Preparing Youth with Financial Literacy Skills

Financial literacy programs are becoming mandatory in many districts as more young people fall into financial traps in high school and college, credit card jargon gets harder to decipher, and debt becomes an American trait. If students aren’t involved in a program through their school or their community, organizations like Young Americans are creating awareness and providing tools on their website to get students and their parents involved in becoming financially literate for their family’s future. Don’t think your child wants to know more? According to a 2006 back-to-school survey by Capitol One, it might not be as difficult as you think to get your child or students excited to learn more about their finances.

49% of teens are eager to learn more about money management, but only 14% have taken a class on the topic and 35% would like to learn from their parents. When asked about the topics they’d most like to learn about, teens express interest in checking accounts, budgeting, investing, saving, and financing for large purchases.
79% of parents see themselves as positive money role models for their kids, yet only a small percentage are taking advantage of day-to-day learning opportunities to arm their teens with practical money skills.
Only 43% of parents have discussed the importance of needs versus wants, compared to 64% who did so last year, and a surprising 42% of parents have not taken any steps whatsoever to discuss financial basics.
- Capital One’s Annual Back to School Survey Finds Teens Eager to Learn about Money, But Parents Continue to Overlook Important Learning OpportunitiesÂ http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=70667&p=irol-newsArticle2&ID=882661&highlight

It’s never too late to get students involved in their financial future. According to Young Americans, you can get children as young as one and as old as twenty-one to open a savings account, teach teens to apply for a loan or a credit card, or get 2nd – 8th graders involved in a financial summer camp, to name a few. The consequences of not preparing youth with financial skills are largely evident in college students and American families.

The average 21-year-old will spend more that 2.2 million in their lifetime (share-save-spend.com).
45% of college students are in credit card debt, the average credit card debt being more than $3,000 (Jump$tart Coalition).
The number of 18-24-year-olds declaring bankruptcy has increased 96% in 10 years (CARE).
50.8% of college-age adults agree with this statement: “I have experienced repeated, unsuccessful attempts to control, cut back or stop excessive money use” (MyVesta).

Understanding finances is still complicating to many adults. If you don’t feel qualified to give financial advice to your child or student, use this as an opportunity to take a financial class, pick up a financial planning book, research on the internet and get involved in your own financial future and security.

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Teacher Tuesday: Incorporating leadership in the classroom

Students see leaders every day but can they envision themselves ever fulfilling that role? In recent news, students have been exposed to many world leaders they may or may not have been familiar with before natural disasters, protests, or rebellion brought them in the limelight. They also might engage with leaders indirectly through media, like reading a blog or following a celebrity on Twitter, but do they identify them as such? What about their peers? Is there someone who controls their group of friends? Is it always for the best? Get students thinking about the different types of leadership in their lives by starting a conversation with the following questions:

What does leadership mean?
What does being a leader mean?
What are some words you associate with ‘leadership’?
Do leaders always have positive influences on people?
How can you identify a person who leads negatively?
Does a leader have to be someone well-known? Well-liked?

Get students thinking about the important role leaders play in their everyday life by having them consider someone they consider to be a strong leader, and someone they think is a weak leader. For ideas, suggest they read a national paper, observe a manager at a restaurant or retail store, take notes on the interactions between a group of friends on campus, or look to their own lives. Discuss these leaders and scenarios in class using the six elements that create a foundation for effective leadership:

Communication
Respect
Critical and Creative Thinking
Ethics
Teamwork
Vision

Next, ask them to complete the following questions about their chosen leaders:

What strength did each leader have?
What weaknesses did they demonstrate?
Is there any way in which their leadership styles were similar?
How did they differ?
What kept your weak leader from succeeding (loss of respect, poor choices, failure to communicate, etc.)?
What can you take away from these observations?

Examining leadership skills that others possess gives student the opportunity to evaluate and develop their own leadership skills. LifeBound offers LEADERSHIP FOR TEENAGERS to help students develop their leadership skills through introspection and the study of both historical and modern day leaders to promote 21st century leadership skills in today’s teens.Â Click here to learn more about this book.

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Upcoming Webinar: Parents as Coaches: Helping your Child Succeed in School and Beyond

Maureen Breeze speaking on Coaches Training at the Denver Quality After-School Connection conference

On March 29, student success expert Maureen Breeze will be presenting the webinar Parents as Coaches: Helping your Child Succeed in School and Beyond. This webinar will teach parents the coaching model and how they can use coaching skills, like listening, observing, asking powerful questions, and acknowledging, as a parenting tool to help their children make effective decisions and guide them toward success and independence.

Why should you be equipped with coaching skills? Coaching skills are important to learn when working with adolescents. As children mature, they need less directive parenting and the freedom to develop independence and critical thinking skills to help them become mature, well-adjusted adults.Â Parents, educators, counselors, and administrators who want to improve effectiveness with students in 5-12 grade are encouraged to join.

Maureen recently spoke to after-school providers on using coaching as a tool to help students discover obstacles, vision, and perseverance to help them overcome challenges at home, in school, and in social situations.

After the conference, Tina Martinez, Director Programs of the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Denver wrote to say:

As you said, Maureen was excellent and several people have commented that it was the best training Denver Quality After-School Connection has offered to date. Thank you for your support of this event and all you do for the youth in our community!

To stay informed on dates and times of upcoming LifeBound events, go to the top right hand corner of the screen and click on the icons to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. While you’re there, you can also signup for LifeBound’s newsletter for monthly updates and deals.Â To learn more about this webinar and for registration information, click here.

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Friday Profile: Happy birthday, Albert Einstein!

Albert Einstein, the 1921 Nobel Prize winner in physics, was born this week in 1879. He is considered to have had one of the greatest minds of all time. He was educated to teach physics and mathematics but could not find a job in his field, so he accepted a job as a technical assistant in a Swiss patent office. During the days he’d review patents that had been submitted to the office, identifying why each of them would not work. His assignment was to find the fatal flaw in each idea. While this position was not glamourous, and a step down from what he was trained to do, it gave him the opportunity to develop the critical and creative thinking skills to effectively evaluate ideas.

Had Einstein become a professor right out of school, he may have never fine-tuned these evaluation skills. And it was these skills which ultimately led him to discover shortcomings in Sir Isaac Newton’s scientific theories. Einstein’s infamous Theory of Relativity directly evolved from his critical evaluation of Newton’s law of mechanics with the laws of electromagnetic fields. Einstein’s work dramatically affected science and the advancement of technology, from the discovery of the Atom bomb to the development of lasers. Einstein once said that his success was directly related to his ability to evaluate ideas that he developed in the Swiss patent office.

Want to learn more about Einstein? The video below is the first part of a six part series by biography.com. Click here to watch the entire series.

The content for this blog was taken from LifeBound’s book CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING FOR TEENAGERS. In every chapter students will be introduced to a different great thinker from history, as well as a great thinker of today, innovations that changed the world, movers & shakers, and people who think on the cutting edge. To learn more about CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING click here.

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Five ideas for a summer of learning

The sun is shining, the middle of the school semester has come and gone, and that means summer vacation is just around the corner. Keeping your children physically and mentally active during their break helps instill the behavior of a lifelong learner and helps them make a smooth transition into the next semester, grade, and/or school. One statistic shows:

Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement, despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper, 1996).

Below is a list of suggestions to keep your kids busy, learning, and having fun this summer to avoid becoming part of the statistic.

Stay active Check with your local parks and recreation centers to learn about summer activities they offer for youth. Also, take advantage of your surrounding landscape and go hiking, swimming, running, biking, etc. Teach your kids about their environment, whether its rock formations on your surrounding mountain ranges or trees along the coast, and maybe you’ll learn something too!
Get brainy Scan the internet and stores for fun puzzles, mind games, mazes, and riddles. Encourage them to solve a problem a day whether it’s during the commercial breaks of their favorite TV show or a set time dedicated to summer brain teasers.
Take them grocery shopping Take your kids to the grocery store and ask them to add the prices of all the products that fall into the grocery cart before arriving at the checkstand. Shopping can be a great opportunity to keep math skills sharp and to teach your child about budgeting.
Read Show the importance of reading by example. Do you read the paper in the morning or at night? Sit in the afternoon sun with a novel? Invite your child to read with you. Some cheap alternatives to buying books new are: trade your books after each read at a used bookstore, check one out from the library, download an electronic reader to your computer and download free e-books, borrow from a friend or purchase at a discount price on websites like Amazon.
Sign them up for a summer program There are a variety of summer programs for children designed to help them further excel in a talent or interest, learn something new, or get them ready for the next semester.Â This summer, LifeBound is offering a Virtual Summer Prep series to help middle school students learn the skills they need to make a successful transition into high school. These virtual classes will be offered in June and July to teach your child skillsÂ likeÂ time management, goal-setting, and stress-management, among many others.Â If you’re interested in “Success Habits for Transition to High School” click here for more program and registration information.

Stay tuned for the rest of this semester as I share success tips for finishing the semester strong, acing finals, and keeping active during the summer months. Please share any tips you have to keep students learning during the summer and any topics you would like to see in an upcoming blog!

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Upcoming LifeBound Webinar – Parenting Tips for Academic Success: Promoting Success at School and at Home

On March 22, Maureen Breeze will be presenting the webinar Parenting Tips for Academic Success: Promoting Success at School and at Home. This webinar will give parents insights on how they can bolster their students’ study, time management and organization skills, as well as their overall interest and motivation both in and out of school.

This presentation is great for parents, educators, counselors, and administrators who want to improve their effectiveness with students in grades 5-12. Maureen will explore ways to create a culture of learning in the home that supports:

high expectations,
improved academic achievement
and the persistence needed to overcome challenges when things are difficult.

At our first webinar this month,Â one attendee,Â Kathy Mellette, North Hall County Honors Mentorship Coordinator wrote in to say:

“Thank you for the informational webinar! I teach a high school Honors Mentorship Class and my students who are planning on careers in education viewed this with me. We enjoyed it-good stuff!”

As the middle of the semester approaches, we are offering the webinarÂ Parents as Coaches in March and April toÂ give parents basic coaching skills, like listening, observing, asking powerful questions, and acknowledging, as a parenting tool to help their children make effective decisions and guide them toward success and independence. Parents, along with educators, counselors and administrators who work with students in 5-12 grade are encouraged to join.

Registration is open for:

This Saturday, LifeBound coach Gina Ballesteros will be presenting in both Spanish and English at the Parent Leadership Institute conference at the Auraria Campus – PE/Event Center. Go down and see the LifeBound team — Michael DeSantiago, Jim Hoops, Maureen Breeze and Gina — and find out more about how parents are getting involved in their student’s success.

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Helping students overcome obstacles and reach their goals

As more classrooms shift their focus from teaching to the test to preparing students to be career-ready, teaching lifelong skills — like goal-setting — is becoming popular in some school districts and showing positive results, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. The importance of teaching students how to set goals is evident in the results from last years Gallup Inc. survey:

The majority of U.S. students don’t believe they have the ability to reach their goals.
Even though children start to form ideas of what they can and cannot achieve by age 7 or 8, only 42% of students in the 10-18 age range are energetically pursuing their goals.
Only 35% of students strongly believe they can find ways around obstacles to their goals.

Schools that have implemented goal-setting programs are seeing higher grades, test scores, and school ratings. Some such programs will use a test in the beginning of the semester to assess what challenges the student will face during the semester. The student and teacher decide on a date the student will have overcome this obstacle (concept, subject, the act of doing/turning in their homework) and break the obstacle into smaller steps to be taken over the entire semester.

One student profiled in the article had been struggling with fractions for years. His teachers proposed they break the obstacles into smaller steps, and in that semester he raised his scores from a 33% to 90%. His baseball coach also noticed the difference his goal-setting skills had on his game. The approach “taught me to out-do other people,” Jackson Sikes says. “Even though they might be better physically, I think I might be a little better mentally.”

A goal-setting method — known by the acronym SMART — was first introduced by project managers in the business world, followed by educators and recently has found its way into the classroom. SMART helps goal-setters remember their path by: setting Specific, Measurable, Attainable goals with clear Results in a set Time frame. But setting a goal is only the first step. When goals and behaviors don’t align, students are setting themselves up for failure, says assistant professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University. She gives the example of a student who is attending school to become a pediatrician, but who is taking drugs and not attending classes. It’s important for students to have goals and it is equally important that they have support from friends, family and/or teachers.

In LifeBound books, curricula, and trainings we take a strong focus on goal setting for students, educators, and parents. Show students the power of setting goals by example. Is there something that you have always wanted to do? Further your education? Learn to ballroom dance? Challenge your child or student to pinpoint one obstacle they want to conquer in their life and share your progress.

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Teacher-prep Draws Attention in New Budget Proposals

Officials of the U.S. Department of Education are hoping to work with Congress to introduce a new program that will alter the reporting requirements currently used to evaluate teacher quality. Since the late 1990’s, states and higher education have been required to report on teacher preparedness under standards set in Title II of the Higher Education Act. Currently, Title II requires institutions to gather roughly 440 data points from teacher-candidates in the admission process, thought by opposers to merely burden institutes with useless data. The president’s 2012 budget request addresses the need for a new formula to measure the outcomes of teacher-candidates with the new $185 million program, called the Presidential Teaching Fellows program.

The Presidential Teaching Fellow program embraces a new mode of thought that measures teacher effectiveness, not by higher education teacher preparation, but rather outcome-based indicators that are evident in their students. Officials are looking to add three new measures to judge teacher effectiveness:

1. Achievement growth of students taught by program graduates;

2. Graduate job-placement and retention rates; and

3. Graduate and employer satisfaction.

The movement has already sparked controversy in the K-12 systems due to the doubt “such information can be used validly and reliably to judge teachers.” As more budget cuts get proposed and student achievement scores plummet or plateau, policies on the state and national level are having to rearrange their financial priorities. Currently, only three states have laws that protect new teachers from the common action taken by districts known as “last-in, first-out” or “last teacher hired, first teacher fired.”Â Michelle Rhee recently drew attention to the need to hold on to great teachers by launching StudentsFirst.org’s new campaign “Save Great Teachers.”

OnÂ CBS’ The Talk, Rhee said because of the economic crisis, budget cuts, and lay-offs it is crucial we hold on to great teachers. Similar to the president’s new proposal that suggests student quality is directly linked to teacher quality, Rhee’s new campaign measures teacher-effectiveness by student outcomes. Rhee asks parents to follow three steps to get involved with the campaign:

1. Educate yourself atÂ studentsfirst.org

2. Contact elected officials

3. Put pressure on school boards

Are you worried about any new budget proposals? Are you supporting any?Â Are you fighting to keep a teacher at your child’s school? Please share in the comment box below.

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Friday Profile: Ray Kurzweil and Artificial Intelligence

When Ray Kurzweil was a student at MIT a computer was the size of a room. Now, 40 years later, that same technology can fit on his pocket. Â Kurzweil is an author, inventor, and futurist who, among many topics, speaks about the intersection of information technology, education, and human knowledge.Â Kurzweil is known for being one of the leading inventors of our time for developing:

the first CCD flat-bed scanner,
the first omni-font optical character recognition,
the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,
the first text-to-speech synthesizer,
the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.
and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition (www.kurzweiltech.com).

He is also known for his controversial futurist predictions and his work in popularizing the term “singularity” — the moment when thinking machines transcend their creators (www.chronicle.com). Despite any controversy that may follow him, over the last twenty years a number of his predictions have proven to be accurate. If you watched Jeopardy last month, you saw IBM’s super computer Watson win the ultimate challenge of computer vs. human. IBM scientists spent the last four years developing the computing system “to rival the human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with the speed, accuracy and confidence” (www.IBM.com) and they succeeded.

Watch the video below to find out more about why IBM chose Jeopardy as their challenger.

Artificial Intelligence also made itself on to the pages ofÂ GQ magazine this month when writer Jon Ronson set out to strike up conversation with some “Social Robots.” He met Zeno, Aiko, and Bina. Bina was also interviewed by a New York Times journalist last year. Watch the video below to see how she stands up to an interview.

Whether you stand with Kurzweil and believe singularity is just around the corner or not, technology has inarguably become a part of a lot of our lives and our futures. Technology has the ability to make education accessible and affordable while also keeping learning new and cutting edge. How much does your classroom rely on technology?

To learn more about Ray Kurzweil, watch this TED video on how technology will transform us!

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Study: New York City teacher pay initiative did not improve student achievement

Merit pay for teachers is under heavy debate but still being considered as a program that could be implemented within the next four years with Race to the Top dollars, according to a recent Times Herald article. Current teachers would be given the option to choose between the merit pay plan or stay on the same pay scale, which is currently determined by education level and years of teaching experience. Some teachers and most unions are against the push to turn teaching into a merit-paid industry because it discourages the collaboration most school communities work so hard to build and maintain. The merit-pay idea sprouts from a basic economic theory that people will work harder if their work is tied to monetary gains. However, teachers are also afraid the administrators who are responsible for spreading the bonuses are not only unqualified to decide whether a teacher is deserving, but they don’t have a system to accurately measure which numbers add up to student success.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer concluded the $75 million spent on the New York City experiment for teacher merit pay did nothing to increase student achievement. Researchers used math and English scores to gauge academic achievement and found scores worsened since 2007, when the monetary incentive was first put in place.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-08 and 2009-10 schools years, before it was quietly phased out. For students, there were negligible outcomes in attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and graduation rates.

Researchers believe the reason the initiative failed in the US, while proving to work in other countries, is because it was unclear which and how many of the test scores influenced teacher pay.

Philip Greenspun, computer scientist, educator, and early internet entrepreneur, writes on his blog, “… I was surprised that anyone thinks merit pay will work. Restaurants arenâ€™t very important to our society or our future. Great empires have been built by countries with bad restaurants. Yet nobody would propose having restaurant compensation be determined by a government bureaucracy assigning ‘merit’ to each restaurant. We allow citizens to choose which restaurant to visit and eventually the bad restaurants wither away and disappear due to lack of customers.”

Where do you stand in the debate? Is there something you would do to improve a merit-pay initiative in your state? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.

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