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Twenty-first century parenting isn't entirely illogical. Rather than trying to eradicate it, I suggest a strategy of containment: Rein in its excesses, and keep it from getting worse. Based on my own research, an unscientific reading of parenting literature, and a sample size of three kids, here are some key things modern parents should know:

Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk. This means you can teach them not to pummel you with carrots at dinnertime, making your life calmer (and your floor cleaner). "Expect more from your children, and they will rise to it. Expect less, and they will sink," Emma Jenner writes in the book "Keep Calm and Parent On."

Seize windows of freedom joyfully, without guilt. Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents. Between the mid-1990s and 2008, college-educated American moms began spending more than nine additional hours per week on child care; this came directly out of their leisure time. The greatest insight to emerge from France since "I think, therefore I am" is that children's birthday parties should be drop-offs. The other parents get three hours to go off and play.

Don't just parent for the future, parent for this evening. Your child probably won't get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it. A Dutch father of three told me about his Buddhist-inspired approach: total commitment to the process, total equanimity about the outcome.

Try the sleeping cure. Most parenting crises are caused by exhaustion. Force yourself to observe the same nighttime rituals as your toddler: bath, book, bed. When you feel an adult tantrum approaching, give yourself a timeout.

Have less stuff. Messiness compounds the chaos of family life.

Don't worry about overscheduling your child. Kids who do extracurriculars have higher grades and self-esteem than those who don't, among many other benefits, says a 2006 overview in the Society for Research in Child Development's Social Policy Report. "Of greater concern," it noted, "is the fact that many youth do not participate at all."

Don't beat yourself up for failing to achieve perfect work-life balance. The French have national paid maternity leave, subsidized nannies, excellent state day care and free universal preschool, and yet they blame the government for not helping parents enough. We Americans have none of the above, yet we blame ourselves.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them. "When a girl meets a new person, she often automatically strives to be likable, even before she has decided whether or not she likes the new person herself," Rachel Simmons writes in her book "The Curse of the Good Girl." "Tell your daughter to switch the order: Size up the person before you start worrying about what she thinks of you."

Transmit the Nelson Mandela rule: You can get what you want by showing people ordinary respect. When Mr. Mandela heard that an Afrikaner general was arming rebels to prevent multiracial elections, he invited the general over for tea. The journalist John Carlin writes that Gen. Constand Viljoen "was dumbstruck by Mandela's big, warm smile, by his courteous attentiveness to detail" and by his sensitivity to the fears of white South Africans. The general abandoned violence. Remind your kids that this technique also works on parents.

It really is just a phase. Unbearable 4-year-olds morph into tolerable 8-year-olds.

Don't bother obsessing about what you think you're doing wrong. You won't screw up your kids in the ways you expect; you'll do it in ways you hadn't even considered. No amount of hyper-parenting can change that.
Pamela Druckerman is an American journalist and the author of "Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting."

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Twenty-first century parenting isn't entirely illogical. Rather than trying to eradicate it, I suggest a strategy of containment: Rein in its excesses, and keep it from getting worse. Based on my own research, an unscientific reading of parenting literature, and a sample size of three kids, here are some key things modern parents should know: Babies aren't savages.

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A veteran teacher shares what she’s learned in the course of 26 years. Big picture: A little empathy goes a long way.

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The Differentiation Equation: A Tool to Develop Independent Readers

Marie Aurea Garrido

Faced with the pressure to teach more rigorous texts to meet higher expectations, teachers often respond in one of two ways:
Classroom 1: Classroom 2: Ms. Andrews's 7th grade class of struggling students are in a circle, listening intently as she reads aloud an editorial about smartphone privacy issues that relates to the unit on privacy versus security and the U.S. Bill of Rights. The students follow along and listen as the teacher connects the concepts to the unit and defines key words for them. The exit slip at the end of class shows that all of the students can explain that day's class content. The 8th graders in Ms. Jeffries's class are quietly reading the poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and answering a set of questions that come from the textbook. The students, a mix of on-level and struggling readers, are having difficulty with the vocabulary and meaning behind the poem. Despite that, Ms. Jeffries is satisfied that 80 percent of the class has earned a 60 percent or higher score on the assignment.
In both classrooms, the teachers are having students read and respond to complex text, but neither instructional method is helping students become independent readers. Ms. Jeffries in Classroom 1 assigned her students complex text, but even though she knows that her students are struggling, she does not employ any strategy for vocabulary and comprehension to help them improve in these areas. This is what I call "under-scaffolding." Under-scaffolding occurs when teachers assign, rather than teach, demanding reading material. It is often given as independent work with a sink-or-swim philosophy. All students are going to have the same test, so I need to get them ready for that, these teachers rationalize.

Ms. Andrews in Classroom 2 is doing all of the meaning making for the students. Although all students were able to explain what they read together, this is an assessment of their memory, rather than their reading comprehension. I call this "over-scaffolding." Over-scaffolding happens when teachers help students through the hard stuff by chunking it into the smallest possible bites to spoon-feed their students. Students stay on the same page as the teacher and often wait for the teacher to provide the explanation or the right answer. This is too hard for my students, these teachers say. This is the only way they can understand it.

Both approaches often come about from good intentions-an effort to get students ready for college and career or to help students understand something that may be too hard. The fact is, every teacher has erred on one side or the other by either over- or under-scaffolding. It is hard to get it just right. My approach combines student data and text complexity measures into a "Differentiation Equation;" a tool to help teachers provide just the right strategies for students reading a particular text. The Differentiation Equation assists teachers in considering two variables when planning a lesson with complex text to build independence: student needs + text demands.

Student Needs

We have an abundance of student reading data in classrooms. Formal measures like standardized test scores, diagnostic testing, and teacher-made tests as well as informal measures like class assignments, exit slips, and other formative assessments can strategically scaffold reading instruction based on need. Ideally, teachers will constantly look at student work and interactions, and mine formative data related to the following areas to determine next steps.

1. Comprehension (making inferences; understanding central ideas, purpose/perspective/bias, and text structure)

2. Vocabulary (context clues, word parts, words with multiple meanings, word relationships, and figurative language)

3. Decoding (high-frequency words, phonemic awareness, and phonics)

4. Fluency (prosody, speed, and expression)

5. Syntactic Knowledge (sentence structure, grammar, and conventions)

Quantitative Factors
Text Demands
Qualitative Factors
The Common Core State Standards Appendix A makes reference to the "text complexity triangle," made up of three factors: quantitative factors, qualitative factors, and student and task considerations.

Most quantitative measures of text complexity, including Lexile, use word frequency and sentence length. Teachers are often surprised when a book traditionally taught at the high school level, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, has a low Lexile measure. They think that this book can't possibly have a Lexile measure of 860, which is appropriate for 4th to 5th graders. In fact, it makes perfect sense that a book told from the point of view of a narrator remembering her childhood is filled with common words and short, simple sentences. Other factors of the book make it a challenging read and thus suitable for a high school audience.
Student and Task Considerations
Language, structure, themes, and background knowledge necessary to access the context of a text can make it more or less challenging to read. For example, readers of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird will grapple with

1. Layers of Meaning: On the surface, the novel tells the story of a young girl growing up in the South. Beyond that, it addresses facets of racism and prejudice, heroism, and the need to be understood. These multiple layers make it more complex for the reader compared to a straightforward story.

2. Structure: With its many flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness structure, the novel's plot can be difficult for novice readers to follow. Often, complex texts have multiple text structures that students must navigate through to make meaning. Poetry's unconventional structure also challenges students.

3. Language Conventions: Characters in the book speak different southern dialects. Dialect, archaic words in seminal documents and classical literature, and technical words in nonfiction writing add to the text demands for the reader.

4. Knowledge Demands: Without knowing the history of the segregated South and Jim Crow laws, students would not understand Atticus's heroism in defending his client. The more background knowledge needed to understand a text, the more complex it is.

The last portion of the text complexity triangle considers what students bring to the text (strengths, areas of need) and what they are being asked to do with it in a given assignment. This interplay of student, text, and task helps teachers make instructional decisions for how to prepare students for challenging assignments involving complex texts.
Table. The Differentiation Equation
Sum: Scaffolds for a Complex Text

When a teacher considers both the needs of the students and the complexity of the text, he or she can plan exactly which strategies to use to scaffold and build student independence by finding the gap between what the students can do and what they are expected to do with the text. Let's go back to Classroom 1 and reimagine the lesson using the Differentiation Equation. The following table shows how I identified student needs and text demands, and aligned these two sets of data inputs to determine the most effective strategies and scaffolds so that all students in an 8th grade intensive class could access a complex text (the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade").

We can solve the problem of exposing all students to complex text and helping them become independent readers by using the Differentiation Equation to select appropriate strategies. By design, the tool guides students to grapple with the hard parts of a text by helping teachers identify areas where students are likely to struggle, based on their needs and the features of the text. As you use the tool over time, you will become more fluent in rigorous lesson planning, and begin to internalize the thought processes behind navigating student needs, text demands, and the supports that will bridge the two.

Marie Aurea Garrido is an instructional specialist in secondary literacy in Broward County Public Schools, Fla.

ASCD Express, Vol. 12, No. 11. Copyright 2017 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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ASCD Express 12.11 - The Differentiation Equation: A Tool to Develop Independent Readers

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The Differentiation Equation: A Tool to Develop Independent Readers Marie Aurea Garrido Faced with the pressure to teach more rigorous texts to meet higher expectations, teachers often respond in one of two ways: Classroom 1: Classroom 2: Ms. Andrews's 7th grade class of struggling students are in a circle, listening intently as she reads aloud an editorial about smartphone privacy issues that relates to the unit on privacy versus security and the U.S.

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What Do You Wish You Had Known In Your First Year of Teaching?

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What Do You Wish You Had Known In Your First Year of Teaching?

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12 Things That Will Disappear From Classrooms in the Next 12 Years

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What Happens When Teachers Spend More Time in a Classroom - Before Teaching? (3)

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What Happens When Teachers Spend More Time in a Classroom - Before Teaching? (3)

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What happenswhen teachers spend More time in the classroom before teaching

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It’s About the Abilities Not the Deficits

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The Ever Increasing Burden on America's Public Schools

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The Ever Increasing Burden on America's Public Schools

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The Ever Increasing Burden on America’s Public Schools

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The Exhausting Life of a First-Year Teacher (2)

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The Exhausting Life of a First-Year Teacher (2)

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The exhausting life of a first-year teacher - The Hechinger Report

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The First Year of Teaching Can Feel Like a Fraternity Hazing (1)

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The First Year of Teaching Can Feel Like a Fraternity Hazing (1)

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The first year of teaching can feel like a fraternity hazing - The Hechinger Report