The capacity for intense focus in our students is a finite resource—a cognitive fuel tank that can, and does, run low. We see the results in the classroom: irritability, impatience, and a fraying of impulse control. But what if one of the most powerful tools for refueling that tank wasn't a new pedagogical strategy, but something far more fundamental?

Five years ago, I wrote about the profound impact that greenery can have on health and learning in The Influence of Greenery on Learning. When I recently listened to Dr. Marc Berman, Director of the Environmental Neuroscience Lab at the University of Chicago, expand on this research on the Many Minds podcast, it prompted me to revisit that post. I was humbled to realize how many of his foundational studies I had completely overlooked. This new understanding reveals that nature is not just an amenity, but a necessity for cognition.

At the start of the episode, Berman unpacks one of the theories I had very briefly mentioned on why greenery might be so rejuvenative: Attention Restoration Theory. According to Berman, the theory posits that our capacity for intense focus, or directed attention, is a finite resource—a cognitive fuel tank that can, and does, run low. When it’s depleted, we can see the results at home and in the classroom: irritability, impatience, and a fraying of impulse control.

Natural environments, on the other hand, engage our involuntary attention—the effortless, bottom-up engagement of our senses captured by the gentle rustling of leaves or the movement of light through the clouds, and it allows our depleted resources for directed, intense focus to restore themselves. Berman terms this “soft fascination.” This is wholly distinct from the “harsh fascination” of a chaotic urban scene, with its blaring horns and noise, which consumes our mental resources.

The cognitive benefits are significant. One of the studies that kickstarted Berman’s research showed a 20% improvement in cognitive performance after a walk in nature. This boost occurred even when participants didn't particularly enjoy the walk, demonstrating a powerful, mood-independent effect.

This research has profound implications for educational equity. A follow-up study found that individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) see even more significant cognitive gains from a nature walk. Conversely, a walk in an urban environment can actually worsen their cognitive performance. This suggests that the lack of green space in many under-resourced communities can be actively harmful to our most vulnerable students. Access to restorative natural environments should therefore not be seen as a luxury, but as a prerequisite for equitable learning.

But what is it about nature that is so restorative? Berman’s explication identifies specific “active ingredients.” It turns out my hunch about fractals was on the right track. His team analyzed what they call low-level visual features to quantify what makes a scene feel “natural.”

Key among these are:

• Fractalness and Compressibility: Natural scenes have high “fractalness”—the repetition of similar patterns at different scales. This visual structure means they are also more “compressible,” like a JPEG file. Our brains find this informational efficiency less demanding to process, which frees up cognitive bandwidth.
• Curved Edges: Natural environments have a high density of non-straight, curved edges, whereas our built environments are dominated more by rigid, straight lines. These curves are not only easier on the eyes, but as one study found, they are also correlated with a viewer's tendency to reflect on deeper topics like their life's journey and spirituality.

Berman furthermore points to additional sensory qualities of nature that go beyond the mere visual:

• Auditory Stimuli: Brief exposure to natural sounds like birdsong, wind, or flowing water has been shown to improve cognitive performance when compared to urban noise.
• Olfactory Stimuli: The air itself carries restorative properties. The scent of damp earth after rain or the airborne chemicals (terpenes) emitted by pine trees can impact our well-being through the olfactory pathway.

For restoration to occur, according to Attention Restoration Theory, an environment must provide a sense of “Being Away” from daily pressures, have enough richness to get lost in (“Extent”), and support a person’s intentions (“Compatibility”). When these elements combine, the mind can truly recharge.

Now pivot that to an educational setting. Imagine a school that embodies these principles. Instead of a long, featureless corridor (no “Extent”), picture a hallway that curves and uses natural materials with fractal patterns like wood grain. Imagine the school itself providing a space for “Being Away” from stressors, a place for creativity and inspiration. By incorporating more trees and natural design principles into our schools, we can improve learning.

Thankfully, we don’t need a week-long immersion in a forest; studies confirm that a restorative “dose” of nature can be as short as 20 minutes. In a world of education reform obsessed with short-term metrics, this research demands we look at a more fundamental input: the physical environment itself. It forces us to ask a provocative question: could 6 hours of instruction plus 2 hours in a park be more productive than 8 straight hours behind a brick wall? The science increasingly suggests that the answer is yes.

For a full, fascinating dive into the research, I highly recommend listening to the entire podcast episode, and then poking around into some of Berman’s studies!

#greenery #learning #attention #neuroscience #schools #ecosystems #wellbeing #AttentionRestorationTheory #environmentalneuroscience #equity

(Note: this was cross-posted on my other blog, Schools & Ecosystems)

This post was written back in 2015 and was originally available on VIVA Teachers and EdPost, but it looks like it's no longer on either. I'm re-posting here for nostalgia and posterity.

Prior to becoming a special education teacher in the Bronx through NYC Teaching Fellows, I was a novitiate store manager at a Trader Joe’s in Queens. I was only there 10 months before I moved on to the classroom, but I learned a lot about warm service to others, hard work, and leadership by example that I continue to apply in my work each day with children and their families. There’s a running theme in education that schools are not businesses, because children are not products. Children are most definitely not products, but the public business of schools is to better educate our students and prepare them for future success. We do that in schools through services such as the curriculum we prepare and teach, attentive conversation and feedback, caring environments, firm discipline and clear structure, enriching extracurricular programs, and other support services such as counseling, speech therapy, and targeted interventions. These services are our products. Children (and their families) are our customers.

Some schools do a pretty good job of providing such services, but unfortunately, other schools seem to have lost sight of the real end-game—the success and well-being of children—and instead choose to focus on test scores or teacher evaluations.

Here’s a secret I learned from Trader Joe’s: if you want to demonstrate quantifiable measures of success, then focus on making people happy.

How does Trader Joe’s do it? Here’s science writer David DiSalvo’s take:

Trader Joe’s employees are different, and the difference they bring to their work changes the psychological experience of the store’s customers. There are emotional contagions in the air at TJ’s and its customers catch an infectious psychosocial buzz…

First, TJ’s hires a certain sort of person, and I don’t mean specific personality types. I mean they hire people who are unabashedly engaged in what they do. And they do everything, from stocking to cashiering to cleaning. TJ’s wants people working there who care about their jobs, no matter what their job is…

Someone placing your groceries in bags and boxes at a TJ’s genuinely cares about doing it well.”

It’s true. Yes, Trader Joe’s is a retail job, and like all retail jobs, the hours can be ruthless and the work physically demanding. But the employees typically exude a warm, contagiously positive vibe. They are frequently having fun, and they deliberately engage with their customers. Part of this is basic: employees are provided with steady raises and feedback, comparatively decent wages, and decent health care—all rarities in the realm of retail.

Another aspect of this is that they are trained to go the extra mile: they will open up products for a customer to sample, walk a customer to the aisle where a product is located, and discuss why they prefer this or that cheese or chip more than the other (employees are encouraged to taste and become deeply knowledgeable about the products they sell).

Some of the customers that came into my store weren’t always happy. I was bagging for an elderly woman during the holiday season one winter afternoon, and I could tell she was depressed. She looked like she hadn’t cracked a smile in over a decade, and she was unresponsive to my cheerful attempts at conversation. Her sadness stayed with me as I began bagging for the next customer.

I could have just let her leave without a second thought, moving on to the endless customers in the line that extended down the aisle. But I had been drilled to go the extra mile, especially as a manager and leader in the store. So I grabbed one of the mini rosemary trees we sell around that time and ran out the store and handed it to her as she was wheeling her cart up to her car.

“Why are you giving this to me?” she asked.

“You deserve it. This is my gift to you,” I said. “Happy Holidays!”

Her face melted, and she began to sob. She informed me that she hadn’t been given a gift in years.

This was a small act on my part, and a small write-off on my store’s part. But through that small act, I was able to provide her with a moment of happiness. And not just her—it made me feel happy, too— even today when I think back on it.

That’s the kind of service that wins loyal customers and employees and makes Trader Joe’s money. You bet that the company has an eagle eye on its profits, just as any business must in a cut-throat sector. But unlike many other companies, Trader Joe’s recognizes the simple truth that profits come as a result of designing and strategically fostering positive community.

As DiSalvo puts it in his article:

“The second thing that’s become clear to me is that the environment in a TJ’s isn’t strictly commercial. It’s a community. I realize that it sounds quaint to say a store has a communal feel, but walk into a TJ’s and the feeling wraps its arms around you. TJ’s employees interact like friends working together at jobs they genuinely enjoy…

TJ’s employees tell me that this doesn’t happen by accident. The company fosters an environment where collaboration is crucial to pulling off a successful day’s work. TJ’s employees aren’t working independent retail jobs — they’re working on interlocking pieces of a project, and that project is to make you happy.”

Isn’t this exactly how we would want a child to feel when they walk into a school anywhere in our nation? To feel a warm, caring community that “wraps its arms around you,” where the staff are working in collaborative, “interlocking” positions that they “genuinely enjoy”?

Yet in some schools, both children and adults walk into environments where they feel threatened, and where they feel isolated.

Maybe it’s time schools started paying attention to what strong businesses are doing well.

#schools #business #contexts #environments #culture

There’s a debate that has flared up around mass shootings that over-simplifies the issues into gun control vs. mental health. Yet these both need to be part of the conversation. We need to decrease access to assault weapons, while increasing access to sustained mental health services.

A recent interview in Politico of two professors who study mass shooters has struck a very personal chord with me and helps point to structures we need to put in place, both within and beyond schools. Here’s two quotes that resonated with me:

“We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services. The problem is that in a lot of places, those services are not there.”

“It was none of these people’s jobs to make sure that he got connected with somebody in the community who could help him long term.”

After reading the Politico piece and the portrait of a teenager shooter they paint in the interview, I realized that I have worked with a student who had echoes of that profile.

Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

I’m going to tell you a little bit about this student, let’s call him Roberto (not his real name), and some of what my team did for him while he was with us. He came to our school in 6th grade and presented with academic gaps and frequent counterproductive behavior in the classroom, such as saying inappropriate things and not completing any work. He did not have an IEP, but the 6th grade team raised him as a possible referral, so I began digging into his previous educational data, speaking to his mom, and interviewing him to learn about what was happening.

In line with the profile from the Politico interview, he had experienced childhood trauma. He grew anxious in rooms with closed doors and in elevators. And his behavior at home with his mom was growing increasingly challenging, preceding the challenges that were beginning to show up in school.

After reviewing all of his data, student work, and speaking with him more in-depth, we had him evaluated by our school psychologist, and indeed he manifested with a learning disability and in need of social-emotional supports. We put in place ICT (co-teaching) services as well as counseling. Thanks to our great counselor, social worker, and parent coordinator, we also aided his mother in obtaining external counseling supports for him.

In the article, they say this about the typical teenage mass shooter:

What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.

Roberto’s targets for the most disrespectful behavior were his mother and generally his female teachers.

As I spoke with Roberto and learned more about his experiences, he shared that he was frightened by the level of work expected at our school, and he knew it was much harder, and he couldn’t hide that it was difficult for him from his peers. So he tried to make them laugh or think he was cool instead.

Talking with Roberto on his own was always insightful–he had a lot of potential, and we were up front with him that his potential didn’t match his current performance. He needed to ask for help and give himself a chance and use the supports his teachers offered him.

In 7th grade, he was making progress, but his behavior became especially challenging in math class. We put in place a more formalized Behavior Intervention Plan to further ensure aligned supports for him.

I left the school after that year, but I felt confident that Roberto would continue to make progress. With the supports we put in place, both school-based and externally, I knew he could be successful in high school if he continued to receive those supports.

A couple years later, I happened to find out he had later been arrested for threatening to shoot up his high school. This hit me hard, because it felt like we had failed him.

He didn’t, thank god, end up becoming another teenage mass shooter. He wasn’t able to acquire a gun, and his threats were reported and taken seriously. His story shows that not only is gun control critical in preventing heinous acts from occurring, but also the importance of ensuring continuity of care and support.

In my former school, he had a strong school-based team looking out for him. And while I don’t think his external therapy was consistent, we did check in with his mother on those supports as well. Yet when he went on to high school did he continue to get external therapy? Was his high school on top of the services recommended by his IEP? If we had still been with him in high school, would we have been able to surface when he needed help before he shut down completely and turned against his peers and torpedoed his future?

I’d like to think so. But it’s hard to place blame on a school I don’t know anything about. They may have provided him an environment of care. They may have been providing his recommended services and monitoring his progress. Something may have been happening in his life and mind well beyond the purview of the school.

It all starts with a school team identifying needed supports and putting them in place as soon as possible. But it doesn’t end there, as I learned the hard way in Roberto’s case. Who was he connected with “in the community who could help him long term”?

To prevent troubled kids from becoming troubled teens who decide to hurt others and themselves, we need services of aligned support that extend beyond the school and into the community and which can help to ensure continuity of supports and services over time.

We can’t reach every kid every time, but if we can keep guns out of their reach, and keep listening to what they say, and taking them seriously, and giving them hope, I think–I hope–we can do much more to prevent harm over the long term.

#guns #teenagers #violence #teams #schools #community #supports #intervention

Discuss...

While I most likely won’t ever write that book, I’d still like to highlight the critical importance of air quality in schools and learning, which has become all the more apparent during a time of a respiratory virus, but which is important at all times. And since I don’t have the time to write it all up in full, I’ll post links to the threads that I had laying about in a document instead, and let you, dear reader, complete the thoughts:

The Health Impacts of Air Pollution

• 92% of the world’s population lives in places where air quality levels exceed WHO limits
• Where a child lives and the air quality in that location can affect how a child’s brain develops
• Air pollution kills vast numbers across the globe each year: 5.5 million deaths worldwide, 800,000 premature deaths in Europe (with each life cut by an average of more than 2 years), while in the U.S., 200,000 are felled annually.
• Air pollution is linked to increased mental illness in children
• Care about social justice? Start caring about air pollution: The Racial Politics of Asthma

Roth and his team looked at students taking exams on different days – and also measured how much pollution was in the air on those given days. All other variables remained the same: The exams were taken by students of similar levels of education, in the same place, but over multiple days.

He found that the variation in average results were staggeringly different. The most polluted days correlated with the worst test scores. On days where the air quality was cleanest, students performed better.

To determine the long-term effects, Roth followed up to see what impact this had eight to 10 years later. Those who performed worst on the most polluted days were more likely to end up in a lower-ranked university and were also earning less, because the exam in question was so important for future education. —HOW AIR POLLUTION IS DOING MORE THAN KILLING US” BY MELISSA HOGENBOOM IN BBC FUTURE

The Impact of Indoor Air Quality on Learning

• EPA paper on air quality and student performance
• As Pollen Counts Rise, Test Scores Fall
• More Fresh Air in Classrooms Means Fewer Absences
• Healthier air quality (in the form of low CO2 levels) can double cognitive scores
• In a study of the effect of indoor air quality on chess tournament decision-making, “we find that an increase in fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) of ten micrograms per cubic meter (10 µg/m3), about three quarters of a standard deviation in the sample, leads to a 2.1 percentage point increase in the probability of making a meaningful error.”
• Indoor air quality in inner-city schools and its associations with building characteristics and environmental factors

When the level of fresh air in the classrooms was increased, the students performed up to seven per cent better than when they were working on the tests in their usual indoor climates. The study also revealed that the students did not themselves notice that they were not quite as astute in the poorer climate. —“BAD AIR QUALITY MAKES CHILDREN PERFORM WORSE IN SCHOOLS” BY JONAS SALOMONSEN IN SCIENCENORDIC

• Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits
• A long and really important investigation on the health impacts of air pollution on schools situated near busy roads by The Center for Public Integrity that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Read the entire thing. Read it again. And then reflect on the following:

Southern California’s air agency, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, earmarked settlements from polluting companies and other funds to cover the cost of such filtration at about 80 schools near freeways or other pollution sources. Nothing’s preventing other states from following the same model. “The technology is well established, the installation is straightforward and the maintenance is simple,” said district spokesman Sam Atwood, who doesn’t recall officials from other states getting in touch to learn from his agency’s experience. —“THE INVISIBLE HAZARD AFFLICTING THOUSANDS OF SCHOOLS” BY JAMIE SMITH HOPKINS FOR THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY

The Relationship of Air Pollution to COVID-19

• New Research Links Air Pollution to Higher Coronavirus Death Rates
• Installing HEPA filters to fight COVID-19
• Most scientists think it is very likely that air pollution increases the number and severity of Covid-19 cases

#ecosystems #schools #learning #airquality #pollution #environment #health

Discuss...

“Compared to most of the interventions aimed at relieving stress (e.g. emotional skill building, anger management, positive behavior programs), placing trees and shrubs on the school ground is a modest, low-cost intervention that is likely to have long-lasting effects on generations of students.”

—Li & Sullivan, 2016

When Joe walks around his neighborhood, he is surrounded by sepia-toned brick buildings. When he goes to bed at night, he sleeps, fitfully, to the vehicular chorus of the Grand Concourse, a symphony of sirens, revving motors, car alarms, and bass blasting from souped up subwoofers. His access to nature is primarily derived from TV shows and a small city park a few blocks away, scattered with trash-strewn weeds. Joe (not any of my former students’ real name) is a 5th grader living in a dense urban area of the Bronx.

You might be forgiven for assuming this is all so normal for Joe that he has neither any conception nor desire for the vistas his peers raised in lusher landscapes have constant access to. Yet when Joe came to interview at the middle school where I worked (we interviewed our prospective 6th graders) and was asked, “What would you like to improve in your community?”, he replied that he would like to reduce trash and noise, and, furthermore, that he would like to live somewhere with more space and trees.

It wasn’t only Joe who responded in this way. Other students we interviewed voiced similar wishes, though they said it in different ways. For one it was a desire for more flowers, for another less violence, or a bigger bedroom, or a backyard, or no upstairs neighbor who made so much noise. I haven’t surveyed all the kids in the poorest areas of the city, but I’d wager they’d also appreciate a little more peace and quiet or nature, if given half the chance to express it.

Actually, many kids have been asked, and their answers were uncannily similar to Joe’s. In the early 1970s, urban designer Kevin Lynch organized a survey of teenagers in cities across four different countries. “When children were asked to imagine the best place to live in, they often mentioned trees, and as beautiful places, gardens, and parks” (Lynch, 1977, as summarized by Chawla, 2015, p. 436).

A craving for access to a beautiful natural expanse may be an intrinsic aspect of being human. There’s even a term for this, biophilia (introduced by Erich Fromm in 1973 and expanded on by E.O. Wilson in a 1986 book by the same name), which means that we have an innate urge to connect to nature and other living things. This doesn’t mean everyone wants to go camping nor be anywhere near a wilderness. But at the very least, we are all likely sustained by an occasional walk through a stand of whispering trees or an urban garden, just as we are by a visit with a friend.

In fact, even a mere view of living green things out of a window can be vicariously invigorating, as a wide array of studies have shown in a wide variety of settings, from our homes and neighborhoods to institutional settings such as hospitals, prisons, offices and—of course—our schools.

The Impact of A Green View on Student Learning

A Room With a View

The idea that greenery could be rejuvenating was kickstarted by an influential study in 1984 by Roger Ulrich, in which he found that surgical patients in a hospital whose windows looked out onto trees recovered more quickly—and with less pain medication—than patients in rooms facing a drab brick wall.

Prison inmates similarly benefit from glimpses of nature. A study found that prisoners in cells with outward facing views of farmland were sick less often than their counterparts with views of the inner yard (Moore, 1981). Of prison inmates, there are none more deprived than those placed in solitary confinement: they are enclosed in a cell for up to 23 hours a day for days, months—sometimes years—on end. Forget windows. Just showing videos of natural landscapes to prisoners in solitary confinement can help them to remain calm and reduce violent behavior (Nalini, et al., 2017).

Perhaps it is unsurprising people confined, whether to a hospital bed or a prison cell, would benefit from a small peek at something, anything, vibrant and alive. What may be more surprising is how subsequent studies have shown that “views of nature out of an office or factory are associated with increased employee productivity, enhanced feelings of job and life satisfaction, greater psychological and physical well-being, and reduced levels of frustration and stress” (Matsuoka, 2010, p. 274). This suggests that a green vista is not only a spark of life to a desperate inmate or sick patient, but a rejuvenative force for all of us who toil indoors for the majority of our day.

An accumulating stream of studies have shown that views and access to green space can improve the well-being and learning of students in K-12 schools. Greenery around a school building supports an increase in test scores, grades, working memory, attention, and plans to attend a four year college, with a concomitant decrease in stress and criminal behavior (Matsuoka, 2010; Wu et al., 2014; Dadvend et al., 2015; Li & Sullivan, 2016; Hodsen & Sanders, 2017; Kweon et al., 2017). Furthermore, greenery in a student's neighborhood can result in an increase in mental health and a decrease in aggression (Alcock et al., 2014; Younan et al., 2016).

Sounds too good to be true? Maybe you think this is fluffy sociological stuff written to assuage the confirmation bias of tree huggers. It certainly sounds fluffy to say greenery is calming. We could say the same sort of thing about aromatherapy, crystals, and listening to whale sounds. But the significant and positive impact of the presence of greenery has been confirmed through randomized controlled trials and longitudinal studies. Fluffy? Maybe not so much.

There’s two theories about why greenery is rejuvenative: one is Attention Restoration Theory (ART) and the other is Stress Reduction Theory (SRT). ART theorizes that green space restores focus and fights fatigue, whereas SRT hypothesizes that nature reduces stress. Both theories have evidence to back them up, so there may be some interplay between reducing stress and restoring focus.

The natural views that seem to wield the greatest restorative and calming effects are from a school’s cafeteria and hallways (Matsuoka, 2010; Li & Sullivan, 2016). Li and Sullivan’s study suggests that “a 10-min break [with a natural view] would suffice in restoring students’ attentional capacities and help them recover from stressful tasks” (p. 156). Another study found even only five minutes of exposure to nature could help to reduce stress (Barton & Pretty, 2010; as cited by Kweon et al., 2017, p. 36). Ensuring that cafeterias, hallways, and other spaces, such as gyms, have a sightline to nature could be an effective way to support students in reducing their stress and restoring their ability to focus when they return to class.

According to one randomized controlled experiment, views of green expanses from a classroom can also support the cognitive performance of students, leading to 13% greater attentiveness than students with views of a parking lot, other buildings, or without any windows (Li & Sullivan, 2016). Another study found that schools with higher levels of nearby tree canopy cover had higher scores on tests of reading comprehension (Hodsen & Sander, 2017). One study even suggests that a mere glance of 40 seconds out of a window onto a green roof rather than a concrete one can serve to sustain attention on a challenging task (Lee et al., 2015).

And we’re still just talking about the presence of greenery outside of a school building. What kind of greenery is most influential? What about greenery within a building? And what about getting kids out of a building to interact with the real thing?

It’s All In the Canopy

Greenery, or green space, could mean a wide variety of things. Are we talking grass? Shrubs? Trees? Astroturf? Let me give you a hint. It’s not lawns. It’s not athletic fields. In fact, those land features, along with parking lots, are associated with reduced academic goals and achievement, and even higher criminal activity (Kweon et al., 2017). Shrubs don’t really do much, either.

It’s those trees, man. It’s that breathing green canopy cover that is the most focusing, calming, and restorative.

This isn’t so strange, when you think about it. Dallying under the dappled shade of trees is the hallmark of the good life. That soothing sound of breeze moving through leaves. The way sunlight shimmers across a variegated green marquee. There’s just something about trees. Something magical and magisterial. They buffer us from wind and rain. They enrich and entrench the soil and bear us fruit. They even communicate to one another through their root systems (Wohlleben, 2015). Some live on a timespan so protracted it’s unfathomable to our puny human minds. Trees bestow us with a sense, however subconscious, of flourishing ethereality that we may only most appreciate in their absence.

More practically, trees also help to reduce air and noise pollution, and help get people to exercise more (Dadvand et al., 2015). Trees can do much to not only “soak up fine particle pollution from cars, power plants, and factories” but furthermore “cool down neighborhoods anywhere from 0.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius on the hottest summer days” (Plumer, 2016). Pleasing on the eyes? Check. Providing ecosystem services for the public health and well-being of mankind? Check.

It is possible that trees only have a restorative visual impact within a certain range of density. For example, one study suggests somewhere between 24-34% tree cover* is a sweet spot (Jiang et al., 2014). Intriguingly, this may reflect an evolutionary preference for savannah-like landscapes and acacia-like—or thin trunk, large canopy—tree forms (Falk & Balling, 2010). Another study suggests that it’s not simply about the quantity of trees, but the quality of those trees, such as how well maintained, varied, and orderly they are (De Vries, van Dillen, Groenewegen, & Spreeuwenberg, 2013). This makes more sense. You could meet any quantitative quota with a sickly or monotonous row of trees, but a healthy, diverse copse will do much more for both your health and your soul.

I suspect there’s something about the just-right visual complexity and dimensionality of a healthy tree canopy that is especially pleasing to our mind’s eye—there’s just enough subtle unpredictable movement, variation, and depth to stimulate, while just enough light and green shade to soothe. In fact, there is the possibility that it is the fractal nature of tree canopy that makes it so pleasing to the eye and the brain (Cepelewicz, 2017).

In barren environments, like the flat expanses of the interstate highway in Kansas or like most school playgrounds, our minds grow desperate for distraction. And indeed, one study found that if a school has a barren playground, children with ADHD have greater difficulty concentrating after recess (Taylor & Kuo, 2001).

Man-made visual complexity, such as urban landscapes, can certainly inspire their own form of awe and appreciation, but as of yet, our architecture can hardly replicate—in a cost effective manner—the gentle scintillations of leaves nor the myriad other environmental benefits, like air filtration, that trees provide.

I’m going to go out on a limb here. I think we need trees not only to feel most fully alive, but in order to truly live.

*Having trouble visualizing what 24-34% tree cover looks like? I was, too. Fortunately, MIT offers a nifty tool that provides percentages for the density of tree cover in cities across the world. Head to senseable.mit.edu/treepedia to take a peek. You can zoom in on a specific spot in a city that has a density within that range, then pull up Google Streetview to get a ground-level visual. Compare between spots with a large percentage of tree cover, such as 50%, to ones with barely any, such as 2%. That disparity will give you an idea why there may be a sweet spot for restorative effects, at least from a visual standpoint.

Trees and Green Spaces Combat Inequality

Here’s a riddle for you: how can you tell the difference between a poor and affluent urban neighborhood from outer space?

Yep. It’s that mass of green.

One longitudinal study found just moving to a greener urban area not only immediately improves mental health, but sustains positive psychological benefits for at least three years (Alcock et al., 2014). That’s all well and good, but there’s another compelling reason to get more trees into your ‘hood: they help raise the property value (Mullaney, Lucke, & Trueman, 2015). Even better yet, “planting 10 or more trees per city block is equivalent to increasing the income of every household in that city block by more than $10,000” by improving perceptions of health, while decreasing “cardio-metabolic” conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, high cholesterol, and heart disease (Kardan et al., 2015).

Not many can afford to move to a greener area, but even small injections of green into dense urban neighborhoods, like replacing vacant lots with gardens, can reduce symptoms of depression in local residents (South et al., 2018). A longitudinal study in 2016 by Diana Younan and her colleagues furthermore found that green space in urban neighborhoods in Southern California reduced aggressive behavior in teens. The researchers found no evidence that this effect was strongly influenced by either sociodemographics nor the quality of the neighborhood, which suggests “the universal benefits of neighborhood greenspace” (p. 9). This corresponds with research showing that “building areas with high levels of vegetation can have approximately 50% lower crime levels than areas with low levels of vegetation (Kuo & Sullivan, 2001), and a 10% increase in the amount of tree cover has been associated with a 12% decrease in crime (Troy, Grove, & O’Neil-Dunne, 2012)” (as cited by Mullaney, Lucke, and Trueman, 2015, p. 159).

Joe and many other children in our densest urban areas crave natural environments with green space and restorative shade. One of the most sustainable and cost-effective interventions we can take to support future generations of children is simply to plant more trees—most especially near homes and schools.

Bringing Greenery Into Schools

    Here’s the reality, though. Most schools are already built, and whether or not they are so lucky as to have any windows, let alone views of trees, is entirely outside the realm of their direct and immediate control. We may not be able to plant trees in classrooms, but is there any way we could bring some of that green juju indoors?

Some research suggests that the presence of plants in a hospital room can increase tolerance for pain (Grinde & Patil, 2009), while indoor plants in an office may reduce fatigue and health complaints (Grinde & Patil, 2009; Ranaas et al., 2011). But most of the research on the impact of indoor plants on classroom well-being, performance, or stress reduction, while suggestive, remains mostly inconclusive (Doxey, Waliczek, & Zajicek, 2009; Han, 2009, 2018; Berg et al., 2016). 

I’ve been grappling with this, given the more robust effects for outdoor greenery. Is it because potted plants in most studies are not selected and situated primarily for visual complexity? If there were more plants or greenwalls with a diversity of size, form, and color placed around a classroom, could these have greater restorative effects?

There may be a sweet spot between quantity and quality which has not yet been discovered for indoor plants. Each study uses different variations and configurations of plants. As one reviewer put it, “although the evidence suggests indoor plants can provide psychological benefits, the heterogeneity amongst the methods and results may imply the benefits are contingent on the context of the encounter with indoor plants and the participants in the experiment” (Burnard & Kutnar, 2015, p. 972).

Furthermore, no study (to my knowledge) has yet examined the two areas where green views are most likely to have the greatest restorative impact: school cafeterias and hallways. Clearly, we need further research (while we’re waiting on the research, to add some dimensionality to your own indoor plant collection, try placing plants at different heights, such as on stools, boxes, or crates, as “garden stylist” Satoshi Kawamoto suggests (Gordon, 2015)). But here’s a short quiz that may help you to determine whether or not you want to bring plants into your classroom or school: 

• Do you prefer a few plants near where you work or relax? Do you liven up your workspace or living room with a flower or succulent? 
• If so, why, and if not, why not? 

Let your answer to this be your guide.

Indoor Plants for Air Filtration?

Even if they may not have the fully restorative or stress reducing impacts that views of outside tree canopy can provide, could they filter and reduce indoor air pollution? If they could, this would be huge because poor indoor air quality impacts learning. Effects reported by various studies have been a reduction in cognitive performance and the ability to make complex decisions, and an increase in sleepiness (Carrer, 2018). In other words, everything you don’t want in a classroom.

A widely cited NASA study in 1989 (Wolverton, Johnson, & Bounds) found that a wide variety of plants filtered volatile organic compounds (VOCs) often present in indoor environments, such as formaldehyde, benzene, and ammonia. Some later studies support this initial finding (Pettit, Irga, & Torpy, 2018), but unfortunately, it seems that outside of a lab setting and in the much larger, real-world spaces of offices and schools, plants do very little to filter indoor air (Meyer, 2019). Well, OK, maybe they don’t filter pollution much, but another side benefit of indoor plants is that through the process of transpiration, they can add moisture to the air, which is good for dry skin (Horton, 2015).

Overall, unfortunately, it appears that indoor plants do not provide the same benefits that outside greenery does.

Keeping plants in a school requires careful consideration, such as how much daylight, if any, is available in a given space, as well as who will be responsible for watering and upkeep, not to mention the issue of safety. Ideally, the plants you select should require little sunlight and watering, provide air filtration benefits, be visually appealing, and highly durable.

Through a survey of friends and online sources, I drew up a shortlist of promising plants for school use, most of which are within the $15-30 range if you buy them pre-potted:

• Variegated Snake Plant
• Chinese Evergreen
• Peace Lily
• ZZ Plant
• Pothos
• Philodendron
• Cast Iron Plant
• Peperomia

If you are fortunate enough to have access to some sunlight in your school or classroom, then look also into the following:

• Palms
• Succulents, such as aloe
• Spider Plant (hang these from the ceiling and they can also help absorb noise!)
• Begonias
• Rubber plants

If you are even more fortunate and can secure funds, you could also consider the installation of greenwalls. While further research is required, there is potential in the biofiltration potential of a greenwall (Pettit, Irga, & Torpy, 2018), as well as possible restorative effects (Berg et al., 2017).

Bringing Schools Into Greenery

So far we’ve focused primarily on the mere presence of trees and greenery, which even passively can be powerful for learning and health by reducing stress and increasing attention, in addition to reducing pollution. But given our focus on education, the logical next question is: does interacting with nature amplify and deepen these effects?

The answer thus far, at least according to research on playgrounds and gardens, is “Yes.” School gardens help to increase physical activity (Wells, Myers, & Henderson, 2014), while playgrounds that are surrounded by greenery promote better cognitive functioning (Kuo, 2010), “concentration and relief from stress,” in addition to more imaginative, explorative, and socially cooperative play (Chalwa, 2015, p. 445). It should also be recognized that just spending time in nature can support the development of stronger immune systems. One study found that walking in a forest boosted anti-cancer cells by 50% or more, which remained elevated even a month after returning to everyday urban existence, while also decreasing inflammation (Li, 2010, Mao et al., 2012, as cited by Kuo, 2015, p. 4).

But there is much more to interacting with nature than the solely utilitarian benefits to health and well-being. Access to nature provides opportunities to build greater self and world knowledge. How can you truly understand how food grows, or how plants utilize photosynthesis, or what it means to cultivate microbial soil life, unless you get your hands dirty? How can you truly develop resilience, fortitude, and patience without having experienced the alternating awe and weariness of spending a day walking through the woods or up a mountain? Some studies have suggested that simply playing in nature increases the likelihood of environmental stewardship later in life (Wells & Lekies, 2006; Thompson et al. 2008). Imagine having a curriculum that includes not only reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, but moreover a scientific and aesthetic engagement with real plots of land?

Hosting school outside may sound radical at first, but ‘forest kindergartens’ are a thing in Germany, Finland, Switzerland, and . . . Vermont (Gregory, 2017; Schoolsoutfilm.com, 2012; Walker, 2016; Hanford, 2015). Given the research we’ve just reviewed, such seemingly hippie-dippy programs now seem eminently sensible. The key hurdle is whether you happen to have a forest handy nearby. But what about schools in local parks? Actually, I wrote that sentence, then poked around on the web for a minute, and lo and behold, there’s classes called Tinkergarten at a park near me that promotes learning through play in local outdoor spaces (and maybe one near you; check it out at tinkergarten.com).

Humanity now faces repercussions from the incredible stress we have placed on the natural world. The great diversity of microbes, habitats, plants, and animals our earth once carried is swiftly ebbing. Traditional ways of living and knowing are preserved primarily for entertainment, rather than as respected sources of wisdom. If developing an appreciation of nature, both scientific and aesthetic, means getting children outside into whatever local park, water feature, grassy knoll, garden, flower box, or forest you may be fortunate enough to have near to your home or school, then let’s do it. If it means bringing plants into a school via hydroponics, as teacher Stephen Ritz does at CS 55 in the Bronx (Check out Ritz’ website greenbronxmachine.org or read his book, The Power of a Plant, to learn more about his work), or via potted plants or greenwalls, or lining playgrounds, starting rooftop gardens, or even just gazing out at a natural landscape from windows or in videos . . . then, hey. We’ve got to start somewhere.

What We Can Do

Trees take a long time to grow. Unfortunately, leaders in education tend to focus on shallower, shorter-term initiatives, like tablets or teacher evaluations.

There has been a growing recognition of the general importance of greenery in our communities, and many trees have been planted in areas that were once urban deserts. Here in NYC, organizations like GrowNYC, Bronx Green-Up, Learning Gardens, and many others are available to help get kids get their hands dirty in a garden. And city-wide initiatives like Greenstreets and MillionTreesNYC have brought street trees to nearly every block. 

For students like Joe living in dense urban neighborhoods, this means a lot. But having a row of street trees is not enough. We need more vacant lots converted to green space, more green roofs, more parks, and far, far greater access and opportunities to interact with nature on a frequent basis.

It may be that growing a green thumb may be one of the most beneficial things you could do to support the learning of future generations.

In Sum

• Greenery around a school building supports an increase in test scores, grades, working memory, attention, and plans to attend a four year college
• Greenery in a neighborhood decreases stress, aggression, and criminal behavior
• Views of trees can both soothe (reduce stress) and stimulate (refocus attention)
• Views of trees from school cafeterias and hallways seem to have the greatest restorative and calming effects 
• Views of greenery from a classroom can also lead to 13% greater attentiveness
• Trees help to reduce air and noise pollution, and support an increase in exercise and property value
• It’s less about quantity and more about the quality of the trees and tree canopy
• Indoor plants don’t seem to provide the same benefits as external greenery
• Moving school playgrounds and classrooms outdoors can provide a range of benefits to health and learning, in addition to building a greater sense of environmental stewardship

Extra Credit: The Ecology of Greenery

Clearly, it’s not within any individual school’s purview alone to increase the greenery within a neighborhood, and nor is one dedicated community organization that receives some grant funding enough. It takes a coordinated effort between local businesses, governmental agencies at different levels, nonprofits, and civically engaged citizens to make it happen. It truly takes a community to plant, sustain, and scale the kind of quality tree canopy our children need.

Caring for plants—and for animals—can not only strengthen a community, but also provide therapeutic benefits for individuals.

Bill Thomas, a NY professor and physician on a mission to improve the care of our elderly, has come up with a model of elderly care he calls the “Eden Alternative” (Bahrampour, 2016). Instead of cold, clinical institutions, he creates environments that are more akin to gardens. He stocks nursing homes with cats, dogs, rabbits, and birds in addition to an array of plants. The effect is reduced need for medication, lower death rates, raised spirits, and greater autonomy.

In Baltimore, one volunteer, Gene DeSantis, has planted over 15,000 trees, overcoming a childhood of trauma while contributing to the long-term health and well-being of his community (Zaleski, 2019).

In D.C., a former drug dealer's love of birds helps him to discover his better self. He now works with children, introducing them to the beauty of raptors, to help them learn to engage with the natural world, and in the process, also discover their better selves (Daniel, 2016).

In schools across our nation, our children are struggling to cope with chronic and acute stress, trauma, and poverty while attempting to learn in environments that offer little rejuvenation nor tranquility.

It’s not only the immediate adults around them who need to build lattices and networks of love, resilience, and calm, but furthermore the sustaining canopies and anchored roots of trees in the land that surrounds them, planted and nurtured by the many diverse people, groups, and organizations of their community.

#greenery #trees #learning #ecology #ecosystems #schools #learning #children #environment #space #buildings #architecture #design #behavior #literacy #health

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This question has sparked the zeal of civic minded citizens ever since a movement for universal public education and “common schools” arose in the U.S. in the early 19th century. Ever since, perennial tensions between vocational and classical education, public and private governance, unions and management, and between progressive and traditional visions have cycled yearly through our discourse, like influenza.

Public school fervor escalated to a fevered pitch between the 1980s and 2000s, first with the publication of the seminal report, A Nation at Risk, which created a national sense of dire urgency, followed by a bipartisan drive across Bush senior’s and Clinton’s administrations to set moonshot goals, such as, “All children in America will start school ready to learn,” or “The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.” The zenith of federal school reform was George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which paired performance standards to accountability measures.

Needless to say, those ambitious goals from the ‘90s have not yet been achieved, despite a concerted focus of federal funding and private market solutions. There is some debate about whether schools have improved at all as a result of those efforts—I would agree with those who have argued that they have—but a deep sense of disappointment in the results seems to be relatively universal.

Perhaps this is because public education seems to embody our society’s quest for a better future. Standing at a dynamic confluence of policy, politics, law, culture, psychology, geography, and human behavior, schools reify conflicting visions, values, and beliefs about children and what they should be taught, and how. There is a thirst to redress our society’s failures through educating our children, whether teaching them proper conduct, civics, or how to code.

Since public schools were first established, efforts to improve their ability to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse body of students have swung and cycled between competing interests, resulting in the accretion of complex and often contradictory layers of policy and practice. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, in their exploration of the pendulous cycles of education reform over the course of a hundred years, Tinkering Towards Utopia (Tyack and Cuban, 1995), put it thus:

“Reforms have rarely replaced what is there; more commonly, they have added complexity. When reforms have come in staccato succession, they often have brought incoherence or uncomfortable tensions.”

Yet despite the increasing complexity of schools and school systems, the primary approach of would-be reformers remains primarily linear, as if every school were more or less interchangeable, as if a school were a machine defined solely by the product of its inputs and outputs: students + funding = graduation rates + test scores.

This approach has led to a preponderance of initiatives that seek to impose a set of seemingly logical mandates from afar, such as systems for teacher evaluation, school ratings based on test scores, state-wide standards and assessments, or legal regulations for special populations of students.

Many of these are worthy efforts, and can result in positive change when enacted in tandem with the cultivation of practitioner knowledge through allocated resources and training that are sustained over time. But such reform efforts all suffer from a fundamental error: they conceive of schools as a simple unit of organization. But in reality, schools are far from simple. While the hierarchy of law, policy, and funding that schools operate within may appear orderly, schools are not defined only by how they are governed and funded, nor solely by their inputs and outputs.

Schools are highly complex organizations, and how they respond to external mandates or initiatives rarely plays out as planned.

Schools are defined primarily by the people who lead the school, and by the ever evolving relationships between that leadership and their staff, students, and parents. A school is furthermore defined by the very structure and appearance of its hallways and stairwells and windows, the quality of the air that its children breath, and the manner in which acoustics are shaped by its surfaces. A school is defined by the very place in which it sits, in that particular community, within that particular state and local policy context, in that specific time. And it influences and shapes the children within it in ways that can be nearly indefinable—in ways tremendously positive, or in ways tremendously negative.

In other words, a school could be more accurately described as akin to an ecosystem—as a complex, dynamic system. A community of adults and children interacting within a unique space, time, and place. An interconnected set of social relationships and roles governed as much by unpredictable and unseen forces as by the stable grammar of grade-levels and discrete academic subjects.

When you think of a school as a simple, linear organization, then you think that they can be improved with the alteration of a specific variable or component. But viewing a school as an ecosystem means that you recognize that changing one thing may result in a cascade of unforeseen and perhaps unintended consequences.

While this may seem daunting at first glance, it also opens up opportunities for us to explore a much broader field of study than that of the small, insular world of education, to which it has been primarily confined for too long. We can draw upon interesting principles and concepts from fields as diverse as ecology, organizational theory, and quantum physics, or from such disparate phenomenon as neurons, ant piles, avalanches, and cancer. And it furthermore allows us to be more realistic—and humble—about what results our efforts to reform a school can incur.

We can improve our schools. But in order to do so more effectively and strategically, we must acknowledge the incredible influence of the contexts in which learning occurs, both physical and social. This means looking at a school more fully as a unique ecology, within which ever evolving forces and players interact. It furthermore means looking at the context within which a school operates also as a unique ecology, in which policies and district leaders and politics collide.

What the view of a school as an ecosystem can also equip us with are significant areas for intervention that we have been mostly overlooking in our zeal for what is rational, cheap, or linear. The purely physical and spatial context in which students and teachers interact each day may have a far larger influence on student learning and behavior than has been heretofore recognized. Consider research on acoustics, temperature, greenery, lighting, and architectural and interior design, and examine how we could better (re-)design our schools for safety, well-being, productivity, and learning.

Consider research on the social context of a school, and consider overlooked opportunities for leadership, the criticality of diverse relationships, collaboration, social-psychological interventions, and social networks that enhance positive behaviors, rather than amplify negative ones. Examine the relationship between vectors, viruses, and children, and draw upon parallels from network and organizational theories.

Looking at a school as an ecosystem, once you come around to this way of thinking, can be intoxicating. But it can also provide us with a necessary dose of humility for any endeavor to improve public education. There is no silver bullet, no easy fix, no technological potion that will magically enable all kids to learn the preferred civic, academic, and social wisdom we’d wish them to ingest. Improving schools is hard work, and it plays out on the ground in the minute-by-minute interactions of the key players—our administrators and teachers and students—on the stage of learning.

The least we can do is to design our schools to promote the greatest well-being, positive social interaction, and inspired learning that we can, based on what we know from available research and from what we know we would want for our own children.

#design #ecosystems #schools #reform #complexadaptivesystem #interconnectivity #schoolculture #relationships

Now that’s a “natural” ecosystem I’m discussing. Let’s explore the concept of a man-made ecosystem in order to better adapt that idea to schools. In a man-made ecosystem, such as a garden, the gardener works to recreate natural environments, but with a focus on a purpose that suits the gardener, such as food growth, or flower cultivation. Sometimes that focus is so monolithic that the gardener ends up in constant battle with nature, and must maintain their garden on life support infusions of toxic herbicides and pesticides. Fortunately, there are methods of deliberately harnessing natural processes and dynamics to best serve our own selfish interests. When the gardener best recreates the conditions that will foster interconnectivity and diversity of life adapted to their environment, their garden will thrive.

Now let’s bring that idea back to schools. In education, instead of growing food or flowers, our work is to grow our kids’ minds. A lot of times, this effort of increasing achievement is presented as a type of competition, which is furthered through the use of punitive grading systems and high stakes testing. Sometimes the way we talk about it makes it seem like all we want to do is pump steroids into the minds of our youth. But we know that’s not what it’s about. Education is about nurturing, developing, instilling, guiding. And in terms of an ecosystem, the big idea is that ultimately, no one is really competing, even if it looks like that on the surface. Ultimately, we work to counterbalance each other and create an environment that best harnesses the resources available within that given community.

This all sounds relatively banal, even to me, but the reason I keep pushing this analogy between gardening and education is because I’m seeking to apply permacultural principles to the ecosystems of schools. Permaculture is a philosophy of cultivating land grounded in holistic and sustainable design practices. The permacultural approach is a method for countering devastating ecological practices.

I believe that one of the critical issues underlying education reform is that we are all too often seeking superficial means of enhancing student performance. In a garden, we might temporarily achieve enhanced production through an arduous turning of topsoils and expensive input of chemicals. In a school, we might temporarily raise student test scores through test prep. But ultimately in both scenarios, we are only doing battle against nature and economy. In order to enhance productivity sustainably, we have to build up the foundations of our communities, our ecosystems. This requires targeted investments in the communities that most require it. There is no other way.

#ecosystems #schools #education #permaculture #interconnectivity #diversity #design

But I feel I must persist, regardless, as this is one of the few avenues I have in which to ponder semi-abstract thoughts in regards to the systems in which I am currently embedded as a public school teacher. Let’s be honest: not many teachers in my school would care to sit down over whiskey and discuss the public school system as a whole, unless it accounts for a preponderance of venting and complaining. So I continue brazenly–or perhaps snoozingly–on the aforementioned topic: school culture.

School Culture

In my last job in retail management, our company would talk about the “intangibles” in leadership training sessions. What they were referring to were things such as how a customer feels when they leave a store, the interactions that were had through conversations between customers and staff, and the overall sense of happiness or adventure that a customer might feel in the store. Another way of stating the idea of intangibles when we are discussing business is “anything that you can’t gauge by a dollar sign.” But the fact is, that company is extremely savvy because they explicitly recognized that their bottom line would be enhanced by paying attention to things that might not be immediately quantifiable. And believe me, that company is doing pretty darn good when it comes to their bottom line. Because they pay attention to something that many businesses (and as I will now begin to examine–schools) do not take into consideration: the culture of their everyday business.

Similarly, in schools across the nation, children and adults every day enter buildings where they may succumb to a sense of drudgery, fear, paranoia, and even just plain chaos. The reasons for this reality are myriad, but one of the things you will hear frequently referred to when you talk about problems in education is the whole test-taking and accountability thing. You’ll hear horror stories from teachers about having to “teach to the test”. In public education, the tests are to schools what the bottom line is to a business. All decisions are made based on the tests, more or less. Such is the nature of things, currently. I’m a centrist on such matters, and believe that at some point you have to measure something.

But as the teachers and their unions oft so angrily point out, there is much more to teaching and to students than what shows up on a singular data point from a test. And one could argue that what does show up on a test has as much to do with factors that are contextual, not merely a matter of an individual teacher nor an individual student. Just as the company I mentioned previously enhanced their bottom line and profited from addressing “intangibles” directly, so too could a school raise the test scores of their students if they spent more attention to factors within the school that have nothing to do directly with the test.

Now let’s be careful here. We all know that there are things going on in students’ lives that may affect their academic performance that are beyond the purview of any school. But what we’re talking about here are the intangibles that are under a school’s control.

We’re talking about the feeling that you get before you even walk in the front door. And we’re not just talking about the signs, the display cases, the bulletin boards, the colors–-although all of those things factor into it. We’re not just talking about whether the school follows some program of anti-bullying or anti-drugs or a social skills or life skills program.

We’re talking about how students talk to each other. How adults talk to each other. How adults talk to students.

The everyday interactions, relationships, and rituals that foster and nurture a community. These are things that are perhaps largely intangible and not easily quantified (unless one is trained to quantify such things), but certainly worth investing attention and care in.

I would be willing to place a bet that if research were conducted that attempted to quantify the presence of a school culture, they would discover that school culture correlates highly with student performance on tests. In other words, they would find that something so fuzzy as how happy or accepted students and adults feel overall would result in stronger performance on state tests. It would also most likely correlate with greater retention of effective teachers.

#relationships #ecosystems #schools #schoolculture #interconnectivity #environment #learning

What we’re really talking about here is the concept of a school as an ecosystem. You can’t disconnect or isolate any one component from the other without considering its relation to many other interrelated parts. For example, you can’t completely isolate a student in a classroom from the collective student body in that classroom, nor that classroom from the collective student body in the grade, nor school. You can’t completely isolate a student from their family, nor community, nor society. You can’t isolate a teacher from the professional collective of teachers and staff in the school, nor from the administration and its policies, nor from the state and federal funding and policies.

So in consideration of the school as an ecosystem, we must:

• acknowledge interrelationships and connections when considering subgroups or individuals by:

  • considering the school culture
  • considering the community and culture of the student population that the school serves
  • considering societal expectations and norms

If we can begin to analyse the components of what I outlined above, we then can begin exploring how we can better harmonize those considerations in order to best foster the conditions for a well-balanced school ecosystem.

#ecosystems #schools #schoolculture #environment

At the time this post is written, the defining education related topics are Waiting for Superman, Race to the Top, Common Core State Standards, Michelle Rhee, Cathie Black, reforming systems of teacher evaluation, bullying and deaths in school.

The strange thing about education is just how damned political the whole undertaking is. The field of education is a messy conflux of policy and politics, with many stakeholders taking often quite adversarial positions even when they ostensibly have common goals. Education is a hugely dynamic and complex field, and it doesn’t really make sense to view it through the lens of only one stakeholder.

Therein, perhaps, lies the crux of the issue. No one can really quite agree on what public education is supposed to do, exactly. We certainly agree that we should be teaching our children, but often in actual application, it would appear that us adults (whether parents, teachers, administrators or policymakers) are quite confused about what is worth teaching and might need some further schooling ourselves. Often we end up simply capitalizing off of children, in the same manner that giant corporations capitalize off of war, and industries capitalize off of prisons.

An Analogy

Coinciding with the rise of public education was the rise of agribusiness. Both of these services to society are crucial and entirely necessary. The drive to efficiency and scalability of agribusiness has resulted in some unforeseen issues, however, such as rampant dependency on pesticides and herbicides, and the ravaging of topsoils.

There are links between food growth and education that I think should be elucidated. When you grow food, you are not simply growing a product, you are sustaining soil life. The more vibrant and diverse that soil life is, the more abundant, sustainable, and healthy your final product is. In education, you are not simply building student dendrites and promoting academic development, you are cultivating a community. The more inclusive, diverse, and vibrant that community is, the better the academic and other outcomes will be for students. We don’t need research to tell us this.

The Big Idea

The big idea here is that post-modern farming and education, as in the permaculture approach, is all about fostering foundational systems of interconnectivity. When you are dealing with complex systems of life, you need to promote those interconnections at all cost, or else you will end up weakening those systems at an incalculably large cost to greater society.

It’s this idea that I think can promote a unified vision for where education needs to go today. It’s not just about technology or knowledge work or global competitiveness or what have you — it’s about societal health and a sustainable future for our nation. If we can’t cultivate self-sustaining communities that are vibrant, interconnected, and teeming with diversity, then we will be able to do little else than continue infusing unhealthy doses of industrial era, one-size-fits-all reforms into school systems, propped up on federal money and compliance based policies.

#ecosystems #food #schools #interconnectivity #reform