The Power of Positive Experiences

Our learning experiences have a huge impact on our future, and on our learning. The good part of this is that teaching is a relationship between the teacher and students, and we can choose to provide those positive learning experiences for our students. The hard part is that we all bring our past experiences and expectations into the classroom, both teachers and students. For some students the classroom environment is the safest and happiest place they have ever experienced. It is very hard to focus on learning if one is scared or hungry. Recent research suggests that 25% or more of students have experienced trauma or ACEs. [1] We can choose how we perceive students and their actions.

Understanding the perspectives of other people is an important part of #SEL social awareness, and as teachers we have great opportunities to be examples of this for our students. Learning to respond to the (undesirable) behaviors of others instead of reacting to them is a life skill we all need. By responding instead of reacting we can engage in tSEL – transformative SEL – supporting students identity, agency, belonging, collaborative problem-solving and curiosity!

When we choose to support all students and build safe learning environments, our students can learn to trust teachers and other students and people in general. This is the important first step. The positive experience of knowing the rules and how to ask for help are important building blocks for students’ self-awareness and self-management – two fundamental #SEL skills for understanding and managing our emotions, thoughts and behaviors. We cannot thrive in the society without these skills, but they are equally important for building relationships with other students.

Collaborating successfully with peers is an extremely powerful positive experience in the classroom – we should never underestimate it! Often students can understand a new concept more easily if a classmate explains it, just because they are close to the same level of language development. For us, as professional educators, some concepts are so “clear” that we don’t even consider having to explain its meaning. Peer collaboration helps students to learn the important #SEL relationship and life skills like seeking and offering help and resolving conflicts constructively.

Purposefully designing healthy learning environments by designing these Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) can protect our students against ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), because they build HOPE – Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences [2]. And when we design and provide positive learning experiences, we also help our students to learn to enjoy learning. This has a huge impact for their futures. Learning enjoyment increases the chances for students to engage in transformative life-long learning[3]. How awesome is this?!?

This is exactly WHY education is my chosen life-long career! 🙂

[1] Scott, J., Jaber, L. S., & Rinaldi, C. M. (2021). Trauma-informed school strategies for SEL and ACE concerns during COVID-19. Education Sciences, 11(12), 796.

[2] Sege, R. and Browne, C. Responding to ACEs with HOPE: Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences. Academic Pediatrics 2017; 17:S79-S85. https://positiveexperience.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The-Four-Building-Blocks-of-HOPE.pdf

[3] Jagers, R. J., Skoog-Hoffman, A., Barthelus, B., & Schlund, J. (2021). Transformative social emotional learning: In pursuit of educational equity and excellence. American Educator, 45(2), 12. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1304336.pdf

Increasing Learner Resilience

One of my favorite projects since 2020 is mentoring a pre-K-6 school in South Africa. They wanted to “Finnish” their school and make it more learner-centered, so we created a plan to modify their curriculum and focus on implementing instructional changes and embed SEL in small steps throughout the schoolyear. The foundation is in Cooperative, Constructive and Cognitive practices to collaborate with families and students, create individual learning plans for all students and focus on documenting learning when it naturally happens (instead of formally assessing every student and their skills), and marking all the developmental milestones and learning achievements in the end of the day – sometimes by sending a picture to the parents, too, to keep them connected and informed.

We all know that children learn a lot on their own, and we want to empower their explorations as much as possible to help build learner resilience – a fundamental aspect of our development, that relates to agency (our cap) and self-efficacy. Agency is our ability to make choices and self-efficacy our belief in our abilities to do thing, like learning.

Fortunately, we are born curious and ready to learn. The only thing we need to do is find a way to cooperate with that curiosity and help students preserve their interest in learning and their sense of wonder – because that is where all true learning starts: wondering if, how, when, why….

As having choices helps children to build stronger learner agency and self-efficacy, I built an infographic about learner-centered education, hoping that it would be easy for Early Childhood Educators to view on mobile phones: https://choosinghowtoteach.blogspot.com/2022/04/empower-students-to-learn.html I think we cannot overemphasize the natural learning process and building on children’s play to help them learn more. Simply put, the EMPOWER stands for Environment, Motivation, Process, Ownership, WHY? Empathy & Emotions and Relationships.

Supporting students’ agency and resilience as learners is easy to do by guiding and supporting students’ natural curiosity and offering help when needed, and figuring out together why things happen. These learning experiences are a tad harder to build, as they don’t fit into pre-structured curricula. But learning cannot be restricted into universal format – learning experiences always have individual flavors and take-aways as we are building on things we have already learned.

This is also the best way for supporting adult learning resilience: offering choices for obtaining the information (reading, listening, watching, discussing…) and demonstrating the competencies (both existing and new ones) by producing a plan or presentation or portfolio, and supporting the self-efficacy of adult learners.

Assessment in Self-Regulated Learning

For online learners, engaging in Self-Regulated Learning is a vital skill today. Often the content to be learned is simply placed into a learning management system – think about MOOCs – rather than spending time to explicitly design it for a great learning experience. And, as learners are individuals with their own preferences, it also makes sense, IF both video and transcript are provided. (My confession: I like to read. And nobody can talk as fast as I can read.)

But learning, especially deep learning, takes much more work than just simply watching the videos and following the discussion prompts. When we learn one of these processes takes place: accumulation, assimilation, accommodation, or (the BEST ever!!) transformation. You know, the amazing A-HA!!! moment when the new information literally shakes our world and makes us think about things in a new way. And then adjust what we already knew to fit in with this new revelation. That’s deep learning at its best. 🙂 The moment when we see the lightbulb lit in our students’ brains. This is the very reason why I am in education.

Now, how do we assess this new, deep learning? Just giving a grade would not cover it, because assigning a grade is an evaluation, not an assessment. Evaluations don’t support our learning processes, they just put an approval (or denial) stamp onto our final product – worksheet, test score, essay, or portfolio. It is just a professional judgment of the output, the product of learning, but doesn’t tell how we got there. It doesn’t address the learning process, which is where learner agency lives.

Assessment and evaluation are two different processes for two different purposes. Student-centered assessment for learning and assessment as learning are to support students’ #deeperlearning process, evaluation is to determine the level of their  performance.  Assessment is for students and teachers, evaluation is for stakeholders. 

Formative assessments that inform (the educator and student about learning process) and summative assessments that sum up the competence are both important and useful, however they require different approaches and interpretations. Both can be designed by the teacher to meet learning objectives. At best assessment is a meaningful and a positive learning experience for students, increasing their interest in learning and boosting growth mindset. Summative assessment is usually a cumulative examination, and can be done as a final project or portfolio. My personal-professional preference is portfolios because they can visualize the learning process and accumulation of ideas and knowledge, as well as the choices where to dig deeper.

Evaluation is making a judgment about an artifact (essay, test score, behavior, teaching practice) against a relevant evaluation criteria, usually a predetermined goal or standard. Evaluation is also interpreting and making decisions about program effectiveness, for example for accreditation purposes and to build capacity. The OECD report is clear: “The point of evaluation and assessment is to improve classroom practice and student learning.”

References:

American Psychological Association (2020). The APA Guide to College Teaching: Essential Tools and Techniques Based on Psychological Science. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/undergrad

American Psychological Association, Coalition for Psychology in
Schools and Education. (2015). Top 20 principles from psychology for preK–12 teaching and learning. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ed/schools/cpse/top-twenty-principles.pdf

OECD (2013), Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment, OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264190658-en.

Learning paths

In the beginning of a school year it is important to remember that every student is on their own learning path – with their private history (which can be scary, maybe with harmful elements for learning process,  like neglect and abuse causing serious trauma that messes with their learning process) [1]. We all are in our own learning paths with our previous experiences and hopes/plans for the future learning. As educators, we can design learning experiences that guide students on the path of making responsible decisions (for their learning and lives #sel), but we cannot force people to change or follow a given path. This is why using the power of positive regard is so important! We are helping our students to create hopeful futures – and I have found empathy, curiosity and open-mindedness to become my most valuable tools as an educator!

It is not easy to try to see the positive in a disruptive behavior. Reminding myself to perceive students as complex human beings is often the most helpful first step for me. Students are on different paths, they have lives outside of school, and sometimes just reframing our perception can help us to remember that there might be a reason for a student to act differently. Isolating the behavior from the person helps us to accept our students as they are, not as we wanted them to be. And the younger the student, the more they need our help in managing their emotions and stress, which is why we want to actively design and build emotionally safe learning environments [2] to help every student to get onto a hopeful learnign path. I know this sounds like a lot of extra work but the payback is incredible: deeper learning, better learning outcomes, less disruptions, students helping each other, and so on. Acknowledging the presence of trauma in all our lives allows us to have more compassion for students and help them to see that the hopeful futures can exist! To design these learning experiences, we need to have empathy, work to find our curiosity again, and then just decidedly stay open-minded.

While we are not counselors or mental health professionals, we ARE supporting our students’ personal growth with all our learning design and classroom interactions – and helping students to stay curious is important! We can (and should) actively choose how to teach because our pedagogical choices impact the deep and surface learning strategies our students decide to use. An important role for a teacher is to help students make good choices. Otherwise kids could just learn everything they need from a video feed.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are often very visible in the classroom, causing many kinds of disruptions. Students may appear disrespectful or angry, disengaged or lazy, but without knowing what is causing their misbehavior, we are more likely to react to the situation than using a pedagogically sound response. The “disrespectful” student may be scared of something and in the fight-flight- freeze-fawn mode; the “angry” student may be worrying about their family or safety. The “disengaged” student may be simply overwhelmed and doesn’t know how to ask for help. And the “lazy” student may have no idea how to get a task started, or homework completed. Which is why they need our help. Lot’s of help. To get on a better path and to make those responsible decisions about their learning and futures.

Designing opportunities for positive childhood experiences (PCEs) are our best tools for creating those hopeful futures [3]. Their report shows that “Children can succeed in school, even with substantial adversity, when they develop executive functioning skills and use the relational supports that are known to promote resilience.” And while I know that the report talks about childhood experiences, during my 10+ years in Higher Ed, mentoring M.Ed. grad students, I have learned that students of all ages react well to the unconditional positive regard. In addition to the trauma from our personal life situations, adult learners often also carry some serious educational trauma, making it harder to be curious and open-minded in a formal learning situation, like continuing education course or while earning a degree, making positive regard and individual support essential pars of our learning design.

What are your ideas for designing learning paths to hopeful futures? Please comment below!

References:

[1] Perry, B. D. (2006). Fear and learning: Trauma-related factors in the adult education process. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 110, 21.

[2] Burstein, D., Yang, C., Johnson, K., Linkenbach, J., & Sege, R. (2021). Transforming practice with hope (healthy outcomes from positive experiences). Maternal and Child Health Journal, 25(7), 1019-1024.

[3] Sege, R., Bethell, C., Linkenbach, J., Jones, J., Klika, B. & Pecora, P.J. (2017). Balancing adverse childhood experiences with HOPE: New insights into the role of positive experience on child and family development. Boston: The Medical Foundation.

Learning theories for deeper learning

Understanding learning theories is crucially important for anyone who wants to teach. Without purposefully designing the learning experience by choosing the learning theory and instructional strategy for the lesson, there is a great change that we are just teaching the same way we were taught – and that might not help our students to learn! It might make them to use surface learning strategies to just pass, not to learn! 

 Are you (and/or your students) engaging in deep learning or surface learning?

 

There is a big difference between instructor/instruction centered vs. learner-centered education.  When learning is perceived to be a product (product, grade, task, test score, etc.) created according the instruction, it makes great sense to group students by their academic ability. That’s what we would do in other industries, right? However, learning is so much more than just a product of instruction!

When learning is perceived to be an internal, individual, life-long process, also the instructional practices have to change. I understand teachers’ concerns of limited instructional time (especially when teaching to the test) and external accountability measures that seriously complicate the teaching-learning interactions. We cannot expect the teachers to change a situation that derives from structural demands and administrative practices in education. Which is why we need to focus on our own teaching practices to always, always, always support our students to choose to engage in deeper learning.

The concept of learning as a product often gets reinforced through teacher education and instructional design practices (current ID models were created in business and military settings, but the pervasiveness of learning objects as measurements of successful instruction is today a global practice). University faculty seldom has extensive training in instructional practices, so they may teach the same way they were taught – which is less than ideal, because contemporary educational research acknowledges the benefits of modern learning theories over behaviorism.

Teacher education has to change. If we want to have teachers who know how to engage their students in learner-centered practices, we must provide teachers with the experience of learning in such environment.

Meanwhile, we all as individual educators, can choose to prioritize supporting our own students’ deeper learning process. Because that makes learning more meaningful.

Deeper learning has another dimension in our contemporary world: media literacy, which is crucially important to teach in all K-12 grades and beyond. Please see the excellent suggestions below:

Image from: https://futuremakers.nz/2023/07/24/a-theory-of-stupid/ and the green link for Fact checking tools in the image: https://www.rand.org/research/projects/truth-decay/fighting-disinformation/search.html

Self-care for teachers

This is the time of the year when I am talking with my teachers who are in a survival mode with all of the end-of-schoolyear-expectations and work. And because they are my students, they are also trying to handle their M.Ed. studies – you can imagine what full-time teaching and full-time studying looks  like during these extremely busy times.

How are you managing your time and stress? How do YOU find time for self-care when work is too busy? And what is your secret for being a resilient teacher to cultivate your students’ learning process, so that it supports the increase of their resilience, too?

I imagine that this might sound like yet another demand for already busy teachers – but, please, hear me out: 

Learning is much more successful when we help our students to become resilient, like the tree in the picture. It doesn’t have much soil, and it has lost some of it’s needles, too. But it bends with the winds and tolerates the salty seawater. And grows. Not as fast as the other trees growing more inland with better soil. It grows on its own pace – like we all do, actually. For growth cannot be hurried

When we discuss learning and metacognition with students, it is important to remember and remind that resilience can be practiced (it is the real growth mindset). Learning to be resilient  helps them to rebuild their confidence and learning skills. Because this is exactly what learner agency is: our capacity to make choices about ourselves and our learning. 

The more we understand the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and use Trauma-Informed Practices, the better we can support our students’ resilience. To me, that is an essential part of being an educator, which is why I want to remind all teachers about engaging in self-care. The easiest ones for me are going outside to enjoy the nature and laughing with friends and colleagues!

Here is a Tiny Survival Guide with great strategies:

What is helpful for you when work gets crazy-busy? How do you take care of yourself?

Choose your focus – TIP toward SEL

Anything you pay attention to in your educational practice is likely to show an increase in your metrics. It truly is as simple as that. The human perception focuses on things we expect. This is why verbalizing your positive expectations will make a difference.

As a teacher you are externalizing your values and beliefs while you teach, i.e. communicate with your students.  So, if you expect students to hate learning…well…that is what you will get.  Focusing your communication on what you wish to happen creates the expectation for students. I am talking about the subtexts of the classrooms anywhere, on any level of education.  And the decisions we make about them, either knowingly or not.

To truly make responsible decisions in education, we need to have a deep understanding of Trauma-Informed Practices, and how to support learners’ self-regulation. (Here is a video and an infographic)  Unregulated students are not able to learn. But there is actually more to that. Our instructional practices match with our communication. And even if our words (and expressions) are positive but the undertone strongly negative, students will instinctively be following the latter.

Here is the TIP sheet I created to have a one-page document reminder of both SEL and TIP (Social-Emotional Learning and Trauma-Informed Practices), so that I can have it open on my desktop while working with my students:

Having practices that communicate respect, transparency, support, collaboration, empowerment, safety and resilience will strengthen the positive messages in our educational practice. This will also strengthen students’ understanding about their own learning process – which of course makes giving encouraging and positive feedback even easier.

This is a choice every educator has to make. It starts from stating positive expectations and making sure your instructional practices match with your words.

What do you want your focus to be?

Here is the link to the PDF TIP for Teaching

References:

Báez, J.C., Marquart, M., Garay, K., & Chung, R.Y. (2020). Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning Online: Principles & Practices During a Global Health Crisis;

Carello, J. (2019). Examples of Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning in College Classrooms;

Carello, J. (2022). A3 Self-Assessment Tools for Creating Trauma-Informed Learning and Work Environments.

Images: https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework and   https://gtlcenter.org/sites/default/files/SelfAssessmentSEL.pdf

Meaningful Learning Experiences

What makes a learning experience a great one?

(It is not the visually appealing design or charisma of the teacher/instructor, even though both of these can make learning experiences nicer.)

The answer lies in the “a-ha!!” moment when we realize something new and connect the dots. This is the magical ingredient that makes learning meaningful by combining the cognitive understanding with an emotional awareness (SEL – identifying personal assets and emotions).

Now, how to lead more students into these a-ha!! moments – this is the real question we need to ask. And part of the answer is that one size can never fit all. To me, this makes teaching such a wonderful profession! Every day is a discovery day to understand how to support an individual student. We are trusted with great responsibility! However, being a teacher is not easy. Especially when mandated to “teach to the test” or “cover so and so much of curricula” – because these expectations have very little to do with learning. They are only focusing on teaching – and every teacher knows that what is taught is not necessarily learned!

Learning and teaching are two different things. They are two different processes that are often put into the same frame of reference (education) and sometimes even happen in the same physical or virtual space (classroom). Sometime we think that students are not motivated to learn new things, but this is a huge misconception! Children are natural born learners; it is our ultimate survival skill. But – for a variety of different reasons – we may not enjoy the experience of being taught.

When learning is seen as an in-built force within your students, the teaching job became easier. By becoming a facilitator for learning and guiding students to build their own knowledge, the teacher has taken a huge step towards supporting learners’ agency and autonomy. Starting with learning outcomes (what students will be able to know or do) we choose the information needed and plan for a selection of activities and assessments to help our students to learn what is needed. Then we add support for metacognition and a selection of recommended learning strategies.

With current technology this can be very easy to do! Lecturing is unnecessary as we have countless (better) ways for providing the information and concepts for students (books, videos, podcasts, walkthroughs, glossaries, wikis, etc.). The most important part of instruction is to share useful frameworks with learners to help them understand the context and connections (within the topic and its’ relations to other learning). These connections are vitally important, because learning process starts with external interactions and is completed with internal elaboration. [1] Learning facilitation means exactly this: supporting each student’s individual learning process and providing choices (within pedagogically/andragogically appropriate boundaries) for constructing their own understanding. Metacognitive skills are crucial tools for everyone because:

• it really is about reflecting higher order learning (often described as critical thinking and problem solving)
• we need the ability to monitor and regulate our own learning
• in information societies learning cannot stop in graduation

Another important part of experiencing a meaningful learning experience comes from getting support when needed – not for finding the correct answers, but for strengthening our individual learning processes. While we all learn in the similar way by interacting with environment and then internally elaborating to make sense of the new information and fit into our own existing knowledge structures, we also have individual differences like the quality and amount of our previous knowledge. Understanding and supporting these personal processes [2] is the key to fostering lifle-long learning, which is why teachers need to be proficient with both SEL and Trauma-Informed Practices.

Making sure that we focus on learning as an individual process makes it possible to keep on supporting students throughout k12 education and beyond. To take this one step further, remember: Truly learner-centered experiences are designed with students, acknowledging their previous knowledge, and providing different learning modalities and assessments to choose from. Here is more about learner-centered design, which obviously makes learning engagement much more meaningful for participants. APA (American Psychological Association) has this great resource about creating meaningful learning experiences!

After SO many years in education, my favorite question still is: “How can I support your learning today?”

[1] Illeris, K. (2003). Towards a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning.  International journal of lifelong education, 22(4), 396-406.

[2] Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press

 

Using positive regard to reframe my perception

What is one thing your can change today? You can choose to reframe your perception!

My work gets so much easier when I remember to assume that others have much better intentions than what their actions of behavior seems to suggest. I have blogged about Positive Regard before, and I often discuss it with people. Learning more about resilience and trauma-informed practices is great, and I hope that more teachers would get training or professional development about it, as soon as possible. The easiest way (for me) to start practicing the positive regard is to detach the behavior from the person and do my best to support the person as they are – because then I can respond, instead of reacting to the behavior or situation.

Sometimes we are told – or taught – how to perceive certain things like behaviors. It is important to remember that these perceptions are tightly related to the learning theories we use (behaviorism, constructivism, humanism, etc.). The learner-centered philosophy builds on the humanist worldview emphasizing construction of meaning and knowledge from individual experiences. It also requires showing genuine interest towards learners and practicing unconditional positive regard in teaching-learning interactions, which means that our perception of students’ behavior must stay in the right hand column of the image. Here is more about Learner-centered practices: What learner-centered really means.

Using SEL strategies helps us to reframe our perception. All SEL skills (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship skills and Responsible Decision-Making) are necessary for successful learning, but too often they are not taught throughout formal education. As children arrive to school with different skillsets of SEL, some will need more help than others.

By embedding the SEL skills to our instruction and classroom management we are helping students to better engage in their own, individual learning process. And this is why embedding SEL is so crucially important! They should not be an additional curriculum, but learned within every school subject and project. Here is another great resource for using SEL in Trauma-Informed Practices.

Emotionally Safe Learning Environments

This blog post was originally published in December 2011. Occasionally I revisit my old posts to see if I still agree with them. 🙂

Student-centered and emotionally safe pedagogy is an attitude.  It is not a handbook of tips and tricks, to help us survive our days.  It is being physically and emotionally present when the student needs us. It is also thinking more about the process than the product. And in these classrooms the focus is in creating, not copying, no matter what the task is – this applies to art as well as note taking!

I think today, in 2022, the learner-centeredness and focusing on supporting students’ emotional safety is more important than ever! But this may require a perspective change for educators and administrators. A big one. Shifting from perceiving students as disobedient, uncontrollable, mean, or acting out, to understanding that these behaviors are indicators of trauma in students’ lives.

We cannot deny the effects of trauma in our classrooms!

Students need our help, so that they can learn how to self-regulate, or to use better ways to get their needs met. SEL is important and necessary in education, but it may not be enough. I think in 2022 we all need to learn how to use Trauma Informed Practices to create emotionally safe learning environments. Emotionally safe classrooms are flexible by their nature and they have rules that are consistent and justified. Ordering other people arbitrarily around is only a way to show your power over them.  Being considerate is generally understood as a virtue, and showing the same politeness to children does not go without rewards. Treating students as individual human beings feels like basic courtesy to me.

The central values of safety, co-operation, individuality, and responsibility help students to build a realistic self-image together with the teacher and classmates – and these all are central SEL skills we all need to be successful in the society. These values also create the foundation for an emotionally safe learning environment. Most often these values are expressed in the classrooms and discussed with the students. Ideally the wording of the rules is created in cooperation with students, and confirmed with the signatures of the teacher and students, before posting them on the wall for further reference.

Stress-free atmosphere is the first principle for creating an emotionally safe growing and learning environment. Focusing on learning process instead of the product helps to create the feeling of having enough time, which enables students to focus on their own learning instead of external factors that might disturb their concentration. This also supports learner agency. Knowing that their thoughts and ideas are valued helps students to think and express their thoughts more freely.

More thinking equals more learning.

The one situation when most of us feel threatened or unsafe is while we are receiving feedback. In an emotionally safe classroom feedback becomes a natural part of the learning process, and thus stops being scary.  While utilizing students’ daily self-evaluation and teacher’s verbal comments, the feedback system actually becomes a tool for the students to control their own learning. This automatically holds students accountable for their own learning and helps them realize how much they already have learned. Ungrading is a growing movement among teachers!

I mentor students pursuing their M.Ed. degrees In Learning Experience Design and Curriculum & Instruction, and try to follow my own advice. Therefore the most important question I ask every day is: How can I support your learning today?