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April 27, 2012
Broader vision of success
Stanford professor speaks at annual KDHS event.
BASYA LAYE
Graduation season is here and, with it, the procession of awards, scholarships and recognition for outstanding academic achievement. While the number of As and Bs will be accounted for, what is less obvious is whether or not students have been actively engaged with the material and whether they are leaving school with a healthy sense of accomplishment.
Dr. Denise Clark Pope visits Vancouver next month as the featured speaker for King David High School’s annual Teaching for Tomorrow, this year entitled Championing a Broader Vision of Success for Youth. Pope has long been concerned with what she says is an extreme focus on academic achievement over other definitions of success and well-being.
A senior lecturer at Stanford University’s School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success, an organization that tries to more effectively engage students in learning and to improve student well-being, Pope has received Stanford’s Outstanding Teacher and Mentor Award three times. Her 2001 book, Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students (Yale University Press), was named Notable Book in Education by the American School Board Journal.
Pope started out as a high school English teacher in Fremont, Calif. “I was clearly involved in curriculum and wanting to engage my students,” she told the Independent. “I went back to school to get a PhD to look at specifically [how] to engage more students with effective learning. The study that I designed, that turned into the book Doing School, was shadowing these five successful students and determining what was working and how they were engaged. As that happened, they helped me, they basically said to me, ‘Look, this is not about learning, it’s about getting the grades, it’s about ‘doing’ school,’ and all the stress and cheating and all the negative consequences that go along with that. I didn’t start off at all to look at stress and health. I don’t even have that kind of a background, but that’s where it landed me as I went to see what was working in school, and the top students were saying, ‘This may look like it’s working on the outside and we’re getting good grades, but let me tell you what’s really going on.’”
It can seem reasonable for parents to assume that their straight-A son or daughter is doing well, academically, mentally and otherwise, Pope said. In fact, even the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which acts to monitor and promote public health in the United States, uses grade point averages as a predictor of well-being.
However, the CDC is using GPA as a predictor of positive behavior, Pope explained. “Usually, if your kid is doing well, that’s a sign that things are going well for that kid. They link that with other things like less deviance, fewer unwanted teen pregnancies, and they throw these measures out there.
“What we’re trying to show them is that, actually, that’s not the case. You can be doing very well in school and getting all As and be very ill or have an eating disorder or have perfectionist tendencies, have suicide ideation or whatever. So, we’re trying to let people know, if you have a kid and they’re kind of doing well, that doesn’t mean, OK, phew, I can just not worry about them.”
When kids end up overwhelmed by stress, it points to a systemic problem, Pope suggested. “Everyone wants to point the blame at someone else – the parents want to point it at the schools, and the schools want to point it at the parents: if the parents weren’t so pushy, if the schools didn’t have so much homework, you know, everyone is pointing blame.”
She added, “And you have kids who really want to please their parents and please their teachers. And we want them to set high personal goals. You know, all of this is very well intended but we have to be aware of the consequences.”
Pope’s Doing School was noteworthy particularly because she directly asked a number of high-achieving students to share their experiences, opinions and feelings, not a common method of examining the education system.
“They’re the ones going through this,” she said of her approach. “Everybody talks about students, talks about their characteristics, their test scores. It’s becoming less rare but, unfortunately, it is rare to go to the students themselves, who are actually experiencing the phenomenon.” Since the book was published, Pope and her colleagues have surveyed more than 10,000 students.
Growing healthy and happy students doesn’t happen in a vacuum and students, their parents, teachers and administrators all have a role to play, said Pope. “For awhile, I was trying to prove that one mattered more. I kept trying, saying, well, who has the bigger influence, so that we know where to put our eggs in terms of policy changes and whatnot. We decided that you really need ... all the players working together toward a change and, by that, I mean, if the school is going to enact a homework policy, you need the parents and the students to be educated about what the purpose of homework is, as much as you need the teachers to be educated about what the purpose of homework is.... And you want people to be on the same page in terms of what is being valued and being fostered both at school and at home.”
Pope’s advice to parents and caretakers is to schedule PDF: play, downtime and family time, an approach that can be implemented no matter in what environment a child or teen is being raised.
“There’s nothing about PDF necessarily that is class-based, because you can have family time, you can have free unstructured play,” without gadgets and technology, for example. In fact, she noted, gadgets sometimes “get in the way of free, unstructured kid-driven play.”
Both Pope and her husband work full time. She acknowledged that some creativity is needed to determine how kids will spend their time when their parents are not around, and that this will be harder for parents who work weekends and/or nights. But, she said, “the time that you do have with your children, we want you to be very conscious and deliberate about how that’s spent. We don’t say you have to be a stay-at-home mom, for instance – at all – there’s nothing wrong with day care.... As long as all the caretakers – teachers, parents, nannies, day-care providers – as long as everyone understands the notion of PDF, then it’s not necessarily a privileged concept.
“I also know there are parents who, out of necessity, have to have kids home alone or kids watching other kids – I do that too, you know – it’s really getting the whole family to understand you need down time, you need to take a break, you need play time, you need to limit the media, basic, basic stuff.”
Both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are key to a healthy sense of self and Judaism’s focus on service to community can help families and kids to recognize and feel empowered about their role in contributing to and improving the world.
“One of the things that we urge parents to do as part of our class and, actually, it’s the parents’ homework, is to come up with a mission statement and core values for their family,” said Pope. “We ask them to really consider what are the values that you hold near and dear and how are you transmitting those to your kids in your actions and your words, and we ask that it become a real family discussion. So, if your family values service and tikkun olam, which many of us do, your kids will know that, and they’ll know that because you’ve talked about it, but they’ll also know that because you’re taking family time to do service together, for instance. You’ll talk to them about becoming advocates at their school, to make and improve the practices and policies that go on there.... It becomes pretty clear to the students that you have a very important role on the team, your voice matters, and you’re here really representing a change mission that you are a part of and need to then help get other kids involved with.”
About raising self-confident kids while avoiding teaching self-indulgence, Pope said, “It goes back to really starting young and really building in a sense of what it means to be a responsible member of a family, a responsible member of community and responsible to yourself. That’s part of why family time is so important; it’s part of why you have kids do chores, it’s part of how you let kids make their own mistakes and learn to be resilient and not indulge them – not helicopter parent and solve all their problems for them.... Most of the time, you’re, in the long run, after a healthy, productive 35-year-old, and you have to remember that that means that your five-year-old and your seven-year-old and your 10-year-old, they have to slowly build up that independence and that resilience and that means you have to really work with that.”
KDHS head of school Russ Klein said he hopes that Pope’s talk will leave students and their families “better suited to define and achieve their success, resulting in their leading happy, healthy and engaged lives that are challenging, empathetic and joyous.”
While some parents and administrators express resistance to a more holistic and qualitative view of education, Pope assured, “I’m not anti-success in any way and I’m not about dumbing down or watering down in any way. We’re talking about an education that is much more rigorous and challenging, just not as focused on grades and performance as they tend to be.... In some sense, you do have to take a bit of a leap. If you have been raised to believe ... the more homework, the better; the harder the classes, the better; the more tests, the better – that’s not what the research shows. So, what we say is, we’re going to translate the research for you ... and help you understand it and put it into practice, but you’re going to have to release some of your misconceptions ... because it’s different from how [you] were raised – it’s a different world.”
Teaching for Tomorrow is on May 10, 7:30 p.m., at the Norman Rothstein Theatre followed by a reception. Tickets, $72, are available at kdhsgala.com and support KDHS programming. For more information, contact Sharon Dwek at [email protected] or 604-263-9700.
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