Headline Jan 01, 2018/ ''' *SUSPEND?* NO STUDENTS! '''

''' *SUSPEND?* NO STUDENTS! '''

*THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY* - which  is the exclusive ownership of every single student in the world : One Share-Piece-Peace wishes and extends to-

THE WHOLE WORLD  : *A Very Happy New Year*. And prays for peace, prosperity and well being for the whole of mankind. 

AS 2018 DAWNS with all its glory, great decisions await, startlingly and tantalizingly on the horizon. The time is upon us, to say-

*Goodbye and farewell to the Blogspheric world of dependencies, and go our way. The decision is for the students of the world, to take. Ready, when you are*. : 

Merium, Rabo, Haleema, Saima, Sairah, Dee, Sameen, Seher,  Eman, Aqsa, Hussain, Shahzaib, Ali, Haider, Salar, Bilal, Vishnu, Toby, Mustafa, Zaeem, Danyial, Ibrahim, Ehsen?

. 

MANY, MANY NEW TEACHERS are driven to give poor kids the tools they need to do well in school and beyond. But within few years teachers grow disillusioned-

By the struggle to maintain control of their classrooms. Dr. Okonofua, together with the Stanford psychologist Gregory M. Walton, Jennifer L. Eberhardt and Dave Paunesku, wanted to change this.

*And that is where this very beautiful research really begins* : 

To his teachers at Ridgeway High School in Memphis, Jason Okonofua was a handful. During class,  his mind drifted and he would lose the thread of the lesson. He slouched at his desk and dozed off.

His teachers seemed to take off it personally, as a sign of disrespect. He earned detention and was suspended several times.

Jason wasn't trying  to rile his teachers. He wasn't paying attention in class because his thoughts were being consumed by his friends' misfortunes -one had just been arrested, another had accidentally shot himself. 

He couldn't stay awake because he was bone tired from having worked at a restaurant until mid-night.

His teachers knew none of this. They regarded Jason as a troublemaker. Research shows that his being black -in his case, Nigerian American  -made it more likely that she'd jump to that conclusion. Jason felt attacked and humiliated, and reacted defiantly.

*TODAY JASON OKONOFUA IS A newly minted psychology professor at Berkeley whose research focuses on empathy*.

As a Ph.D student, he examined how helping couples understand each other's feelings enabled them to talk to, not at, each another. Then he began applying the idea to education.

How can you help teachers understand the ways adolescents make sense of the world? Tackling the problem from teachers' instead of the students perspective was a novel approach. 

If he could change the behavior of a single teacher, could he improve the chances of a whole class-room of Jason Okonofuas?

The answer, it turns out, is yes.

Mini - rebellions like young Jason's unfold in classrooms thousands of times a day. In US the  Department of Education estimates that 7 percent of the student population -nearly 3.5 million in  kindergarten through high school -was suspended at least once in the 2011-12 academic year, the last for which these data are available.

Despite the Checkpoint Charlie climate in many urban high schools, where students are herded through metal detectors when they enter the building, suspensions are rarely prompted by violence.

*Ninety five percents are for ''willful defiance'' or ''disruption''.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN students are hit hardest. 

They are more than three times as likely than their White classmates to be suspended or expelled. As a result, as early as middle-school, many black students have concluded that when it comes to discipline, the cards are stacked against them.

They stop trusting their teachers, and their negative attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They fall behind when they are suspended, and many drop out or are pushed out.

GETTING RID of bad seed students is supposed to benefit their ''good'' classmates, but that turns out not to be the case. 

When students witness their classmates being shown the door for trivial offenses, they worry that they may be next. Studies show they grow anxious and do worse on on high-stakes math and reading tests.

IN SHORT,  this kind of a discipline is a lose-lose proposition. What's to be done? Enter empathy.

Professor Dr. Okonofua and his research team created brief interventions that stressed the power of  ''empathic discipline'', including a 45-minute online tutorial and one 25-minute online module.

In a  2016 study, they had 31 middle school math teachers take the tutorial. 

The teachers read stories on how what looks like disobedience may reflect the way teenager are learning how to navigate the world -not as troublemakers, but as adolescents, testing out new identities. 

''A teacher who makes his or her student feel heard, valued and respected shows them that school is fair and that they can grow and succeed there,'' one of the segment advises.

The aim isn't to turn teachers into softies who let students get away with murder, but to demonstrate that they can combine discipline with rapport, to good effect.

The Honor and Serving of the Latest Operational Research on Students, Education and the Real World continues. The World Students Society thanks Contributing Writer David. L. Kirp.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

'''' Students & Shimmers ''''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless