Dear Blake Families:
After our first five-day week, I hope that everyone has enjoyed a nice weekend, taking some time to get outside in the lovely fall weather. We have had a great weekend - soccer games, taking Owen to his first Patriots game, dinner with relatives, and we are hoping to take the kids apple picking this afternoon. Thank you to the seventh and eighth grade parents/guardians for your attendance and participation last Thursday at Parent Information Night. We hope you found the night to be informative and that it helped to generate excitement and investment in the 2012-2013 school year. I would also like to thank the entire Blake community for their generous donations to the Medfield Food Cupboard. The amount of food that arrived on Monday was impressive and moving. Thank you to Tracy Allen for her efforts in coordinating this drive.
This past week certainly had the feel of being in full stride in school - although we experience it every year, it never ceases to amaze me how quick the adjustment/transition of 'back to school' truly is. I shared this sentiment at our faculty meeting and again with parents Thursday evening - in talking with some parents that evening, it was clear that we are not alone in this feeling, as they are feeling the same way. Parent night really helped me to 'take a breath', however, and once again think about the overarching goals and vision that we have for our students. I shared with the parents my goals for Blake for the year (Educational Technology; Culture/Community of Professionalism/Collegiality; and Preservation/Examination of Middle School Model), and also presented our theme of Perseverance. In sharing the theme and our goals, I conveyed the idea that our goal is to embed these aspects into our curriculum, and not present them as 'one-stop' or 'lessons in isolation'. If we want our students to understand and acquire these values, they need to be embedded into our work. With this in mind, I have posted an article (located on the Articles tab of this blog) for your interest from The Wall Street Journal, 'Opting Out of the Rug Rat Race', written by Paul Tough. In this article, the author argues that the development of 'noncognitive skills' (character), is most important in a child's development:
What matters most in a child's development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character.
Tough highlights studies and presents research that supports this hypothesis, primarily from James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago. At the end of the day, Heckman came to the conclusion that the development of these noncognitive skills had a more profound impact on a person's life than one's cognitive ability. The findings begged the key questions -- How do we develop these skills in our children? How are noncognitive skills acquired? What are the implications for teachers and parents?
So what can parents do to help their children develop skills like motivation and perseverance? The reality is that when it comes to noncognitive skills, the traditional calculus of the cognitive hypothesis - start earlier and work harder - falls apart. Children can't get better at overcoming disappointment just by disappointment just by working at it for more hours. And they don't lag behind in curiosity simply because they didn't start doing curiosity work sheets at an early enough age. Instead, it seems, the most valuable thing that parents can do to help their children develop noncognitive skills - which is to say, to develop their character - may be to do nothing. To back off a bit. To let our children face some adversity on their own, to fall down and not be helped back up.
This does not imply that we as educators and parents should do nothing. We should be working on developing and enhancing the cognitive skills of our students. And, we should always be looking to support our students. But, we also need to keep in mind that mistakes, failure, and healthy risk-taking do indeed have an important role in the educational process. We must allow our students to fail so that they can learn and acquire the skills how to 'bounce back' from that failure. Adversity does have a place in education, and it is only through the experiences of adversity that perseverance can be developed, acquired, and valued. These experiences should be embedded into all of our work.
Building off last year's theme of community, it is my hope that we (staff, students, administration, and parents) can work together in this regard. In our efforts to provide a high-performing educational experience for our students, it can be easy to 'lose sight of the forest for the trees'. I hope you will help me to keep perspective throughout the year as well, as it will certainly help keep me grounded as both an educator and a parent.
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Take care.
Nat Vaughn