The Birchwood Project

High expectations can inspire high achievement, but high achievement requires hard work. This fact highlights the need for good habits, a strong will, self-discipline, and intellectual stamina. These qualities are grounded in “right thinking”, the reasoning capacity that is able to direct energy, emotion, and passion.

Concerning education, “right thinking” begins with personal ownership. Here we help children conclude, “It is my job to get a good education. This is my primary responsibility as a child and adolescent. A good education will lead to academic achievement, personal fulfillment, and better prospects for a prosperous and fulfilling adulthood.” Parents and teachers are challenged to reinforce this maxim through their words and actions. Acquiring a good education has the highest priority in the life of a young person.

“Right thinking” also implies managing the internal conversations (maybe argument is a better word) buzzing in their heads. One voice clings to noble thoughts - achievement, success, hard work, perseverance. Another voice undermines good intentions. That voice gives children reason to quit, give up, find excuses, cut corners, find the path of least resistance, or cast off responsibility. Sustained, high academic achievement depends upon children understanding this argument in their minds and then managing that argument in order to do what is best.

Teaching this skill, cultivating this habit, is the job of parents and teachers. It is a tedious and time consuming job but without adult intervention children generally fall prey to their lower instincts. Lessons about managing the internal conversation must be taught and re-taught, extending from the time children are about eight years old until they are in their late teens or early twenties. Since the default mode is acquiescence to the voice of compromise, parents need to continually awaken their children’s ear to the noble voice until children build up the habits of thought and deed that can support their best aspirations.

I have found one of the best ways to teach this lesson is to illustrate that the internal argument is common to everyone, and productive individuals learn to deal with the arguments to their own success. From my experience, I know that children love to hear stories about the people they know, love, and respect who have experienced quitting or have met with frequent failure. They cling to the story line that explains how others found a way to overcome. Learning that achievement and success are not a status that you either have or you don’t have, but that achievement and success can, and is, realized by people just like they are - people who find themselves wanting to quit, who want to take short cuts, people who fail far more frequently than they succeed. This is real. This is life. And children draw inspiration for their own achievements through these truths.

In my work with elementary and middle school students, I frequently describe the internal struggles famous men and women experience in their efforts to achieve their goals. But I also find that children like to hear about the struggles, failures, and successes of the people around them. So I often describe my own, daily struggles related to my personal goals. The stories are simple, full of human frailty, but powerful because they illustrate success comes through managing inner conversations. My students like to hear how hard it is for me to lose 15 pounds (my recurring health goal). I tell them how I “cut corners” on my diet because I love chocolate chip cookies. I describe my lament after each setback. They roar with laughter at my weaknesses, but nod with understanding when I describe my new plans for victory. In another example, I recently described my pitiful attempts to learn how to swim (I nearly drowned three times last winter). I told the children how I hated to jump into the pool at 6:00 am on a cold wintery day. They giggled as I enumerated all the excuses I gave myself to avoid this daily ordeal. Nevertheless, as I described my thought process about how I could attack my goal again, they also drew inspiration recognizing comparisons to their own mental wrestling. My struggles are just like theirs! And good goals just take time to attain. Sometimes we have to reassess our strategies and come up with a new plan. But as we manage those inner conversations, as we learn to have answers to that part of us that speaks discouragingly, we can find pathways that lead to success.

By Charles Debelak

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Appropriate academic expectations, those which provide the hope of success through personal industry, enable children to experience academic success and, as a consequence, foster a sense of self worth. Children identify with their successes and experience degrees of self-fulfillment. Given repeated opportunities for success, children emerge into adolescence seeking challenges and knowing how to achieve.

As I noted in the last few months, success at anything requires practice and hard work. We need to remember, however, that children do not learn the value of practice and hard work on their own. Children, just being children, do not have the intellectual and psychological resources to cope with challenges. Neither have they developed the habits of mind or the voice of reason that enables them to persevere through weariness or failure.

Consequently, parents must supply the strength and will power to help children reach academic goals. Mom or Dad will need to monitor homework. Either might also need to sit patiently at the piano until a lesson is complete. The fact that a child can persevere in these tasks is directly related to parental commitment. But parents will not always be around. Children need internal guideposts that buoy their will and empower them to remain on course. They need “right thinking.” Right thinking provides the “why.” “Why should I do my homework? Why do I need to study hard? Why do I need to practice, practice, practice?” Right reasoning drives and empowers the will and strengthens a child’s efforts when he wants to quit.

In education it is so. If we want children to excel in academics, if we want them to reach their highest potential, if we hope they can someday compete in a global marketplace, then they will need to work very hard in school. From every corner of our society today, we hear that education is essential. To heed this claim, children need to value their education above everything else. Amidst the countless distractions children face in our fast-paced culture, they need to be reminded again and again that their personal fulfillment, their academic future, and their professional success, hinge on a quality education. They must be taught to value education above sports, above pop music, above fashion, above video games, and even above just “hangin’ out.” Surely these activities are all fun and they have their place in a child’s life; after all, this is America, a rich and bountiful country filled with wonderful leisure activities. But if a child has not been taught to treasure education and the pursuit of education above these enjoyments, children will compromise their academic aspirations and consequently compromise the benefits of a quality education. When academic excellence calls for greater effort and time commitment, when high achievement requires that children put away video games, or turn off the television, children lacking “right thinking” will not have the will power to carry out their responsibilities.

If you want your child to value education then the home and family life must also make education a top priority. Good grades matter. Homework matters. Academic challenge matters. Academic successes matter. Leisure activities are secondary. TV can wait, video games can wait, iphones can wait, Facebook can wait, and even soccer and basketball can wait. The value of today’s leisure activities will fade and give way to new leisure activities whose value will also fade. But the value of high quality education will endure for a lifetime. Children must know this and hold this, and if they so value education they will also have the will power to commit time and energy to succeed in academics. They will have the will power to delay their gratification in leisure activities until they have secured their best efforts toward education. If the words and actions of parents declare that education matters, then it will matter to children.

Next month we will expand on the idea of “right thinking.

By Charles Debelak

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Expectations often determine achievement. To be effective, expectations are set at an instructional level, which means that the level of assigned work will correlate to a child’s ability and previous achievements. Being given a goal on an instructional level, children can expect success after they invest time and energy. Through this cycle of hard work and achievement, two things are accomplished. Children grow in competency and selfconfidence, and they learn the connection between success and industry.

Lessons about hard work and practice are not easy to teach. My experience has caused me to wonder whether children specifically and humankind generally are hard-wired to avoid demanding work and gravitate to a path of least resistance. I am reminded of “Gilligan” in the 1960’s sitcom Gilligan’s Island. Whenever someone mentioned “work”, Gilligan screeched “work” as if he had just been called to a torture chamber. The scene always made me laugh, but I also thought the performance was not far from reality.

Most children are willing to do some amount of school work. If a little boy finds a topic he enjoys, he will immerse himself in work. Engagement continues until the topic becomes more demanding, and advancement will involve – well – work! Even the most ardent student will balk when confronted with real challenge. In fact, if given the opportunity to give up and quit, little boys and girls will, as a matter of habit, avoid hard work. This is a problem, because the avoidance of work can become habit, and habits grow into dispositional problems.

It is clear that parents and educators need to emphasize industry. But when hoping to establish the connection between achievement and hard work, parents and teachers should grasp how difficult it is to make this correlation practical for children. Children will resist, and their resistance will be ferocious. In other words, we are in for a battle. We need a long-term, long-suffering, patient, enduring, strategic plan that, despite children’s protests, can foster those habits that will equip our children with a sturdy disposition, one that empowers them to reach all of their goals.

At the core of this long-range strategic plan is “right thinking.” Facing challenges and embracing hard work requires the right mindset. To accept the inevitable difficulties and hardships in accomplishing goals, children need the right frame of mind. Mommy and Daddy cannot always walk alongside their children reminding them not to quit or not to compromise goals. Children need the intellectual resources to cope with challenges and to answer the voice inside their own heads that is telling them to give up. Here is the focus of labor for parents and educators. It will require us to walk a fine line between love and discipline, kindness and firmness, accommodation and authority.

This will be our topic next month.

By Charles Debelak

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Appropriate academic expectations should be set at an instructional level. “Instructional level” is education talk meaning that academic expectations are set so that children, through a reasonable amount of effort and hard work, will succeed. If the expectations are set too low, the child succeeds too easily. He gets bored, develops bad work habits, and finds his interests and passions in non-academic pursuits. School, for him, is a waste of time. On the other hand, if the work is consistently too difficult (I emphasize the word “consistently” because appropriate expectations will also be difficult), a student may just quit. And like his friend who found work too easy, locate his pursuits outside of the academic arena.

It is so important for children to learn and understand the connection between success and work. It is the foundation that leads to genuine self-worth and self-esteem. As children experience both work and success they value and identify their achievements: “I’m good at math; I’m a good reader. I’m a good student. I love school.”

When expectations are set at an instructional level, they require work. The student must practice until he or she understands and is competent. Practice means the student does something over and over again until he gets good at it. Unfortunately, practice, if effective, is seldom enjoyable. It is work, often hard work. But it can’t be avoided. Every child dreams about successes, but most shy away from the practice and hard work that are required for achievement. But if children are going to become competent, they just have to do it. The world of sports and music exhort the aspiring athlete or musician: Practice! Practice! Practice! Why would we possibly think that academic achievement can somehow circumvent hard work and practice?

While we talk about the story of hard work and practice, let’s us also connect this story to the love of learning – the love of reading, writing, mathematics, science or history. Children love academics because they are succeeding in academics. They are succeeding in academics because they are practicing. They are practicing because they have parents and teachers who understand that children cannot become good at anything unless they practice, and children will not enjoy anything unless they can become good at it. With this understanding, teachers and parents acknowledge the role of hard work and practice, and they teach their children how to develop the attributes and mindset necessary to persevere.

I have been in education for nearly forty years. Often parents will tell me, “I just want my children to enjoy school.” I understand these sentiments. I felt the same way about my children. Yet without knowing it, these sentiments are often misguided. They suggest a hope that school will become an entertainment or a therapeutic center where teachers are at the beck and call of each child’s individual happiness. Well, that never happens. Even if a school could become an entertainment center and even if every one of a child’s wants (not needs) could be satisfied, I guarantee that you would not find a happy child; you would not find a thriving child who is growing personally and academically. More likely, you would find a self-absorbed, narcissistic student who is seldom happy and is grossly incompetent.

The joy of learning and the sense of personal well-being at school are found in academic success. Academic success is a result of achieving academic expectations, and achievement is grounded in hard work and practice. The bottom line is that if you want your child to love learning and to love school, they must achieve. You would do well to help your child understand this age-old phenomenon.

By Charles Debelak

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We have established the need for context in relationship to academic expectations; now we should see how to align expectations with ability and talent. Even though we all hope our children will succeed in school at a superior level, we also must match our hopes to potential. We readily acknowledge the impossibility that every child will make the varsity soccer team or the varsity debate team. Academic achievement is the same. Even if we maintain high expectations and expect hard work under any circumstance, high expectations and hard work cannot alter aptitude.

Setting realistic expectations and being able to attain expectations requires two components: identifying performance ceilings and building habits of mind and industry to reach expectations. It is actually a rather simple equation that we frequently apply to everyday affairs. Let me illustrate.

Last summer I enticed my grandson to play catch with a 20-inch, plastic ball. From ten feet away, I tossed him the ball only to have him swat it away with his uncoordinated, outstretched arms. Being an astute educator I noted, “Ah, expectations are too high! I must adjust.” I moved closer, maybe eight feet away. I let the ball fly. Same result. I pondered, “The ceiling is still too high.” I moved to a distance of five feet and told my grandson to stretch out his arms. Then I carefully aimed my toss so that the ball would land softly in his grasp. Success was ours. He beamed with pride. We did it again and again. He loved his success.

You might say we found his achievement ceiling and practiced from that point until he could catch the ball every time. But after repeated successes, it was time to raise the expectations, establish a new ceiling. First, I challenged him, “Do you think you could catch the ball if I took a big step backwards?” Bolstered by his recent successes, he welcomed the challenge, “Sure I can. Let’s do it.”

Our first few attempts at reaching new expectations followed a similar scenario. He missed the first two or three tosses. We both made some adjustments and soon he was catching the ball about half of the time. A few tosses bounced out of his arms or off his head. Clearly, he had not reached mastery. He could not attempt more difficult catches until he became proficient at this level of ball-catching. Nevertheless, we did establish an important ball-catching ceiling. We needed more practice at this level of expectation.

I believe we have had many similar experiences while teaching our children new skills. Common sense (as well as piles of research) will tell you that this is how people learn. But I would suggest to you that this is exactly what should happen in the academic world. You, together with your child’s teachers, should be ascertaining academic ceilings. You ought to ask yourself, “What are my child’s aptitudes? What are his/her ceilings at school?”

The folly of lock-step grade level curriculum is that it cannot possibly address each child’s learning potential. That requires parent-teacher collaboration. If children are going to develop their abilities to the fullest, then they need help establishing ceilings and support to reach and surpass their ceilings.

By Charles Debelak

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When setting academic expectations, we have to be aware of context. Superior performance in one context may be a mediocre performance in another. A good illustration comes from a friend of mine who at one point in her career was teaching a remedial reading course to college freshmen. Quite surprisingly three of her students who had ranked among the top 10% of graduates at their respective high schools were required to take this remedial course.

“How could this be?” I asked, incredulous. The answer was context. These students attended schools where the academic standards were detached from a broader county or state context. What their own school called excellent may have only been average in another high school. The commencement of college level work became their day of reckoning and they were found wanting. In my opinion this was an injustice to these students. They were led to believe something that was simply not true.

If we are serious about high quality education we must face context - that can be very disconcerting. It may challenge us; it may expose us. Imagine! We might not be what we say we are! Maybe our claims to high quality education are true only in our self-serving bubble. We have to face the facts of context, because if you don’t you might find yourself in a make-believe world.

My wife and I have always taken this kind of “hard line” approach to assessing our claims of high quality education at Birchwood. We wrestle with context. Sometimes we don’t like what we see. We may fall short. But that’s okay because then we can address our deficiencies head on. Actually in this regard context saves us. It saves us from babbling about a school of “excellence” or “world class education” when in fact the only excellence we have is that which is invented in our self-serving bubble. Frankly, we have no choice; if we say we offer a superior education, we must answer the question, “Superior to what?” If we say we have a good math program or an excellent writing curriculum we must answer, “What is our context?”

When we establish academic expectations based upon a meaningful context, we also develop a healthy appreciation of ourselves and our work. In weaknesses, we seek improvement. Amidst superior work, we learn. If we cannot be the best, then at least we know why, and we appreciate those individuals whose achievement standards are even higher than ours. In any case, within a meaningful context, we take inventory of who we are and what we can do. This is a place from which we can move forward and grow. And that just feels good.

By Charles Debelak

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What should we expect from our children? What is appropriate? Expectations have a powerful impact on performance and achievement. If we expect too little, we get little and a child’s development will be limited. If we expect too much we will cause frustration and discouragement. The question then becomes how we establish expectations that will lead to growth, development, and enthusiasm.

The first thing to keep in mind is that expectations are always determined by context. Without context achievement gropes for meaning. Whether you want your son or daughter to excel in dance, mathematics or writing you set your goals and measure progress based upon context.

For example, let’s look at learning how to play baseball. At first, we may simply want our son or daughter to develop basic skills in catching, throwing, and hitting. The context is personal enjoyment. With certain rudimentary skills a child can come to appreciate the game and enjoy it. But let’s imagine a child who wants to play on the city’s traveling team. Immediately the context changes and the expectations change. It is no longer a matter of whether the child can catch and hit for personal enjoyment, he or she must be able to hit as well or better than the other children trying out for the team in order to get a place on the roster. The challenge is similar if the child wants to play on the high school baseball team, or if during high school he or she wants to earn a baseball scholarship to college. Increasing levels of achievement are accompanied by increased expectation. Someone might ask, “Is Joey a good baseball player?” A friendly answer is, “Sure, he is a terrific player.” An honest answer is, “Compared to whom? What context are you talking about?”

Expectations work the same in education. On the one hand, certain levels of expectation are absolutely necessary within a broad, general context. Every child must learn to read, write, and solve mathematics problems. The context is productive membership in a democratic society. It defines baseline proficiencies. In fact, this is what most state tests are all about – developing core competencies. But as a parent you may have greater expectations for your child’s academic career. If so, the question becomes, “What is your context? With whom or with what are you comparing your notion of ‘greater expectations’?”

This is a tougher job than you may think. It seems that everything in American culture today is “excellent” or “award-winning.” It would be amusing if it was not so misleading. Today children receive academic awards, trophies, ribbons, certificates of distinction, newspaper write-ups, and a whole host of other symbols of excellence. But you have to ask the question, “What is the context?” When your child earns an “A” or a “B” in writing or math or reading, you should ask, “What is the context. How does this level of achievement compare to my child’s actual ability? How does it compare to other students his/her age? How do the academic expectations compare to those in other classrooms, other cities, other states, other countries?” The academic levels to which you want your son or daughter to attain depends upon your level of expectations, and your expectations depend upon the context of your assessment.

Certainly expectations should be and will be mitigated by ability. Next month we will talk about this. But as a parent who cares greatly about your child’s academic achievement, it is important that you guide your child’s development by meaningful contexts.

By Charles Debelak

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