We are delighted to share a Lower School Blog, intended to be a resource for parents, faculty, and staff -- including a variety of educational and parenting articles, book reviews and research, as well as some links to school-related and Lower School activities. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

Beyond Counting Sheep: Why math is the hot new bedtime reading"

Time
February 25, 2013
p. 52
Forty-three year old Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is a Princeton-trained astrophysicist turned stay-at-home mom; she is the founder of the nonprofit Bedtime Math.
Overdeck wants kids to fall in love with numbers.
As part of that mission, she wants to change the way parents put their kids to bed; Overdeck wants parents to add a math problem to the nighttime routine.

In 2012 Overdeck launched the Bedtime Math website.
An app and book also are on the way.
She is reaching out to libraries to host Bedtime Math pajama parties, and is exploring partnerships with organizations such as the Girl Scouts in Chicago.
Overdeck also is hoping to reach out to science museums.
"Everyone knows they should read a book to their kids before bed, but nobody knows they should be doing math, too."

The core of Bedtime Math is simple: a free daily math problem, geared to one of three levels of difficulty--prekindergarten, kindergarten to grade 2, and second grade and up.
The subjects are designed to appeal to children.
For example, candy.  
M&Ms last thirteen months, but Lifesavers only last nine months.
How many more months do M&Ms last?
Another problem asks children to calculate how far a skunk can spray its scent.
Overdeck hopes these topics can be a remedy for math anxiety.

Research shows that early math skills are a better predictor of academic success than reading ability.
American students rank 25th of 34 industrialized nations in math.
Everyone from the Girl Scouts to the television program Sesame Street has launched efforts to reverse the trend.
Part of the problem is cultural.
People do not brag they cannot read, but they do say they don't do numbers.
The aim is to create a cultural shift to make students come to school comfortable with math.
Math should be warm and fuzzy, which isn't to say it should be easy.

Because of demand, Bedtime Math is rolling out problems for older children targeted at tweens, teens, and adults.

Here is the link to Bedtime Math
Here is the link to the Museum of Mathematics

"Giddyup"

Children's Books

Giddyup

‘Noni the Pony’ and ‘Rosie’s Magic Horse’

From "Rosie's Magic Horse"
Horse fiction is a staple among school-age readers, particularly girls, but for some reason picture books about horses are less common. This makes two new picture books, “Noni the Pony” and “Rosie’s Magic Horse,” welcome additions to the genre. Each demonstrates the pleasures of horses and ponies for children whose feet do not yet reach the stirrups.

NONI THE PONY

Written and illustrated by Alison Lester
32 pp. Beach Lane Books. $15.99. (Picture book; ages 2 to 5)

ROSIE’S MAGIC HORSE

By Russell Hoban
Illustrated by Quentin Blake
40 pp. Candlewick Press. $15.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)
From "Noni the Pony"
Alison Lester, an Australian author-illustrator and one of that country’s inaugural children’s laureates (along with Boori Monty Pryor), has written a number of books about both hoofed varieties. In her most recent, “Noni the Pony,” an unabashedly sweet and simple tale about a happy pony, her affection and easy familiarity with these four-legged favorites shine through.
“Noni the Pony is friendly and funny.
Her shimmering tail is the color of honey.”
Thus begins the story of the dappled Noni, related in laid-back couplets that work perfectly for young children. The light rhyme is occasionally mechanistic (“Noni the Pony is gentle and kind, and never lets anyone get left behind”), but the target audience will appreciate its simple cadences, which allow them to predict the rhyming words and to participate in the pleasures of the story. And Noni’s story is all about pleasures – “trotting and prancing” and “the ladies next door” who always “moo while she’s dancing.”
Lester’s cheerful illustrations nicely match the text, yet offer welcome surprises. There’s something amusing about Noni’s oversimplified movements, from her squirrel-like leap on the cover to her curled-up-like-a-kitty finale.
Noni and her friends, Dave Dog and Coco the Cat, “ambush each other and play hide-and-seek,” and on occasion even the carefree little pony gets spooked: “When the leaves rustle and sigh in the breeze, Noni thinks monsters are shaking the trees.” But being in the company of friends manages to calm her into a bedtime snuggle.
Sheer exuberance prevails in “Rosie’s Magic Horse,” a delightful picture book, published posthumously, by Russell Hoban (“Bedtime for Frances,” “The Sea-Thing Child”). Quentin Blake, best known for his contemporary illustrations of Roald Dahl’s work, is a fine choice to complement Hoban’s witty and original prose. His doodled ink-and-watercolor illustrations, rich with humor and whimsy, recall the work of William Steig. And the similarity is echoed in the offbeat text.  As with “Noni,” there is a leaping gallop on the front cover, in this case a horse caught in mid-air, with a young girl astride his back.
The story is inventive from the very first pages, when it becomes apparent that the narrator is in fact a Popsicle stick. Carelessly tossed to the ground after his surrounding icicle is eaten, the stick contemplates its circumstance: “ ‘The sweetness is gone,’ said the stick. ‘No more sweetness.’ For a long time, nothing happened.” And then something – neither the stick nor readers will expect – does.
A girl named Rosie, a collector as it happens, picks up the discarded ice-pop stick (drawn with a forlorn look on its “face”).  It turns out the numerous sticks in her collection each have a consciousness, and all are pessimists too. “Without our ice-pops, we are nothing,” the eldest stick tells the newcomer, who nonetheless dreams of being something more. He dreams of being a horse. And this rouses the other sticks from their downtrodden resignation.
Rosie has a dream too. She wishes her stick collection was instead a hoard of treasure so she could help her parents, who can’t pay the bills.  The story shows how those disparate wishes meld into dreams come true. It would be unfair to give away what happens as the plot, fantastical and delicious, veers and soars.
Suffice it to say the stick becomes known as Stickerino. The heroine triumphs. There is an ice-pop mountain. Flying ice-pop sticks can wreak a startling degree of havoc (especially on inconvenient pirates). All ends well when you don’t question your dreams.

"Managing Your Preschooler's Fascination with Apps"

Managing Your Preschooler's Fascination with Apps

If apps are your go-to babysitter, learn how to break the habit.

Apps and Preschoolers


Advice & Answers


Little kids love apps -- and so do most parents. The ability to tap, touch, and swipe can lead to hours of fun, especially for tiny fingers. And sometimes, handing over your smartphone makes a tantrum magically disappear.
Apps can teach great things –- at low or no cost. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you should always hand over your device when your little one is bored. Each swipe on a tablet or smartphone means less time spent doing all of the other activities that are good for preschool-aged development and more time spent in front of a screen. And if your kid is already watching TV or playing on your computer, it all starts to add up.
Too much screen time can impact everything from kids' health to their school readiness. Here's how to manage your kid's app habit.

Tips to manage your preschooler's app habit

There are better teething devices than electronics. If your kids start to put your phone in their mouth, they're too young to use it. Find something else for them to chew, shake, or throw.
Pay attention to what they're doing. Make sure you download age-appropriate apps -- there are lots of them. And check out the apps before your kids do to make sure that the subject matter is right for their age. Can they understand the words? Can they manipulate the game? Really young kids are still developing their fine motor skills, so unless you want a frustrated child on your hands, make sure that a game doesn't require lots of coordination to play.
Don't make phones a habit. Remember that kids quickly develop routines. If they associate going to restaurants or driving in a car with playing games on your phone, it will be difficult to transition out of the behavior.
Balance coping skills. Ultimately, we want kids who can amuse themselves without batteries. Make sure that your kids are equally comfortable with board books, music, and that old faithful -- the crayon.
Keep an eye on the phone. They can get dropped -- on the floor, in a toilet -- wedged in a seat, left in a seat pocket, etc. These things are expensive!
Remember that you're their role model. Kids learn their behavior from you. If you're always on your phone, they'll want to be, too.

"Schools Ask: Gifted or Just Well-Prepared?"

Schools Ask: Gifted or Just Well-Prepared?

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Natalie Viderman, 4, was tutored at Bright Kids NYC for an assessment test.
When the New York City Education Department announced that it was changing part of its admissions exam for its gifted and talented programs last year, in part to combat the influence of test preparation companies, one of those companies posted the news with links to guides and practice tests for the new assessment.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Natalie Viderman, 4, and her mother, Victoria Preys. Natalie spent months preparing for gifted programs’ admissions tests. 

The day that Pearson, a company that designs assessments, announced that it was changing an exam used by many New York City private schools, another test prep company attempted to decipher the coming changes on its blog: word reasoning and picture comprehension were out, bug search and animal coding were in.
If you did not know what to make of it — and who would? — why not stop by? 

Assessing students has always been a fraught process, especially 4-year-olds, a mercurial and unpredictable lot by nature, who are vying for increasingly precious seats in kindergarten gifted programs.
In New York, it has now become an endless contest in which administrators seeking authentic measures of intelligence are barely able to keep ahead of companies whose aim is to bring out the genius in every young child. 

The city’s leading private schools are even considering doing away with the test they have used for decades, popularly known as the E.R.B., after the Educational Records Bureau, the organization that administers the exam, which is written by Pearson. 

“It’s something the schools know has been corrupted,” said Dr. Samuel J. Meisels, an early-childhood education expert who gave a presentation in the fall to private school officials, encouraging them to abandon the test. Excessive test preparation, he said, “invalidates inferences that can be drawn” about children’s “learning potential and intellect and achievement.” 

Last year, the Education Department said it would change one of the tests used for admission to public school gifted kindergarten and first-grade classes in order to focus more on cognitive ability and less on school readiness, which favors children who have more access to preschool and tutoring. 

Scores had been soaring. For the 2012-13 school year, nearly 5,000 children qualified for gifted and talented kindergarten seats in New York City public schools. That was more than double the number five years ago. “We were concerned enough about our definition of giftedness being affected by test prep — as we were prior school experience, primary spoken language, socioeconomic background and culture — that we changed the assessment,” Adina Lopatin, a deputy chief academic officer in the Education Department, said. 

And yet test prep companies leapt to action, printing new books tailored to the new test and organizing classes. 

Natalie Viderman, 4, spent an hour and a half each week for six months at Bright Kids NYC, a tutoring company, working on skills like spatial visualization and serial reasoning, which are part of the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, or NNAT 2, the new gifted and talented test. She and her mother, Victoria Preys, also worked every night on general learning, test prep and workbooks, some provided by Bright Kids.
“It is my philosophy that if you can get more help, why not?” Ms. Preys said. She prepared her son the same way and he benefited, she said, scoring in the 98th percentile, qualifying him for a seat. She interpreted the Education Department’s decision to change the test and “raise the standards,” she said, as a message that it expected parents to do more. “We are increasing the standards, so you have to work with your kids more, to prep more,” she said. 

“Every time these tests change, there’s a lot of demand,” Bige Doruk, founder of Bright Kids, said. She said she did not accept the argument that admissions tests had been invalidated by test prep. “It is not a validity issue, it’s a competitive issue,” she said. “Parents will always do what they can for their children.” And not all children who take preparation courses do well, she said. The test requires that 4-year-olds sit with a stranger for nearly an hour — skills that extend beyond the scope of I.Q. or school readiness. 

Natalie also applied to Hunter College Elementary School in Manhattan; she missed the cutoff for the second round by a point.

"Nickelodeon Hopes Its App Wins Hearts"

Nickelodeon Hopes Its App Wins Hearts

Nickelodeon has spent the last two years asking 9- and 10-year-olds what they want to watch on the iPad. The result: Very little actual television.
The Nick app features free games, interactive polls and slide shows floating against a bright orange background.

That response posed a problem and an opportunity for Nickelodeon, a top-rated children’s cable channel that is home to “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Victorious” and “iCarly.” Instead of simply making its programs available on tablets, Nickelodeon designed its first app as a noisy, colorful smorgasbord of animated clips, irreverent music videos and the occasional deluge of the network’s trademark green slime. Or, as Nickelodeon executives describe it, the app is designed to be a “ginormous grid of everything Nick.”
As fun as it is supposed to be for children, the Nick app has serious implications for its parent company, Viacom, and for the entire television distribution business. The app represents the first attempt by a Viacom channel at TV Everywhere — the concept that paying customers can stream live and on-demand shows on all devices — that many television executives hope will keep viewers tied to their cable and satellite contracts. It is expected to be available in the Apple App Store on Thursday. 

The Nick app features free games, interactive polls and slide shows floating against a bright orange background. A less obvious feature also allows users to watch full-length Nickelodeon shows on tablets as long as they (or, more likely, their parents) authenticate that they are paying subscribers. 

Nick arrives late to the app store. A main rival, Disney, already offers authenticated apps for the Disney Channel and Disney Junior that allow children to stream shows like “Good Luck Charlie” and “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” and to participate in interactive “appisodes.” 

Cyma Zarghami, president of the Nickelodeon Group, said she preferred to wait until the cable channel had more information about how its audience used mobile devices. Research showed children preferred to play games and watch short clips on apps, rather than catch up on complete episodes. Nickelodeon already has individual branded games available as apps. 

“TV Everywhere is a given. It’s not special anymore,” Ms. Zarghami said. “Being first wasn’t important to us. We took our time to combine these two ideas” of interactive games and snippets of shows.
A brief video instructs children to “grab an adult” to enter a password that shows they subscribe to Nickelodeon before gaining access to the last five episodes of series like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Big Time Rush” and “Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness.” This fall, Nickelodeon will introduce a separate app for Nick Jr. intended to serve as an “interactive play date” for its preschool-age audience.
Nickelodeon’s strategy — based on extras rather than episodes — signals how Viacom may approach apps for its other cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and VH1. Until this week, Viacom had not introduced authenticated apps for its channels, unlike Time Warner’s HBO and its popular HBO Go app.
“This is a creative sandbox for kids but it’s also a creative sandbox for the company,” said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president for digital. 

The Nick app represents an evolution in Viacom’s thinking about its audience. Nickelodeon has long been a powerhouse in children’s programming, but its ratings suddenly plunged in 2011. Viacom in part blamed Nielsen for not counting children who streamed shows via “unmeasured platforms” like Netflix. (The company also conceded that it had aging series like “SpongeBob” and “iCarly”.) 

Viewers who watch shows on the Nick app will not be counted in ratings data, but the cable channel can at least sell advertisements. Nickelodeon will introduce the app to marketers at its upfront next week in New York. 

The introduction of the Nick app comes as the channel’s ratings are slowly climbing back after the unexpected plunge that started in 2011. A daily average of 2.9 million viewers ages 2 to 11 watched Nickelodeon this month, up 12 percent from February 2012, according to Nielsen.
Ms. Zarghami said the Nick app could help the channel develop new series and stars, based on which clips, actors and characters drew the most attention. Nickelodeon commissioned 12 short films for the app, including one called “Dance Party in a Port-A-Potty” that featured meerkats partying in a portable restroom. Nickelodeon has greenlighted five for the channel. “Our aim is to get more content faster,” Ms. Zarghami said. 

Tablet use among children 11 years old and younger is projected to grow faster than almost any other age group. Half of households in the United States with children own a tablet and 70 percent have some sort of smart device, according to Nickelodeon’s research.
“The tablet has come of age particularly among our audience,” Mr. Youngwood said. 

Nickelodeon has struck deals with eight cable or satellite providers including Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS, Cablevision and DirecTV to make the streaming feature of its Nick app available in nearly 50 million homes. The nonstreaming offerings will be available to viewers who do not subscribe to those companies.
Paul Verna, a senior analyst at eMarketer, said the authentication model could pose challenges for Viacom. He pointed to the media company’s dispute with DirecTV this last summer, which prompted the satellite provider to suspend Viacom’s channels. 

“How do you explain to a little kid that your friend on Comcast can watch Nick Jr. and ‘iCarly’ on their iPad but you can’t?” Mr. Verna said.

"50 Ways to Entertain a Kid on an Airplane"

© iStockphoto
Samuel L. Jackson was terrified of snakes on a plane. But the tough guy never dealt with an energetic toddler on a five-hour flight to Grandma’s house.  Now that’s scary.

But you don’t need to worry. All you need to do is print and save this list. You’ll find 50 fabulous ways to pass the time, without annoying fellow passengers or running into TSA restrictions (play-dough, glue sticks and ninja throwing stars are all in the “forbidden” category, no matter how much your toddler may enjoy them at home).

Pick your favorite lightweight, no-fuss options from the following list. Go ahead, have a good time on the plane. They aren’t charging you for that—yet.

Read more ... http://www.parenting.com/gallery/50-ways-entertain-kids-plane?pnid=363362 

"Helping a Worrier Become a Warrier"

Helping a Worrier Become a Warrior

Is your child a warrior, or a worrier?

That cute — and memorable — phrasing comes from “Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart?” by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (famous for “Nurture Shock” and now the authors of “Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing”) in The Times Magazine. It’s shorthand for a problem most of us are familiar with: some people seem born to take tests or compete. For others, the whisper of pressure can trigger the seeming disappearance of everything we ever learned.

In their magazine piece, the authors look at what lies under that difference: “how we were raised, our skills and experience, the hormones that we marinated in as fetuses.”

But while understanding the causes may help promote eventual changes in standardized testing, there’s no way to entirely avoid the need to perform under pressure — and no way to avoid it on behalf of our children.
For the parents of worriers, one question hovers over the topic: how can we help our children learn to both perform better, and feel that stress just a little less? I asked the magazine piece’s authors to help me pull out what they learned in researching their article, and to share some other ideas and background that might help.

Embrace the anxiety. Students who read a statement declaring that recent research suggests “people who feel anxious during a test might actually do better” did, in fact, do better on tests, in the lab and outside.

Find competition that’s fun. Spelling bees, chess teams, sports, science fairs: when the pressure is predictable and comes with friends and excitement, even worriers build up their tolerance for the stress that doesn’t include those benefits (like the SAT exams). These competitions “give kids the chance to make that connection between feeling a little anxious and performing at their best,” Mr. Bronson said.

Emphasize success. Even when competition is fun, getting through it is a victory for a “worrier.” Help your child focus on the ebbs and flows of the competitive anxiety, and then remind him to celebrate the accomplishment — and think back to it the next time that anxiety rears its head. Parents comfort children when they feel insecure, but we also need to foster exploratory behavior. “By destabilizing children, pushing them, we help children be brave in unfamiliar situations, stand up for themselves, and learn to take risks.”

Watch for when “stress” turns into “distress.” For many children, short-term stress can be energizing. But when it goes beyond the short term into a larger problem, “parents need to try to find the triggers that change test taking from a challenge state to a threat state.” The child who lost sleep for a month over standardized testing (described in the article) had heard from teachers that school funding and teacher pay is partly tied to these tests now, so he felt an enormous burden to score super high on the standardized tests, to help buoy the school’s averages.

Change the story. “Right now, the story is that college spots are really hard to get,” Mr. Bronson wrote in an e-mail. “Cary Roseth, assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, classifies the race to college as a ‘scramble competition,’ like a huge game of musical chairs – except with too few chairs. This is somewhat of an illusion. Every year, U.C.L.A. runs a national survey of incoming college freshmen; last year, they collected data from over 204,000 frosh who attend 270 different bachelor’s colleges. 83 percent of them were attending their first or second choice college. U.C.L.A., all by itself, admitted almost 16,000 applicants. Over 10,000 of them turned U.C.L.A. down. Nationally, 59 percent of all admittances are turned down by the students. So who is rejecting who here? Maybe we all need to hold our tongues when we’re tempted to scare the kids, ‘You know, you have to study harder if you want to get into a U.C.’ And maybe when we say, reassuringly, ‘There’s a good college for everyone,’ we have to convince ourselves first.”

"How Advertising Targets our Children"

How Advertising Targets Our Children

Joyce Hesselberth 
I always wanted somewhat cynical children, at least where advertising and proselytizing are concerned. That is, I wanted my children to grow up alert to the silken, studied salesmanship of those who want your trust but are not really your friends.

I grew up in the era of unfettered television advertisements for tobacco. I remember all the jingles — but I also remember the welcome cynicism of Mad Magazine parodies in which gravestones discussed the great taste of cigarettes and Hitler endorsed them as terrific mass murderers.

In serious discussions of advertising today, I sometimes miss that harsh humor. Researchers have long focused on the effects of cigarette and alcohol ads on children — and more recently, on the effects of subtler marketing through product placement in movies and TV shows. Studies show that advertising does help push children and adolescents toward unhealthy behaviors, but also that it is increasingly difficult to shield them as marketers exploit the Internet and social media.

In a study published last month in the journal Pediatrics, Jerry L. Grenard, a health researcher at Claremont Graduate University, and his colleagues followed almost 4,000 students from seventh through 10th grades, assessing their exposure to alcohol advertising on television and asking about their alcohol use.

A large body of literature shows that advertising does increase the odds of underage drinking, Dr. Grenard noted. But his new results take the concerns a step further. “This study linked exposure to alcohol advertising to an increase in alcohol use among adolescents and then that in turn is associated with higher level of problems with drinking alcohol, getting drunk, missing school, getting into fights,” he said.

Adolescents who see alcohol advertising are being sold something that we would prefer them not to consume in any amount. Food advertising raises different issues, since children will certainly eat and will certainly have — and express — food preferences.

Jennifer Harris, the director of marketing initiatives at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, told me that television advertising remains very important in the ways that foods are marketed to children. According to the center’s data, every day on average in the United States, children and teenagers see 12 to 14 food ads on television.

But parents may not realize that their children are also subjected to messages from advertisers coming in from other directions.

“They have Web sites with reward programs. They’re advertising on other Web sites, social media — Facebook is huge — Twitter, mobile marketing, mobile apps,” Dr. Harris said. Many children are playing “advergames” online, for example, intended to promote products. Parents may be completely unaware, she said.

And what are they marketing to children? According to Dr. Harris, the top four products are fast foods, sugared cereals, sugary drinks and candy.

Thomas Robinson, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, has studied childhood obesity and its links to screen time. In experiments with preschoolers, he told me, “even a 30-second exposure to a novel product, one that you’ve never seen before, changes their preferences for brand.”

In another study, researchers looked at the effects of branding by giving 3- to 5-year-olds two portions of identical foods, one set out on a McDonald’s wrapper. The children were asked to point to which foods tasted better and, Dr. Robinson said, “overwhelmingly, for hamburgers, French fries, baby carrots, milk or juice in a cup, kids would say the one on the McDonald’s wrapper tastes better.”

Up to the age of 7 or 8, children are thought to be unable to understand the nature of advertising — developmentally, they can’t identify the underlying persuasive intent.

Older children may have a better understanding of commercials, but they are vulnerable in other ways.
“Coke is the most popular brand on Facebook,” Dr. Harris said. “It has 58 million fans.” When adolescents “like” Coke, they receive posts every day, which they may then “share” with friends.

“That whole tapping into the peer relationship that kids of that age have is, we think, very deceptive,” Dr. Harris said. “They don’t necessarily recognize that it’s advertising and also very manipulative.”

What can parents do? With young children, the most important strategy is probably to reduce screen time, and the number of messages, and to keep track of what they’re seeing when they do watch TV.

And when a child asks for something, parents should not simply refuse. “Respond, ‘Well, why do you want that? Where did you hear about it?’ ” said Dr. Robinson. And if the answer is that the child saw it on TV or on the Internet, “Say, ‘Well, they want you to want it, they’re trying to sell you that.’ And then have a discussion.”

And what about my aspirations of nurturing young cynics? Though teaching critical viewing skills does enhance children’s awareness, Dr. Robinson told me that relying too much on notions of media literacy can actually play into the hands of the advertisers.

“That takes the responsibility away from them and puts it on the kids to be educated consumers,” he said.
Know what your children are watching. Watch with them. Talk about what you see — the images on billboards or on touchscreens, the Super Bowl commercials, the Web sites they visit.

In an information-rich world, we need to know the messages children are receiving, and help them decode and understand what the world is trying to sell them.

"Why Third Grade is So Important: The Matthew Effect"

Why Third Grade Is So Important: The ‘Matthew Effect’

Students studying
FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP / Getty Images
Children doing their homework in a gymnasium in Kentwood, New Orleans, LA on August 30, 2012.
Take a guess: What is the single most important year of an individual’s academic career? The answer isn’t junior year of high school, or senior year of college. It’s third grade.

What makes success in third grade so significant? It’s the year that students move from learning to read — decoding words using their knowledge of the alphabet — to reading to learn. The books children are expected to master are no longer simple primers but fact-filled texts on the solar system, Native Americans, the Civil War. Children who haven’t made the leap to fast, fluent reading begin at this moment to fall behind, and for most of them the gap will continue to grow. So third grade constitutes a critical transition — a “pivot point,” in the words of Donald J. Hernandez, a professor of sociology at CUNY–Hunter College. A study Hernandez conducted, released last year by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, found that third-graders who lack proficiency in reading are four times more likely to become high school dropouts.

Too often the story unfolds this way: struggles in third grade lead to the “fourth-grade slump,” as the reading-to-learn model comes to dominate instruction. While their more skilled classmates are amassing knowledge and learning new words from context, poor readers may begin to avoid reading out of frustration. A vicious cycle sets in: school assignments increasingly require background knowledge and familiarity with “book words” (literary, abstract and technical terms)— competencies that are themselves acquired through reading. Meanwhile, classes in science, social studies, history and even math come to rely more and more on textual analysis, so that struggling readers begin to fall behind in these subjects as well.
 
In operation here is what researchers call the “Matthew effect,” after the Bible verse found in the Gospel of Matthew: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” In other words, the academically rich get richer and the poor get poorer, as small differences in learning ability grow into large ones. But the Matthew effect has an important upside: well-timed interventions can reverse its direction, turning a vicious cycle into a virtuous one.

Recognizing the importance of this juncture, some states have been taking a hard line: third-graders who aren’t reading at grade level don’t get promoted to fourth grade. “Mandatory retention” bills have already passed in Arizona, Florida, Indiana and Oklahoma, and are being considered in Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico and Tennessee. But many education researchers say holding kids back isn’t the answer. The ideal alternative: teachers and parents would collaborate on the creation of an individualized learning plan for each third-grader who needs help with reading — a plan that might involve specialized instruction, tutoring or summer school. Most important is taking action, researchers say, and not assuming that reading problems will work themselves out.
 
It might seem scary that a single school year can foretell so much of a student’s future. But maybe we should feel grateful instead — that research has given us a golden opportunity to both build on what has already been accomplished or turn kids’ academic lives around.

"It's Not Just Story Time and Bookmobiles"

It’s Not Just Story Time and Bookmobiles

Buffy Hamilton
Buffy J. Hamilton is a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Ga. In January she will become the learning strategist for the Cleveland Public Library. She is on Twitter.

Contemporary libraries have shifted from warehouses of books and materials to become participatory sites of culture and learning that invite, ignite and sustain conversations.

The media scholar Henry Jenkins has identified that such participatory sites of culture share five traits:
· Creating learning spaces through multiple participatory media;
· Providing opportunities for creating and sharing original works and ideas;
· Crafting an environment in which novices’ and experts’ roles are fluid as people learn together;
· Positing the library as a place where members feel a sense of belonging, value and connectedness; and
· Helping people believe their contributions matter by incorporating their ideas and feedback.

Modern libraries of all kinds – public, school, academic and special – are using this lens of participatory culture to help their communities rethink the idea of a “library.” By putting relationships with people first, libraries can recast and expand the possibilities of what we can do for communities by embodying what Guy Kawasaki calls enchantment: trustworthiness, likability, and exceptional services and products.
Libraries in various communities provide enchantment through traditional services, like story time, bookmobiles, classes and rich collections of books. However, libraries are also incorporating innovative new roles: librarians as instructional partners, libraries as “makerspaces,” libraries as centers of community publishing and digital learning labs.

While libraries face many challenges – budget cuts, an ever-shifting information landscape, stereotypes that sometimes hamper how people see libraries, and rapidly evolving technologies – our greatest resource is community participation. Relationships with the community build an organic library, that is of the people, by the people and for the people.

"Certain Television Fare Can Help Ease Aggression in Young Children, Study Finds"

Certain Television Fare Can Help Ease Aggression in Young Children, Study Finds

Nancy Jensen looks on as her son Joe, 2, is allowed a little time watching television.Ted S. Warren/Associated Press Nancy Jensen looks on as her son Joe, 2, is allowed a little time watching television.
 
Experts have long known that children imitate many of the deeds — good and bad — that they see on television. But it has rarely been shown that changing a young child’s viewing habits at home can lead to improved behavior.

In a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers reported the results of a program designed to limit the exposure of preschool children to violence-laden videos and television shows and increase their time with educational programming that encourages empathy. They found that the experiment reduced the children’s aggression toward others, compared with a group of children who were allowed to watch whatever they wanted.

“Here we have an experiment that proposes a potential solution,” said Dr. Thomas N. Robinson, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford, who was not involved in the study. “Giving this intervention — exposing kids to less adult television, less aggression on television and more prosocial television — will have an effect on behavior.”

While the research showed “a small to moderate effect” on the preschoolers’ behavior, he added, the broader public health impact could be “very meaningful.”

The new study was a randomized trial, rare in research on the effects of media on children. The researchers, at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington, divided 565 parents of children ages 3 to 5 into two groups. Both were told to track their children’s media consumption in a diary that the researchers assessed for violent, didactic and prosocial content, which they defined as showing empathy, helping others and resolving disputes without violence.

The control group was given advice only on better dietary habits for children. The second group of parents were sent program guides highlighting positive shows for young children. They also received newsletters encouraging parents to watch television with their children and ask questions during the shows about the best ways to deal with conflict. The parents also received monthly phone calls from the researchers, who helped them set television-watching goals for their preschoolers.

The researchers surveyed the parents at six months and again after a year about their children’s social behavior. After six months, parents in the group receiving advice about television-watching said their children were somewhat less aggressive with others, compared with those in the control group. The children who watched less violent shows also scored higher on measures of social competence, a difference that persisted after one year.

Low-income boys showed the most improvement, though the researchers could not say why. Total viewing time did not differ between the two groups.

“The take-home message for parents is it’s not just about turning off the TV; it’s about changing the channel,” said Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis, the lead author of the study and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington.

“We want our children to behave better,” Dr. Christakis said, “and changing their media diet is a good way to do that.”

Until she began participating in Dr. Christakis’s trial, Nancy Jensen, a writer in Seattle, had never heard of shows like Nickelodeon’s “Wonder Pets!,” featuring cooperative team players, and NBC’s “My Friend Rabbit,” with its themes of loyalty and friendship.

At the time, her daughter Elizabeth, then 3, liked“King of the Hill,”a cartoon comedy geared toward adults that features beer and gossip. In hindsight, she said, the show was “hilariously funny, but completely inappropriate for a 3-year-old.”

These days, she consults Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group in San Francisco, to make sure that the shows her daughter watches have some prosocial benefit. Elizabeth, now 6, was “not necessarily an aggressive kid,” Ms. Jensen said. Still, the girl’s teacher recently commended her as very considerate, and Ms. Jensen believes a better television diet is an important reason.

The new study has limitations, experts noted. Data on both the children’s television habits and their behavior was reported by their parents, who may not be objective. And the study focused only on media content in the home, although some preschool-aged children are exposed to programming elsewhere.
Children watch a mix of “prosocial but also antisocial media,” said Marie-Louise Mares, an associate professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Merely being exposed to prosocial media doesn’t mean that kids take it that way.”

Even educational programming with messages of empathy can be misunderstood by preschoolers, with negative consequences. A study published online in November in The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology found that preschoolers shown educational media were more likely to engage in certain forms of interpersonal aggression over time.

Preschoolers observe relationship conflict early in a television episode but do not always connect it to the moral lesson or resolution at the end, said Jamie M. Ostrov, the lead author of the November study and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo.

Preschoolers watch an estimated 4.1 hours of television and other screen time daily, according to a 2011 study. Dr. Ostrov advised parents to watch television with their young children and to speak up during the relationship conflicts that are depicted. Citing one example, Dr. Ostrov counseled parents to ask children, “What could we do differently here?” to make it clear that yelling at a sibling is not acceptable.
He also urged parents to stick with age-appropriate programming. A 3-year-old might misunderstand the sibling strife in the PBS show“Arthur,” he said, or stop paying attention before it is resolved.

"In Alabama, a Model for Obama's Push to Expand Preschool"

In Alabama, a Model for Obama’s Push to Expand Preschool

Meggan Haller for The New York Times
Damien Fowler, 4, playing a memory game with his teacher at the Nina Nicks Joseph Child Development Center in Mobile, Ala.
President Obama’s call in his State of the Union address to “make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America” rallied advocates across the country who have long argued that inequity in education begins at a very young age.
Multimedia
In details that emerged early Thursday, the administration proposed that the federal government work with states to provide preschool for every 4-year-old from low- and moderate-income families. The president’s plan also calls for expanding Early Head Start, the federal program designed to prepare children from low-income families for school, to broaden quality childcare for infants and toddlers. 

While supporters herald the plans as a way to help level the playing field for children who do not have the advantages of daily bedtime stories, music lessons and counting games at home, critics argue that federal money could be squandered on ineffective programs. 

In the 2010-11 school year, the latest year for which data is available, 28 percent of all four-year-olds in the United States were enrolled in state-financed preschool programs, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. 

According to W. Steven Barnett, director of the institute, which is based at Rutgers University, only five states, including Oklahoma and Georgia, have a stated objective of offering preschool slots to all 4-year-olds. While about 1.1 million students across the country are enrolled in federally financed Head Start programs and others attend private preschools, that still leaves millions of children on the sidelines.
The president’s plan would provide federal matching dollars to states to provide public preschool slots for four-years olds whose families earn up to 200 percent of the poverty level. President Obama would also allocate extra funds for states to expand public pre-kindergarten slots for middle-class families, who could pay on a sliding scale of tuition. 

President Obama’s early education proposals come as a handful of states have been more aggressively pushing taxpayer-financed preschool. 

In Alabama, for example, Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican, has called for a $12.5 million increase — or more than 60 percent — in the state’s preschool budget, with the eventual goal of increasing financing over 10 years to the point where every 4-year-old in the state could have a preschool slot.
The governor’s proposal is supported by a coalition of early-education advocates and business leaders, who see preschool as an important component of future job readiness. 

“We’re trying to invest in a work force that can compete in 20 years with other states and other nations,” said Allison de la Torre, executive director of the coalition, the Alabama School Readiness Alliance.
Alabama is one of only five states whose preschool program received top marks based on an assessment of its quality standards by the National Institute for Early Education Research, but only 6 percent of 4-year-olds there are enrolled in a state-financed preschool. 

To receive state money in Alabama, a preschool must employ teachers with bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education or child development, keep class sizes under 20 children, and follow a state-approved curriculum. The Obama administration is proposing similar standards for its federal matching program.
At one of the state-financed sites on Wednesday, the Nina Nicks Joseph Child Development Center in Mobile, Tina Adair, the lead teacher in a class of 18 students, most of whom come from low-income families, helped Amiyah Wilson, 5, copy the words “Happy Valentine’s Day” onto a card for her mother. Elsewhere in the classroom, Donovan Smith, 5, and Henry Hinojosa, 5, used a scale to compare the weights of two loads of blocks. 

Ms. Adair said that the children had plenty of time to paint, sing or play with dress-up clothes and toy trucks. But she said they were also preparing for kindergarten and beyond through letter and number games, science experiments and writing. 

As a former middle-school teacher, Ms. Adair said she could tell when students have had academic preparation from an early age. 

“As fast-paced as our public school system is right now,” she said, “any little advantage that they can get is a bonus.”

"The Author Himself Was a Cat in the Hat"

The Author Himself Was a Cat in the Hat

The Cat wore a hat. Everyone knows that.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P.
This hat from Theodor Geisel's collection resembles the one worn by the Cat in the Hat.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P.
The Cat in the Hat.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P.
A hat familiar to readers of the Dr. Seuss book "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins."
Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P.
Geisel in a San Diego State band hat, with his wife, Audrey. 
 
But so did Sam-I am, the mooing Mr. Brown and the fat fish from “One Fish, Two Fish” — a tiny yellow hat.
The Grinch disguised himself in a crinkled Santa hat.
All over Dr. Seuss’s beloved children’s books, his characters sport distinctive, colorful headwear — unless they are the kinds of creatures that have it sprouting naturally from their heads in tufted, multitiered and majestically flowing formations.
So it’s no surprise that the real Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, was a hat lover himself. He collected hundreds of them, plumed, beribboned and spiked, and kept them in a closet hidden behind a bookcase in his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He incorporated them into his personal paintings, his advertising work and his books. He even insisted that guests to his home don the most elaborate ones he could find.
“Believe me, when you get a dozen people seated at a fairly formal dinner party,” his widow, Audrey, said in an interview for an 1999 educational video, “and they’ve all got on perfectly ridiculous chapeaus, the evening takes care of itself.”
Now, as part of their efforts to keep the Seuss brand fresh in the eyes of young readers, Random House Children’s Books, his longtime publisher, and Dr. Seuss Enterprises have collaborated on an exhibit that for the first time will display some of his hats to the public.
The show, timed to the 75th anniversary of his book “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,” will open Monday at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and then travel to 15 other locations over the course of the year. About a dozen hats will be displayed.
Paintings done by Geisel for his own enjoyment that include the hats are also part of the exhibit, but because of space constraints in New York those paintings will be shown separately at the Animazing Gallery in SoHo.
Theodor Geisel was born in 1904 in Spingfield, Mass., at a time when hats were a much more common part of a man’s wardrobe. Still, Geisel, who was something of an iconoclast and prankster, enjoyed them more than most, largely because of their costumelike quality.
During a brief time studying at Oxford University, he wore a cap. As he traveled to 30 or so countries in his 20s, he wore a Panama hat. It was then that he started his collection.
After his sister Marnie returned from visiting him in the autumn of 1937, The Springfield Union-News quoted her as reporting: “Ted has another peculiar hobby — that of collecting hats of every description. Why, he must have several hundred, and he is using them as the foundation of his next book.” She added, “I have seen him put on an impromptu show for guests, using the hats as costumes,” and “he has kept a whole party in stitches just by making up a play with kitchen knives and spoons for the actors.”
Robert Chase, co-founder and president of Chase Art Companies, which represents modern and contemporary artists, is the curator of the hat exhibit. He said the hats showed up early in the advertising work and editorial cartoons of Geisel, who died in 1991. “By putting a hat on a character” Geisel “realized he could give that character a lot of personality,” Mr. Chase said. “In some cases the hat became a punch line.”
In one of the humorous ads he did for the insecticide Flit, for example, Geisel showed a mosquito busting a hole through a surprised woman’s tiny flower-decorated hat. The ad helped jump start his career as a commercial artist and copywriter and became part of one of the longest-running campaigns in advertising history, built around the line “Quick, Henry, the Flit!”
While hats in Mr. Geisel’s personal collection clearly make appearances in his paintings, it is harder to draw a straight line from his hat collections to his children’s books, Mr. Chase said, although there are examples of where the connection is clear.
The collection does feature a red Robin Hood-like cap with feather that is exactly like the one that kept reappearing on Bartholomew Cubbins’s head. A tall blue military cap with red yarn balls that is also in the show under the name Triple Sling Jigger, seems to have been the inspiration for a hat in “The Butter Battle Book,” Mr. Chase said.
Then there is the striped, red-and-white stovepipe hat that is clearly the twin of the one worn by the most famous, mischievous cat of them all. Mr. Chase said he has no documentation as to which came first — the hat on display or the illustrated one in “The Cat in the Hat.”
But even when the hats in the collection did not directly inspire the drawings in the books, they certainly seemed to inspire the man. The exhibit quotes from a book called “Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel” to illustrate how this sometimes worked:
As editor in chief of Beginner Books at Random House in the late 1960s, Michael Frith worked closely with Geisel, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. When they were stumped by a word choice, Mr. Frith said, Geisel would often bound to the closet and grab a hat for each of them — a sombrero, or perhaps a fez. There they would be, sitting on the floor, Mr. Frith remembered, “two grown men in stupid hats trying to come up with the right word for a book that had only 50 words in it at most.”

"Fundamentals of Creativity"

Fundamentals of Creativity

Ronald A. Beghetto and James C. Kaufman
Five insights can help educators nurture student creativity in ways that enhance academic learning.
Creativity has become a hot topic in education. From President Barack Obama to Amazon's Jeff Bezos to Newsweek magazine, business leaders, major media outlets, government officials, and education policy makers are increasingly advocating including student creativity in the curriculum.
But without a clear understanding of the nature of creativity itself, such well-meaning advocacy may do more harm than good; educators may experience calls for teaching creativity as just another guilt-inducing addition to an already-overwhelming set of curricular demands. Here are five fundamental insights that can guide and support educators as they endeavor to integrate student creativity into the everyday curriculum.

1. Creativity Takes More Than Originality

The first question educators should address is, What is creativity? People commonly think of creativity as the ability to think outside the box, be imaginative, or come up with original ideas. These are aspects of creativity, but they tell only half the story.
Scholars generally agree that creativity involves the combination of originality and task appropriateness (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007; Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004). This combination may seem contradictory. How can something be original and at the same time conform to a set of task requirements? And isn't originality sufficient for something to be judged creative? Why must it also be task appropriate?
A quick example (adapted from Beghetto & Plucker, 2006) may help. Consider a teacher who wants students to express creativity in their science fair projects. Before assigning students to create their own projects, the teacher discusses the scientific conventions and requirements of the project. (For example, each project must pose a hypothesis, gather evidence to test the hypothesis, and explain whether the hypothesis has been supported.) Students are then invited to work within these conventions to create their own original, personally meaningful science fair projects.
One student's final project simply reproduces a class lab experiment in which students guessed how much acid various brands of soft drinks contained and then measured the degree of acidity in each. Although this project is task appropriate, it is not creative because it does not contain the student's original ideas. At the other extreme, one student performs an interpretive dance illustrating the biological phenomenon of mitosis; this project is highly original, but it is not creative because it does not fulfill the academic requirements of this particular task. For a student's project to be considered creative, it would need to incorporate the student's own ideas while staying within established academic guidelines and the conventions of scientific inquiry.
Teachers who understand that creativity combines both originality and task appropriateness are in a better position to integrate student creativity into the everyday curriculum in ways that complement, rather than compete with, academic learning. For example, during a lesson on ancient Rome, students might create a diary for a person living during this time, with period-accurate details. A biology class might have students brainstorming about the conditions under which a plant might grow best. Or a math teacher might have students explore how many different ways they can solve an algebraic proof.

2. There Are Different Levels of Creativity

Some instances of creativity occur every day (for example, a 4th grader coming up with an idea for a short story). Other instances of creativity redefine the way things are done (for example, smartphones) or even transform history (the computer chip, the Declaration of Independence, the scientific method, electricity, or Billie Holiday's powerful performance of the anti-racist song "Strange Fruit").
Researchers have drawn a distinction between these two levels of creativity: the contributions made by everyday people (little-c creativity) and the lasting, transformational contributions made by mavericks within a domain (Big-C creativity). In an effort to broaden the concept, we developed a more nuanced, developmental model, which we call the Four C Model of Creativity (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). This model describes the following levels of creative expression:

  • mini-c, or interpretive, creativity (such as a 2nd grade student's new insight about how to solve a math problem).
  • little-c, or everyday, creativity (such as a 10th grade social studies class developing an original project that combines learning about a key historical event with gathering local histories from community elders).
  • Pro-C, or expert, creativity (for example, the idea of the flipped classroom pioneered by teachers Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann).
  • Big-C, or legendary, creativity (for example, Maria Montessori's new approach to early childhood education).
The Four C Model provides a framework for including creativity in the curriculum and helping students develop their creativity to higher levels.
Consider two elementary students who each write a short story and submit it to a schoolwide literary contest. One student writes a science fiction story that is based on his own ideas and is personally meaningful to him; although the literary contest judges rate it as ordinary, the story meets the standard criteria of being task appropriate and original as judged by the student himself. Therefore, the story can be considered creative at the mini-c level. Another student writes a science fiction story that the judges rate as highly creative, to which they award first prize. Although this story is not of high enough quality to be published in a science fiction magazine, it displays an unusually high level of originality and quality for an elementary student and may be considered creative at the little-c level.
The first student's teacher could help him develop his mini-c ideas about science fiction stories into little-c creative contributions by encouraging his interest and helping him develop greater understanding and mastery of storytelling. Similarly, a teacher could work with the second student to help her develop her understanding of the science fiction genre and the domain expertise necessary to move from little-c science fiction stories into published, Pro-C science fiction. This achievement should be understood as a long-term goal: Moving from little-c to Pro-C takes years of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2006). Few children will reach the Pro-C level of creativity, which is reserved for expert-level authors.
The fourth level of creativity, Big-C, is reserved in science fiction writing for legends like H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, or Mary Shelley. This doesn't mean that Big-C creativity plays no role in the classroom, however. Teachers can include biographies of Big-C creators across various subject areas to illustrate the work, setbacks, and supports involved in becoming a legendary creator. The lives of Marie Curie, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King Jr., and Claude Monet, among others, include stories of persistence and resilience, traits associated with creativity at all levels. Exploring such biographies can capture students' imagination, raise important questions, and even dispel misconceptions about creativity in particular fields of study. Learning about C. S. Lewis's struggles with writer's block, for example, may help a young student realize that such challenges are universal.

3. Context Matters

Some education thinkers have expressed concerns that U.S. schools are stifling student creativity, or causing a "creativity crisis" (Bronson & Merryman, 2010). Although a narrow focus on convergent teaching and learning can suppress creative thinking, the good news is that where there is life, there is creativity. Research has demonstrated that creativity is a robust human trait; students can be protected and bounce back from creativity-stifling school and classroom practices (Beghetto, 2010).
Certain contexts can curtail and suppress creativity, however. In particular, the school and classroom environment often send subtle messages that play an important role in determining whether students will share their mini-c creative insights and have the opportunity to develop their creative competence.
For instance, research shows that creativity can suffer when people are promised rewards for creative work, when learning conditions stress competition and social comparisons, or when individuals are highly aware of being monitored and evaluated by others. Conversely, creativity generally thrives in environments that support personal interest, involvement, enjoyment, and engagement with challenging tasks (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010).
The key insight from this research is that teachers should do their best to minimize features of the environment that can impede creativity (social comparisons, contingent rewards, and so on). Instead, teachers should help students focus on the more intrinsically motivating and personally meaningful aspects of the work by discussing how students might incorporate their personal interests into the tasks and by acknowledging their creativity.
For example, instead of having students choose from a limited set of topics for their science experiments, a teacher might encourage them to plan experiments that examine their specific interests (such as autism, nutrition, or social media). Language arts students might have the option of writing a new scene for an assigned novel instead of writing a compare-and-contrast essay. Such alternate assignments would be equally rigorous but would encourage students to be more invested in the outcome.

4. Creativity Comes at a Cost

Creativity is often associated with fun, fluff, and frills. A quick Google image search on creativity yields a vast array of playful images, including laughing faces, smiling light bulbs, colorful arrays of crayons, and explosive bursts of paint. These images belie the more serious aspects of creativity. Creativity can have benefits that transcend temporary enjoyment. It can produce effective solutions to highly complex societal problems; lead to higher levels of career success; and create intense personal enjoyment, engagement, and meaning in life (Kaufman, 2009).
But the benefits come with a cost; creativity requires work, effort, and risk. Many years of painstaking effort are needed to develop the expertise to make creative contributions that go beyond the everyday level. Moreover, even everyday creativity takes effort, subject-matter understanding, the ability to put a new spin on the task at hand, and the willingness to share one's creative expression with others—risking rejection, ridicule, or worse.
When a young student shares a new and personally meaningful perspective on how to solve a math problem, she risks having her idea dismissed or misunderstood by her teacher. A student who volunteers to read a story in front of the class is taking the chance of being laughed at by his peers. It does not take many such incidents for a student to learn that it's not worth the effort and risk to share personal ideas—it's much easier to provide the answers that teachers and peers expect.
Part of encouraging creativity, therefore, includes helping students become aware of the potential costs and benefits associated with creative expression. When students understand both the potential benefits and potential costs of creativity, they will be in a position to determine whether the risk is worth it.

5. There's a Time and a Place for Creativity

Given all the talk about nurturing creativity, teachers may feel that creativity should be encouraged and expressed at all times. But would you want a creative dentist or cab driver? It depends. We don't want a dentist trying a new tooth extraction procedure during a routine cleaning or a cab driver exploring a new route during a typical ride from the hotel to the airport. In such cases, we prefer that they conform to what is expected. However, if a tooth unexpectedly shatters during a cleaning, we want that dentist to be creative enough to improvise a way to fix it. Similarly, if we are running late for an important flight and the interstate traffic comes to a screeching halt, we might very well appreciate our cabbie's creative exploration of an alternate route.
Accomplished creators know when to be creative. Therefore, it's important for teachers to teach (and model) how to read a situation and determine whether and how to express one's creative ideas, insights, and behaviors. In other words, students need to develop creative metacognition—a combination of creative self-knowledge (knowing one's own creative strengths and limitations, both within a domain and as a general trait) and contextual knowledge (knowing when, where, how, and why to be creative) (Kaufman & Beghetto, in press).
Educators can help students develop their creative metacognition by providing them with informative feedback on their own creative strengths and limitations. Feedback should follow the Goldilocks Principle (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007)—it should be neither too harsh (stifling students' motivation) nor too mild (failing to acknowledge real-world standards). Teachers should provide honest feedback that strikes the just-right balance between challenging students and supporting them as they develop their creative competence.
Consider, for example, a student who is assigned to write a historical account of an event during the past decade that had an impact on the local community. The student takes a novel approach to this assignment, combining secondary sources (such as news accounts) and imaginary primary sources ("ghosts of the past" who represent various generational perspectives).
To provide balanced feedback, the teacher might acknowledge the originality and insightfulness of the student's attempt to present multiple generational perspectives of the event. The teacher might then challenge the student to replace the fictional sources with actual primary sources by locating real community members who represent different generations, interviewing them, and incorporating their perspectives into the final paper.

Realizing the Benefits

As parents, educators, and creativity researchers, we are encouraged by the increased attention being paid to creativity and the recognition that it has a role to play in schools and classrooms. It's essential, however, that education leaders develop a thorough understanding of creativity and that they take the time and care necessary to ensure that the benefits of creativity are realized in schools and classrooms.