Drowning In Parenting Advice? Here’s Some Advice For That

At my baby’s six-month appointment a few months back, I got a one-pager from the pediatrician titled “Starting Solid Foods.”

“It is critical that the baby develop a taste for rice cereal at the beginning, to offset the loss of iron from formula or breast milk,” it reads.

Sounds serious. Then come the all caps: “THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF FEEDING GIVE RICE CEREAL ONLY.” That is followed by advice to introduce pureed vegetables before fruits so the baby doesn’t develop a sweet tooth.

I obediently went out and bought some sand-textured baby cereal. (Organic, of course.)

“Oh no, we’re not doing that.” My spouse pointed me to a parenting book we had on the shelf.

“There’s no need for cereals alone; they are bland and bulky and their iron benefits are overstated,” it reads. “The idea that you should introduce vegetables before fruits to avoid creating a sweet tooth is just an unfounded myth. A carrot has virtually the same amount of sugar as an apple.”

Welcome to early parenthood’s barrage of contradictory advice. It tends to be detailed, with convincing internal logic. “Studies” are often invoked. And the stakes feel so high — like, if I do this wrong, will my baby be malnourished or end up a picky eater or not succeed in life somehow?

Enter Brown University economics professor Emily Oster and her new book, Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth to Preschool. It’s the follow-up to her first book, Expecting Better, a deep look at the data behind pregnancy advice, which has a bit of a cult following. (I am in this cult.)

In her new book, Oster ticks through big and small parenting dilemmas. She uses her training as an economist to look at the relevant research for each of them and to assess how much stock we should put in the findings.

“What I do in the book is actually try to comb through these studies and figure out which of them are giving us the best information,” Oster says. “So then you can make these choices having the best information, not just the first thing that comes up when you Google it at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

OK, so what about my solid-food dilemma? Yea or nay on rice cereal? Veggies first?

“It turns out there isn’t any evidence to suggest that is a particularly important way to introduce foods or not,” she says.

The answer to this one: You do you. Keep the food mushy, and don’t stress about it too much.

This wasn’t my only point of confusion that this book cleared up, even though I’m nearly four years into parenthood. Here are a few of my personal takeaways.

• Nipple confusion is not a thing — you don’t need to wait three weeks after birth to give a pacifier or bottle. (This makes me feel better about giving my firstborn a pacifier on day two.)
• Baby milestones have a wide normal range, so don’t obsess. (Still vaguely worried that by nine months my baby should be clapping.)
• Breastfeeding does not help mom lose weight. (Crushed.)

A lot of the other takeaways are kind of nuanced. They don’t give you a clear-cut answer, so much as information to help you make your own decision. One reason for that is designing a good study of the risks and benefits of a parenting decision is really hard.

Take, for example, Chapter 4: “Breast Is Best? Breast Is Better? Breast Is About the Same?” Oster provides a path through the maze of conflicting advice by sifting out the convincing studies from the questionable ones.

“Most of the studies on this are done by comparing the kids whose moms breastfeed to the kids whose moms don’t,” Oster says. “The issue with that is that the kind of moms who breastfeed are different than the moms who don’t, on average. So, in the U.S. in particular, moms who breastfeed tend to be better educated, higher income, more likely to be married.”

(It’s unclear why that demographic breastfeeds more, Oster says, but the timing for the trend is connected to the public health push away from formula that began in the 1970s.)

Now, let’s say you want to find out the impact of breastfeeding — and not of these demographic differences — on things like IQ and obesity.

“When we narrow in on some studies that are better — like, for example, studies that compare siblings, where one sibling is breastfed and one sibling is not — those studies do not show the same kinds of impacts on long-term things like obesity or IQ,” Oster says.

For the record, she found that there are some health benefits to breastfeeding, but they’re more limited than the hype. If it works for you and your family, Oster concludes, great; if not, formula is a good option.

So, even if you’ve made a decision about how to introduce solids and whether to breastfeed or bottle-feed, there are so many other ones to make! What about baby nap schedules, how to potty train or the financial impact of choosing a nanny versus day care versus staying at home?

As an economist, Oster advocates for taking some of the angst out of it.

When making a parenting decision, she says, “Step one is to kind of really figure out what the best evidence says about the choice.” Look for randomized studies and big sample sizes.

“But then there’s a really important second step, which is to combine that with what is going to work for your family,” she says.

For instance, when she first brought her baby daughter home, she knew the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that your baby sleep in your room, ideally for the whole first year, as part of its safe infant sleeping environment guidance.

“My husband did one day with our older daughter, and he was like, ‘I can’t believe it’s making those noises.’ He just couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t sleep,” she says. Room sharing for a full year was just not workable for her family.

With Cribsheet, Oster is trying to make parents less confused, more confident in their choices and less judgmental of other parents who make different choices. Reading the book makes that feel surprisingly achievable. Laying out the research really strips these decisions of their drama, and you end up wondering why it all felt so overwhelming in the first place.

When the time came to break out the solid foods with my baby, we did mashed sweet potato. A few months into it, emboldened by Oster’s book, we’ve gotten adventurous: This weekend at our Seder, baby even had a bit of brisket smushed up with horseradish.

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

from MindShift http://bit.ly/2GDXfB9

Bravetart’s Levain-Style Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’ve got something BIG for you today. Big, beautiful, and swimming in chocolate morsels. I had to make these cookies as soon as possible after seeing Bravetart (Stella Parks) post about them on instagram. She’s basically a genius at all things baking and often creates copycat recipes of classic sweets. And this chocolate chip cookie is a New York City classic … if you’ve ever been to Levain Bakery in the Big Apple, then you know what I am talking about. Monstrous, majestic and served warm and melty. Like a cushion of chocolatey goodness.

Here’s the link to get Bravetart’s Super-Thick Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe (a la Levain Bakery) posted over on Serious Eats.

And here’s a link to her book, Iconic America Desserts if you want to learn how to make Homemade Oreos, Twinkies or Nutter Butters like these for instance.

The rest of this post is basically just photos showing you how glorious these cookies are. Visit the links above for her detailed instructions and a video, too.

Full disclosure. These cookies do have walnuts in them, which I usually don’t like in my cookies, but that’s how Levain makes them, so that’s what she did, and me too. And really, you don’t notice them that much with all the chocolate morsels that make it into every bite of cookie … so I’m okay with that.

And when I say all the morsels. I mean it. These cookies have fifteen. 15. One Five. ounces of chocolate chips in them.

Stella recommends a mix of morsels. I used, Ghiradelli bittersweet, semisweet and milk chocolate chips along with some Guittard 66% cacao baking wafers. Those are the really big ones in the pic above.

Look at that!

And feast your eyes on this. Once you mix up your dough, weigh out about 6 oz for each cookie.

Can you say tennis ball?!

With cookies that big, you’ll end up with eight great big balls of dough. Which is plenty. Trust!

Once your dough is prepared, wrap it up securely and refrigerate overnight.

When you’re ready to bake, sprinkle a little salt on the tops and arrange four cookies at a time on a baking sheet to allow room for spreading. You can also bake as you want to enjoy them over the following couple of days. Because you will want to eat these warm for full effect. Just wrap them tightly in plastic wrap and store in the fridge.

What?!?!?! I’m in love.

Here’s the inside of one of the cookies. Look at that center! These baked for 22 minutes and were absolutely perfect. They immediately made me think of eating a Levain cookie on the sidewalk in NYC. And I already want to make them again.

And here’s the inside of another cookie. The next time I make these, I’m going to try them without walnuts to see if I miss them and for two minutes less in the oven. You know just to get them a tad more under cooked like I like.

Okay, one more view to enjoy! So good.

from bakerella.com http://bit.ly/2USiKXH

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Most Teachers Don’t Teach Climate Change; 4 In 5 Parents Wish They Did

How Your Teacher-Librarian Can Be An Ally When Teaching With Inquiry

This article was originally published by Canadian School Libraries, a registered non-profit charitable organization dedicated to professional research and development in the field of the school library learning commons in Canada. It is republished here with permission.

By Trevor MacKenzie

We teachers are constantly reflecting on our practice and professional growth. We want to make sure we are doing the best for our students despite the demands of constant assessment, unanticipated curricular changes and continually changing student needs and demographics. Combined with our own desire for excellence, this is so overwhelming. I’ve attended really inspiring professional development, only to figure out that teaching materials, specialized training and additional technology are out of reach for most school budgets. Where can teaching professionals go for support as we try to improve?

I have discovered rich support and learning in my own backyard when I have collaborated with my teacher-librarian. This educational professional is often under-utilized in a school environment. Many teachers see the librarian interact only with students, but they are invaluable resources for teachers as well.

Collaboration with a teacher-librarian creates a rich inquiry practice for classroom teachers that can easily be implemented with students. If we develop the habit of accessing this great resource as a regular class routine throughout the year, we will see the kind of progress and success we are looking for.

Teacher-Librarians Have More Flexible Schedules

The librarian’s schedule and workday provide more flexibility so they can be available to help teachers. The door is open, why not come in? Also, it is my experience that teacher-librarians love having discussions with teaching colleagues–they get to play an active role in student progress and success. I have often stopped by the library unannounced, with the intention of just asking a quick question. What starts out as a two minute query ends up in a rich, inspiring discourse that goes well beyond “a quick question.”

Sometimes I have an underdeveloped idea for an inquiry project and I need a sounding board. How do I figure out a starting point? What will be our goal? What steps should we take to get there? How do I keep things student-centered? During our conversation, the teacher-librarian is willing to listen to me, assess my students’ needs, reflect on an array of resources and learning materials to support us, and then supply them in a timely and easy manner. They ask questions I hadn’t yet thought of, and they direct me toward objectives I had not previously considered. They want to make realizing my lesson goals as easy and seamless as possible.

This type of personalized help makes me feel supported when I sometimes feel like I’m teaching “on an island.” The Teacher-librarians’ unique training gives them a way to assist me in my teaching goals and help me in ways I had not previously envisioned. The flexibility continues. As our inquiry work progresses, the teacher-librarian follows up with us, visiting our classroom to see how the work is coming along, asking questions, making observations, and offering up next steps of support. Students begin to see the teacher-librarian as a “learning partner” — a more authentic support of what’s happening in the classroom.

Teacher-Librarians Strengthen Support

As committed as I am to the inquiry method of learning, and though I have published work to help teachers in the practice, I still have areas of weakness. Mine in particular is the research component. This is where the teacher-librarian is a great partner. They develop a collaborative alliance with me and discover my teaching strengths and weaknesses objectively, without judgement. Because of their training, they have a knack of offering up just the right support in ways that lift up or elevate my teaching practice. They complement my instruction with their own when working with students to assist in the research phase of inquiry.

Teacher-librarians employ their unique expertise as they walk students through the learning library and demonstrate how to navigate databases and locate resources. They also sharpen research skills by helping students understand the validity of information and evaluate it by recognizing bias and persuasion in various sources. This is difficult for both teachers and students to master. I have been so thankful to have teacher-librarians who offer help in this area that I find extremely challenging. It balances out the inquiry experience for my students and provides them (and me) with the support necessary to follow through with our big ideas and meet our learning goals.

A True Teaching Partner

The teacher-librarian is truly a second teacher in inquiry, an additional support for all of my students as we embark on more personalized learning structures and objectives. The more I include my teacher-librarian, the more I find that they are able to help students with inquiry: the collaboration becomes a powerful cycle of support that gains momentum and benefits the students, the teacher, and the culture of learning in the school.

Students can also visit the library to seek out support from the teacher-librarian on their own time outside of class, because they now see that person as “in on the learning” and someone who understands the inquiry and can provide support and help. The teacher-librarian knows the resources in the library, how to locate them, and how to empower students in this process. Students then become more competent independent researchers and learners themselves.

Just as I intentionally nurture a culture of inquiry that gradually releases control over learning to the student, so too does the teacher-librarian partner with the teacher in their support of the student. Now there is a collaborative team dedicated to meeting the needs of the students. Each learner has access to learning and materials based on their learning strengths challenges. The teacher-librarian also gets to know each learner’s topic and can help personalize inquiry much better than I could if I worked alone. The end result is a collaborative team that reinforces independent learning.

Teachers everywhere struggle with meeting student needs even though we have few resources. We also struggle with the breadth of our own learning and practice. We have to get creative. But what if a truly great resource is at our own school, right under our noses? A teacher-librarian is the ideal partner for inquiry – they are flexible and can make time for us and our students. They are a great sounding board to help inquiry projects take shape, make authentic progress and meet meaningful objectives. They build meaningful relationships with students and help them hone their inquiry skills while taking responsibility for their own learning.

Teachers do not need to teach “on an island” with little support when there is such a rich resource in the library–not just for us, but for our students as well. Teachers also don’t have to know everything about a practice from the start: they can learn with their students along the way. It will make them better teachers. Students do better in general when they have more adults on campus they know have concern for them. The teacher-librarian can become a valuable support for teacher practice and student academic growth, as well as their emotional health. Why not make use of this amazing school asset?

Trevor MacKenzie is an award winning English teacher at Oak Bay High School in Victoria, BC, Canada, who believes that it is a magical time to be an educator. Trevor is the author of Dive into Inquiry: Amplify Learning and Empower Student Voice as well as Inquiry Mindset: Nurturing the Dreams, Wonders and Curiosities of our Youngest Learners, co-authored with Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt.

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

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How Selective Empathy Can Chip Away At Civil Society

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump’s characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren’t all criminals, he said. “What about those who have come here for reasons of need?”

Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of “the fathers, the mothers, the children” who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.

In an earlier era, Bundy’s appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone’s-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.

When I was growing up in the ’70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other’s eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.

And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an “empathy pill” so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: “It’s not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help” or “Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.”

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It’s strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that’s what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.

So, for example, when the wife of white nationalist Richard Spencer recently told BuzzFeed he had abused her, the question debated on the lefty Internet was: Why should we care that some woman who chose to ally herself with a nasty racist got herself hurt? Why waste empathy on that? (Spencer, in a court filing, denies all her allegations.)

The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your “enemies,” but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That’s practically a taboo.

And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.

In the past 20 years, psychologists and neurologists have started to look at how empathy actually works, in our brains and our hearts, when we’re not thinking about it. And one thing they’ve found is that “one of the strongest triggers for human empathy is observing some kind of conflict between two other parties,” says Fritz Breithaupt, a professor at Indiana University who studies empathy. “Once they take the side, they’re drawn into that perspective. And that can lead to very strong empathy and too strong polarization with something you only see this one side and not the other side any longer.”

A classic example is the Super Bowl, or any Auburn, Alabama game.

But these days in the news, examples come up every day: the Kavanaugh hearings, emergency funding for a wall, Spike Lee walking out of the Oscars, the Barr report, Kirstjen Nielsen, every third thing on Twitter.

Researchers who study empathy have noticed that it’s actually really hard to do what we were striving for in my generation: empathize with people who are different than you are, much less people you don’t like. But if researchers set up a conflict, people get into automatic empathy overdrive, with their own team. This new research has scrambled notions of how empathy works as a force in the world. For example, we often think of terrorists as shockingly blind to the suffering of innocents. But Breithaupt and other researchers think of them as classic examples of people afflicted with an “excess of empathy. They feel the suffering of their people.”

Breithaupt called his new book The Dark Sides of Empathy, because there’s a point at which empathy doesn’t even look like the kind of universal empathy I was taught in school. There is a natural way that empathy gets triggered in the brain — your pain centers light up when you see another person suffering. But out in the world it starts to look more like tribalism, a way to keep reinforcing your own point of view and blocking out any others.

Breithaupt is alarmed at the apparent new virus of selective empathy and how it’s deepening divisions. If we embrace it, he says, then “basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.”

We can’t return to my generation’s era of empathy innocence, because we now know too much about how the force actually works. But we can’t give up on empathy either, because empathy is “90 percent what our life is all about,” Breithaupt says. “Without it, we would be just alone.”

In his book Breithaupt proposes an ingenious solution: give up on the idea that when we are “empathizing” we are being altruistic, or helping the less fortunate, or in any way doing good. What we can do when we do empathy, proposes Fritz, is help ourselves. We can learn to see the world through the eyes of a migrant child and a militia leader and a Russian pen pal purely so we can expand our own imaginations, and make our own minds richer. It’s selfish empathy. Not saintly, but better than being alone.

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

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

Why You Should Avoid Nightshade Vegetables in Your Diet

Among nature's many delicious and amazing fruits and vegetables, there are a few types that have been known to cause mild to severe discomfort in the people who ingest them. For most people plants in the variety of nightshade are relatively harmless, and make for great additions to meals, but for those who suffer from […]

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor http://bit.ly/2KRNOCa

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Buttercream Bunny Cupcakes

Bunnies in buttercream on bright and happy colored cupcakes. These floppy eared-friends are super cute and pretty easy to decorate, too. I used melted candy coating for the pretty pastel colors and vanilla buttercream frosting to make the little bunny bodies. Let me show you.

Go grab some cupcakes and let’s hop to it.

Before covering the the tops of the cupcakes in melted candy coating, I wanted to make sure they had nice smooth domes made of buttercream. That way there was something soft underneath the hard candy shell when you bite into them.

First, frost the tops of the cupcakes using an offset spatula to make them as smooth as you can.

Then gently dip the tops in a small bowl of confectioners’ sugar. The sugar will create a thin barrier so you can shape the frosting without it all sticking to your hands. Just use your palms and fingertips to gently shape the frosting into a nice and even dome.

See, nice and smooth curved tops.

The next step is to dip them in colorful, melted candy coating. When they dry, the tops will have a hard exterior shell. This will make it easier to decorate the bunnies so you don’t have to worry about messing up the tops.

Dip them in smooth and fluid melted candy coating and then lift them out, turn them over and gently swirl them around to allow the coating to settle evenly.

Let them dry completely and fill two piping bags with buttercream frosting using decorating bags – one fitted with an Ateco #804 tip and another with a Wilton #12 tip.

Use the smaller tip (Wilton #12) and pipe two straight or curved lines for bunny ears.

Use the larger tip (Ateco #804) and pipe a ball of frosting at the bottom of the cupcake for the body, leaving space in the middle for the head.

Use the same tip again to pipe a larger ball of frosting in position for the head, so that it just overlaps the bottom of the ears and connects to the top of the body.

Pat the bunny!

Coat your finger with a thin layer of confectioners’ sugar and then gently pat the buttercream down to shape. Simple. Don’t worry, the buttercream will gradually absorb the sugar and make it disappear.

To complete the look, you just need a few fun sprinkles.

Push black jimmies into the buttercream for tiny eyes and use miniature pink heart sprinkles for noses. That’s all you really need.

…Unless you want to dress them up.

I mean, look how dapper they look with blue confetti heart sprinkles for bowties.

They are so pretty just like this and I love how the floppy ears give them so much character even though they are decorated super simple!

But you know I like to give you options. These confetti sprinkles are an easy way to create polka dots.

To attach the sprinkles, just dot melted coating on the tops of the cupcakes using a toothpick and place a confetti sprinkle right on top to dry in place. That’s it!

Hope you enjoy these happy, hoppy little Easter bunnies.

from bakerella.com http://bit.ly/2GoOZ7L

How Moringa Will Improve Your Health and Vitality

When you’re looking at that massive range of new and tempting foods that are available as they compete for the title of absolute “superfood for health,” it’s important to consider the content of the nutrients that the food contains. Many will boast of nutritional content, but few will match the might of the moringa. If […]

from Dai Manuel: Your Lifestyle Mentor http://bit.ly/2GmyJEd

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To Boost Reading Comprehension, Show Students Thinking Strategies Good Readers Use

Once students learn how to sound out words, reading is easy. They can speak the words they see. But whether they understand them is a different question entirely. Reading comprehension is complicated. Teachers, though, can help students learn concrete skills to become better readers. One way is by teaching them how to think as they read.

Marianne Stewart teaches eighth grade English at Lexington Junior High near Anaheim, California. She recently asked her students to gather in groups to discuss books where characters face difficulties. Students could choose from 11 different books but in each group one student took on the role of “discussion director,” whose task was to create questions for the group to discuss together. Stewart created prompts to help them come up with questions that require deep reading.

[pullquote size=’medium’ align=’right’ citation=’Marianne Stewart, English teacher at Lexington Junior High’]’When you find a strategy like this that really helps students wherever they’re at, that’s like gold.'[/pullquote]

This process of questioning while reading is one of a number of “cognitive strategies” Stewart teaches her students. The strategies focus on what research has shown to be the thought processes of good readers. Others include planning and goal-setting, tapping prior knowledge, making connections, visualizing and forming interpretations. By mastering these strategies explicitly, students learn that reading is an active process, not one in which they simply sound out words in their heads.

And it’s incredibly effective at improving their reading comprehension.

Carol Booth Olson, a professor at the University of California-Irvine School of Education, developed a program called the Pathway to Academic Success Project that teaches cognitive strategies to improve student performance, in both reading and writing. Olson’s program trains teachers like Stewart to introduce them methodically and weave them into lessons throughout the school year. First in Santa Ana and then in Anaheim, the Pathway Project clocked impressive results, closing achievement gaps for students who speak languages other than English and Latinos, who have traditionally had lower educational outcomes.

Now, with support from the U.S. Department of Education, Olson’s Pathway to Academic Success Project is set to expand beyond California to six other states.

Olson has long focused on getting her program into urban schools, particularly those with large populations of students for whom English is not their first language. An eight-year-long study of English-learners in the Santa Ana Unified School District found that students receiving cognitive strategies instruction improved their writing at greater rates than their peers for seven years in a row. A follow-up study in Anaheim found Latino students in the group receiving cognitive strategies instruction outscored their white peers who didn’t receive the instruction. And the 10th grade English-learners benefiting from the program outscored the state average on the high school exit exam by 20 percentage points, according to
Olson.

“That’s our goal,” Olson said, “to level the playing field for all kids.”

Stewart spends time at the beginning of the school year teaching kids all of the various cognitive strategies so that they can draw on them as needed throughout the year. She has found with her largely immigrant student population that cognitive strategies help them understand complex texts and help them move beyond just surface reading. These students have had a lot of vocabulary instruction to be able to make it through a passage, but Stewart said they struggled with deeper thinking about a text. The cognitive strategies not only remind them to think deeply but also help them figure out what to do if they don’t understand certain words or concepts as they read.

When it comes to writing, the Pathway Project prioritizes revision. With each revision, students take feedback from their teachers or the graduate students participating in the project to move toward deeper thinking. Less experienced writers tend to rely on summarizing, but “knowledge transformation” is what more experienced writers achieve.

Stewart has been an English teacher for 15 years. She has tried more writing strategies than she can keep track of, many of which try to make the writing and revision process hands-on by having students color code a draft and use symbols to annotate throughout.

“I’ve tried all the color codes and all the symbols,” Stewart said. “You end up teaching the colors and the symbols, and not the content, until you’re blue in the face and no one can remember what pink meant anymore.”

Teaching cognitive strategies through the Pathway Project has been different. They keep the attention on the actual text, whether students are reading it or writing it. And they’re flexible, Stewart said, so teachers can ask individual students to use specific strategies based on what they need at the time. That’s important in classrooms where student strengths and weaknesses vary dramatically.

Olson acknowledges it’s a hard sell to convince teachers to start using the cognitive strategies – even for a program with striking results. It takes time and effort to understand them and figure out where they can fit into existing lessons. The focus on revision to improve writing can be a big change for English teachers. Helping students revise their work is time-consuming. And Olson’s program requires teachers to believe that explicit instruction and appropriate support can actually help all students achieve. Believing students are capable of this is not always a given, Olson said.

Over the last 20 years, 10 school districts in Southern California have adopted cognitive strategies instruction. The federal Department of Education’s $14.7 million Education Innovation and Research expansion grant will take the Pathway Project to schools in Arizona, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin over the next five years. It is expected to reach 240 teachers and 109,200 students.

Olson also plans to create teaching modules through a partnership with the Council of the Great City Schools that could bring cognitive strategies instruction to more teachers nationwide.

For Stewart, the value of the program is clear.

“When you find a strategy like this that really helps students wherever they’re at, that’s like gold,” she said.

This story about strategies for teaching reading and writing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children’s way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It’s not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

“We didn’t really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do,” says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

“It was like, ‘Someone, please help me write my essay!’ ” she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

“I can write it for you,” they tweeted back. “Send us the prompt!”

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“For me, it was just that the work was piling up,” she explains. “As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. … And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it’s just … the pressure.”

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they’re likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

“Technically, I don’t think it’s cheating,” the student says. “Because you’re paying someone to write an essay, which they don’t plagiarize, and they write everything on their own.”

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she’s plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

“That’s just a difficult question to answer,” she says. “I don’t know how to feel about that. It’s kind of like a gray area. It’s maybe on the edge, kind of?”

Besides she adds, she probably won’t use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they’re purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

“Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest,” cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she’s not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

“I have a friend who writes essays and sells them,” says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. “And my other friend buys them. He’s just like, ‘I can’t handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I’ll do the other three.’ It’s a time management thing.”

The war on contract cheating

“It breaks my heart that this is where we’re at,” sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

“Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious,” Finley says. “It’s part of the brave new world for sure.”

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to “Get instant help with your assignment” and imploring them: “Don’t lag behind,” “Join the majority” and “Don’t worry, be happy.”

“They’re very crafty,” says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they’re from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

“I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!” gloats one. “Save your time, and have extra time to party!” advises another.

“It’s very much a seduction,” says Bertram Gallant. “So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world.”

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

“Yes, just like the little birdie that’s there to help you in your education,” explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who’s now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a “professional essay writing service for students who can’t even.”

Some students just want some “foundational research” to get started or a little “polish” to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn’t keep her up at night.

“These kids are so time poor,” she says, and they’re “missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they’re studying and writing papers.” Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more “well-rounded.”

“I don’t necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it’s not something that bothers me,” says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. “I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well,” she says.

“This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do,” sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it’s not just about “a few bad apples.”

“Instead, what we have is a lot … of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us,” he says. “We know officially what is right and what’s wrong. But really what’s driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing” or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that “everyone’s doing it.”

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students’ behavior.

“Yes, they’re serious mistakes. They’re egregious mistakes,” says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

“But we’re educational institutions,” she adds. “We’ve got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That’s our responsibility. And that’s better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts.”

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document’s metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin’s vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it’s as simple as looking at the document’s name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like “Order Number 123,” and students have been known to actually submit it that way. “You would be amazed at how frequently that happens,” says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

“Think of it as a writing fingerprint,” Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student’s other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

“At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not,” he says, “and you get it really quickly.”

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school’s academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, “we’ll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we’ll have a very hard few years,” she says. “But then the message will get through to students that we’ve got the tools now to find these things out.” Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was “gibberish” and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn’t pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is “buyer beware.”

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it’s wrong.

“If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won’t win,” she says. “What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can’t wear their glasses because we’re afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?”

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about “creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter” and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

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

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

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Why Adults Should Listen, Learn, Trust, and Expect More From Kids

Twelve-year-old Adora Svitak hates the world “childish” if it’s being used to describe irrational demands or irresponsible behavior. She sees enough of that in the adult world to know it’s not the exclusive domain of children. In fact, she says adults can learn a thing or two if they’d only open their minds to the possibility that kids have a lot to offer the world.

“We kids still dream about perfection and that’s a good thing because in order to make anything a reality you have to dream about it first,” Svitak said in a TED talk. “I think that adults should start learning from kids.”

When she’s not on the TED stage, Svitak often speaks to educators, making the point that learning in schools should be more of a reciprocal relationship between teachers and students.

“It shouldn’t just be teachers at the head of the classroom telling them do this, do that. The students should teach their teachers. Learning between grown ups and kids should be reciprocal,” she said.

But she’s not naive, and she knows that isn’t how many classrooms and schools operate. Her theory is that it’s all about trust. Adults always seem to have a restrictive attitude towards kids.

“Although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules,” Svitak joked. “When really the attitude should be reciprocal. Adults often underestimate kids abilities. Now we love a challenge, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them.”

As a young child, Svitak loved to write. When her mom gave her a computer she wrote over 300 short stories on it. And she wanted to get published, a dream that her parents luckily supported. Even though she was turned down by many publishers, eventually she did have a book of short stories published. She was only seven-years-old.

After that first success, Svitak has gone on to do more impressive things, something she wishes more kids had the support to do. She says it’s important for kids to be heard and contribute when they’re young so they grow up to become a better kind of adult.

“The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adults, but rather better adults than you guys have been. The way progress happens is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. It’s the reason we aren’t in the Dark Ages anymore,” she said.

Check out Adora Svitak’s funny and charming TED talk.

from MindShift http://bit.ly/2GcYw1S

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Nine Ways To Ensure Your Mindfulness Teaching Practice Is Trauma-Informed

A recent MindShift article highlighted some things teachers should be aware of if they’re bringing mindfulness into their classrooms. Students may have experienced trauma that makes sitting silently with their eyes closed feel threatening, and teachers can’t assume it will be an easy practice for every child. That awareness is important to create an inclusive environment, but it doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t cultivate their own mindfulness practice or use some techniques with students.

Often mindfulness is used as a way to help students build self-regulation skills and learn to calm down when they become frustrated or angry. Cultivating those skills can be powerful for students, but many teachers say mindfulness is crucial for themselves, helping them take an extra moment before reacting to students.

“The best way to practice trauma-informed mindfulness is [for teachers] to have their own practice and interpret the behavior of the youth through a trauma-informed lens, even if they never do mindfulness training with the kids,” said Sam Himelstein, a clinical psychologist, trainer and author who has spent most of his career working with incarcerated youth. He’s received a lot of questions about how to be trauma-informed while still using mindfulness in classrooms since the first article. He suggest nine guidelines for teachers that he uses to make sure mindfulness practice with youth is helping, not hurting.

1. Do No Harm

“The assumption behind that is that harm can be done,” Himelstein said. “If you teach someone mindfulness meditation who has had a lot of trauma in their life, in fact, harm can be done.” That’s important for teachers to know. Research on mindfulness shows the practice can bring up uncomfortable feelings, and layered on top of existing trauma can be frightening or psychologically dysregulating. That’s why Himelstein stresses that no one should be forced to close their eyes or sit a certain way.

“If you’re unintentionally portraying that it’s really important to close your eyes, they can misinterpret that,” Himelstein said. In fact, it’s common for folks who have been traumatized to misinterpret a neutral direction.

2. Establish a sense of safety

“There are some situations in some school settings where youth are not that safe because there’s violence that happens,” Himelstein said. “If you’re not in a place where kids feel physically safe, then you probably shouldn’t be doing any deep practices.”

Kids can feel vulnerable when attempting to be present in the moment, so physical safety is key. Establishing that kind of safety may take some extra culture-building in the classroom first.

3. Build relational mindfulness

This set of strategies is about building the type of community where students feel safe practicing mindfulness. Teachers can help make their classroom feel safe to students with clear boundaries that are predictable. Group norms or agreements developed with students are one way to do this.

“For people who have experienced trauma those things tend to not be present, so the more you practice predictability by practicing group agreements, and building authentic relationships between you and the youth, and among the youth, it starts to feel more safe,” Himelstein said.

It can be tricky to know if relational trust has been built, but Himelstein said when students are more willing to share openly about themselves or they’re relating class material to their own lives, that’s one sign they feel safe. Of course it’s complicated because of different personality types, some of which may naturally be more reserved. But even with introverted students, teachers can often tell if trust is there through their writing or if they share something out loud even once.

“You can check in with the youth and not just leave it up to your own assessment or guesswork in terms of where they’re at in feeling safe and that there’s trust in the room,” Himelstein said. If there’s more work to be done, trust games and icebreakers can help people get more comfortable.

4. Understand intersectionality. Be mindful of implicit bias and culture.

Mindfulness cannot be detached from the other ways teachers interact with students in the classroom. Himelstein said it’s important to take note if, for example, girls are being punished more harshly for the same behavior a male student exhibits, but for which he isn’t punished.

“It depends on the context, but I’ve definitely coached some teachers and therapists who work in diverse settings in terms of who they call on the most, who gets the most energy, how their expectations are shifting depending on different folks,” Himelstein said.

If students think a teacher is unfair based on race, gender, sexuality or any other identity marker, that will undermine the relational trust needed to facilitate mindfulness and mental health.

“In my work with youth, I never divorce the practice of mindfulness from the greater sphere of building an authentic relationship with that young person,” Himelstein said. “I don’t divorce intersectionality from the practice of mindfulness.”

5. Understand the “window of tolerance” and be on the lookout for it

Imagine two parallel lines. Within those lines is the window of tolerance for physiological arousal. Outside of that is when people may experience tunnel vision, when they can’t think straight. Outside the window of tolerance students may be hyperaroused when they’re extremely angry or hypervigilant. But students can also be hypo-aroused, when they’re disassociated from their surroundings. In both of these states, students won’t be able to follow directions.

Himelstein remembers meeting his wife for lunch after a therapeutic session with a client that triggered him. He couldn’t physically read the menu because his prefrontal cortex was offline. “My brain was down regulating,” he said. “I wasn’t quite in fight, flight or freeze, but I was on the way there.”

If teachers can recognize those moments with students, they can use other interventions to help students get back into the window of tolerance. Those might include listening to music, playing a rhythm game, dancing — something that doesn’t require the student to process directions.

A teacher might notice a student is getting triggered and naturally take a break from instruction to listen to some music or play a quick game without calling attention to the student who is triggered. This works better if these types of movement or music breaks are already part of the DNA of the classroom. Then it doesn’t feel odd or out of place to students when a teacher uses it as a tool to intentionally support a specific student.

“You’re hoping in some way the music moves them, not emotionally, but there’s something about the music they like,” Himelstein said. “Maybe they get that head bob going. That’s what you’re looking for.”

He remembers one young woman he worked with who had been estranged from her father for several years because of his drug addiction. She finally felt ready to reach out to him to try to build a new relationship when she found out he had died of an overdose. Himelstein was with her when she got the news. The young woman was in shock and no mindfulness techniques would have worked at that moment. Instead, Himelstein put on a song he knew his client liked, and they sat and listened until she came out of shock and back into her window of tolerance.

6. The paradox of mental training

The paradox is that paying attention to the present moment — the heart of a mindfulness practice — won’t always make a person feel calmer. But, at the same time, practicing mindfulness when one isn’t upset builds a toolkit that could be useful to stay calm in stressful situations. Himelstein said this is a contradiction teachers have to embrace in this practice.

Deep breathing exercises or a body scan are strategies to practice in a calm state. They can help with stress reduction and emotional management. The goal is to make them part of everything that happens in the classroom so they’re second nature, and students can draw on these tools when they need them without thinking.

Himelstein trains youth and guards in juvenile detention centers in these techniques. Recently a young person told him that when a guard called him a name he naturally took a deep breath, providing him the slightest bit of space to consider the consequences of taking action, and preventing him from getting triggered.

“I’ve heard that in juvenile hall, in education settings, in so many situations,” Himelstein said.

7. When teaching mindfulness, prioritize somatic-based exercises.

“The body tends to have the ability to help ground people a little more, or at least not trigger as much,” Himelstein said. Especially if students are not used to mindfulness, or don’t feel comfortable with it, keeping them out of their heads can be a good thing. Instead focus on how deep breathing feels in the belly and the chest. Do body scans or remind young people to think about the sensations in their bodies.

“When youth don’t have a clear sense of what they’re supposed to be doing, and it’s not as tangible, it’s easier for their minds to wander and stumble upon traumatic memories,” Himelstein said.

8. Don’t over-identify with mindfulness logistics

It can be counterproductive to insist too strenuously that mindfulness look a certain way. Things like keeping eyes closed, holding the hands in a certain way, or having a particular body posture really don’t matter, and can lead to power struggles.

9. Think about daily mindfulness interventions.

There are lots of informal ways to bring some of the benefits of focusing on the present into the classroom. It might become routine at the start of the day, or when class begins, to do a mindful check-in: Each student takes a deep breath, and shares how they are feeling at the present moment. Himelstein always encourages youth to use a real emotion like angry/frustrated/happy/sad, as opposed to more generic statements like good/bad. It’s also not too much of a stretch to add some element of academic content to these activities.

“It’s a great way to embed a mindfulness practice in the DNA of the classroom and also you can easily add a prompt to the end of it,” Himelstein said.

from MindShift http://bit.ly/2D6N59R

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Classroom Strategies To Encourage Participation And Learner Agency

Every classroom has a few eager students who always participate and a less enthusiastic majority content to sit back. Often asking students to raise a hand when they know the answer exacerbates this problem because some students process the question more quickly and their eagerness to answer can undermine others’ confidence. That’s why Ann Young, a middle school math teacher, uses a thumbs up strategy that’s less visible to give students more confidence participating.

“You need instructional strategies and routines that allow everybody an entry point, particularly at the beginning of the class,” Young said in an Edutopia series on the science of learning. If you have something where the kids are feeling like, ‘Oh, this is great, I participated today, I contributed something today,’ then they go on to their next task, you have them a little bit more than you would otherwise.”

Giving students some agency over their learning is another simple way to increase student motivation. No matter how carefully a teacher picks books to include in the curriculum there will always be students who aren’t excited to read them. Letting students choose books they’ll read in a book club format could make the difference for many.

Ultimately teachers and parents want students to take ownership of their learning and be able to identify strengths and areas that need support. Some schools have found that student-led conferences are a good way to build this type of learner independence.

“So often in anything that you do in education, in life, students always feel like, oh, adults are always saying their opinion. I don’t have a voice. I never have any say,” said Lynnel Reed, a school counselor. “So part of what we do with the student-led meetings is they get a chance to say what their concerns are, how they see things.”

“Interestingly, the social and emotional competencies are as important as the intellectual skills that we try to teach in school, and they predict more of how you do in school and in life than particular lessons that get taught academically,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute.

from MindShift http://bit.ly/2UvD67T

Homemade Butter Mints

I’ve got a really easy springy treat to share with you guys today. I was flipping through one of my cookbooks by Back in the Day Bakery last weekend and landed on a recipe for Butter Mints. But it was the picture inside of cute little cubes of color that grabbed my attention. And I knew I had to make them right away.

You only need a few ingredients. Confectioners’ sugar, butter, salt, sweetened condensed milk, peppermint extract and food coloring to jump all over these.

Once you mix all the ingredients together minus the coloring, the dough will form a ball shape in the mixer and pull away from the bowl.

Turn the dough out onto some parchment paper lightly dusted with confectiones’ sugar and shape into a large disc that you can then divide into four equal portions. Or divide into however many colors of mints you want to make.

You just need 1-2 drops of gel food color to tint the dough a pretty pastel color.

I went with yellow, blue, purple and pink. So pretty! And I’ve got to tell you … right about here I was really wishing I had some Play-doh toys in the house to try the dough out on. I think I could make some super cute shapes.

But alas, I just went with these charming little rounded cubes. All you have to do is roll the dough into a long rope shape about 1/2 inch to 3/4 inch in diameter and then cut the rope into 1/2 inch sections.

The dough is soft before it goes in the fridge to chill out, so the cylinder shape starts to flatten a little bit making them look like rounded cubes.

Repeat with all your colored dough and transfer the individual pieces onto a large cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Now just cover them in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for about four hours to firm up nicely.

I definitely nibbled on a few right away. So soft and sweet. So perfect for Spring!

Print Recipe

Yield: 8 dozen mints

Back in the Day Bakery’s Butter Mints

Ingredients:

• 1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 7 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted, plus more for dusting
• 2/3 cup sweetened condensed milk
• 1 tablespoon peppermint extract
• Liquid gel food coloring, four colors

Directions:

1. Line a 9 X 13 inch baking pan with parchment.
2. Using a stand mixer, cream the butter and salt together on medium speed for two minutes. Slowly add the confectioners' sugar, sweetened condensed milk and peppermint extract and mix on low until the mixture gathers into a ball.
3. Remove mixture from the bowl, place on parchment paper and shape into a disc. Divide the disc into four equal portions. To color the mixture, add 1-2 drops of food coloring to one portion and knead until fully incorporated. Add more coloring as needed to darken the shade. Repeat with remaining three portions.
4. Working with one portion at a time, lay on a clean parchment paper-covered work surface that is lightly dusted with confectioners' sugar. Divide the portion in half and roll each half by hand into   3/4 inch ropes. Using a paring knife, cut into 3/4 inch pieces. Gently shape as you cut if needed and place on the prepared baking sheet.
5. Cover the mints with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 4 hours. The mints will keep refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 week.

Back in the Day Bakery by Cheryl Day and Griffith Day, 2012

P.S. I love this cookbook. So many great recipes. Here’s a link on amazon to their book. Go grab a copy.

I’ve also made their Coca-Cola Sheet Cake (See it here) and it was delicious.

Or just make some butter mints to enjoy!

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