America’s Obsessed With Guns and Violence. And Schools Are the Target

America’s Obsessed With Guns and Violence. And Schools Are the Target

I remember watching the events of Columbine play out after I left school that day. We didn’t have 24/7 access to the internet back then, so we watched it all unravel on the national news. It was not the first school shooting, as we have all come to learn, but it certainly was the most prevalent in our minds for a long time when we thought of school massacres.

Over the years, as a teacher and then principal, I watched as our school went from practicing fire drills to engaging in active-shooter drills. Of course, we masked the active-shooter-drill language with that of “safety drills.” As much as we tried to focus on the positive with students, they knew why we were asking them to find a safe place to hide in case a bad person came crashing through their classroom door.

I was always proud to be a teacher and principal, but after Sandy Hook, there was nothing quite like walking around the school engaged in a “safety drill” with one of the state police officers in our community. It changed the way we viewed our surroundings, and everyone who rang our doorbell at school.

There are so many people who still don’t believe social-emotional learning has a place in our nation’s schools, which I wrote about here when I focused on school board candidates. However, massacres like those in Uvalde, Texas, show us exactly why we need to focus on SEL, because I imagine that so many of our teachers and school leaders across our country had to alleviate the fears of children and adults on Wednesday as opposed to focusing on literacy, math, and science. Not to mention the social-emotional toll it takes on students, teachers and leaders after a “safety drill” is practiced.

Now, more than a week after the massacre, anxiety runs deep for those students, teachers, and leaders who are still in school.

Unfortunately, as the days have gone on since the massacre, the same arguments have come up since they did after the countless other school massacres. One thing is for sure: What this shows, whether people care to agree or not, is that America has an obsession with violence.

I remember a few years ago, I overheard a father, mother, and son talking while we all waited to board an airplane. The son talked incessantly about how many people he killed in the game he was playing, and his mother pointed out how unemotional he seemed as he talked about killing 12 people, when there had been an uprising in school shootings. The father chimed in and said, “Stop freaking out so much. There have only been like five or six school shootings.” The father went back to looking down at his phone.

That’s what happens, though, doesn’t it? We talk about how sad all of this is, and how those states must have major issues, but we never think our own children have issues as they play games where they “kill” countless bad guys in the name of being a patriot. As for some Republican politicians and their gun laws, it’s clear they care more about the NRA than they do about the lives of children. Let’s face it, so many of these politicians fight harder to ban books and prevent the use of the word “gay” than they do about actually focusing on something that kills innocent people.

However, in the last few days, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, showed interest in negotiating with Democrats when it comes to gun control. I’d love to celebrate, but this is something that should have happened long ago, and it’s hard to celebrate after so many massacres in the last few weeks. Additionally, Texas Republican John Cornyn was interviewed after the massacre and said they are ready to do something about gun laws because “they have a sense of urgency they haven’t felt before.” Really? What about all of the school massacres over the last 20 years?

Let’s get some facts, though. Researcher, author, speaker Adam Grant says that Americans are united on some aspects of gun control. According to Grant’s recent Instagram post:

Every morning, I turn on my local news, and the anchor rattles off the shootings or deaths that took place in the capital of New York state, where I live. They seem so unemotional as they tell the story, and many times, we become desensitized to hearing it all. Many times, to those with a twisted sense of guns and violence, the names of those responsible for the killings are given instant celebrity.

At night, as I turn on the television to unwind from the day, I find myself feeling more and more anxious before bed. It’s because, although I don’t watch violent programs, I am exposed to commercials highlighting the violent dramas that we should watch at 8 p.m., 9 p.m., and 10 p.m. The more graphic the deaths, the better the ratings. (No need to say the names of the shows, because you know what they are already.) This programming can have a negative impact on adolescents. In fact, according to the American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP):

While multiple factors can lead to violent actions, a growing body of literature shows a strong association between the perpetration of violence and exposure to violence in media, digital media, and entertainment. This is a serious public health issue that should concern all family physicians, particularly as it affects young patients and their parents or guardians. Children, adolescents, and young adults consume digital media from a variety of sources, many of which are mobile, are accessible 24 hours a day, and offer both passive and active engagement. Many of these media platforms feature entertainment that contains significant doses of violence and portrays sexual and interpersonal aggression.

Early childhood exposure to TV violence predicted aggressive behavior for both males and females in adulthood. Additionally, identification with same sex aggressive TV characters, as well as participants’ ratings of perceived realism of TV violence, also predicted adult aggression in both males and females. Furthermore, while a positive relationship was found between early aggression and subsequent TV violence viewing, the effect was not significant. These findings suggest that, while aggressive children may choose to watch more violent TV programming, it is more plausible that early childhood exposure to TV violence stimulates increases in aggression later in adulthood.

America is obsessed with guns and violence, and Americans feed on it when they go to the movies, buy video games, or listen to music that highlights guns and more and more violence. Toxic masculinity plays a part in all of this, too, because let’s remember that most of these killers behind the massacres of innocent children, the Asian community, and Black community have been young white men.

Hollywood producers and movie stars tweet their anger and disbelief at the same time they make millions of dollars off their movies that promote the same graphic violence that they seem to be so appalled by. But hey, they’re doing it for entertainment, and in all of their movies, they are playing the good guy who gets rid of the bad guy.

Video-game creators hide behind freedom of speech when they try to justify their part in all of this, as they work hard to create more graphic games that include algorithms that keep bringing people back to play the games over and over again. When you feel a loss of control over your own life, play a video game in which you can control every part of the situation. Watching kids play games where they easily fire assault rifles and kill people, even some innocent people by mistake, is just really beyond appalling.

Nineteen children and two teachers went to school as they did on any normal day and never went home. Days later, politicians made excuses and spun their rhetoric. Sadly, many on their side bought that rhetoric. Perhaps this time politicians will work together to do something about the gun laws. What will we do as a nation to do something about the obsession with guns and violence?

It’s Time to Give Feedback Another Chance. Here Are 3 Ways to Get It Right

Feedback is one of those words that teachers and school leaders (i.e., principals, head teachers (U.K.) love and hate at the same time. I say that because there is no doubt about the importance of feedback, because Hattie and Timperley found that it is one of the most effective influences on student learning (2007). However, what most educators do not like about feedback is how it is used against them. For example, feedback is often the purpose of walk-throughs, learning walks, and formal observations, but all too often the content of the feedback focuses on an area that teachers and school leaders never discussed beforehand, or the school leader lacks the credibility to provide feedback in the first place.

In a study of over 400 teachers and 4,000 students, Dawson et al. (2018) found that there are four reasons students and teachers believe are the main purposes of feedback: justifying grades, identifying strengths and weaknesses of work, improvement, and affective purposes.

A great deal of the feedback literature focuses on feedback to students, but what inspired this post was the idea that most of that literature was conducive to feedback between teachers and school leaders as well.

The first way to get feedback right is to look at it as a process and not a one and done event to tick off a box. Too often, walk-throughs, learning walks, and formal observations are seen as something to get done as opposed to a process to engage in that could be truly impactful to everyone involved. When we look at feedback as something to get done, we miss a great learning opportunity. In Dawson’s study, the researchers asked what made the feedback experience effective, and the prominent themes were, “the content of the comments, aspects of the feedback design and the source of the feedback information.”

Additionally, Dawson et al. (2018) write that, “The early 2010s marked a shift in how feedback was positioned within the literature, with understandings of feedback moving from something ‘given’ to students towards feedback as a process in which students have an active role to play.” When reading the research on feedback, as well as the above quotation, it makes me think of the feedback often given between teachers and school leaders. If teachers are expected to look at feedback as a process, and not something they just give to students in isolation, shouldn’t feedback be seen as a process between school leaders and teachers, too?

After all, Robinson (2001) looked at the organizational-learning (how an organization learns together) research by Argyris and Schön, and she writes that there are two strands by which an organization learns, which are:

Descriptive strand—Has its roots in social and cognitive psychology, seeks to understand the processes by which organizations learn and adapt.

Normative strand—Is sometimes referred to as research on the “learning organization,” is concerned more with how organizations can direct their learning in ways that bring them closer to an ideal.

The feedback process certainly can help the adults in a school achieve those two goals.

Three conditions necessary for effective feedback

The second way to get feedback right is by understanding the conditions necessary to provide effective feedback. Nicole, D. & Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) suggest three conditions that must be clarified for anyone to benefit from feedback. In fact, in a recent review of feedback models, Lipnevich and Panadero (2021) refer to the study by Nicole and Macfarlane-Dick as “one of the most important readings in the formative assessment literature.”

Where teachers and school leaders are concerned, I believe the three conditions highlight the importance of feedback being seen as a process and not a “one and done” activity. For this to happen, teachers and leaders would have to have a common understanding of the desired performance, as well as a clear understanding of the current performance. To be clear, these conditions should not be seen as top-down from school leaders to teachers. The reality is that any credible school leader would be asking teachers and students what they want out of a school leader and have a clear understanding of their current performance as a school leader.

What makes the third condition so difficult for the relationship between teachers and school leaders is whether either one truly knows how to close the gap. It is yet another reason to look at feedback as a process, because through faculty meetings that focus on learning instead of management tasks and instructional-leadership team meetings that focus on how and what leadership teams learn together, as well as effective professional learning communities PLC, can a school community truly engage in a feedback process that is worthwhile? In these learning sessions that take place at the faculty meeting, leadership-team meetings, or PLC’s, educators can discuss what Dawson et al. refer to as, “the content of the comments, aspects of the feedback design and the source of the feedback information.”

In education, we commonly hear that we need to be lifelong learners, and for that to happen, feedback in schools needs to be seen as an effective way to inspire self-regulated learning on the part of students, teachers, and school leaders alike. This leads us to the third way to get feedback right.

Over the last decade or longer, we have heard so much about feedback. At first, the word “feedback” was like our favorite song that we wanted to hear all the time, but then somewhere along the way, feedback became the song we no longer wanted to hear. Some of that was due to the fact that teachers and school leaders lack a common language and a common understanding of what feedback is all about.

If we are to show our school communities, and the rest of the world for that matter, that our schools are more than child care during the day and that school leaders and teachers engage in learning that is equally as powerful as the learning students are supposed to engage in, then we have to understand what feedback is all about and how it can be impactful.