(Guest Blog – Tessa Dodson)

Tessa Dodson, Senior Writer of Classrooms.com, explores the need for students to develop the learning behaviors of seeking and using support from others. She suggests actions teachers can take to build these skills and mindsets. Instructional coaches can explore the benefits to students and teachers of building these empowered learning capabilities. These are skills we want students to carry with them.

Support looks different at every stage of a student’s education. As students move through middle and high school, they can gradually take a more active role in recognizing when they need help. Educators are often very good at recognizing when students need help. But if adults always identify the need, locate the resource, and initiate the support, when does the student learn to do those things?

I have seen this development from two very different perspectives. During my time as a teacher’s assistant in middle school, I noticed how naturally students relied on the adults to meet their needs. Later, as a college student career coach, I saw them working through a different kind of independence. These experiences made me think more about when students actually learn to recognize that they want help and take the first step toward getting it.

Why Support Matters as Students Become More Independent

Research has found that students who experienced positive teacher support showed lower levels of study-related burnout and higher levels of study engagement. I find this interesting because it points to the value of consistent guidance and assistance from teachers as students work through academic and day-to-day challenges.

In high school, educators often have many opportunities to provide more structured support. As teachers see the same individuals regularly, it is easier for them to notice changes in academic performance or behavior. From here, counselors, families and other educators can bring different perspectives to the situation.

Teacher-to-teacher communication is also particularly useful as students move between classrooms and grades, giving the next educator more context for supporting the student. When students go to college, that direct educator handoff is often less available. That makes it especially important for students to practice identifying their needs and finding support before leaving high school.

Educators need to gradually step back and give learners more responsibility for working through challenges and seeking assistance. At the same time, they should remain available to guide them through the process.

Building Help-Seeking Skills Through SEL

Help-seeking skills are easiest to build when students have room to practice them. Social-emotional learning (SEL) gives educators an effective framework to help learners develop these capabilities.

SEL’s framework comprises five key areas, including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. Several of these competencies directly support the different steps of seeking help. Self-awareness helps students recognize when they need assistance, while social awareness includes recognizing the people and resources around them, which helps them see where that help can be found.

Students also benefit from relationship skills that help them communicate their needs. When it comes to evaluating choices, responsible decision-making helps them consider their options and decide how to use the support they receive.

Together, these competencies can guide learners along the student learning continuum, gradually moving them toward greater confidence in seeking support.

Let Students Explain the Need First

When students encounter difficulty, it is important to give them space to identify and explain what they need before offering a solution. Describing the problem can help them understand their own learning while giving teachers a clearer picture of where support is useful.

• Give students time to describe the part of a task they find difficult.
• Encourage them to separate what they understand from what remains unclear.
• Ask them to identify what they have already tried.

Practice Finding the Right Resource

Students would benefit from learning how to identify where appropriate help can come from, whether that is a teacher or another school resource.

• Introduce students to different sources of academic and personal support.
• Help them recognize which resources suit different needs.
• Provide them with opportunities to consider their options before directing them to one.
• Encourage them to use more than one resource when appropriate.

Build Question-Asking into Routines

Knowing where to seek help is only part of the process. Students should also practice explaining what they require and formulating specific questions.

• Encourage them to prepare questions before seeking assistance.
• Ask for specific descriptions of where they are struggling.
• Build question preparation into classroom routines.
• Give them low-pressure opportunities to practice communicating their needs.

Give Students a Role in Follow-Up

Students can also learn to consider whether the support they received actually helped and what they can do with it. Building in a reflection process builds student agency by helping them make decisions about their own learning.

• Provide opportunities to apply the guidance independently.
• Encourage reflection on what they learned from the support.
• Have them consider what they might try if a similar challenge comes up.
• Set up a system for checking progress.

In my experience, reflection is often where the learning becomes more personal. Students begin to see which kinds of support work for them and become more prepared to make similar decisions on their own.

Why Students Still Need Support Along the Way

The need for meaningful support does not disappear as students become more independent, in part because so many students still do not fully know where to turn for it.

Building independence, then, is about helping students recognize when they need assistance. It also helps them make good use of available support. A study of over 1,000 high school students found that 40% regularly hesitated to admit if they were confused or did not know something. That gap serves as a reminder that recognizing the need for help doesn’t come naturally to most students. It’s a skill they have to practice, the same way they practice any other part of learning.

Preparing Students for Independence

Findings from higher education research suggest that students benefit academically when they seek help to address their learning needs. By the time they reach college, they may have plenty of resources around them. However, they must take more responsibility for accessing them.

Earlier practice gives students a foundation for doing more of that work themselves. They already had opportunities to recognize when they are stuck and who to turn to for support. When they transition to a different environment, these experiences can make seeking help feel like a familiar part of learning.

Empowering Students to Move Forward With Confidence

The move toward greater independence starts well before students leave high school. Educators can help them prepare by giving them more opportunities to take an active role in their own learning, decisions and problem-solving. Taking small steps can build confidence and help learners take greater ownership of what comes next.

Thanks Tessa. Readers can contact Tessa at: tessa@classrooms.com

I have been a long-time promoter of engaging students in real-life (project-based) opportunities. That’s driven from my own experiences as a 4-H participant in my elementary and high school years and having observed teachers and students tackling powerful learning through doing live event projects. Those experiences generated my interest to learn more when I was introduced to The Society of Childhood Entrepreneurs. Leah Ellis shares how even young elementary students can learn important life skills as entrepreneurs.

Visit The Society of Childhood Entrepreneurs website here. 

Find Leah’s book, “Sparks to Stars: The Story of Astra & Zeke” here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.300] – Steve [Intro]
Hello and welcome to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Together, we’ll explore ways to support teacher growth, elevate your coaching practice, and boost student success. Each week, I’ll share my own insights as well as conversations with inspiring guests to help you lead with confidence. Thanks for listening.

[00:00:30.000] – Steve
Powerful learning through entrepreneurial opportunities. I’ve been a long-time promoter of engaging students in real-life, project-based opportunities. That’s driven from my own experience as a 4-H participant in my elementary and high school years, and having observed teachers and students tackle powerful learning through doing projects. I’ve recorded a number of podcast with teachers and students who tackled solving real problems, such as the fourth-graders who designed their playground so that it was accessible to students in wheelchairs. They also held events all year long to generate the funds for the design to be implemented. Those experiences generated my interest to learn more when I was introduced to an article about the Society of Childhood Entrepreneurs. Joining our podcast today is the founder of the Society of Childhood Entrepreneurs, Leah Ellis. Leah an experienced early childhood and elementary educator and the mother of four children. Welcome, Leah.

[00:01:37.280] – Leah
Hi. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:39.240] – Steve
Thank you so much for joining us. Why don’t we just jump in for a starter to work from then. Give us a little description of the Society of Childhood entrepreneurs.

[00:01:50.720] – Leah
It’s a Society of Child Entrepreneurs. We teach kids how to start and run their own businesses. But it’s not just those lemonade stands that you’re used to. I have kids that graphic designers, 3D printers. They’re really kids who have an idea and the tools to implement it. Then I teach them the skills to make sure they implement it well and it can be sustainable as they get older.

[00:02:13.520] – Steve
What led to your initial focus on students as entrepreneurs?

[00:02:18.480] – Leah
My daughter – it’s a little bit of a long story, so bear with me.

[00:02:22.920] – Steve
Go ahead. We got time.

[00:02:24.800] – Leah
Before COVID, I ran an in-home daycare, and I taught essentially an all girls engineering curriculum because that’s just how our program had fallen together. I loved it, and I loved teaching STEM to little girls and pushing these girls outside of the traditional boundaries of what they expected little girls to learn. Yes, our water bottle Rockets had lots of glitter, but they still learned about propulsion, and it was amazing. But then my house flooded, and I had to move into a hotel. You cannot run an in-home daycare out of a hotel room, so we temporarily shut down our daycare. Unfortunately, our grand reopening was March 17th, 2020. At the time, we lived in Los Angeles County, and that is the exact day that they issued the stay at home order. So we never got to reopen. And then the city that we lived in opened a free for essential workers’ childcare within walking distance of my house. So then even my tiny glimmer of hope that maybe we’ll get the essential workers went away because they had a free option less than a mile from me. That meant I needed to pivot and figure out something else to do.

[00:03:31.620] – Leah
Since I’m reasonably entrepreneurial, my husband and I had decided to start a financial coaching company together. I would watch small business trading videos and entrepreneur mom stuff, videos like that on the big TV in our living room because my husband was deployed and I was home alone with an 18-month-old and a four-year-old. Then, maybe April, May, my four-year-old looked at me and said, “Mom, I want to start a business, too.” Of course, my initial gut reaction – “Four-year-olds can’t start businesses. No.” Then she did that one word that is the top of every four-year-old’s vocabulary, that they all…it’s their immediate reaction to everything, “but why?” I had no good answer for why she couldn’t start a business. And we were trapped at home anyway. So what was the risk of experimentation? It was going to be, at the very least, a learning opportunity for her. So we sat down and we brainstormed, and she went even into some Facebook groups and had voting and polls on what name she was going to select with her business and everything. And she finally settled on, Custom Drip Art from Melody Paints. After the world reopened for COVID, Melody ended up having some opportunities to be a featured artist for some city art shows.

[00:04:45.260] – Leah
She continued doing her outreach. We were invited to our first children’s business fair, which she loved. Then we left California and we moved back home to Kansas, and I hosted a children’s business fair as an opportunity to get connected with some of the other people who were doing similar things with their kids. When I finished it, I was not nearly as satisfied as I had been at the first Children’s Business Fair because as the organizer, I realized all the things that we weren’t doing. Because we had to put on this beautiful event, the kids had all made tons of money, sold amazing things, and then they left, and there was no more learning. And that, as somebody who takes child development and education so seriously, really frustrated me because we had opened this wide door of excitement and then not used it. We created the Society of Child Entrepreneurs to take that big excitement of their first fair and then build an entire educational program around it so that they’re actually learning sustainable entrepreneurship, financial literacy, leadership skills, confidence, all of those skills that they learn as entrepreneurs while they’re still kids.

[00:05:55.700] – Steve
Could you tell us some of the projects that students have taken on as their business?

[00:06:02.860] – Leah
My favorite one is, I actually have a girl who does the plushies that she crochets, and they are so soft and so beautiful. They look amazing. I looked at her and I was like, “How do you make these? How long does this take?” She was like, “Oh, it takes an hour and a half.” I was like, “Wait, what?” I have another girl who does custom pens. I really love her pens. I have one in my desk that says, “She is fearless.” We have two young gentlemen who run 3D printing companies. I have another boy who is an avid reader and very frustrated that at 13 years old, his classmates aren’t avid readers anymore. We all know that around fourth grade, that reading for pleasure drops off. But he still really loves reading, and he wants his classmates to read with him. So he created this business called Troy’s Top 10. And if you tell him a genre that you like, he will give you books in your recommended genre that he would recommend you read next. That way, he can keep his classmates reading because they’re not reading boring books. He’s already identified the books that they’re going to be interested in.

[00:07:14.700] – Steve
Very cool.

[00:07:15.740] – Leah
Yeah, he’s a future educator. He just doesn’t know it yet.

[00:07:20.180] – Steve
[laughter] There’s a term that I use in my work with teachers that I call, “live event learning.” I use that term to describe students working on projects where there’s a real consequence for the choices that they make. There’s also some unknowns that are present. I think those are both key elements to the learning. I think it’s why extracurricular activities in schools are so often a great learning experience for students. It seems that all applies to your entrepreneurial focus.

[00:08:00.160] – Leah
Oh, absolutely. I mean, we literally put on live events open to the public where these kids have to put on their customer service hats and talk to strangers. And we don’t know how many people are going to show up. We don’t know who’s going to show up. We don’t know what they’re going to say. I had one guy tell me at a renaissance festival that he would not support our organization because he did not support child labor.

[00:08:23.227] – Steve
[laughter]

[00:08:23.560] – Leah
And the kids were like, What? I had to be like, I don’t think you understand our program. But it was a great opportunity for the kids to be like, no, this is not child labor. This is mine, and I want to do it. It’s always fun because we never know what we’re going to hear at an event, and the kids have to learn how to pivot, how to think on their feet, how to communicate.

[00:08:49.880] – Steve
Real life.

[00:08:50.500] – Leah
How not to laugh at grownups who say we don’t support child labor.

[00:08:54.380] – Steve
Yeah. I read on your website that the experience is build learners’ confidence, communication skills, and resilience as just a few of the positive traits that you mentioned. Would you expand on that a little?

[00:09:09.280] – Leah
Right. If we think about entrepreneurship as an adult, you’re the face of your company, which means you have to have great communication skills because you have to be able to identify what your company does and explain it to other people in a way that they understand. You have to have confidence to know that you’re describing it in the right way and that you are the right person to do that job. And then you have to be resilient enough to know that some days there are going to be bad sales days and you keep going anyway. All of those things still apply to my kids when they learn. One of the biggest opportunities for one of our kids to learn resilience. Actually, it’s a little bit of a sad story. We had what we thought was going to be an amazing market set up. Our city does a fall festival, and we bring in 10,000 to 15,000 people from the neighboring big city to our small town in two days. It’s a massive event. I had gotten the opportunity for our kids to be able to have booths at the event. It was free.

[00:10:09.400] – Leah
It was just for our members. We were anticipating it was going to be the biggest thing that had ever happened for our little baby organization. But at the last minute, the city moved all of the adult vendors to a different location, which meant the area where our kids were was crickets because there were no vendors around us. We were just in this empty building by ourselves. The unfortunate part of all of it was it also took place on my daughter’s 10th birthday. So on my daughter’s 10th birthday, she woke up that morning prepared to make hundreds of dollars, talk to thousands of people, and just have a blast selling her business. And over the course of the day, she probably saw three people and got four or five pity sales. And she obviously was incredibly disappointed at the end of the day. That was her birthday, and it had not gone the way she wanted it to. Then we had another fair the following month, and she came home and she was like, “okay, so these are the steps I want to take to make sure that the November fair goes better than the October fair did.”

[00:11:12.080] – Leah
How easy would a 10 years old to have been like, “That sucked. I’m never doing business again.” She’s learning that resilience of, okay, sometimes things don’t work. What do we do to make it go better next time? The November fair was a little bit better, and she did make some more sales.

[00:11:28.360] – Steve
Well, you can tell your daughter that you met a gentleman who got on an airplane in New Jersey and flew to Washington, DC, and spent a small fortune to speak at a conference, and no one came to his session. [laughter]

[00:11:50.580] – Steve
I know her entrepreneurial pain and learning from that.

[00:11:57.700] – Leah
Right. What entrepreneur doesn’t know the experience of a bad event or a bad sales day. It’s part of saying, this is a part of life. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, there’s going to be bad days in whatever you’re doing and that resilience to be able to say, what do I have ownership that I can fix to make it better? It’s not even just the resilience, but also that problem solving skills and that locus of control of what do I manage.

[00:12:26.680] – Steve
I earlier recorded a podcast with the authors of a book called, “Leaders of the Class.” They focus on schools developing leadership skills for all students. Their focus was high school and traditionally, there’s a select group of students who go through high school learning leadership skills. Their focus was on our need to greatly increase that opportunity. It strikes me that entrepreneurial approach can create a lot of those similar opportunities for kids.

[00:13:06.380] – Leah
Right. Especially because as an entrepreneur, not only are you learning to lead your business, but part of our curriculum teaches social entrepreneurship and how as an entrepreneur, you have the opportunity, and I would even say the obligation, to work on making your community a better place. In one of our books that is yet to be published, the main characters help a girl identify a field in their city – we have all those fields, and it’s like an empty field in between buildings, and it’s full of plastic bags. So how to take that field and turn it into something that the community can use. And this young entrepreneur leads the project to turn it into a community garden in a playground. Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to do those things because we already have outreach in our community. People already know us as the person who does that business. So they already understand the report. They’ve already built some relationship. They want to help us with other projects.

[00:14:00.000] – Steve
Very cool. I’m wondering how you would envision teachers making entrepreneurial opportunities for students. I know some teachers do a thing that they call a genius hour, where it gives kids a freedom and autonomy to tackle anything they want. As I was thinking about the work that you’re doing, I could envision an entrepreneurial hour a couple of times a week, falling into the schedule where kids could engage in their entrepreneurial venture.

[00:14:40.480] – Leah
Absolutely. In fact, I cheated a little bit on this one because I’m writing a curriculum. So the best way to put it in your classroom is wait 24 months for me to publish the rest of what I’ve written and then just put my curriculum in your classroom. But no, really, it’s all about just starting to ask questions and let the kids build the solutions. Tell the kids, we have this problem, how can business solve it? And then letting them slowly build businesses that solve those problems that they see in their community. And then taking those to the public and collecting money and being very proud of themselves for earning their own money. With our curriculum, it starts out very simply with, what is an entrepreneur and what does an entrepreneur do? Then by the end of the school year, they actually put on their first market where they’re selling the product that they’ve invented that school year.

[00:15:26.960] – Steve
Very cool. What’s the best way for a listener to find out more about your Society for Childhood Entrepreneurs and follow up with you personally on some questions and follow that curriculum you’re working on and the books you’re working on?

[00:15:43.600] – Leah
Our website is is soceict.org – if you follow on that, I post stuff on our blog. Then our Facebook page, the Society of Child Entrepreneurs, I post regularly in there on what the kids are doing and what’s going on. Those are the two places that you’ll catch on the quickest when new things arrive. Then my email address is just leah@soceict.org. You can always email me and be like, I need to know more. Then, this is new – I didn’t tell you about this Last time we talked because it wasn’t a thing yet. But the first Astra and Zeke book is now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can actually buy the first book in the series and at least meet the characters.

[00:16:25.960] – Steve
Tell us a little bit about that book.

[00:16:28.360] – Leah
Astra and Zeke the mascots that I created for the Society of Child Entrepreneurs. One thing that we talk about when we’re the Society of Child Entrepreneurs, it can’t just be adults telling them what to do because that’s just bossing them around, which is what we’re trying to avoid. So I created Astra and Zeke, 10 and 12-year-old business coaches who work together to teach entrepreneurship to kids. They’re the staple of our curriculum. They’re the staple of most of our programming. And so this first book is the story of who they are, how they meet, and the origin of their business coaching company, “From Sparks to Stars.”

[00:17:05.340] – Steve
Well, terrific. We’ll put the links to those things in the lead-in to this podcast, make it easy for folks to find.

[00:17:12.160] – Leah
Also, I got incredibly lucky. I have the best illustrator, so the book is just beautiful.

[00:17:17.500] – Steve
Terrific. Terrific. Thanks so much for joining us.

[00:17:20.820] – Leah
Thank you so much for having me.

[00:17:24.060] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

The WOOP process (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) looks to engage learners in goal setting by stretching their aspirations while acknowledging the messy realities of progress. In her book, “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation,”Gabrielle Oettingen challenged the belief that merely imagining positive futures helps us succeed. She developed WOOP as an evidence-based framework that, unlike traditional goal-setting approaches that emphasize positive visualization alone, invites individuals to picture success and deliberately confront what might get in the way. She argues that without coupling “wishes” and “outcomes” with a clear look at the internal obstacles along with a concrete plan to overcome them, positive thinking on its own can lull us into complacency. The dual focus on desire and difficulty encourages agency, perseverance, and strategic thinking. (Here’s a short video clip describing WOOP.)

WOOP begins with a Wish—something meaningful, challenging, and attainable.

Wish: A high school student wants to develop a consistent weekly study routine instead of cramming before exams. It’s challenging because they juggle work, social commitments, and several demanding courses.

The next step, imagining the Outcomes, asks us to explore how it would feel to achieve the wish, and what benefits would follow.

Outcomes: What would life feel like if the wish was met?

• They’d experience less stress and anxiety, especially before major deadlines.
• Their grades would likely improve because they’d be learning over time rather than memorizing at the last minute.
• They’d feel more in control of their schedule, instead of constantly reacting to academic pressure.
• They’d have more guilt-free, free time knowing their work was already underway.

WOOP’s power comes from the Obstacle phase: honestly identifying the internal habits, emotions, or behaviors that could derail us.

Obstacle: The biggest internal obstacle could be the student’s tendency to procrastinate when tired. After a long day of classes or work, they tell themselves they’ll “study later,” but then get distracted by social media or hanging out with friends. Another obstacle is a sense of overwhelm, not knowing where to start, so doing nothing.

Plan: Having identified the obstacles, a plan creates specific strategies to navigate those obstacles when they arise. For example;

• If I feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, then I will open my planner and choose one small task to complete first.
• If friends invite me to hang out during my planned study time, then I will join them afterward as a reward for finishing my task.

The WOOP elements might provide an effective guide for instructional coaches. Many coaching trainers focus on beginning coaching with a goal that the teacher has established. Identifying a wish can establish an initial goal. I often ask a teacher to describe what it would look and sound like if we made progress toward the wish. A teacher might describe that currently when a task challenges, students turn to passive, learned-helplessness behaviors. He wishes for risk-taking, trail and error, experimentation and reflection.

Outcomes can be benefits for students as well as for teachers. Students learning trial and error processes and increasing perseverance are certainly better prepared for future academic and life challenges. Less learned-helplessness student behaviors allow greater opportunity for the teacher to impact deeper learning for all students. I often examine outcomes as an element of a costs/benefits conversation with a coachee. Change is likely required on the part of the coachee. What’s the cost of the change? (Time, stress, emotions) What are the benefits to be generated for the teacher and the students?

Obstacle and Plan: In instructional coaching, this is where the observation and feedback are likely to plug in. Changing student learned-helplessness behaviors will very likely require new teacher behaviors. How will the teacher respond to a “waiting to get started student?” What response will the teacher give to students’ questions seeking clues? These new behaviors are difficult to consistently execute. Practicing in advance with the coach and getting observed feedback become part of the plan for change.

A WOOP coaching conversation might sound like this:

Coach: When your students are working in groups, what is something you wish were happening more often?

Teacher: Honestly, I wish they stayed engaged instead of drifting off. When the task gets hard, they give up fast or just wait for someone else to do it.

Coach: If your wish started to come true—what would it look and sound like in your room?

Teacher: Hmm. I’d see students trying things without waiting for me to tell them the next step. There’d be more experimenting, even if they got it wrong at first. And they’d talk with each other about what they’re doing instead of sitting quietly and staring.

Coach: And how would that feel for you as the teacher?

Teacher: Amazing. I think I’d feel proud of them—and less exhausted. Right now, I feel like I’m constantly trying to push them forward.

Coach: And for the students? What benefits show up for them if they take more learning risks?

Teacher: They’d build confidence. They’d learn that not knowing something isn’t the end of the world. I guess they’d be better prepared for more complex tasks later on.

Coach: So, you’re imagining more perseverance, more agency, and skills that help them beyond just this unit.

Teacher: Exactly.

Coach: And for you, the benefit is less time spent pulling them along and more time digging deeper into learning.

Coach: What change do you imagine you might need to make?

Teacher: I’ll have to change how I respond in the moment.

Coach: That’s an important acknowledgment. What might get in the way? When students are off task or waiting, what internal trigger or habit makes it tough to respond how you’d like?

Teacher: I think I jump in too fast. I don’t like seeing them struggle, so I give them hints. I know I’m reinforcing the behavior, but it’s hard to stop.

Coach: It sure is. What else?

Teacher: Noise. When groups get noisy, I lose patience. I shut it down because I worry it’s getting chaotic.

Coach: If those situations are predictable, what’s a plan you can use to respond differently when they happen?

Teacher: Maybe I could have a couple of go-to responses ready. Like, if someone asks me for the answer, I could say, “What have you tried so far?” or “Show me where you’re stuck.” And if noise is the issue, maybe I can check what the noise is about before I react.

Coach: Sounds like a plan.  So if…?

Teacher: If a student asks me a question just looking for a clue, I’ll respond with, “Tell me what you’ve already tried.”

Coach: And when you sense it’s too noisy?

Teacher : If a group gets noisy, I’ll approach and listen before deciding whether to intervene.

Coach: What if we plan to rehearse a few responses together, then I’ll observe and notice what worked and where adjustments might help.

Teacher: That feels doable.  I’m excited to see if the students can rise to it.

Coach:  You’re stepping into a different role—not rescuing students, but coaching them.

Have you witnessed this in your classroom or had teachers share it as a coaching request? “When the cognitive load rises, many students default to learned- helplessness or passive habits. I see it in the quick, ‘I don’t get it’ before they have engaged with the problem, in the immediate search for confirmation rather than justification, and in the quiet waiting for me to circulate rather than making an initial attempt.” Science teacher-leader, Colin Simpson, shares his observations and strategies implemented to build student learning approaches.

Connect with Colin here.

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.300] – Steve [Intro]
Hello and welcome to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Together, we’ll explore ways to support teacher growth, elevate your coaching practice, and boost student success. Each week, I’ll share my own insights as well as conversations with inspiring guests to help you lead with confidence. Thanks for listening.

[00:00:30.000] – Steve
Building Student Learning Perseverance. I’m pleased to welcome Colin Simpson to today’s podcast. Colin is a teacher leader and Department Head of Science at the American Cooperative School in Tunis. I’ve had the pleasure of learning and exploring teaching, coaching, and leadership with Colin over the past few years. He completed a microcredential in instructional coaching, and Colin worked to extend coaching experiences among his department and his staff. I follow Colin on LinkedIn, and I ask him to join me for a conversation when I read the following post: “I noticed something this semester in my grade 10 class. When the cognitive load rises, many students default to learned helplessness or passive habits. I see it in the quick, ‘I don’t get it,’ before they’ve engaged with the problem, or in the immediate search for confirmation rather than justification, and in the quiet, waiting for me to circulate rather than taking an initial attempt.” Colin, thanks so much for agreeing to join me.

[00:01:43.920] – Colin
Well, thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to having a talk about this.

[00:01:47.640] – Steve
Well, first phrase I pulled out of what you said was cognitive load. What’s your description of cognitive load?

[00:01:56.060] – Colin
So cognitive load, even going back to the idea of cognitive load theory, is something that I’ve actually been working with since before I was a teacher. So teaching is a second career for me. I used to be in training as a commercial pilot and worked in the industry for a short time. One of the things that they always taught us was about the cognitive load of flying an airplane. You have to become an expert in the little systems so that you have the space in your brain to deal with the emergencies when they happen. You don’t have time to think, you have to be able to react. That was my initial introduction to it.

[00:02:33.080] – Steve
Wow – that’s new for me. Thank you.

[00:02:37.260] – Colin
I had to leave some surprises here. It really comes down to the idea of when an emergency happens, you have to be trained to recognize those key symbol ideas of what’s happening and then react before you really have a chance to think through it so that you can gain the time later to work through the problems. And so transferring that to an educational perspective, it comes back to the… There’s three concepts of cognitive load theory and how your brain works with your working memory. And then there’s the extraneous pieces that are going on, which are distractions or design the lesson that doesn’t flow nicely. The kids are distracted and losing what they’re focused on. And then there’s the actual period where you’re going to be getting your growth. It’s where you are making those connections to your previous learning and pushing things a little bit further. What I’m seeing with my students is that they are getting overwhelmed very quickly. Rather than trying to make those connections to their prior knowledge, when that overwhelmed state is happening, they are following back on rote learning that they have done that has worked in the past.

[00:03:58.960] – Colin
When I get stuck, if I wait, the teacher will take up the answer on the board before they ask me anything. That’s where I started this year off with that grade 10 class.

[00:04:10.680] – Steve
A couple of things are coming to me. I generally see this when I’m looking at math instruction. In math, the student looks at the problem, and if it doesn’t immediately look like a problem we’ve been taught to do, then I can’t do it. There’s no series of questioning or a problem attack that steps in.

[00:04:41.340] – Colin
Yeah, that’s the traditional one, right? The student learns how to do the multiplication problem when explained as multiplication. But when you throw it into the word problem, everything fell apart. That’s the one we’ve all been classically trained as teachers of how do we deal with these things. The traditional bit has been that scaffolding. You teach the kid with that scaffold in place, and sometimes it’s broken down in the problem, sometimes it’s a separate page, sometimes it’s a poster on the wall, but it’s, okay, you identify the numbers and then you work your way through it. That works really well. But what I noticed is I had my grade 10’s come in the start of the year, and I didn’t know what scaffolds had been used the previous year. We hit that point. This is when you hit that, the scaffolds take away too easily, you end up into that idea of learned helplessness because they’re seeing that their effort isn’t changing the outcomes, that they get that low self-efficacy of, I can’t do it, and then they give up or zone out.

[00:05:49.360] – Steve
I can’t pull up the numbers in my mind exactly for you, but the history tells students that the amount of time that you have to wait in a math class for the teacher to help, it was minimal. I mean, it was extremely minimal. So that behavior gets internalized rather early.

[00:06:16.560] – Colin
Yeah. Even I’m guilty of that knowing that that appropriate wait time is a master skill that every teacher builds, and we still always need to improve it. I’m sure when you’ve been in coaching on that, even people who have been teaching forever still have those moments of like, wait, you didn’t give them enough time to think through their answer there.

[00:06:39.420] – Steve
Yeah. That’s because our focus is on getting to the right answer. Almost our ego gets struck when the kid gets to the right answer, regardless of how they got there.

[00:06:54.220] – Colin
Yeah. It’s tough to really train your mind around the idea that the journey is the most important part of all of this learning. Because you get the kid, why do I ever need to learn this? I’m never going to do blank in the future. But you are wiring the pathways in your brain for problem solving. You are building that resilience, that grit, all of those wonderful traits we look for. They require this. I think it’s the best part of a broad educational background and that broad educational setting where we don’t allow kids to specialize early because you never know what subject is going to help them grow the most in the area that’s most important to them.

[00:07:41.580] – Steve
In the piece that you had on LinkedIn, you described that the student reactions aren’t signs of inability, but patterns shaped by those past experiences with over scaffolding. That’s the part we’re hitting here. Answer first instruction and environments where mistakes felt high risk. What do you mean by answer first instruction?

[00:08:08.560] – Colin
Well, I think that’s any place where the answer is the most important part. We don’t talk about the process. We’re not grading the process. We’re grading the final results. And places with high stakes testing, that’s your IJCSEs, or it’s your DP exams, it’s your SATs, aall of those things do not put any value on the process. That’s what our kids are training for. It doesn’t matter what system you’re in. We all have those standardized exams that don’t value the process. Somewhere along the way of instruction, we lose that focus on process and really start to put that answer as the most important thing, even if it’s only subconsciously in the teacher’s mind, because you want the kids to be successful on whatever test it might be.

[00:09:03.620] – Steve
You describe environments where mistakes felt high risk. How do you think we end up getting to that? I don’t think there’s any teacher who’s attacking that purposefully. Nobody’s purposely trying to make that environment where I’m going to scare you into learning or working harder. How do we get to that sense of fear of making mistakes?

[00:09:30.500] – Colin
I sometimes wonder that a lot myself. For those who don’t know me, I teach also in the IB diploma program. I have both a physics and a chemistry section. When we have very full curriculums, we don’t have a lot of time for that relearning that sometimes needs to take place. I think that’s where those high-risk environments grow up is that we have a finite amount of time, we have a large amount material and skills to teach. At some point, we all make that decision of, is it more valuable to go back and reteach these basics that X percentage of my students need to know, or do I have to move on to make sure that I give the best full broad coverage of everything for the other students? At the end, it becomes a bit of high risk that one because you don’t get the second chance that you might want.

[00:10:34.700] – Steve
You triggered that for me. It’s almost the teacher being in the high risk that passes the high risk on to the kids.

[00:10:42.260] – Colin
It sometimes is. Those are all external to the classroom, which makes them really hard to make effective systematic changes within the classroom, within your students and all of that. I’ve tried through things like allowing retests through demonstrations of improved skill before we schedule a new opportunity, all of the positive mindset language of, okay, you’re not there yet, but how do we get you there next? Unfortunately, I almost feel like that’s had a counterintuitive approach with some of my students in that by taking some of that stress off at the wrong place, they don’t put the effort in as well. I’m still looking at trying to gather enough data for this, but I don’t know if it’s been beneficial because the results don’t seem to look that way.

[00:11:35.100] – Steve
The pressure off, but the effort on is the challenge.

[00:11:40.640] – Colin
That would be the Holy Grail that we’re looking for, finding that intrinsic motivation in all the students. It’s everything we’re all trying to do. I don’t think there’s a single teacher out there who enjoys what they do, who isn’t trying to do this, but we’re all struggling.

[00:11:58.920] – Steve
It’s almost like It’s almost like the learning or the mastery needs to become the reward or where the student is getting this sense of satisfaction from pulling off the mastery rather than… I don’t have the right words. It’s like getting the right answer isn’t where the satisfaction comes from. It’s figuring out the right answer is where the student needs to find the satisfaction.

[00:12:33.740] – Colin
Yeah. It’s a struggle. We’re now getting into about a month away from the end of semester. I wrote that post reflecting on the end of a first quarter. I did have some success. I think some of the things that I was able to do was I listened to some of the scaffolds they had been using before, and I brought those back, but under conditions. I redid the curriculum that I was working with and chose a different set of slides and practice problems for teaching the content. This is a good time to give a shout out to the New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning, who makes a wonderful material available for all maths and sciences completely free. It gave me a great foundation to make a really big change easy. Where it worked out well is that these questions that I was using were scaffolded in their own way. They were grouped by topic, so we had chunking happening. They were scaffolded as they got more difficult as we go along. You get down to the end where we’re having a full holistic review without the scaffolds. That’s normally where I found my students falling apart because they’re taking it away.

[00:13:51.620] – Colin
But by working through those processes and each subtopic, pulling the scaffolds away a little bit further and further, we switched over to our chemistry subtopic. Everybody is probably a grade level higher on our scale here because they knew what to expect, even though the themes changed from physics to chemistry, the process we were using didn’t. I went back to all those elementary and middle school techniques that were ask three before me. I put big whiteboards out on each group table. Before they could call me over for a question, I needed to see visually that everybody at that group before had put down their thoughts of what they think needed to be happening. I didn’t make it easy to come to me. I had to, and I’m still training myself on this one, the response to, “is that right?” Became, “You tell me.” Which became shorthand for, use your processing, the steps that we’ve used, walk me through your problem solving and you tell me how you got to your answer, and then you tell me if you feel confident in it. It took a lot of work.

[00:15:10.180] – Steve
I was going to ask the question, what do your students need to learn how to do? Because it sounds like you were modeling for them or the scaffolds were providing for them,e ventually, the things they needed to do themselves when the scaffolds were gone. Does that make sense?

[00:15:33.300] – Colin
Yeah, I think. And what they need to learn is what we’re all trying to teach them. But the thing that clicked into my brain as I was getting ready for our conversation today is in my 12 years now of teaching, I have had countless administrators come in for observations. One of the questions is always, how do you differentiate? What are your scaffolds are you using for your students? I have never once been asked, what is the exit strategy for those scaffolds? I went back and I looked at some of my teaching college notes because I still had them. Everything was scaffolded were meant to be temporary. It’s right there in the notes for that I have from teachers college. Going back 13 years ago. Love the digital age – I can pull those things up. Never once in my professional career was that side given any air time or any focus. We’ve all been told about all the differentiation techniques we can all the different ways we can scaffold things. We can do it visually, we can do it with checklists and so on and so on and so on. Not once has there ever been anything about how to get rid of them.

[00:16:42.020] – Colin
How do we move past them?

[00:16:43.760] – Steve
Yeah, how and when and actually teaching the student the purpose of the scaffold. We’re scaffolding your learning. We’re scaffolding how to learn and not scaffolding getting to the answer. Does that phrase work?

[00:17:04.400] – Colin
Yeah, I think that’s it. This has led to some really interesting conversations with my peers here, my colleagues, because we’re all dealing with the same thing, but nobody’s been talking about it. When I brought up this idea of what’s the exit strategy, you could see a light bulb come on as people realized, oh, I don’t have one. There’s no judgment on that because that’s a product of system that we’re working in. Sometimes it takes the village to come up with the right idea to move us forward. Going forward from here, I’m going to be asking a lot of people, including my learning Learning Services team, my learning specialists, about what can I do to learn more about exit strategies on my scaffolds? How do I make sure that when I get my kids to the end of the year, their assessments that their grade of what they are able to do in our mastery-based programming reflects what they can do without the scaffolds. Maybe that also includes putting together a bit of a note that I pass on to the next teacher of, these were the scaffolds that I used along the way. If they regress, if they find that they’re struggling a bit more, these are comfortable tools for them.

[00:18:27.980] – Colin
Maybe that gets built into a school a worldwide document. I don’t know. But for the first time in this year of dealing with this, I now feel like I’ve actually got partners to work in.

[00:18:41.120] – Steve
I’ll tell you, I’m so glad that I sent you a note and ask you to connect. I’ve been at coaching for a whole lot of years, and no one’s ever come to me with that question of how do I begin to take the scaffold away. Now, I can tell you the one that I pushed, as I started pushing years ago, that I thought it was more often that we had a problem from teachers over-scaffolding than from under-scaffolding.

[00:19:14.340] – Colin
I believe it. Because when you scaffold for your differentiated learners, you’re building the scaffold for, generally, your weakest student. You want to make sure that they’re there. Then a phrase that I’ve written down in my teaching college notes of what’s good for one is good for all. Suddenly, you’ve got these scaffolds that you’ve built for your language learning student who doesn’t know the definitions of words or the student with dysnumeria, dyscalculia. All of those things are there and made me realize how many students I had robbed of the opportunity to build those problem-solving skills. What did that mean for the students that I had sent on to universities elsewhere where they don’t have those scaffolds? v

[00:20:19.160] – Steve
Yeah. If we look at the skills for the kids to develop, the empowerment… I’m seeing the empowerment two ways. One is, if I need the scaffold, do I know how to go about requesting it, finding it, getting the support that I need, but then also recognizing the need to push myself to the next step? I know there’s a skateboard video clip to be looking at here as to when is the new learner scaffolding the new piece they’re learning? When do they know to let go that scaffolding? Because if I don’t let go the scaffolding, I can’t go on to the next piece. I’m afraid what we’ve done is teach the kids the safety isn’t hanging on to the scaffolding, hanging on to the support and missing that next growth piece.

[00:21:24.180] – Colin
It’s almost like we’re all riding bikes around with training wheels on. We’ve never gotten to the stage for those to come off. It’s interesting because, again, this all then ties into that learned helplessness that I thought was the initial problem. It wasn’t. It’s definitely – there’s underlying causes to this. But that learned helplessness, when you have these kids who are getting these repeated failures from these systematic issues, then they get this I can’t do attitude. They’re going to give up, they’re going to zone out, they’re going to wait for the teacher to take up the answer, they’re going to write it down, and they’re going to feel like, oh, I can do that because I saw how it was done. It’s the transition from the I see to I do where we reinforce that cycle. We’re not going to get out of it unless we have a supportive culture within the classroom, but also within amongst teachers, because it’s not easy for me to sit there and say, there are students there that I have had in the past who I now know that I failed in those problem solving issues that they went on towards, I contributed to them.

[00:22:35.060] – Colin
I didn’t necessarily start them. I didn’t make them necessarily better or worse, but I definitely contributed somewhere in there. We got to have that supportive culture. We need to make sure we’re putting that focus on our effort and process and work on, I guess, teaching resilience if you want that buzzword to fly in there because it is changing that idea of I can’t to I could try whatever strategy they want to use.

[00:23:05.540] – Steve
I worked with a advanced math teacher, and his statement to the kids were, if I send you to the board to do a problem that you know how to do, I’ve wasted your time. So he communicated to the students, I’m looking at you, I’m thinking about what you know, and I’ve picked this problem purposely for you because I think you’re not walking up to it knowing how to do it. No, I got a belief that you can figure it out. You can struggle with it. That’s where my belief is in with you. But if I sent you up there to illustrate that you can already do this, we don’t have the time in the classroom for that.

[00:23:49.680] – Colin
Yeah. My saying that parallels along that amongst my physics class, at least, is I always joke with the reason why physics is felt with a P instead of F is because that P is for the partial points you’re going to get to make yourself successful.

[00:24:04.730] – Steve
[laughter] That’s great.

[00:24:09.360] – Colin
It’s not about getting the right answer. It’s about building the process along the way We’re trying something maybe a little bit unique. Then if it doesn’t work out at the end, we’ve still learned something. We’ve learned that that law of physics doesn’t apply in that direction, or mathematically, there is an issue, but maybe that process actually works when we bring in the right math tool. What works for algebra doesn’t necessarily work for when we hit calculus, but there’s things that calculus can do so much better than the algebra could.

[00:24:41.600] – Steve
It seems to me that one of the challenges for us is, as we develop these skills in our students, the payoff in their grade doesn’t likely show up early on.

[00:25:00.580] – Steve
So we got to be able to point out to students what they’re learning from a skills vantage point. We need to be reinforced that what we’re doing is getting us the payoff and then believe that increased academic success comes later.

[00:25:21.700] – Colin
Yeah. I can almost hear everybody who’s listening to this thinking about those parent emails and phone calls coming in about, what do you mean my kid’s grade is going to get worse for the next three months while we focus on this because they’re applying to this school or they are trying to do that.

[00:25:38.960] – Steve
I don’t think their grade has to get worse.

[00:25:43.360] – Colin
No, but sometimes it does. Learning new strategies, learning how to focus through this does take some minor setbacks. Growth is never fully linear. My favorite one for this is there’s a graph that gets shared around as a meme about learning a second language. Overall, it’s a nice overall growth. But there’s some really big regressions along the way where you can have one day where you’re speaking fluently, and then the next day, you can barely string a sentence together. That’s learning. We have to recognize that setbacks, whether they’re documented as grades or not, are part of the process. That’s part of learning, trying, and failing, and growing from that failure. If we’re too scared as parents, as caregivers, as teachers, to have those grades recorded as setbacks along the way, we’re never going to come to the moment of working through the pain to get to the goal on the other side.

[00:26:47.160] – Steve
We really got to live through the same perseverance for growth that we’re hoping to develop for the kids. We need to take the time, the trial and error, the reflection.

[00:27:01.080] – Colin
Just like we would expect a math teacher to model the math problem on the board, the English teacher to model how you put together a paragraph, all of those things we’re modeling for the students. We need to be able to model this development of perseverance and grit and dealing with the stumblings, being able to say in the middle of a lesson, you know what, guys? This is not working the way we hope it is. Let us try and reset this, and we’ll come back next class with a different approach. That scaffold didn’t work or we took that scaffold away too soon. However, we want to name it in front of them. It’s humbling.

[00:27:38.780] – Steve
It’s making them more of a partner in the learning process. Almost, I can point out that my thought was this was going to provide this, and it didn’t. Just the way you thought this approach to a formula was going to take you there, and it didn’t.

[00:27:56.260] – Colin
Yeah, it’s all there. My biggest one with my grade 11 and 12 students in the diploma program is, okay, so we get to a bad test. And so your preparation and your study skills, what you were doing to get here, didn’t work out. What change are you going to make to expect a different result the next time? Because we’ve already proven that pathway didn’t work. Can we learn from it? Because that’s the growth we need.

[00:28:27.160] – Steve
Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining joining me in this conversation. I knew that I was going to enjoy it, and you certainly delivered. Is LinkedIn the best place for people to touch base with you if they got questions or would like to follow the conversation along?

[00:28:45.540] – Colin
Yeah. And if anybody has some strategies or some ideas or some recent research that goes along this way, I’m just starting in this journey. And so anybody who’s a few steps ahead, if they want to give me a bit of guidance, I’d love to hear it as well.

[00:29:00.660] – Steve
I will keep on the look out for that for myself as well as for you. Thanks again.

[00:29:06.600] – Colin
Thank you so much, Steve.

[00:29:09.820] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

I heard about a great experience illustrating awe in learning that was shared by a group of middle school students and their teacher in Grand Island, New York. They joined me on this podcast sharing their reflections and insights. As you hear their story consider where these elements of Awe appeared:

• Awe occurs when we experience something much larger than ourselves
• Awe leads to the need to reframe one’s understanding of the world.
• Awe often brings forth emotions of humility, gratitude, and compassion.
• Awe is linked to prosocial behavior: people are more likely to help others after experiencing awe.

Connect with the teacher, Lora Randles: lorarandles@gicsd.org

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.000] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:29.540] – Steve
Find Leading Awe While Learning. While I’ve been involved in writing a chapter for a book about awe in learning, I heard about a great experience generated by a group of middle school students in Grand Island in New York and their teachers. Their superintendent posted about their work with a note that said, “The students were learning with heart and leading with purpose.” As you hear their story, consider where these elements of awe connect. Awe occurs when we experience something much larger than ourselves. Awe leads to the need to reframe one’s understanding of the world. Awe often brings forth emotions of humility, gratitude, and compassion. Lastly, awe is linked to pro-social behavior. People are more likely to help each other after experiencing awe. I’m excited to have Lora Randalls, an ELA middle school teacher, and her students, Fiona and Logan, sharing their stories with us today on the podcast.

[00:01:49.540] – Steve
Welcome, folks, and thanks so much for joining us.

[00:01:52.840] – Lora
Hi. Thanks for having us.

[00:01:55.220] – Steve
Lora, you shared with me earlier that this unit, built around the book, “A Long Walk to Water,” has been part of your instruction at the school for a few years. Would you share with us how it was selected and what you’ve learned about the power of the book across the years with students?

[00:02:16.540] – Lora
So it was about 16 years ago, and New York State had just started implementing this new curriculum and one of the books in their curriculum, they called them Modules – and they were leaning towards these four modules. And one of the books in a module was “A Long Walk to Water.” And I had never read the book before, but as I began delving into these new standards, I started by reading the book. And if you want to talk about an awe moment as an educator, it’s actually sitting in a staff development, probably should have been paying more attention to the speaker, but got caught up in this book, which is an appropriate middle school level. So I ended up finishing it in that setting and thinking to myself, I don’t love the module that New York State’s prepared, but this book’s a keeper. And I knew from that moment on that this book was going to be both changing in my life as an educator, but also for the lives of my students. But what it did is just so much more than I could have ever anticipated – this impact that it’s had on them and me personally in my life as well.

[00:03:30.000] – Steve
Logan, as you read the book, what impact did it have on you?

[00:03:38.620] – Logan
When I was reading the book, it was just very wild to think that kids my age were going through that stuff. I go to school, I go home, I have fun. And kids over in South Sudan were running from wars and stuff. And it was really wild to think about, but just hearing saw the story was so impactful. He’s just such a powerful person. He came from being in war, being in this war-set environment to now helping everyone in South Sudan and those places without water. It’s just super changing of what he’s done.

[00:04:23.280] – Steve
Fiona, talk about a piece that especially caught your attention.

[00:04:28.900] – Fiona
Just how lucky we are to have running power and electricity and heat and water and air conditioning because it never really occurred to me how lucky we are because these kids have to go and get a bucket and fetch water every single day for their village. And even when they go and walk the entire day to get the water, it’s filled with harmful bacterias and sicknesses. And so that’s just a really big struggle. And I didn’t really realize how lucky we are to have clean water and fresh water, and that we don’t have to spend our entire day walking to get water that’s just filled with bacteria and that’s going to make us sick anyways.

[00:05:13.600] – Steve
Lora, what led to the move from reading the book to the decision to engage in the Water for South Sudan project?

[00:05:23.520] – Lora
Well, I feel like I would be amiss if I didn’t say a little bit about the book.

[00:05:28.240] – Steve
Yeah, please.

[00:05:29.400] – Lora
Okay. The book itself was written by Linda Sue Park. Salva is a true person. He was a Sudanese refugee who became known as the Lost Boys back in the ’80s. When these boys from South Sudan were relocated to America, they began their lives here. As Logan said, Salva has now dedicated his life to bring water back to the people of his original country. Reading the book, Salva as a real person, and he speaks it like engagements, church, civic organizations, schools, and he had to gather a lot of money to get his project started. It just so happened that Newbury, a winning author, Linda Sue Park, was in the audience at a church in Rochester when Salva was speaking. She was so moved by his story that she decided she wanted to write a biography about him. But she wanted to write it for middle school students as that was Salva’s age when his journey began. So as Salva gets separated from his family at about 11 years old, he flees to what they call in Africa as the Bush, only to never return home. And Salva travels for 11 years over thousands of miles of the wild truck of Africa swamp lands, areas inhabited by dangerous lions, crossing rivers filled with crocodiles to different refugee camps, only to find life they’re not as much better than just his survival in the wild.

[00:07:16.320] – Lora
When the United States found out that this was happening in other countries around the world, they started to bring these Sudanese refugee kids over to America. But they couldn’t have been a soldier. They had to be orphans. And Salva met criteria, and they had to have a vision. They wanted to bring something to America. They wanted these people to come to get educated. And Salva learned English from one of the workers in the park. So he comes to America, and he’s relocated right here in Rochester. And the family that he lives with helps him adjust to life in America. He goes to Monroe Community College, graduates with a business degree. And then all of a sudden, after he’s lived in America about six, seven years, he checks his email. This is a fun point in our lesson when we’re like, How far Salva has come? Now that he’s checking his email.

[00:08:06.270] – Steve
[laughter]

[00:08:06.860] – Lora
He realizes that an old cousin from his back in Sudan says he thinks that he’s found his father at a clinic suffering from some waterborne illness from drinking the water. Salva and his new family in the United States help him get all the paperwork in order.

[00:08:24.410] – Lora
He travels back to South Sudan, finds out, yes, this, in fact, is his father. He gets spend a week with his father. It’s very moving. It’s a very powerful moment. And Salva then has to return to the United States, not knowing if he’ll ever see his father again. So at this point in Salva’s life, he realizes he wants to give back. He wants to do something. And his dream is he wants to bring water to the people of South Sudan. So things like that are happening to his father don’t happen to others. So to do this, Salva needs to start a nonprofit organization, and he needs to do it from scratch. He needs to start at the beginning. So he starts, as I started my story, by talking to civic organizations and schools. And it takes him a lot of years to raise enough money to bring his first well to South Sudan, which would be built in his original village of Lunarik, and where he was reunited with his mother and his sisters that he hadn’t seen at that point in over 20 years. So at this point now, after all these years have gone by, and Water for South Sudan has now been up and running for about 20 years, he’s brought more than 600 wells to South Sudan.

[00:09:41.980] – Lora
He teaches hygiene with water, planting crops with water, how to preserve water, how to maintain wells, and all of these components. And the well is never to be used just for one village, and they have to share it with anybody who comes. So Linda Sue Park writes this manuscript, and it’s 900 pages. She’s like, okay, this isn’t going to apply with middle schoolers.

[00:10:07.650] – Steve
[laughter]

[00:10:07.650] – Lora
This is a fabulous story of Salva’s life. She goes back to the drawing board, and I tell my students this, too, not once, not twice, nine times.

[00:10:17.260] – Steve
Oh, wow.

[00:10:18.050] – Lora
Nine times until she gets this version of Salva’s story that she’s satisfied with. So it’s condensed to about 120 pages. She’s still not satisfied. Linda Sue Park says there’s just something missing. She goes, yes, this is a story about Salva, about water. But when we’ve learned about the water in Africa, it’s really the girls whose lives revolve around the fetching, the gathering of water, the boiling of water, washing with water. The girls are the ones who have to transport using their lives. The boys hunt. They are more likely to get an education. So Linda Sue Park created a composite character. She created a fictional character, a girl about Salva’s age, and she named her Nia, which is just a popular name in South Sudan.

[00:11:07.960] – Lora
Nia’s story was told at the beginning of every chapter, much shorter, maybe a page to two pages, just telling about Nia’s very monotonous, very mundane life of gathering water, coming back for lunch, gathering water again, having to teach her little sister how to gather the water, her little sister becoming ill during the rainy sees in them having to move to an area closer to a lake bed. But then there’s tribal wars on top of the Civil War. So there’s all these components going into the story. So at the end of the book, When Salva is working on building his wells, Nia is from a rival tribe. So at the end of the book, the little girl Nia is asking her, Uncle, why did Salva bring the water to our village? Why would it Dinka to bring water to the newer tribe. Her uncle said, Well, he wants to bring water to all the people of South Sudan, not just to his own tribe, the Dinka. At the end of the book, Linda Sue Parks creates this very moving moment when Nia goes up to Salva and thanks him for bringing the water. I cry every year.

[00:12:20.040] – Lora
It’s just such a lovely full circle moment. At this point, these kids are engaged. They’re engaged in Nia’s story, even though it’s fictional, they can relate to this arduous task of having to gather water day in and day out, and they see what Salva has done in the world to make a difference. That is the story of why Linda Sue Park wrote the book. Now, her and Salva are very close. They do speaking engagements together. Prior to these students I have with me today, Logan and Fiona, we actually taken a group of students that we were able to see Linda Linda Sue Park and Salva together and talking about the creation of the book. I’m going to let Logan tell you a little bit about when we saw Salva this last time and how his message now has changed a little bit, if that’s appropriate for this point in the conversation?

[00:13:18.900] – Steve
Yeah, I have to tell you, I’m awed. I’m awed listening to the story from you, and I love the passing on of awe. Linda Sue Park gets odd the first time she hears Salva, and then she writes the book that puts you into awe, and now you’ve got this great opportunity sharing it with the kids. I’d love to hear Logan’s insights.

[00:13:44.600] – Lora
This year, Salva came – it was a Sunday, so we couldn’t take a field trip. So voluntarily, students were able to just go hear him speak at a local church. So Logan was one of the students who came out to meet Salva. So I’ll him tell you about that day.

[00:14:01.680] – Logan
So I remember going in there and then just actually seeing him in person was just like, wow. Because you think about all that he’s went through, and now he’s here in front of you, telling you about what he’s doing with the water for South Sudan and everything. Then after he was done explaining how he helps people and makes wells, he actually sat down and then he would sign books and meet people. There was a line to him because, of course, there’s a line. Then it was so big. To just think, when I was getting closer to it, I think, I’m going to meet him. It’s just so like, wow, like what I said before, of what he’s been through, and now I’m going to shake his hand and stuff.

[00:14:53.140] – Steve
You’ve given a great description of awe for our listeners.

[00:14:58.120] – Lora
Definitely. He’s very great gracious. One of my students who drew him a picture, and Salva was kind enough to let my student bring the picture up for him. He’s like, Salva, I drew this picture for you, and he was very gracious, and it was very sweet.

[00:15:16.120] – Steve
Fiona, I’m wondering, how did you get engaged with raising the funds that your class raised?

[00:15:25.340] – Fiona
I went home that day and I was telling my parents Salva’s story, and they were very touched by it. And so I also called up some of my relatives, and I told them Salva’s story and just how hard his life was and how hard life is still for people in Sudan. And they were crying on the phone. They were so touched and awed by his story. So they donated to the fundraiser. And we did a walk the entire seventh grade, our entire team. We did a walk around the track a few times. It was in the hot sun. And I couldn’t imagine walking in the hot sun every day to get water for your entire village because I was barely walking in the hot heat on our track because it was so hot. But we walked for water, and we did that all as a community. It was a really cool thing to just see so many people get together and actually care about his story and what it means.

[00:16:27.140] – Steve
I really hear the awe experience keeps rippling out to other people getting engaged in it.

[00:16:37.720] – Lora
One of the local Aquanis Club heard about the story, and then they donated a couple of thousand dollars to support the kids. So by the end of the walk, the kids had raised all of this money going towards a second well that we would bring to South Sudan. And so we were really proud of them.

[00:17:00.660] – Steve
Very cool. I’m wondering, Logan and Fiona, do other times at school and other projects that you’ve been engaged in, can you connect to another time that you got that awe experience? Anything come to mind?

[00:17:22.180] – Logan
It was actually in Mrs. Randall’s classroom again. At the beginning of the year, we were reading this book called “The Outsiders,” and It’s like the whole book’s made up, but it’s about the Greasers back in the ’60s. I did not expect it to turn out how it did. I love the book so much. I had to buy the copy of it. I’m actually going to see the Outsiders play this weekend.

[00:17:55.620] – Steve
Very cool.

[00:17:56.370] – Lora
The Outsiders, the Broadway musical is Buffalo this week.

[00:18:01.080] – Steve
Oh, wow.

[00:18:01.890] – Lora
The Outsiders’ book, I’ll let you, Fiona tell you a little about it, but it’s just a great novel in not judging a book by its cover. It’s these really poor, beat-up-looking kids, and the rich, popular kids taunt them and jump them and things. It’s just a really great book for the kids as well.

[00:18:26.660] – Steve
Fiona, I’m wondering what words of advice you might offer to teachers as well as students about the opportunities to be engaged in those kinds of learning experiences that create awe?

[00:18:45.700] – Fiona
Just that it’s very important to learn about other people’s stories and points of view because you don’t really know what others are going through because you can’t really tell until you read about it or they tell you about it. I feel like reading a story about somebody else’s life, it doesn’t even have to be “A Long Walk to Water.” Another book about somebody’s struggles during a hard time or some event in history can really help you open your eyes and see what’s going on in the world around you and what happened in the world around you. It can make us learn from that and move on from that.

[00:19:28.380] – Lora
I know in eighth grade, you’re going to read Diary of Anne Frank, so that might be impactful, too.

[00:19:33.240] – Steve
For sure. Fiona, I want to tell you, you just gave a great description that matches what the researchers are writing about awe, and that it gives you a perspective of the world around you that you didn’t have before. You clearly labeled that. Logan, any words of advice to teachers and students about these kinds of learning opportunities?

[00:20:04.900] – Logan
I mean, some of the most important things with teachers is the teachers have to… They cannot just read the book and be done with it. They have to incorporate some of the book with their classes, and they have to actually make the book fun. Because during “A Long Walk to Water,” when we first started reading it or we walked around the school with holding a water while walking.

[00:20:35.350] – Lora
We also made these hay canoe things, which it’s taking that stuff from the book and turning it into something that you could do in class just makes learning about it so much better.

[00:20:48.640] – Logan
So you’re not just sitting there bored out of your mind. You get to actually not experience it, but kind of experience it.

[00:20:57.220] – Steve
Well, Logan and Fiona, I I can tell you the two of you are ready to do a workshop for teachers. I’ll look to sign you up. I’ll tell you this, you’re giving your teacher awe as she gets to listen to you because I can sit here and watch it happening on the screen. Lora, I’m just wondering any closing thoughts of advice you’d give to teachers about stepping into these kinds of opportunities?

[00:21:28.740] – Lora
Well, I feel like this book really speaks for yourself itself, and it touches a lot of people. Taking that little extra step and connecting with Water for South Sudan network – they give a lot of educational opportunities communities, and they provide a lot of different ways for educators. So whether it be a walk for water, they have a literal walk for water, sorry. They have what’s called the Iron Draft Challenge. So schools are able to raise funds and if you raise a certain amount, you can win a visit with Salva, or you can win a visit with Linda Sue Park. So they offer incentives. Because of the popularity of the book, it’s really been the success of Water for South Sudan. And then they give other ideas just for curriculum, and they also give different ideas for fundraisers for kids to try to help, even if kids are… I mean, our fundraisers turned into something school-wide and something rather big. But even if it’s a small fundraiser where students are raising $20, it’s still showing the students the power of giving, the power of that they are able to do something, that this doesn’t have to happen. This is what’s happening in the world, and they can make a difference.

[00:22:48.850] – Lora
I tell them the story, I’m Salva’s age exactly. While I’m teaching the story, I refer to Salva as 11-year-old, and he’s escaping in the bush running for his life and finding water, finding food, hiding from soldiers, trying not to get kidnapped. So he has to fight. And I went to middle school like them. And the next year, when Salva lived in a refugee camp, I went to high school where they’re going to go. And I tell them this is the year that, to remember the song “We Are the World?” “We Are the World” gets released. So at this point, it was directly talking about the children of Ethiopia. But as middle school students ourselves, we didn’t know that there was a crisis in Africa, the same as these kids. And it wasn’t until that time in my life that I realized that there are people in the world that don’t have food, that don’t have water. Just from this song, “We are the World,” that brought a lot of awareness. I feel like the book brings a lot of awareness. The organization Water for South Sudan, it’s not just fundraising. When you’re walking around with a T-shirt on, you bring an awareness to these causes that are bigger than you and things that humble you and make you really appreciate what you have and the life that you’ve been given.

[00:24:13.160] – Steve
You’ve just labeled awe. Bigger than you. Appreciate. It’s very, very powerful. Lora, I’m wondering, is there a way that you’d be okay with any listeners touching base with you if they had questions and wanted to learn more you?

[00:24:30.940] – Lora
Sure, of course. They could email me right at my school email address, which is just my full name. Again, none of my name is spelled normal, so lorarandles@gicsd.org.

[00:24:57.160] – Steve
Thank you so much. And extend a thank you to your superintendent for putting the post on LinkedIn and allowing me to find out about it.

[00:25:04.800] – Lora
I will. Thank you so much.

[00:25:08.000] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

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