A review by kwugirl
Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why, by Paul Tough
4.0
This is not a parenting book, but it was helpful to read as a practical-minded person for what recent research on plausible interventions to help children growing up in poverty or otherwise disadvantaged homes. I'm probably biased in favor of looking at the suggestions positively because it seemed to me that the tl;dr is that Dr. Montessori was right: kids are natural scientists and learners, observe the kid, set up the right environment to promote their independence, then mostly get out of their way. It did seem like there was something for everyone in here though:
* agreement that the American public education system is not very good at education (example of math instruction in Japan where students are presented with an unfamiliar problem and try to struggle to solve it for awhile before getting guidance from the teacher, vs. American teacher demonstrating the steps to take and students practicing the steps over and over)
* school suspensions have disparate impact and are ineffective even at improving the learning environment for unsuspended students
* importance of diversity and representation amongst teachers ("[students] feel a sense of relatedness when they perceive that theire teachers like and value and respect them")
* caring about the costs of certain intervention programs
* placing importance on good parenting, etc.
I appreciated the analysis of what promising programs have in common. Also, just makes intuitive sense that "grit" is not a skill to be successfully acquired via a classroom lecture, but instead something that has to be learned over time by seeing the results of effort. There's further support to my personal unifying theory that learning healthy emotion management needs to come before everything else.
Other things I liked learning about:
* parenting "interventions" could be successful by having observers focused on noting all the positive types of interactions to do more of, instead of a picture I'd had of shaming parents. This approach makes the parents "feel better about their relationship with their infants and more secure in their identity as parents." "The message to parents is: You don't need to learn something new. We just want to show you what you're already doing, because if you do more of that, it's going to be transformative for your baby."
* clever ways of measuring a particular teacher's long-term impact outside of standardized test scores (work by Kirabo Jackson, who developed proxy measure for a students' non-cognitive ability using existing administrative data--attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA, for whether the student showed up, whether the student misbehaved, and how hard the student worked in classes. Even as a rough measure, this was a better predictor than a student's test scores for whether the student would go to college, their adult wages, and future arrests. Then used this to calculate a value-added assessment of teachers. Some teachers can reliably raise students' standardized test scores--these teachers are already recognized and rewarded. Some other teachers could reliably raise the measure for noncognitive ability and grades went up even in classes with other teachers.)
Quotes:
chronic early stress--what many researchers now call toxic stress--can make it difficult for children to moderate their responses to disappointments and provocations. Small setbacks feel like crushing defeats; tiny slight turn into serious confrontations.
when parents behave harshly or unpredictably--especially at moments when their children are upset--the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations
When a child's caregivers respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to manage and cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones. That understanding, which is not primarily an intellectual understanding but instead is etched deep into the child's psyche, will prove immensely valuable when the next stressful situation comes along--or even in f the face of a crisis years in the future.
when their immediate environment is in constant flux--when the adults in their orbit behave erratically or don't interact with them much--the child's brain and the stress-response systems linked to it are triggered to prepare for a life of instability by being on constant alert, ready for anything
the educational value of pre-K for children who aren't poor is still in dispute; studies have found little or no positive effect (or even a negative effect) of universal pre-K programs on the skills of well-off children. That said, pre-K does see mto reliably help *disadvantaged* four-year-olds develop the skills they need for kindergarten, as long as the program they are enrolled in are considered high quality.
the ability to focus on a single activity for an extended period, the ability to understand and follow directions, the ability to cope with disappointment and frustration, the ability to interact capably with other students
Yet schools that educate large numbers of children in poverty are generally run, even more than others, on principles of behaviorism rather than self-determination. These are often the schools where administrators feel the most pressure to show positive results on high-stakes standardized tests and where teachers feel the least confident in their (often unruly and underperforming) students' ability to deal responsibly with more autonomy. And so in these schools, where students are most in need of help internalizing extrinsic motivations, classroom environments often psh them in the opposite direction: toward more external control, fewer feelings of competence, and less positive connection with teachers.
[in contrast to the skill-development paradigm where teachers teach new noncognitive skills; students learn new noncognitive skills; those new skills lead to different behaviors] in effective classrooms, teachers create a certain climate, student behave differently in response to that climate, and those new behaviors lead to success.
Moments of failures are the time when students are most susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, about their potential.
academic perseverance: the tendency to maintain productive academic behaviors over time. What distinguishes students with academic perseverance is their resilient attitude toward failure (Farrington)
if you were a teacher, you might never be able to get your students to *be* gritty, in the sense of dveloping some essential character trait called grit. But you could probably make them *act* gritty--to behave in gritty ways. [Farrington argues] that that is eactly what mattered.
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
The first toolbox has to do with relationships: how you treat students, how you talk to them, how you reward and discipline them. The second has to do with pedagogy: what you teach, how you teach i, and how you asses whether your students have learned it.
[different successful programs target different toolboxes]
Is my teacher criticizing my work because he's trying to help me improve or because he doesn't respect me?
The guiding principle for American teachers seemed to be that practice should be relatively error-free, with high levels of success at each point. Confusion and frustration, in this traditional American iew, should be minimized. Japan: 41% basic practice, 44% to inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material. America: 96% on repetitive practice, <1% on new approaches.
* agreement that the American public education system is not very good at education (example of math instruction in Japan where students are presented with an unfamiliar problem and try to struggle to solve it for awhile before getting guidance from the teacher, vs. American teacher demonstrating the steps to take and students practicing the steps over and over)
* school suspensions have disparate impact and are ineffective even at improving the learning environment for unsuspended students
* importance of diversity and representation amongst teachers ("[students] feel a sense of relatedness when they perceive that theire teachers like and value and respect them")
* caring about the costs of certain intervention programs
* placing importance on good parenting, etc.
I appreciated the analysis of what promising programs have in common. Also, just makes intuitive sense that "grit" is not a skill to be successfully acquired via a classroom lecture, but instead something that has to be learned over time by seeing the results of effort. There's further support to my personal unifying theory that learning healthy emotion management needs to come before everything else.
Other things I liked learning about:
* parenting "interventions" could be successful by having observers focused on noting all the positive types of interactions to do more of, instead of a picture I'd had of shaming parents. This approach makes the parents "feel better about their relationship with their infants and more secure in their identity as parents." "The message to parents is: You don't need to learn something new. We just want to show you what you're already doing, because if you do more of that, it's going to be transformative for your baby."
* clever ways of measuring a particular teacher's long-term impact outside of standardized test scores (work by Kirabo Jackson, who developed proxy measure for a students' non-cognitive ability using existing administrative data--attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA, for whether the student showed up, whether the student misbehaved, and how hard the student worked in classes. Even as a rough measure, this was a better predictor than a student's test scores for whether the student would go to college, their adult wages, and future arrests. Then used this to calculate a value-added assessment of teachers. Some teachers can reliably raise students' standardized test scores--these teachers are already recognized and rewarded. Some other teachers could reliably raise the measure for noncognitive ability and grades went up even in classes with other teachers.)
Quotes:
chronic early stress--what many researchers now call toxic stress--can make it difficult for children to moderate their responses to disappointments and provocations. Small setbacks feel like crushing defeats; tiny slight turn into serious confrontations.
when parents behave harshly or unpredictably--especially at moments when their children are upset--the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations
When a child's caregivers respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to manage and cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones. That understanding, which is not primarily an intellectual understanding but instead is etched deep into the child's psyche, will prove immensely valuable when the next stressful situation comes along--or even in f the face of a crisis years in the future.
when their immediate environment is in constant flux--when the adults in their orbit behave erratically or don't interact with them much--the child's brain and the stress-response systems linked to it are triggered to prepare for a life of instability by being on constant alert, ready for anything
the educational value of pre-K for children who aren't poor is still in dispute; studies have found little or no positive effect (or even a negative effect) of universal pre-K programs on the skills of well-off children. That said, pre-K does see mto reliably help *disadvantaged* four-year-olds develop the skills they need for kindergarten, as long as the program they are enrolled in are considered high quality.
the ability to focus on a single activity for an extended period, the ability to understand and follow directions, the ability to cope with disappointment and frustration, the ability to interact capably with other students
Yet schools that educate large numbers of children in poverty are generally run, even more than others, on principles of behaviorism rather than self-determination. These are often the schools where administrators feel the most pressure to show positive results on high-stakes standardized tests and where teachers feel the least confident in their (often unruly and underperforming) students' ability to deal responsibly with more autonomy. And so in these schools, where students are most in need of help internalizing extrinsic motivations, classroom environments often psh them in the opposite direction: toward more external control, fewer feelings of competence, and less positive connection with teachers.
[in contrast to the skill-development paradigm where teachers teach new noncognitive skills; students learn new noncognitive skills; those new skills lead to different behaviors] in effective classrooms, teachers create a certain climate, student behave differently in response to that climate, and those new behaviors lead to success.
Moments of failures are the time when students are most susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, about their potential.
academic perseverance: the tendency to maintain productive academic behaviors over time. What distinguishes students with academic perseverance is their resilient attitude toward failure (Farrington)
if you were a teacher, you might never be able to get your students to *be* gritty, in the sense of dveloping some essential character trait called grit. But you could probably make them *act* gritty--to behave in gritty ways. [Farrington argues] that that is eactly what mattered.
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
The first toolbox has to do with relationships: how you treat students, how you talk to them, how you reward and discipline them. The second has to do with pedagogy: what you teach, how you teach i, and how you asses whether your students have learned it.
[different successful programs target different toolboxes]
Is my teacher criticizing my work because he's trying to help me improve or because he doesn't respect me?
The guiding principle for American teachers seemed to be that practice should be relatively error-free, with high levels of success at each point. Confusion and frustration, in this traditional American iew, should be minimized. Japan: 41% basic practice, 44% to inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material. America: 96% on repetitive practice, <1% on new approaches.