Author: Mr. Chase

Things I Know 247 of 365: Their goal was real

Glory lies in the attempt to reach one’s goal and not in reaching it.

– Mohandas Ghandi

“Now move your left foot over to the green one. That’s it.”

“Like this?”

“Yup. Now hold that red one with your right hand.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Sure you can, it’s right there. C’mon. You’re super close.”

The scene is playing itself during my last trip to the climbing gym.

One of the players is clinging to a wall 30 feet in the air.

Another is standing on belay, watching and coaching – her neck craned upward.

A third climber stands awkwardly harnessed, awaiting her turn.

None of the trio can be any older than 8 years old.

On my way to tie in on this my third trip to the gym, I stop for a moment to watch how things play out.

These kids are climbing routes graded well beyond those currently within my reach.

The thing that gets me and gives me pause is the way they’re working it all out.

The third has stopped walking in circles to turn and look up at the boy climbing. He’s hit a rough section and the girls below begin talking him through the next steps.

They speak with authority and support at once. Were I at the other end of the rope, I would know what I was to do and that those below me believed I could do it.

It is not until later, on the ride home, that it strikes me I’ve just witnessed three elementary school children holding each other’s life in their hands, trusting explicitly and working to accomplish something the average parent would balk at.

And, the next day, they went to school. They took their places at their desks or tables, to independent or group work. If they should happen to be in classes where more than the textbook and accompanying problem sets are expected measures of learning, still, those experiences fell short of the work in which they were engaged the day before.

At some point a teacher will work to explain to the children the importance of expository writing. He will use all of the words of the English classroom, throwing out “support,” “introduction,” “thesis,” and “conclusion” along with the other bests of.

And there’s a chance those children will struggle.

What I witnessed tells me they will work through that struggle – these kids are tough.

Still, it strikes me as wrong that these three should ever endure a lecture on supports or conclusions.

Let them, instead, invite their teachers to the gym.

Let them say, “This is where I learn.” Only, when they do it here, they call it play. As one panic-stricken teacher or another experiences a mixture of fear and exhaustion before reaching the top of a route, let the children say, “It’s ok. You can come down. You made it farther this time than last time. Don’t worry about how far anyone else made it. I’m proud of you.”

Let that happen.

Things I Know 246 of 365: I’m deciding to learn something new

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

– Winston Churchill

In my first weeks at SLA, I got a little terrified. I inherited my classroom midway through the first quarter. By the time I’d started thinking about getting my bearings another teacher approached me, “What are you planning for your benchmark this quarter?”
For what was the fiftieth time since joining the school, my heart stopped.
I had no idea.
I talked to Chris. It was a moment of intellectual cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Essays, he explained, could be projects.
I breathed again.
I can do essays. They are the coin of the realm for the bulk of schooling. Whether you believe the 5-paragraph essay is the devil or the first step to clean livin’, schools find ways to get kids writing essays. Take a look at standardized test scores and you won’t be able to turn around without bumping into a schools whose writing scores outpace reading, math and science.
I’ve got three major essays in the offing here at school. This is on top of the weekly essay assignments for two classes. Add to those the daily postings here, and I start to feel like the essay king.
It’s ok. Essays are my sport.
So, I’ve decided to take up a new sport – one I appreciate watching, but have no idea how to play.
I’m going to learn to create data visualizations.
In google reader, my “Infographics” folder is my favorite.
I’ve been quietly building my collection of resources in delicious.
After I complete my next two essays, I’m starting. Seriously.
As many people better versed in the visualization of data have written, information and making sense of it are the coins of the realm for the modern age.
This realization is my secondary drive. Most of all, I’m curious. It’s the same things that led me to open up and dissect every telephone I could get my hands on as a little kid. It’s what prompted me to mix rain water, onion grass and other things I found in my yard and leave them in the garage to see what happened.
I’m curious about something I don’t know. So, I’m learning a new sport.

Things I Know 245 of 365: I’ve been re-arranging the furniture in my head

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

– Mark Twain

I’ve been trying to change my mind over the last couple day. Lifehacker posted a blurb on a report from Science Daily suggesting runners should drink water when they are thirsty.

This information probably didn’t blow your mind the way it did mine.

Let me explain.

For over nine years, I’ve been a distance runner. Since that comical first go when I was sure I’d make 2 miles to my last marathon, I’ve been amassing pieces of running knowledge and sharing them as I meet other runners:

  • During morning runs, warm up with two easy miles and then stretch so as not to injure cold muscles and tendons.
  • Your metabolism is spiking for the first 45 minutes to an hour after you run.
  • About 20 minutes into a run is where the average person’s sugar supply is depleted and the fat burning process begins.
  • If you wait until you’re thirsty to drink water, you’re probably already dehydrated.

These are the pieces of who I am as a runner. They represent the framework of knowledge I carry with me that let me know I have some idea of what I’m doing.

Except, as Science Daily seems dedicated to pointing out, I don’t know what I’m doing.

This is the battle in which I’ve been engaged.

I’ve been grieving an idea.

Though it’s painfully simple – one sentence long – my flow chart of running is built around such conditional statements. If this is wrong, how do I know what is right?

I’ll be fine on the running front, I know.

I’ll do some research and figure out what makes the most sense.

It’s got me thinking, though, about what this means in the other systems in my life. I’ve started contemplating how receptive I am to new ideas and how receptive I expect others to be when I introduce a new idea or way of framing understanding.

New ideas aren’t easy. They require the shuffling around of the furniture in my head to make way for that new armoire. The thing is, collecting the new ideas requires losing some of the old ones. I can fit in the armoire, but I’ve got to lose the love seat.

And that’s the piece that’s probably been the most difficult in this instance. My best friend Katy, who taught me to run, educated me on when and when not to hydrate. That knowledge has emotional attachment.

I frequently ran into this problem on the other side when I’d tell students they could begin a sentence with “because” or they should avoid starting sentences with “There is…” or “There are…” To me, I was building a framework to help them succeed. To them, I was asking them to donate most of their mental furniture to the infinite.

Learning is tricky stuff.

I’m going running later today. I’m seriously considering not drinking water until I’m thirsty. Is that crazy?

Things I Know 244 of 365: We only need to half-flip the classroom

Chatting with a friend today, I explained the premise of the flipped classroom:

1. Teacher makes videos of shortened versions of lectures.

2. Students watch lectures at home.

3. In the physically shared space of the classroom, the community practices at the learning.

I think I’ve got a way to make the whole experience better.

Stop making the videos.

I hesitate to write this. The flipped classroom is as close as we’ve come in a long time to an institutionally-backed shift from teacher-centered to student-centered classroom practice. The mastery system is an improvement from the traditional way of doing things. The model frees teachers to provide students with individual attention. These are good things.

Part of me wants to say, “Keep the videos so long as it transforms classrooms to studios, labs, workshops and playgrounds of learning.” But there’s a way to make less work for teachers and students in this equation:

1. In the physically shared space of the classroom, the community practices at the learning.

The Internet is replete with videos, how-tos and step-by-steps explaining almost any lesson a teacher could conjure. What’s more, many of these resources are better than what a typical teacher has time to create.

Some tips for a half-flipped classroom:

  • Use diigo, stumble upon, delicious or another social bookmarking tool to collect any and every resource students find in connection to the learning they’re engaging in at the moment. Come up with a class tag, unit tag, lesson tag and challenge students to find the resources that make the learning work best for them.
  • Give time in class to talk about what they’ve found and how they found it.
  • Have a class space for the curation of content. It doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t be, any one kind of space. Wiki? Great. Google site? Tremendous.
  • Be available and encourage student availability. For me, this meant creating a google voice number that fed student text messages to my e-mail account, being available through Facebook, twitter and IM. For anyone else, it might mean any one of these or something else.
  • Learn along. Nobody likes a know-it-all, but everyone likes to know it all. Any chance I had to learn along with my students, I took it. They knew more about more than I did. I knew literature, grammar and writing. That’s what I brought to the room. From there, I was genuinely curious to learn what they knew – not from an assessment standpoint, but from a learning standpoint.

I’ve two other arguments against the fully flipped classroom. They are the natural derivatives of the Law of Unintended Consequences. First, we’ve taken enough of our students’ time already. Though our hours or 45-minutes with them at a time might seem always too short, they experience a school day full of these bursts. Giving them more to do “for us” won’t make our classes more important. They’ll merely seem more urgent. Play is an endangered species. Let’s respect the ecosystems of our kids’ lives.

My second argument against full flipping is that we’re fooling ourselves if we think our students will continue to watch these videos over years. At some point, the novelty will wear off. The Freakonomics folks posted today about the Indian government’s issuance of masks to workers in the field who were in danger of tiger attacks.

Because tigers attack from the rear, workers wore the masks backwards to fool the tigers.

It worked – for a while. Tigers have started to learn the masks are just that.

Rather than masking students’ experiences in the novel, let’s outfit the experiences with the authentic.

Things I Know 243 of 365: Teachers might be too institutionalized to occupy

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

– Ivan Illich

In class today, we learned of Erving Goffman’s description of the structures surrounding the social relationships of mental patients and other inmates.

Goffman describes the structures as follows:

  1. Basic split between a large managed group, called inmates, and a small supervisory staff.
  2. Each grouping tends to conceive of the other in terms of narrow, hostile stereotypes: staff seeing inmates as bitter, secretive, untrustworthy and inmates seeing staff as condescending and mean.
  3. Social mobility between the two strata is restricted and the social distance is formally prescribed.
  4. Inmates are excluded from knowledge of the decisions taken regarding their fate.
  5. The institutional plant identified by both staff and inmates as somehow belonging to staff. Reference to the institution implies the views and concerns of the staff.

In the context of class, these qualities were presented as representative of Ivan Illich’s position of deinstitutionalizing schools because teachers have too much power in relation to children.

Replace “staff” with “teachers and administration” and “inmates” with “students” and you see where this was going.

My question was this, what if we replace “staff” with “policymakers and education officials” and “inmates” with “teachers?”

Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot said my point was well taken but challenged it with the idea that teachers have ample opportunity to use what Joseph McDonald refers to as their “teacher voice.” McDonald writes that teachers too rarely engage in voicing the intimate, complex and nuanced understanding of the practice of teaching.

McDonald posits it is this voice teachers must better mine.

José has an excellent post over at GOOD calling for #OccupyTheClassroom, and he’s not wrong. “Teachers live in a space where they worry about every move they make,” he writes, “fearful that some administrator might come out of the bushes with a rubric that decides they’re not proficient.”

This fear is a piece of it for some.

For others, it is a conditioning of supporting and listening. To teach is to help students, in the words of George Dennison, “discover themselves in more richly human terms.”

Unfortunately, teachers suffer institutionalized silence – an unofficial and unhealthy gag rule on the areas of our expertise.

Historically, and too easily in modern society, teacher become so focused on this act and honing their listening to draw out the better version of their students that they lose the voice that shows the better versions of themselves.

What José calls for and what McDonald advocates is the use of teacher voice to reframe how others see the profession of teaching.

Karl, one of the voices I read and listen to most closely wrote this:

…this thing we call school doesn’t happen without us.

What if we just said, “Enough.”

What if we just said, “Your reform is bad for our students. We need to transform.”

What if we just said, “Not in my classroom. Not to my students. Not to my own children.”

What if we did #occupytheclassroom?

What if I #occupiedmyclassroom?

What if you #occupiedyourclassroom?

Sadly, these ideas are revolutionary. One needs only look at the forfeiture of curriculum, scheduling, assessment, and learning to see how much the inmates have given up to the staff.

McDonald charges teachers are being irresponsible individually and collectively for not combining our voices of expertise with our voices of advocacy to speak against those who would demean and misappropriate the teaching profession and the learning of children.

What if we #occupytheclassroom?

Things I Know 242 of 365: Now is a teachable moment

The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic,and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and oppression.

– Gene Sharp

My brain has been playing the “What if…” game with #occupywallstreet since I learned about the movement as things were getting underway.

It isn’t a game of “What if the movement succeeds?” or “What if things get out of hand and go terribly wrong?”

It has been a game of “What if I were teaching right now?”

When I was in high school, Mrs. Henning-Buhr taught a class called Literature of the 60s and 70s. It was amazing.

In order to understand the texts of the time, we first had to learn the history of the time – a history we didn’t know existed as our American history class barely made it past WWII.

That semester was when I learned about The Chicago 8, Kent State, the 1968 Democratic Convention, Vietnam, and so much more

Though I know she had them, I don’t remember Mrs. Henning-Buhr ever pushing her views of the events on us one way or the other.

She gave us the space to examine the history and draw our own conclusions. Some of the richest debates of my high school career happened in that class as I listened to the evangelical Christians and the stoners argue what was “right” after both groups read the same texts.

I don’t want to be in the classroom right now in order to influence kids’ thinking one way or another about what’s going on in urban centers all over the country.

I want to be in the classroom right now to encourage kids to think one way or another.

In between sleeping and being a student, I’ve been clipping artifacts I’d use if I were designing a unit around #occupywallstreet.

First, I’d show this e-mail that showed up in my inbox yesterday declaring Netflix’s decision to stay, well, Netflix. We’d talk about it’s purpose and brainstorm whatever questions we could around what process led to that e-mail.

Then, we’d read this piece from the New York Daily News reporting FOX’s resurrection of Family Guy years after the show had been canceled. Our questions about the process would take their place alongside our questions about netflix.

Next, we’d read this piece by Cord Jefferson over at GOOD who took the time to sample and analyze the trends present at the #occupywallst tumblr. Again, questions.

Next, we’d take a look at John Titlow’s piece on ReadWriteWeb about Google handing oner a Wikileaks volunteer’s gmail data sans search warrant. If you’re not seeing the trend here, you’re not paying attention. More questions would line the walls.

Finally, we’d take a look at this note my friend David posted to his Facebook wall as an open letter to the Wall Street occupants. Again with the questions.

From there, we would devise a plan for finding answers to our questions. As more resources were uncovered, we’d tag, share or tweet them. Then again, maybe we’d come up with something better. As we amassed information in answer to our questions, we’d realize the need for someplace to put it all – a place to share the learning.

Every other day or so, we’d take a look at our answers, pause and attempt to draw some sort of connection between everything we’d found and begin to devise hypotheses of cause and effect. We’d write, record and talk – sharing everything and inviting comments from the world.

We would make meaning of history as it happened around us.

Not for the politics of it, but for the history, it is incumbent upon us to teach what is happening.

If our students join in, we must make certain they know why.

If they rally against, we must help them find their reasons.

If they propose a better way, we must help them inform their understanding.

#occupythought

Things I Know 241 of 365: We’ve been talking about this for a while

There is no book I know of that shows so well what a free and humane education can be like, nor is there a more eloquent description of its philosophy.

– Herbert Kohl on The Lives of Children

For A-107 this week, we read a few chapters from George Dennison’s The Lives of Children. Dennison writes about the pedagogy and practice of The First Street School. I’ve read the book before as part of my teacher preparation, but haven’t visited it since then.

I’m glad I did.

It reminded me how beautiful the relationships between caring adults attending to the needs of children caring teachers attending to the needs and personhoods of students can be.

It also left me a bit saddened.

Dennison was writing 50 years ago about what schools can be and how we can most humanely treat children. He was writing half a century ago and still we have stories of school-regulated caste systems based on test performance. And so, I thought it important to type up and stow away some of the bits and pieces of Dennison that resonated most with me as I read. I’ll archive them in the cloud and pull them out when I need to be reminded of what we can do and how we can care for kids.

The closer one comes to the faces of life, the less exemplary they seem, but the more human and the richer. (p. 5)

Learning, in its essentials, is not a distinct and separate process. It is a function of growth. (p. 5)

We might cease thinking of school as a place, and learn to believe that is is basically relationships: between children and adults, adults and adults, children and other children. (p. 7)

We did not give report cards. We knew each child, knew his capacities and his problems, and the vagaries of his growth. This knowledge could not be recorded on little cards. The parents found – again – that they approved of this. It diminished the blind anxieties of life, for grades ha never meant much to them anyway except some dim sense of problem, or some dim sense reassurance that things were all right. (p. 8)

They had discovered each other – and had discovered themselves – in more richly human terms. (p. 11)

Motivated, of course, means eager, alive, curious, responsive, trusting, persistent; and its not as good a word as any of these. (p. 13)

Rousseau: The most useful rule of education is this: do not save time, but lost it. (p. 13)

Now what is so precious about a curriculum (which no one assimilates anyway), or a schedule of classes (which piles boredom upon failure and failure upon boredom) that these things should supersede the actual needs of the child? (p. 17)

…by accepting her needs precisely as needs, we diminished them; in supporting her powers, in all their uniqueness, we allowed them to grow. (p. 18)

But let me replace the word “freedom” with more specific terms: 1) we trusted that some true organic bond existed between the wishes of the children and their actual needs, and 2) we acceded to their wishes (though certainly not to all of them), and thus encouraged their childish desiring to take on the qualities of decision-making. (p. 21)

We read of statistics and percentages, and are told that learning is the result of teaching, which it never is and never was. We hear of new trends in curriculum and in the training of teachers, and of developments in programmed instruction – of everything, in short, but the one true object of all this activity: the children themselves. (p. 33)

School was not a parenthesis inserted within life, but was actually an intensified part of life. (p. 33)

Why is it, then that so many children fail? Let me put it bluntly: it is because our system of public education is a horrendous, life-destroying mess. (p. 74)

It can be stated axiomatically that the schoolchild’s chief expense of energy is self-defense against the environment. When this culminates in impairment of growth – and it almost always does – it is quite hopeless to reverse at the trend by teaching phonics instead of Look-Say. The environment itself must be changed. (p. 80)

Would growth be possible – indeed, would there be a world at all – if the intake of the young were restricted to those things deliberately offered them by adults? (p. 83)

We cannot raise children to be free men by treating them like little robots; we cannot produce adult democrats by putting children in lock step and placing all decisions in the hands of authorities (p. 88)

I know that in the course of our lessons I committed errors and God knows how many omissions, yet this physical base was so important and so reliable that it provided all kinds of leeway. It took the sting (though not the seriousness) out of my rebukes, it expressed a concern I could not have put into words, it gave a reality and continuity to sessions which were sometimes of the most ephemeral content. If one single formula were capable of curing the ills of our present methods of education, it would be this physical formula: bring the bodies back. (p. 169)

Dennison, G. (1999) The lives of children: The story of the First Street School. New York, NY: Boynton/Cook

Things I Know 240 of 365: I wrote with the world

The world and I wrote a paper Friday.

By midnight tonight, I’m to submit my Theory of Learning for A-341 Supporting Teachers for Instructional Improvement. I’d been resisting the writing of the paper. After railing against the silver-bullet approach to education, sitting down to distill my beliefs into a single theory lived in a hypocritical room of my brain.

The temptation was strong to submit a Word doc containing only a link to this space, but that steps outside the bounds of the assignment requirements.

Two weeks ago, I asked 5 people to take a look at the first few pages of a rough draft of the paper. I’d written it up in Google Docs and shared it out.

Friday, I needed to get down to business. I wasn’t going to face a long weekend with an assignment hanging over my head the entire time.

I sent out this tweet and started writing:

Before long, other folks from wherever had jumped into the doc and started lurking. A few left comments on my friends’ comments. My friends, either from the doc or via e-mail, responded to the comments.

I kept typing.

Dan Callahan, who’s about as fine a teacher and person as you’re likely to meet, retweeted:

Google Docs let me know as more people joined me in the doc.

I kept typing.

As I neared the end, this message popped up in the doc’s chat window:

On the other side of the world, a teacher I didn’t know was reading my thinking as I cobbled thoughts together. Even more, she was moved to interact. We talked about our experiences in modeling and eliciting passion from students and shared a bit about our backgrounds. I learned her name is Jo:

I told her the doc would remain live as long as Google let it be so and that the copy would be posted here. I offered to brainstorm with her and her teaching partner if they’d like – to continue connecting.

And then she left.

I kept typing.

The difference at that point was huge.

I’d been putting together a theory of learning based on the ideas that:

  • Students learn best when they are in an ethic of care.
  • Students learn best when they know something about what they are learning.
  • Students learn best when the learning situation has real stakes and is challenging.
  • Students learn best when the learning is playful.

I’d been professing all of this to complete an assignment that initially spoke only to the second tenet. I knew a little bit of where I spoke.

The rest, as a student, I created.

As soon as I invited my friends, those whose minds and passions inform my thinking, I chose to surround myself in an ethic of care. In the initial stages of the rough draft, my sister Rachel watched from Missouri as I typed in Somerville. She offered encouragement and asked prodding questions. What I was saying mattered to someone other than me.

Each time Bud or Ben or Debbie pushed back, my learning was more playful. Every comment in the spirit of “What about X?” was an intellectual chess move asking me to refine my process and play with my thinking more deeply.

As soon as Jo entered the chat and asked if she could use a piece of thinking that was being created as she typed, the stakes became real for me. What was otherwise to languish as another artifact of academia destined for the eyes of a professor and teaching assistant was transformed into a guide of practice that would, in some way, affect the learning of children half a world away.

Unless a teacher is completely out of touch with his students, an assignment is likely to connect to students’ previous learning and fulfill my second tenet.

The other three, though, they take work. I write this as a teacher and a student – that work makes all the difference.

Things I Know 239 of 365: My idea is good, and I like yours better

The focus of Improv leads to conversers being present, meaning they exist in the here and now. The acceptance in Improv leads to the speakers’ connection, meaning each becomes part of a co-creation team. The distance between the communicators is thereby no longer a gap to be closed. It becomes a connector, filling the space between bodies like a see-saw connects the two riders on either end. Each is dependent on the other for flow and movement. This synchronicity of focus and acceptance is what results in full body listening.

– Izzy Gesell

We sat in the breakout section of one of my courses yesterday. Once per week, small sets of students from the course sit with Teaching Fellows from the class to look into the readings and ideas of the week more completely than we’re able to in a larger lecture class. For an hour-and-a-half, we delve more deeply. Not quite a study group, the time still pushes my thinking.

Thus far, it’s been a way for me to better hear the plurality of views in the room.

Yesterday’s was the first of of the student-led sections. In pairs, we each have a week during which we’re responsible for leading 45 minutes of the conversation.

Yesterday’s leaders reminded me of one of the more difficult rules of improvisation, “My idea is good, and I like yours better.”

We each took three notecards.

On each card we wrote a quotation from or question inspired by the readings.

When everyone was ready, someone in the group started by stating their question and throwing the corresponding card into the center of the table (whether what was written on the card was relevant or not).

Whoever responded did so and threw one of their cards into the center of the table.

Conversation continued according to this system.

If there was a lull, someone would read a fresh question from the cards remaining in their hands.

If you ran out of cards, yours became a job of listening.

Often, people had selected quotations that could easily shift and be re-purposed to fit into the flow of the conversation.

Sometimes, though, the cards and what people wanted to say were out of sync. In these moments, folks were faced with a choice.

Enter, the rule of improv.

In grad school, like any other school (or any meeting of more than one person, really) conversations are often peppered with unrelated remarks. Though I’m as guilty as the next person of occasionally moving things to my point rather than appreciating and building off of others’. It’s a tough skill and not something completely in line with rugged individualism.

Yesterday’s process required us to make some choices. We were forced to evaluate which of our thoughts was worth sacrificing in exchange for access to the contribution – “My idea is good, and I like yours better.”

In an improv scene, two people enter a scene, often with only a single word as a suggestion, with the purpose of building of a narrative that looks effortless. In good improv, Person A will speak a line and Person B will edit whatever was about to come out of his mouth and speak to build on the idea of Person A.

In great improv, the whole process takes a fraction of the second and the audience has no idea.

It’s not a negating of a person’s idea, but a shifting of purpose. I could cling to my idea or I could work to build up another person’s equally valid proposition. If it’s about good ideas and the building of understanding, my plan can easily be abandoned so long as we’re building something.

And, if there’s a fire to my idea and what I’ve written on my cards is imbued with passion and inquiry – then I spend that card as is.

This is something we could do well to teach the children in our care, the adults at our sides and, most importantly ourselves.

Things I Know 238 of 365: Small schools’ve got moxy

Results showed that smaller, more personal learning environments and strong, caring bonds between students and adults can increase graduation rates dramatically.

– Bill Gates, Jr.

Growing up, I never thought of myself as attending a small school. We were country, sure, but the 50-some members of my graduating class and I were never cognizant of our small school status.

Though the Shadow Secretary of Education has lost patience with small schools, I’m still in this fight.

In the end of whatever the fight may be, it’s the small schools that will be around anyway.

Small schools are scrappy. Small schools are nimble. And, small schools see kids. In the interest of avoiding any claims I’m making a molly coddler’s case, we’ll ignore the idea of seeing kids as being key to strong and effective schools.

Let’s don our navy blazers with brass buttons and talk all business-like for a few moments.

Small businesses are scrappy. They run on lean budgets and are driven by market forces to find the niche demands of clients.

Nestled away in a side street here in Cambridge, is a shop the shape of a hallway that sells goods of India – fine textiles and curios among other things.

And they’ve been their for years, connected to and dependent on the other shops around them, offering something their peers cannot – filling a unique need.

Small schools do this too. Built around a magnet program, a unique pedagogy or a partnership with a local institution, small schools can build an infrastructure of school choice and specialization unmatched by lumbering industrial schools.

Small schools do not lumber.

They are nimble.

Howard Hughes’ infamous Spruce Goose flew only once and then at only 70’ for less than a mile. After that:

A full-time crew of 300 workers, all sworn to secrecy, maintained the plane in flying condition in a climate-controlled hangar. The crew was reduced to 50 workers in 1962, and then disbanded after Hughes’ death in 1976.

Such is the case of most industrial schools. Built in times of great conflict, many flew only once, if that, and then never as high as was hoped.

In each of the small public schools I’ve taught in, moves to adjust to the needs of both students and teachers were quick, exact and effective.

A student causing problems across classes was discussed among a teaching team, suggestions were made, and a plan was put in place. Rather than falling deeper and deeper into the chasm of neglect present in many industrial school, students were caught early and supports were put in place.

When school-wide reading strategies were the identified need, teachers read the same texts together, discussed what they found and began implementing – comparing results along the way. The resulting shared language around curriculum found its genesis in the examined texts, but was shaped by the school community to build a coded language of literacy owned by all faculty.

Busy meeting the needs of all wings and factions, industrial schools are constantly preparing for takeoff, let alone worrying about how they might turn, should the course be wrong once they’re aloft.

Small schools are imperfect. Resources are often at a scarcity. Faculty members often juggle several roles.

Still, their scrappiness, nimbleness and ability to more clearly see the children in their care make them better places for learning.

In an network of small public schools, proponents of school choice who often bemoan the lack of options would find the answers and educational affordances for which they are searching.

Let’s build those.