacher and a current coach of a Nationally ranked Speech & Debate team who also happens to be made up of Title I, ELL students, the fact that they must dress up, nod a thank you to a judge regardless of their verdict, and shake the hands of their competitors is definitely a bonus for a “Manners at School” argument as a means to boost achievement. Wow, that was some run-on sentence. Anyway, thanks for the article.
I remember my Classroom Management professor telling us that if a kid is stealing it might be because he doesn’t know that stealing is wrong. This shocked me. How could anyone not know that stealing is wrong. Then I thought about it. If I was raised by a family that just took what they needed, and they never taught me that it was wrong, then I might not know. If I had to take food in order to eat, I might see myself as a Robin Hood of sorts, taking from the rich to give to the poor.
I think that directly teaching behavior is important. There are a couple programs that do it, but even in schools that expect it to be taught, not every teacher does. It is hard to teach behavior, but every teacher I’ve talked to that teaches behaviors says that for ever 10 minutes they spend teaching behavior they gain an hour (figures might differ). That is about a 50 minute gain. In the short time we have to teach so much, gaining this time is so important.