Can't vs. Won't

"Kids do well if they can."  An interesting philosophy adopted by Dr. Ross Greene, author of several books on behavior and associate professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard University and one that challenged the core of my personal educational philosophy.  I was researching student-motivation for my IRC Conference presentation in March when I ran across this article in the Phi Delta Kappan written by Dr. Greene in 2008.  In this article, he presents the idea that if a child truly has every skill it takes to perform a task at a particular time, he or she will, indeed, follow through.  At first thought, many educators would squint our eyes, wrinkle our brows, and say, "Well, what about those kids who don't want to?"  Right?  But after reading through Dr. Greene's article with examples and explanation, not only do I support this statement, but I realize that it both supports and contradicts my entire educational philosophy.

Dr. Greene starts out by stating the alternative thought - Kids do well if they want to, and he challenges his readers to decide which philosophy they would prefer to follow.  Most of us would say that the difference in implication for both statements is pretty profound.

"Kids do well if they can" vs. "Kids do well if they want to."

"Can't" vs. "Won't".  A very respected colleague of mine uses this simple thought with some of her most challenging kiddos who show potential to swing one way or another.  Those kids who have made so much progress and then fall back and then move forward for a few weeks and then fall back for a month - the ones who appear as if they can do it, but they are "just unmotivated" (a common thought among educators).

Our first response is to say to ourselves, "What can I do to motivate this child?"  I can tell you, friends, that motivating our kiddos has been such a passion of mine for the almost-three-years I have been at this job.  But there are times when I collapse at my desk, put my head in my hands, and cry because I just can't seem to make some of them care.  WHY can't I figure it out?

Dr. Greene presented me with the idea that there is only one answer to this - when a child chooses not to do something, when a child chooses behavior we consider to be unacceptable, when a child chooses blatantly inappropriate behavior, there is a skill that he is missing and that he can be taught.  When we choose to approach the behavior (and this includes work ethic) from the top (rewarding good behavior or hard work with external rewards such as tangible items or grades or punishing undesirable behavior), the desired behavior is never taught, and the likelihood that the student will learn it and internalize it is not high.

Adversely, there are some struggling students who are motivated by grades and rewards.  These are the kiddos who work so hard to "make the grade" or get the reward, but when you take a look at their actual skill acquisition, often times these kiddos continue to exhibit low skill.  When the rewards are removed, they may or may not be able to exhibit the correct behavior, probably will choose not to, and if they do, there is no meaning behind it.  These are the kids who are the first to ask, "What do we get if we do it?"  Most of our kiddos, right?

Greene's eight page article focused more on behavior than it did to academics and was obviously more in-depth than my quick summary, but the idea is the same.  When I walk into our intervention language arts class, when I walk into an intervention SLC class, when I look at the detention list, when I look at the D-F list, when I look at the kiddos who get suspended most often, the kiddos who come up at our Tier 2/3 meetings, my "below the twenty-fifth percentile" list - who do I see?  The same kids over and over and over and over again.  Why is this?

And this is when I started making the alignment between what Dr. Greene says in this article to the RtI (Response to Intervention) model that we are currently using.  RtI spans both academics and behavior.  We currently work to catch our academic strugglers with our benchmarking tests (we use Scantron Performance Series and AIMSWEB) with the hope that we can service these kiddos before they become unmotivated, but at the middle school level, some of them have not known success for years and (as I have stated in previous posts) find it much easier to refuse to do it and deflect attention by misbehaving than to try and fail again.  Their egos have had enough.  Many of these strugglers have already hit that threshold and have stopped trying.

My job as a reading specialist is to identify the issues, and (holy smoke!) there are a lot!  Our PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention System) team's job is to identify the issues of our students with inappropriate behavior and provide supports for these students as well.  Unfortunately, we have the same exact problem - we have seven hundred students, and each one comes with his own recipe!  I've tried and tried and tried to be prescriptive for each, individual student, but as Dr. Greene points out - screening tests will often give us general information, but some of our kiddos will go their entire academic careers with skill deficits that never get resolved because we don't have a way of "collecting the data" on them.  And the skill sets are vast!  We also see that often students have social skill deficits that distract them from making academic gains (things like having difficulty empathizing with others' point-of-view), so no matter how much academic intervention we give, until we can identify their social skill deficits we watch some of our kiddos move from sixth to seventh to eighth grade, make a little and lose a lot and make a little and lose a lot.  Its devastating to watch, and I am sick when we ship them off to high school.  Sometimes we manage to qualify them for an IEP, and sometimes not, but regardless - I feel like I could have done more.

As usual, the big question then becomes: So what?  What now?  What can we do?  How can we work with this new philosophy, keep our current curriculum moving, and address these needs?

• Do not ignore students who appear unmotivated.  Dr. Greene is emphatic when he states that these students CAN if they have skills needed.  If we ignore those who refuse to do what we ask, we are missing out on an opportunity to teach a skill that could change a life.  Bring this student up to whomever will listen, and don't rest until somebody takes action!
• Carry on, but keep a culture of trust and support in your classroom.  
• Communicate with your colleagues about students who struggle or act out in your class.  If yours is the only class, its time to keep track of when the negative behaviors are occurring.  If you find that the student is struggling in more than one class, start a conversation about the situations that cause the student the most problems.  You may find that there is a very quick and easy solution, or you might solicit the advice of an administrator, dean, social worker, reading specialist, or speech path.
• Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
• Pay attention all the time.  Academic issues may be masked by acting out and social issues may be causing a lag in academics.  Take note on trends or difficult situations.
• Plan engaging activities and don't leave room for down time.  Change scenery at least twice in a period.  An unmotivated student's favorite time to act out is when there is down time or when she has been doing something above her skill set for too long.  Keep her going with social, active, thought-provoking lessons - and don't give her a chance to think about whether she wants to do it or not.  
• Let your strugglers know that you care.  Whatever that looks like to you.  We had an issue with a very tough kiddo in the late fall who was on his way out because he was spending demerits like they were on his lunch card.  One "come-to-Jesus" meeting with the Tier 3 team, some of his most devoted and caring teachers, and his Mama - and we haven't really heard a peep from him since then. And the meeting wasn't a, "you'd better shape up, pal, or you're outa here!" kind of meeting.  It was a "how lucky you are to have your mom show up to your meeting and look at all of these teachers here who care and support you" kind of meeting.  A few quick and simple rules on a behavior plan, and he was good to go.  He's not our star student, by any means, but what a difference it makes when we could start identifying his needs!

Finally, consider approaching all unmotivated students with the idea that their difficulties are caused by a skill deficit somewhere and watch as your attitude changes about them.  As I was dealing with my ten-year-old daughter this evening, Greene's words rang in my head, and I could feel my energy shift.  Although her issues are anger and anxiety and not motivation, the premise of the feeling is still the same, and it seemed easier to work through with her knowing that there were skills that she needed to master, and I would have to be her teacher (not her disciplinarian).  It didn't go exactly as I had hoped, but we still have another eight years before she can legally walk out on me, so perhaps in that time I will get it right.  In the mean time, practice makes perfect, and we will all be better educators for at least considering the idea that kids do well if they can.

Why do many of our English Language Learners suffer in our system?

I'm wondering when my reading specialist colleagues are going to stop answering text messages and emails from me with the subject "vocabulary".  They have to be sick of my ranting by now because I've been beating that poor dead horse all year, and it seems that I'm only beating harder nowadays.  But this time I'm backing up my rants with some real data. 

For two years, I've suspected that vocabulary is at the root of our issues for many of our kiddos, but vocabulary is such a vast and general topic, and I'd never been satisfied with any assessment that I'd seen for vocabulary.  As it currently stands, there's the most commonly accepted Three-Tier Model for reading vocabulary: Tier 1 vocabulary (sight words), Tier 2 vocabulary (academic vocabulary), and Tier 3 vocabulary (content-area vocabulary).  Project CRISS's fourth edition manual now includes a Four-Level Model that, in no way, aligns with the Tiers, but the tiers would absolutely fit into the four levels (mostly academic and/or content-specific vocabulary).  Level 1 critical words are words that must be pre-taught before reading.  Level 2 words are important but do not require a lot of pre-teaching time.  The third level are words that are important, but they are clear in the text and do not require preteaching.  Finally, level 4 words are words that are not necessary to be taught to students before, during, or after.  As an educator, I make automatic assumptions that vocabulary-building means words that you read, right? Well, after this week I have begun to wonder if maybe I had it all wrong from the beginning.

With all of these categories and ways to approach vocabulary, why do we struggle so much once we hit this roadblock in reading?  We seem to have all of the answers for phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency, but yet when it comes to vocabulary - the answers come in all shapes and sizes, and yet none seem to be fitting for so many of our middle schoolers.  Most of us skip considering vocabulary as a major issue because we assume that we are covering it when we teach content or literature-specific words, and when our kiddos test below level in comprehension, we push comprehension strategies, not vocabulary (in my case because I thought I had already covered it).  But what happens when you have a student who started life speaking a different language (in the case of most of our ELLs - Spanish)?  Maybe she began learning English at the age of six.  Imagine all of those important first-words that she missed and then had to learn!  How many years do you think it takes to catch up in a new language?  And how does that impact her at the age of thirteen?  Research tells us that each year our students absorb thousands of new words, but what if you don't start learning them until age six or seven?

So a few months back I remembered an assessment from my graduate work in reading that I wanted to try - one that targets oral vocabulary, specifically.  Although I was unable to get my hands on that specific assessment (the Peabody), our speech pathologist had something very similar for both receptive and expressive vocabulary.  I spent some time skimming through these two assessments and decided to give them a shot with one of our eighth graders (let's call him Tito) who has been through just about every Tier 2 intervention we offer.  At this point in the year, I begin to panic when nothing is working because I know that my time is limited with our almost-freshmen, and I need to act quickly to pinpoint a solution.

What I found did not surprise me one bit with this kiddo, and my former hypothesis that oral vocabulary is at the root of many of our English Language Learners' reading struggles sprung to life again with all sorts of questions attached to it.  Tito's scores on both the receptive and expressive vocabulary tests were in the very low average and below average range.  During the receptive vocabulary testing (where he had to identify pictures that best matched the words that I gave him), his responses came quickly.  However, the expressive vocabulary assessment was almost painful - he took so much time trying to formulate words for the pictures that at one point I wondered if he had forgotten that he was supposed to give an answer!  In several instances he finally gave up and said, "I don't really know."  Also, at times when the answers were incorrect, Tito's response was a short phrase description of the actual word.  It was obvious he was trying his best to express himself correctly every time.

I then started to formulate a list of questions that I will be pondering over the next few months:

• What can I do, as a reading specialist, to help close the gap for these ELLs who fall under the RtI umbrella?  It is my responsibility to "catch them up" in reading, and yet I'm not trained to develop tens of thousands of missing pieces in oral vocabulary.  This is the most loaded question and very general, so then I started to get specific.
• Will testing more of our ELLs produce the same information?
• How do these gaps effect their performance in their content area classes?
• What can I do to communicate this information to our staff?
• How can I support our students who are lacking in oral and aural vocabulary so that they can be more successful?
• What strategies work best for middle level students who have significant gaps in expressive and receptive vocabulary?
• Within the confines of our current schedule, when can we work on these gaps?
• How can my speech path (who is AWESOME, by the way) and I work together to make a plan, even though she is tied mostly to her students with IEPs?
• Who else can help? (I have already talked to our speech pathologist who gave me some ideas, a bilingual reading specialist, and gotten an email from a former colleague who is hoping to help me use some resources to which she has access, and I'm super excited about all of it!)
• At what point do I stop digging? Because I'm exhausted and exhilarated at the same time.  Although the screeners are just screeners, so are our comprehension, fluency, and phonics screeners - but you have to start somewhere, and the fact that both of Tito's tests came out just a few points from each other tells me that we do, indeed, have a problem.  

By next weekend, I hope to have a few more students assessed so I can report on how those went.  I have chosen three more students (three eighth graders and a repeat seventh grader) on which to complete testing. Once I get that done, my next step is to consult with our other reading specialists on this and formulate a plan of action after we put our resources together.

For now, friends, the next time you stand in front of your class and register that you have ten students who appear to have zoned off, take a moment to evaluate how you speak to your class.  The trick is to support them all without "dumbing it down".  The last thing we want to do is to stop exposing them to rich academic vocabulary, but know that if you do that without rephrasing and supporting, many of your kiddos may not have the skills to even understand the words that come out of your mouth.  A few years back I had this exact conversation with a respected social studies colleague who admitted that she hadn't considered that her vocabulary choice when instructing her students would impact their performance in class.  Also, we often think that if we read the text to our kiddos it will make a difference (and it sometimes does!), but imagine trying to keep up with an instructor who spoke to you in words so difficult that you often couldn't understand him, no matter what strategies you used.  What would you do?  I know what I would do, and it certainly wouldn't be to pay more attention and take more notes.  And yet this is often the answer just about every student gives when we ask them what they think they can do to improve themselves - even those who struggle due to language . . .