Consuming vs. Creating - We Are What We...Consume.

The old adage, we are what we eat is a bit of advice that helps us to make healthier dietary choices, although lately, I'll admit I’m at a higher percentage of caramel and cheese popcorn than my doctor would probably prescribe. Beyond our nutritional intake, how else can this adage serve us?  What about in the ways how we spend our time?  How does what we “consume” shape us?

WHAT we are consuming?

Psychologists argue that spending too much time on social media, watching an endless cycle of news reporting, or even video games (though like boredom, video games have their upside) can be problematic.  Focusing heavily on current world issues without an outlet for finding solutions can lead to cycles of helplessness and profound sadness in children.  Extensive time on social media can lead to negative comparison conception and overreliance on “likes”, “views” or other forms of approval to improve self-esteem.  This reminds me of another good proverb - too much of a good thing.  Children engaging in social media, video-gaming, or learning about what is happening in our world are all good things...in moderation.  The problems start to arise when the teenage developmental tendency towards obsessiveness with new tools and an expanding sense of self and their place in the world is “fed” with negative messages without a creative and positive counter-message.  One solution is to balance consuming with creating.

Consuming vs. Creating

There has been a push lately from the recognition that all consuming all the time is not a great way to become our best selves. STEM and STEAM education movements in schools have been an effort to engage learners through hands-on problem solving, creative solution finding, and applying learning in ways beyond a single “right” answer. We certainly need to “consume” in order to learn and in order to seek inspiration for the things we might create.  If we focus on how the media and information provide us with the know-how to better ourselves and to share learning with others, we might make better choices.  If we are selective in the media and learning we consume, we can focus our time and energy toward the creative process, one that makes better use of our complex brains, one that challenges us to grow, one that provides an outlet to process negative feelings can leave us feeling more calm, connected and productive.  We need to be critical consumers in order to become better creators.

Hands-on learning, the maker movement, and PBL (project or problem-based learning) are all mey elements meant to put the learner in a creative headspace or a state of flow.  When students create things, they gain confidence, pride in their work, build perseverance, grit, and self-efficacy.  We could all benefit from more time spent in creative pursuits.

What’s the best advice?

As with all things, our kids need to find the right balance for them, guided by the adults in their lives who care about them.  Ask your child to reflect on the quality and types of media they regularly consume and the time they are consuming vs. creating. Creating has a broad definition and many levels of application.  Basically, we all want our learners to do something with the things they are learning, both in the classroom and in life.

Here are some resources if you’d like to go further:

When Bright Kids Become Disillusioned
Creating vs Consuming — how to think about your time in a crowded world
Seven Stages in Moving from Consuming to Creating
Possible Effects Of The Electronic Social Media On Gifted And Talented Children’s Intelligence And Emotional Development

Is Your Child A Perfectionist?

A continuing theme when working with gifted students is perfectionism.

Like many personality traits and tendencies, perfectionism has two sides.  The pursuit of excellence is something we want for all children to develop.  Perfectionism can become problematic when the internal dialogue about performance causes high levels of anxiety and stress or paralyzes students from acting or taking reasonable risks for growth.

Some of the ways we work with perfectionism in Discovery, our pull-out gifted program, include allowing students to adapt or create their own assignments and projects, to work through a flexible timeline, and to make a resubmission plan for any assignment that does not meet expectations.  I also conference with students regularly about not only the progress and completion of work but on the growth demonstrated throughout the semester. We focus on the creation and setting of goals for progress and to build positive scholarly habits through our time working together.  Discussions about points and grades are common and serve as a point of positive negotiation. Students show me evidence and we discuss how that evidence demonstrates their learning and growth. Depending on where students’ are in their self-esteem regarding performance, sometimes I am the coach advocating through evidence that they have grown in performance level and skill.  My goal is to get all students to be able to respectfully share their work and make a case for their own learning with confidence.

Perfectionism, in particular, can limit the ways in which gifted children define themselves and their personal and professional trajectory for the future.  It is important that as the adults in our children’s lives that we help to guide them through making healthy choices in interpreting and reacting to expectations by focusing on realistic, manageable goals and the strategies needed to attain them.

Some strategies to help perfectionists manage feelings of inadequacy, task paralysis, prioritization, time management or other traits include:

• Providing a nurturing environment;
• Model mistakes as learning opportunities and demonstrate a “growth mindset”;
• Model and help your child set realistic goals and the steps needed to reach them;
• Work with your child’s teachers to break down long-term assignments into manageable chunks;
• Challenge “flawed” beliefs about negative outcomes from failure; and
• Set clear expectations for tasks or chores to limit children creating their own unrealistic assumptions of what is required.

Remember, that a perfectionist may appear outwardly as a high functioning gifted child at school.  At home, parents may see the emotions that unrealistic expectations can trigger. The key is to help our children to develop coping and management strategies as school and extra-curricular demands grow larger and more rigorous.  Additionally, many underachievers are hidden perfectionists afraid to engage in assignments or activities because of fear of failure. The strategies that serve to support perfectionists can help them as well.

Resources:

Perfectionism from Psychology Today

Helping Gifted Students Cope with Perfectionism - Davidson Institute

Deep Thinkers and Perfectionists: Getting to Know Your Gifted Teen

On Recreational Reading in Middle School

One of the common themes to my parent meetings each year revolves around the importance of recreational reading.  Is your kid reading outside of his school assignments? How much is enough? What should you do if your child only reads fantasy novels, only reads Sports Illustrated, only reads comics?  Ultimately, whether it’s the comics or Cervantes, recreational reading should be recreational. As parents, you can create an environment which encourages your kid to read through setting some expectations in terms of how much reading is reasonable for your child.  The key is to offer your child some choice within the guidelines you set.

What counts as reading?

Second only to writing in terms of cognitive processes engaged, reading is an important way your child develops vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure, understanding of ideas big and small, and connects them into the thinking and actions of others.  Additionally, reading for just 20 minutes a day is linked to higher test scores, the likelihood of college admittance, as well as stronger career and economic opportunities. There are benefits for all of us in picking up a book or checking out an online article every day as a part of our regular routine.  So how do we encourage our busy, energetic, and multi-talented children to stop, drop, and read?

Share a book or article:

Talking about what your kids are reading is a way to broaden the learning and impact of the topic.  Discussion and social interaction give the brain more opportunity to reflect on what was read, consider other points of view, and develop a stronger sense of theme/real-world connections.

Participate in Twitter:

At 140 characters a post, Twitter may seem far from an actual “reading” resource, but more and more professionals and hobbyists are using it as a platform to share the best of their thinking and learning.  Consider having your child follow leaders in his or her area of interest. Often, the best tweeters are writing blog posts and articles that are directly linked to posts and can lead your kid to head down the rabbit hole of reading without even trying.  Maybe it will even inspire your child to start his or her own blog on a topic. And don’t leave yourself out of the mix - you can follow the same people as your child and even add yourself to some groups about how to find more great reading ideas for your family!

Set reasonable challenges:

Our lives are busy and so are those of your children.  Fifteen to twenty minutes of reading outside of school work can be a manageable goal.  Consider family reading time before or after (or in place of?) screen time. If you are concerned that your child is not reading at all, let anything that is not school related count - comics, graphic novels, news articles, maybe even Facebook posts.  If your concern is that your child seems stuck in a certain genre, challenge them to read something different once a week or one out of every 4 books. Your children can use goodreads and the Lexile Find a Book sites to get a wealth of suggestions

See below for specific articles and resources for your readers at home.

READING for MIDDLE SCHOOLERS

Best Young Adult Books
Dr. Given's Young Adult Book Recommendations

Summer Reading Lists for Middle School Kids

The Best Books for Middle School


READING for BOYS
Best Fiction for Middle School Boys - from Goodreads
History and Non-Fiction for Teenage Boys
50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men - From The Art of Manliness - Heavy on fiction with a few manuals thrown in (Boy Scouts of America), this list is a lovely mix of classic and contemporary titles. Any list that starts out with Gary Paulsen is a winner!

READING for SPORTS ENTHUSIASTS
Books about Sports
The Reading Level of Sports Writing
The 64 Best Sports Books of All Time
Top 50 Sports Writers to Follow on Twitter
Best sports writing of the century - A book about the 20th-century sports articles and writing that make the grade - nice historical connections

READING for FANTASY FANS
Popular Middle School Fantasy Books
Best Fantasy Books for Middle Schoolers - student-generated
Fantasy and Science Fiction for Middle School - librarian generated

READING for MYSTERY SLEUTHS
9 Best Mysteries for Kids - reading level tops out at age 12 but there are some great titles on here
Teen Fiction - Mysteries and Thrillers - Barnes and Noble recommendations
50 Must Read Mysteries for Middle Schoolers

READING for HISTORY BUFFS
Teen Historical Fiction - 825 titles with teens as protagonists
Best Sellers in Teen and Young Adult Historical Fiction - Amazon
Best Historical Fiction for Teens - Madison Public Library
Historical Fiction for Hipsters - From Reading Rants - a blog of "out of the ordinary teen book reading lists".

READING to BROADEN PERSPECTIVES
30 Multicultural Reads Every Teen Should Know
15 Best Multicultural Novels for Middle Grades
Culturally Responsive Book Lists

Thanks and happy reading!  

What I Learned from George Couros Today

Today I had the honor to see George Couros speak at the Summit Country Day School.  It seems appropriate that about a year after my initial post on this blog about Innovator's Mindset, I would finally follow up with more details from its author.  I found George to be fast-talking, funny and human and susceptible to sharing multiple youtube videos that made me get all verklempt (it's just allergies, I swear).  I was going to tweet all of the moments that gave me pause during his presentations today but figured a longer post was a better fit as I work out the ways I want to put what I learned today into practice.

George mentioned that when adults use technology to find answers, we call them resourceful.  When students use technology to find answers, we call that cheating.  Why aren't students permitted to use their resources when they are taking a test?  If the answers can be found by googling, do they really need to have that content memorized?  Isn't it more important that they use that knowledge to make a connection, solve a problem, or create their own content?

Your Fears & Beliefs Create the Edges of a Child's Playground

I often hear discussions in our schools about what and when we should and should not allow students to have access to in terms of websites, technological apps, and social networking.  The focus on what we, as adults, are afraid of what kids might do online comes from our own lack of experience and from actual stories of what has happened to some children due to bad choices.  I have never believed that web filters keep students "safe" online. We all know how well banning something from students works in general.  What if instead, we embraced using the technologies with our students?    I appreciated George's message today about modeling positive uses of technology within real-world contexts.  

Someone today asked the question of how to help kids become digital leaders online within the context of building positive uses of social networking.  How do we help kids to deal with FOMO and keeping up with the curated lives of peers on Instagram and other networks?  George's answer was not what teachers or parents can do, but how can we help kids to create leadership teams interested in building positive culture online.

My favorite idea - I want to create a communications team of students for our classroom where they get to decide how and what we share about our learning with the greater community.

Your Digital Footprint Matters - And Is a Part of Who You Are

George showed us all the ways in which his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter already has an online presence.  While many parents shy away from having photos and info about their children online, George's point was that he and his wife want to help their daughter create a positive online presence - not from a public relations point of view but from an authentic digital self-timeline.  Colleges and employers already regularly Google potential students and employees.  What would they find if they Googled your name or your students' names?  

While I love Google Classroom for managing the work students complete and turn in, one of its limitations, in the name of keeping students safe, is that no one outside the school domain, including parents, can access the course.  I appreciate so many of the free tools that Google has created and keep finding new ways to use these to improve the instruction I provide to my students, but I think student work needs to have an authentic audience.  I'm considering how blogs, websites or another tool might be better to help students develop a positive online footprint as well as make their work public to an authentic audience.

Teachers Need PLNs | Students Need an Authentic Audience

George did a great job of illustrating the power of Twitter as a learning network for teachers.  He also made a good case for going beyond being simply a consumer of content to becoming a digital leader that gives back to the community through creating content - both as teachers and for our own students.  We ask our students to solve the problems and scenarios we design for them.  There are certainly enough problems already in the world that can be used to connect to the content and skills we are expected to teach.  Why not help students find the problems they are interested in solving and teach through a more authentic and student-led pedagogy?

There are many great online resources, thoughtful quotes, and ideas I received this morning thanks to George's willingness to share his wisdom with today's audience.  If you liked any of these ideas, I suggest you read his blog and consider purchasing his book, Innovator's Mindset.

Most of all, today was an uplifting reminder to do a better job of creating content, be a more active member of my PLN, offer more opportunities for my students to find problems that matter and then solve them, and model positivity, the high road, and being nice, online and IRL!

Classroom Engagement, Problem Finding & Content Creation

I am so very excited to be learning with my fellow Indian Hill colleagues as we read the George Couros's Innovator's Mindset book together.

Today's work involves considering how Carol Ann Tomlinson's key aspects to a differentiated classroom might be realized through the eight characteristics of the Innovator's Mindset.  The easiest connection for me to make between Tomlinson's differentiated classroom and Couros's ideas is through Tomlinson's engaging learning environment and Couros's characteristics of students being problem finders.  "Educational thought leader Ewan McIntosh notes that finding the problem is an essential part of learning— one that students miss out on when we pose the problem to them first" (Couros, 2015, Kindle Locations 741-742).  While Problem-Based Learning has been a popular movement in today's classroom, teachers are still defining what problems students are to solve in these scenarios.  Couros and others assert that students need to learn to identify the problems in their environment in order to develop as learners and as innovators.

Another clear connection between engaging learning environments and innovator mindset characteristics is through students acting as creators.  "Consider how much deeper learning could be if “creation” was a non-negotiable in the learning for both us and our students" (Couros, 2015, Kindle Locations 843 - 844).  While student do need to consume education in order to learn, it is equally if not more important that they act as creators of knowledge, content, solutions, and innovations as a part of their school experience.

In terms of serving our students identified as gifted, estimates as high as 5% of gifted identified students, more prevalently from underserved populations, are dropping out of high school before graduating (Renzulli, 2000 as referenced in Landis & Reschly, 2013).  Underachievement is often a risk factor associated with gifted students choosing to drop out of school and additionally, levels of low student engagement can be directly linked to student underachievement.  We need to engage all students in the classroom, but the risk with not caring for our brightest students may be greater than we realized in terms of their educational and ultimately life trajectory.  Gifted students often need a sense of greater purpose for the work in which they choose to engage and do not often follow directions just because that is the expectation.

In my own classroom, students have the opportunity to find problems and act as creators through the projects we offer through Discovery.  Sixth graders identify problems in order to create inventions and innovations in order to solve the issues they explore.  Seventh-grade students have the opportunity to study urban infrastructure and systems of today in order to propose improvements in a city of the future.  Eighth-grade students can create their own projects based on their interests and as a part of that work, their work is an exploration of creating something new under the umbrella of leadership theories.  One area I am looking forward to exploring is to publish and get feedback on our work to a broader audience and to incorporate more community and expert voices as a part of our learning.

While there are multiple aspects of Tomlinson's and Couros's work that will serve our gifted learners well, considering the experience students have in our own classrooms in terms of their involvement, choice, and engagement will go far in guiding us to make the best choices we can to help students to thrive.