Liar, Liar

The truth or not the truth, is that the question?

It’s certainly one of them, according to the folks at Making Caring Common (MCC), a project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education focused on helping schools, parents, and community members to “develop caring, ethical children.” 

In a newly released video, MCC co-director Rick Weissbourd — a psychologist and senior lecturer at HGSE — shares screen time with several elementary school-age children who define what lying means to them, while coyly owning up to their own bouts with dishonesty.

Weissbourd stresses that lying is all too common with children, citing the statistic that 95 percent will “lie to their parents at some point,” but parents should view these instances as part of an ongoing conversation on the importance of honesty and integrity. Sure, sometimes it may be justified — does Aunt Suzie really need to know that you hate the green sweater that she bought you for Christmas? — yet parents and children alike should proceed with caution when not telling the whole truth.

So what are parents and caretakers to do? MCC and Weissbourd provide four tips:

1. Don’t Freak Out. Weissbourd says kids can lie for “all sorts of innocent reasons,” including eating too much candy but telling mom otherwise, as one student in the video admits. It’s important to keep the relationship close and the lines of communication open.
2. Encourage Honesty. Talk about it. It’s essential to listen and understand why they are lying. Try this: Take turns reflecting on a recent time you were dishonest. This may include telling a small white lie or even just leaving out a piece of information. As a parent, you could also share an example from your childhood. After you have both shared, discuss the impact of your dishonesty and what you could have done differently. How did it affect others? You?
3. Model Honesty. In your daily activities, Weissbourd encourages the modeling of honesty and integrity. “We can’t tell our kids to be honest and then have them witness our own white lies or dishonesty,” he says. "If they hear us lying, we need to explain to them why we chose to lie. If we regret the lie, we should explain to them why we made a mistake." Try this: Plan an “Honest Attention Day.” This activity is meant to bring more awareness to the behavior you are modeling. For one day, from when you wake up until you go to bed, pay particular attention to how honest you are. Jot down notes if you need to. At the end of the day, reflect on how honest you were. Are you surprised? Would you do anything differently? 
4. Praise Honesty. “Sometimes being honest is tough for them and it takes real courage,” says Weissbourd. “We need to be able to honor that courage.”

Writer: Mary Tamer

Source: Usable Knowledge

Financing Health and Education for All

In 2015, around 5.9 million children under the age of five, almost all in developing countries, died from easily preventable or treatable causes. And up to 200 million young children and adolescents do not attend primary or secondary school, owing to poverty, including 110 million through the lower-secondary level, according to a recent estimate. In both cases, massive suffering could be ended with a modest amount of global funding.

Children in poor countries die from causes – such as unsafe childbirth, vaccine-preventable diseases, infections such as malaria for which low-cost treatments exist, and nutritional deficiencies – that have been almost totally eliminated in the rich countries. In a moral world, we would devote our utmost effort to end such deaths.

In fact, the world has made a half-hearted effort. Deaths of young children have fallen to slightly under half the 12.7 million recorded in 1990, thanks to additional global funding for disease control, channeled through new institutions such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

When I first recommended such a fund in 2000, skeptics said that more money would not save lives. Yet the Global Fund proved the doubters wrong: More money prevented millions of deaths from AIDS, TB, and malaria. It was well used.

The reason that child deaths fell to 5.9 million, rather to near zero, is that the world gave only about half the funding necessary. While most countries can cover their health needs with their own budgets, the poorest countries cannot. They need about $50 billion per year of global help to close the financing gap. Current global aid for health runs at about $25 billion per year. While these numbers are only approximate, we need roughly an additional $25 billion per year to help prevent up to six million deaths per year. It’s hard to imagine a better bargain.

Similar calculations help us to estimate the global funding needed to enable all children to complete at least a high-school education. UNESCO recently calculated the global education “financing gap” to cover the incremental costs – of classrooms, teachers, and supplies – of universal completion of secondary school at roughly $39 billion. With current global funding for education at around $10-15 billion per year, the gap is again roughly $25 billion, similar to health care. And, as with health care, such increased global funding could effectively flow through a new Global Fund for Education.

Thus, an extra $50 billion or so per year could help ensure that children everywhere have access to basic health care and schooling. The world’s governments have already adopted these two objectives – universal health care and universal quality education – in the new Sustainable Development Goals.

An extra $50 billion per year is not hard to find. One option targets my own country, the United States, which currently gives only around 0.17% of gross national income for development aid, or roughly one-quarter of the international target of 0.7% of GNI for development assistance.

Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom each give at least 0.7% of GNI; the US can and should do so as well. If it did, that extra 0.53% of GNI would add roughly $90 billion per year of global funding.

The US currently spends around 5% of GDP, or roughly $900 billion per year, on military-related spending (for the Pentagon, the CIA, veterans, and others). It could and should transfer at least $90 billion of that to development aid. Such a shift in focus from war to development would greatly bolster US and global security; the recent US wars in North Africa and the Middle East have cost trillions of dollars and yet have weakened, not strengthened, national security.

A second option would tax the global rich, who often hide their money in tax havens in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Many of these tax havens are UK overseas territories. Most are closely connected with Wall Street and the City of London. The US and British governments have protected the tax havens mainly because the rich people who put their money there also put their money into campaign contributions or into hiring politicians’ family members.

The tax havens should be called upon to impose a small tax on their deposits, which total at least $21 trillion. The rich countries could enforce such a tax by threatening to cut off non-compliant havens’ access to global financial markets. Of course, the havens should also ensure transparency and crack down on tax evasion and corporate secrecy. Even a deposit tax as low as 0.25% per year on $21 trillion of deposits would raise around $50 billion per year.

Both solutions would be feasible and relatively straightforward to implement. They would underpin the new global commitments contained in the SDGs. At the recent Astana Economic Forum, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev wisely called for some way to tax offshore deposits to fund global health and education. Other world leaders should rally to his call to action.

Our world is immensely wealthy and could easily finance a healthy start in life for every child on the planet through global funds for health and education. A small shift of funds from wasteful US military spending, or a very small levy on tax havens’ deposits – or similar measures to make the super-rich pay their way – could quickly and dramatically improve poor children’s life chances and make the world vastly fairer, safer, and more productive. There is no excuse for delay.

Writer:Jeffery D. Sachs
Source: Project Syndicate

Old School?

When it's time to renovate an old school or build a new one, many principals and teachers have a simple wish list. They “just want buildings that work,” says David Stephen, educator, architect, and founder of New Vista Designs for Learning. They’re thinking about windows that are operable, good air handling systems, enough classrooms to fit everyone in — the building blocks of a basic, functional school.

But learning has changed, says Stephen, and it’s time for educators to seize the chance “to think beyond the traditional school blocks that they’re accustomed to.” So how can educators help design 21st-century learning spaces?

Usable Knowledge asked Stephen to share some advice. We also asked Daniel Wilson, the educational chair at Harvard’s Learning Environments for Tomorrow Institute, and Grace O’Shea, an eighth-grade teacher in New York City and a member of room2learn at the Harvard Innovation Lab, to share their thoughts.

AN ARCHITECT’S VISION

Changes in technology and in teaching methods are making it possible to think of school buildings in far more dynamic terms, says Stephen. Schools no longer have to be “collections of classrooms, administrative spaces, and a gym, auditorium, and cafeteria. They can be high-performance work environments that promote the 21st-century soft skills of critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication.

“Schools are becoming interconnected ecosystems — less compartmentalized and departmentalized. Classrooms and the spaces between them, as well as shared amenities such as the cafeterias and media labs, are becoming more flexible and agile.”

What does this look like in practice? A focus on project-based learning might mean that workspaces are more flexible — desks can move and stack easily against the walls or connect to form large, flat working surfaces. An emphasis on high-quality learning might mean that classrooms are more physically transparent, so that passersby can see students working in a robotics lab or an art studio. A fully wired school might mean that learning can take place anywhere, so hallways become extended-learning areas.

TEACHERS AS DESIGNERS

But an architect designing a new school can’t construct these changes on his own. To work in a space that supports their goals and sense of innovation, educators need to be prepared to describe precisely what kind of learning environment they want to create. Wilson, the Director of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, thinks the conversation between educators and architects should cover four broad points: 

1. Visions and goals. Educators should be ready to share a broad vision of the school’s mission and what teachers are trying to achieve, such as “We want students to be global citizens” or “We want students to be collaborators and creators.”
2. Illustrations of those goals. Once educators have articulated their general goals, they need to share examples of what success might look like in daily practice. If a principal wants students actively engaged in current events, then the school might need gathering spaces where students can watch and discuss the news during free periods. If teachers want students regularly working in groups, then classrooms might need easily maneuverable desks.
3. Current obstacles. Educators can use this chance to consider some of the biggest challenges they face in their current setting. Are they lacking storage for project materials? Are they missing common spaces for bringing together multiple classes of students?
4. Supporting teacher learning. A new school is an opportunity for teachers to consider the ways they learn and grow at work. They should think about how they collaborate best with colleagues or generate lesson plans, and recognize that a new building is a chance to help them on their path of professional development.

REBOOTING YOUR CLASSROOM

What if you’re a teacher who wants to transform her classroom, but a total-school redesign doesn’t look feasible? The room2learn team, comprising students from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Harvard Business School, is creating an online platform for teachers and designers to share resources and ideas for transforming classrooms.  O’Shea shares some of her favorite hacks to optimize space and augment learning:

1. Remove the desks. If you want students to be totally absorbed in a specific object, such as a text, drawing, or model, try pushing the desks against the wall and arranging the chairs in a circle in the middle of the room.
2. Repurpose unused furniture. If there are empty bookshelves against the walls in your classroom, try making them into workspaces. Remove the middle shelves, and then have students sit on stools and use the top of the bookshelves as a “bar” to work on.
3. Change writing surfaces. “It’s amazing how you can get even the most reluctant writer to enjoy writing when you allow students to write on tables or walls, which you can do by adding idea paint,” says O’Shea.
4. Use Velcro. If you apply Velcro to pencil boxes or supply boxes, you can then stick them on the walls anywhere the room. When supplies are visible and accessible for students, there are more opportunities for them to engage in self-directed learning.

How do you know if your space needs a reboot? Stephen, Wilson, and O’Shea say that students themselves will provide a hint. Schools and classrooms are meant to be their spaces. If learning is stagnant, if the arrangement of objects or the layout of the classroom is hindering engagement, it’s time to consider a change.

Source:Usable Knowledge

Writer: Leah Shafer