Health #2 Chapter 13

This was a lengthy chapter with loads of information. However after reading it, there are a few thoughts that came to mind regarding the interactions that I have as a teacher with my students. I think that child development is so important to understand and teachers and parents should have a really good grasp of the cycle of development in children. We continue to develop over time and children are always changing and growing. I find child development fascinating and worthy of my taking more time to read and explore. I took a child development class at a local community college back in 2004, and it was mostly focused on the preschooler, but t was very helpful to me in my understanding and building relationships wth the preschool children I had. The first piece of the article that grabbed my attention was the part on page 7 about self-esteem. As teachers it is really important that we understand that our action and interactions with our students help mold that. "Concern that too many children receive praise for mediocre or even poor performance and as a consequence have inflated self-esteem." I know as a teacher I want to encourage my students;however, there are certain behaviors, skills etc that are just expected and to make a really huge deal about them I think falls into the area of praising mediocrity. At our school we have value rockets, and I think that there may be a tendency to overuse these at this level meaning for something that really is not worthy of a value rocket just to give it out everyday to someone in each class, I think is falling into the trap of what this quote is driving at. In my room, I don't know who will get a value rocket, and it has to be something that is really above and beyond just a "super purple" on our behavior clip chart. TO earn one in my class is something that has a "wow" factor, and if that means that someone does not earn it that day or for a week or two then that is how it goes. I think our intentions are good in wanting to recongnize and reward students that praise, but I think we can get carried away with it and we can be guilty of rewarding mediocrity.

The chapter listed for things to increase children's self-esteem: Identify the causes of low self-esteem in which children are encouraged to identify and value areas of competence such as academic, athletic, physical attractiveness, and social acceptance. Each individual child excels in at least one area. I know I have students who may be a little weaker academically, but they excel in social skills or other problem solving areas, and building their awareness of their strengths in whatever area is our responsibility as teachers. Second, provide emotional support/social approval. A lot of our students come from conflicted families and situations that are beyond our control. Some have experienced abuse and neglect. I, over the years, have had a multitude of experiences with students I have known who have been sexually molested, witnessed abuse, live in extreme poverty, live with drug addicts or alcoholic parents, and some that are homeless. Again I think it is our responsibility to provide whatever emotional support they need to help foster their sense of self-esteem. Some children probably carry a lot of guilt over whatever situations they have at home, and providing them with a safe environment is definately critical to their development of self-esteem. Third, help children achieve. Here we as teachers need to teach straightforwar real lskills which studies show results in increased achievement. We are so driven in the area of achievement, and communicating and teaching our students real skills and the importance of having that, translates into their achievement of those goals. Somewhere in the chapter it talked about giving them the tools to assess where they are in achieving their goals, and I believe everything we do at Rocketship does emphasize the goals that they are responsible for reaching. They are always aware of where they are in terms of those goals, how far they need to go, and this year I am having all of my students reflect on what they have done that has contributed to their being able to scale the mountain towards reaching their goal by the end of the year. They had to write about what things they had to do to make it there after I gave them feedback on their first round diagnostic in September. Each time they take the diagnostic, they will have to go back and reflect and write what they did to increase their climbing up the mountain or what they failed to do that maybe held them back. I think this will give them a tremendous amount of satisfaction and allow them to take ownership of what they have accomplished. The fourth way to increase self-esteem that the chapter mentioned was helping children cope. Here again, I think Rocketship does a great job at teaching children to learn how to face a problem onad try to cope with it. We use I-Statements which empower children to solve problems on their own rather than avoiding them. THis is critical to developing healthy self-esteem.

The next piece of the reading that caught my attention was the part about the differences between males and females which I find fascinating. As a teacher I really need to be aware of these differences and learn how it plays into my instruction and the results that I get from my students. One cognitive difference that I have heard about before reading this article was that girls are stronger in verbal abilities and boys are stronger in math and visuospatial skills. As a math teacher, I have always kept this in mind, and I had read articles before claiming that in certain studies boys are always called on more in math than girls. THe other area of differences is what the article called report talk vs. rapport talk. What this means is that males do well when it comes to re port talk which is talking that gives information like public speaking, story telling, lecturing with information. On the other hand, females do better when it comes to rapport talk which is language of conversation and a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships. I am going to watch out for this and be more observant when it comes to this in my classroom because I had never heard of such a thing before. Last, according to the reading boys are more likely to hide their negative emotions such as sadness and girls less likely to express disappoinment that might hurt others' feelings.

In sum, I find child development very interesting and fascinating and I would like to continue to read about their development not only as a teacher, but as a mother of a teenager. I think anyone who has children or works with children should really take the time and effort to understand stages of development and what that means as a parent or an educator. THere is so much to know in terms of development, and I wonder if it is possible to really learn what we need to learn about child development in one class? Absolutely not would be my answer.