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Welcome to the Tuesday morning, March 20, 2018, edition of the HML Post. This weekly newsletter is a service to the members of the Horace Mann League of the USA.
More articles of interest are on the HML Flipboard site.
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Quote of the Week
Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen. Horace Mann
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Research suggests young people who experience three or more "adverse childhood experiences," such as abuse, severe economic instability, or the death or imprisonment of a parent, are at significantly greater risk of academic and health problems later in life.
Based on federal data, the nonprofit Child Trends documented the share of children under 18 who have experienced three to eight such traumas. In the map below, hover over your state to see the percentage of children with three or more traumatic experiences. (Learn more.)
Students are easily distracted, but regular, short breaks can help them focus, increase their productivity, and reduce their stress.
in the classroom to the longer break of recess-are not simply downtime for students. Such breaks increase their productivity and provide them with opportunities to develop creativity and social skills.
Students, particularly young ones, often struggle with staying focused for long periods of time. In
a 2016 study, psychologist Karrie Godwin and a team of researchers measured how attentive elementary students were during class, and discovered that they spent over a quarter of the time distracted, unable to focus on the teacher or the current task.
Shorter lessons, however, kept student attention high: Teachers found it more effective to give several 10-minute lessons instead of fewer 30-minute ones. (
Learn more.)
On a day when thousands of students nationwide walked outside to protest school shootings, senior Gabrielle Rabon urged her City High/Middle classmates to walk into voting booths.
"We need to make real change and real policy happen by voting," Gabrielle told hundreds of students gathered in an amphitheater behind the school. Facing students holding aloft placards proclaiming "Enough is Enough" and "Am I Next?," she challenged students turning 18 to vote in upcoming elections and push for legislation to help end mass school shootings.
"This cannot happen anymore," Gabrielle said forcefully.
"This cannot be tolerated. We need to speak up with all the power we have, because we are the voice of America. In the next couple of years, all of us will have this same power, and we need to use it." (
Learn more.)
Reading fiction can help you be more open-minded and creative.
According to research conducted at the
University of Toronto, study participants who read short story fiction experienced far less need for "cognitive closure" compared with counterparts who read non-fiction essays.
While about a book a week might sound daunting, it's probably doable by even the busiest of people. (
Learn more.)
Most education reform efforts focus on what teachers are doing - professional development, new curricula, bonuses and incentives to raise scores, and so on. All are based on the belief that teachers can teach more effectively if their skills can be improved, their tools can be better, and their efforts can be more energetic.
Teachers are the largest group of staff within the K-12 system, and their skills matter for its performance. But they do not manage or direct the system. Do organizations wanting to improve expect that they can get it done by up skilling only their line-level staff? If Walmart were losing money, would it conclude that management was doing a great job but the floor staff needed professional development?
The more natural focus would be on decisions and actions of executives, managers, and senior administrators.
(
Learn more
.)
1. Unanimous:
If it's really important that everyone be 100 percent behind the decision.
2. Consensus:
Unlike a unanimous decision, consensus doesn't require the same level of commitment.
3. Objection less:
Sometimes one or more team member just can't get the point of agreeing to an option, but they don't want to block the vote.
4. Supermajority:
This requires two-thirds, or 66%, of the members to agree on a decision.
5. Majority:
A simple majority requires one more vote than half of the members of the voting group.
6. Minimum Vote:
In some cases, you may want to set another threshold that is below one-half of the voting members to get a clear winner.
7. High vote:
When you have three or more options in the situation, the decision is not critical, and time is important, it's often easiest to move to a high vote model.
8. Authority with input:
For the authority decision with input method, there is no voting.
9. Delegate:
In this case, the team delegates the decision to someone else on, or off, the team.
10. Defer:
Sometimes a team can defer a decision.
11. Abdicate:
In this case, a team consciously decides not to decide.
Choosing the right approach is not always easy, but it is important. Teams that don't make decisions well will only end up having to redo them later when the decisions don't stick, or worse yet, having to live with the outcome after it's too late to change their minds. (
Learn more.)
Nearly a half-century after the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling striking down school-sponsored prayer,
Americans continue to fight over the place of religion in public schools. Indeed, the classroom has become one of the most important battlegrounds in the broader conflict over religion's role in public life.
Some Americans are troubled by what they see as an effort on the part of federal courts and civil liberties advocates to exclude God and religious sentiment from public schools. Such an effort, these Americans believe, infringes upon the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.
Civil libertarians and others, meanwhile, voice concern that conservative Christians are trying to impose their values on students of all religious stripes. Federal courts, the civil libertarians point out, have consistently interpreted the First Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion to forbid state sponsorship of prayer and most other religious activities in public schools. (
Learn more.)
What makes a country happy? The United Nations considers the answer with its annual
World Happiness Report, ranking a total of 156 countries.
Key ingredients for well-being include longer healthy years of life, more social support, trust in government, higher GDP per capita, and generosity.
This year's list hosts the same top 10 countries as 2017, however some managed to jump the ranks while others fell. Most notably,
Finland jumped from fourth place to first this year, snatching the title from
Norway. Finland also has happiest immigrants, a new special focus of this year's report. [Read more about the
happiest cities in the United States.]
While the experiences of tourists were not considered specifically, the report sets a standard for blissful places to visit. After all, aren't smiles contagious? (
Learn more.)
Not surprisingly,
the researchers identified the quality of leadership as one of the key factors driving the transformation, in line with many previous studies into school improvement, such as Kenneth Leithwood and Karen Seashore-Louis' influential 2011
Linking Leadership to Student Learning.
Through a study of reports by school inspectors, they came up with a set of characteristics shared by successful school leaders that I thought was worth sharing.
- They have consistent, high expectations and are very ambitious for the success of their pupils.
- They constantly demonstrate that disadvantage need not be a barrier to achievement.
- They focus relentlessly on improving teaching and learning with very effective professional development of all staff.
- They are expert at assessment and the tracking of pupil progress with appropriate support and intervention based upon a detailed knowledge of individual pupils.
- They are highly inclusive, having complete regard for the progress and personal development of every pupil.
- They develop individual students through promoting rich opportunities for learning both within and out of the classroom.
- They cultivate a range of partnerships particularly with parents, business and the community to support pupil learning and progress.
- They are robust and rigorous in terms of self-evaluation and data analysis with clear strategies for improvement. (Learn more.)
The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment: Where is the Supreme Court Heading? by Michael McConnell on the Catholic Lawyer site
Ever since the establishment clause was first applied to the activities of state governments in 1947,' the courts have wavered between two conflicting ideals: separation of church and state, and neutrality toward religion. From the beginning the Court has correctly rejected a third logical alternative: the claims of the majority for special preferences for their chosen faith.
The animating metaphor of separationism is the famed "wall of separation between church and state." This metaphor portrays a world divided into two spheres: the private, in which religion is permitted to operate freely, and the governmental, which is to be strictly secular. When the government is involved in an activity (principally by providing financial support), any suggestion of religious teaching or endorsement must be scrupulously avoided.
As government assumes a larger share of the responsibility for education and social welfare in the modern world, the result is that those fields-once pluralistic, with significant religious involvement-become, of necessity, secularized. (
Learn more.)
The very real specter of schooling as a place in which students and teachers must be vigilant about safety, about the possibility of being shot; the very real specter of calls for turning schools into fortresses, with teachers armed like prison guards.
As
David Edwards reports
, students increasingly see attending school not as a place of learning, but a place to survive:
"It's really scary," the organizer added.
"This is a turning point. Things really have to change. We won't tolerate it. We won't tolerate being scared to come into school. We won't tolerate having to stay out of school because we're scared. It has to change. We can't be hunted."
(
Learn more.)
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The Education Cartoon of the Week.
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The Superintendent's Special topics:
(Please share your ideas. Contact Jack McKay
)
Sponsor a Professional Colleague for membership
in
the Horace Mann League.
Click here to download the "Sponsor a Colleague" form.
On the Art of Teaching by Horace Mann.
The book, On The Art of Teaching by Horace Mann has been presented to new teachers as a welcome gift by a number of
schools district
. For orders of 50 or more, the district's name is printed on the front cover.
Ordering Information
Cost per copy: $12.50
Orders of 50 to 99: $11.00
Orders of 100 or more: $10.00
Send orders to: (include name of district, P.O. #, and address)
The Horace Mann League of the USA
560 Rainier Lane
Port Ludlow, WA 98365
or
email: Jack McKay
FAX (866) 389 0740
About Us
The Horace Mann League of the USA is an honorary society that promotes the ideals of Horace Mann by advocating for public education as the cornerstone of our democracy.
Officers:
President:
Dr. Eric King, Superintendent, (ret.) Muncie Public Schools, IN
President-elect:
Dr. Laurie Barron, Superintendent, Evergreen Schools, Kalispell, MT.
Vice President: Dr. Lisa Parady, Exec. Dir. Alaska Assoc. of School Admin., Juneau, AK
Past President:
Dr. Martha Bruckner, Exec.Dir., MOEC Collective Impact, Omaha, NE
Directors:
Dr. Ruben Alejandro, Supt.
of
Schools, (ret.) Weslaco, TX
Dr. David Berliner, Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Dr. Talisa Dixon, Supt. of Schools, Cleveland Heights - University Heights, OH
Mr. Jeffery Charbonneau, Science Coordinator, ESD 105 and Zillah HS, WA
Dr. Carol
Choye
, Instructor, (ret.) Superintendent, Scotch Plains Schools, NJ
Dr. Brent Clark, Executive Director, Illinois Assoc.
of
School Admin. IL
Dr. Ember Conley, Supt.
of
Schools, Park City, UT
Dr. Linda Darling Hammond, Professor of Education, Stanford U. CA
Dr. James Harvey, Exec.
Dir
., Superintendents Roundtable, WA
Dr. Steven Ladd, Superintendent, (ret.) Elk Grove USD, Elk Grove, CA
Dr. Stan Olson, President, Silverback Learning, (former supt.
of
Boise Schools, ID)
Dr. Martin Brook, Executive Direcctor, Tri-State Consortium, Satuket, NY
Dr. Kevin Riley, Superintendent, Gretna Community Schools, NE
Executive Director:
Dr.
Jack McKay, Professor Emeritus, University of Nebraska at Omaha,
560 Rainier Lane, Port Ludlow, WA 98365 (360) 821 9877
To become a member of the HML,
click here to download an application.
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