Has coddling destroyed a generation?

One of the most common conversations among educators these days is the rising tide of anxiety and depression among young people. This disturbing trend comes at a time when schools are already being asked to do more and more academically, and these two factors are creating a perfect storm that we are having difficulty navigating. And so we are seeing ideas like grit, resilience, social-emotional learning, and trauma-sensitivity being offered up as possible solutions, and this new book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind.

The basic premise of the book is that by protecting our children and students from everything from peanuts to opposing viewpoints, we have crippled our college campuses and created a mental health crisis among teens and young adults. The book is definitely worth a read. The increasing prevalence of anxiety and depression among young people is something I deal with every day, and it's clear that something has gone wrong on college campuses when speakers are being "disinvited" simply for holding opposing political viewpoints.

I also see overparenting as a major issue. It's a constant struggle as a parent to keep from overprotecting your kids from failures and consequences, and the same goes for running a school. What is needed is an authoritative approach, with clear rules and consequences and a focus on support, rather than a permissive or authoritarian approach. Coddling is a good reminder that we do damage by not allowing our kids to experience difficulty. I always viewed parenting as repeatedly casting my kids out and reeling them back in. 

But while I think the book makes important contributions to the discussion, I also think it muddies the waters a bit. The authors are huge fans of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and they noticed that some of the cognitive errors targeted by CBT are similar to logical errors being made, in their opinions, by parents, schools, students and universities that are overprotecting kids. From there, they built their case that overzealous censorship at universities and the mental health crisis were symptoms of the same cause--what they call the "3 Great Untruths."

1. What doesn't kill me makes me weaker
2. Always trust your feelings
3. Us vs. them

While I agree that these are dangerous errors, I think this greatly oversimplifies the problem. From my perspective as an administrator, overzealous protectionism at schools has little to do with ideology or philosophy and everything to to with protecting ourselves from litigation. But that is a minor issue compared to the question of what is causing the mental health crisis.

The authors themselves mention some other possible causes of rising anxiety and depression, such as screen time (citing Jean Twenge's book, iGen). Sarah Rose Cavanagh has questioned the role of screen time, but suggested several other possible causes, including the decline of "face-to-face social communities" and economic inequality, just to name a few.

Human psychology is complex, and the changes taking place in our society are profound. Take, for example, the massive cultural shift that has been under way in our whole worldview as a society. I just finished listening to The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. This classic lays out Becker's theory of what happens when you strip the dominant religious worldview from a culture. Who knows but that we are also seeing those types of effects today among young people?

We live in a world that has become a whitewater rapid of change--technologically, culturally, economically, you name it. Anyone growing up in such a world as this would be understandably prone to anxiety, just as much as they would if they were born in the midst of a river rafting trip.

I think our best bet in supporting them is to do just that--support them with research based practices and provide high expectations backed up by high levels of relational and academic supports. Allowing them to experience consequences is part of this, but my concern with this book is that is reflects a movement to discount the massive changes taking place today and their impact on kids. Kids today have to be tougher, in my opinion, than I had to be growing up. It means we have to be there for them even more than ever, casting them out into the whitewater and reeling them back in again, again and again.

It's good to be wrong

Depot students having a blast during fitness block.

"I feel like you treat us like delinquents. I feel like we're always being watched with suspicion."

We were sitting around the table, having a little conference. I had been sensing some negative vibes lately between the students and me, and so I called some of them together. The student who just spoke had been quiet, but he drummed up his courage and got right to the heart of the matter.

I was glad he did, because it's good to be wrong. That is, it's good to know you're wrong, because then you can change.

There had been several recent disciplinary incidents, and I had responded by taking away some privileges. On top of that, this year we've vastly increased accountability at the Depot. We added the CHIPS incentive system, ALEKS math block, competency ratings and progress tracking, and careful credit accounting. All this came together to generate lots of stress and negativity. The kids in the meeting had also complained about the Chips and how some students may not be able to go on the outing to Lake Compounce.

As I listened to what they had to say that day, I knew they were right. I knew the importance of focusing on support--that accountability is a poor driver of improvement, but I had lost focus. We had increased support along with the increased standards, but it wasn't enough, and according to our recent school climate survey, compared to last year at this time, more students felt like we don't care.

Time for a course correction. As Brian Tracy says, an airliner is almost never heading straight for it's destination. It's constantly correcting its course. It's constantly wrong, but the pilots know it, and they constantly adjust.

So I reinstated the privileges I had taken away. I reduced the Chips requirement for the latest reward outing, and finally, I made it easier to get math credit through the ALEKS system.

This last adjustment was the result of me looking more closely, after that little conference, at the sources of stress on the kids. I suspected that a few of the behavioral incidents and the slow accumulation of reward Chips were actually due to kids struggling with their math. They were nearing the end of their courses, and only the most difficult topics were left.

It may be coincidence, but since I adjusted the ALEKS requirements, there has been a notable change in behavior and attitude among a few of the students I had been concerned about, and spirits, in general, have been higher since the changes.

Lesson learned.

Being wrong is good stuff.

Education on the cheap

What I like about Betsy DeVos' recent comments about a former East Hartford High student is that they point out the importance of high expectations. What I don't like is that they offer the same tired old fallacy we've been buying for decades: that we can have quality education on the cheap.

You can't characterize East Hartford High on the basis of one student's story, but the sort of thing Besty is talking about does happen in many schools, and she's right, high expectations are one of the keys to student success. But you can't raise the bar without increasing the support, and that costs money.


Several years ago, during my libertarian phase, I would have been a big fan of Trump's proposal to cut public school budgets and increase school choice. But my experience experimenting with different school models changed my mind. It's not the model that's the problem. It's a lack of support.


Most teachers and administrators in struggling schools are doing the best they can and working their butts off for these kids, but they are fighting a battle the rest of us can't even imagine. They are fighting the combined effects of generational poverty, systemic racism, and years of insufficient support in which kids fell further and further behind. Those kids needed longer school days and extended years. They needed one-on-one instruction. They needed reading support, psychological services and social services, but didn't get them, because they were too expensive.

School reformers and new charter and magnet schools are a dime a dozen, and every one of them offers their own flavor of instructional models, but most have one thing in common: they are cheap.

They are all out there hawking their their magic elixirs and cure-alls, and they're all "on sale."

It's hard for reality to compete with the illusion of education on the cheap.

But why does everyone think they can get something for nothing? Why should we be surprised that raising and educating something as marvellous and complex as a human being requires a tremendous investment?


It's worth the investment, even from a utilitarian standpoint. As Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children Zone once pointed out, for some of these kids, it's a choice between five thousand dollars extra per year while they are in school or sixty thousand per year while they are in prison.


Of course, money isn't magic. It has to be mixed with research-based practices. But the best practices in the world still need people to implement them. They still need time. And more people and more time mean more money.

I know the politicians aren't listening.

I know people vote with their pocketbooks.


But maybe one day that will change and we'll start taking the education of all kids seriously. If we do, I believe the return on our investment will be amazing.

"The only way out of poverty," said an inner city activist I met the other day, "is education."

The procrastination equation: Putting research into practice at the Depot

They were discussing different forms of government, and the conversation had degenerated into a frustrating chorus of "There is no right answer. It's all just a matter of opinion."

"That's not true," I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. "There are benchmarks. Some forms of government work better than others."

I'm not sure they got my point, but that kind of relativism is one of my pet peeves. Unfortunately, it infects many parts of society, including education. People in education often think that there are no real answers--no reference points by which to judge between the myriad of models and practices that promise to improve student success. But that's not true. Research has shown what works. The same science that brought us modern medicine and discovered global warming can help us educate our kids, and if we're not using it, we're fighting this battle blindfolded. Here's the story of how we're putting research into practice at the Depot, and how it's impacting our kids.

Last year was my first year at this little non-traditional school, and it soon became obvious that motivation was a serious problem. Motivation was low, engagement was low, attendance was low, task completion was low, and procrastination was high. Then I came across this article on procrastination from psychologist, Piers Steel. It was a thorough review of research related to motivation, and his "procrastination equation" became my guide. I took the liberty here to make it a bit more user friendly:

Utility is "how desirable a task or choice is for an individual." Expectancy is whether we think we will be able to complete the task, value is how much we value the outcome, the more impulsive among us will have a greater tendency to procrastinate, and the further away the deadline (the greater the delay), the more we'll put off the work.

Using the equation is simple. If utility is low, we procrastinate. To decrease procrastination, we need to increase expectancy and value and decrease impulsivity and delay. At the Depot this year, we're attacking all four factors of the equation.

Expectancy: According to Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, "efficacy expectancy is somewhat susceptible to verbal persuasion and emotional arousal but is especially influenced by modelling and actual performance accomplishments." With this in mind, we are increasing our use of explicit instruction at the Depot, and our new Project Block is designed to provide students with a string of small successes to build upon. As of last week, about 60% of our students had completed 8 science projects, including hands-on projects, lab reports and a research paper, and had begun their first independent project.

Focused work during Project Block

The ALEKS online math system, which we also started using this year, is another way we're building self-efficacy. It offers a mastery-based approach the kids love, and our students' average progress on their courses is 54%.

And finally, we've really ramped up the 1:1 support this year. With a combination of interns and an instructional assistant, we are able to assign struggling students one-on-one help during ALEKS, Project Block, and any other time they need it.

Value: Dr. Steel points to classical conditioning as one way to increase the value factor. During our summer program, we were having trouble getting kids to do their online math work, so I was tossing around the idea of a token-based incentive system with Ellen. I had planned to make the tokens worth credits. "But what if they don't care about credits?," she asked. 

She was right. Many of our students don't seem to be motivated by threats of credit loss or offers of credit. So what did we do? We still offered credit, but we also tied the tokens to a field trip reward, and it worked. They really valued that reward!

We carried that same approach over into this year: Students earn poker chips for on-task behavior, and if they earn enough, they qualify for special field trips. Many students use our new progress tracking system to keep track of their chips and they value them so much that their anxiety about the chips has actually become a bit of a problem. My hope is that this system will build the habits of work that we adults call intrinsic motivation. According to Steel, this is exactly what happens--students associate reward with the work, and the work becomes intrinsically rewarding.

(Of course, they don't always succeed. The other day, I told a student he would not have enough chips to qualify for the field trip the next day. He pushed his few chips away on the table as if to disavow them and said, "I don't want any more chips!" His protest reminded me of my son when he was young. He wouldn't eat his Thanksgiving dinner, and the consequence was not getting any pie. "I don't like pie!," he repeated, as he marched around the table. The fact that chips can tap into their emotion is testimony that we've tapped into the value factor.)

Impulsivity:  Impulsivity is considered a personality trait, and Steel questions whether we can influence it much, but he does suggest two possibilities: stimulus control and automaticity. "Stimulus control," says Steel, "helps to direct behavior by indicating what is appropriate (i.e., rewarding) under any given circumstance," and I think the chips serve this purpose also. If students stay off their phones and on-task for 10, 15, or 20 minutes (we gradually increase the blocks of time), they receive reward chips. Most students earn the full amount of chips available during ALEKS Block and Project Block, and it's surprising to see how easily most of them can focus for 20 solid minutes under these conditions.

To increase automaticity, Steel recommends schedules and routines. This year we've implemented a new blocked schedule at the Depot, but there's more we could do with routines within the blocks themselves. Interestingly, Steel also mentions reducing choice as a means of helping those with high impulsivity. I think the blocked schedule has also helped here, especially the replacement of "self-directed learning time" with Project Block, but I'm still chewing on this one.

We've also added another research-based strategy to the mix to try to address the impulsivity factor--one that Steel didn't mention. Stephen, one of our teachers, has been teaching mindfulness during morning pick-me-up since the beginning of the year. They've gone over several techniques, from focusing on the breath to mindful eating, and they had a great time identifying thoughts and feeling invoked by popular songs the other day. Several students have said they have started to practice meditation on their own. Our hope is that this will help them not only manage stress but also increase focus.

Delay: Our new progress tracking system is designed to give students continuous, rapid feedback about their progress, and the timed chip blocks have provided small chunked goals for the students, but I think we can help students a lot more with handling delays. My goal for the second semester is to explicitly teach the students two methods of time/project management, and then reward them for each box checked off their to-do lists. (Hat tip to Elizabeth Brott Beese, a Ph.D. student from Purdue who spent some time studying our program, for pointing me in this direction.)

That is how we're using science to help our students. That's our goal, anyway, and so far it seems to be working. Engagement is up, attendance is up, and even task completion seems to be up. I was so excited to find Steel's article last year. It has provided a framework--a science-based guide for improving our program. So often in education, we bounce from one model to another, often without much confidence that any of it will work. But there's no need for that. There is a research base in psychology and education that we can use and build on. We're not blind, we don't stumble in the dark, and we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can't afford to. Time is precious for every one of our students.

Tracking student progress in a mastery-based system

"She won't be happy until her progress report is 100% green." That's what one of our teachers told me about one particularly driven student. She was talking about our new Google Drive-based progress report system.

One of the challenges of mastery-based learning is tracking and reporting student progress. Our new system allows students, parents, and teachers to see it all at a glance, so students can get the support they need, see their growth over time, and get quick feedback.

At The Depot, we measure student progress toward mastery of six competencies: Communication, Information, Media, and Technology, Career Skills, Life Skills, Critical Thinking, and Creativity and Innovation.

They work on these skills in various blocks during the school day: Pick-me-up, Advisory, Math Block, Book Teams, Project Block, and Fitness, and at their internships.

Teachers rate student performance on the six competencies using our Competency Rubric, and then enter the data in a spreadsheet like this:

A separate "progress report" spreadsheet for each student reports the data out to students, teachers, and parents, like this:

They see a graph of their progress toward each competency, plus a color-coded matrix that indicates their progress by subject area and block. It also reports attendance, credit issues and their accumulated "chips" (a new incentive system we are using this year). Red and orange squares indicate areas of concern. Yellow shows emerging growth, and green indicates competency.

The system also shows progress on a standard sequence of required tasks (the "non-negotiables"), their current credit status, and a worksheet that shows where their subject area credit is coming from this year. 

The system allows us to better identify students who need specific supports, and we are seeing increased use of the progress reports by parents and students. Our hope is that they will find it not only useful, but also motivating, as they see their growth over time. Our end goal, after all, is not only competency, but self-confidence.

Mastering (and loving) math at the Depot

We've made lots of big changes this year at the Depot, but this may be the most important one:

More math.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the importance of social skills for jobs, but jobs requiring a combination of math AND social skills have shown even more growth.

That's why we've ramped up the math.

But how do you ramp up math at a tiny school where the students are out of the building two days a week, and none of the teachers are certified in math?

It's called ALEKS, and I'm not the only one who likes it. I've had multiple students actually say to me, "I love ALEKS."

How can this happen? They used to say they hated math.

Well, maybe that's changing.

ALEKS is an online math learning system. We enroll students in courses, like Algebra and Geometry, they read tutorials, and then they practice the skills online two hours a week.

What's so cool about ALEKS is that it is a mastery based program. Students start by taking an initial assessment of their skills in each course. It tells them how many topics they have already mastered, and starts them THERE. They may start 20% or 30% of the way through the course, if they already know that much of the material!

ALEKS shows them their progress in a way that is rewarding and motivating, and they only move forward after they've mastered a topic. It gives them periodic "knowledge checks" along the way, and will send them back to relearn topics if necessary, even on their final assessment. There are no grades, because they don't finish until they have mastered 100% of the topics in the course.

If students are not progressing fast enough, we move them to an easier course. For example, a student who is hitting the wall in Algebra is moved to High School Preparation for Algebra, so she can get the skills she needs to go back and tackle Algebra 1 later in the year. If a student is moving quickly, they may get through more than one course in a single year--more credit, and more progress toward college and career!

Right now, our average progress on Geometry and Algebra 2 is 36%. Not bad for independent, online study!

All of this just confirms what I've been thinking lately: Kids don't hate school because it doesn't match their learning style, they hate it because they feel they're not good at it. 

Imagine if we could change that! Just imagine if every student left this place with a new confidence in their math skills?

Imagine the doors that would open for them, not only to college and careers, but to new ways of understanding the world?