Stick Up for Your Learning!

This is an article originally authored by me and printed by The Education Game. I’m sharing it again today since I’ve had several requests to release it again. Consider it the beginning of A Better Path to Learning’s “Best of the Best.”

When I was a high school principal, I was visited by many middle-class parents asking favors for their children.  These favors included, to name a few, asking for their children to be moved to more popular teachers, asking that their children receive a better grade, and asking for their children to drop a class after the deadline so their children’s GPA and transcript weren’t tarnished.  Although some of these requests were legitimate, most cases were non-starters once the parents entered my office.  Many of these parents served on the high school’s parent-teacher organization, so they saw the above requests as a sort of “quid pro quo” in return for their participation in school activities that raised considerable amounts of money to contribute to our school’s improvement.

I guess we can agree that although what I describe above are examples of negotiation between parents and traditional schools, I think we all can agree these are examples of what we might call power play negotiation.  What I found interesting is that, although many middle-class parents participated in these types of power play negotiations, very few low-income families did.  These families, many who had both mom and dad working several jobs to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, either didn’t know how to negotiate this way, or they understood the ethical problems associated with such bargaining.

What is needed now between the learning organization and the learner and their family, no matter their economic situation, is the endorsement and practice of authentic, goal-oriented negotiation, not what I describe above.  Whether you are a middle class or low-income parent, there are negotiation skills that you need to know and practice, if you are going to be successful in helping your children find success along their learning pathway.  Here are several suggestions on how to carry the art of authentic, goal-oriented negotiation into your relationship with your child’s learning organization:

You Know Your Child Better Than Anyone – Because they are trained professionals, traditional school people often believe they can diagnose problems and prescribe solutions for children without accounting for parent input.  Traditional schoolteachers and leadership seem to do this even more with low-income families. This is a mistake on the part of the learning organization, and parents, no matter their economic level, need to address this misstep early in their relationship with their child’s learning leaders.  Saying “I know this kid better than anyone” is a great move at the beginning of the first conversation with your child’s learning leaders, whether they be a teacher, principal, central office personnel, or learning coach.

What Is My Child Learning? – This is a great question to ask adult learning leaders after parents proclaim their expertise of knowing their kid better than anyone else.  Here’s some advice – don’t let the learning leadership answer this question by listing the subjects or courses your children are taking each day.  Parents! You must push your learning organization to describe learning goals in detail, like “Your child is working on fractions this week. They are finding success with proper fractions but struggling with improper.” This type of specificity should apply to all skills the parent’s children are expected to learn.

How Do We Know My Child Is Learning? – This is one of the most important questions a parent can ask their learning organization, and probably the one that most learning leaders don’t know how to answer. The usual evaluative practice schools send home is the grade. Explaining grading practices is going to have to wait for a future column but suffice it to say most grades are extremely arbitrary.  Whenever you have teachers giving bonus credit for kids bringing toilet paper to school (yes, this was attempted while I was a middle school and high school principal,) you know you have a serious problem legitimizing grading practices. My advice to parents, when thinking about answers to this question, is focus on demonstrations and explanations that prove competency.  Part of the reason most traditional schools rely on grades and standardized tests is that they don’t feel they have the time or the talent to move to a more competency-based evaluation system.  The Aurora Institute offers many excellent resources to help parents down the competency-based learning pathway.

What Do We Do When My Child Doesn’t Learn What They Need to Learn? – This is another important question for parents to pose to their child’s learning leader. The usual traditional school answer to this question is to offer a failing grade.  WRONG!  Learners need time to learn difficult tasks, and most traditional school pacing guides are designed around a testing calendar, not an individual’s need to learn.  Time and support are the answers parents are after when they negotiate with the traditional school around this question.

Parents! Please start with this statement and three questions when beginning to negotiate with your children’s learning organization.  And, begin teaching your child (children) how to share this statement in their own words (like “I know how I learn better than anyone else.”) and pose these three questions as personal inquiries as they move along their own learning pathway. Because here’s a little secret not many parents want to admit – the sooner you teach your child how to own their own learning through the art of negotiation, the sooner principals like me will bend over backward to help the learner themselves and not feel exploited by parent manipulation.

Til tomorrow. SVB