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May 2007
| Volume 64 | Number 8
Educating the Whole Child
Why Focus on the Whole Child?
Marge Scherer
Balance in the Balance
Richard Rothstein, Tamara Wilder and Rebecca Jacobsen
Throughout nearly 300 years of policymaking in the United States, educators have promoted eight broad goals of schooling: basic academic skills, critical thinking and problem solving, social skills and work ethic, citizenship, physical health, emotional health, the arts and literature, and preparation for skilled employment. A recent survey about the goals of public education confirmed the public's interest in having students focus on more than just basic skills. To create incentives for teaching a balanced curriculum, schools should be held accountable for each of the eight goal areas. Schools and states could use data from current surveys, such as the Current Population Survey of the Census, to focus schools more emphatically on promoting these behaviors. Balanced accountability would require school inspections that evaluate whether schools engage in activities likely to generate balanced outcomes. Principals could promote using report cards that assess student progress in such areas as work ethic and classroom citizenship, making teachers more likely to incorporate the development of these skills into daily classroom activities.
The Curriculum Superhighway
Thomas Armstrong
A superhighway is being built across today's education landscape, extending from preschool to graduate school, writes Armstrong. This superhighway bypasses all the byways, narrow routes, and winding paths that have traditionally filled the road from early childhood to early adulthood. As schools race to move students through the curriculum at breakneck speed, they ignore the needs that they should address at several developmental stages—early childhood, middle childhood, early adolescence, and late adolescence. Armstrong describes the kind of instruction that is developmentally appropriate at each of these stages. He asserts that educators must dismantle the curriculum superhighway to preserve students' right to grow and develop.
Assessment Through the Student's Eyes
Rick Stiggins
Traditional assessments—which detect and highlight differences in student learning and rank students according to their achievement—inevitably produce winners and losers. Because today's schools cannot afford to leave any child behind, educators need to embrace a new vision of assessment—one that enables all students to become winners. The author describes how assessment for learning turns day-to-day assessment into a teaching and learning process that enhances (instead of merely monitoring) student learning. Teachers share achievement targets with students and work with them in partnership to use the results of frequent assessments to move toward those targets. Rather than a one-time event stuck on at the end of an instructional unit, assessment becomes a series of interlaced experiences that keep students posted on their progress, even in the face of occasional setbacks.
Teaching as Jazz
Carol Ann Tomlinson and Amy Germundson
Tomlinson and Germundson compare teaching well to playing jazz well. Excellent teaching involves a blend of techniques and theory; expressiveness; syncopation; call and response, and, frequently, improvisation. Weaving in analogies to jazz, the authors delineate four elements of such teaching: curriculum that helps students connect to big ideas, understanding of students, differentiated instruction, and assessment for learning. A description of a middle-school science teacher's effective unit on cells fleshes out the teaching-as-jazz analogy.
How We Treat One Another in School
Donna M. San Antonio and Elizabeth A. Salzfass
Research shows that social isolation and bullying can profoundly affect students' sense of affiliation with school and thus hamper their ability to learn. In a survey of middle-grades students in three diverse schools, the authors found variations among the schools with regard to the extent to which students felt safe in school, the locations where bullying most often took place, the types of bullying that occurred, and the primary reasons students became targets of bullying. In all three schools, however, students felt that adults were not aware of the extent of bullying, and they wanted adults to take a more active role in intervening and keeping them safe. The article recommends strategies for implementing a schoolwide social-emotional learning curriculum that will not only mitigate bullying, but also improve school climate in general.
Countering Standardization
Julie Landsman and Paul Gorski
Landsman and Gorski decry what they see as the narrowing of curriculum, overemphasis on test scores, and overstandardization of curriculum in ways that undercut teaching critical thinking. They believe these trends stem from five myths that policymakers and teachers alike buy into: that curriculum enrichments are “frills”; that all students should follow the same standardized curriculum; that teaching for basic skills rather than critical thinking is “politically neutral” teaching; that low achievement reflects deficiencies in a student, not the system; and that tracking by ability promotes achievement. They discuss positive steps teachers and administrators can take to creatively counter these myths. The article lists strategies for teaching that boosts critical thinking skills and connects to students' overall lives and home cultures.
No More Haves and Have-Nots
Joyce A. Huguelet
When parents and staff at Winter Park Elementary School in Wilmington, North Carolina, realized that some children could not afford school activities, such as purchasing ice cream on Fridays, they decided to level the economic playing field. The school began eliminating all practices that required students to spend money to participate. Students no longer had to pay for ice cream, yearbooks, field trips, and school T-shirts. Funds for these efforts came from the PTA, individual parents, local businesses, and state and district allocations. The effort to promote socioeconomic equity is linked to the school's overall philosophy of providing an emotionally safe learning environment.
Teaching Content Through the Arts
Thomas R. Feller Jr., Brian Gibbs-Griffith, Linda D'Acquisto, Claudia Khourey-Bowers and Cynthia B. Croley
Policymakers sometimes view arts education and experiential learning as distractions from the goal of enabling all students to master rigorous content standards. The three school programs described in this article, however, demonstrate that content standards can be integrated into engaging, motivating curriculums based on the arts and authentic experience. In the first program, middle school students channel their adolescent energy into a drumming ensemble, exploring musical theory, learning about teamwork, and serving the community in the process. The second section describes how 5th-grade art students become detectives, deploying their critical thinking skills to evaluate the evidence and decide who rightfully owns stolen paintings. Finally, 6th-graders design creative museum exhibits to answer the question, How do humans help and hurt the environment?
Nature Lessons
Thomas M. Irvin
In 2000, Oil City Elementary School faced collapsing enrollment, a high-risk student population, and a reputation as the place for kids who were not smart enough to attend the nearby academic magnet. The school was slated for closure. But the school had a history of connection to Oil City, a town of 1,500 in western Louisiana, and school staff members committed to keeping it alive. In 2001, they adopted a schoolwide environmental science program and convinced the school board to cast the school as an area-wide magnet. Irvin describes how incorporating three national environmental education programs—Project Learning Tree, Project Wild, and Project WET—into Oil City's curriculum and instruction revitalized the school. Enrollment, achievement scores, and student and teacher pride have all soared.
Learning to Love Learning
Ben Castleman and Dennis Littky
Too often, teachers in public schools do not have the time to get to know their students or tailor their instruction to students' interests. As a result, many students lose interest in school. The Met School, a public high school in Providence, Rhode Island, is designed to help students enjoy school while learning real-world skills. Castleman and Littky share the story of one student whose love of Japanese manga comics was treated as a distraction in a typical school but was used as the basis for his Japanese studies at the Met. They argue that the Met's use of advisories and real-world internships help students develop the holistic skills they will need in life.
A New Day for Kids
David Farbman
The Martin Luther King School in Boston and nine other Massachusetts public schools used a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Education to expand their school days by at least two hours. Each school lengthened the time students spent in reading and math instruction. Farbman focuses on the Martin Luther King School's foray into an extended day. He shows how by adding 30 minutes each to reading and math blocks, and increasing the number of weekly science classes, teachers were able to go much deeper with a project-based learning approach. All King students also have a chance to choose a daily enrichment activity designed to connect to their interests and reinforce academic content. The school also built in 30 minutes each morning to implement the Responsive Learning curriculum, designed to teach problem-solving and social skills.
The Katha School: Where Learning Matters
Richard Hanzelka
During its trip to India in 2006, the ASCD Board of Directors visited the Katha School, which is located in a high-poverty section of Delhi. The Katha School began in 1989 with five students. It now houses 1,450 students, with hundreds on a list waiting to get in. Part of the Kalpavriksham Centre for Sustainable Learning, the school is the main learning center that works in and with a large slum cluster in Delhi. The Katha School works to improve the surrounding community, which is highly impoverished, by running self-help groups for community members on a variety of topics. The school is also committed to the idea that through story, the school community will actively build a caring society. The Katha School is an example of the kind of learning environment that India's National Curriculum Framework 2005 is trying to move toward. But India has its challenges. The country has been in the throes of a “testing as learning” struggle for some time. Also, its greatest challenge—now that all children in India have the right to go to school—may be using education to strengthen the democratic way of life.
China and the Whole Child
Yong Zhao
Despite a policy focus on educating the whole child, China continues to struggle with a culture of testing, placing a premium on academic knowledge to the detriment of a more well-rounded curriculum. Students are overworked, lack adequate sleep, and have little time for anything beyond school work. The Chinese Ministry of Education has enumerated the problems associated with test-oriented education, including an overemphasis on preparing students for tests, a reliance on rote memorization and mechanical drills, and lack of creativity. Although recent curriculum reforms and a new national college entrance exam promote the importance of “quality education,” few schools and teachers have fully adopted the approach. Efforts to educate the whole child can only bear fruit when China drastically reforms its college admission system to expand admission criteria beyond student test scores on a limited number of subjects.
After the Bell, Beyond the Walls
Eric Langhorst
Today, anyone can publish text, audio, pictures, or video on the Web quickly and at no charge using blogs, wikis, podcasts, and videosharing sites like YouTube. An 8th grade American history class has taken advantage of these technologies to expand student learning. Students read books and blog about them with people who live in different states, interact online with authors and experts, and study for tests using StudyCasts, recorded test reviews that they can download to an MP3 player. StudyCasts have also proven beneficial to special education students, who can review material at their own pace.
The Playground as Classroom
Anne Santa
Recess gives children the freedom and the time to explore the natural world, socialize, and exercise. But in many school systems, recess time in shrinking to make time for test preparation. In support of recess, Anne Santa cites research showing that recess breaks can actually improve learning because student attentiveness improves after a break. She also argues that recess addresses needs of the whole child by giving students time to practice conflict-resolution skills and build their physical fitness.
Grain Size: The Unresolved Riddle
W. James Popham
New Ways to Hire Educators
Douglas Reeves
How I Spend My Summer Vacation
Thomas R. Hoerr
The Whole Child: An International Perspective
Amy M. Azzam
ASCD Community in Action
The Best of the Blog
Laura Varlas
Journal Staff
Educating the Whole Child
Naomi Thiers
Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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