Category: epm12

Things I Know 292 of 365: There’s a party going on

Celebrate we will, because life is short but sweet for certain.

– Dave Matthews Band

I just arrived home after a day of prepping for writing my final papers across all four classes.

As it turns out, we’re hosting a party in my apartment tonight.

As I type this, people are playing acoustic guitar, bongos and harmonica to “Country Roads.” A guy outside my bedroom door just yelled into his phone, “No, it’s still going. Come over! Right! Now!”

Tomorrow, this will all be an ironic college experience.

Tonight, I’m going to go watch the craziness unfold with no sense of irony.

Also, my roommate is walking around wearing this. I want one. First person to order one for me gets mad props.

Update: There’s now an accordion version of “Wade in the Water.” When did this become my life?

Things I Know 290 of 365: Write a teacher a thank you, and you’ll make their day

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making some suggestions of possible sources of gifts for the teachers in your life. Some will be products for purchase. Some will be ideas of things to make. All of them will be meant to help remember teachers as worthy of thanks.

At each schools year’s finish, I gave the same assignment. Rather than asking my students to write about what they’d learned in the school year as part of some essay that would be far from cherished and not have the time for attention as our other writing projects had, I had them write a letter.

I showed them an manilla folder that travelled with me from my first classroom. “This is the good stuff,” I’d say. “These are the cards, letters, sticky notes and snapshots from kids across the years I’ve taught. On days when I get to the end and I’m pretty sure I’ve screwed all of you up, I read one or two of these. It helps.”

The folder now lives on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. I think of its position as the foundation.

Then, I told my students about Mr. Curry, and how he taught me math in high school and also how to be a caring teacher. I told them about the e-mail I sent Mr. Curry once I was a teacher and realized how much of him was in my teaching. I told them about how he replied and told me it wasn’t nice to make old men cry.

And then I told my kids to think of a teacher in their lives who was their Mr. Curry or who had inspired them or whom they’d like to make proud. “Write a letter to tell them how you’re doing and what you’ve learned.”

And they wrote. They looked up addresses to old schools, addressed envelopes, and sealed their letters inside.

If the teachers were from my school, I got to deliver them and watch as they were read. They were narrative report cards holding only the good stuff – moments of reminders that what they did mattered, and they hadn’t screwed the kids up too badly.

Do that this holiday season.

If you’re a parent, write a letter to one of your kid’s teachers letting them know just how much you appreciate and honor the work they do each day to help your kid (a complete stranger) understand a little bit more about the world and their place in it.

If you’re a teacher, write a letter to one of your colleagues letting them know you see how much they do for your students, your school and your faculty.

If you’re a student, write a letter to a teacher telling them how they helped you learn.

Maybe you’ll be the first entry in their Good Stuff folder.

Things I Know 289 of 365: In teaching, the simple is complex

And so from that, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.

– Will Wright

In working toward completion of a final learning task in which I design a learning organization, I’m re-visiting the reading from this unit of study.

In one 2002 Teaching and Teacher Education article from Judith Warren Little, I found this description of a comment made in a meeting of teachers. One teacher, Leigh, has asked her colleagues if the will all be implementing silent sustained reading uniformly across their classrooms. It stuck me that Little’s description of the conversation captures some of the richest conversations a teaching colleagues can have:

Leigh’s questions thus becomes the occasion for revealing differences in the teachers’ instructional preferences, and for negotiating what it will mean for the teachers to work together in “piloting” a new course. These are not mere matters of technique or procedure; fundamental issues of principle and purpose figure prominently in that negotiation. Further, these are no matters that could have been fully negotiated in advance. They arise in and through the work itself. As Leigh’s question is posed and modified, engaged or deflected, individuals find occasion to state their own preferences and intentions, locating themselves in a variety of ways in relation to the collective project of the group (piloting the course, developing this week’s curriculum), past and present relationships in the classroom (student choice), and the group’s way of being (decisions).

A classmate and I were talking today about the perceived disconnect between external perceptions of teaching and the internal complexity of the work. Little is describing four teachers faced with a simple question or whether they will all be practicing the same reading method uniformly in their classrooms, and she describes the complicated nature of the attempt to answer that question quite wonderfully. This is tough work.

Things I Know 288 of 365: A managerial approach can include an ethic of care

We fail to realize that the way we manage ignores the fact that very few people – and students are no exception – will expend the effort needed to do high-quality work unless they believe that there is quality in what they are asked to do.

– William Glasser

Glutton for punishment, I picked up William Glasser’s The Quality School by choice a week ago.

Until then, all I knew of Glasser was the ubiquitous table that ends with some variation of, “Children learn 95% of what they teach to someone else.”

It seemed a bit thin as a basis for evaluation.

The basic thesis of Quality thus far is the importance of doing away with coercion in schools as a system for managing students and for managing teachers.

For the less advantaged, boss-management both at home and in school is a double disaster: First, such students have learned fewer need-satisfying behaviors than children from advantaged homes, and they come to school both less willing and less able to do the work. This means that almost from the start they do not do as well in school, even though they are inherently just as capable as the advantaged students who do better.

Writing in 1990, Glasser throws around now-out-of-fashion terms like “boss-manager” and “lead-manager,” and that took some getting used to. Each time I pick up the book, I’ve got to remind myself he was writing in a time when we weren’t yet trying to disguise the use of business principles in education.

By coercing students, Glasser argues, we’re attempting to move them away from their natural tendency to meeting their inherent needs. This ignoring and subversion of needs leads to resentfulness in students. “If we attempt to manage people without taking their needs into account,” Glasser writes, “we will ask them to do things without considering whether or not those things are need-satisfying either now or later.”

Ignore students’ needs enough, he says, and you kill any chance of inspiring quality work. Oh, you’ll get work, but it won’t be quality.

And eventually, you won’t get work from those whose needs are most often ignored or marginalized.

I’m not entirely in agreement with Glasser at all times. That’s one of the signals I’m reading something worthwhile.

What I am digging thus far is the connection his thinking on management inadvertently makes Nel Noddings’s philosophy behind the Ethic of Care. Oftentimes, when I speak of caring to people, I’m heard as a touchy-feely sort who can’t speak in the register of results or blend the thinking of workforce with schooling.

While I’ve some definite issues with looking at the purpose of schools as workforce development centers, I do understand the need to speak the language of my audience.

If I’m not having to define each term as it leaves my mouth, I save time and manage a clear, cogent line of argument.

Adjusting for the 30 years since it was written, The Quality School, offers language of explaining an ethic of care to those speaking for a more managerial or business ecosystem. In that way, I’m finding it quite helpful.

Things I Know 287 of 365: Here’s where I’m from

I am from those moments–
snapped before I budded —
leaf-fall from the family tree.

– George Ella Lyon

As we closed out our final meeting of the small group section attached to one of my courses, we engaged in a conversation on the importance and shape of teacher autobiography. We ended with a writing exercise. I wanted to call Bud, because I knew how happy he’d be.

After brainstorming the sensory details we associated with our individual school journeys. Then, we looked at George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From.”

Our job was to re-imagine Lyon’s work filled with the stories of where we’re from. It was a beautiful task, and I thank my colleague Tracy for giving us space and safety to create and share. We began our time together this semester by sharing the basics – name, home, experience in education, etc. Tracy gave us a space to mark the end of our time together by, again, sharing who we are in a way that honored the intimacy inherent when a class becomes a community.

Here is where I’m from:

I am from tater tots,

from madrigal dinners and holding your breath in the boys bathroom.

I am from painted cinder-block walls.

(Covered in essays and coats of arms to disguise the normalness of it all.)

I am from chalkboards that wanted to be dry erase boards,

the pride of a strong FFA chapter

and knowing we’d be champions in meat judging

if not basketball.

I am from the safety of the choir room,

from Hemingway and yearbook editing.

I’m from the old guard who knew their duty to be sacred.

They’d taught our parents’ parents, and they’d teach us.

I’m from being sick the days we learned to use scissors,

and finding it didn’t matter because the teacher was right-handed.

I’m from scholastic bowl, Alanis Morissette’s debut album,

pizza that looked like it came on a giant saltine,

huddling around a speaker phone to interview a victim of Kent State,

being bumped a grade and then terrified as Mrs. Miller explained how she hated freshmen because they smelled –

making her laugh in spite of herself throughout that entire year.

I am from hallways and classrooms –

built by people who knew –

their hope and ours depended on knowing more than they did.

Things I Know 286 of 365: I wrote my purpose

You may recall one of my assignments for my School Reform course called on me to articulate my beliefs around the purpose of school. Thursday, I’ll likely be receiving the graded paper. Below, you’ll find what I submitted.

The What and The Why

“You’ve made interesting points in your writing,” I said, “I’d like to hear what happens when your points start interacting.” Before I set them free, I asked the students what a productive conversation would look like, and wrote their words on the board. I offered one suggestion, “If things lose steam, ask a question.” Then, they were on their own – a room of 32 high school sophomores left to discuss the themes of Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. If I’d done my job correctly, the room would be quiet for a moment. Then, the first student would dive in, “What I didn’t get was why they all talk so strange.” It wasn’t a question, but it was the necessary spark. We were off. Students pulled in the historical implications of the novel’s setting. Laptops flipped open to find what others had said and exactly where in Florida we were reading about. Students said things like, “Remember what we said about power when we read Lord of the Flies?” I kept my mouth shut, scribbling notes furiously. This task and successive iterations of it as I refined my practice came to embody my belief of the purpose of schooling.

Schooling’s purpose is to provide a space for practice toward mastery of literacy, numeracy, and citizenship embedded inquiry (Sizer, 2004; Postman & Weingartner, 1969). I am straying from the traditional early 20th century definition of literacy e.g., reading a book and writing an essay. Instead, I am referring to a person’s ability to access and create texts across myriad iterations and formats. Numeracy refers to those processes of mathematical thinking that call for the consumption and production of numeric understanding. It asks, “What do I need to understand about numbers to fulfill my definition of success and have the options I want?” This definition applies to the many iterations and formats possible within the realm of numerical thinking – taxes, price comparisons, musical rhythm. Citizenship refers to the habits of mind and action necessary to understanding, questioning, and furthering society. Finally, inquiry is here defined as the process of asking questions, devising answers, testing those answers and then refining one’s thinking by following those refinements with the next level of questioning.

My reasoning is built first and foremost on what I, a teacher – any teacher – cannot know. To quantify the unknowable I need only reference the infinite. No teacher has ever known fully this student or that student sitting before him in a classroom. He has only ever known those attributes and pieces revealed through the relationships he has cultivated with his students and the limited intellectual eavesdropping allowable through assessments he’s designed. He sees only the narrow pieces of themselves school teaches students to exhibit for display and public scrutiny (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2011). His students have remained more unknown than known.

While the teacher of the past may have made peace with this unknowability of students and their personhoods, he could take solace in a fairly clear map of the futures of his students. With few exceptions, he could accurately predict the paths down which his students would embark once they left his classroom and prepare them for these futures. The students may have been diverse, but their futures didn’t seem as such. My purpose of school finds its genesis in the fact that the paths down which students may embark are now as infinite and unknowable as the students themselves. The connectivity, globalization and immediacy of opportunities have taken away any certainty teachers may previously held as to the purpose of their work. All schooling can do is work to develop an understanding of societal systems in the moment as well as the actions and habits of mind necessary to adapt to whatever changes exist on the other side of the horizon.

The Idea’s Evolution

My time as a teacher and student most directly affected my thinking on the purpose of schooling. Exercises in literacy and citizenship such as the one described above were not the norm in my classroom throughout my first few years teaching. A strict focus on management of my teaching served as a placeholder for focusing on learning. When students asked why we needed to read the same book at the same time, I gave the answer my English teachers had given me, “The shared reading experience is an important one.” After a time, I started to reflect on this statement. Nowhere in my personal literacy did I seek out experiences where I read the same parts of the same books at the same time as 30 other people. In truth, we were reading the books together because it was easier for me and it was how I had been taught.

I always believed in the importance of those purposes outlined here, but it wasn’t until I formally returned to the classroom as a student that I became equipped with the language to articulate my beliefs. Minds like Theodore Sizer (2004) gave me words for my ideas on inquiry, “One thinks, one imagines, one analyzes those ideas, one tests them, and then thinks again” (p. 103). This was the road down which I’d embarked when stepping outside my students’ conversation and let them test and refine their ideas. These skills embodied the citizenship toward which I was preparing my students. To paraphrase David Perkins (2010), I was helping my students to play a junior version of the whole game.

Regarding numeracy, I was taught in the usual way – practice set, problems with teacher, homework and eventual test or quiz. This was how I understood numeracy instruction until I observed my teaching colleagues. To be sure, their minds were focused on measurement and estimation, but their practice was focused around rooting those ideas in the questions of our students. When introducing a topic, they opened by inviting questions or uncertainties. Those questions served as the goals toward which a unit of study would work. When time came for students to create projects to present their learning, they were much less stressful than I remember being because, as John Holt (1995) writes, “When we feel powerful and competent, we leap at difficult tasks.” Rooted in inquiry, the numeracy skills they were earning held deeper meaning and were immediately practical. They realized Sizer’s claim that “Education’s job is less in purveying information then in helping people use it – that is, to exercise their minds” (p. 84).

My understanding of the purpose of schooling began in my experiences as a k-12 student and deepened in my missteps as a middle and high school teacher. Those experiences were rooted in compliance, management and transfer. They focused on management of teaching and of student behaviors, yet they failed to invite joy and curiosity into the learning process. Not until I engaged in reflective practice and worked to align my espoused beliefs with my enacted beliefs and encountered those thinkers on whose shoulders I stand did I see how literacy, numeracy and citizenship could and should be embedded in inquiry to awaken the learning of all students.

What it Looks Like

The most accessible vantage point to see this purpose enacted is that of a student engaged in its practice. Our student, Troy, is a 16-year-old African American male living in an urban setting. He transferred to the Learning Center Mixed-Grade Charter Public School (LC) at the age of 12 from a traditional school in the district. He’d experienced some struggles with reading at his old school and his parents noted how distressed he’d gotten with school as he watched his peers move forward while Troy was placed in remedial classes.

Transferring to the Learning Center, Troy was most immediately struck by the fact there were no English, science, history or math classes – let alone remedial classes. Instead, Troy had a week of getting to know each of the five clusters within the school. Each day, he was greeted by a more veteran LC community member of a different cluster. That member mentored Troy and helped him understand the nuance of the cluster such the focus of learning for the International cluster (global agriculture) or the current project of the Media cluster (journalistic standards). At week’s end, Troy met with his faculty advisor and a member from each of the clusters to help him decided where he would like to spend that academic year. While each cluster representative assured Troy they’d be happy to have him as part of their cluster of roughly 80 students each, they also made it clear they were present only to help make certain he made the best decision for his own learning. When he returned to the LC the following Monday, Troy had decided to join Media.

This year, Troy is a member of Media again after spending last academic year as a part of Health and Wellness. He is two mastery projects away from graduation from the LC. He and a team from his cluster are working on a project about interpreting online advertisements that they hope to present to novice learners in the cluster as well as during community time at the end of the day to any LC members who are interested. Troy is responsible for gathering, synthesizing and then making easily understandable the data his group gathered around the amount of money corporations spend on online advertisements for children. In a brainstorming session, another student had asked, “How much do you think companies spend on advertising each year?” Troy volunteered to head up their investigation into advertising budgets as well as the science of psychology behind advertising choices.

Troy is happy with his selection because it has led him and his advisor to discuss the possibility of Troy completing a proposal for a children’s literacy campaign to present before city council as his next mastery task. Of course he will have to refine the task by first presenting it to his learning cluster and then the entire LC. During the presentation, Troy will be required to synthesize and explain his use of the literacy and numeracy principles expected of a Level 5 as outlined by the LC’s mastery rubric and handbook and established by each Mastery Standards Council. Troy appreciates the freedom he has in deciding how to show his mastery, but is also happy to have the guidance of his cluster’s 6 faculty members, including his advisor. He knows he won’t be allowed to advance unless all of his faculty members and 80% of the other students in his cluster at Level 3 and above agree he’s reached mastery according to the rubric.

Today, Troy and other community members who have reached Level 5 Mastery on their Learner’s Permits have organized a field trip to the local food bank to help stock the shelves and make some general repairs as part of a citizenship project organized across three of the clusters. One of the Level 6 students on the trip is also planning to interview the food bank director for her capstone mastery project on the factors influencing citizen philanthropy. Troy knows his sister, a Level 2, would like to come along, but she can’t because Level 2s are only allowed on adult chaperoned trips. Troy knows his sister is also jealous that Level 4+ are allowed to budget their 40 hours each week at the LC as opposed to the standard schedules for Levels 1-3 students.

Troy also has a meeting with the Level 3 Mastery Standards Council. Two representatives from each mastery level above 3 and a faculty member from each cluster have been engaging in the biennial review of the rubric and mastery standards required to move to Level 3. The council means a great deal to Troy because his first mastery project at the LC was Level 3. He was disappointed when his cluster had advised him to revise his presentation, but felt much better when he read all the positive feedback from faculty and community members. Troy found their suggestions for improvement in the literacy zone of the project to be particularly helpful in guiding his studies before his next attempt. He’d also been proud when he finished and had his Level 4 presentation approved in a year and a half. Reading was easier when he was surrounded by people who helped him understand how to get better and remain mindful of the successes he’d had in the process of learning.

Troy knows he wants to go to college when he completes his capstone, and thinks studying marketing might be an interest for him. At the same time, the work he did with the science of epidemiology during his time with the Health and Wellness cluster has piqued his interest as well. Troy’s parents are proud of the joy he has in talking about his learning in literacy numeracy, and citizenship.

Troy’s teachers meet daily from 8-9 before the start of school to review cluster progress, discuss individual students and organize the learning space to fit the needs of each cluster’s activities. The malleable environment allows for the creation of large shared spaces as well as smaller collaborative environments. Though sometimes frustrating, the faculty appreciate the standard of consensus in making decisions for the school.  They see it as an extension of their own citizenship as members of the LC and as adding value to their vision of schooling as providing practice toward mastery in literacy, numeracy and citizenship embedded in inquiry.

References

Holt, J. (1995). How children learn [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com.

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (2011, October 12). The ecology of education: Culture, communities, and change in schools. Lecture conducted from Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA.

Perkins, D. N. (2010). Making learning whole: How seven principles of teaching can transform education. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.

Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New York: Delacorte Press.

Sizer, T. R. (2004). Horace’s compromise: The dilemma of the American high school. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co..

Appendix A

Salient Quotations from Theodore Sizer’s Horace’s Compromise (2004):

p. 43 It is a new experience to make up one’s own mind.

p. 44 The supervised youth does the homework but may never learn the self-discipline that he will need in the future.

p. 48 Many adolescents parade their new sexuality. The choreography in a high school hallway during a break between classes is colorful, with awkward strutting, overdressing or underdressing for effect, hip swinging, hugging, self-conscious and overenthusiastic joshing, little bits of competition clumsily over expressed.

p. 50 Eighty years ago, most adolescents had far more sustained contact with both older and younger people than do today’s youth. The separateness and the specialness of adolescence were less attended to.

p. 51 They are impressionable, but also autonomous; the two are not contradictory.

p. 51 Franklin Zimring: “How do we train young people to be free?” he asks. “If the exercise of independent choice is an essential element of maturity, part of the process of becoming mature is learning to make independent decisions. This type of liberty cannot be taught; it can only be learned.” Adults can help this learning, in powerful ways, by example, by being honest, by trusting young people, and by giving them the compliment of both asking much of them and holding them accountable for it.

p. 52 In a word, we shouldn’t pander to youth. WE should show them respect by expecting much of them and by being straight – and part of being straight is telling them that they are still inexperienced and therefore must share their freedom with older people until they have learned the dimensions of liberty. (Learner’s Permit)

p. 52 Wise teachers and parents wait, explain, encourage, criticize, love and explain again.

p. 53 But the kid who’s fun to teach is the questioning one, the kid who wants to know why.

p. 113 Holding a student’s commitment requires convincing him that the subject matter over which he is toiling is genuinely usable — if not now, then in the future.

p. 105 observing-recording-imagining-analyzing-resolving

p. 103 One thinks, one imagines, one analyzes those ideas, one tests them, and then thinks again.

p. 94 Israel Scheffler, “Knowing requires something more than the receipt and acceptance of true information. It requires that the student earn the right to his assurance of the truth of the information in question.”

p. 86 The essential claims in education are very elementary: literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding.

p. 84 Education’s job is less in purveying information than in helping people to use it – that is, to exercise their minds.

p. 68 A sensible school would have a variety of means for exhibition – timed tests, essays, oral exams, portfolios of work.

Appendix B

Salient Quotations from Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969):

p. 1 To the extent that our schools are instruments of such a society, they must develop in the young not only an awareness of this freedom but a will to exercise it, and the intellectual power and perspective to do so effectively.

p. 11 Change changed.

p. 19 It’s not what you say to people, it’s what you have them do.

p. 23 Once you have learned how to ask questions-relevant and appropriate and substantial questions-you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

p. 33 The full spectrum of learning behaviors – both attitudes and skills – is being employed all the time.

Appendix C

Salient Quotations from John Holt’s How Children Learn (1995) [e-book]:

  • What teachers and learners need to know is what we have known for some time: first, that vivid, vital, pleasurable experiences are the easiest to remember, and secondly, that memory works best when unforced.
  • A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing. Why can’t we make more use of this great drive for understanding and competence? Surely we can find more way to let children see people using some of the skills we want them to acquire—though this will be difficult when in fact those skills, like many of the “essential” skills of arithmetic are not really use to do anything.
  • All children want and strive for increased mastery and control of the world around them, and all are to some degree humiliated, threatened, and frightened by finding out (as they do all the time) that they don’t have it. When we feel powerful and competent, we leap at difficult tasks. There are times when even the most skillful learner must admit to himself that for the time being he is trying to butt his head through a stone wall, and that there is no sense in it. At some times teachers are inclined to use students as a kind of human battering ram. I’ve done it too often myself. It doesn’t work.
  • I feel even more strongly now than then that it is in every way useful for children to see adults doing real work and, wherever possible, to be able to help them.
  • While this goes on, I say nothing.
  • Where the young child, at least until his thinking has been spoiled by adults, has a great advantage is in situations – and many, even most real life situations are like this – where there is so much seemingly senseless data that it is impossible to tell what questions to ask. He is much better at taking in this kind of data; he is better able to tolerate its confusion; and he is much better at picking out the patterns, hearing the faint signal amid all the noise.

Appendix D

Salient ideas from David Perkins’s Making Learning Whole (2010):

1. Play the whole game.

2. Make the game worth playing.

3. Work on the hard parts.

4. Play out of town.

5. Play the hidden game.

6. Learn from the team.

7. Learn the game of learning.

Things I Know 285 of 365: I’m thinking about next semester

Bores can be divided into two classes; those who have their own particular subject, and those who do not need a subject.

– A.A. Milne

Tonight, as I approach the midweek mark of my last week of classes for the semester, I started looking at possible courses for the spring semester.

As I’ve already said, I’ll be taking every course credit/no credit in an attempt to further focus on the learning and not the grades.

I’ve an overabundance of options moving forward. Here’s what I’m looking at so far:

Managing Change with Prof. Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Way back in the spring, just after I’d decided to enroll, I got an e-mail from my mom. She was excited to have made the connection that Kanter, one of her idols was a faculty member here. Add to that the fact Kanter’s work has come up in three of my four courses this semester and that I’ve used pieces of her research in my own writing, and this course is a strong contender.

Intermediate Statistics with Prof. Andrew Ho

My statistics course has been the dark horse of the semester. As John Becker pointed out it really is like learning a new language. For the first time in my academic life, I feel like I’m working toward fluency in a foreign language. Additionally, I’m truly enjoying looking at research from a different and more informed perspective. Being able to pull articles and reports apart to see what makes them tick feels great. That joy of learning puts this course ahead of most others.

Advanced Digital Studies in Politics, Policy and Media with Prof. Nicco Mele

If you’re reading this post, you’ve probably got a good idea why this course appeals to me. The fact that it is the advanced course makes me think it’ll challenge my current level of knowledge and broaden my understanding of how the tools I use to see and interact with the world are being utilized by those in neighboring ecologies.

State Education Policy: A Practicum with Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville

Particularly enticing in this course are the two words after the hyphen. I’ve lamented this semester the lack of opportunities to do real work and build things. Not only would the course build my knowledge around policy and the state, that knowledge would be built through practical application. That is enticing.

The Federal Government in the Schools with Prof. Tom Hehir

I’ve had the opportunity to hear Hehir speak on a few occasions since I arrived. Each time, I’ve been impressed with his candor and knowledge. He knows from where he speaks and is here to help share that knowledge. The course is also practical, which puts it neck-and-neck with Sec. Reville’s course.

Either way, I am required to enroll in any of the policy courses listed here as the final requirement of my program. Both Reville and Hehir’s class would fit the bill.

I can’t pretend I’ve seen all the options. In addition to pretty much any course listed here, the offerings of MIT and Tufts are also open to me. Enrollment is a ways away, and I’m open to any suggestions. What would you take?

Things I Know 282 of 365: Perhaps our strength can overpower our weakness

Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.

– Emily Post

As a teacher, I learned alongside my students. As the youngest faculty member in my first school, this was a mindset I brought with me fresh from my undergrad program. To most of the more veteran teachers, I was seen as idealistic and cute. My two years in that school were full of many “Yeah, but” scenarios.

Those weren’t the only voices I heard. Three other teachers, folks who had been in the classroom more than a decade each, saw something of value in my want to learn with and from my kids. Often and informally, I found myself in conversations with them about what we were asking students to do and why. When we saw things the same way, it helped build my sense of craft. When we disagreed, it led me to ask myself why I was making the choices I was making and if there was a better way. There usually was.

In that school, my community with those three other teachers was the counterculture.

The school ran on a mix of the Landlord & Tenant and General & Soldiers leadership archetypes as described by Quigley and Baghai in their discussion of their book As One. The power sat at the top and we did as we were told. In some areas such as curriculum design, there were multilevel hierarchies. For the most part, control existed at the top, and you got access by find a path to the top.

Quigley and Baghai’s 8 Leadership Archetypes:

  • The Landlord & Tenants pairing is based on landlords’ top-down driven strategy and power: they control access to highly valuable or scarce resources.
  • The Community Organizer & Volunteers archetype sits on the emergent axis, meaning that the power for setting direction emerges bottom-up from the volunteers and not top-down from the community organizer.
  • The Conductor & Orchestra pairing is based on highly scripted and clearly defined roles that focus on precision and efficiency in execution as defined by the conductor. The orchestra members, who have similar backgrounds, need to be fully trained to comply with the requirements of the job and, therefore, must be carefully selected to ensure they fit the strict culture and scripted tasks.
  • The Producer & Creative Team pairing is typically about producers providing their creative team with the freedom to do their best work and reach their natural potential. This pairing is led by legendary, charismatic producers who bring together a team of highly inventive and skilled independent individuals to achieve the producers’ objective.
  • The General & Soldiers pairing has a command-and-control-type culture combined with a multilevel hierarchy organized around the general’s clear and compelling mission. Soldiers’ activities focus on clearly defined and scripted tasks.
  • The Architect & Builders pairing focuses on the creative collaboration between groups of diverse builders that have been recruited by visionary architects to bring a seemingly impossible dream to life.
  • The Captain & Sports Team pairing operates with minimal hierarchy and acts like a single cohesive and dynamic organism, adapting to new strategies and challenges with great agility as they appear.
  • The Senator & Citizens pairing is based on a strong sense of responsibility to abide by the values or constitution of the community, which have been outlined by the senators.
What strikes me as odd, though, was the fact our principal avoided 9 of the 10 most common leadership shortcomings as described by Zenger and Folkman. That 10%, though, was enough to lock down the culture of the school. While there were pockets of innovative thinking occurring around the campus, little of that innovation ever grew to scale because teachers didn’t know how to get to the top of the structure. Once there, and in spite the clear vision and direction of the school, a rift of language existed between both sides in building understanding of how the innovation could help move the school in that direction or achieve our vision.

Zenger and Folkman’s 10 Most Common Leadership Shortcomings:

  1. Lack energy & enthusiasm
  2. Accept their own mediocre performance
  3. Lack clear vision & direction
  4. Have poor judgment
  5. Don’t collaborate
  6. Don’t walk to walk (violate their own standards for behavior/performance)
  7. Resist new ideas
  8. Don’t learn from mistakes
  9. Lack interpersonal skills
  10. Fail to develop others

And while I know Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie outline a decent path for leading adaptive work in their 1997 article “The work of Leadership,”  I’m left wondering if there’s an inverse to Zenger and Folkman’s work listing the 10 necessary qualities of a leader. If my evaluation of my principal is correct, and it took only 1 of 10 shortcomings to stunt the school’s growth, are their qualities of leaders that would balance out that shortcoming if applied?

For example, if a principle is “accepting of their own mediocre performance,” could extreme charisma and deep knowledge of pedagogy negate that shortcoming?

Every leader studied by Zenger and Folkman possessed at least one of the Top 10. If we assume this is true of all leaders, then shouldn’t it be true that those leaders who motivate fiercely adaptive organizations such as those Heifetz and Laurie describe to move forward and grow also possess at least one of those shortcomings? And if this is the case, what balances the equation?

Perhaps we don’t need to eliminate shortcomings. We need only make certain the strengths run longer than the weaknesses.

Things I Know 281 of 365: Schools should stop casually dating their teachers OR Why schools should be more like frats

Nobody very remarkable ever come out of it, s’far as we know.

– Thornton Wilder, Our Town

The more readings I complete for my courses this semester, the more it seems that American school systems see their teachers as short-term boyfriends or girlfriends. They invest just enough to keep the relationship friendly and interesting, but not so much as to risk vulnerability should the relationship go south.

While I am tempted to criticize this line of thinking as jaded or cynical, I stop short of it. The transience feared by many districts and schools if they invest too heavily novice teachers’ professional development was exactly what took place in my own career. My school district in Sarasota, FL invested thousands of dollars in my professional development as part of a pilot 21st century learning initiative. A year after the training completed, I was recruited away to teach in Philadelphia. With me went Sarasota’s investment.

Perhaps the district should have required a commitment on the part of pilot participants that they would spend a minimum length of time in the district following program completion to limit attrition to other districts. Even this seems implausible. I had no plans of leaving Sarasota prior to admission to the project, and would gladly have signed such an agreement.

Instead of shifting admission and selection practices for professional development, schools should stop thinking of professional development as casually dating all of its teachers and look for a model that better serves its purposes.

While the idea of teams as described by Richard Hackman in his examination of what makes a great team serves as a possible alternative, it lacks a specificity many schools would require for high fidelity of implementation. I agree with Hackman’s assertion of the importance of setting the conditions in which it is likely a team will work effectively and reach desired goals, and in applying this thinking to schools, we must consider the expectations for team membership. Specifically, how do we build successful teams that account for and accept member transience rather than working to play the odds of building a team around those members seen as least likely to depart?

In this space, I offer collegiate fraternities and sororities as models for the way schools should begin to think about their team members and how to support them. Such institutions are built around an acceptance of high annual turnover, the need to constantly pass on institutional memory, and build unique cultures attractive to a multitude of applicants in a system awash in options. Additionally, fraternities and sororities maintain loose networks across the nation and honor their individual histories while shifting to maintain contemporary relevance.

These organizations meet each of Hackman’s conditions for team effectiveness, account for annual turnover and allow for adaptability. What’s more, they thrive on what Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink identify as the three kinds of knowledge most common to leaders in Sustainable Leadership – Inbound Knowledge, Insider Knowledge and Outbound Knowledge.

By engaging all of these knowledge types jointly, fraternities and sororities create the kind of stability, boundaries and adaptability Hackman describes and set the stage for reversing many of the negative trends in professional learning.

What I want to know is how this shift in paradigm could best be brought about. SLA gave me a fair bit of this feeling. Though not a teacher there anymore, I continue to feel connected to the school and the people. I continue to feel a sense of ownership and stewardship in a way I might have if I’d rushed a frat in college. If this is how SLA was designed, how can an existing school shift its culture to bring about those same feelings of belonging?

Things I Know 279 of 365: School would be better if we weren’t playing school

We should also remember that children (like adults), and above all young children, know and understand much more than they can put into words.

– John Holt

My reading of John Holt’s How Children Learn continues to act as the water filling in the spaces between the rocks of other readings required by my course work. For all of the well-reasoned structures proposed by those readings of requirement, Holt provides a voice of contention, making the case for being people with kids rather than teachers.

He describes the type of talk you might hear from a parent talking through the process of tying shoes with his child. “And I suspect that most people who try to talk this way to children will have so much more teaching in their voices than love and pleasure that they will wind up doing more harm than good.”

It gets me thinking about the kinds of conversations I’m involved in throughout the week. I’ve started paying particular attention to the tones I take with professors and classmates and the tones they take with me.

When I’m speaking, I hear my voice as almost penitent. It’s not quite the same thing as respectful, but more a tone of not wanting to upset the order of things. In some cases, “gee whiz” is implied.

The tones I hear are distant and nice – “We are learning together,” or “I am going to teach you.”

Those aren’t tones I hear when I’m doing learning anywhere other than school.

Holt’s contention that these tones of teaching are doing more harm than good might be a bit inflated. That said, how close can we get to doing work that is real and meaningful if we are playing our roles rather than playing ourselves?

Holt brings his examination back to the topic of quizzing suggesting too much “is likely to make him begin to think that learning does not mean figuring out how things work, but getting and giving answers that please grownups.”

Right now, it leads me to more questions than answers. Are our teacher and student voices the products of assigning work too distant from the learning being done outside of school or do the roles and voices we put on to play school precluding school learning from being more aligned with life learning?