Success resources for children and youth

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

It won’t surprise anyone that, having spent my career in academia, I love books. Even my friends who share my love of books find it surprising that I read three of the four volumes of the Robert Caro biography of Lyndon Johnson on my smartphone.

My introduction to libraries began before I went to elementary school. My mother and my sister would take me to a very large public library almost every Saturday when family chores had been completed. There was an area in the children’s section that was enclosed with an oak railing. The librarian would gather interested children there at different times of the day and read to them. One of the things I liked best about the public library was that I had my own card and could borrow as many as six books at a time.

The library in my elementary school was three storage rooms situated at the ends of three floors of our school, rather than one large repository for books like the public library. Groups of students from each class had a regularly scheduled library time each week. Each week our appointed group would go the library to peruse the books that were lined up along the side and rear walls and select one or more to read.  At the end of library period, students would take their books to two kids, called library monitors, who sat at a table and checked them out by stamping the due date on a slip of lined paper glued inside the back cover of each book. Being a library monitor was a privilege! Library monitors were rewarded with extra time to explore the books that lined the shelves.

The Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) is a huge institution serving a diverse population of more than 4 million in a region with more than 13 million people. Its size affords it economies of scale that are not likely evident in small public libraries. LAPL offers an impressive suite of services under the banner of student success: free, one-to-one online tutoring for K-12 and adults; workshops to help student prepare for post-secondary applications; and a wide variety of e-media resources. Every student in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) receives a student success card granting them access, borrowing privileges, access to tutors, and “no fines – ever.” 

Most families do not have the resources or the ability to provide tutoring and homework assistance for their children. Yes, there are some very useful e-resources available on the Internet. But even the best of the resources available on the Internet are not aligned with the curriculum as organized in the region. The LAPL’s focus on students in the LAUSD attempts to ensure such alignment.

Something organized along similar lines at the provincial level would be a welcome addition to what school boards try to provide, achieving economies of scale impossible for libraries serving small or medium size populations.

Given the social and technological changes of the past century, it is doubtful that children and youth will have the same affinity for books that I did. They are afforded rich opportunities that I could not have imagined as a child. LAPL’s student success initiative with its curated collection of resources is helping to forge a connection with children and youth in a media saturated, digital environment in which today’s student live.   

 Best wishes for the holiday season and new year. This blog will resume January 11, 2023.

Minimum Conditions for Improving Student Achievement

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

From time to time, one hears about extraordinary individual improvement. The victim of an accident who through enormous effort overcomes near life-threatening damage to lead a life unimpeded by the injuries she sustained. The athlete who by dint of training and hard work becomes a medal-winner.   

They make for nice stories: Individuals overcoming significant obstacles to their success. But they are not complete stories. What one rarely hears about are the support from people who made such successes possible. The first responders who extricated the accident victim in time to save her life, the nursing and surgical staff who repaired the damage, the occupational therapist who carefully calibrated an exercise regimen and coached the patient.  

Behind each story of individual success there is a cadre of people removing obstacles, coaching, mentoring, encouraging, using their ingenuity and talents to improve performance so that success can be achieved. It takes a village to raise more than children.  

The key ingredient in improving performance and achieving success in most – if not all – human contexts is teamwork. Improvement and success are difficult to achieve on one’s own. Not only must individuals do their jobs well, but they must also be conscious of the contributions that others make to the overall effort. There must be a sense of shared, collective responsibility.  

Improving student school performance is more difficult than rehabilitating an accident victim or helping an athlete excel. It is more like improving a team of athletes. Schools are collections of students. Teachers can cope with a classroom of students. Some extraordinary teachers can close their classroom doors and improve the performance of all students in their care. Notice my explicit use of the word extraordinary.  

Yes, there are remarkable teachers who on their own help students make remarkable gains in achievement. Those gains probably won’t be sustained over time. Most empirical literature indicates that improvement attenuates over time in the absence of collective, sustained effort.  

There is much talk about school staff members taking collective responsibility for student achievement. One hears of teachers meeting to review data, plan improvement, share techniques, monitor results, and, when obstacles are encountered, adjust their practice.  However, as a participant in education for 50 years, it happens less frequently than one would infer from the literature and is rarely sustained beyond a couple of years – at best.  

The obstacles to successful student improvement are many. Individual teachers must be sufficiently comfortable to talk about their practice and receive suggestions from their peers. They must be willing to meet with their peers on a regular basis and consider evidence about student improvement beyond the information they collect by means of classroom assessments. They must be willing to interpret the data and dig in behind the data to try to understand the challenges students face. They must be willing to expose their practice to one another and be accountable for the results they have achieved.  

Oh, yes, there is another very important ingredient: leadership. For student improvement to occur at the school level there must be leadership. And, if whole systems are going to improve, there must be district leadership. Schools must have leaders who can bring together the disparate individual teachers and support staff to take collective responsibility, interpret data, create an improvement plan, share techniques, monitor results, and, when obstacles are encountered, adjust both individual and collective practice.   

I have described what I believe are the minimum conditions for improving student achievement. The literature and my experience tell me that many, perhaps most, are not present in schools or school districts. Until those conditions are met, one is unlikely to see much sustained improvement in student achievement.

E-Learning & Student Success

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia
[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

No longer a novelty, e-learning is almost routine for most us. When contemplating a new recipe, trying to learn a complex photo editing program, and refreshing my memory of the syntax for a spreadsheet formula, my go-to solution is instructional videos found on the internet. I am often successful. My cooking is edible, I removed wrinkles from scanned copies of old family photos and created a spreadsheet of our household expenses.

I’ve had some challenges along the way. I struggled with the photo-editing program and the related videos. When I mentioned my difficulty with the photo-editing program to my grandson, he said, “yeah, getting all of those layers to work is the key, but it is hard.”

The video on electrical wiring did not mention removing or adding (I have forgotten which) a metallic bridge between the upper and lower outlets in the kitchen. My lack of knowledge blew the circuit in our unit and all the other units in our building. On Labour Day weekend. Luckily, that catastrophe was resolved by a call to a helpful electrician who told me what to do over the phone.

What brought e-learning to mind was the announcement by the Government of Ontario that, beginning in the 2020-2021 school year, students will be required to take four of the 30 credits required for graduation through e-learning. The e-learning notice was one of many changes the government will make under the banner of “modernizing education.”

There were few details when the announcement was made in March, making it difficult to know whether e-learning will be blended with classroom instruction, a regularly scheduled event, or something that students should pursue on their own schedule. It mentions that ‘class size’ will be limited to 35, implying that students will learn with guidance from a teacher. But it doesn’t say whether the teacher will convene sessions for groups of students or the whole class. Working out these details and many others will be crucial to student success.

To the extent that I was a successful e-learner, the success depended on a range of factors. I was highly self-motivated to acquire the knowledge I needed for cooking, photo-editing, performing repetitive calculations, and even rewiring the outlets in our kitchen (except for the circuit-blowing episode). I had plenty of time to learn and review because I had no due dates or deadlines. I was determined to complete each of the tasks. And, although some of the video tutorials were part of a larger course or package, I could focus all my attention on the part that I was pursuing.

I am long past being an adolescent, but, when I was, I possessed few of the attributes I applied to my more recent e-learning.  I acquired what discipline I possess today with support (and prodding) from my teachers.

My grandson will enter grade 10 in Toronto the year that e-learning will become a mandatory feature of Ontario's secondary education system. I'm concerned that the implementation of e-learning considers the supports students will need to succeed. My grandson is an intelligent young man who is at ease with technology. He taught himself to edit sound and video. When he needs advice, he calls his grandmother who is a film and video editor. They discuss timecode, aspect ratios, 2K vs. 4K, and other things that are unfamiliar to me.

But as intelligent and comfortable with technology as he is, my grandson possesses about as much discipline as I had when I was his age. He procrastinates. He needs encouragement even when confronted with deadlines. He can be extremely focussed and remarkably indifferent at the same time. He is like most of us when we were his age.

There are many excellent online courses for the highly motivated and disciplined learner. I hope that the folks in Ontario remember what they were like in high school and plan e-learning accordingly. My grandson’s education and the education of his peers will depend upon how well they do.