Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for April 26, 2009 BABY TALK

I may be a dinosaur, but Julia Steiny is a loose canon!

Julia says she wants a school revolution and it won't happen...

• Until teachers give up their "still faces", and

• Schools become "engaging to the humans inside of them, and to nourish their abundant creativity.

• Responsiveness will save us."

Julia Steiny: The real school revolution is a new responsiveness to kids

The real revolution in American schools is not going to come about by collecting and analyzing more data. We already have tons we don’t use very well. The revolution won’t be a result of stricter accountability, national standards, merit pay, or any other mechanical fix. We will never overcome the legacy of factory-model schools — designed to churn out academic product called “achievement” — through more tests, regulations, legislation, or contract negotiations.

All that is just tinkering with a bad machine.

American schools will improve when they’re designed to be engaging to the humans inside of them, and to nourish their abundant creativity. Responsiveness will save us.

At the well-attended annual Kids Count breakfast, Harriet Meyer drove this point home with a mere two-minute video about the power of human responsiveness. As president and founder of An Ounce of Prevention Fund, Meyer is an early-childhood expert who helped develop the Early Head Start program.

During the first minute of the video, we see a mom interacting with her darling, year-old daughter. Meyer has us watch to see the “serve and return” quality of their interaction — laughing and “talking” together in cooing voices, back and forth like a conversation. When the baby points, mom looks to the object of interest. They are gorgeously in sync with each other, or “attuned,” as the psychologists put it. The audience at the breakfast vocalizes with their own delighted oooos and ahhhhs.

But this video demonstrates the “still face” experiment. The researchers have the mom turn away momentarily, and when she turns back, her affect is completely flat, no emotion, no responsiveness. The baby’s face falls immediately. For a bit she seems stunned. Then she gets to work on retrieving the connection by exercising the interactive skills she’d used before — smiling, pointing and trying to generate chat. The mom does not respond. The baby utters a distressed shriek, and when that doesn’t work, she begins to disintegrate into full-on upset. Mercifully, we see the mom relent and comfort her. The point is not to torture the baby, but to show us the destructive power of non-responsiveness.

The early-childhood community is especially bananas about promoting healthy responsiveness to young children. Children with chatty, usually middle-class, parents learn more words and coping skills before they enter school, and they develop confidence, trust and appetite for learning in general. Responsive parents give kids a strong foundation for bright futures — assuming the kids’ lives continue to be filled with responsive adults, such as teachers.

Meyers says, “Redefining education in the 21st century involves seeing that education starts at birth. Children who get inconsistent or inappropriate response from adults do not learn how to calm down and return to ‘resting state.’ ” Children raised by poorly responding adults become emotionally chaotic and difficult to integrate into cooperative communities such as schools. Meyers continues, “Effective relationships are the intervention we’re trying to get to kids before they enter school.”

That’s fine, but kids need enthused, attuned adult attention after they enter school as well. The data are clear that when a well-cared-for Early Head Start child goes to a wretched school, the hard-won gains disappear by fourth grade. At no point is it OK for responsive adult attention to dry up.

Shortly after Meyers’ speech, Peter McWalters, the state commissioner of education, said the image of the connection between mom and baby is what the connection between a teacher and student should be.

Providence Mayor David Cicilline then added that the mom-and-baby connection is also a good image of how a community should relate to its children. Very satisfying.

But I’ll go one more step. Connections with our children will become stronger and easier when the connections between the adults are also more attuned. In the case of schools, attunement means stopping the academic conveyer belt and having the front-line workers, the teachers, talk with one another much more about how school could be more engaging to the kids. The revolution we all want for schools will come when mutually supportive teams of teachers can turn to the kids and be like that charming mom in the video — chatting, smiling, talking, pointing to fun stuff to learn. It’s all teaching. Adults teach kids whenever they engage with them. Teachers just teach more purposefully.

Schools need to be structured so adults can be in sync with one another, as a prerequisite to being in sync with the kids.

So at this point, there are really only two kinds of schools — those that are fundamentally responsive and those that aren’t.

Responsive schools are the “whatever-it-takes” kind. In Rhode Island, the alternative and charter schools have students for the same amount of time as regular schools, but the adults take much more time to talk together — after school, during summers, over e-mail and by phone. They have the power to implement their ideas, which is huge. They appreciate that the on-going conversation hones their program. And they seem to enjoy their jobs a good deal more than teachers in hyper-regulated schools.

Factory-model schools — i.e. most of them — are structurally unresponsive. On a self-propelled conveyer belt, kids encounter teachers’ “still faces” for just enough time to get a dose of English, math, science. Such schools were designed to be efficient “instructional delivery” services. They are often tough places to work, never mind learn. And yet, efforts to restructure them — to improve responsiveness or anything else — usually depend on industrial-style, labor-management contract negotiations, which sideline the human needs, of kids and adults alike, however unintentionally.

See Meyers’ video for yourself on the RI Kids Count site, and imagine that baby as a fifth or seventh grader. And then as a ninth grader, roaming the halls of an unengaging school, thinking about joining a gang, or finding a boyfriend to love her, or doing anything that has more promise of connection than hanging in that school. Dropping out would surely be better than this. Acting out is a close second.

Until we build in time for schools to work toward attuned responsiveness, all the other academic efforts are just tinkering. And two decades of sophisticated data-gathering argue that the tinkering doesn’t work.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@gmail.com, or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.