http:\/\/www.paultough.com\/the-books\/how-children-succeed\/<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Those in education quickly learn how to identify students in a class who have the skills to succeed as well as those who do not.\u00a0 However, the more pressing issue has always been what to do with those students lacking the skills to be successful.\u00a0 In Paul Tough\u2019s book, How children succeed<\/i>, he focuses on the soft skills students need to perform well in school and life.\u00a0 These skills include grit, curiosity, and character.\u00a0 This is accomplished through compiling the findings from a number of research studies.\u00a0 However, this book is by no means a literature review. The writing style keeps the concepts accessible to anyone in education, regardless of their background in educational research.<\/p>\n
The book begins with an interesting comparison of traditional high school graduates versus those who earned a GED.\u00a0 Essentially, those with a GED are found to retain content knowledge from high school just as well as graduates.\u00a0 The time to study for and earn a GED averages about 40 hours versus about 4000 total hours to graduate from high school.\u00a0 So from a purely economic standpoint, it would seem more efficient to earn a GED if the content knowledge is all that matters.\u00a0 Of course, while each group had similar retention of content even years later, the high school graduates ended up having higher lifetime earnings, less time in jail, more post-secondary education, less job changes, and even lower divorce rates.\u00a0 While the traditional high school graduate was putting in those thousands of additional hours of work, what they seemed to learn was how to persevere through difficult tasks, people, and situations.\u00a0 The GED students did not learn those skills so they eventually struggled more than their peers in persevering through other trying tasks like finishing college and maintaining a steady job.<\/p>\n
Online and blended learning excel at making the content of K-12 education more accessible and relevant to students.\u00a0 However, to reach our students who need our help the most, we must also ensure that our online experiences equip participants with the soft skills needed to be successful beyond our times with them.\u00a0 The push toward developing these soft skills has been seen in many states with a push towards career and technical education.\u00a0 This book outlines specific strategies to develop these needed skills outside of academic curricula.<\/p>\n
Mr. Tough\u2019s first main point focuses on why many at-risk students from high poverty struggle in school.\u00a0 In particular, the medical effects of poverty are discussed at length.\u00a0 The fight or flight receptors in the hypothalmus region of the brain become overstimulated when children are raised in stressful environments often associated with poverty.\u00a0 When the hypothalmus is overstimulated, it triggers receptors in the pituitary gland and the stress responses we are all familiar with including clammy hands and elevated heart rate. The prefrontal cortex is the area of the brain most affected by stress and this is the area where executive functions, often referred to in education as soft skills, are developed. When the body is overstressed, it is more difficult to develop and exhibit self-control and delayed gratification.\u00a0 Those skills are helpful in academic settings but for students in stressful environments it is more like having a fire alarm going off while trying to learn.\u00a0 Thus, it is not the poverty directly, but the stress related to it that causes academic issues.\u00a0 Our application in online learning is to be sure our focus on big data and learning management also includes collecting information on student home lives and providing interventions when necessary.<\/p>\n
The next obvious question is how to address the stress associated with high poverty home environments; exactly what type of interventions will be effective.\u00a0 Parental attachment lets students deal with the stress of poverty.\u00a0 Children need to be comforted when they are upset.\u00a0 While that sounds intuitive to many parents, what it looks like in practice does not come naturally to all.\u00a0 Parenting coaches help parents learn to better comfort their children and build stronger attachments.\u00a0 When parent attachment is high, the stress levels children experience is drastically lower, even in high poverty. Students can also benefit from intense mentoring that will help students better cope with the stress in their lives. By focusing on these non-academic issue, students are in a better mental state to develop the soft skills that will help them succeed academically.\u00a0 While these interventions are typically face-to-face, the core coaching and mentoring can certainly be applied in an online environment as well.<\/p>\n
The second section of the book focuses on how to build character, by which he means self-control, willpower, and motivation.\u00a0 There is a good summary of psychological research on motivation including a study that showed candy as a reward led kids to do better on IQ test.\u00a0 It of course wasn\u2019t that it made them smarter, it made them try harder.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t just a high IQ that helps you do better in life, job, school, money, but the characteristics that make you try hard on an IQ test to get a higher score too. While these little perks help with motivation, too much affluence can actually hurt motivation. Without enough struggle people generally don\u2019t develop character as well.\u00a0 Prestigious schools don\u2019t raise the ceiling for rich kids, they raise the floor.\u00a0 By surrounding students with other affluent achievers, it provides a safety net that will keep most students from failing to achieve.<\/p>\n
Some charter schools are working on systems that seek to teach character traits that lead to academic success. KIPP schools have behavior modification systems like SLANT, which stands for sit up listen ask questions, nod and track speaker.\u00a0 They refer to it as role switching, how you need to act when in the dominant culture, which is the business culture and how you should act at college interview, in a museum etc.\u00a0 Other strategies that are taught in some schools include mental contrasting where students are taught to concentrate on positive outcomes as well as obstacles that may get in way of achieving it. Students do better when they think they can improve their intelligence.\u00a0 Character report cards seek to reinforce with students that their character is something they can improve over time.\u00a0 It is not static.\u00a0 These behavior modification systems and character report cards are certainly interesting ideas to incorporate further into the online environment.<\/p>\n
The third section of the book looks at how to think.\u00a0 The primary example is with chess.\u00a0 Some schools in high poverty areas have had great success with chess teams and teaching students how to play at high levels.\u00a0 When students become more accomplished chess players, it correlates with an increase in IQ.\u00a0 Additionally, it teaches soft-skills like problem solving and self-control.\u00a0 The idea of clubs in the online arena is by no means new, but Mr. Tough\u2019s ideas make a compelling argument for any online school to add a chess club or give it more priority if it already exists.<\/p>\n
The fourth section focuses on how to succeed. There is a college conundrum in our nation in that we still send lots of kids to college but other nations are catching up with their post-secondary attendance rates. College education is more valuable today than it has ever been yet we have so many American college students dropping out.\u00a0 One issue is undermatching in low income groups where they tend to attend schools below their ability level and that actually makes them more likely to drop-out.\u00a0 Whether or not you finish college has more to do with your work ethic than IQ.\u00a0 This work ethic is best reflected in high school grades.\u00a0 So students need more than just ACT SAT prep, they need rigorous courses along with mentoring that provides a path to college for students and focuses on that long-term goal.\u00a0 This is an area where online learning is well positioned to meet student needs.\u00a0 Projects like NROC\u2019s Ed Ready can let students see what they need to do to gain the necessary skills to be good candidates for higher level colleges.\u00a0 The visualizations possible in an online tool like this help make the college preparation process concrete in a way never possible before.<\/p>\n
The final point Mr. Tough makes is about creating a better path for students. He begins with where not to look, teacher quality is important but likely accounts for only ten percent of variation in student success. Initiatives for educating high poverty populations work best with the most able of the poor, but our national education initiatives are done broadly based on lunch subsidies so we can\u2019t easily identify the best places to focus efforts.\u00a0 We need a well-organized national system like Teach for America but for counseling and mentoring.\u00a0 This group could mobilizes high quality, motivated staff to help young children better deal with the stress of their high poverty lives.\u00a0 When students are able to better deal with the stress in their lives, they will be in a position to close achievement gaps seen in underperforming groups.<\/p>\n
The overall message of the author is that schools must focus on addressing non-academic barriers before students are ready to learn the content schools teach.\u00a0 For students to be successful in college and beyond, they will need soft-skills that will equip them to persevere through difficult academic and life situations.\u00a0 These skills can be taught to students in schools and need to be supported with intensive mentoring for at-risk students.<\/p>\n
In terms of blended and online learning, the overarching application is that we must shift our focus from being so content driven.\u00a0 A learning management system is ideally suited to efficiently help students acquire content knowledge.\u00a0 However, if we stop there, we have done our students a disservice and have not set them up to succeed after leaving the K-12 education system.\u00a0 We must help our students focus on goals for their postsecondary education and the skills required to well wherever that next step is.\u00a0 In this challenge, we in online learning also have a great opportunity because of our ability to easily organize and aggregate student data.\u00a0 Instead of only focusing on student data with academic performance, the focus must shift towards data on student soft-skills and gaps in those skills that need to be addressed.\u00a0 Overall, this book is one that I would recommend to anyone in online and blended learning.\u00a0 Mr. Tough compiles a wealth of educational research and presents it in interesting snippets that keep the reader engaged.\u00a0 It provides a glimpse into the bigger picture of the challenges our students face everyday outside the classroom and what we can do to help them.<\/p>\n
Joe Cozart is the Associate Director of Strategic Planning with Georgia Virtual Learning, which runs a statewide virtual school through the Georgia Department of Education.\u00a0 He has been in education since 2003 and online learning since 2005. Dr. Cozart oversees research conducted on the program both internally and externally.\u00a0 Current research is focusing on learning analytics and teacher development.\u00a0 Additionally, he writes policies for the school and advises regarding online learning policies with stakeholders across the state.\u00a0 Dr. Cozart earned his Ph.D. from The University of Georgia in mathematics and science education.<\/p>\n
Joe Cozart, Georgia Virtual Learning<\/p>\n
joe.cozart@gavirtuallearning.org<\/p>\n
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Today\u2019s guest blogger is Dr. Joe Cozart of Georgia Virtual Learning. He reviewed Paul Tough\u2019s book How…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"issue":[385,377],"location":[],"class_list":["post-1918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","issue-redefine-student-success","issue-state-policy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Guest blogger \u2013 Joe Cozart reviews Paul Tough\u2019s How Children Succeed - Aurora Institute<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n