Cultivating Responsibility in Children

Anni Krummel Reinking is a Graduate Assistant and Ed.D. student in the School of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University. She is a former preschool, kindergarten, second grade, and early childhood special education teacher. In this post, Anni describes how teachers can cultivate responsibility in young children with some great practical tips for doing so!

Teachers, especially early childhood teachers, build a foundation for students to learn responsibility through choices and consequences (Head Start, 2014). While building that foundation, with the help of parents, it is important to emphasis strategies, character traits, and skills that can be applied to children developing and living in a diverse, high tech, and democratic society (Popkin, 2014). Children are growing up in a society that has changed over the generations and is continually changing.

Arguably, parenting styles and teaching styles are very similar and have worked reasonably well. However, when we think about the past, our society is much different today. What worked fifty, twenty, or even ten years ago does not work today in the society we are living in. It is our job, as educators, to cultivate responsibility within our students in order to create future citizens who can problem-solve, communicate, and cooperate (Head Start, 2014; Popkin, 2014).

Where do our children learn these skills in order to increase their courage and self-esteem? Children learn it from teachers and parents. How do teachers and parents create situations to cultivate responsibility increasing children’s self-esteem and courage to communicate and problem-solve effectively? The answer is simple, through discipline, which includes choices and consequences, along with consistency.

Dr. Popkin (2014), a psychologist who focuses on raising children today, brings attention to the importance of creating an active environment for everyone, rather than a “Dictator” (Autocratic) environment or a “Doormat” (Permissive) environment. According to Dr. Popkin, in a Dictator society or environment, children are lead by fear and are compliant because of rewards and punishments.

In a Doormat society, children have absolutely no boundaries and rules are not enforced. However, in an Active environment parents and teachers are able to take the strengths from the autocratic and permissive styles to create an environment of communication and problem solving. When teachers and parents are able to create an active, or working together, environment children are able to develop critical character traits and skills. These traits and skills are needed to develop courage and high self-esteem (Popkin, 2014).

Today, some professionals and researchers argue that schools are being run in a more “dictator” mentality. For example, when teachers tell their students what to do, “because they said so,” children are not able to develop a voice or a sense of ownership in their life or environment. In this type of school building, students who know how to follow the rules and “play the game” survive. However, children who are still learning how to make acceptable choices are continually punished through losing rewards other students are receiving. They are not punished through physical violence in school buildings. However, missing out on the same activities day after day, quarter after quarter, year after year, is a type of punishment or teaching through hurting (Popkin, 2014). But, providing opportunities for choices followed by consequences that are NOT focused on rewards and punishments builds a child’s self-esteem and creates an environment where everyone has a voice and “power” in their own life (Kohn, 1993).

As teachers, or parents, we may walk into a situation where rewards and punishments are used to manage our students or the students in our school buildings. So, what can we do? The top five ways, described by Dr. Popkin (2014), are:

1. Encourage

– Make sure to encourage your students

– “Catch them being Good”: Don’t wait for children to misbehave, expect them to follow rules and procedures and acknowledge the small steps

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate

– Help your students think through the pros and cons of the situation

– Ask questions so they are able to think through all of the possible outcomes of choices

3. Mutual Respect

– Give choices (That you can live with)

– When children are given choices they feel as though they are valued as an individual

4. Provide consistent and logical consequences

– Teachers need to assist students in learning boundaries and developing responsibility

– It is important to remember, though, that the consequence must match the misbehavior (i.e. A student throws a toy, when they know the rules of the classroom. The logical consequence would be to lose the privilege of playing with that toy for an amount of time.)

– It is also extremely important to communicate with students during logical consequences so they understand and link between their behavior and the consequence.

5. Role-model appropriate ways to problem-solve

– Provide the words or ideas students or children may need to solve a conflict with a peer

– This includes how to handle emotions, such as anger, appropriately for situations

We are responsible for cultivating responsible future citizens and that cultivation begins in early childhood through experiences, conversations, and choices. When children feel as though they have a say in their high tech, diverse, and democratic society, they begin to build confidence, courage, and a high self-esteem. Let children have a voice, sometimes what they say may surprise you!

References

Head Start. (2014). Domain 6: Social and emotional development. Retrieved from https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/ttasystem/teaching/eecd/domains%20of%20child%20development/social%20and%20emotional%20development/edudev_art_00016_061705.html

Kohn, A. (1993). Choices for children: Why and how to let children decide. Phi Delta Kappan 75(1), 8-21.

Popkin, M. H. (2014). Active parenting: A parent’s guide to raising happy and successful children (4^th      ed.). Canada: Active Parenting Publishers.

Round Robin Reading: The Bane of the Literacy Classroom

Dr. Sherry Sanden is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Literacy at Illinois State University. She is a former first- and second-grade teacher and child care director. Her research interests include the ways that teachers learn about and use books and reading in early education classrooms. In this post, Sherry raises the persistent issue of Round Robin Reading in ECE classrooms. Read ahead to learn more.

Picture this: You are a third-grader seated in your classroom on a Wednesday afternoon in early October. You and your classmates follow your teacher’s direction to take out the science textbook and turn to page 32. As you pull the book out of your desk, you start to get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach because you know what is coming next. Sure enough, your teacher points to the student in the front row and says, “You read the first paragraph, Molly behind you will read the second paragraph, and so on. Go ahead.” And your heart sinks because you know that by the time the reading snakes its way to you, you will be so anxious over this public exhibition of your developing skills that you will hardly be able to utter a word. You count how many students are seated ahead of you, then rapidly scan the pages to try to locate the paragraph you will need to read. Are there any unfamiliar words that will cause you to stumble? Maybe today you’ll be lucky and get a short, easy paragraph that won’t necessitate the teacher correcting your reading in front of your friends. Or will the teacher notice that you are not following along and suddenly break the routine, making you read a paragraph that you haven’t had a chance to preview?

What the teacher would like to think is happening is that everyone is listening attentively as each student dutifully reads aloud a part of the text, moving throughout the room until the end of the section is reached. However, anyone who has ever witnessed this experience knows differently. Readers who are unsure of themselves are doing their best to avoid embarrassment by scanning ahead to prepare to read material that is most likely beyond their capability. Advanced readers are either reading ahead silently or staring out the window at the turning leaves, completely bored with listening to the halting performance of their classmates. Few of the learners are actually attending to the substance of the material being read.

This all-too-common routine is known as Round Robin Reading (RRR) or sometimes Popcorn Reading, and it figures prominently in many adults’ stories about negative school literacy experiences. Too many readers were turned away from reading, sometimes permanently, by being forced to suffer over and over again the anxiety, embarrassment, or boredom brought about by reading that was turned into an unrehearsed public performance in front of their peers. There is no research that supports this practice and plenty of findings that point to its detrimental effects on young readers. For instance, simple math will tell you that RRR provides less time for eyes on text per student than would having students read independently. In the typical model of RRR, each student reads aloud a page or a paragraph and supposedly “follows along” as others read. If students were provided time to read the same amount of text independently or even aloud with a partner, the amount of reading practice for each student would obviously be far more. In addition, in a classroom with students of uneven reading abilities, it is inevitable that students will be listening others whose reading is even less fluent than their own. A steady diet of that cannot hope to provide the sort of modeling of fluent reading we would hope for. Finally, it appears that struggling readers, who require our strongest instruction, often suffer the worst effects of RRR. Studies demonstrate that struggling readers are more often expected to participate in RRR, usually in texts that are too hard. Then, when they do, they are more often interrupted during their reading, especially following mispronunciation of a word, rather than being encouraged to self-monitor and fix up their own reading. This is opposite the kind of support that will create independent, self-regulating readers.

Many teachers continue to utilize RRR because they experienced it themselves and they don’t know what else to do to meet the instructional needs that they believe RRR addresses. Some teachers believe that RRR is the only way to cover reading material that students can’t read and understand on their own. They think that having their students simply read aloud, one after another, will allow them to understand material on topics they couldn’t read about independently. This does not appear to be the case—students are often too bored or distracted during RRR to truly listen to what others are reading. A big part of this problem is created when we expect all learners to read from the same material. A common example is using class sets of social studies or science textbooks, which are often written at levels beyond the reach of many of our readers. However, the plethora of nonfiction trade books written for young readers provides great resources for classroom use. If we scrap the textbook sets and substitute trade books matched to our learners’ reading needs, we won’t feel forced to read aloud the books that so many of our students couldn’t access independently. We can provide our readers with opportunities to read their own books silently because they’ll be able to, thereby avoiding the public reading of texts that they weren’t paying attention to anyway.

A second reason teachers use RRR is their belief that it is an effective way to provide oral reading practice and assess students’ oral reading abilities. While oral reading is not an exact match for silent reading, it is about as close as we can get to understanding the strategies readers use. So, assessing students’ oral reading is a valuable practice but doing it in the public arena of the classroom, surrounded by critical peers, is fraught with all kinds of problems. There are many alternatives to using RRR for assessment purposes, like listening in for a few minutes one-on-one as all students read books independently. Similarly, there many beneficial and fun ways to provide students with oral reading practice that don’t come with the baggage of RRR. One that many readers enjoy is reader’s theatre, which allows students to rehearse and perform parts in a context that is far less stressful and more entertaining than the cold reads of RRR. There are many published reader’s theatre scripts available online or in published books, or you can easily turn a favorite class picture book into a script.

Most, if not all, teachers claim that a major objective of their literacy programs is to instill in their young readers a lifelong love of books. In keeping with this, abandoning a practice that appears to have the opposite effect on students and instead developing practices that support rather than inhibit reading growth and enjoyment seems warranted. Dropping round robin reading from our instructional repertoire and substituting routines that provide children with opportunities to practice their burgeoning reading skills in safe and supportive reading environments will go a long way toward meeting this goal.