How positive associations improve learning outcomes Kris Fallon
A few weeks ago, I was in
Bloomingdale’s
with my two teenage daughters,
and we were shopping –
something I love to do.
And I ended up in the shoe
department – something I love as well.
And I was looking through the
sales rack,
and all of a sudden a woman passed by
and I caught the scent
of Nina Ricci perfume.
Immediately, I was transported back
to Toms River, New Jersey,
and I was a little girl with my Nanny
and my Papa Pat.
My Nanny is the type of person that
always makes you feel special.
She makes you want to be the best
version of yourself.
She’s 98 years old,
and she lives in Ohio right now,
and I don’t see her as much as
I’d like to see her,
but every time I smell the perfume,
I’m reminded to be strong
and to be my best self.
Sights can do that for me as well.
When I see a Little League game,
I remember my time as a Little League
softball player.
Now, I was never a great softball player,
but I had amazing coaches,
and they always made me feel like I
was a really good softball player.
And because of that, I played
throughout my youth,
and I played into my high school years,
and my junior year I made the varsity team.
And my team was very good, and I
ended up winning a state tournament
that I might not have done
if my coaches had been different.
And that’s the power of positive
association,
especially when you’re young, when
you’re still trying to find a sense of self.
Now, negative associations can
be equally powerful.
When I see a huge science textbook,
I’m immediately taken back
to a couple courses
that I had in high school.
Those courses were very difficult
for me.
They made me feel bad about myself.
What I do remember from the course is my
teacher standing up in front of the room
spewing some information at me,
giving me a handout,
and I was left to my own devices
just to figure it out.
Now I was a really good student, so a lot
of times I would try to engage.
I would go up and I would talk
to the teacher,
and one teacher in particular would say,
“Look it up in the book.”
And the book was big, and the book was
covered in a brown paper bag
because you always had to cover your
book in a brown paper bag,
and I hated that book and because
of that association,
it changed a course in my life:
I thought I was really bad at science,
and I really hated science,
and I never took a science
course in college.
It wasn’t till years later when I
became a pharmaceutical sales rep
that I discovered I was really good
at science, and I really liked science.
I thought back to that experience that
I had had in high school,
and I was resentful.
I was resentful that those teachers
closed a door in my life.
Now I love what I’m doing now,
but I often kind of think,
“Wow, because they did that
my life’s course was changed in a way.”
So when I embarked on my journey into
education,
it became really a passion of mine to think
about this idea of positive association
because I wanted my students to look at
school, my course, and me
in a positive light.
So I started to reflect as teachers
always do on their own experiences,
and I kind of thought about
what my association with school
was really like as a child.
Now, I come from a family of educators.
Both of my sisters are elementary
school teachers,
and my dad was a high school history
teacher who finished his career as a principal,
and when I was little, he would take
my sister and me to the high school
where he taught, Whippany Park
High School,
on the weekends sometimes, to do work.
Now, when you’re a kid and you’re in
an empty high school,
the hallways are cavernous and
everything is kind of magical.
And this was the 70s, the mid-70s so
every classroom had a chalkboard,
you can write on it with the chalk
and there was overhead projectors,
and had like the markers that you could
erase and there were ditto machines,
so you had to make your hand out and
transfer it onto a ditto
and not make a mistake, and then
that’s how you got your copies,
and I thought all of that stuff
was super cool,
but the thing I loved the best
was the library.
I hadn’t really seen a library before.
I mean this room filled with books
on any topic you could imagine.
You went to the card catalog and
you could look up anything
and you could find a book.
So I was just, I thought a school was
like a playground.
So my first entree into real school
(I never went to nursery school)
was kindergarten.
And kindergarten was all about Mrs.
Cokefair.
I can envision Mrs. Cokefair
in my head right now.
She was a little older, she never wore
pants,
she always had a skirt or a dress on,
she was pretty firm,
but had like these gentle boundaries
and all you wanted to do was please her.
And I wanted to please her because
I wanted to earn points
to play in the wooden kitchen.
The wooden kitchen was magical.
It had pots and pans and play food and a
spatula…I don’t know why I loved it,
but I loved the spatula.
You could like flip the eggs.
The other thing that I remember about
kindergarten was snack time.
We had the same snack every day:
we had graham crackers,
and you could get chocolate milk
or regular milk in the little cartons.
Now you didn’t have 10 different types
of snack, and you didn’t order it.
You got graham crackers.
I don’t remember anyone
saying, “I hate graham crackers,”
“I’m not eating the graham cracker.”
Everyone ate the graham crackers,
and I loved them.
I love them, to this day,
graham crackers mean
kindergarten to me.
First grade was Miss Petlinsky,
and Miss Petlinsky was the most beautiful
human I have ever seen.
She looked like Cher.
She had long dark hair she parted
in the middle,
she wore pink frosty lipstick, she had
white nails – so beautiful.
And aside from her being beautiful,
Miss Petlinsky taught me to read.
Wow, what a magical thing!
We had a reading program called SRI,
and you were a color.
You were blue or purple or red.
You weren’t accelerated, middle, low.
You didn’t change levels; we didn’t use
language like that, right?
You were just a color, and if you
did the little assessments,
you got to go to a new color
and maybe got a sticker.
So everything was just so great.
So I credit her in large part for my
love of reading.
But then I go back to this idea of
association, right?
Why has my love of reading
never changed over the years?
It really hasn’t, because we know that
reading peaks in elementary school
and drops off significantly
through middle and high school.
So that became a big thing with me–
why is this happening?
So I again thought back–
so my association with reading
when I was little was vacation.
We never flew when we were young,
I didn’t fly till college.
So I was in the car all the time,
whether we were going to the beach
or we’re going to Disney,
we were in the car.
So I’d pack my little bag,
it’d have my snack,
I’d have a coloring book perhaps,
and my book.
And it was in the car that I went
through the wardrobe to Narnia,
and it was in the car
going on vacation
that I hung out in Walnut Creek with
Laura Ingalls Wilder.
So that was magical to me, and
I thought everyone loved to read,
especially people from my generation,
because there wasn’t a heck
of a lot more to do.
You played outside, there were 13
channels on the TV, right,
so you read.
But my cousins are like, “Nah,”
so we as adults,
like I said, I come from a family of
educators,
two of my cousins are also teachers,
one’s an administrator,
and we would talk and they’re like,
“Nah I hated to read when I was little.”
I’m like, “Why?”
They’re like, “Mom used to put us
in our room and say,
‘It’s reading time. You have 20
minutes to read in your room.'”
And again, my generation,
your room was boring,
like it was really punishment, right,
because you didn’t have a TV, you didn’t
have a phone, you didn’t have anything.
Kids nowadays could live in their room
for like a month, right?
I always say, if they have a refrigerator
they could live in there,
but we thought it was punishment, so they
associated, my cousin’s like,
“I always thought it was like a punishment
to have to read in my room.”
So again, I kept thinking, wow, it’s these
associations that kind of last with us,
because what we’re finding is that
as kids get older,
reading becomes work.
They can’t delineate leisure reading and
work reading, it all just becomes work.
As you get older, you’re assessed on it,
you’re looking for research,
you’re trying to find things in your reading,
you’re not doing as much leisure reading.
So kids, people will say, “Well little kids
should do fun things at school,
when you’re big you have responsibilities,
the work becomes more arduous,
you have to do it,”
but I think what we’re really missing
is the operative word is “kid.”
You’re still a kid in middle and
high school.
So as educators,
we have to remember
we’re not just disseminators
of information,
we’re in the human connection business.
right, so we have to again look
why are they losing this sense of
wonder?
Learning should be empowering
and for some reason,
the kids are looking at reading
as just work,
and we all know
work is not that fun.
So it became a passion of mine to bring
this enlightenment with reading
back into my classroom.
So the curriculum at my school is filled
with wonderful things,
I mean I love teaching The Catcher
in the Rye and Macbeth and The Crucible,
and I think they’re all super important
and very, very enriching
to a young person’s life,
but it leaves them really just not too
much time to read for pleasure.
So over the past few years, I’ve been
involved in this wonderful program
that my school does, it’s called the Independent
Reading Program,
and it’s based on the work of Penny
Kittle and her book called Book Love.
Her premise in the work is that if we put
books in their hands that they love to read
they’re going to want to read more.
Makes sense, right?
So as a department, we started the
program and we gave the kids
a minimum of 10 minutes every single
day to read anything that they want to read.
They make the choice.
Now in my classroom.
I made a choice that I wasn’t going
to assess them on this at all.
No page counts, no “how many
books have you read?”
No accountability in terms of that,
because again,
I think work and assessment are linked
together
and it’s not so much linked with leisure,
right?
The other thing that I thought was
super important to me,
was building this accessibility to this
library in my classroom.
You have to have the books
readily available to them to read.
So I’ve done a million things: I’ve gone
to library sales,
I’ve bought books of my own,
but I wanted the library to be really rich
with titles that they would really,
really connect to.
And now I haven’t read all the books
in the classroom,
but I’ve read many of them,
so when I have a reluctant reader, I can
offer something up to them,
I can talk to them about something
because I think that that ability
to have that discourse with the students
is vital to the program.
The other thing that I did
in my classroom
is I set up a tea and hot chocolate
station in the back of the room.
So when they come in after a really
stressful morning
or really stressful test,
they can go and make themselves
a cup of tea or hot chocolate,
sit down, read their book.
Again, it’s that association, right?
Chocolate is pleasure, I want to
get that in the room,
just like Mrs. Cokefair did for me with
the graham cracker.
Associations are powerful, and so are
teachers.
It hasn’t happened to me very often,
but a couple times during my
career as a teacher,
I’ve had colleagues say to me,
“I don’t care if the kids like me,
that’s not my job; my job is to teach.”
I think that’s a really strange
statement.
Can we learn from someone
we don’t like?
Of course we can, but think of
how much more you could learn
if you really liked that person.
Now, when I say “like,” I mean respect,
that you feel safe in their classroom,
that you know at all times,
that teacher has your back.
The greatest compliment a student has
ever given to me
was when he said, “I found your course to
be really challenging,
but I always knew you
wanted me to do well.”
We have a superpower as educators.
We have the power of human connection.
We can close a door so tightly that it can
change the direction of someone’s life,
or we can open it so wide that the
learning never stops.
Because let’s face it, if we’re all being
honest,
we all want to be the
Nina Ricci perfume,
and we want to be the
softball coaches.
One of the best things about my job
is when former students contact me
and want to get together just to talk
about what’s going on in life.
I’ve been to colleges and I’ve seen
some of my students in plays,
I’ve been in to other schools and
watched them in athletic performances,
but my most favorite thing is to sit
down with them over a cup of coffee
and I had the pleasure of doing that a
couple weeks ago
with two of my former students.
We met at this really cute place in
Summit,
the type of place that makes the little
pictures in your foam,
and we were sitting and one of my
students grabbed his cup, took a sip,
it happened to be hot
chocolate, and he said,
“Mrs. Fallon, do you know
what this reminds me of?
It reminds me of reading The Glass
Castle in your class.”
And we went on and we talked about the
book a little bit,
and I thought to myself,
sometimes in class
it’s not the assessments or the
discussions that we have
that tell you how well you’re doing.
Are you truly connecting?
But in that moment, I knew that I was
doing something right.