Middle School Archives

12 Ways to Identify a Good School

October 14, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Jay Matthews
Original Source: The Washington Post
Originally posted August 24, 2014

Fourteen years ago, I wrote a Washington Post magazine piece about a young couple seeking a school for their daughter, including 12 things to look for in a good school. The article survives online. Parents still ask me if I would change any of those recommendations.

I would, a bit. Here is the original list, with my updates in italics:

1. A Good Principal. Spend at least 30 minutes with the principal. Five or more years experience at the school is a good sign. If the school has had more than two principals in the past five years, that’s a bad sign. Be particularly cautious if the principal doesn’t have 30 minutes to see you. I stand by this, and never had principals complain they couldn’t handle it.

2. What It Feels Like. Don’t discount the mood and the atmosphere. Are the walls gaily decorated? Are the teachers friendly? Do the children seem happy? Yes.

3. Active Parents. Never put your child in a school without speaking to at least two parents already there, including at least one PTA officer. If you can’t find such a person, or if there’s no active PTA or equivalent organization, beware. Still true.

4. Good Teachers. If average scores are in the 70th percentile, or are rising year to year, that’s a good sign. But more important is the quality of the teachers your child will likely get. Ask experienced parents about them. Fourteen years of the most intense focus on test scores in U.S. history have taught me to distrust the results. Some schools with great scores are not so good, and vice versa. Let parents be your guide.

5. Long-Term Superintendent. Most urban systems, including the District, average little more than three years per superintendent, and yet have many good schools. But a suburban system with rapid superintendent turnover is less common and a matter for concern. If the principal impresses you, don’t worry about the superintendent.

6. A Well-Stocked and Well-Used Library. Are there enough books and computer terminals? And how many students are using them? A library full of kids is a sign of health. This will always be true.

7. Using Every Minute. Are there before-school classes for students with special needs? Is there tutoring available at lunch or after school? Are there Saturday sessions? An active summer school? I would put more emphasis now on tutoring, unless of course you can do that yourself.

8. High Expectations. Are there accelerated classes? Gifted student services? Are these available for all students who want them, not just for those who have high grades? Look for signs of enrichment outside the classroom — student musicals, publications and athletic contests. I no longer think gifted services are important so long as you are sure your child will be challenged.

9. Connections to Adults. Some schools have set up systems to ensure that at least one school employee — a teacher, a counselor, an aide, a coach — knows each child and his or her family well. Such schools are rare gems.Still correct.

10. Safety. This is less likely to be a problem than the headlines would suggest. If you are comfortable living in your community, then the neighborhood school almost certainly will be safe enough for you. If you are looking at a school far from home, talk to parents who send their children to that school. Yes.

11. Challenges Ahead. Does the high school your child is headed for have Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Advanced International Certificate of Education courses? Does it provide dual enrollment in local college courses? Are such programs open to any student who wants them? This remains very important.

12. Listen to Your Heart. The school may pass all these tests, and yet you’re still not sure. If there’s another school you like better, even if it doesn’t look as good on paper, go there. Still true. How is your child going to be comfortable with the school if you’re not?

5 Music Activities to Connect to the Ear (and Brain and Hand)

October 10, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Impulse and Improvisation

Much of the language with which we discuss music composition has been passed down to us by Beethoven’s discussion of his own music. “Music,” said Beethoven, “is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.” A lot of great music has been written by people who think of composition in this way, as a process of filtering the raw material of sound. But more often than not, composition involves just as much of the tools influencing the composer’s choice of sound as it does the sound influencing the composer’s choice of tools. To stick with Beethoven’s metaphor, a winemaker may choose a tank based on the grape, but may also choose a grape based on the type of tanks available to him or her. In music composition, the tank and the grapes affect one other in real time, constantly changing shape as the compositional process unfolds.

Beginning composers often feel most comfortable allowing the sounds in their heads to dictate the tools they choose, rather than the other way around. These 5 exercises instead encourage a composer to derive sound from a tool. The primary purpose of these activities is to get the student feeling more comfortable allowing tools to influence sound, on the way to developing a mental space in which sound and tools may influence one another freely. Because these activities stress system and reaction over impulse and improvisation, they may also be thought of as creative ways to catalyze and develop executive functioning. The functions which these exercises emphasize range from the more basic, such as organization and planning, to the more complex, such as working memory and flexibility. Next to each exercise is listed the executive function or functions it will most help to develop.

Play a Floor Plan (Organization, Planning)

Draw a basic floor plan of your living space. Choose a major key (e.g. G Major), and assign each room of the floor plan one of the six common chords in the key (I; ii; iii; IV; V; vi). If you have more than six rooms in your living space, then several adjacent rooms may share a chord. Track your motion from room to room throughout the day. Translate this motion from room-to-room into motion from chord-to-chord, and use this layout as a harmonic basis for a short piece. Only the harmony is fixed; everything else is a compositional decision. Keep in mind, when initially assigning the chords, which rooms you are in most frequently, and, consequently, which chords you want your piece to center around.

Adapt-a-melody (Flexibity)

Choose a simple melody (for example, a riff or chorus from a pop song). If you play piano, then you may accompany yourself. In your right hand, use only the notes from the melody, in the order in which they appear. Improvise freely with your left hand. By shifting style, accent, rhythm and harmony, improvise a piece that extends this melody as long as it can while remaining convincing. The activity may also be done with two people. In this case, one person should improvise freely while the other adapts the melody to the shifting accompaniment.

Fill In the Blank (Goal-Directed Persistence)

In a single piece of music you enjoy, pick at random two measures. One of these measures will serve as the beginning of your piece, and the other will serve as the end. The goal of this exercise is to find a convincing way (other than the way the original composer did) to link these two snippets of music together. Ideally, the piece should be no more than 10-20 measures in total. Each compositional decision should be made with the conscious goal of leading towards the end-point.

Working with Found Sounds and Objects (Working Memory, Abstract Thinking)

Choose a household object you’d like to try using as an instrument (e.g. pot or pan). Trying not to be influenced by this choice, pay attention throughout the day for a sound that you find striking. The activity will work at least as well, if not better, if the sound you choose does not seem to correspond to the object you chose (e.g. a bird call and a pan). Compose a short piece in which you attempt to capture something about your memory of the sound that struck you using the instrument you chose first. This activity is worth trying several times with different combinations of sound and instrument.

Composing with One Chord (Sustained Attention)

Sit at a piano and rearticulate one chord for an extended period of time. You may change the inversion, volume, range, rhythm and articulation of the chord, but not the chord itself. Attempt to focus on both the subtle shifts in your playing of this chord and the consistency of the chord’s sound. After doing this for some time, attempt to write a short piece with one chord or pitch that will keep a listener’s attention as much as possible. For an example of someone doing this exercise shockingly well, look up Scelsi’s “Four Pieces on One Note”.

By Chris Ruenes, Private Tutor

Project Based Learning as a Key to Student Motivation

October 3, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

My experience as a college engineering professor for the past twenty years tells me that students who are motivated tend to perform better academically, graduate within six years of education, and to either pursue advanced degrees or transition into engineering jobs of their choosing. But how do students get motivated? Is motivation an innate skill or can it be attained? What makes a student motivated?

I am a strong advocate for project based learning. I believe that learning can only be authentic when one understands how and when knowledge attained can be applied to solve problems. I frequently give out projects in my freshman and junior classes and encourage students to think outside the box and apply what they have learned in the class to develop creative solutions. Project examples include renewable wave energy system and remotely operated vehicle designs. As I expected, students who worked on these projects appeared very enthusiastic and motivated. I was led to believe that student can become motivated when they see what they learn can be connected to reality. In other words, they see meaning in what they learn.

Five years ago, I found out motivation is not just about finding meaning in learning. I assigned a project on vegetable garden system design to my freshman students. They were to design a sustainable engineering solution based on renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar and rainwater, and that can be implemented on campus. I thought students would find this project highly relevant. In contrast, I was astonished to find out students were not motivated to work on this meaningful project! I was literally back to square one about what makes students motivated.

I came across an important psychology research finding about four years ago that led me to a solution. The research [1] suggests autonomy is an important driver for motivation. Autonomy is all about having choices. When students have choices to decide what they want, they tend to take ownership of their choices, and are willing to spend as much time as they can. Think about why someone would spend enormous time and money playing a sport like hockey (I can tell you from personal experience how expensive it is!). The simple answer is that is what they want to do. The converse is true: when students are told what to do every step of the way, they don’t feel like owning the problem because they think it is not theirs. This was so true for my garden design project example. Students didn’t choose that project, I did.

Nowadays, rather than assigning projects in class, I empower students to design their own projects. There are many challenges in this approach for both students and faculty. I have to balance autonomy with guidance and direction. Students experience, sometimes for the first time, making academic decisions. The rewards for both are well worth the effort. In addition to college students, I also mentor high school students for college preparation. Recently I mentored two high school students who wanted to have project experiences; one designed an underwater scooter, the other designed a wave energy system. They both achieved a great deal in terms of levels of confidence and problem solving skills, and more importantly got offers to their first-choice universities. Based on my experiences so far, I truly believe that educators should embrace the tools of autonomy and help our kids to reach their full potential.

[1] E. L. Deci, and R. M. Ryan. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior, NewYork: Plenum, 1985.

By Edgar An, Private Tutor

19 Meaningful Questions to Ask Your Child’s Teacher

September 22, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Terry Heick,
Original Source: Edutopia
Originally posted August 19, 2015

Back-to-school content is usually focused on teachers and students, and as these two groups will have the largest workload ahead of them, that makes sense.

But for students, the ultimate support system is not an expert teacher, but an informed and supportive family. One of the most significant challenges facing formal education in the United States is the chasm separating schools and communities. The more informed a family is, the more seamlessly they’ll connect to so many other edu-constructs, from extracurricular activities and tutoring to reading programs and school-related events.

While schools (hopefully) work to update themselves and the way students learn within them, many parents have to work with what’s available to them. With the exception of in-depth content like Edutopia’s guides, much of the “parent stuff” you’ll find through Googling is decent enough, but it can be surface level or otherwise completely unrelated to process of learning. Some common examples:

“Ask them what they did today.”
“Help them with homework.”
“Help them with separation anxiety.”
“Talk to them about their struggles.”
“Get them a tutor.”

But these kind of topical interactions aren’t always enough, nor do they do anything at all to create transparency between schools and communities.

So, in pursuit of that transparency, below are some questions to better clarify what’s happening in the classroom, and then help you decide on the kind of non-superficial actions you can perform at home to truly support the learning of your child. Many of the questions may seem a bit direct, but I don’t know any teachers who would take offense to them. In fact, most of my colleagues would welcome the kind of added capacity that questions like these could lead to. Many of these questions are rarely the subject of parent-teacher interactions, but — well, that’s kind of the point.

Just…don’t ask them all at once. In fact, maybe pick two and hope for the best.

19 Questions Your Child’s Teacher Would (Probably) Love to Answer

What academic standards do you use, and what do I need to know about them?
How will you respond if or when my child struggles in class?
What are the most important and complex (content-related) ideas my child needs to understand by the end of the year?
Do you focus on strengths or weaknesses?
How are creativity and innovative thinking used on a daily basis in your classroom?
How is critical thinking used on a daily basis in your classroom?
How are assessments designed to promote learning rather than simple measurement?
What can I do to support literacy in my home?
What kinds of questions do you suggest that I ask my children on a daily basis about your class?
How exactly is learning personalized in your classroom? In the school?
How do you measure academic progress?
What are the most common instructional or literacy strategies you will use this year?
What learning models do you use (e.g., project-based learning, mobile learning, game-based learning, etc.), and what do you see as the primary benefits of that approach?
What are the best school or district resources for students and/or families that no one uses?
Is there technology you’d recommend that can help support my child in self-directed learning?
What are the most common barriers you see to academic progress in your classroom?
How is education changing?
How do you see the role of the teacher in the learning process?
What am I not asking but should be?

Unlocking Difficult Students

September 4, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Tutors dream of being tasked with a cheerful, bright, dutiful young student, one who follows every direction and has an answer for each question. But the nature of our position often involves assisting students who aren’t the apple of their teacher’s eye.

And, that’s ok. It’s why we became tutors in the first place. Our job is to connect with the student and understand what makes him/her tick.

I’ve found that being able to shed the standard open-your-book -and-begin-the-assignment attitude is imperative when dealing with unorthodox students. For a variety of reasons, students suffering from depression or other behavioral issues do not take to standard classroom instruction and most likely won’t take to your tutoring prompts either. I’ve therefore found it necessary in these cases to go on the offensive and get creative.

Marc was one of these kids. An enormously intelligent adolescent who suffered from severe depression, he had difficulty with social interaction and frequently stayed home from school. When I arrived for my initial session with him, he was not in the best of moods.

Within five minutes he excused himself and I could hear him complain to his mother that he didn’t want to do this anymore. I heard violent screams from the other room: “Tell him to leave! I hate this! I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!” His mother apologetically came back into the living room and told me this probably wasn’t going to work out. But I asked if I could just talk to him once more and she agreed. “Hey Marc,” I whispered, “Can I come in to ask you a question?” “NO! GET OUT!” I realized I needed to come up with something to defuse the situation. “Why don’t we head to the coffee shop I passed by on the way here? Maybe a walk outside will help clear your mind. We’ll get some hot chocolate–we don’t even need to study.”

He was not expecting this. His mood changed instantly. He came out of his room as if nothing had happened (which I thought was a bit odd, but I went with it) and began putting on his coat. His mother shrugged her shoulders with a look of let’s-not-jinx-it and we were off. Our session that day was essentially Yu-Gi-Oh breaks interspersed with Biology, but I succeeded in forming a rapport with him, one that seemed unthinkable an hour prior.

Coming up with interesting games on the fly, creating scenarios that pertain directly to their lives, and making an occasional joke or two are just as important as the actual study material. I’ve found it produces better academic results and helps them adjust to new environments outside their academic lives as well. We would be well-suited to place a higher value on these tutoring techniques.

By David Hollander, Private Tutor