When Kids Ask Really Tough Questions: A Quick Guide

I know she died, but when is Grandma coming back?

Why is your skin darker than Mommy’s?

Why do we live here but Daddy doesn’t?

Are you the tooth fairy?

Anyone with kids in their life knows what it’s like to be surprised by a tough question. It can come at any time, often when you least expect it: at breakfast, at bedtime or from the back seat.

We’re parents ourselves, and it’s these questions — and the awkward, knee-buckling panic they induce — that led us to create a new series of parenting guides for NPR’s Life Kit, a family of podcasts dedicated to making your life just a little bit easier.

Life Kit’s podcast, Parenting: Difficult Conversations, with help from Sesame Workshop, is full of research-tested strategies to help you navigate conversations about death, race and other tricky topics. Best of all, we get help from Sesame Workshop’s in-house child development experts. They’re the folks who review every word that comes out of a Muppet’s mouth to make sure it’s as helpful as possible for kids. This year, Sesame Street celebrates its 50th season, so you know they know what they’re doing.

Parents, grandparents, teachers and caregivers are busy. We get it. So we decided to distill some of what we’ve learned so far, no matter the kind of question that comes your way.

1. When you get a tough question, listen for what the child is really asking.

Don’t rush to answer. Pause and ask for clarification. This does a few things. First, it buys you time to choose your words carefully. It also stops you from answering the wrong question.

Rosemarie Truglio, a developmental psychologist and Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president of education and research, says when her son, Lucas, was 8, he came home from school and asked, “Is Santa real?”

She answered with a simple question back to him: “Why are you asking?”

“They may not actually be asking what you think they’re asking,” Truglio says. “You may be about to give them too much information that they don’t want and they’re not ready for. Pause before you respond, and make sure you’re really answering the question with the just-right amount of information that they can handle at the moment.”

It turns out that Lucas was doubting Santa Claus because other kids at school had voiced their skepticism, but, Truglio says, he was looking for reassurance. And thanks to her quick thinking, that’s just what he got.

We’ll underline this point with a quick joke that has made the rounds of the Internet:

“Where does poo come from?” a little boy asks.

“Well, son,” his father says, “food passes down the esophagus by peristalsis. It enters the stomach, where digestive enzymes induce a probiotic reaction in the alimentary canal. This contracts the protein before waste enters the colon. Water is absorbed, whereupon it enters the rectum finally to emerge as poo.”

“Wow,” the boy says. “So where does Tigger come from?”

2. Give them facts, but at a pace they can manage.

Whether you’re breaking news about the death of a loved one, a job loss or a serious illness, it’s important to understand that children process information a little bit at a time. That means you should be prepared to revisit the topic, perhaps many times.

A hospice worker who specialized in talking with children about death gave Truglio this advice: Children take in information the same way they eat an apple. Instead of crunching through the whole fruit in one sitting, they nibble, take breaks, then circle back.

Dave Anderson, director of programs at the Child Mind Institute, a national children’s mental health nonprofit, says sometimes we have to adjust our expectations when delivering heavy news. “A young child moves on fairly quickly.”

Anderson recalls one couple who fretted over telling their son about his diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “They were worried he would feel the weight of the stigma.” Instead, his response was more like, “OK. Where are we going for dinner?”

This goes for not-so-tough topics too. Once, I (Anya) was talking with my then-6-year-old daughter about seasons and why it’s colder in the winter. I may have been monologuing a bit. My daughter spoke up: “Mama, it’s kind of weird to have an answer without a question.”

3. “That’s a great question. Let’s find out more together.”

This is a good response to have up your sleeve for complex issues: science, history, race, gender, politics, scary incidents in the news or any time a question catches you off guard.

“We can say, ‘Let’s explore this together, because that question is really a big one,’ ” says Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president for U.S. social impact at Sesame Workshop. ” ‘Let’s go to the library and let’s look at some books. Let’s search for maybe some films or movies or get recommendations from our teachers or librarians.’ Because not everything has to be in the moment.”

Maybe you don’t like the way you initially answered your child’s question. Don’t worry. You can also go back and ask for a do-over: “I am thinking more about what you asked, and I’d like us to find out more of the answer together.”

This approach gets you off the hook — so you don’t feel like you’re making something up that you might regret later. “We often feel that, as parents, we always have to have the answer in the moment,” says Betancourt. “And the thing is, we don’t. And that’s OK. We’re still good parents.”

4. Reassure them that they are safe and loved.

Often when kids grapple with a scary or uncertain subject, their questions will have one fundamental motivation: What’s going to happen to me? Will I be safe? Will I be taken care of? Those are the questions you need to answer, even if they aren’t being asked explicitly.

If it’s a school shooting in the news, they want to know whether their own school is safe. You can talk about everything that adults are doing to keep them safe.

If it’s a divorce, they need to hear that both parents still love them and that the split is not their fault. In addition, “both parents talking about consistency and routines would be very helpful,” says Sesame’s Betancourt.

If it’s the death of a loved one, says Truglio, “make sure they know that there are many people in their lives who are like family. So you will always be cared for.”

5. Take care of yourself, and don’t be afraid to share your emotions.

We adults need to have our own support system — and time — when we deal with hard things.

“Without taking care of ourselves, it’s very difficult to help our children,” says Betancourt.

For example, if your family has to attend a funeral, you can ask a good friend or extended family member to help shepherd your children, in case they need a moment away from the service or in case you, the bereaved, need a moment to yourself.

But that doesn’t mean we grown-ups have to “wall ourselves off in our grief” or other feelings, Truglio says. Her mother died several years ago, and she says she still experiences moments of grief. Recently, she says, she cried in front of her son and didn’t hesitate to explain, “I’m sad because I miss Grandma.”

That simple statement is really helpful for kids, says Anderson of the Child Mind Institute. “We don’t tell parents to suppress emotions. If a parent is feeling emotional, it is actually great for their own child’s emotional functioning for a parent to label and self-disclose.”

Listen to all our Parenting: Difficult Conversations episodes here.

If you like this article, check our other offerings from Life Kit, NPR’s family of podcasts for navigating your life, from personal finances to diet and exercise to raising kids. Sign up for the newsletter to learn more, and follow @NPRLifeKit on Twitter. Email us at lifekit@npr.org.

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Unicorn Cake Pops

I’ve been horsing around in the kitchen making these colorful cuties!

They were inspired by …What?!?!? … UNICORN HORN gold sprinkles that Sweet Sugarbelle sent me. OMG! So, so cute! And obviously when I saw these I knew I had to make cake pops with them!

Need some basic cake pop instructions? No problem. Get the how-to here.

Then, once you’ve rolled your cake and frosting into balls, follow the instructions below to make Unicorns.

Shape the rolled balls into horse heads. You can use wax paper to smooth the sides and help you shape them. Basically, I rolled into a long cylinder first, then bent it and reshaped the base to be thicker and the nose to be a little narrower.

To finish the horse head shape, dip some white or light-colored coated sunflower seeds in melted candy coating and then place them in position for ears. Let them dry completely and then place the heads in the freezer for about 10-15 minutes to firm up. Once firm, transfer them to the fridge to remain chilled, but not frozen.

Now, breakout the cutest sprinkles ever from Sweet Sugarbelle so you have them handy when dipping your pops. Alternatively, you can make your own unicorn horns by shaping fondant into tapered thin cylinders and then twisting them together.

Okay, let’s get to dipping. Remove 1-2 shaped cake pops at a time from the fridge. Carefully submerge the pop into a small, deep bowl of melted and fluid white candy coating. Remove and gently tap off any excess. And then before the coating dries, insert a unicorn sprinkle in position for the horn.

Let them dry completely before continuing to decorate.

I used three colors of melted candy coating for the mane, but one color would be just as cute.

Start at the bottom and work in sections to apply candy coating so it looks like the unicorn mane falls on top of itself. Use a toothpick to apply the coating and layer as you go. It helps to let the coating cool and thicken slightly to hold it’s shape. Apply all the blue to the pops first and let dry. Then apply the yellow, and then the pink. Go back and tweak with more and varying thicknesses of coating if needed.

So these are mane-ly adorable!

To finish the faces, draw on eyelashes and nostrils with an Americolor black edible-ink writing pen. Use a thin paint brush to draw on pink luster dust.

Love them!!!

Hope you enjoy them, too!

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Anger Can Be Contagious — Here’s How To Stop The Spread

Even if you’re not aware of it, it’s likely that your emotions will influence someone around you today.

This can happen during our most basic exchanges, say on your commute to work. “If someone smiles at you, you smile back at them,” says sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Yale University. “That’s a very fleeting contagion of emotion from one person to another.”

But it doesn’t stop there. Emotions can spread through social networks almost like the flu or a cold. And the extent to which emotions can cascade is eye-opening.

For instance, Christakis’ research has shown that if you start to become happier with your life, a friend living close by has a 25 percent higher chance of becoming happy too. And your partner is more likely to feel better as well. The happiness can even spread to people to whom you’re indirectly connected.

To document this, Christakis and his colleagues mapped out the face-to-face interactions of about 5,000 people living in one town over the course of 32 years. Their emotional ups and downs were documented with periodic surveys. “We were able to show that as one person became happy or sad, it rippled through the network,” Christakis says.

It’s not just happiness that spreads. Unhappiness and anger can be contagious too.

And you don’t have to be in the same house or city to catch someone else’s emotions. There’s evidence that emotional contagion can spread through our digital interactions too.

Say you’re in a negative mood, and you text your partner. A research study, dubbed, “I’m Sad You’re Sad,” documented that in these types of text exchanges, your partner is likely to both sense your emotion and mirror it.

So, just how far does this go? A study of nearly 700,000 Facebook users suggests we can pick up on — and mirror — the emotions we encounter in our social media feeds too.

As part of the study, users’ news feeds were altered. Some people in the study began to see more positive posts, while others began to see more negative posts.

“We found that when good things were happening in your news feed — to your friends and your family — you also tended to write more positively and less negatively,” says Jeff Hancock, a communications researcher at Stanford University and author the two studies on digital interactions

And the reverse was true too. Viewing more negative posts prompted people to write more sad or angry things. Overall, the effects were very small, compared with what has been documented in face-to-face interactions, “but [the study] suggested that emotions can move through networks through contagion,” Hancock says.

A lot of us have seen this play out on our social media feeds, especially on Twitter. Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel pokes fun at angry tweets by asking celebrities and famous athletes to read aloud the mean things that have been tweeted about them. “Draymond Green’s jump shot is almost as ugly as his face,” NBA player Draymond Green read to an audience last June. “Whoa!” the audience responded.

It’s funny in the moment. But when you’re on the receiving end of a personal attack, it’s hurtful. And it increases the likelihood that you’ll lash out in return.

One study finds there may be a little bit of troll in each of us. If you read a nasty message from a troll that dishes out sarcasm or a personal attack and you happen to be in a bad mood, the research shows you’re more likely to copy the troll-like behavior.

Bottom line: It’s easier to be mean from behind a screen. The rules of face-to-face interactions don’t exist. “There are fewer cues,” Hancock says. You don’t see or hear the person on the receiving end of your tweet or post. “That makes it a little harder to view you as a person,” he says.

This is what happened to a Twitter user named Michael Beatty who lives in Alabama. He’s 65 and served in the military during the Vietnam War. Earlier this year, he got ticked off when he read a tweet written by comedian and actor Patton Oswalt. It was a negative tweet about President Trump.

“So I did a knee-jerk reaction,” Beatty told us. ” I sent him two tweets back.”

Beatty says he told Oswalt: “I enjoyed seeing your character in [the movie] Blade: Trinity die so horribly.” In another tweet he poked fun at the actor’s height.

Looking back, Beatty says, “it was harsh, uncalled for, embarrassing.”

Patton. You have humbled me to the point where I can barely compose my words. You have caused me to take pause and reflect on how harmful words from my mouth could result in such an outpouring. Thank you for this and I will pass this on to my cousin who needs help. A cascade. pic.twitter.com/6Is7KflPeY

— Michael Beatty (@MichaelBeatty) January 24, 2019

And Oswalt’s response? The actor scrolled through Beatty’s feed and learned that he had some serious health issues. After a long hospital stay, he had medical bills piling up.

Next thing Beatty knew, Oswalt had donated $2,000 to Beatty’s GoFundMe account and encouraged his millions of followers to follow his lead. “This dude just attacked me on Twitter and I joked back but then I looked at his timeline and he’s in a lot of trouble health-wise,” Oswalt tweeted. “I’d be pissed off too. He’s been dealt some s***** cards — let’s deal him some good ones.”

Beatty began to hear from Oswalt’s followers. Some donated money; others sent encouraging messages. His GoFundMe account grew to about $50,000.

Oswalt’s generosity spread. “It had a large cascade effect,” Beatty says. “I honestly, truly thought I was dreaming and this couldn’t happen in real life.”

One act of kindness led to the next.

“I realized that knee-jerk reactions to things [are] not the way to go,” Beatty says. It led him to slow down and reflect. “What kind of person have I been?” he asked himself.

I want to thank everyone who came to my aid with generous outpourings- and also to @pattonoswalt without whom I would not be the recipient of so much love and support. I'm not a man who ever cries but I had to wait to send this. And to quote Stuart on Big Bang "meat tonight"! pic.twitter.com/r4Kc9zYk7E

— Michael Beatty (@MichaelBeatty) January 24, 2019

He says when he wrote those angry tweets, he was in a bad place, angry at himself for letting his health deteriorate: “It was easy to snap back and snarl.”

But Beatty says the empathy shown toward him changed him. He has begun to think, “People are good.” He realizes that politics divide people, but one on one, “people are caring, generous, helpful.”

Over the last month, he says, he has felt his anger fade away. This manifests in lots of small ways. For instance, he used to have serious road rage. But now “if someone wants to get over, I’ll wave them in,” Beatty says. “I have changed.”

This story reminds us of what we should already know (and hopefully remember from watching Mister Rogers): “It’s good for us to be kind,” Hancock says.

Not only is it good for the world around us, but it makes us feel a lot better and disarms anger.

“There’s lots of scientific evidence that when you are kind or express gratitude you get all kinds of psychological benefits,” says Hancock.

So next time you’re tempted to respond to an angry post, maybe you’ll remember this story.

Anger leads to more anger. But a single act of kindness can help stop the spread.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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More Green Spaces in Childhood Associated With Happier Adulthood

The experience of natural spaces, brimming with greenish light, the smells of soil and the quiet fluttering of leaves in the breeze can calm our frenetic modern lives. It’s as though our very cells can exhale when surrounded by nature, relaxing our bodies and minds.

Some people seek to maximize the purported therapeutic effects of contact with the unbuilt environment by embarking on sessions of forest bathing, slowing down and becoming mindfully immersed in nature.

But in a rapidly urbanizing world, green spaces are shrinking as our cities grow out and up. Scientists are working to understand how green spaces, or lack of them, can affect our mental health.

A study published Monday in the journal PNAS details what the scientists say is the largest investigation of the association between green spaces and mental health.

Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark found that growing up near vegetation is associated with an up to 55 percent lower risk of mental health disorders in adulthood. Kristine Engemann, the biologist who led the study, combined decades of satellite imagery with extensive health and demographic data of the Danish population to investigate the mental health effects of growing up near greenery.

“The scale of this study is quite something,” says Kelly Lambert, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond who studies the psychological effects of natural spaces. Smaller studies have hinted that lack of green space increases the risk of mood disorders and schizophrenia and can even affect cognitive development.

But more practical factors, like socioeconomic status, family history of mental illness, and urbanization can also have large effects on mental health. Wealthier families, for instance, might be able to afford to live in neighborhoods with more access to nature and also have access to other wealth-related resources that could enhance childhood development.

To isolate the effects of nature from so many potential confounding factors requires a large and rich data set. The Danish Civil Registration System is just that.

Created in 1968, the system assigns a personal identification number to every Danish citizen and records gender, place of birth and parents’ PINs. A PIN links individuals across multiple databases, including mental health records, and is updated with changes of residence. “It’s an incredibly rich source of data,” says Engemann. The researchers’ final data set comprised nearly 1 million Danes who were born between 1985 and 2003 and for whom they had longitudinal records of mental health, socioeconomic status and place of residence.

Satellite data extending back to 1985 allowed the researchers to calculate vegetation density around each residence. Unfortunately these data can’t distinguish an old-growth forest from an overgrown field, but in general the more greenery that is packed into a plot of land, the higher the vegetation density.

Armed with these data, the researchers compared the risk of developing 16 different mental health disorders in adulthood with how much green space surrounded each child’s residence. And because they had yearly income, work history and education level, they could weigh the relative contribution of green space against socioeconomics of the parents and neighborhood.

After accounting for those potential confounding factors, the researchers found that growing up near green space was associated with a lower risk of developing psychiatric illness in adulthood by anywhere from 15 percent to 55 percent, depending on the specific illness. For example, alcoholism was most strongly associated with lack of green space growing up, and risk of developing an intellectual disability was not associated with green space.

The strength of the association between green space and risk of psychiatric disorder was similar to other factors known to influence mental health, like socioeconomic status. According to Engemann, it is estimated that about 20 percent of the adult Danish population will suffer from poor psychiatric health within any given year, making these slight changes in risk potentially important.

“Green space seemed to have an association that was similar in strength to other known influences on mental health, like history of mental health disorders in the family, or socioeconomic status,” says Engemann. What’s more, the effect of green space was “dosage dependent” — the more of one’s childhood spent close to greenery, the lower the risk of mental health problems in adulthood.

Engemann cautions that the study does have limitations: “It’s purely correlational, so we can’t definitively say that growing up near green space reduces risk of mental illness.” Establishing cause and effect for variables like these is incredibly difficult, according to Engemann.

Still, the breadth and depth of data used for this analysis add to the circumstantial evidence linking green space and mental health. “The effect is remarkable,” says Lambert. “If we were talking about a new medicine that had this kind of effect the buzz would be huge, but these results suggest that being able to go for a walk in the park as a kid is just as impactful.”

The greenery association with better mental health held across both rural and urban areas of Denmark. “You could grow up in very urban areas but still have reduced risk if you’re surrounded by green spaces,” says Engemann.

The study also can’t address how different kinds of green space — and how people use it — affect mental health. Are forests more impactful than sparer park spaces? Do you need to actively use these spaces, or is simply growing up near greenery enough? These are questions Engemann hopes future studies can answer.

One large question remains: Why? What is it about growing up near trees, shrubs and grass that seems to boost resilience against developing mental health problems?

Lambert suggests the explanation might run deep, evolutionarily speaking. She says we evolved surrounded by green space, and something about being exposed to our “native” environment might have powerful physiological and psychological effects.

Additionally, more green space might simply encourage more social interaction, exercise, or decrease air and noise pollution, all of which are known to impact mental health. Even exposure to a wider diversity of microbes in childhood could play a role.

“There are a lot of potential mechanisms to follow up on, but generally I think this study is tremendously important,” says Lambert. “It suggests that something as simple as better city planning could have profound impacts on the mental health and well-being of all of us.”

Jonathan Lambert is an intern on NPR’s Science Desk. You can follow him on Twitter: @evolambert

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Dr. Seuss Books Can Be Racist, But Students Keep Reading Them

This week, millions of students and teachers are taking part in Read Across America, a national literacy program celebrated annually around the birthday of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. For over 20 years, teachers and students have donned costumes — often the Cat in the Hat’s iconic red and white striped hat — and devoured books like Green Eggs and Ham.

But some of Seuss’ classics have been criticized for the way they portray people of color. In And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example, a character described as Chinese has two lines for eyes, carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice, and wears traditional Japanese-style shoes. In If I Ran the Zoo, two men said to be from Africa are shown shirtless, shoeless and wearing grass skirts as they carry an exotic animal. Outside of his books, the author’s personal legacy has come into question, too — Seuss wrote an entire minstrel show in college and performed as the main character in full blackface.

In light of this, the National Education Association rebranded Read Across America in 2017, backing away from Seuss’ books and Seuss-themed activities. It introduced a new theme of “celebrating a nation of diverse readers.” Its website now highlights works by and about people of color.

But in many schools and libraries, the week is still synonymous with all things Seuss. Classrooms are decorated in colorful red and blue fish and children dress up as their favorite iconic characters, like Thing 1 and Thing 2, dreaming of the places they’ll go.

That tension between Seuss and Seuss-free classrooms is emblematic of a bigger debate playing out across the country — should we continue to teach classic books that may be problematic, or eschew them in favor of works that more positively represent of people of color?

Part of the reason this debate is so complicated is the staying power of classic books. Think back to the works lining your school bookshelves. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the N-word appears more than 200 times. But for generations, people have argued that the book is vital to understanding race relations in America in the late 1800s. And the trope of Jews as greedy and money-hungry is pretty clear in The Merchant of Venice. Yet Shakespeare is hailed for his keen understanding of human nature that continues to be relevant today.

Jaya Saxena, a writer whose work examines inclusivity in young adult literature, is in favor of revamping the canon. But she understands why teachers might continue to teach it. She says when she was in high school, her teachers used the classics to teach literary devices and styles of writing, not necessarily to prioritize certain narratives or worldviews. The Merchant of Venice, for example, is a prime example of allegory.

“The point was, here’s what this book does well,” Saxena says. “Maybe they weren’t everybody’s favorite books, but they were good examples of … the craft of writing.”

And when planning lessons from year to year, it’s easier for teachers to prioritize books they’re already familiar with. But when these books include offensive stereotypes, teachers have to decide whether to continue teaching them and how.

“Not engaging [with problematic texts] at all runs too great a risk of not learning or understanding where the problems lie,” says Larissa Pahomov, who teaches English at a high school in Philadelphia. “I believe there is a way to look at material that is stereotypical [and] racist and identify it for what it is, and then hopefully, in doing so, neutralize its effect.”

When Pahomov read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with her seniors last fall, she was careful to teach students how to read the work through a critical lens that took the author’s background into account. In class discussions, she made sure to emphasize that context to her students as they examined the work.

“What resources did he draw from to write this book, and this character? What has been the Native American reaction to this book specifically? What was the reaction of the psychiatric treatment community? How do we look at it now? What’s the treatment of women? There were so many angles to discussing it,” she says.

Pahomov notes that because her students are teenagers, having these conversations is possible. But books geared toward younger kids? Those discussions can get a lot more complicated.

Which brings us back to Dr. Seuss.

In a study published earlier this month in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens found that only 2 percent of the human characters in Seuss’ books were people of color. And all of those characters, they say, were “depicted through racist caricatures.”

Those caricatures have a potent effect, even at an early age. Research shows that even at the age of 3, children begin to form racial biases, and by the age of 7, those biases become fixed.

“One of the reasons for that is the images and experiences that they’re exposed to regarding marginalized groups and people of color,” Stephens says. “And so [Seuss’ books] being mainstream, and being spread out all over the world, has large implications.”

If kids open books and “the images they see [of themselves] are distorted, negative [or] laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society in which they are a part,” Rudine Sims Bishop, a scholar of children’s literature, wrote in a 1990 article.

But when they see themselves represented in a positive way, it can have a similarly powerful effect.

That’s one of the reasons first-grade teacher Emily Petersen says she won’t be reading Dr. Seuss with her students this week, or ever.

“If I’m looking at a 6-year-old and choosing what story [I’m] going to teach them how to read through, I’m definitely going to choose the one that affirms and celebrates identities in a new way,” she says.

For other teachers who want to help students affirm their identities, the NEA is offering grants and resources to help schools highlight literary works by and about people of color.

But the forces that have kept Dr. Seuss on the bookshelf for decades are strong. Often, schools plan their Read Across America events months in advance. Costumes, books and activities from previous years are ready to go. It can be difficult for teachers to deviate from these plans, especially when they have celebrated in the same way year after year after year. And with over 650 million of his books in circulation worldwide, just like his infamous cat, it looks like Dr. Seuss will keep coming back.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Strategies To Foster A Sense Of Belonging In Your Classroom

When students feel they belong at school they also feel respected and ready to learn. That’s why teachers work so hard to create a class environment where every student feels able to contribute and be heard.

“As human beings, one of the most essential needs we have is the need to belong,” said Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute in an Edutopia video series on the science of learning. “When that sense of belonging is there, children throw themselves into the learning environment and when that sense of belonging is not there, children will alienate, they will marginalize, they will step back.”

Classroom norms are one way to make sure everyone is on the same page about how to treat one another in academic spaces, and they’re even more powerful when kids come up with them.

“To begin nearly every class, I start with the norms,” said middle school social studies teacher Bobby Shaddox. “We developed this list of about ten adjectives. The classes that go really well are the classes when I start off reflecting on the norms and using those norms to articulate how our class will run well.”

In addition to giving students a shared language to talk about the learning community, teachers can use specific strategies like “I notice, I wonder” to engage learners in a topic no matter their starting point. With many learning needs in a classroom, this practice gives students time to think to themselves, as well as time to learn together. It also builds confidence because there are so many entry points for noticing and wondering.

” ‘I notice, I wonder’ just brings the conversation to a place where all people can contribute,” said math teacher Ann Young. “It gives everyone a voice. It allows kids to listen to other people’s ideas before they do the analysis. So, it’s like a way to collect information collaboratively, but allowing time to think first.”

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How to Grow Stronger Muscles with Fruit

No one wants to waste time during their workouts, so why would we waste time eating something that won't fuel our muscles to become stronger and leaner?  Muscle building foods are a great way of getting a strong, healthy body you desire. They are nutritious with high-quality proteins making it a great way of meeting …

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Fox Cake Recipe

How to Improve Your Gut Flora with Probiotics

It’s important to have the perfect balance of both good and bad bacteria in your gut. Here’s how you can make sure that you keep the good kind of bacteria where it should be. How to Heal Your Gut If you are eating a lot of sugar, you are feeding the wrong kind of bacteria …

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The Best 5 Prebiotic Loaded Food for a Healthy Gut

Prebiotics are indigestible food ingredients that stimulate the growth and maintenance of the gut. They also feed and support the growth of beneficial bacteria, also known as probiotics, in your large intestine. What are Prebiotics? And What are their Benefits? Fructooligosaccharides are prebiotics compounds that are used to manufacture prebiotic supplements, for example, inulin and …

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Top 20 Ways to Avoid Bloating

Nobody likes that bloated, miserable feeling you get after eating certain foods. Many of us find ourselves asking, ‘What causes bloating in the stomach?' And, sometimes this bloat is simply caused by temporary gas. And infrequently it can be a sign of a much more dangerous problem. Since bloating usually occurs because of the way …

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How to Choose the Perfect Probiotic Supplement for you

Finding the right type of probiotic for your body is very important. But unfortunately, it’s not as easy as you want it to be. There is a large range of probiotics, all with different ingredients and different things they do for your body. Just try Googling ‘probiotics' and you'll find yourself in a rabbit hole …

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How Making Time for Mindfulness Helps Students

Not knowing the answer to a question when you’re called on in front of the entire class. Forgetting your homework. The kid behind you pulling your hair. School poses a lot of stressful moments, but how children (and teachers) react to them can make all the difference.

A new study suggests that mindfulness education — lessons on techniques to calm the mind and body — can reduce the negative effects of stress and increase students’ ability to stay engaged, helping them stay on track academically and avoid behavior problems.

While small, the study of sixth-graders at a Boston charter school adds to a still-growing body of research about a role for mindfulness in the classroom. In recent years, the topic has excited researchers and educators alike as a possible tool to help students face both behavioral and academic challenges by reducing anxiety and giving them a new way to handle their feelings and emotions.

The Findings

After finding that students who self-reported mindful habits performed better on tests and had higher grades, researchers with the Boston Charter Research Collaborative — a partnership between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR), MIT, and Transforming Education — wanted to know if school-based mindfulness training could help more students reap similar benefits.

They designed a study focusing on sixth-graders in another Boston-area school. The study, published in a white paper by a team including Martin West of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, showed that sixth-graders who participated in an eight-week mindfulness were less stressed out than their classmates who hadn’t. Practicing mindfulness had helped hone the ability to focus in the moment, expanding students’ capacity to learn and regulate their emotions.

Four times a week, instructors from Calmer Choice, a Massachusetts nonprofit specializing in mindfulness education, taught the group techniques and led them through practices, like focusing on a rock for a minute, then discussing when their mind wandered and refocused on the rock. Another group of sixth-graders took computer coding during that time instead. The students were randomly assigned between the groups.

At the end of the eight weeks, the mindfulness group reported being less stressed than they had been before the mindfulness education, and better able to practice self-control. About half of the students also volunteered for brain scans, and those revealed positive effects for the mindfulness group, too: their amygdalas — the part of the brain that controls emotion — responded less to pictures of fearful faces than they did prior to the mindfulness work, suggesting their brains were less sensitive to negative stimuli, or, in other words, that they were less prone to get stressed out and lose focus. The group who attended coding classes didn’t see the same benefits.

The findings suggest that the mindfulness instruction helped boost students’ attention skills, as well as develop coping mechanisms for stress. The authors maintain that this kind of evidence could be especially useful in efforts to support students suffering from trauma and other adversities that trigger stress in the body, hurting students’ ability to succeed.

Bringing Mindfulness to Your School

The paper includes recommendations from educators and leaders of mindfulness-based education programs for implementing mindfulness in your own school:

• Build consistency and school-wide buy-in. Make time for staff and students to learn about the theory and science behind mindfulness, so students know how to talk about mindfulness and understand its purpose. Creating consistent space for mindfulness practice – like guided meditations — and theory in the school day can positively affect the entire school culture, emphasizing acceptance, self-care, and empathy.
• Provide teachers with dedicated time to engage in mindfulness practice themselves. In order to help students reap benefits, teachers also need time and support in adopting it. Research has also shown mindfulness to be helpful to teachers, improving their own emotional wellbeing, helping them understand student perspective, and freeing them up to be more effective in the classroom.
• Allow students to make their own time for mindfulness. Encourage students’ awareness of their own emotions by allowing and encouraging them to identify times when they can use and practice mindfulness. In order to adopt mindfulness as a tool for mental health and happiness, students have to have the space and time to practice it.

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9 Simple Ways to Feel Younger at 60 Years Old and Beyond

This year ushers in another year of wear and tear for our minds and bodies. But watching another tick by doesn’t mean you have to feel any older. There are plenty of things older adults can do to turn back the clock and make another year older feel like another year younger. If you’re 60 …

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15 Easy Vegetarian Lunch Ideas

How Bad Bacteria in Your Guts is Making You Sick

If you are experiencing digestive problems along with some discomfort, you could have an imbalance of good and bad bacteria in your gut. Many ongoing health problems are overlooked, and the health problems the person is having can be related to many different things. And sometimes those things can lead to worse things if not …

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How to Treat Chronic Pain with Medical Marijuana

A medical marijuana doctor says that chronic pain is characterized by pain lasting for at least 12 weeks and maybe even longer for some patients. It can make you feel a dull or sharp pain that leads to an aching or burning sensation in the affected areas. To understand the condition better, let’s discuss its …

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Coleslaw & Swiss Melt Sandwich

Best Coleslaw Recipe

How Schools Spark Excitement for Learning with Role-Playing Games

Michael Matera’s students don’t merely learn about medieval Europe, they live it. Albeit, with a few monsters and enchanted items thrown in the mix.

The Milwaukee teacher’s Grade 6 history class is an ongoing role-playing game called Realm of Nobles, where students join guilds, earn achievements, make trades and wage the occasional epic battle in an imaginary medieval kingdom. Matera has played the game for years, and maintains that the fusion of history, fantasy, narrative and role-play is an effective formula to engage students in learning.

“The excitement and the pride in their accomplishments are all through the roof. I love seeing kids gaining real-world skills, taking risks and learning from defeat in this gamified class,” said Matera, who wrote Explore Like a Pirate: Gamification and Game-Inspired Course Design to Engage, Enrich and Elevate Your Learners, a manual for teachers who aspire to design their classes as games.

A growing number of educators like Matera are remodeling their classes by fusing game elements to their instructional environments. But, does switching grades for experience points and homework for quests amount only to cosmetic surgery? Is school merely being “reskinned” with a new paint job without fundamentally altering the age-old classroom rituals?

The Rise of the EduLARP

The use of simulations and role-play in education is not a recent development. Model United Nations, historical re-enactments, mock trials and other types of dramatic simulations have been in the teacher toolbox for decades. What is new, however, is that the simulation is packaged as a game and sustained for an extended period, often spanning the entire school year.

This particular union of role-play, narrative, and game owes no small debt to Dungeons & Dragons, the classic role-playing game (RPG) that is enjoying a recent resurgence. D&D pioneered and popularized an array of RPG conventions that are now video game and tabletop staples, like experience points (XP), levels, loot, character classes and boss fights.

In the mid-’70s some eager D&D fans donned armor, weapons, gowns and cloaks, and transplanted RPG elements to the real world in the form of live-action role-play, or LARPs. Players stay in character as they interact and battle in elaborate adventures set in real-life forests and fields that evoke medieval fantasy. The popularity of LARPs in Scandinavia inspired a pair of Danish educators to open the Østerskov School that teaches with edularps. Today, edularps are found in schools in Sweden, Finland and Denmark, and even some U.S. schools have jumped into the fray.

Sanne Harder, a game designer and educator who worked at the Østerskov School, thinks that edularps are not only a fun way to learn, but also a better way to learn.

“When I choose to use role-play as a means of teaching, it is because it is an excellent way of organizing teaching, not because the hobby appeals to its fans,” wrote Harder. “In the 21st century, being a teacher is not about teaching pupils facts, it is about helping them internalize knowledge, skills, and competencies.”

Sarah Lynne Bowman and Anne Standiford conducted a 2016 mixed methods study of edularps at an L.A. charter school and found that they encouraged “greater motivation, engagement, interaction with peers, collaboration, and comprehension of material,” which is promising, but the area is new and the research nascent.

Choosing a Road to Victory

Edularps, and other class-as-game variants like alternate reality games (ARGs), pervasive games and gamified class, are popping up in schools, universities and even camps across North America. While the sword-and-sorcery motif remains prevalent, some educators have diversified into themes and settings that better fit their learning goals.

While still a high school science teacher, University of Connecticut assistant professor Stephen Slota designed a unit-length game to teach human reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases. “The students worked in teams of three to control a character avatar in a fictitious village, and their goal was to engage in an epidemiological study of the area by investigating locales and speaking to non-player characters as enacted by the instructor,” said Slota, who edited Exploding the Castle: Rethinking How Video Games & Game Mechanics Can Shape The Future Of Education, a collection of game-based learning essays.

Slota has since developed half a dozen class-as-games for subjects as far-flung as education technology, Latin, psychology and biology. Matera also sets one of his games during the Cold War, and the edularps at the Østerskov School involve a wide range of themes and settings.

The games tend to be flexible and students are able to alter the unfolding experience through the choices they make. This freedom to shape their circumstances and the accompanying sense of agency is a big part of what engages them in learning.

“I’ve found — both anecdotally and in my research — that freedom to push and pull at the game’s narrative and ruleset provides students with a sense of greater personal ownership, and therefore greater depth of knowledge about content than usually accompanies schoolwork,” said Slota.

Matera also stresses the importance of student agency, and feels that it marks a significant departure from typical classroom dynamics.

“Games have clear objects, but no one set path to that victory. This is where strategy comes into play. An RPG, as with many well-designed games, allows for the players to create their own path to victory,” said Matera. “This level of customization and personalization feels different than traditional school because it is different. Students have an opportunity to create their own experience within the game. They earn badges, items and power-ups that allow them to have a unique game characters. This leads to endless strategies, trades and allegiances to help successfully make it through the Realm.”

Houston-area teacher Kade Wells also personalizes his class by using a D&D-style character class system. He gives his students a basic personality test and, based on the results, assigns them one of four roles designed to support classroom management.

“Protectors keep the peace and manage group outbursts; Initiators get things ready and help to get materials, sharpen pencils and put things away; Diplomats help group members and facilitate all processes and are ultimately responsible for the group’s behavior; Sages keep the records, help with attendance, make sure that things are orderly and accounted for,” said Wells, who has found the class system empowers his students to self-regulate and take greater ownership of their environment.

There’s an App for That

Matera, Slota and Wells design their games from scratch, cannibalizing a pastiche of web applications, pen-and-paper elements, learning management systems, Google apps, spreadsheets and any other available tools that they can bend to their playful purposes. But teachers who don’t have the time, confidence or knowledge to dive into the DIY approach can turn to commercial software designed to help educators run their classes as games.

Rezzly’s 3D GameLab, the University of Michigan’s GradeCraft, NEXED’s Answerables and Classcraft are gameful learning management systems that have tapped into the class-as-game zeitgeist to help educators keep track of quests, levels, experience points, badges and other game features.

“They will do anything for XP [experience points] and GP [gold pieces] to level up their avatar,” said Carrie Casey, a Wisconsin middle-school science teacher who uses Classcraft. “I have seen some of my students who will not hand in work — work hard to get their work in for me so they get XP and do not disappoint their team.”

It has also helped Casey reach some challenging students: “I have connected to them through gaming where no other teacher has connected to them that year.”

Canadian teacher Justin Matheson says that his Grade 6 students loved the sword-and-sorcery motif, and he credits Classcraft’s video game qualities for fostering perseverance. “With video games, people get to a point where things become increasingly difficult and they experience repeated failure. Then, you are encouraged to try again and again, and to seek help through outside resources to find success. This is the most notable benefit that I have seen in my class. My students see difficulties as speed bumps instead of roadblocks.”

Grafting Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG elements to classrooms can have an effect that delves much deeper than mere optics. Games and classes are both systems that operate with rules. When the rules that typically govern the class are hacked by the rules of the game, a fundamental shift can take place. Games offer a valuable palette of functions and features that can be creatively repurposed to rewrite some of education’s more problematic operations. Educators who are not satisfied with business as usual can tap into the power of play and design the change they want to see.

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7 Benefits of Working Out in the Morning to Lose Weight

When it comes to living a happy and healthy life, it’s increasingly easy to spend a lot of time making the wrong choices. For example, most of us prefer to do exercises in the evening, treating it as the last ‘job’ of the day. While that might sound like inspired advice, it’s actually anything but. …

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Why Adding Probiotics to Your Lifestyle is a Good Idea

Have you thought about adding probiotics to your diet? You create a good and healthy lifestyle for yourself when you add probiotics to your life. Luckily, probiotics come in many different and delicious foods. Some of those foods include pickles, sauerkraut, Kombucha tea, and yogurt. On top of eating healthy probiotic foods, supplementing with a …

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Healthy Banana Bread Muffins

A Complete Guide to Vipassana Meditation for Beginners

Be it from reading books and magazines or from your friend, you most definitely heard about the benefits of practicing meditation daily. After all, most studies show that doing meditation can be quite a challenging but exciting new practice which can improve not only your physical but also your mental muscles. Vipassana, which is one …

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Eat Your Way to Wellness: How to Change to a Healthy Diet

Healthy eating doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to stay thin by depriving yourself of your favorite dishes. Instead, it’s about improving your health by avoiding meals that could adversely affect your energy and mood. Sometimes when a doctor gives you diet advice, you are left overwhelmed by the type of foods you have to …

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What are Probiotics? And Why do they keep us healthy?

Probiotics are live bacteria that are good for your health but especially good for your digestive system. When we think of bacteria we think about how they cause diseases and about how harmful bacteria can be. But the bacteria found in probiotics are helpful to your body – most specifically, your gut. They will help …

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Basic Knife Skills for Home Cooks

How to Make Fun and Fitness Go Together

If you lack the motivation to work out or engage in sports and fitness activities, lifting heavy weights like Ronnie Coleman or running miles like Mo Farah won’t come naturally to you. On a daily basis, many people struggle or find the motivation to exercise, and that's the reason why some go to the gym, …

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What is Adrenal Fatigue and What to Do if You Have It

There are times when people get tired and can't find an immediate and obvious reason to explain the cause. Sometimes it is overwhelming stress caused by an unpredictable situation which depletes your body and mind from the strength and stamina you have always wanted. When you start struggling to wake up in the morning, even …

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When Teens Threaten Violence, A Community Responds With Compassion

Triple Cherry Cheesecake

Handling Stress Before It Happens – the Game Plan

Stress is something that everyone in the world will experience. Some of us deal with a lot of stress – others, not as much. But one thing that we all have in common is that we all have a reaction to stress. When something happens to cause stress, we’ll react in either positive or negative …

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School Shooters: What’s Their Path To Violence?

It’s hard to empathize with someone who carries out a school shooting. The brutality of their crimes is unspeakable. Whether the shootings were at Columbine, at Sandy Hook, or in Parkland, they have traumatized students and communities across the U.S.

Psychologist John Van Dreal understands that. He is the director of safety and risk management at Salem-Keizer Public Schools in Oregon, a state that has had its share of school shootings. In 2014, about 60 miles from Salem, where Van Dreal is based, a 15-year-old boy shot one student and a teacher at his high school before killing himself.

“Someone went out of their way to target and kill children who look like our children, teachers who look like our teachers — and did it for no other reason than to hurt them,” says Van Dreal. “And that’s very personal.”

Still, Van Dreal and other psychologists and law enforcement agents do spend a lot of time thinking about what it’s like to be one of these school shooters, because, they say, that is key to prevention.

How many school shootings?

Tallying up all shootings and instances of school violence is difficult, researchers say; there’s no official count, and various organizations differ in their definitions of school shootings.

For example, an open source database put together by Mother Jones suggests there have been 11 mass shootings (where four or more people died) in schools since the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in 1999, and 134 children and adults died in those attacks.

Psychologists and law enforcement agencies have been analyzing how these sorts of multivictim attacks came to be, because of what they tell us about many other people who are at risk of becoming violent in schools and the ways we might intervene early, before anger becomes violence.

In the two decades since the Columbine High School shooting, researchers have learned a lot about school shooters. For one thing, many are themselves students, or former students, at the schools they attack. A significant majority tend to be teenagers or young adults.

“There’s no one thing, [but] maybe a couple of dozen different things that come together to put someone on the path to committing an act of mass violence,” says Peter Langman, a clinical psychologist in Allentown, Pa., and the author of two books and several studies about school shootings.

Multiple factors contribute in each case

Most shooters in these cases had led difficult lives, the studies find.

“Adolescent school shooters, there’s no question that they’re struggling and there have been multiple failures in their lives,” says Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who has consulted with the FBI.

Many struggle with psychological problems, Meloy says.

“We know that mental health issues are very much in the mix,” he says. “The child might be just, you know, very depressed. We also found in one of our early studies that you’ve got this curious combination of both depression and paranoia.”

Studies by the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service have also found that many of the shooters were feeling desperate before the event.

“Whether or not they’ve been diagnosed, or whether or not they’re severely mentally ill, something is going on that could [have been] addressed through some kind of treatment,” says Langman.

But most never got that treatment.

The role of mental health problems

Mental health issues don’t cause school shootings, Van Dreal emphasizes. After all, only a tiny, tiny percentage of kids with psychological issues go on to become school shooters.

But mental health problems are a risk factor, he says, because they can decrease one’s ability to cope with other stresses. And studies have shown that most school shooters have led particularly stressful lives.

Many, though not all, of the perpetrators have experienced childhood traumas such as physical or emotional abuse, and unstable families, with violent, absent or alcoholic parents or siblings, for example. And most have experienced significant losses.

For example, the defendant in the case of the Parkland, Fla., shooting last year had lost his adopted mother to complications from the flu just a couple of months before the school attack. His adopted father had died when he was a little boy.

Feeling like an outcast at school may also play a role.

“A lot of these people have felt excluded, socially left out or rejected,” says Van Dreal. Studies show that social rejection at school is associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression, aggression and antisocial behavior in children.

A 2004 study by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education found that nearly three-quarters of school shooters had been bullied or harassed at school.

Marginalized kids don’t have anchors at school, says Van Dreal. “They don’t have any adult connection — no one watching out for them. Or no one knows who they are anymore.”

And the absence of social support at the school, Meloy says, is a big risk factor.

“People who do these kinds of targeted attacks don’t feel very good about themselves, or where they’re headed in their lives,” says Van Dreal. “They may wish someone would kill them. Or they may wish they could kill themselves.”

For example, Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine shooting, had been depressed and suicidal two years prior.

“About half of the school shooters I’ve studied have died by suicide in their attack,” says Langman. “It’s often a mix of severe depression and anguish and desperation driving them to end their own lives.”

Of course, most people who feel suicidal don’t kill others.

So what makes a small minority of kids who have mental health issues and thoughts of suicide turn to violence and homicide?

Meloy and Van Dreal think it’s because these individuals had been struggling alone — either because they were unable to ask for help or their cries went unheard when the adults in their lives didn’t realize the child needed support.

When despair turns to anger and a desire for revenge

When someone has been struggling alone for a while and failing, their despair can turn into anger, the researchers say.

“There’s loss. There’s humiliation. There’s anger. There’s blame,” says Meloy.

That sort of anger can lead to homicidal thoughts, Van Dreal says.

They start out fantasizing about revenge, says Meloy.

“So the fantasy is one where the teenager starts to identify with other individuals who have become school shooters and have used violence as a way to solve their problem,” he says.

These days, Meloy adds, it’s easy for a troubled kid to go online and research how previous shooters planned and executed their attacks.

Easy access to guns — one of the biggest risk factors — then turns these fantasies into reality.

Psychologists say these attacks can be prevented — they are often weeks or months in the planning.

The keys to prevention are to spot the earliest behavioral signs that a student is struggling, Langman says, and also to watch for signs that someone may be veering toward violence.

Some signs can seem obvious in hindsight. “So, I’ve stopped being the kid who went to Boy Scouts, and church and loved his grandmother,” Van Dreal says, “and now I want to be that kid with camouflage who’s isolated and attacks people and hurts them.”

But sometimes, even professionals who see the signs miss their significance.

About a year and a half before he attacked students at Columbine High School, Dylan Klebold, who was a gifted student, started to get into trouble.

He and some friends hacked into his school’s computer system. Then, a couple of months later, he and his friend Eric Harris broke into a van and stole some equipment. They were arrested at that point and sent to a diversion program — an alternative to jail for first-time juvenile offenders — that offered counseling and required community service.

Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother and subsequent author of the book A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, tells NPR she was upset and concerned to see the sudden change in her son’s behavior. She says she asked the diversion counselor if his behavior meant something and whether he needed a therapist. The counselor asked Dylan, and Dylan said no.

Sue Klebold says she never realized how deep the problem was.

“The piece that I think I failed [in] is, we tend to underestimate the level of pain that someone may be in,” Klebold tells NPR. “We all have a responsibility to stop and think — someone we love may be suffering, may be in a crisis.”

Beware pitfalls in the search for a solution

The solution, according to psychologists who study kids who become violent, isn’t to expel or suspend a student like Dylan — though that is what happened to him in the fall of 1997, after he hacked into his school’s computer system.

A student like that who’s expelled “can now be bored, can be isolated at home, can be living in a dysfunctional family, and can be ruminating and thinking all the time about how he’s going to avenge what has happened to him,” says Meloy.

Eric Harris, who was Dylan Klebold’s friend and fellow killer that day at Columbine, didn’t seem depressed; he was self-absorbed, lacked empathy and was prone to angry outbursts, according to those who analyzed his journals and earlier behavior.

While Klebold’s journals were “full of loneliness and depression,” Langman says, the writings of Harris were “full of narcissism and rage and rants against people — a lot of contempt.”

Harris’ contempt extended to himself. Significant surgeries during his early teen years to correct a birth condition contributed to self-loathing, Langman’s study of Harris’ journal suggests.

“I have always hated how I looked,” Harris wrote in his journal. “That’s where a lot of my hate grows from.” In his last journal entry, Harris refers to himself as “the weird looking Eric KID.”

“Anyone contemplating getting a gun and killing people needs to be seen as a person in crisis,” says Langman. “And that’s why it’s so important to reach out and connect with that individual.”

Time and time again, psychologists and educators have found that surrounding a young person with the right kind of support and supervision early on can turn most away from violence.

Connecting with these students, listening to them and supporting them, getting them the help they need, these researchers say, can help prevent future attacks and make schools a safer place for all children.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

from MindShift http://bit.ly/2GIg4Ug

How Extra Arts Education at School Boosts Students’ Writing Scores — And Their Compassion

Originally posted on Chalkbeat by Matt Barnum on February 12, 2019

When you’re the big fish, it’s not OK to pick on the little fish just because you can.

That’s an important lesson for everyone. But some Houston first-graders got a particularly vivid demonstration in the form of a musical puppet show, which featured fish puppets and an underlying message about why it’s wrong to bully others.

The show left an impression on the students at Codwell Elementary, according to their teacher Shelea Bennett. “You felt like you were in that story,” she said. “By the end of the story they were able to answer why [bullying] wasn’t good, and why you shouldn’t act this way.”

The puppeteer’s show was part of an effort to expand arts education in Houston elementary and middle schools. Now, a new study shows that the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students’ compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students’ scores on writing tests.

It’s just the latest study to find that giving students more access to the arts offers measurable benefits. And adding time for dance, theater, or visual arts isn’t at odds with traditional measures of academic success, according to the research — which amounts to one of the largest gold-standard studies on arts education ever conducted.

“Arts learning experiences benefit students in terms of social, emotional, and academic outcomes,” write researchers Dan Bowen of Texas A&M and Brian Kisida of the University of Missouri.

The study, released Tuesday through the Houston Education Research Consortium, looked at elementary and middle schools — which predominantly served low-income students of color — that expressed interest in participating in Houston’s Arts Access Initiative. There appeared to be significant need: nearly a third of elementary and middle schools in the district reported lacking a full-time arts teacher.

Too many schools were interested, which was bad news for some schools but good news for researchers. They worked with the district to randomly assign some schools to participate, with about 5,000 students in each group. The schools in the program offered students nearly eight “school-community arts partnerships,” compared to just three at comparison schools.

What that looked like ran the gamut. Schools were encouraged to provide some exposure to theater, dance, music, and visual arts, and that took the form of on-campus performances, field trips, artists in residence, and other programs outside of school hours.

When the researchers compared the two groups of schools, they looked at academics but also responses to surveys that asked students whether they agreed with statements like, “I want to help people who get treated badly,” “School work is interesting,” and “I plan to go to college.”

The positive effects on writing test scores, discipline, and compassion were small to moderate. Students’ disciplinary infraction rates, for instance, fell by 3.6 percentage points. But these results are particularly encouraging because the cost to schools was fairly small — about $15 per student. (This did not include costs borne by the program as whole or by the cultural institutions that donated time.)

On other measures, the initiative didn’t make a clear difference. That includes reading and math scores as well as survey questions about school engagement and college aspirations. Still, the survey results were mostly positive, though largely not statistically significant.

“It could have come out negative. It could have been, look, they did this extra stuff where they learned more in these other domains but their math scores went down, so here’s the tradeoff,” said Kisida, one of the researchers. “We don’t see evidence of a tradeoff.”

That’s especially notable because some have feared that pressure to raise test scores has squeezed arts out of the curriculum in many schools (though there’s limited empirical evidence on whether that’s actually happened).

Other recent studies on field trips to the theater and museums have also found encouraging results, boosting students’ political tolerance, interest in the arts, critical examination of art, and, in one case, math and reading test scores. And since low-income children are less likely than their wealthier peers to access things like plays and art galleries over the summer, schools are critical providers of those cultural experiences and the accompanying benefits.

The latest study came to a mix of conclusions about which group of students benefited the most from the extra arts education.

Tiffany Thompson, another first-grade teacher at Codwell Elementary, said she’s seen the extra arts make a difference for struggling students.

“Some students who don’t excel academically, they’re more engaged, because it gives them a different way to learn,” she said.

One caveat to the study is that principals volunteered for the program. It might not be as successful in schools where there is less enthusiasm for the idea to start.

Still, the results of the study hold national import as districts consider how much to prioritize arts education and as cities assess or expand their similar initiatives.

“I really feel like people should know how much the [kids] do benefit from it,” Bennett said. “Normally they wouldn’t have this exposure.”

Correction: A previous version of the story mis-stated the number of partnerships in schools that participated in the arts initiative. The correct number is eight, compared to three in schools that did not participate.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

from MindShift http://bit.ly/2tlZZvB

How High-Crime Neighborhoods Make It Harder For Kids To Show Up At School

Getting students to show up is one of the biggest challenges schools face: How can someone learn at school if they’re not there in the first place?

A new study suggests living in a high-crime area, or simply passing through one on the way to school, can impact how often students show up to class.

“Some kids have a harder time getting to a school than others, not for any fault of their own, but because of the way the transportation system is set up, because of the way crime clusters in particular places,” explains Julia Burdick-Will, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University and the lead author of the study. “It might not be huge, or every day, but it adds up.”

She and her team looked at how neighborhood crime in Baltimore affects attendance. The vast majority of students there use public transportation (like many urban school systems, Baltimore City Public Schools don’t bus students). Researchers mapped the routes high school freshmen took to and from school — what streets they were walking on, when and where they picked up a bus, when they transferred, etc. Then, researchers applied crime data by location and time of day to see how those findings related to student absences for the year.

They discovered “kids who are supposed to be walking along streets with higher rates of violent crime are more likely to miss school,” Burdick-Will explains.

The Baltimore school district struggles with getting kids to show up: 37 percent of students were chronically absent last school year, meaning they missed at least 10 percent of school. Research shows students who miss that much school are way more likely to fall behind and eventually drop out.

Burdick-Will says, “When we think of attendance we often think of a kid not wanting to be there.” But this research shows other factors may be at play.

The role of school choice

As school choice gains popularity, students are going to schools farther and farther away from their homes. And, Burdick-Will explains, “Getting kids to school is going to have to be something that we pay more attention to as we open up [school] choice options.”

Research by the Urban Institute found that, in cities where school choice is a popular option, black children often travel farther and longer than their white and Latino classmates.

In Baltimore, where all high schools run on a school choice system, students spend, on average, more than 35 minutes getting to school, and they have at least one public transit transfer, according to Burdick-Will.

And kids who travel through high-crime areas face another challenge: They can’t always take the most direct route. “They know that it’s dangerous to go to this bus stop, and so they go in a different direction and they have an extra transfer,” Burdick-Will says. “Or they have to rely on a ride that sometimes falls through.”

The rise of absenteeism

The latest national numbers suggest that nearly 8 million children in the United States are chronically absent; that means about 1 in 7 students are missing 15 or more days of school each year.

External factors, like neighborhood crime, are important, explains Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works. But, she says, schools still need to be looking inward.

“If we make schools better — safer — more inclusive and trauma-informed, students will want to be there.”

And if students want to be there, Chang says, maybe they’ll be more willing to walk those extra blocks to avoid high-crime areas. Perhaps they’ll also feel comfortable talking to teachers and staff about the obstacles they face on their way to school.

Efforts in Chicago

Some cities are experimenting with ways to help students get to school safely.

In 2009, Chicago Public Schools started Safe Passage, a program that places adults along highly trafficked routes to schools. The idea was to make those paths safer for students and help boost attendance — and it worked, according to research and data from the district.

But Safe Passage has its limits. A lot of Chicago students walk to school, while in Baltimore students are mostly taking public transit and only walking a few blocks to and from a bus stop. That means districts need to be creative when they’re looking for solutions.

“The public transit system isn’t always designed with students in mind,” says Burdick-Will of Johns Hopkins.

Public transit schedules often revolve around work commute times, and sometimes stops aren’t placed in convenient locations to walk to a school. But Burdick-Will’s Baltimore data does show high-traffic transfer locations, where students switch from one bus to another. Burdick-Will points to those transfer locations as an opportunity to bring more adults to the school commute.

“Adult supervision matters a lot for kids,” she says.

As her previous research has shown, just having an adult there can go a long way in helping kids feel safer.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

from MindShift http://bit.ly/2TM0Uks