Author Archives: Jan Kragen

About Jan Kragen

I'm a National Board Certified Teacher. I am also on the Executive Board of the Washington Association of Educators of Talented and Gifted (WAETAG). I've been a teacher since 1977, in public and private schools, in third through eighth grades, in California, Colorado, New York, and Washington. In 1983 I started specializing in gifted education. I now work in North Kitsap, teaching a self-contained Highly-Capable 5th grade class. I also teach teachers. I've written science and social studies curriculum units for our district, resource books for teachers, and educational articles. I've presented at national and state science, social studies, and gifted conferences. And I've done in-service training, both within my district and as a consultant through other districts and my ESD. Many of the things I have written and many of the materials I have developed for my own classroom use are available for free off my website, kragen.net.

Yes, Things Have Changed

Posted by on
Current Affairs, Life in the Classroom, Social Issues

I am retiring at the end of this year, and people keep asking me, “How have things changed?”

ONE

I can’t tell you how many systems of school-wide discipline I’ve trained in over the years. Yet student behavior seems to get worse. Students tearing things off the walls. Throwing tantrums. Screaming. Assaulting other students—and staff. Running away from adults, from classrooms, from school.

Recently I walked by a student trampling in the garden area by the office. I pointed out the sign telling people to stay out of the area and asked him to move to the sidewalk. He looked up at me and said, “I don’t know who you are.”

I said, “I’m Mrs. Kragen. I teach fourth and fifth grade here.”

He shrugged and said, “You aren’t my teacher” and went back to romping through the greenery.

It used to be that any adult—teacher, para, substitute, parent volunteer—could tell a child what to do, and the expectation was that the child would mind. Now children think the only adults they need to pay any attention to are the ones they know. The ones that have established a relationship with them.

I see it at home too. I told a neighbor child not to throw rocks at other kids. The father showed up at my doorstep later. He told me not to tell his child how to behave. I said, “But your child was throwing rocks at someone else!” He said, “Tell me what he did. I will deal with it.”

At the same time, everyone says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” That always makes me laugh. When my husband studied at Syracuse, we knew international students from Africa. They told us that, in Africa, the saying means that any adult has the right—actually, the responsibility—to rebuke and discipline any child.

At Johns Hopkins summer programs for gifted youth, everyone wears an identity card on a lanyard. Staff lanyards are blue, and students are red.

As I explained to a child who had gotten into trouble, “See this lanyard? Mine is blue. It means I get to tell you what to do.”

I think having a system like that at school would be a great idea.

Pages: 1 2

HC with ADHD

Posted by on
Uncategorized

A recent Professional Development training had to do with Multi-Disciplinary Support Services (MTSS). The goal was to adjust and strengthen our current MTSS systems to create equitable opportunity and access to instruction/supports for all students. It made me think of the most common group of twice-exceptional students that I teach: students identified as Highly Capable who are also identified as ADHD.

Obviously, I work with all my students on behavioral skills and organizational skills. But there are certain things I do that are specifically geared toward helping my ADHD students.

FIRST

Because ADHD is so common with my Highly Capable (HC) clientele, I set up my classroom each year specifically to address their needs. I learned 40 years ago that the bulletin boards are the most distracting things for that population in the classroom. The least distracting is the view out the window. Therefore, as much as possible, I put the bulletin boards directly behind the desks so the students have to turn around to look at them. The walls on the sides are as clean and clutter-free as I can make them.

Then I orient all the student desks to face the windows.

One of my principals came into my room in August the first year I was in his building.  He saw the way I had set things up and asked, “Why are all your desks facing the window?”

I said, “If you were sitting in these chairs for hours every day, what would you rather be looking at—the window or the whiteboard?”

He agreed the window was more appealing. “But how do they see the board?” he asked, gesturing to the right.

“They turn to look at it.”

He was still confused. “But where is the front of the room?”

I walked around the room a bit, his head swiveling to look at me, and replied, “Wherever I am!”

guest speakers in the “front” of the room

SECOND

I give my students something to do with their hands. Fidget spinners were wildly popular for a while, but I found them intensely distracting. I went to a conference and got a different idea. Before Covid-19, the bottom of each desk in my room had a square of soft, furry cloth taped to it. I didn’t announce that fact. The kids discovered it and told each other. I never noticed them using it. In fact, I thought the strategy was a dud, that no one was using it. Then one day I asked, “Does anyone ever use the cloth on the bottom of the desk to help calm down?”

Every single hand went up.

Post-Covid, I had to remove the cloths from the desks. My next idea was to wind really furry pipe cleaners around a desk strut—something personal that kids could remove and take home with them when we moved desks.

Pages: 1 2

Just Say No To Learning Styles

Posted by on
Education | ,

According to a survey in 2017, 93% of the public and 76% of educators believe in the theory of learning styles. It’s a pervasive idea. It’s appealing. It’s obvious.

Even though it’s wrong.

As its essence, the idea behind learning styles instruction is:

  • children who are visual learners learn best with visual instruction
  • children who are auditory learners learn best with auditory instruction
  • children who are kinesthetic learners learn best with kinesthetic instruction

However, experiments don’t bear this premise out. “If classification of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.”

Dr. Dylan Wiliam from the Institute of Education, University College London, argues that the whole premise of learning-styles research—that the purpose of instructional design is to make learning easy—may be incorrect. “If students do not have to work hard to make sense of what they are learning, then they are less likely to remember it in six weeks’ time.”

In other words, the learning styles movement wanted to make learning easy. But people learn best when learning is more challenging.

Especially if it’s more interesting.

Not only that, but teachers and students may have very different ideas of what each child’s “learning styles” are.

In a study published in Frontiers in Education, researchers interviewed nearly 200 fifth and sixth grade students, asking them to choose their preferred learning style (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic). Then their teachers were asked to identify each student’s preferred learning styles.

There was no significant correlation between the teachers’ judgements and the students’ own assessments. Clearly, the styles aren’t as obvious as some might expect!

If you, as a teacher, are a strong verbal or auditory learner, you should learn to incorporate extra kinesthetic activities like “vote with your feet.” However, you aren’t doing the activities to make your kinesthetic learners suddenly become better students. You are adding the activities to make your classroom experience richer for everyone. In the same way, you ought to incorporate extra visuals into your instruction: art, maps, charts, graphs, cartoons.

In my classroom, everyone learns to take 2- and 3-column notes (the third column giving space for questions or doodles). I also show everyone how to take notes in a more visually interesting way. In the end, students will choose the way that suits them best.

Pages: 1 2

Encouraging Dis-Comfort

Posted by on
Current Affairs, Education Policy, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Mathematics, Social Issues

At the beginning of this year, in the middle of a math lesson, one of my most advanced students, Caren,  suddenly said, “I don’t get it.”

Another student immediately spoke up to offer help. “Let me show you how to do it!”

I stopped the second student, saying, “That’s ok. Let her struggle.”

Caren’s face went bright red. She wasn’t used to struggling at anything. But I let her sit in that discomfort. I let her struggle. Eventually she said, “Oh, I see what I did wrong.” She was able to explain how she made her mistake on the problem.

After school, in the parking lot, I talked with her father and told him what I had done. He laughed and said he agreed with my strategy.

On March 14 I showed my class a SlideShow of pie charts during math for Pi Day. They were all jokes. My class had a wonderful time laughing at all the visual puns.

Toward the end I put up the following slide.

Pie Charts Are Hard

One of my students, Edgar, said, “I don’t get it.”

Kids tried to explain, but I just said, “Look at the title.”

Edgar said, “There’s no red!”

I said, “Look at the title.”

He said, “There’s no red anywhere!”

I repeated, “Look at the title.”

Finally, he said, “The title, what? The title … I don’t get it … I don’t … oh. Now I understand.”

Pages: 1 2

Gifted Parents

Posted by on
Parent Involvment

I don’t watch much sports, but I’m an Olympics junkie. I love the Olympic motto: Higher—Faster—Stronger. That’s how I want to teach, helping my kids as they always reach for the next goal.

This year one detail from an interview with Nathan Chen, the American gold medal figure skater, struck me. He said that his family didn’t have money for skating lessons when he was a kid. So his mom took him to occasional lessons. While he worked with the coach, she took copious notes, and—between lessons—she was the one who coached him, using what she had learned at the last lesson.

In this column I talk a lot about gifted students, or, as Washington State says, Highly Capable (HC) students.

It’s time to talk about gifted parents.

We had neighbors with a son Rafe who dug up their back yard to install a koi pond and a Japanese tea garden. Then he decided it wasn’t right, dug it all up again, and redid the whole thing. Multiple times. In the end they had a lovely back yard, but only after years of mess and chaos.

Rafe had a gift for gardening.

I thought his parents had a gift too. They were willing to put up with years of mess and chaos in order to support their son.

By the way, by the time he was in high school, Rafe started his own landscaping company that helped pay his way through college.

Pages: 1 2

To Acknowledge History Is to Be Radical

Posted by on
Uncategorized

In December, I taught my students about the Great Depression. Factories and stores couldn’t sell their goods, so they paid their workers less. The workers then bought fewer things, so the factories and stores sold less, leading them to pay their workers even less.

Banks failed. People lost their savings.

Clothes wore out and were patched.  There was no money to buy new.  People moved to cheaper houses and then to cheaper dwellings that didn’t qualify as houses.  They bought cheaper food and then less food.  Finally, they weren’t able to buy enough food to keep up their strength.

At that point in the lesson, one of my students Aleesha raised her hand. She said, “Mrs. Kragen, I would rather live through five years of a pandemic than live through the Great Depression.”

Teaching history provides perspective.

Pages: 1 2

Identifying Students for Highly Capable Programs

Posted by on
Assessment, Education Policy, Equity | ,

It’s hard to identify students for gifted—or Highly Capable (HC)—programs.

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s 2009 book What the Dog Saw. One chapter was called “The New-Boy Network: What Do Job Interviews Really Tell Us?”

Gladwell explained that people can give a terrific interview and be bad at the job. Why? Because people’s traits and abilities are task-specific. Someone may have the characteristics of a great interviewee and the ability to answer interview questions well, but that same person may not have the temperament or personality or skills to perform well at the job. An interview and a job are different situations, and the person will respond differently to the two types of situations.

How does that apply to gifted identification? Imagine that a district limits itself to a single test. You may have a child who delights in that type of test question and who is comfortable with that type of testing situation. On the other hand, you may have a child who finds that kind of test question boring or who is distressed at the testing situation. If those same children have identical abilities, the first child is going to have a higher test score.

A psychologist in New York state gave a 4-year-old girl an individual IQ test that took over an hour. When the test was over, the psychologist came out and said the child missed the cut-off score by one point. However, he added, the score wasn’t valid because the girl got hungry halfway through the test.

He never gave her the chance to take a snack break.

In a district in North Carolina, the means of identification was single creativity test: “Draw a person.” Of course, the more detailed the drawing, the more creative the student. One child barely drew a stick figure, so was not identified as gifted. His mother said they should have had him draw a map. He would have been working on it for over an hour. 

He needed a different prompt.

In Washington state, districts are required to use multiple criteria for identification.

  • The more points of information, the better. Having just three items is ridiculously low, especially if two of them are subjective.
  • The more diverse kinds of information, the better.
  • The more familiar the setting for data collection, the better. Assessing kids in their own school during the school day is the best.
Pages: 1 2

Critical Thinking for Research?—My Teaching Needs to Expand

Posted by on
Elementary

Last week I introduced the year’s big research project to my class. My students are so excited!

In addition to learning about a conflict in the 20th century, individuals and teams will analyze causes and short- and long-term effects of their conflict.

The first step was to pick a topic that fit within the parameters. It also needed to be a manageable topic: for example, the Bus Boycotts instead of the Civil Rights Movement.

The second step was to find good resources, both print and online.

We talked about where to find good books: in my room, in the school library, in the public library. One student shared a couple of books her team had found in the school library for their topic—the Tet Offensive. We used the index in each, and in one book we found not just a section about the Tet Offensive, but also information in following sections about consequences of the offensive. My student’s eyes got big, and she said, “We really lucked out on this book!”

As we talked about finding online sources, I said to focus on .gov and .edu and sometimes .org sites and, even more importantly, to look for who sponsored the site—NASA, Johns Hopkins, the American Medical Association. “You want to know who is standing behind the person saying you can trust that they are an expert.” I also explain about “gateway” sites. For example, our local library provides links to vetted sites for students to use. So does the Smithsonian.

(“Is Google.com a good source?” “Google isn’t like a book or an article. It’s a collection of a trillion or more books or articles! Saying “I found my information in Google.com” is like saying “I found my information in the library.”)

I told my class to avoid most .com sites, explaining that “.com stands for commercial.” (It was originally the designation for business sites, which doesn’t necessarily mean bad content, it’s just not usually academic or educational content.) I added that a student had come to me once asking if a site was legit. The World War II information looked good, but he couldn’t find the sponsor for the site. I went to the home page. Turns out the site was for a used car dealership, which my students found hilarious. Apparently, the owner of the dealership was a bit of a history buff, but we all agreed we wouldn’t use his site as a trusted source.

Having students read and take notes on books before they go to online sources gives them a good cross-check for information, too.

That’s a quick snapshot of how I teach students to evaluate sources.

It’s not enough, anymore.

I’ve been teaching in a world of the library and the internet.  

Now that more and more people are turning to social media for information, I need to start teaching about social media.

Pages: 1 2

Perfectionism in the Highly Capable Classroom

Posted by on
Elementary | , , , ,

In a Vox article giving reasons why kids are anxious, one significant reason was, “The constant pressure to optimize their futures.”

I admit, I’ve talked college with my elementary students for 40 years. I try to keep some perspective, though.

I loved one conversation with a gifted eighth-grade student. Filling out her high school paperwork, she struggled to tell what she wanted to be when she graduated.

She wanted to major in English, Spanish, French. Math and science. History. Art.

She looked at me, distraught. “How am I supposed to know what I want to be when I graduate?” I looked at her page and offered, “A well-educated adult?”

“Yes!” she chortled and wrote that.

Highly-Capable kids can be gifted in more than one area. I have students in my HC class who also play team sports. Or participate in the local theater group. Or take music lessons. Or do everything!

Such children can feel overwhelmed with all the things they have on their plate. Add to that the expectation that they will excel in every endeavor. Otherwise, how will they get into that top college and achieve that career success that everyone expects?

Here are some ways my kids agreed with points made about perfectionism in an article I had them read.

  • I agree that trying to be perfect stresses me out.
  • Perfectionism is not quite the best idea.
  • Mental health comes first.
  • We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves.

Perfectionism robs students of the joy of their accomplishments. A student in my middle school social studies class for gifted students was an outstanding artist and used her talent in a class project. After her oral presentation, students lavishly praised her artwork. She deflected all the compliments, telling everyone her art wasn’t good and pointing out all the mistakes.

Pages: 1 2

Tornado Alert!

Posted by on
Current Affairs, Elementary, Life in the Classroom

I’ve been through so many drills—and emergencies—in my teaching career.

We’ve had multiple lockdowns. Once a neighbor’s bull got loose and rampaged through the playground. Once police called the school and said an armed suspect was in the area; they asked us to keep all the students inside. Once there was a chemical spill scare. The entire school spent the afternoon in the gym before a custodian figured out a delivery truck driver had parked with the exhaust pipe up against the school’s HVAC intake—and left the engine running.

We’ve had fire alarms result in the entire school outside for an hour or more, waiting for the fire department to clear the building.

Students get excited with these interruptions to their routines, but in short order they get bored with the restrictions to their activities.

As we practiced a lockdown drill for the first time, I answered a host of questions from my students. The idea of someone bringing a gun to school to shoot people was very concerning to them. “What if this happened?” they asked.  “What if this happened?” “What if this happened?” I told them that, as far as they were concerned, the answer was going to be the same no matter what scenario they might present. “Listen to me and follow my directions.” I gave them a couple of specific examples of what I would have them do, but it still came back to that—just listen and follow directions. They calmed down. They were ok with that.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed more dramatic events. A fire alarm went off. Heads snapped up. Then kids noticed the smoke pouring out of the multipurpose room across the courtyard from our class! I sent my students out to the gathering point while I went looking for the fire extinguisher. When I met up with my class later, they had followed the fire drill routine perfectly.

When the Nisqually earthquake struck, I’d just sent my class to recess. Some students were on the playground. Some were on the stairs leading to the playground. Some were in the halls. Some were in the bathrooms. Some were in my classroom. The earthquake roared in, the ground shook, the building swayed. And every student, no matter where they were, did exactly what they were supposed to do.

In every single emergency or drill that I’ve been through with a class, no matter how intense, the emotional response was the same. The students go on high alert. They might be concerned or nervous. But they look to the adults. They follow directions. The routines and practicing of drills gives them a framework for how to respond. They cope brilliantly.

After a major event, they chatter. Everyone has to share their personal experience—where they were, what they saw, how they felt. I let them all speak, let them come down off that emotional high. Then we go right back to a regular school day.

This week, though, was different. As we worked on math, there was the faint sound of sirens. Then a voice on the intercom said teachers were to keep all students in their classrooms. Shortly thereafter, sirens returned, louder. The voice on the intercom said everyone was to duck and cover. There was a tornado alert.

Pages: 1 2