The following article was originally posted as part of my blog series on the Huffington Post where I am sharing experiences and insights I gained from my recent travel. 

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a twenty-year anniversary celebration for the National Society of Collegiate Scholars in Washington, D.C. It was a special honor to be there because I knew the founder, Steve Loflin, some twenty-five years ago before this concept had completely gelled in his mind. What started as a “crazy idea” to convene a college honor society on scholarship, leadership, and service was hatched with two of Steve’s friends over a lasagna dinner at his apartment. Twenty years later, this organization is a million strong with chapters at some 400 colleges. In Steve’s speech he spoke to the messiness of start-up ideas and the organic, sometimes random nature in which crazy ideas take root; an excellent perspective as the college culture can protect students from the uncertainties and ambiguities they will meet in the reality outside of school. With all of the news stories and data on how students struggle academically, emotionally, and socially, it is nice to see so many examples of students who are thriving and doing their best to make the world a better place.

Continue reading on the Huffington Post.

 I recently returned from a trip where I spoke in Bangkok at the Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools (NESA) Conference and in Singapore at the International Association for Scholastic Excellence (INTASE) Conference. The following article was originally posted as part of my blog series on the Huffington Post where I am sharing experiences and insights I gained from my trip. 

When I was in Bangkok a few weeks ago at the NESA (Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools) conference, I met an extraordinary young award recipient from the American International School — Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. Karen Grace received the Stanley Haas/Luke Hansen Student Award as a student who displays “consistency, persistence, willingness to take risks, acceptance of other cultures and points of view and a genuine interest in and commitment to the welfare of others.” The Stanley Haas/Luke Hansen student award shares the names of Stanley Haas, the late executive director of NESA and Luke Hansen, a remarkable middle school student who died in an accident.

At a time when students are commonly awarded for taking AP classes, getting a 4.0, and getting high scores on standardized tests, eighth-grader Karen Grace was awarded for her strength of character. Karen Grace opened her acceptance speech, stating:

My family and I were so amazed to find out that there is an award out there, given on character and not on grades. Competing towards the good of mankind is the most positive and sensible idea anyone could come across.

 

Continue reading on the Huffington Post.

Imagine you are offered a position to work as a museum attendant. Your only job is to stand around making sure that no one touches a painting. The job doesn’t sound too bad, right?

In reality, for many, standing around is a “boring” job that doesn’t offer much variety, interaction with people, or enjoyment. So why do people take these boring jobs?

The results of new research out of Duke University, shared in the NPR story “Why Do People Agree to Work in Boring Jobs?”,  suggests people trick themselves into taking these boring jobs by thinking they will be more enjoyable than they actually know they will be.  They also may suffer from effort aversion. When given multiple choices, people are more likely to choose the one that will require less effort.

Though a low-effort job may sound appealing, the luxury of exerting low-effort comes at a cost. Not only is the job boring, it probably doesn’t pay as well as a job that requires skill. In one experiment, researchers took a group of business students and asked them to unplug from their devices for 5 minutes in order to get paid $2.50. They were given the option to solve word problems while they waited out their 5 minutes. At the end of the time, the students who chose to solve word problems with their 5 minutes rated themselves as happier than those who did not solve word problems, though expected more money for putting in more effort.

What does this study mean for students and career seekers? If you’re searching for happiness, taking the easy road may not always be the best decision. Happiness comes to many people when they exert effort, have their ideas heard, finish projects, and have variety in their day, not from being asked to stand around.

How might these psychological studies change the way you think about making your next decision between something easy and something potentially more difficult but potentially more gratifying?

What are the top skills employers demand? Communication skills, judgement and decision making, active listening to name a few. These skills are referred to as soft skills, or non-cognitive skills that are not measured by a cognitive or academic test, like IQ, for example.

In an age when our economy demands more college grads in order to fill the jobs of the future and to be globally competitive, the answer has been to make our classes harder and rank students, schools, and teachers by the scores students earn on their standardized test. Put more effort behind increasing IQ and get a better prepared workforce, right?

Wrong. Little to no research gives evidence that more rigorous classes or standardized tests will lead to more college graduates, according to the review, “Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners.” In fact, studies show the best indicator of success in college is not the difficulty level of classes a student took in high school or their standardized test scores, but rather their course grades, GPA, and class rank.

Researchers argue these standings are much more indicative of a student’s academic and economic potential because they measure, in part, the transferable and non-cognitive skills a student possesses:

“The prevailing interpretation is that, in addition to measuring students’ content knowledge and core academic skills, grades also reflect the degree to which students have demonstrated a range of academic behaviors, attitudes, and strategies that are critical for success in school and in later life, including study skills, attendance, work habits, time management, help-seeking behaviors, metacognitive strategies, and social and academic problem-solving skills that allow students to successfully manage new environments and meet new academic and social demands. To this list of critical success factors, others have added students’ attitudes about learning, their beliefs about their own intelligence, their self-control and persistence, and the quality of their relationships with peers and adults.”

This is one reason why parents put their kids on a soccer team, students are told to get involved in activities so they can highlight them on their college application,  and job seekers have a place to showcase their extracurricular achievements on their resumes. While there is no direct economic value to a child playing soccer, it is thought of as a social activity where people acquire the non-cognitive, or social and behavioral, skills that are necessary to get along with people at school and in the workplace, learn responsibility to a team, balance school and life, work under pressure, etc.

While classroom time is traditionally thought of as  a time to develop cognitive skills and after-school time is used for non-cognitive, the two skill sets are inextricably linked and don’t need to be exclusive. At LifeBound we train K-12 teachers, professors, advisors, tutors, and staff to use coaching skills to capitalize on the time they have with students and develop these non-cognitive skills for success in school, career, and life.

Through the coaching process, students answer questions and engage in self-reflective activities to mindfully create:

• Vision for what is possible
• Balance in their academic, social, and emotional lives
• Perspectives on the challenges they face and the choices they make
• Accountability to themselves and others
• Fulfillment from making choices that align with core values
• Habits of success to help address their personal strengths and weaknesses

What would your brightest students be capable of if they developed their non-cognitive skills alongside their cognitive? How would your struggling students benefit if they were asked powerful questions and learned to ask themselves powerful questions when they need help?

If you’re in the Denver area, join us on November 1 for a one-day Introduction to Academic Coaching. This training will give you a thorough introduction to the coaching process as well as leave you with coaching skills you can use Monday morning.  If you are interested in LifeBound coming to your area, email me at caroljcarter@lifebound.com for more information.

Could developing a kids’ thinking and behavioral skills cut crime among youth?

It’s a very good possibility, found a new study from the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab. In the study, about 1400 kids in 7th through 10th grade from high-crime neighborhoods in Chicago were chosen to participate in the 30-week program Becoming A Man. A similar group was tracked who did not go through the course. Researchers found students who had been through the Becoming A Man program were 44% less likely to have been arrested by the end of the year.

The program uses Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which “aims to get people to think about the way they think, and to recognize unconscious patterns of thought that produce unhappy life outcomes,” according to NPR.  One activity the participants had to do began with the group dividing into teams of two. One kid had a ball and it was the job of the other teammate to get the ball from him. Fighting ensued, and the program leader stopped them and asked why not one of them just asked their teammate for the ball. The kids trying to get the ball thought it would show weakness. When the teammate with the ball was asked what they would have done if they would have been asked for the ball, they said they would have given it to their teammate. This activity helped students see that their perception of what the other person in a confrontation is thinking can often be “falsely imagined.”

Read the full story, “Therapy Helps Troubled Teens Rethink Crime,” at NPR.

Critical thinking, social, and emotional skills are just as important as academic skills for success in school, professional, and personal life. My books Critical & Creative Thinking for Teenagers and People Smarts for Teenagers are perfect for teens to learn critical thinking skills for school, home, and life. If you are interested in learning more about how these books can be used for a summer reading program or enrichment class at your school, contact me at caroljcarter@lifebound.com

This article was originally posted on The Huffington Post on May 8, 2013.

Last February, The National Center for Education reported that 50 percent of the 3 million students who begin college annually require some level of remediation. This trend costs students, parents, institutions, and taxpayers nearly $7 billion a year, while remedial students fail to earn a single college credit.

The high volume and costs of remediation have policymakers and education leaders scrambling to stop this financial hemorrhage. While reform in remedial education is inevitable, the unintended consequences of swooping changes can be harmful to students, institutions, and the economy at a time when the U.S. is struggling to fill the 21st century workforce with high-skilled workers.

Who are remediated students?

A report released today by the National Center on Education and the Economy states that many community college career programs demand little or no use of math, and high school students are taking math courses they will likely never use. In reading and writing, the group noted incoming college freshmen had simplistic and academically unchallenging skills. Finally, NCEE discovered that very little writing is required of community college freshmen, and when it is, there are low expectations for making a cogent argument and employing basic rules for writing, punctuation, and grammar. The report calls for the bar to be raised if students are to succeed in college, career, and life. Some of these same patterns exist for freshmen admitted to open admission four-year colleges.

Policymakers believe the solution to plugging up the remedial financial drain is to stop offering remedial classes in college, cut funding, or hold high schools accountable. Yet, these all-or-nothing solutions oversimplify who is entering remedial courses and how they got there. The spectrum of today’s remedial students includes:

• Nontraditional, returning students who’ve been out of school for years and need to brush up on learning skills while pursuing a degree or certificate.
• Students with undiagnosed learning disabilities.
• Low-income, minority, and first-generation students.
• Misplaced students who were misidentified as needing remedial classes.
  Multiple studies indicate up to 20 to 30 percent of remedial students are misidentified and don’t belong in developmental classes.
• Students who failed to master high school material due to a lack of focus, emotional/social maturity, home support, poor instruction, or a combination of these factors.

As funding plummets, remedial students still remain, as does the need to fill many of the 3.9 million U.S. job openings that require a college degree. Realizing remediation will be anything but a quick fix, many people and organizations are offering cost-saving strategies.

What does remedial reform look like?

Mike Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently argued that Pell grant funding — a need-based grant that helps qualifying students afford college — should not be available for students who require remedial education. Instead, he believes this $40 billion annual federal aid should only be awarded to students who take credit-bearing classes. The argument has merit. Statistically, the 35 percent of students who require remediation in four-year institutions complete a degree within six years, and worse, less than 10 percent of students enrolled in one or more developmental classes in community colleges graduate within three years.

Petrilli’s solution raises many questions. Is limiting college access to low-income students really a solution to remediation? Will high schools have the bandwidth to take accountability for the underprepared students who are denied grant-funding because they don’t possess basic skills? Are college-ready students more deserving of federal dollars than those who are underprepared for college?

Already, a recent change to Pell grants is negatively impacting developmental students. In the past, students were allowed to receive funding for up to 18 semesters. Now, they are limited to 12 semesters. For many students who work while going to school or are required to take several semesters of remedial education, this reduction in aid is a huge barrier to degree attainment.

Institutions, as well as people like Petrilli, are evaluating their best response to the remediation crisis. For example, in Ohio, only 25 percent of residents hold a college degree. The state hopes to improve the number of grads by adopting a new formula that aligns the amount of funding four-year colleges receive with the amount of graduates they produce. The community colleges are also seeing a shift to performance-based funding but not at as high a rate as four-year colleges. Like Ohio, more states than not have transitioned, are transitioning, or are discussing transitioning away from enrollment-based funding to performance-based funding.

Another solution for some states is to simply get rid of remedial funding. In addition to Ohio’s performance-based funding, the state government will start phasing out funding for remedial classes in the 2014-15 school year and completely end funding by 2020. In Connecticut, a bill attempted to cut remedial courses and put those students who would have been placed in a remedial courses in college-level, credit-earning courses. A bill was ultimately signed into law which allowed students to take one remedial course.

There are a number of different strategies being proposed by states and colleges to cut costs in remedial education. Until the pipeline to college improves, however, the need for remediation will remain. Without careful analysis of tradeoffs, cutting funding, courses, and opportunity is not reform: it is giving up and hoping someone else will pick up the slack. We need a holistic solution for the short and long term. As the NCEE stated in their report this morning:

“The logical conclusion might be for community colleges to raise their expectations and for high schools to step up the rigor… but that would not help today’s large proportion of high school graduates who do not meet the criteria to enroll in credit-bearing college courses.”

What are solutions which impact pipeline preparation before college?

Remediation may never be completely eradicated, but improvement can be made in the K-12 to college pipeline to better prepare students for college from the start.

Continue reading at The Huffington Post

This spring we’re definitely not sitting still at LifeBound. In the next few months we have many new events, trainings, blogs, and more that will reach communities who are dedicated to improving learning opportunities for students, teachers, and professionals. One initiative we’re supporting all summer long is to get more students involved in productive learning activities over the summer months.

Research shows all young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. That’s why LifeBound is offering summer enrichment workshops at Lighthouse Writers Workshop for students in middle school through high school that foster self-awareness, critical thinking, and practical know-how. You can find out more about our week-long workshops for teens at our website. We are also encouraging students to read over the summer with our book display at the Tattered Cover Book Store on Colfax.

Coming up on Wednesday, April 10th, I’m excited to give a keynote to faculty at University of Oklahoma’s First-Year Experience Program. If you’re in the area, the event is free and open to the public. You can find out more at the event website.

Also coming up this month, is our three-day academic coaching training. Academic Coaching is an ongoing partnership to help students produce fulfilling results in their lives. Through the process of coaching, students deepen their learning, take responsibility for their actions, improve their effectiveness, and consciously create their outcomes in life. We conduct trainings for professors, teachers, administrators, and counselors. LifeBound Academic Coaching trainings are available year-round. Learn about our lead trainers, check out upcoming dates, and register for your next coaching session at our coaching website www.lifeboundcoaching.com.

Last but not least, I am now blogging for the Huffington Post under “Impact”.  For the next two months, I will be focusing on remedial students, posting every Tuesday.  Check out my most read article, “Why Aren’t Low Income Students Succeeding in School?” You’ll see some of the best insights include what readers posted in response.  Below is a sample of some of the topics I will be exploring in the future. Let me know in the comments if you have any additional ideas for blog topics.

• “From Trailer Park to Corporate Executive: One Woman’s Path to Personal and Professional Success”
• “Where Are We Struggling With Literacy?”
• “Why And How Are We Struggling with Innumeracy?”
• “Why And How Are We Struggling with Thinking Skills?”
• “Why And How Are We Struggling with Communication?”
• “Pipeline Success for Developmental Students.”

I look forward to sharing more about this eventful season. For inquiries about academic coaching, speaking engagements, summer reading, and anything else, call the LifeBound office at 1-877-737-8510.

As many as 1.7 million first-year students will take a remedial course to learn the math, reading, or writing skills they need to enroll in a credit-earning college-level course. Of all remedial courses most students are remediated in math skills. Due to a variety of factors — class dynamics, curricula, instruction,  skill-level, academic support, financial standing, life — retaining and passing students in a remedial course is a major concern.

Colorado Community College System conducted a longitudinal remedial math study that tracked remedial math students for 4 years. They found that though the majority of students required remedial math, math had the lowest pass rate of all remedial classes.

• Only 8% of students who enrolled in remedial math had graduated after four years
• Unlike the findings of a national study, the majority exited the sequence due to withdrawal or failure to pass a course, rather than completing and failing to enroll in the next course
• More than 40% of CCCS remedial math completers did not attempt college math

How can we equip these students with the tools to stick with and pass a remedial class? You’ll know from my blog earlier this week that ideally I believe more resources should be used at the K12-level to address learning difficulties before students graduate from high school and enter college. However, eliminating the need for remediation will not happen over night. What can we do today for the students who are graduating from high school with the dream of graduating from college, but who don’t have the skills to do so?

Academic Coaching promotes student accountability, motivation, and follow-through. It asks the student to not only do their homework, but to make a commitment to studying, getting a tutor, finding a support system, and passing the class. A faculty member with Academic Coaching skills asks the struggling developmental student powerful questions that puts the student in the driver’s seat of their own learning and asks them to invest in their own success.  LifeBound is at the National Association of Developmental Education (NADE) Conference this week sharing the benefits of using Academic Coaching with developmental students with faculty from around the country. Today, Maureen Breeze is giving the session Academic Coaching for Hybrid, Online, and Self-Paced Math to train faculty to use academic coaching skills to inspire students to persevere and foster success in any level or mode of math class.

If you’re at the NADE conference is Denver, make sure to come say hello to LifeBound in the exhibit hall.

This week, Denver will be hosting the National Association for Developmental Education Conference.  This organization is made up of thousands of members who are dedicated to helping students who come to college without the skills required to enroll in a college-level course in math, reading or writing. As many as 1.7 million first-year students entering both two-year and four-year colleges will take a remedial course to learn the skills they need to enroll in a college-level course. Less than one-quarter of students attending a two-year college who take a remedial course will complete a college-level English or math class.¹

For many students who need to take remedial courses, they will be required to take up to three remedial courses per discipline before qualifying to enroll in a credit-earning class.² In some states, like Colorado, change is afoot.  Instead of offering three classes in math and three in English and reading, these classes will be collapsed into one class for each discipline.   Much of the learning will be self-paced at community colleges where the student to advisor ratio is 1500 to 1.³Â  Students will need to take initiative for their own learning, work with staff when they have questions they need answered and be accountable for their own personal improvement plans. These steps will provide a successful on ramp to other classes that are more challenging and require more rigor, self-discipline and collaboration with classmates once these basic requirements are met.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in partnership with Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Lumina Foundation and The Kresge Foundation are asking the developmental community to rethink how developmental math is taught, and they have an ambitious  goal to increase the percent of developmental students who earn credit for a college-level math class from 5 to 50 percent. The Carnegie Foundation knows that students who have a history of struggling in math classes will most likely continue to fail in math classes that mirror their past experiences of failure. That’s why they created two math improvement communities at the college-level: Statway and Quantway.

Statway is a one-year program designed for students transferring to degrees in humanities or social sciences which culminates to a college-level statistics class. Quantway similarly is a one-year course that culminates to a college-level quantitative math course. This course is different than your typical developmental math course in that it “will motivate and engage students with an innovative quantitative reasoning focus in which students use mathematics and numerical reasoning to make sense of the world around them.” The goal is to have students become “quantitatively literate students,” opposed to memorization machines.⁴

In Colorado, 1 in 5 students are in concurrent enrollment programs that allow the student to earn a high school diploma, while simultaneously earning an Associate’s Degree.⁵ Concurrent enrollment programs are appealing because they pay for two years of a student’s college education; encourage students to pursue 4-year degrees after graduation; and give high school students an opportunity to take remedial courses before moving on to college. On the other hand, a new report shows that the number of students taking remedial courses in a concurrent enrollment program grew 39.2 percent between the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school year.⁶ Concurrent enrollment programs are being used as a strategy to prepare more high school students with the basic skills they need before moving on to college. Though there is no argument that we need to prepare students to enter college while they’re still in high school, why isn’t there a focus on preparing students for college-level courses when they are in elementary, middle, and high school? Shouldn’t students be mastering high school classes in high school to prepare them for college courses, not mastering remedial college math courses while they’re still in high school?

While concurrent enrollment is a good idea for students who want to pursue the trades—careers in welding, auto mechanics, refrigeration, etc—it is a grave concern to me on other levels:

1. Where are the emotional and social skills that students need to mature so that they can succeed and thrive when they are in college?  If they are spending all of their time on college academics while they are in high school, what is the point of the community college?  How will they ever get the experience and maturity that they need to succeed personally and professionally?
2. The majority of concurrent enrollment classes take place at high schools, not on college campuses. Taking a college course down the hall from other high school courses fails to introduce students to college culture and expectations. Which is not to imply that more classes should be taught on college campuses. I’m all for high school students being on a college campus, but why not for summer enrichment, summer reading programs with experts or even college mentors and role models who can inspire and direct students?
3. Community colleges can barely keep up with the demand of returning students and displaced workers.  Now we are setting up a structure to engorge that system even further with high school students?
4. Why can’t we make high school more effective?  Why can’t we have more reading requirements, more activities that students join to build their professional skills, more ways to make high school a time where students prepare for the rigor and complexities of college, career and life?

Are we overemphasizing analytical and academic skills at the expense of the “soft” skills and experiences that students actually need to know themselves, understand what they are good at, be able to overcome challenges, think critically and creatively, and determine what makes them unique in the world?  If so, what is the short and long term cost?    Marching students through all of these courses does little to address the issues that they really struggle with on a personal level which, unadrressed,  absolutely stands in the way of their academic, personal, and professional success.

Between my company blogs at www.lifebound.com and here at the Carol J. Carter blog, we’ve posted hundreds of blogs filled with tips for teachers, students, parents, and professionals. Why so many blogs? We believe that learning is lifelong; that the teacher, the parent, the executive must remain the student in some capacity. Consider the following quotes:

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

“We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 — and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?”

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

How could reigniting a desire for learning change how you spend the next year? What practices could you add to your resolutions list that would model the importance of being a lifelong learner for your children or other people in your life? Here is a round-up of the most popular articles that inspire and support new beginnings from our LifeBound blogs.

Blogs for a Strong Start