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Is ADHD an American Disorder?

May 18th, 2013
by jmholland.
4 comments

In the American mindset I think we often have blinders when considering the reality we create for our kids. For example, this article shared by my friend Tracy Rosen on FB talks about how children in France are not diagnosed with ADHD. If they do have symptoms psychologists in France take the view that it is a psychosocial phenomena. I have long felt the same way. As a teacher I was able to be successful with students who moved onto other grades and teachers and became “ADHD”. Maybe I had my own blinders but I often think kids who struggle with impulse control and attention, when placed into a predictable environment that allows for a certain amount to these behaviors can be successful. The other thing about the French perspective is that all areas of life are considered to contribute to behavior, even nutrition. Check out this quote below.

The French holistic, psycho-social approach also allows for considering nutritional causes for ADHD-type symptoms—specifically the fact that the behavior of some children is worsened after eating foods with artificial colors, certain preservatives, and/or allergens. Clinicians who work with troubled children in this country—not to mention parents of many ADHD kids—are well aware that dietary interventions can sometimes help a child’s problem. In the United States, the strict focus on pharmaceutical treatment of ADHD, however, encourages clinicians to ignore the influence of dietary factors on children’s behavior.

My wife and I decided when my son was 2 years-old that he had difficulty dealing with artificial colors and flavors. There is plenty of artificial ingredients in America but maybe not so much in France? We asked his teachers not to give him fake stuff at class parties. We had a lot of trouble explaining this at first. It did not compute that green frosting on a cupcake could be artificial. Finally we figured out if we told them he is allergic to food coloring and coached him to recognize packaging that was likely to to have artificial flavoring he could manage it himself. Anything that had pictures of fruit on it but said “10% Real Fruit Juice” was not real. He was so sensitive he could figure it out for himself through taste. We went to a function once where there was lemonade, fake lemonade that is. My son had one sip and said, “I can’t drink that, it tastes chemically.” He then had a melt down about 5 minutes later. I suggest this to my students parents who struggle with their kids’ behavior all the time but I think in America we don’t necessarily make that connection between the mind and the body.  This is especially true in high poverty neighborhoods where access fresh fruits and vegetables are rare but more importantly that families in these neighborhoods look for extremely satisfying sensory experiences. I attribute this to the financial relationship between happiness and poverty. If you can’t have the car you see on TV at least you can have the hamburger and it looks so good.

What I Have Learned or Re-Learned

May 13th, 2012
by jmholland.
1 comment

A few notes on what I have learned or re-learned recently.

Don’t wear ties to school, the kids like to yank on them. At least not this year, when I had my class from the beginning of the year I could teach them but, since I came in half way through, I have to choose my battles. (Besides I don’t like ties that much.)

Finger paint is an effective projectile, if you have enough of it.

Sorry doesn’t mean anything to kids, unless it is accompanied by a consequence first.

One weekend full of abusive language in one child’s life can effectively disrupt the the lives of 17 kids and 2 teachers for approximately 2 weeks. I learned this when one of my more challenging students came to school and dropped some not so choice words. She was angry and the words were completely out of context. Since that day I have decided that one layer of teaching this class is providing a safe place for students who live in difficult situations to let go of their anger. Its kind of like primal scream therapy some days.

Parents care what teachers think of them and they listen. I did a home visit and changed the nature of the connection between myself, a parent, and a child tin an almost palpable way.

When trying to convey a story to a difficult class of active young children it can be helpful to cross-over storyteller to performance artist and become the story.

If a child displays ADD or ADHD type behaviors but, with proper support is able to change those behaviors, the behaviors may be learned instead of a chemical imbalance. Either way, accommodating those behaviors, without trying to encourage small steps of improvement, is a disservice to the child.

Sit in the pocket and you can see the whole thing. This last one I just learned. Thursday I had a really rough day. I took offense to something an adult said earlier in the day and it sent me into a spiral. The kids could sense I was not in the zone and kept making it worse. The only moment that I felt learning was actually happening was during a music and movement time. The class had just finished singing the Tooty Ta by Dr. Jean and they all yelled and clapped “Woohoo!” During the truly uninspired performance by my kids I pulled back from the moment and realized that I had allowed my frustration from earlier to color my vision of the moment. I had only seen two children actually sing and perform the song.  I said, “Wait a minute. You guys were not that good. If you want to try it again and really sing, then we can clap and shout.” I turned on the music and they launched into the performance. Every child sang. Every child participated. Every child gave their best effort and there it was, a real teaching moment of beauty. As I sang and did the performance with the class I encouraged them, “That’s it. That’s my class!” When they finished we all yelled and cheered. While we were doing the song I kept remembering my own daughter performing the song on stage 7 years ago with her friend. I realized I had pulled back from the situation so much that I felt like I was sitting in a pocket of time. I felt like I imagine a great quarterback feels when the chaos swirls all around, time slows down, and that perfect pass becomes apparent because they are able to wait for it. (I only imagine this, I have never been a quarterback). That was the best two minutes of the whole day.

On Friday, I was determined to take that experience and expand it. It worked. I was more patient, the kids were more connected to myself and their peers, and there was much more learning.

Why I Teach Head Start

May 10th, 2012
by jmholland.
No comments yet

I recently had the opportunity to write an article about why I love teaching for the Learning Matters blog. If I had written this before my “break” as an administrator I would likely have said that I loved teaching because I felt like I made a difference. After having had that time away I found that my explanation of why I teach was much more emotional than I thought it would be. Below is an excerpt from the piece:

I went back to the classroom a little over 10 weeks ago — because I love teaching. For the two and a half years before that, I provided support and supervision to 16 classrooms in our Head Start program. It was responsibility without immediacy. Each day I would see the interactions teachers were having in their classrooms and I would feel like an artist walking into someone else’s studio. As an administrator I could see the result of learning but never the beauty of it. I realized, through talking to children and their passionate teachers, that I missed creating learning more than I could bear. I also missed the huge responsibility of teaching children like Daniel.

Educare in Chicago: Why Aren’t We Doing the Obvious?

Apr 6th, 2011
by jmholland.
1 comment

Educare is open 11 hours a day, 5 days a week, all year. It is a shining example of the difference high quality pre-k can make in the development of children. The segment below, by education correspondent John Merrow, describes the up hill battle to find a model of early childhood program built with the intention of best serving children. There are public preschool options in Chicago like Head Start and other programs but, they are not the same. One of those programs is Preschool for All. Of course the difference between Educare is and Preschool for All is capacity and intensity. Preschool for All reaches only 24,000 kids for 2 1/2 hours a day for nine months a year.

This video shows the ineffective crosshatching of policy that is intended to support at risk children. What it does though is provide the best to a few, some services to many, and none to the majority. Sounds like an inequitable system to me. If high quality public pre-k is a a great investment, why is are programs like Head Start always on the chopping block.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

TeacherSolutions Teacher Working Conditions TSTWC Report

Nov 30th, 2010
by jmholland.
4 comments

Education reformers want high teacher performance and high student achievement without excuses.  If effective teaching were just about teachers and kids that would be all that needed to be addressed. However, we don’t teach in a void. We teach in highly specific situated realities that seriously influence teacher effectiveness. While a master teacher may be able to teach with a stick and a patch of dirt as fellow Teaching 2030 author Renee Moore has described, a first year or novice teacher will never have the pedagogical skill or knowledge of students to make learning in dire circumstances possible. This is where teacher working conditions come in.  Are policy makers and educational reformers willing do what it would take on the systemic and institutional level in order to be able to hold teachers solely accountable?

On December 1st, the Center for Teaching Quality published its latest report in its efforts to change education for the better by leveraging the voices of accomplished teachers. The report, Transforming School Conditions: Building Bridges to the Education System that Students and Teachers Deserve is the first in a body of reports that will describe steps that need to be taken to create the best possible future for students, families, and teachers. Here are some of the suggestions that schools and districts need to consider if they really don’t want excuses:

Teachers should…

Be able to make decisions about instruction in their classrooms in order to meet diverse student needs.
Be cultivated as teacher leaders and be able to spread their expertise.
Be offered high-quality professional development – focused on the content and students they teach – In the beginning, middle, and end of their career.
Be evaluated by multiple measures of performance not a single score per child.
Be able to teach in assignments for which they are prepared and be supported in meeting new challenges.

and…they shouldn’t have to beg for paper towels or working lights.

Pictures Count

Oct 10th, 2010
by jmholland.
3 comments

I know this isn’t true for everyone but pictures are really important to me. One of the reasons I fell in love with teaching pre-k was that I got to read picture books everyday. I am secretly afraid my son will some day soon (he is six) stop letting me read him picture books. I am really dreading it. I may have to go back to the classroom then. Unless, maybe I can read some picture books to college students? I remember one of my college profs in teacher prep reading us several stories. She really inspired me by modeling that process of falling into a story and still teaching at the same time. Recently, I read my son a story that I knew was a classic but I had never read before. It is called Knots On a Counting Rope. It has so much going on I was kind of glad I waited until he was older to read it. I got a knot in my throat reading. It was that good. Part of what made it so good for me, and for my son, were the illustrations. We love reading books sometimes, just because the the illustrations are unique or beautiful. We we really enjoying the pictures when the story snuck up on us. I won’t tell you the plot twist but, in this story the illustrations are almost a character. I hope that my son never stops letting me read him bed time stories. Recently, I read a New York Times article on how parents are pushing their kids to read “big kid books” when they are just 3 or 5. I wonder if parents know what they are doing when they push that grow up button? Besides, an appreciation and application of design is one of those important skills kids are going to need to be successful in 2030.

Love Tag

Sep 12th, 2010
by jmholland.
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I have to admit that my children are deprived. They don’t have a Nintendo DS, Gameboy advanced, or Playstation. They watch about 45 minutes of TV per week. Usually, So You Think You Can Dance (which sucked this season) or Wipeout (which is surprisingly hilarious and teaches perseverance). My son is often the author of the Kids Quotes you see over there>>>.(You can add one by adding a comment here.

Of course, Wipeout and SYTYCD are not high drama. It is fluff, but they know it is fluff, and that is why we only watch it once in a while.

Last night as the sun set and the kids played in the back yard they reinvented a game they last played about a year ago. The game is love tag. The rule: When you get tagged, whatever you are looking at  you fall in love with for 5 seconds. Last night my daughter fell in love with the fence, a spider egg sack, and a shrub. My son fell in love with the slide, the cat, and the ground. It lasted for 45 minutes, an eternity for a kid’s game.

This morning the two of them disappeared upstairs after breakfast. When they came downstairs my son had become a “Dat” a two headed, six pawed, half dog, half cat creature. Later he had gained the power to turn his sister into: a weakless bug. I asked him, “Is it weakless or wingless?”

“Both,” he replied.

Right now she is reading him a choose your adventure story. My poor kids, what will they ever do without mass media? They may never develop the need to buy things to make them happy.

Wipeout by the Surfaris

What’s in a Name

Aug 6th, 2010
by jmholland.
4 comments

I always ask new acquaintances to tell me their name twice. It is because I have a hard time remembering adults’ names. Kids though, I can remember. It is crucial, if you want to have a relationship with a child to remember their name. Words, and especially names have power.

Names for children and their care givers have always carried political baggage. From daycare to child care, from Head Start to pre-K, preschool to pre-k, and from caregiver to teacher. We can’t get around the fact that what you call something also describes what you believe about it.

That is why it took me a long time to decide on the name of this blog. I was certain that it needed to be right. By right I mean, it needed to push the conversation about pre-K and early learning forward. It had to have meaning and still represent what I, and my previous professional blog were about, children. I kept circling around “Early Learning” because that seems to be the way we (the early childhood profession) are moving in defining ourselves. I wanted something that would allow me to address issues beyond pre-K because, in a departure from Inside Pre-K I believe we need a comprehensive approach to early learning. Birth – 8 years old is a crucial time and is developmentally distinct from the stages of a child’s life after age 8. Children learn to read and then read to learn. That is how our schools have traditionally operated. Young children are in a process of forming, beginning, creating themselves. They are emerging from the womb, from the family, and from the home, into society. Learning from birth to 8 is an emergent time in a child’s life.

I also wanted this blog to be about more than schooling just as I believe pre-K is about more than school readiness. I wanted it to be about learning. Children, in a high quality early childhood setting are becoming learners not just students. That is why I have begun to consider children who are birth to 8, emergent learners, not “just” students, or preschoolers, or kids (one of my favorites) or children. They are becoming learners, what they will be for the rest of their life.

EmergentLearner.com also represents my own take on my process of becoming a leader in the early childhood field. I am constantly trying to learn more about the field and become a better advocate for children.

Thanks for joining this journey.

Obama on Education

Mar 20th, 2010
by jmholland.
No comments yet

I thought Obama was going to be an early education president. Turns out he isn’t even an education president. I think he is using education to shift some conservative votes to his side of the isle. This cartoon is in a contest for the New Yorker. Please vote. I would love for the political “game” to be more public.

Slamming bad teachers is easy… he should try something harder like improving the process of becoming a teacher.

A Nod to Insanity and National Standards

Feb 1st, 2010
by jmholland.
2 comments


Jon Becker recently skewered several arguments about the direction education “needs” to go in. He did it so well, I couldn’t help but respond in a comment to another false assumption about the direction of schools.

On Educational Insanity Kevin commented,

I think the point Mr. Becker is trying to make is that we need to first decide what we want a graduating senior to know and be able to do, before we can talk about the “how” or “why” of school change. If my analysis of his post is correct then I would agree with him. Too often I find in schools that we try to make decisions in a vacuum without ever deciding what it is we are aiming for. As educational leaders we should be asking ourselves first “Where are we headed?” It is the basic concept of backwards by design. Figure out your endpoint and then decide how to get there.

The idea of backwards design, when it comes to the purposes of education is one of those ideas that sounds good on the surface but, would fly apart upon implementation. Backwards design assumes that we are able to know where we want to go based on the information we have now.

Most of the jobs young students will have in the future haven’t been invented yet.

Just watch, as we try to come up with national standards, how narrow we get with the purposes of school. If you try to make everybody (including the USED) happy all the time, it is hard to say anything meaningful beyond common sense ideas like, everybody should be able to read, everybody should have some ideas about probability. These ideas have already been put forward by various national organizations. The national standards will be nothing new, they will only make what we need to teach kids more specific, and less meaningful.

Kevin, I don’t think we need to incorporate backwards design at this point. When we throw the purposes of education up for delineation it actually makes the purposes of school less democratic in our current society. There are so many “influencers” out there that do not have students’ success and welfare at the center of their arguments that by clarifying the goals of schooling we would defacto narrow those goals. The loudest voices in a backwards design would the ones with the most to gain in the process, industry. At least the way it is now, teachers have the opportunity to squeeze in some Plato, or Joyce, Jack Kerouac, or Abbot and Costello into a discussion on language and meaning. In a backwards designed classroom we will always be chasing the lion’s tail, trying to catch up with a changing society. Students will be doing this because of what some policy maker or eduwonk has deemed important instead of what they have decided for themselves. The more specific we make our goals, the less meaningful they will be. The less specific we make our goals, the more opportunities there will be for students to find meaning. Maybe we should start thinking about the shape of the pegs, when we design the holes, instead of the other way around.

Image: http://www.josephnolen.com/images/monk-riding-backwards.jpg

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