How to make students (and teachers) want to go to school | Michele Freitag | TEDxYorkBeach

Summary

Michele Freitag shares her 55-year journey in education, emphasizing the importance of creating a system that is engaging for both students and teachers. She describes how traditional methods and abundant assessments can hinder students' enthusiasm for learning. Instead, she proposes using the CRSSP strategies, which include choice, relevance, strength-based learning, specific feedback, and passion, to make education more personalized and meaningful. Freitag's anecdotes illustrate the power of relationships and creativity in the classroom, inspiring both teachers and students to become more invested in their educational experiences.

Highlights

• Michele’s CRSSP strategy revolves around choice, relevance, strength, specific feedback, and passion. 🌟
• A story where a simple relationship and understanding transformed a child's learning experience. 😢➡️😊
• Encouraging students to showcase their learning in creative ways can lead to impressive outcomes. 🎭
• Highlight on the problem of standardization and lack of teacher autonomy in modern education. 🛑
• Celebrating teacher wisdom and experience can reinvigorate the teaching profession. 📈

Key Takeaways

• Empowering students with choice and relevance can transform their learning experience. 🎓
• Focusing on students' strengths rather than their weaknesses fosters a more positive learning atmosphere. 💪
• Passion and enthusiasm in teaching are contagious and can significantly boost student engagement. ❤️
• Integrating real-world relevance into the curriculum enhances student connection and interest. 🌍
• Teachers need to be allowed professional freedom to adapt lessons to their students' needs. 📚

Overview

Michele Freitag, with over five decades dedicated to education, champions a shift from rigid instruction to a more dynamic, student-centered approach. Her talk is infused with personal anecdotes that highlight her passion for creating a nurturing and engaging learning environment for students of all ages. By focusing on relationships, she demonstrates the profound impact teachers can have when they connect with their students on a personal level.

Freitag introduces the CRSSP approach as a revolutionary framework that prioritizes student choice, relevance, and passion towards their learning. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing and building upon students' strengths, thus fostering a more encouraging and supportive academic experience. Through her storytelling, Freitag illustrates that when students are engaged this way, they are more likely to excel and embrace their educational journey.

Addressing the challenges teachers face today, Freitag underscores the need for professional autonomy and creativity in the teaching profession. She critiques the pressures of standardized testing and advocates for a balanced education system that values teachers’ expertise. By empowering educators to tailor their teaching strategies to their students' needs, she argues, both teachers and students can thrive in a more balanced and fulfilling educational environment.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Personal Background The chapter "Introduction and Personal Background" shares the speaker's long-standing tradition of attending the first day of school for the past 55 years. Despite the early mornings and effort required, the speaker has continued this routine, hinting at a deep personal connection or commitment to education.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Personal experiences with school The narrator expresses a strong affection for school both as a child and as an adult, highlighting a love for learning and a positive relationship with their teachers.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Challenges faced by family members The chapter titled 'Challenges faced by family members' highlights the story of an individual who overcame physical challenges to march on crutches at their college graduation, showcasing resilience and determination. This spirit was carried into their teaching career, where they created a loving and fun learning environment for their students. The narrative reflects on the influence of this experience on the narrator's own approach to teaching, emphasizing a love for school and the significance of Awards Day as a cherished memory.
• 03:00 - 04:30: The flawed educational system The chapter titled 'The flawed educational system' focuses on the experiences of individuals within the schooling system, particularly on the aspect of awards and recognition. While some students look forward to Awards Day, finding it a highlight, others, like the speaker’s husband, find it disheartening. Despite being smart, he never received awards, reflecting a flaw in the system where not all talents and intelligences are acknowledged or celebrated, leading to a sense of discouragement in some students.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Relationship in teaching The chapter explores the theme of relationships in teaching, particularly focusing on how standardized educational instructions can sometimes fail to accommodate different learning styles. The narrator recounts personal experiences with their three sons, who were early readers and curious learners but faced challenges because their learning methods didn't align with traditional schooling norms. This highlights the need for a more individualized approach in education.
• 05:30 - 07:00: CRSSP Strategies: Choice, Relevance, Strength-based Learning, Specific Feedback, Passion The chapter titled 'CRSSP Strategies: Choice, Relevance, Strength-based Learning, Specific Feedback, Passion' explores a parent's and educator's perspective on the education system's need for reform. The narrator reflects on the challenges of raising children with diverse strengths and the necessity of navigating an often rigid educational framework. This personal experience fuels the narrator's passion for systemic change to accommodate all students' needs. With nearly 40 years of teaching experience, the narrator emphasizes the importance of strategies that cater to student choice, relevance, and individualized approaches, along with specific feedback and nurturing passion in learning.
• 07:00 - 09:30: Guided Research Unit In this chapter titled 'Guided Research Unit,' the narrative opens with a heartfelt story shared by the teacher. It describes an emotional moment in a fourth-grade classroom during a reading assessment. The teacher notices a young boy, visibly distressed, with his head down on his desk. When approached, the boy reveals his struggle and feelings of inadequacy, saying 'I can’t do this. It’s too hard. I’m just not good at this,' highlighting the emotional and educational challenges faced by young learners.
• 09:30 - 12:00: Claymation Project Experience The chapter titled 'Claymation Project Experience' explores the emotional impact of standardized testing on children. Through a poignant example, it illustrates the distress caused by a system overly fixated on isolated skills and test scores. The narrative centers on a child who feels like a failure due to an assessment question, highlighting the inadequacies of current educational evaluative methods.
• 12:00 - 15:00: Educational reforms and testing The chapter discusses the impact of continuous assessments in educational systems, creating a stressful environment for both students and teachers. The author emphasizes the excessive pressure that testing can create in schools, turning them into pressure cookers of stress. During a conversation with a student, the author demonstrates a supportive, understanding approach by encouraging the student to set aside the test temporarily and discuss their insights, highlighting the importance of personal interaction and understanding students beyond their test scores.
• 15:00 - 16:30: Empowering teachers and students In this chapter, the focus is on understanding and evaluating the knowledge of children through personalized interactions. A teacher shares an experience where she engages a student in a discussion about a story he read, intertwining assessment questions into the conversation. The student demonstrated a clear understanding of the story and possessed the assessed skills. The teacher realized the student's potential, as she had taken the time to know him well. This approach emphasizes the importance of tailoring educational assessments to individuals, thereby empowering both teachers and students.
• 16:30 - 17:00: Conclusion The chapter "Conclusion" emphasizes the importance of relationships in teaching, mentoring, and coaching contexts. It suggests that successful teaching starts with building these relationships, regardless of the setting. Once a relationship is established, various strategies, referred to as CRSSP strategies, can be effectively implemented.

How to make students (and teachers) want to go to school | Michele Freitag | TEDxYorkBeach Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Transcriber: Ana Carolina Bisinella Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg Every September, for the last 55 years, I’ve done the following routine. I get up earlier than I want to, put on my best outfit and head off to the first day of school - again. That’s right. I’ve been going to school for 55 years. Now you might ask, Why would anyone want to do that?
• 00:30 - 01:00 The answer for me is quite simple. I love it. I loved school as a child, and I love it now as an adult. I always liked learning at school. I got along with my teachers. I loved them. They generally liked me back. In fact, let me tell you about my favorite teacher, Mrs. Erga, my third grade teacher. She was less than five feet tall. She had the biggest heart. When she was in college, she lost a leg to an illness.
• 01:00 - 01:30 Just three weeks later, she marched on crutches at her college graduation. That’s heart. And she brought that same heart into the classroom. Every child in her classroom felt loved and appreciated. And she made learning fun. So I have tried to bring that same heart to my teaching. So yeah, I loved school. And Awards Day, that was my favorite
• 01:30 - 02:00 because it was often a highlight of the year to bring an award home. So what was not to love, right? It turns out that’s not the case for everyone. Let’s look at my own family, for example. My husband, he liked school enough. He didn’t love it. And Awards Day? He hated it. Because he knew no matter what he did, he was not going to be going up to get one of those awards. And it's not that he isn't smart. He's plenty smart.
• 02:00 - 02:30 It's just that the general instruction didn't fit the way he learned. Then came along my three sons. I was like, Ah, I know they’re going to love school just like I did. They were early readers. They loved learning. Super curious. I thought this is going to be great. Not so much. They did okay, but - they did great, actually - but some of the times they really struggled because the way they learned didn’t fit that little box.
• 02:30 - 03:00 They needed something different to tap into their myriad of strengths. So as parents, my husband and I spent a lot of our time, instead of celebrating, we spent it helping them figure out the system and how to work within it, which is one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about changing the system to make it work for all students. I’ve been teaching for almost four decades, and in that time, I’ve had lots of wonderful moments with students.
• 03:00 - 03:30 But right now, I want to share a story with you that is the kind that rips a teacher’s heart out. It was just a few years ago. I was teaching fourth grade, giving a reading assessment, and I noticed this little boy sitting over there with his head down on his desk. So I walked over; I said, “What’s wrong, hun?” And he looked up at me with these big, tear-filled eyes, and he said, “I can’t do this. It’s too hard. I’m just not good at this.”
• 03:30 - 04:00 That broke my heart. Now imagine that for a minute. Imagine if that’s your child. Or your grandchild. Or your neighbor’s child sitting there crying, feeling like a failure because of an assessment question. In that moment, that child was broken. Broken by a system that is too focused on isolated skills and test scores.
• 04:00 - 04:30 A system that is filled with assessments one after another, building pressure: pressure on kids, pressure on teachers. It can be a real pressure cooker at school, and I believe we can do so much better. So, I looked at that child, and I said, “Honey, put the test aside. Come up to my desk, let’s talk.” We talked for a few minutes. I had seen him during our read aloud times. He gave great answers and connections to the books we were reading.
• 04:30 - 05:00 So I talked to him about the story he just read, and I wove in the questions that were being assessed. And as my suspicions were, he knew the story well, he understood it, and he had the skill being assessed. He was shocked when I said, “Honey, you just aced the assessment. Go ahead and sit down.” The reason why I knew what that child needed at the moment was because I had taken time to get to know him.
• 05:00 - 05:30 I’d listened to him. I knew what he needed. Teaching begins with relationship. It doesn’t matter if you’re teaching students in a school, mentoring adults in a job or coaching members of a team. It all begins with relationship. After you’ve established that, you can use some strategies that I call CRSSP strategies.
• 05:30 - 06:00 The C stands for choice: giving students choice in their learning, not unlimited choice but meaningful choice whenever possible. This empowers the students and engages them in their learning. R is for relevance: making sure that the learning is meaningful to the students. This helps them to connect to it and engages them in the process and makes their work purposeful. The first S is for strength-based learning:
• 06:00 - 06:30 focusing on my students strengths and talents and building from there. When we focus on deficits, it can be counterproductive. It can end up leaving the student discouraged, disheartened. But if we begin from a position of strength, it’s easier than to tackle the challenges. The second S is for specific, honest and positive feedback. I would catch my students being good, catch them doing well,
• 06:30 - 07:00 or most importantly, catch them working really hard through a difficult situation. And I would use those minutes, moments as encouragement to build their confidence and to build their enthusiasm, because success breeds success. And when we begin by focusing on success, we can then tackle those challenges, and the students are able to hear the constructive criticism
• 07:00 - 07:30 they need to hear in order to improve. The P stands for passion: making sure that I know my students well enough to know what their interests and hobbies are. Because knowing what’s important to them can allow me to weave that into the curriculum in a way that I can engage them and hook them and just pull them right in. Now, the next unit in my classroom was a unit on non-fiction reading and writing. I politely and respectfully set aside the teacher’s manual.
• 07:30 - 08:00 Because I knew from experience a way that I could teach it called guided research, which is something I’ve used for years in my gifted ed program. I knew that I could make it more engaging and also employ these CRSSP strategies. Here’s how. First, the students are allowed to brainstorm a variety of topics that they’re interested in and choose the one that they want to learn about. That one decision alone
• 08:00 - 08:30 taps into choice, relevance and passion. Next, I try to reawaken in my students that natural curiosity they have. I have them think things like: “I wonder how, wonder why; I wonder if.” And they use that kind of thinking to develop questions to help them dig into their topic and really learn about it. Along the way, they’re going to start researching.
• 08:30 - 09:00 And when they’re researching, I can help give that positive feedback. I can weave in those skills from the teachers manual in a way I call just in time learning. What that means is they learn the skills they need when they need it, just in time, when it's relevant in the process. That gives me the opportunity, as they’re working at their own pace, to give them positive feedback. And for strength, I ask the students
• 09:00 - 09:30 to volunteer for different tasks that they are good at. What are they an expert at? This not only empowers my students, but it allows me to be the guide on the side instead of the sage on the stage. And it also cuts down on wait time. At the end, they’re allowed to choose how they’re going to present what they’ve learned. Again, tapping into choice and their talents and their strengths and their passions. I’ve had students create videos, books, puppet shows,
• 09:30 - 10:00 games, even programming games on the computer about their topic. And these are fourth graders. Fourth graders. If we allow our children to use their creativity and show their learning in an authentic way, they will. I’d like to share another time when I used CRSSP strategies. After I tell you about that student who had been crying.
• 10:00 - 10:30 He gladly researched his topic. He enthusiastically did it. He created a slide show, and on the day he presented, there were no tears, just lots of pride in what he had done. Other students said to me, “Can we do extra projects just for fun?” I was like, “Uh-huh.” (Laughter) So, another time I used these CRSSP strategies was when I was teaching third grade way back in 2005. I had just finished reading aloud a book called Gooseberry Park.
• 10:30 - 11:00 It’s a delightful story about these animal characters who have to help each other after a strom. My students loved the book, and at the end they said, “Mrs. Freitag, could we write to a movie company and ask them to turn this book into a movie? Because it would make a great movie!” And I said, “It would, and we can, but they may or may not choose it. And even if they do choose it, it probably will take them years to produce. So really, the only way you’d see it while you’re still kids
• 11:00 - 11:30 is if we did it ourselves.” They were like, “Could we? Could we?” Since I’d suggested it, I kind of had to say yes. (Laughter) So, they spent the next six months rereading the book, writing the script for all the scenes, creating all of the claymation figures, taking over 6000 pictures and doing the voice work, and then weaving all of that together into a 20-minute long stop action video
• 11:30 - 12:00 that is still shown at our school today. Some of the other teachers said to me, “Michele, how can you possibly fit this in? There’s no time.” My principal said, “Michele, how can you be sure that you’re covering all the standards, and they’re getting all the skills they need?” I was able to reassure them. I was able to tell them exactly what skills I was covering in reading, in writing, in performance skills, in tech.
• 12:00 - 12:30 I wove it together. When we do that, when we integrate the learning, we can buy ourselves time to make those choices. Now, over the years, my colleagues and I, we have seen a lot of changes, a lot of reform. There’s been lots of research that’s come out to tell us what best practices are and how students learn most effectively. Things like the importance of hands-on, relevant learning, things like how important voice and choice are to engage students.
• 12:30 - 13:00 But during that time, there’s also been a huge shift in education towards test data collection. Now, accountability is important, but how does that fit with what we know are best practices? I believe the system is very out-of-balance. Along with changing guidelines comes new curriculum. And very often teachers are asked to teach this new curriculum with fidelity.
• 13:00 - 13:30 And what that means for some people is that all teachers must follow the teachers guideline and do the lessons in order all the same so that all students are getting the same thing. There are actually districts out there that go into classrooms and check to make sure that teachers are on the same page. I suggest that teaching with fidelity is not the same as teaching with integrity,
• 13:30 - 14:00 which is where you look at what the desired outcomes are, and you figure out how to get each student there. Not teaching just for the test. Teachers want to teach this way. They want to teach this way, but all too often, their hands are tied. Did you know that right now, teaching is the profession that has the highest percentage of burnout by a wide margin?
• 14:00 - 14:30 And while there are lots of factors to that, I believe one of them is the deprofessionalizing of teachers. Let me say that again: the deprofessionalizing of teachers. See, in far too many classrooms, teachers are not allowed to use their training, their knowledge their experience, their wisdom to ask things like: What would work best for this class? What would motivate that student? How can I make this more meaningful?
• 14:30 - 15:00 What teachers need? They need the same thing as the students. They need these same things. They need to be able to make choices in their classroom to use their experience and their wisdom to look at the students in front of them and see what will meet their needs, their interests and their abilities. We need to know they have permission to do this. They need to be empowered to tap into their strengths, their talents so that they can teach most effectively.
• 15:00 - 15:30 But someone who is valued and empowered, an employee, is going to bring more enthusiasm and passion into their work. And the great thing about enthusiasm is it's contagious. So when students capture that enthusiasm, when they’re valued and have a voice in their learning, we will no longer have a student sitting at his desk with his head down crying.
• 15:30 - 16:00 We will have empowered, confident students engaging in their learning in a meaningful way. I have loved teaching for 39 years. And I’ve loved going to school for 55 years. Wouldn’t it be great if every student who walked through our doors, loved coming to school? Thank you. (Applause)