Supporting for the Whole Child

Presented by Deanna E. Mayers

WHAT ARE YOUR HOPES AND FEARS ABOUT EDUCATING THE WHOLE CHILD?

Type your fears in RED and Type your hopes in GREEN on the white board now.

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Support and Whole Child Education

• Each student has access to personalized learning and is supported by qualified, caring adults.

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Build Relationships of Respect

• Use the child names when writing an email or post response

• Answer the questions with details specific to students needs

• Respect the students view and knowledge

• Notice when the student does something unprompted

• Watch for a student slipping and reach out to move them forward

James Comer (1995) puts it well: "No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship."

Make Beginning Learning Relational

• Whenever possible, introduce new learning in a setting that builds on something they already know

• Create assignments that allow for cooperative groups or partner work

• When an student is presented with new content, learning should happen in a supportive context

Teach Students to Speak in Formal Register

• Hart and Risley's (1995) study of 42 families indicated that children living in families receiving welfare heard:– approximately 10 million words by age three

• whereas children in families in which parents were classified as professional heard:– approximately 30 million words in the same

period.

• Build many listening opportunities

Assess Each Student's Resources

• Interventions that require students to draw on resources they do not possess will not work.

• If such a student isn't completing homework, telling that student's parent, who is working two jobs, to make sure the student does his or her homework isn't going to be effective.

• Provide an intervention that supports this child, can you brainstorm some ideas?

Teach the Hidden Rules of School

• In the community having reactive skills might be particularly important.

• These skills may be counterproductive in school, where a learner must plan ahead, rather than react, to succeed.

Monitor Progress and Plan Interventions

• Chart student performance • Keeping in mind essential content, determine which

content you need to spend the most time on. • Plan to use the instructional strategies that have the

highest payoff for the amount of time needed to do the activity. – For example, teaching students to develop questions has a

much higher payoff for achievement than completing worksheets.

• Use rubrics and benchmark tests to identify how well students are mastering standards

• Identify learning gaps and choose appropriate interventions.

• Interventions can include scheduling extra instruction time, providing a supportive relationship, and helping students use mental models.

Translate the Concrete into the Abstract

• Help students become comfortable with the abstract representations characteristic of school by giving them mental models—stories, analogies, or visual representations.

• For example, in math, one can physically form a square with the number of items represented by any square number. – We can teach students this concept quickly by

drawing a box with nine Xs in it. The student can visually see that 3 is the square root of 9, because no matter how the student looks at the model, there are 3 Xs on each side.

Teach Students How to Ask Questions

• To teach students how to ask questions, I assign pairs of students to read a text and compose multiple-choice questions about it.

• Give them sentence stems, such as "When ___________ happened, why did __________ do ___________?"

• Students develop questions using the stems, then come up with four answers to each question, only one of which they consider correct and one of which has to be funny.

Forge Relationships with Parents

• It is essential to create a welcoming atmosphere at school for parents.

What students want

• Take Me Seriously• Challenge Me to Think• Nurture My Self-Respect• Show Me I Can Make a Difference• Let Me Do It My Way• Point Me Toward My Goals• Make Me Feel Important• Build on My Interests• Tap My Creativity• Bring Out My Best Self November 2008 | Volume 66 | Number 3

Giving Students Ownership of Learning Pages 48-51

What Students Want from Teachers

• To what extent do the classroom rules encourage the "neatness" of compliant behavior instead of the inherent messiness of engagement?

November 2008 | Volume 66 | Number 3Giving Students Ownership of Learning Pages 38-42Springing into Active LearningAllison Zmuda

• To what extent do scoring tools over-reward students for packaging their work and under-reward the quality of thinking?

• To what extent do school staff members "save" students from having to struggle?

• To what extent do students revise work?

The Authentic Learning Environment

• Allow students to grow more accepting of not getting it right the first time

• They will learn that a breakthrough can be right around the corner, that the right words are on the tip of their tongue, that the connections they are hunting for are right before their eyes.

• They will develop a faith in their capacity to learn that will support them in becoming self-motivated learners November 2008 | Volume 66 | Number 3

Giving Students Ownership of Learning Pages 38-42Springing into Active LearningAllison Zmuda

Gift of Education

• education is the tool that gives a child life choices.

• establishes mutual respect, cares enough to make sure a student knows how to survive school, and gives that student the necessary skills is providing a gift that will keep affecting lives from one generation to the next

Steps to Whole Child Education in your district

Or classroom…

Review of Step One: Form a Good working group

• Ask your local school board to pass the resolution supporting education of the whole child.

• Present the whole child resolution for reading and offer to speak to the board concerning the need for such a movement

Step Two: Think and Act Locally

• Approach local government to embrace the whole child resolution

• Ask the school board to recommend other local officials or interest groups that they think would support the project

Step 3: Spread the Word

• Ask friends and neighbors to sign the whole child petition

• Attach the resolution and petition and take to any local social events and meetings

• Submit letters to the editor in the local newspaper

Internet Safety Policy Recommendations. National

Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), 2007. (web

commentary)

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Step 4: Make Friends

• Tap into groups of community stakeholders with ready made audiences who are interested in Whole Child

• Parents• Businesses

• Doctors, health care

• Education groups