Most people would agree that it’s a good idea for educators to work from a written plan that is focused on students learning important knowledge and skills. Writing a set of standards is a way to create such a plan.

In the district where I taught for 20 years, teachers, parents and administrators worked together to write standards for language arts. There was a tremendous sense of ownership, and for five or six years those standards were alive and well in K-12 classroom. Then what happened? Teachers retired and new teachers were hired. Administrators moved up the ladder of responsibility. Interestingly enough, parents were the most stable element of the group, many remaining closely involved with the schools as one child after another reached kindergarten age and entered the system.

The natural turnover in education makes it necessary to revisit standards for them to remain viable. About the time that our language arts standards needed a visit, several other sets of standards competed for attention. When different directions are coming from multiple sources, the natural response is to shut out the confusion and rely instead on what is most familiar. Under such circumstances, teachers reach back to what they experienced in school, modulated somewhat by what they learned in teacher preparation programs. In other words, confusion about standards tends to reinforce the habits of the past and impede progress toward the future.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have the potential to clarify what’s important in a 21st century education by establishing shared standards in all states. (At this writing, four states have declined to adopt the CCSS and one is using only the language arts standards.)

There are essentially two approaches to writing standards. One is to list every skill and concept that a child should learn by grade level, K-12. The problem with this approach is that teachers may feel the need to race at a breakneck pace through the long to-do list, sacrificing real learning for covering the curriculum. The other approach is to decide on a small number of essential skills and concepts that students will be working on throughout their years of school, and to back this list up with more detailed information about what mastery of the essentials looks like at each grade level. This approach gives teachers permission to limit the number of topics covered and focus on individual needs and strengths. This is the approach taken by CCSS.

As long as I have been involved in education, people have worried about national standards and national tests. The typical line taken is that parents, teachers and administrators want local standards and local control. In a society as mobile as ours, it’s a huge responsibility to prepare students for college, careers and, we hope, fulfilling lives given that they may eventually live in a wide variety of regions and settings. The responsibility gets even huger when we think about how rapidly our knowledge base is increasing, along with the technology to share and store that knowledge.

In my opinion, we need to “think globally and act locally.” All learning is local because it can only happen in a specific, personal context, but those who guide learning need to have a larger perspective. The CCSS offers that larger perspective to parents and educators nationwide. It’s important to note that a recent poll of members of the American Federation of Teachers shows 75 percent support CCSS. Teachers recognize the value of shared standards, but they need some time and support to do a good job of integrating them in their long-term plans and in their day-to-day work with students.

Jeanetta Jones Miller taught for 25 years in public schools in Albany, California, and Newtown, Connecticut, serving as English department chair at Newtown High School from 2001 to 2011. She specialized in curriculum development and served on committees that developed interdisciplinary reading and writing standards.

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The zombies have arrived at Education.com. Fast ones, slow ones, nice ones and no-ones. (Sorry — we went on a department field trip to a Dr. Seuss exhibit last week; it is clearly still with me.)

We recently published a new batch of workbooks, and Zombpocalypse was one of them. We were so excited! And then, technical issues. It happens sometimes. Anyone who downloaded the workbook early on will know that two of the pages showed up mysteriously blank:  in the middle of a history of zombies and between the anatomy of the brain and emergency survival tips.

Luckily, we’ve fixed it. The text and images are now in their proper place and the zombies are here to stay. Users who downloaded workbooks with missing pages may try downloading again.

The post Zombie Workbook Errors Fixed appeared first on Education.com Blogs.

The Looking Glass Wars was definitely a fun book, and Frank Beddor (the producer of There’s Something About Mary) basically basically wrote it as a blueprint for a Hollywood film. The book itself loaded with some befitting tropes: characterization happens really rapidly, people in the book embody the classic hero and villain archetypes, and themes like the power of imagination are delivered in a pretty in-your-face manner. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it presented me with a cool opportunity to get kids thinking about the elements of a Hollywood movie and common Hollywood character types.

But then there was this: the publisher inserted several glossy pages featuring very detailed “concept art” in the middle of the book. Upon seeing the illustrations, one of my students exclaimed, “They’re all white!”, a comment that elicited a chorus of giggles from her peers.

I teach in a very diverse area. I’d say about 99% of my students are Americans of Asian, Indian, Pakistani or Middle Eastern descent. Lots of them have parents who are immigrants. I suppose Lewis Carrol’s original Alice character can be presumed to be white, because she’s depicted as a British kid in the 19th century—but does that mean that all the other residents of Beddor’s Wonderland need to be European in appearance? I think it’s a question worth asking because in Beddor’s rendering, Wonderland exists in an alternate dimension.

On my own, I’d find nothing notable about the fact that the characters in Beddor’s Wonderland are white. But then again, I grew up seeing plenty of faces on TV I could identify with. Tons of stuff has already been written about how poorly represented Asians and Asian-Americans are in film and television. Hollywood blew what was an awesome chance to cast minority actors in lead roles for The Last Airbender when the very cool cartoon the film itself was based on features its own fantasy universe heavily influenced by East Asian, Indian, Inuit, and South American cultures.

This is rarely a significant issue in literature—that is, unless you write a book the same way you’d create a film. A picture is worth 1000 words, and therein lies the problem: when you insert hyper-detailed concept art into a fantasy book—whether that art depicts characters, architecture, landscapes, monsters, whatever—the text is no longer able to do the talking, and you deny kids the opportunity to paint the picture themselves. In fantasy, it’s a great thing when we as readers are allowed to render the world as we see fit. It becomes partly our own world—the product of our own imaginations. It’s also pretty cool when we can step into the shoes of characters we identify with and share their adventures with them, so explicitly giving a character an ethnic identity when that identity is in no way essential to the plot is a small authorial choice that can have a significant impact on the meaning a book can have in a kid’s life.

Card soldiers from The Looking Glass Wars, looking a little Star Wars-esque

The reason why “I thought the book was better” is such a ubiquitous sentiment whenever a book is adapted into a film is that we project our own creativity, identity, and emotion onto what we read, and the end result is something we cherish. A film adaptation of a book almost always feels like an imposition of someone else’s vision, because that’s exactly what it is.

When publishers cram a bunch of interstitial concept art between the pages of a fantasy book, I honestly feel like they’re jumping the gun. Let the book be a book. Kids’ imaginations can do the rest.

The post Don’t Take the Imagination Out of Literature appeared first on Education.com Blogs.

I know, I know: History? Really? I’m well aware of the reputation that history, especially as a school subject, has gained over the years. Luckily, working at this place has allowed me to indulge my love for history, preservation, and all things old. For instance, I produced this workbook here and had a blast doing so. The development of this series was really just an excuse for me to dig around in some archival photos. I visit the Wikipedia pages of certain historical figures so often that I’ve rechristened them with friendly nicknames (Susie B, G-Dub, G-Dub C). Though it’s consistently at the low end of favorite subjects for the majority of kids, I’ve always been amazed and astounded by history.

I grew up with a dad who liked to travel, but who also hated spending money. As a result, I was in and out of a lot of weird museums on family vacations. The Portland Police Museum, for example. The Museum of Surgical Science. The Bata Shoe Museum (which you’d think would be wacky enough to hold my interest, but was actually kind of boring). And just a few years ago, as a grown-up taking my first vacation sans parents, I learned all about the history of sanitation at The Plumbing Museum – appropriately located in Watertown, Mass.

I wasn’t always enamored with artifacts – as a kid, I was actually a little freaked out by them. Traipsing through creaky old houses, even with a tour group, was a little unsettling to me. Even today, the smell of an old building gives me a little bit of a knot in my stomach.  But as time went on, that uneasiness transformed into curiosity. The past was still a little creepy to me, but at the same time, I wanted to get as close to it as I possibly could (this was happening around the same time I was getting into horror movies, actually. I wonder if that’s related). Today, I’ll browse antique stores for fun, and no matter where I am, will always stop to read a Historic Landmark plaque. Some of my happiest hours here are spent browsing old books and documents, searching for public domain content to use on worksheets.

As an adult, history feels almost like magic to me. Being able to see; touch things that existed before you were alive is such a thrill. You weren’t there to see all that time pass and can never, will never, comprehend everything that happened in that span of time, and really, as far as you know, it might not have ever happened…but here’s something that tells you it did. Even when I think about it really hard, history doesn’t make any sense at all.

When I came to Education.com, I always volunteered to take on social studies content because it meant I’d get to spend my days sifting through old photos and documents – something I do for fun. Though I’ve moved on to other tasks since then, I still get to do it occasionally, and I still get a little giddy when, while shuffling through PDF after PDF of yellowed paper, I run across something like this:

Abroad, a children’s picture book from 1882

Or this:

The Rocket Book, copyright 1912.

However, my own interests aside, history, as part of a curriculum, still has a bad rap. I understand why — it’s actually pretty hard to make a case for history being all that useful in the real world. It’s not uncommon for kids to excel in language arts and science, but write off history as a “When am I ever going to use this?” subject.

So what can you do to get your kid to take a shine to social studies? Here are some suggestions on how to start:

Visit a weird museum. If you can think it, there is a museum out there dedicated to it. Does your kid have a specific interest? A sport? A style of music? Seek out strange museums in your hometown, or consider taking a summer vacation to a town that has one. However, you might want to pre-screen the place first: some seemingly innocuous museums contain mature content (see The Museum of Surgical Science above).

Scan the news. Now is actually an amazing time to start talking about artifacts — there have been a bunch of great discoveries in the news lately. Remember when they found the remains of Richard III under a parking lot late last year? How about getting to hear Alexander Graham Bell’s voice for the first time? Or this Buzzfeed list?  These are the kinds of things that got me wondering as a kid.

Take in a biopic. While screenwriters sometimes take liberties with the truth when it comes to based-on-a-true-story films, biography films are a great way to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality and help your child to start believing in history. 42, the story of Jackie Robinson, is in theaters right now.

Dive into some family heirlooms. Bring those boxes down from the attic and stroll down memory lane with your kids. Look at old certificates, trinkets and letters with your child and talk about how life has changed for that person. Family photos are especially great for tweens, who will love giggling at the outdated technology and goofy outfits. Not only is it a fun way to bond, examining old documents hits a lot of the points that teachers cover in reading and social studies lessons.

All these things and more are what helped me love history, and none of it would have been possible without preservation. Here’s to all the archivists, restorers, researchers and archaeologists out there. I can’t speak for most other people, but y’all are rock stars to me.

Though a lot of kids would disagree, history isn’t boring because humans aren’t boring. There have always been embarrassing aunts, noisy neighbors, and heroes and villains in our global story, and that’s something I try to convey in every worksheet I produce. History is weird and often improbable, and I’m still not entirely convinced it isn’t magic.

The post National Historic Preservation Month…and Why History Isn’t Boring appeared first on Education.com Blogs.

In addition to being expelled from school, Wilmot is being charged for “possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds” and “discharging a destructive device.” There’s a chance she will be tried as an adult.

from Miami New Times

DNLee, a blogger at Scientific American, touches on some of the bigger social implications of the story, while making some disturbing observations about what she sees as the broken state of science education in this country:

I’ve witnessed beautifully remodeled lab classrooms with supplies, computers, and equipment — all locked away, never to be touched by most students.
Why? Some teachers and administrators worry about damage and wear and tear or shenanigans. But the same administrators will brag about their facilities and take visiting dignitaries to tour their fancy facilities? What/s the point?! The kids aren’t getting a chance to experiment and learn.
[...]
[Keira's] expulsion and arrest sends a very clear and striking message to students, especially urban students of color: Don’t try this at home, or school or anywhere. Science exploration is not for you!

Here’s the observation that stands out to me the most:

I can’t name a single scientist or engineer who hadn’t blown up, ripped apart, disassembled something at home or otherwise cause a big ruckus at school all in the name of curiosity, myself included. Science is not clean. It is very messy and it is riddled with mistakes and mishaps.

It’s a beautiful point. In response, scientists are now backing Keira on Twitter by tweeting about all the stuff they’ve blown up over the years.

It’s cool to see that the story is prompting a discussion about science and science education in the United States, but I really hope it helps initiate some greater dialogue about the way we discipline students in general. I can’t help but see some big issues with the way people in positions of power are handling the case.

The local school district felt that expulsion was a fair punishment for Wilmot because kids should learn that “there are consequences to their actions.” A lot of critics of this decision are responding by pointing out—accurately—that Kiera got near-perfect grades and had a perfect behavior record. But the people who bring up this objection seem to be functioning under this weird, invisible assumption about what constitutes appropriate punishments for teens, and it begs the question—Even if Wilmot weren’t a “perfect” kid, would she still deserve to have an example made of her? The kind of punishment doled out by the school is in no way rehabilitative—and if Keira’s found guilty, we all know that a felony conviction would basically constitute a death sentence for whatever professional or academic future she may have had to begin with.

The alternative is problematic, too. Let’s say we were to argue for a “rehabilitative” as opposed to a punitive response. We’d have to deal with the very real possibility that we’re effectively trying to “rehabilitate” a kid for being curious.

I went to a private high school, and I knew some guys who stole a chunk of raw sodium from the chemistry room and tossed it into the lap pool to watch it blow up (not even as an experiment, but as a prank). They didn’t expect it to sink ten feet before exploding. That’s exactly what it did, and it left a fat crater at the bottom of the pool.

“I can’t name a single scientist or engineer who hadn’t blown up, ripped apart, disassembled something at home or otherwise cause a big ruckus at school all in the name of curiosity, myself included. Science is not clean. It is very messy and it is riddled with mistakes and mishaps.” -DNLee

Unlike Keira, these kids had some valuable social capital in the school and community (via their parents) that allowed them to get off the hook—relatively speaking. They had to pay for the 400 something dollars in damage they caused to school property. At distance, this looks like a pretty reasonable punishment. It certainly conveys the whole “do this stuff in a controlled environment (i.e. don’t blow up the school pool)” idea pretty well.

What I’m skeptical of is the idea that ruining a kid’s life teaches that kid anything besides the fact that we as a society simply don’t care about individual students who take risks and happen to make some mistakes—we only care about using those kids as a way to make sure all the other kids continue to keep their heads down.

As an educator myself, I can’t help but find that idea terrifying.

The post Kid Literally Expelled for Doing Science appeared first on Education.com Blogs.

Those were the days. I was rewarded for bad habits.

These days, I love concise language. Everyone does. Making clear points quickly is a 21st century skill that should be taught early. It’s a career skill, a conversation skill, a life skill. Nobody has time for wordiness, from the kid taking your lunch order to the head honcho at your workplace.

Asking students for a set number of pages is like scoring a basketball game on number of dribbles. Good players need only one dribble to get from the three-point line to the rim, and good writers share information in as little space as possible.

Dearest teachers, I have an assignment for you. Teach your students to write gorgeous sentences with a high information-to-words ratio. Write a long sentence on the board, then cut it down to its essentials.

Give them some disorganized facts, and challenge them to write a short paragraph that includes all of them. Whichever paragraph is best, read it out loud to the class.

Assign an essay without a length requirement. Tell them to respond to your prompt with a set level of depth or breadth.

Does this have to be the only way they write? Nope. But they shouldn’t be taught to just write long, rambling, meandering stuff that goes in all kinds of different directions, digressing at every turn, pulling in useless information and extraneous, needlessly big words like extraneous, sort of like this ridiculous sentence I’ve got going on right here.

Oops, old habits die hard.

The post Brevity rules, verbosity drools appeared first on Education.com Blogs.

Did that ad just tell me I’m worthless?

As an editor I’m constantly clicking through Education.com—finding articles, checking on new worksheets, looking at content much like one of our members might. And like anyone on the Internet I’m moving fast. So I was already waiting for the next webpage to load when I read that.

I laughed and joked to myself, I think I just got bullied by our website.

A week later I saw it again. It might have told me “Everybody hates you.” This time I was ready; I stayed on the page. I waited to see what it would say next. The banner flashed “You’re worthless” at me (yawn; you used that insult already, Advertisement). Then it flashed a third image that finally revealed the point:  Our kids can face hurtful words like this, constantly. Let’s take constructive action and help teach them to act.

I see the intent, and it basically worked—I even clicked to the advertiser’s website. But did the banner ad get to its point too slowly? Was it too much like a Magic 8 Ball of insults? Had anyone else at work seen this?

We’re not fans of bullying at Education.com. Last year we worked hard on our anti-bullying resource center. And we were really excited to work with filmmakers of the movie Bully, and be part of The Bully Project. (The movie is available to stream on Netflix Instant Play now if you want to check it out.) So when I faced that fleeting message as I clicked through the site I was curious but, had a bit of context.

And then … a real user on Education.com asked about it. This started a round robin discussion in the office of what this ad was for, from whom and what we thought of it. I learned two interesting things.

It’s for a great cause!

The “Be More Than a Bystander” campaign, orchestrated by the nonprofit Advertising Council, underscores the problem with a series of television, print and online ads and a Web site promoting the idea that if witnesses know what to do, they can take various steps, such as moving the victim away from the situation or reporting the treatment to an adult, to defuse the bullying.  -NY Times, “Campaign Tries to Help Defuse Bullying”

StopBullying.gov brings attention to cyberbullying and has so many ideas and resources for adults and kids to cope with this epidemic of social abuse.

A crash course in advertising placement:

Think of a webpage as having spots, kind of like seats in a car. In some ways a website is a chauffeur to advertising. Like any taxi driver we have to make money in some way to stay in business. Pretend you definitely know who is going to be in the driver’s seat, you even know who is going to be in the backseat on the passenger side of the car. And in the open seats, whoever is most relevant will show up and sit there. Relevance might be governed by what is at the website or by what has been recently looked at by people on their own particular computer. Have you ever searched online for “Mexican restaurants” and then started seeing ads for Mexican food when you’re on Facebook or some other site? It’s like that.

Back to that taxi driver analogy: we fill the seats we can, directly, cause we like having friends in the car. But not all seats get filled. And when that happens, third party advertisers will show up based on relevance. It’s like the friend of a friend’s friend.

In the end we didn’t consider this ad as effective, though we now understand and completely agree with its message. But what do you think?

Have you seen any of this campaign on TV or online? How did you react to it?

Was this specific ad effective or did it miss the mark?

Effective or not?

The post No thank you, said the editor to the ad. appeared first on Education.com Blogs.

—Carl Sagan

Rolling your eyes at Edith here might make you look cool to your peers, but after 2 years of teaching SAT I feel like one of my biggest imperatives is encouraging more kids to take a cue from her methodology

As one of the “new kids” in the Education.com office, I find myself asking a lot of questions—about processes, the back end of the site, policies for freelancers, and just about everything. Like many of people in the working world, I’m chary of creating the impression that answers to these questions don’t stick when I’m provided with them. The problem is that I always tell my students that “there’s no such thing as a dumb question”—that is, unless your question is disingenuous or deliberately disruptive. I’m pretty bad at taking my own advice.

Last summer, I taught an SAT boot camp where I worked 10-hour days by teaching 8 full classes of kids. Over the course of the two-month program, instructors get really close to the kids and become personally invested in their hopes and dreams. It’s pretty cool. One student in particular started the program with diagnostic scores in the mid-1700′s, which is fine—but he was dead-set on going to either Berkeley or Cornell, and wanted the kind of SAT score that would enable him to get there.

This student quickly earned a reputation for self-deprecating humor and became equally well known for his bizarre responses to SAT writing prompts. These responses weren’t an attempt to troll the essay graders, and to see them as evidence that he didn’t take the class seriously would have been naive. He was legitimately applying himself. In fact, he was applying himself so honestly and so deliberately that shame didn’t hold him back from trying anything, even if that meant responding to a broad-based essay prompt about the virtues of hard work with admittedly weak and (and goofy) examples (my favorite is a surreal personal anecdote about his consistently bad experiences with girls and dating). If that was the most relevant thing he’d manage to brainstorm during the notoriously stringent 25-minute time frame provided for essay completion, then so be it—that’s what he’d go with.

That same courage also enabled him to have no filter in class. The moment a question crossed his mind, he’d ask it: “I didn’t understand the word, so I eliminated it as a possibility. Is that bad?”

Yes, it’s a bad idea. Other students didn’t hesitate to let him know how (seemingly) ludicrous a question like that is. But here’s the thing: every time there was a gap in his understanding, no matter how trivial, he’d make sure to fill it immediately. He was participating—a skill that’s probably a whole lot more important than keeping your nose to the grindstone by quietly studying vocab for hours on end.

Why am I so convinced of this? Because the dividends of class participation are tremendous. After a summer of being one of the most engaged and vocal kids in the room, this student earned an official SAT score of 2290: a perfect 800 in reading, a perfect 800 in math, and a 690 in writing. He earned a perfect score in the grammar sub score for writing, but I suspect he got docked on the essay because he wrote about something really strange. And honestly, I’m fine with that.

Here’s the moral of the story: Encourage your kids to ask questions and take risks, even if they have to take a few small social risks in the classroom because their queries could be construed as “dumb questions.”

Odds are, they’ll learn a lot.

The post Class Participation: More Than a Buzzword appeared first on Education.com Blogs.

These are alpacas. I learned about alpacas last night while enjoying screen-free human interaction.

What’s Screen-Free Week, you ask? It’s like Christmas. The differences are that it doesn’t cost you anything, the weather is nicer, and instead of giving people gifts, you give yourself the gifts of fresh air, rested eyes, and human interaction.

Originally called TV Turnoff Week in 1994, its creators probably never imagined how many normal Joes would walk around town carrying magical cell phones with Internet, video, music, games, and an app that saves a parking space for you. Yes, that exists.

Even so, the basic idea remains the same. Too much screen time isn’t good for you, and it’s especially bad for kids. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which runs the event, would remind you that preschoolers average 32 hours of screen media per week. But you knew that. You also knew that screen time can lead to irregular sleep patterns, body image issues, lack of creativity, early childhood aggression, academic failure, and weight problems.

We’re addicted to screens, some of us literally, despite the fact that more and more of us spend our 9-to-5′s in front of one. A week off is the least we could do for ourselves. It’s coming at a good time too, following a fit of sensational, tragic news in Massachusetts that brought us closer to screens than usual. My poor eyes have been burning the midnight oil!

So just do it. Turn off your screens. You’ll see fewer Nike ads. Enjoy life the way it used to be, because for your kids growing up in this screen-crazed era, there is no “way it used to be” anymore.

If a whole week with no screens is just not possible, or if you need your phone’s map feature to find the nearest park, fine. Nobody’s cracking a whip. But make the effort. This isn’t some wacky hippie treehugger conspiracy theorist event. It’s for normal people.

Let’s look at some of the normal things you can do:

Talk.
Read.
Garden.
Barbeque.
Go fishing.
Talk a walk.
Skateboard.
Go to a play.
Look at a map.
Draw a picture.
Play with a pet.
Go to a concert.
Clean the house.
Go to a museum.
Go on a bike ride.
Play 20 questions.
Invite friends over.
Play a board game.
Donate old clothes.
Rearrange furniture.
Bury a time capsule.
Clean out the garage.
Go to a baseball game.
Cook an elaborate meal.
Create an obstacle course.
Make simple art with words.

The post A blog post about why you shouldn’t read this blog post appeared first on Education.com Blogs.

1. Focus on fundamentals: Build skills, build them some more, and keep building them.

Many youth coaches make the mistake of teaching complicated strategic concepts while their players lack the physical skills to put these concepts into use. Good coaches teach the fundamentals—dribbling, passing, shooting and footwork—and practice them at every practice. In the long run, the kids become more skilled players, and they can enjoy the sport for years. Complicated concepts can possibly help an underskilled team win a couple extra games during a short youth season and satisfy the shortsighted coach, but the players’ growth will be stunted. As they say, “It’s not the X’s and O’s; it’s the Jims and Joes.”

Teachers, schools, school districts, even parents, they all are guilty of the same shortsightedness as the victory-crazed coach. In the interest of finite accomplishments—a good score on a paper, in a class, on a standardized test—the skills are often neglected. Anything worth learning should be a process, and it’s more important for kids to learn how to do things, rather than what to do. As a co-worker and SAT tutor says, “If a kid gets a perfect SAT score, does that mean he’s smart? No, he’s just really good at taking that test.”

2. Build confidence. Allow kids to make mistakes.

I was talking with a fellow youth coach, and I asked him what “type of stuff” he liked to coach, selfishly wanting to get into a discussion of flex offense, trapping zone defenses, magical inbound plays—something that would entertain the basketball junkie in me. “I just try to build confidence,” he said. “Half the game is confidence.” Good answer. In sports, players need to have a “short memory,” meaning that if they make a mistake, they’d better “forget” it quickly so they can focus on the next play. In basketball, if a player misses a shot, for example, he shouldn’t be afraid to shoot again.

I wonder how many teachers have the same attitude. The key isn’t just that this guy wanted his players to be confident; it’s that he focused his effort actively building their confidence. Teaching requires more than the knowledge of a subject; it requires people skills. What many people don’t realize is that the more confident a person is, the more receptive he is to help. If a kid is great at math but bad at writing, build his confidence with math, and he’ll be more willing to accept that his writing skills need work.

3. Listen. Don’t just talk.

This is two coaching points in one. First, many coaches regularly talk too much during their practices. Kids can only absorb a few key points, and it’s best to spend practice time, you know, practicing. Making clear, concise points is a priceless coaching skill. Just ask a player. Second, many coaches think coaches should talk and players should listen, and never the other way around. Many big-time coaches have a “system” and force the players to buy in like little soldiers, but this style isn’t healthy for youth basketball.

When I was in grade school, I often thought about how terrible my teacher was at listening, that the teacher hardly even knew the students. I often felt that school was a test in patience, a contest to see who could stare at the teacher and listen for the longest amount of time. A healthy learning experience is more like a conversation than listening to a speech. People learn by talking. Coaxing students to participate can seem like pulling teeth, sure, but teachers should never give up on this effort.

4. Don’t get mad about a player’s mistake unless it’s been practiced repeatedly.

Basketball coaches are notorious for their angry outbursts. In other news, the sky is blue. Angry coaches will always be part of basketball, but youth coaches should show control and patience; we can all agree on that. A good rule is that a coach can expect his players to get something right only when it’s been practiced a hundred times. Too many coaches give an instruction during a long talk (See #3) and expect players to implement it immediately. Good coaches decide what skills are worth the time and effort and spend lots of both during practice. Then, if a player still doesn’t get it, a simple shout, sprint or set of push-ups might serve as proper motivation.

Teachers shouldn’t ever mention something once in class and then put it on a test. Anything worth learning should be a process (Sound familiar?), and teachers should help their students understand something, practice, practice, practice, then test it. Mentioning something once does not qualify as instruction.

5. When the defender overplays, make a hard back-cut or V-cut.

Okay, fine, I’ll stop talking about basketball.

The post 4 Youth Basketball Coaching Concepts That Translate to Classroom Teaching appeared first on Education.com Blogs.