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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Equity, Policy & Reform, Teachers

Education crisis extends across the United States

The U.S. Education Department reports that the high school graduation rate is at an all time high at 80 percent.  Four out of five students are successful in studies completion and graduate within four years. While these statistics sound like a reason for a standing ovation, they are overshadowed by the crisis that is sweeping the United States. While 80 percent of high school seniors receive a diploma, less than half of those are able to proficiently read or complete math problems.

The problem is that students are being passed on to the next grade when they should be held back, and then they are unable to complete grade-level work and keep up with their classmates.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the largest standardized test administered in the United States, reports that fewer than 40 percent of graduating seniors have mastered reading and math and are poorly equipped for college and real world life.  These students who are passed to the next grade are at a serious disadvantage and have an increased chance of falling behind and dropping out of college.

Luckily, the problem isn’t going unnoticed.  The chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, David Driscoll acknowledges the sobering scores. He points out that it is necessary to determine the performance level of high school seniors, and that the data obtained is useful. It can instill a sense of urgency throughout the U.S. education system to better prepare students for college and the real world.

While this isn’t new news to me, I do feel that this crisis is alarming. I agree with David Driscoll and feel that this data can be used to make improvements in education. All students should be able to proficiently read and do math problems prior to high school graduation.

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, First Year Teachers, Teachers

The First Year Teaching: The desist approach to classroom discipline

By Matthew Lynch

As you look for your own way of operating your classroom efficiently, there are several styles of teaching discipline to consider. One that is often used because of its easy-to-implement practices is the “desist” approach. Unlike the self-discipline approach where students are responsible, the desist approach places teachers as the responsible ones. This approach can be viewed as a power system, as teachers have the power and they set the specific rules to give students discipline and correct students’ behaviors. Here is how this method is put into practice:

Assertive Discipline

This approach bases itself on the fact that teachers have the power to ask and require specific actions from students. However, this discipline still has students’ best interest in mind. Canter and Canter, in their historical study conducted in 1992, found that teachers who use this discipline are actually calm when it comes to the rules and limits. This discipline makes teachers assert clear rules.  It gives students the clear idea that misbehavior has consequences and if students want positive consequences, they know how to achieve them.

Behavior Modification

This approach centers around four types of punishment/reinforcement.  These are:

  • Positive Reinforcement: Giving extra credit for a question answered with much thought
  • Positive Punishment: A meeting with a Principal
  • Negative Reinforcement: Removal of an activity that the student does not enjoy
  • Negative Punishment: Decrease in free time

This approach finds the positive reinforcement to be the most effective while punishments are comparatively ineffective. It goes without saying then that teachers are expected to encourage students’ good behaviors instead of criticizing the misbehavior.

In both cases, a lot of the responsibility of the enforcement of acceptable classroom behavior falls on the shoulder of the teacher but for individuals who want to have a tighter control over how things operate, this may be favorable. In classrooms with younger students, this may also be something that is desired as students, particularly in grades K-3, have not yet had enough classroom exposure to really understand how to implement self-discipline models.

In most cases, teachers will subscribe to more than one type of classroom management when it comes to discipline and order. If you are a teacher with different students depending on the period of the day, you may find that one style is preferable over another based on the personalities in your specific class. Conversely, you may go into the process with one style in mind and then find that in practice, something else works better. The main thing is that you at least consider how you want your classroom to operate before going into the process blindly, hoping for the best.

It may be hard to believe, but at some point you won’t need to put so much upfront effort into determining the kind of teacher you want to be — it will just come naturally. In the mean time, consider the best ways to function in your classroom to benefit your students and make your early teaching years more manageable for you.

Check out all our posts for First Year Teachers here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch

3 People (Besides Teachers) Who Play a Role in Students’ Success

As someone who train educators for a living and have written books about following “the calling” to become a teacher, I do believe in the power of teachers to make an impact, both positive and negative, on their students.

But what about “superstar teachers”?  You are probably familiar with the concept, particularly since it is perpetuated in popular culture through movies like the classic Edward James Olmos film “Stand and Deliver” and 2012’s “Won’t Back Down.” The idea is that with the right teacher – a committed, bright, in-tune, talented teacher – P-12 problems like the achievement gap and high dropout rates will cease to exist. If only every student had a standout teacher like the ones portrayed in these shows, the very P-12 system as we know it would be transformed for the better.

I do think that teachers make a difference – but I cannot put all of my faith in these “superstar teachers” to reform the education system the way that is truly needed. In this article, I will focus on three other types of people who can have a serious impact on the success of students.

  1. Parents: Perhaps the most obvious influencers of all, parental involvement can have positive impact on the students’ ability to learn. While the clearest benefit of parental involvement is more time spent on academic learning, there are other benefits too. Some of them include parents better understanding where their children may struggle (and not just hearing it secondhand at a teacher conference) and better attendance and participation for kids who follow the enthusiasm and good example of their parents.

Unfortunately, in this day and age it is difficult to get parents involved. A study done by Stanford University found that the number of U.S. households with two working parents nearly doubled from 25 percent in 1968 to 48 percent in 2008, and that doesn’t even factor in parents who have part-time jobs, health issues or other children that vie for their time. This leaves parents with less time to be involved in their children’s activities.

  1. Principals: Increased attention at both the local and national levels on improving student learning has resulted in a growing expectation in some states and districts for principals to be effective instructional leaders. Consider these statistics: nearly 7,000 students drop out of U.S. high schools every day and, every year approximately 1.2 million teenagers leave the public school system without a diploma or an adequate education. There are 2,000 high schools in America in which less than 60% of students graduate within four years after entering ninth grade.

The situation is not much brighter for students who do earn a high school diploma, and enter two –year or four-year institutions. In community colleges, approximately 40% of freshmen (and approximately 20% in public, four-year institutions) are in need of basic instruction in reading, writing, or mathematics before they can perform in college-level courses. It is vital that principals advocate for these students and provide leadership to reverse this appalling educational outcome.

Here are some issues principals can help with: aligning instruction with a standards-based curriculum to provide a good measure of achievement and effectively organizing resources. Principals must use sound hiring practices, ensure professional development is available at their schools, and keep abreast of issues that may influence the quality of teaching in schools.

Principals do face some obstacles though, and that includes having relatively little ownership of their problems or the proposed solutions to them. The district (or state) defines the existing instructional issues in their schools, which often leaves some principals feeling powerless to make changes.

Often, many principals spend much of their time finding ways to work around the district office, rather than with them. To obtain the support they need, they often decide to avoid hiring protocols and develop “underground” relationships with individual staff in the district office.

All that aside, when a principal has the support of district leaders, principals can actually focus on supporting the teachers in their school.

  1. School counselors: Consider this: one in five American high schools do not have any school counselors. And to First Lady Michelle Obama, that needs to change.

The First Lady addressed 2,000 attendees at the American School Counselor Association in 2014, and spoke of the role counselors play in encouraging further education.

She said that, “The national average is one school counselor for 471 students.”

Obama highlights that school counselors are key to her “Reach Higher” program. This initiative encourages children to continue education after high school graduation, whether at a professional training program, a community college or a four-year college or university.

Evidently, parents, principals, and counselors are not the only people who play a role in how our educational system runs. However, by focusing on just these three kinds of people who can help, I hope I have been able to demonstrate that teachers are not the only ones responsible for the success of students.

Can you think of other people (or entities) who play an important role in P-12 education?

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert

Learn One Spelling Rule and Unlock 9,000 words

Note: The following guest post comes to us from Julie Bradley. She has been an educator for more than 30 years. Her expertise has taken her to outback Australia and around the world presenting to educators and parents on spelling and foundational skills. Mrs Bradley is Managing Director of Smart Achievers, a worldwide distributor for Smart Words Spelling, Reading and Perceptual Motor Programs.

There are 30 rules that govern the spelling of English words.

By learning just one spelling rule, you can spell 9,000 words. Learning the rule for words that start with a hard ‘c’ or ‘k’ gives the knowledge to use the /k/ sound.

Are you confident teaching this rule?

Over the years, the traditional teaching method requiring kids to learn lists of words hasn’t been effective. Perhaps that’s the method our teachers used with us when we were kids or how we were instructed to teach. But this method doesn’t work.

Here’s why. For a student to learn a list of words, they have to memories them. Every week they have to learn new words.

But get this:

• The human memory can cope with approximately 2000 sight sound symbols.
• The English dictionary has 2 million+ words.
• The average adult has 40,000 to 60,000 words in their working vocabulary.
• Well educated people know about 200,000 words.
• The average six year old knows 10,000 words.

This means, to be ‘average’, students need to learn 4,000 new words a year.

That is 11 words per day.

To learn 200,000 words by the time a student turns 26 they must learn 27 words a day, 365 days a year. You are not going to make the grade if you’re learning to memorize a list of 20 words per week.

It’s possible that many people, teachers included, fall significantly short of this mark. Kids tend to memorize their list of words, often without knowing why words are spelled the way they are. The added dilemma for many students is they have to do this without memory training, so they will soon be overloaded.

Considering an estimated 98% of English words follow the 30 Rules of Spelling – it’s very important that we teach our students those rules. But the most important thing is for teachers to also know the associated rules so they can refer to them and explain them simply to students.

To tackle these issues, Smart Words is designed to teach you the rules so you can apply them with ease. Smart Words aims to help you improve your kids spelling accuracy, quality of writing and ability to read words.

When a student is able to read and write with confidence, it then frees up thinking space so they can think about the Science or the Maths they’re trying to understand. It gives them thinking space to make their writing interesting by adding adjectives and adverbs.

It is reassuring to acknowledge that the Australian Curriculum emphasizes that competency with Literacy be prioritized above other subject areas as success in other subjects is often dependent on a child’s success with reading and writing.

How are your students going with their spelling? Do you have students who don’t apply their spelling list words to their writing? Let me know in the comments. I would love to hear what strategies have worked.

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Nurture Budding Wings: How Early Childhood Education Can Help Students Soar

School environment is one of the most formative factors of a child’s educational success and experience in life. A supportive, growth-oriented environment can set a child up to be confident and a self-starter in all their endeavors, while a school environment that fosters negativity and fear can produce an individual crippled by anxiety and set up to aim low in life.

The school environment encompasses the structure, schedule, space, curriculum and course work, and approach to socialization within a school. Schools are organized by grade level, forming the grades into the groupings known as preschool, elementary, middle, and high school.

The early childhood education environment typically involves preschool up to third grade and encompasses ages birth to eight. Day care, nursery schools, and Head Start programs serve the purpose of early intervention and preparation. Early intervention services are provided for pre-kindergarten children who have been discovered to have a disability or to be at risk for developing a disability. The county health department services students with disabilities up to age three. At age three, the school system becomes responsible for the early intervention. Studies show that the earlier intervention services are administered, the greater the chances of success are for the child. In response, 40 states have some type of state-funded preschool program that emphasizes early intervention.

Preparation is another purpose of early childhood education. Schools prepare the students for socialization in kindergarten by teaching them to listen, follow directions, share, take turns, and treat other people and property with respect. Schools also prepare students by focusing on language development. Language development forms a basis for further learning.

Preschool and kindergarten are the most crucial years for developing language skills. It’s important to include developmentally appropriate learning materials and activities for children at these early ages. Children in kindergarten and grades one to three require a much more holistic education than children who are older. The early learning period is characterized by a high potential for student assimilation.

In setting a curriculum for learners in early childhood, it’s important to consider the aesthetic, affective, cognitive, language, physical, and social domains. This means that the teacher of a class of 5-year-olds will be setting tasks covering all these areas as appropriate for a 5-year-old. Emphasis may be placed on being able to complete tasks, participate constructively in activities, learning to share, and learning how to work with others to complete tasks. These tasks may incorporate traditional subject matter such as basic mathematics, science or biology, or even history. The teacher of a class of 7- or 8-year-olds will also set tasks appropriate to students of this age. By this age, students are expected to be able to cope with more directed and complex tasks that require them to perform research, complete homework or tasks outside of the classroom, bring the information back into the classroom, and share or distribute it effectively among their peers.

Teachers also need to be sensitive toward the individual needs of their students. Socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic factors may influence what activities are considered appropriate for students of a certain age. Some cultures place greater value on speaking out openly and freely, whereas others place greater value on being able to solve complex problems without assistance from outsiders. Students from financially struggling homes tend to cope less well with increasingly challenging exercises than their more financially stable peers. This will require you to creatively and proactively find ways to keep your students achieving at the required level, without causing them undue stress by pushing them too hard. Setting up activity stations for more independent children, for example, may be designed to allow certain forms of assessment, while also freeing you to be able to spend more time focusing on students who are struggling with concepts.

The early childhood years are some of the most important. The tone set by a child’s early years can pervade the rest of its life, even outside of academia. Take a hard look at the set up of your early childhood education facilities. Is it priming students for success? Is it encouraging them to develop and grow? If your aim is to help your students fly, make sure you’re giving them an environment that nurtures budding wings.

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Navigating the Two Types of Teacher Preparation Field Experiences

Field experiences are a necessary, and highly beneficial, component of your academic development. In the process of developing knowledge, skills, and dispositions that prepare students to become teaching professionals, education students will have various levels of participation and experience for exposure to classrooms and teaching. At the initial level of exposure to the classroom, students have field experiences associated with specific courses. In these experiences, students learn skills and techniques for working collaboratively with other professionals, for observing teaching, and for working with diverse groups of children.

Different variations of field experiences are available. In the most basic form, you may simply observe the class, your collaborating/mentor teacher, or a specific focus assigned by your instructor. At a more advanced level, you may be asked to assist the teacher or act as his or her aide. Finally, you may be asked to teach a lesson. Specifically, these roles take place in two types of field experiences: observations and student teaching.

  1. Observations

Your observations, attentively watching what takes place in a classroom, can help you to make a final decision about becoming a teacher and will help you learn through concentrated discussions of what you observed.

To observe a classroom you may either go and visit the classroom or, by using technology, observe via distance learning. On-site observations take place in an actual school setting. Instructors assign each pre-service teacher to a different class, often at more than one school. You’ll receive a chance to reflect on your observations and discuss what you observed with the other pre-service teachers in a class setting.

Thanks to modern technologies like video streaming and web cams, a modified version of observation internship is now sometimes available in the form of telecommuting.

Distance Learning

Using these distance-learning methods, college instructors may allow an entire class of pre-service teachers to observe an actual classroom without any disruption to the class being observed. This type of observation is beneficial to the pre-service teachers because everyone is observing the same thing, which leads to a more focused discussion of observations.

Whether you’re observing in person or virtually, instructors typically assign a focused observation. A focused observation is an observation conducted with a clear objective. A university instructor may instruct you to observe the teacher’s interaction with students who have special needs, or to focus on the structure of the lesson, the behavior management system, the difference in how boys and girls are treated in the classroom, student ability levels, or many other factors.

Instructors provide various instruments to use in observations. Some instructors require an informal description or a log of journal entries. Another method of recording observations is using a quantitative checklist, which allows the pre-service teacher to observe and discuss multiple interactions and activities in the same observed setting. Another method is the use of teacher evaluation rubrics. Rubrics are a specifically stated set of standards that enable the equal scoring of subjective ideas, observations, and projects.

The number of observations that each pre-service teacher is required to do varies by college or university, class, and instructor. Some instructors may require 10 to 20 hours of observation in addition to the course work, and others may require multiple 45-hour blocks in different grade levels, usually with an overall minimum of 90 hours. Some universities have implemented week-long or month-long field experiences earlier in the training program, although you’d typically be expected to complete the experience toward the end of your education program.

  1. Student Teaching

The most extensive and in-depth field experience is student teaching. You are required to perform this exercise to obtain your teaching degree. Typically lasting from at least 5 weeks to 2 semesters, student teaching places you for an extended period of time shadowing the same mentoring teacher, with a consistent daily schedule, and servicing the same students. In essence, you do everything your mentoring teacher does.

As you begin your placement, you’ll typically just observe for a few days. You’ll get a feel for the climate, culture, and content of the class, and you’ll reflect on your observations. As you and your mentoring teacher begin to feel comfortable, you’ll gradually start taking over the teaching responsibilities. You’ll progress to taking over one or two classroom activities, then to taking over most classroom activities, with the eventual goal of taking charge of the entire class. The mentoring teacher is available for support and to assist with any problems you might encounter, as well as to provide guidance on how to cope with any difficulties that may arise. You will be given a few weeks of solo classroom management, after which you’ll slowly begin to hand the class back over to the collaborating/mentoring teacher, reversing the process by allowing them to observe, take over a few activities, and so on.

An important aspect of student teaching is the reflection process. Regardless of whether your course requires it, keeping a student teaching journal is an excellent personal tool. This could be as simple as a log of each day’s events, using brief, open-ended bullet points. You can extend your student teaching journal to include your observations of your mentoring teacher, including his or her classroom management style, behavior, responses, and reactions to various situations. Include this along with your objectives for the field experience, observations of your own developing classroom management style, behavior, and responses to events that arise in the classroom and how you can improve these.

During a typical internship, students are in classrooms 2 full days per week. They have the opportunity to observe teaching, to work with small groups of students, and to complete independent study projects to engage in experiential learning. In addition, internship students are expected to complete assignments from their co-requisite courses.

Student teachers are placed in schools and assume the work schedule of a full-time teacher, all day, 5 days a week, for a full semester. Interns practice to develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions of the teaching profession. Particular emphasis is placed on planning, in which interns practice long-range, intermediate, and daily planning for student performance based on planned instruction; and using time management and classroom management skills that are essential to student achievement.

Members of the college of education faculty supervise internships and collaborate with collaborating/mentor teachers to guide the intern in developing knowledge, skills, and dispositions and to evaluate teaching practice. The collaborating/mentoring teacher is responsible for providing guidance and feedback as necessary, and communicating with your college advisor about your progress and participation. You should try to develop a good working relationship with your collaborating/ mentoring teacher. As well as having an influence over your academic performance, he or she is also a valuable source of learning and guidance and can be considered as one of the resources during your teaching education. Your degree of involvement in the classroom activities will be based largely on your relationship with your mentoring teacher.

Remember: the more engaged you are in your education, the more engaged your pupils will be in theirs!

 

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Ask An Expert: Should Teachers Give Spelling Tests?

Question: Should students be given weekly spelling tests? Rebecca S.

Answer:  First of all, thank you for your question. Weekly spelling tests are a time-honored tradition in American elementary schools. For quite some time now, however, schools across the U.S. have elected to cut them out of their curriculum. Why? Because many education experts, like me, believe that they only test student’s short-term memory and do not assist students in gaining spelling mastery.

Over the last decade or so, many districts have elected to use a method called “word study,” which focuses on patterns instead of rote memorization. Word study is based on phonics, spelling and vocabulary and teaches students to examine, recognize and comprehend the patterns in words. An understanding of these patterns helps students master spelling more effectively.

During word study instruction, students engage in challenging and motivational activities instead of simply memorizing a set of words. In order to become literate, students need hands-on practice with dissecting and rearranging word elements in a manner that permits them to generalize learning from remote, individual examples to entire clusters of words that are spelled the same way. In itself, word study is not a panacea, as there are exceptions to every rule. Students can, however, learn invaluable strategies that teach them how to read, write and spell words.

Word study also teaches students how to examine words so they can construct a deep understanding of how written words function.

Even though many educators and parents are totally against abandoning weekly spelling tests, it is my professional opinion that alternative methods of spelling instruction, such as word study, are more viable. If you are an educator who is still giving traditional spelling tests, I strongly urge you to give word study a try — not because I said so, but because it will provide your students with balanced literacy instruction and exponentially increase their ability to read, write and spell.

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, list, Matthew Lynch

3 Reasons Students Don’t Play More Games in the Classroom

Children are becoming acutely acquainted with mobile technology long before their K-12 classroom years. When they arrive at their first organized school experiences, they are often already savvy on basic computers and mobile devices. If their parents used this technology correctly, these kids have had at least some exposure to phonics and math through learning websites, downloads and other applications.

With these new developments, you would expect that children would continue to learn in this fun and easy way—but this is not the case. Research suggests that once these young learners enter a classroom, however, learning through tech “games” disappears. Families may still choose to buy the apps and use them at home but schools are slow to bring gamification of education into their classrooms.

A report by the market research group Ambient Insight found that edtech in the forms of learning games is not making its way into classrooms. Instead of educators making learning game purchases, marketers target parents because they are the ones who buy them. The North American edtech market is expected to grow over 15 percent in the next half-decade but company leaders have candidly said that they will focus marketing efforts on parents, not schools. To paraphrase, targeting schools is simply a waste of time.

So why are games developed for young learners having such a difficult time entering classrooms? Let’s take a look at a few reasons why.

  1. It’s always about the money. Money is a factor and it impacts more than the purchase of the games or applications themselves. K-12 schools are still in the process of creating mobile technology policies and finding the money in their budgets to fund these initiatives. There are also issues of slow internet speeds and low bandwidths that prevent too many students from flooding the network at once. If teachers do not have the right technology in their classrooms, they cannot purchase the games to enhance lessons.
  2. Regulations are another issue when it comes to the quick implementation of learning technology, including games. There seems to be a distrust of games, and in some cases of technology in general, and their place in the classroom setting. By the time teachers can prove the worth of the games they want to use, another game is available with more bells and whistles. For-profit companies that develop these learning games have no hoops to jump through with parents but the same cannot be said of schools.
  3. Too much screen time rots your brain…or at least that is the prevailing belief. Researchers have actually found benefits of these games for young minds. In her paper “Children’s Motivations for Video Game Play in the Context of Normal Development,” Cheryl Olson found that games, even non-educational ones, improve decision-making and encourage self-expression in children. If there is an educational feature, children absorb the knowledge while finely tuning motor and strategic skills.

It stands to reason then that children with access to gaming technology at home are at an advantage. If there was no educational gaming at home AND no educational gaming at school, it would be a different story. Instead, parents that can afford the vehicles for the technology and the games themselves are able to better prepare children for the classroom and academic success – furthering a socio-economic achievement gap. Through educational technology that is readily available to consumers, the advantaged become more so and the disadvantaged fall farther behind.

For all students to benefit from edtech initiatives, schools need to find the funding for better technology suites and cut through red tape more quickly. Otherwise the educational opportunities presented through gaming will never be fully realized and the students will suffer.

Have you found ways to incorporate edtech, particularly when it comes to gaming, into your classroom?

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

How Mentorship Can Help Teachers Succeed

Just like having good mentors is important to student teaching, as newly hired educator, having a mentor at your school is incredibly important, too. Mentor teachers can provide invaluable help to new teachers. Mentors are experienced, patient, knowledgeable veteran teachers who are selected and trained to guide new teachers. These mentors assist new teachers to adapt to the school culture and norms, which include official and nonofficial norms, and school or district-specific norms. They will also guide the new teachers with curriculum, teaching strategies, successful scheduling, and communication skills. They can supervise you and provide you with suggestions on improvements that you can make. New teachers can turn to their mentors for support when times are tough and seek advice. In many programs, mentors are responsible for new teacher assessments, and mentors can suggest training for teachers to improve performance. Successful mentorship programs don’t end there and also guide new teachers in choosing professional workshop opportunities.

Mentors Know The Ropes
Mentors can help you with recognizing which files from the principal get the highest priority and which administrator has the most power in evaluation, and they may offer you helpful inside information (e.g., the room where the best projector is located).

Mentors Help Keep You On Track
Not all schools have such programs, and in those schools, new teachers may have “tele-mentor” and “e-mentor” support programs over the Internet. If those options aren’t available, and you’d like to have a mentor teacher, you can always look for an unofficial one, or find support from several other teachers in the school. Research shows that first-year teachers who’ve had the support of a mentor develop better classroom management skills, stay in the teaching profession longer, and maintain their initial enthusiasm longer.

Mentors Know What You’re Talking About
True mentors are patient listeners and good guides. They provide thoughtful advice based on their years of experience. They can help prepare new teachers for formal evaluations. They understand how to provide support to new teachers learning the expectations of the field. You’ll find that as a new teacher, you’ll benefit from soliciting feedback from your mentor as a way to improve your teaching. When you receive feedback:

  • Focus on what is being said rather than how it is said.
  • Focus on feedback as information rather than as criticism.
  • Concentrate on receiving the new information rather than defending the old.
  • Probe for specifics rather than accept generalities.
  • Focus on clarifying what has been said by summarizing the main points to the satisfaction of all 
parties.

Be proactive about seeking out your mentor and engaging yourself in the professional relationship. Be thoughtful, be respectful, and be sure to remember to express your thanks!

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Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Diversity, Equity, list, Matthew Lynch

Top 3 Little-Considered Issues Related to Student Diversity

Schools and colleges tout the buzz word “diversity” when talking about their ideal student populations, but ideals and reality do not always add up. Diversity is more than filling a quota, or having a certain number of students from an under-represented minority group in your classroom.

There are many issues to address that will help improve our education system in a manner that celebrates the diversity in this country. Here are three issues related to diversity that you might not even have thought about.

  1. Native Americans are falling through the cracks when it comes to education. Obama wants to dedicate $1 billion to changing this.

Young people in Indian Country are some of the most at-risk in the United States. Many grow up in communities suffering from poverty, unemployment and substance abuse. More than one-fifth of Native Americans over 25 years of age never earned a high school diploma. Of those who attend college, only 39 percent earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.

Administrative officials said the President was inspired to increase funds to better serve this population partially as a result of last year’s visit to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. He and the First Lady traveled to North Dakota and met with young people who shared how drugs, violence and poverty impacted their lives.

President Obama’s budget request includes $1 billion for American Indian schools next year, with millions of those dollars dedicated to restoring crumbling buildings and connecting classrooms via broadband Internet.

The federal government reports that around one-third of Bureau of Indian Education schools were in poor condition last year. This has forced students to learn in classrooms that fail to meet health and safety standards.

I can only imagine the impact $1 billion would make on the Native American community, one that is in such dire need of resources. Students do not deserve to have roofs caving in on them — they deserve to attend school and get an education in dramatically better conditions.

  1. There is a gender gap in colleges now—and the imbalance works against men.

If you have been following education hot button issues for any length of time, you’ve likely read about the nationwide push to better encourage girls in areas like science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The thought is that by showing young women that these topics are just as appropriate for them as their male peers, more women will find lasting careers in these traditionally male-dominated fields.

I’m all for more women in the STEM workplace but with all this focus in one area, are educators neglecting an even larger gender gap issue?

Nationally, over 57 percent of college attendees are female when public and private school stats are combined. Females have been consistently edging ahead of their male classmates since the late 1970s when the percentages flip-flopped. Aside from all-female schools, there are others that have marked disproportionate numbers. Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena has nearly 96 percent females in attendance, and the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center in Memphis has over 93 percent.

There are a few reasons why more young women than men are choosing a college education. The first is that there are more trades that do not require a college degree that appeal to men. The second is that economically speaking, women earn a better living with a college degree than without one in comparison to men. Though there is still a wage gap (in 2012, women earned just 80.9 percent of the salaries of their male counterparts), women see the value their earning potential can gain from achieving a college diploma.

I hear people asking this question all the time: What are K-12 educators doing wrong when it comes to preparing young women for STEM careers? It’s a valid one.

But based on the statistics I’ve listed here, shouldn’t we also be asking this question: What are K-12 educators doing when it comes to preparing young men for a college education?

It all comes down to the weight we assign to the worth of a college education. If a diploma is simply a way to earn more money over a lifetime, then perhaps men are doing the intelligent thing by launching into the workforce early and without student loan debt. That logic is flawed, however, when taking into account the fact that blue-collar jobs are declining in favor of white-collar ones. A young man making a lifelong career decision today simply cannot predict what educational demands will be placed on his field in another 10, 20 or 30 years.

Money aside, there are other pitfalls in a disproportionate number of men going to college. Statistics show that marriages where the couples have differing education levels more often end in divorce than couples with the same educational achievements. And even before divorce is an option, women who set college educational goals may not want to settle for men with less motivation – at least when it comes to academics. If this trend continues, social dynamics may be impacted.

  1. Even as student bodies are becoming more diverse, college faculty remains homogenous.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, just 16 percent of full-time professors at post-secondary institutions are minorities. That means that 84 percent of those in full-time professorships are white. 60 percent are men and 25 percent are white women.

Those numbers decrease slightly with faculty. 79 percent of the “instructional faculty” within this nation’s colleges and universities are white and just six percent are black.

Considering the hiring boom that many schools have experienced since the start of the 1990’s, it’s mildly surprising that not many minorities were included in that growth.

“The Condition of Education: Characteristics of Post-secondary Faculty” shows that there was a 42 percent increase in the number of instructional faculty hired from 1991-2011. During that 20 year period, not many institutions hired minorities to fill their vacant positions.

What’s striking is the gross under-representation of minority professors at America’s higher education schools. While many may be concentrated within Historically Black Colleges and Universities or schools who have a high number of black students, that percentage makes barely a dent in the overall number of black, Asian, Hispanic, and American indigenous who may teach at America’s best schools of higher learning.

While the government is rightly focused on college affordability, we should slightly turn our attention towards why many colleges and universities fail to hire minorities for faculty and professorship positions.

What do you think? Do you think we need to expand our focus on what diversity is and re-think the initiatives we use to increase it?

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

 

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