Category: Post-A-Day

92/365 Teachers Should Probably be Readers

The same way that we must want for adults what we want for students, we must do as adults what we would like students to do.

Particularly – reading.

In the schools we need, teachers not only encourage literacy and learning, but they participate in it themselves as well.

Every school has one teacher who can point to the filing cabinet drawer when you walk into her room. “That drawer,” she will tell you, “has eighth grade in it.” Pointing to the other drawers, she will explain that the lesson plans and overheads for other years are all stocked away in the even that she be moved to teach another grade the next year.

Sadly, many schools have many versions of this teacher.

The high-tech version of this teacher can point to the flash drives with text files and powerpoints archived across grade levels.

Teachers must seek and engage in reading for the same reason we want our students to read – to find new ideas, challenge old ideas, and build on what they already know.

Admittedly, given the papers that need grading, the lessons that need planning, and the resources that need creating, picking up a book about teaching is not the sexiest of out-of-school activities. The right books, though, could mean finding new practices that alleviate the load of traditional teaching.

While toolkit books that preach this or that newest “best practice” can be helpful for a quick top-off when teachers are struggling to figure out how to make their next units of study interesting, they aren’t the best reading. These books are the paperback romance novels of the education world. They offer quick escapes from the problems of practice and don’t ask their audiences to think too much about what’s happening or why.

The education books worth the time it takes to read them, engage teachers in thinking about why and how they do what they do in their classrooms or other learning spaces. Like the best literature, they are complex, thought-provoking, and devoid of easy answers. Readers must also do the work. Dewey, Friere, Lawrence-Lightfoot, Holt, Dweck and many more present ideas about education and schools that ask us to evaluate our preconceptions and remain open to the new worlds they would have us create through out practice.

Admittedly, the time crunch mentioned above is a barrier to teacher reading in the same way the hyper-scheduled student struggles to find time to read anything other than the chapters assigned by his teachers.

Schools can help here:

  • Interested faculty can organize a reading group that meets regularly over a common planning period, after school, or during lunch.
  • In spaces where common interest cannot be mustered, teachers can turn to online spaces like goodreads.com for communities of readers, book suggestions, and conversations about what they read.
  • School leaders who understand the value of common language in building culture can ask faculties to study texts they’ve selected as speaking to the mission, values, and goals of a school in order for all concerned to build an understanding of the common vision of the space.
  • Ten minutes of every faculty meeting could be opened up to faculty members sharing pieces of something they’ve read in the interim since the last time everyone got together.

If we want schools to be temples built to the exchange of ideas, we must create the spaces necessary for those exchanges and we must be constantly working to access, synthesize, and consider new ideas. Reading, though not the only way to access these ideas, can be a strong gateway drug for learning.

91/365 What if Teachers Acted Like Students? #YearAtMH

I’ve been asked by Sam Chaltain to contribute to the conversation over at EdWeek around the series A Year at Mission Hill. I’ll be offering a take on each episode and interpreting some of the research that might be relevant and trying to make it practical. This piece was originally posted at EdWeek.

To many progressive educators, answering the opening question to Chapter 3 of A Year at Mission Hill is as easy as turning to the father of progressive education, John Dewey.

To Dewey, the mind is brought to life through experiences, and more specifically, experiences that foster continued curiosity.

“There is an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education,” Dewey wrote in his 1938 work Experience & Education, and this has been the guiding principle of progressive education efforts ever since.

Just as important to curating actual experiences for students, teaching and learning must focus on building on the curiosity of students as they move forward.

We see this in the work of Mission Hill teachers as they introduce their students to the natural sciences and the study of the world around them.

Sometimes, it can be as simple as looking, and asking a question.

In his book Making Learning Whole, David Perkins describes a kindergarten teacher who plays the “explanation game” with her students. As they examine an abstract painting, the teacher asks her students, “What do you notice?” and follows those answers with “What makes you say that?”

To many, this approach will bear a remarkable resemblance to the opening steps of the scientific method – and it should. Curating learning experiences that augment students’ curiosities about the world is as simple as asking them to take note of the world around them, explain why they said what they said, and then taking it a step further to develop and work to answer the new questions these observations raise.

In Place-Based Education, David Sobel urges teachers to “make your students’ experiences so good that parents won’t tolerate boring textbooks.”

This is a worthy goal, and I’d suggest it can be done one better, by making teachers’ and students’ experiences so good that they won’t tolerate anything less.

We see this as part of the embedded process at Mission Hill when its teachers begin their work for the year off-site and working collaboratively. As they plan to help their students experience the natural sciences, they themselves are surrounded by nature. As they plan ways for their students to work collaboratively and cross-disciplinarily, they themselves are working together and across disciplines.

Perkins writes that this type of engagement of teachers as learners and members of the learning community is key. “Remembering that the instructor is part of the team too,” he explains, “the instructor circulates all the time providing individualized guidance, a far cry from the sage on the stage model.”

All of this – building experiences, inviting curiosity, noticing the world, working beyond boring – help Mission Hill Teacher Jacob Wheeler achieve the goal he has for every one of his students.

“Knowing how to find the information and how to solve the problem is what’s most important for me,” Wheeler says — and Dewey would agree.

One final benefit flows from this approach. The language describing it embodies the work of Carol Dweck and her theories of fixed vs. growth mindsets. By asking students and teachers to notice problems, ask questions, and then take the freedom to work to find those answers, teachers help their students and themselves to develop mindsets of growth as learners.

Constructed in deep and vibrant ways, these experiences can have all members of a learning community asking Dweck’s question: “Why waste time worrying about looking smart or dumb, when you could be becoming smarter?”

90/365 Can Caring Change Classrooms #YearAtMH

I’ve been asked by Sam Chaltain to contribute to the conversation over at EdWeek around the series A Year at Mission Hill. I’ll be offering a take on each episode and interpreting some of the research that might be relevant and trying to make it practical. This piece was originally posted at EdWeek.

Beginnings are wonderful things, and Episode 2 of A Year at Mission Hill does well to capture the wonder and possibility inherent in the beginning of most school years.

Some years into my career, a veteran teacher was leading an introduction for all of the novice teachers at our school. She shared this piece by Irene McIntosh documenting the “ride” of first-year teachers. By the end of the introduction, I’d clipped the graphic timeline from the article and posted it on the bulletin board by my desk. While it claimed to be the timeline of a new teacher, I’d experienced enough first and last days to know the cycle repeats itself no matter whether it is a teacher’s first or fourteenth year in the classroom.

It was later in my career that I encountered the work of Nel Noddings and her study of the Ethic of Care in her book Caring. It seems such a simple thing, and if you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that’s what I’d been doing each day. I taught because I cared. Throughout her book, though, Noddings frames caring in a different light, and it’s one that’s important for any teacher hoping to maintain a sense of both anticipation and rejuvenation throughout their career.

Noddings describes caring as a specific relationship between two people – one that is caring, and one that is cared for. These two engage in a caring relation when the caring listens to and attempts to understand the needs of the cared for, and moves to satisfy those needs. The bond is established when the cared for recognizes what is taking place as caring.

This is key, and it’s evident throughout our observations of the classrooms at Mission Hill. It is not enough, not completely enough, to say we are caring for another person. That person must recognize what is happening as caring for the relation to be established.

How often have we teachers known the pain of caring the hell out of a student only for that student to ignore those acts and walk away? Humility lives in caring. It is the humility of listening to students and attempting to move our actions to meet their actual needs, not necessarily what we’ve identified as their needs. This is difficult.

Noddings puts it best: “The one-caring reflects reality as she sees it to the child. She accepts him as she hopes he will accept himself — seeing what is there, considering what might be changed, speculating on what might be. But the commitment, the decision to embrace a particular possibility, must be the child’s.”

Again, this is difficult work.

It is difficult, and it is deeply fulfilling. In that fulfillment we find the passion described by Mission Hill teacher Jenerra Williams as she advocates knowing each of her students well and thereby wanting to advocate for them.

This is the incalculable payback for those of us who teach. It is a reciprocity of care, and for many years it was what carried me through from August to June. It is not a reciprocity in the sense that we should expect our students to care for us in the same way that we care for them. It is more of a deep noticing and appreciation of being cared for that can energize us and that leads us to care again in the future. As Noddings writes, “In considering education, then, we have to ask how best to cultivate the moral sentiments and how to develop communities that will support, not destroy, caring relations.”

If we can do these things, then it is possible the nadirs in energy that can follow a bright beginning will not be so low.

89/365 Adopt Change at a School Zone Speed Limit

As soon as it was taken up as a tentpole issue for the champions of “21st Century Skills,” collaborative effort was destined to wiggle its way into the goals of any school’s annual planning for at least the first two decades of the 21st century. By 2030, we’re likely to be championing “22nd Century Skills.” For now, though, let us focus on the century at hand.

In the rush to adopt a practice of collaboration, many schools have set decrees and adopted protocols to ensure collaboration in actions if not in spirit. Lest a school’s culture – its leaders, its teachers, its students – has decided to own the effort of collaboration, practice by decree is sure to be mired in “almost implimentation.”

The schools we need allow for a school zone speed limit to taking up a practice of collaboration.

For schools having difficulties initiating collaborative approaches, the danger lies not in doing something new or different, but in doing something much more quickly than is comfortable to those responsible for the work.

While we are firm believers in learning the work by doing the work, this does not mean doing all the work at once and expecting it is all done well.

A school zone speed limit adoption method takes on all the practical implications of asking drivers to slow down when traveling through a school zone. Moving at full speed in these areas will mean they are not likely to fully appreciate where they are doing, and they will be much more liable to interfere or endanger the travels of others who are attempting to move through the same space.

The same principles apply to full-speed adoption of collaboration. Asking people to jump in to a practice of collaboration with full integration of lesson planning, peer observation, brainstorming, curriculum planning, etc. makes it entirely unlikely this newly adopted approach will not notice the small but significant details important to improving collaborative practices.

They will go through the motions of collaborating, as the drive will likely still stop at a stop sign, speed zone or not. They will not, take or have the time to reflect on what happens when they change this or that element of their practice.

A school speed zone approach to adopting a new practice and adapting a system to this practice’s inclusion might include the following steps:

  • At the top of each school-wide meeting, asking all teachers to share with those around them a single sentence explaining something they are working on with their students.
  • Asking for a group of teachers to volunteer to sit in on at least one of their peers’ classes during a week and to welcome others to do the same in their own classes.
  • The creation of a common physical or online space where teachers are asked to share questions and ideas relevant to what they are teaching or planning to teach with immediate means for others to offer answers and suggestions.
  • The allocation of 5 minutes at the beginning of every faculty meeting for teachers to stand and share those things they saw that they identified as good in a peer’s classrooms since the previous meeting.

The list could continue forever. Indeed, as a learning organization feels more and more comfortable with collaborative practice and begin to speed up, the list is likely to lengthen exponentially. It should do.

Slowing down, focusing on a few key elements of practice will allow those being asked for mindfulnes to see and reflect on the shifting of the organization. They will have the ability to refine these new efforts and the practice will evolve.

We can surely get somewhere as quickly as possible. To do so often means sacrificing safety and ignoring our surroundings. It’s possible, but rarely worth it.

88/365 We Work Together Because We’re Better for It

In a room filled with teachers of students from grades 6 to 12, the discussion is focused on the new direction for the school. On the table at the moment – the question of yearly themes and grade-level essential questions.

A teacher, not convinced of the need for either, raises her hand, “Why do we need themes? Why can’t we just trust that teachers will go in to their classrooms, do their very best for students, and help them learn?” The overarching constructs being debated sound look and sound a lot like further encroachment on the territory of teachers’ professional judgement.

“And,” the teacher added, “Isn’t me prescribing essential questions just more teacher-centered learning? What if these aren’t the questions my students have? Why can’t each student decide which questions are most interesting?” Again, the questions smack of contrivances and the undercutting of student interests.

Two responses are most key to this teacher’s questions. The first is general and free of considerations of the merits of her arguments. Surveying the room, every teacher, not the consultant who’s been brought in to facilitate the conversation should have an answer to this teacher’s questions. Each teacher should, to varying degrees of detail, be able to proffer an answer as to why this is the way forward for their faculty and students.

Without an ability to explain why what they are proposing is what they should be doing, this faculty, like many others, will not move forward. Rather, they will move everywhere. Without a clear philosophy of practice as described by Dewey in Experience & Education, this school (or any school) will not know why they are doing what they are doing, and they will not know whether they are doing it well.

Many contemporary schools are suffering both mission drift as well as theory drift. Some began with visionary leaders and teams who possessed clear, sound arguments for why they would do what they would do in a certain way toward the goal of teaching children. As time inevitably passes, more urgent matters erupt, and faculty change, that initial vision can become clouded or forgotten.

The hope, for this school at least, would be prior to ratifying any specific change of course, each member of the teaching community is asked to explain both what they want for the school and why they want it. If each teacher can do this, the future will look much brighter.

The second response is a direct answer to the questions posed. It has several parts. First, trusting teachers to do the very best they know is not in question. On an individual basis, some training may be necessary and some teachers may not be up to snuff. Themes, essential questions, and other boundary-crossing curricular elements mean creating pathways for teachers to do there very best together through the sharing, challenging, and iteration of ideas. Cross-classroom components build in space for teachers to do better by doing together. It staves off the siloed teaching of traditional classrooms and raises new questions.

Such elements also work to eliminate the false boundaries between “subjects” established by the traditional structures of schools. By working across classes to answer a question like “What is my role in my community?” students can come to realize there isn’t one answer, nor does any answer belong to a specific class or subject area. Citizenship, literacy, ethics, anything – these are themes and understandings that have implications across all areas of learning, and any question asked without considering all disciplines would be the lesser for its exclusion.

Finally, two pieces to the question of excluding student interests. First, to say teachers could work separately and each allow students to chase the answers to their individual questions rests on a key assumption. It requires an answer to the following: Does every teacher within this school have the practical and professional capacity to help each individual student in his or her care ask whatever questions of interest?

If the answer is yes, this school is unique in its capacity and should be captured for study. If the answer is the more likely “no,” then the students would be better served and the teachers’ stress greatly reduced by a team approach to drawing out curiosity and crafting experiences around it.

Secondly, there are issues we, as educators and professionals understand more deeply than our students. We have the “mature” knowledge as Dewey described it, and we should not free directing student learning in a throughout, goal-based way to help students become the citizens we need and intend. This rests on the assumption mentioned above, we must be intentional with our practice, and we must not fear nor be ashamed of our own expertise.

Working together need not sacrifice individuality. Providing for student choice does not mean abdicating a teacher’s responsibility to direct. There’s more complexity than an assumed dichotomy would suggest.

87/365 Get Together

One of the best things we do at SLA is get together. This is partially faculty meetings and the side conversations that take place there. It is in the happy hours and birthday celebrations, but it’s also more than that. Those gatherings are about the faculty. The best moments of getting together are around being a school.

In the schools we need, people get together.

It starts in ninth grade. About a month into the school year, a few dedicated parents of upperclassmen staff a bank of phones in the main office. They are calling other parents – the parents of the newest class of students. They are calling to invite them to the annual Back-to-School night. SLA has a BTS night as every school across Philadelphia does to welcome new students and parents and introduce them to the school, the adults and the building.

SLA’s night is different. While those parents are on the phone, they’re not only offering an invitation, they’re making a request, “Bring something to eat.” SLA’s BTS is also a potluck where each new ninth-grade family is invited to bring a dish, something pivotal to the family if possible. Things are better with food.

Our first year of the tradition, Chris was worried we wouldn’t have enough food. A few hundred people would gather in our cafeteria and all we’d have to offer is a cheese platter.

As families started to arrive that first year, so did the food. Everyone who was hungry ate that night (including the students who’d hung around after extracurriculars).

It’s not just the eating, it’s the cementing of community as well. Parents and students sit with the students’ advisers. These are the teachers in the building responsible for groups of 20 students as their crying shoulders, their advocates, their kicks in the butt for their four years of high school. Parents, students, advisers – they all sit together, share a meal in the din of noise in a high school cafe-gym-atorium and begin the get together that will be these students’ tenure in high school.

While they eat, those teachers who work with ninth-grade students circulate, introduce themselves and answer brief questions about what the upcoming year will hold.

Later in the evening, there are formal talks, people introducing themselves through a microphone, but this is not, nor should it be, about speeches. This is about getting together, talking, listening, and welcoming into a community.

Four years later, with many events and meetings in between them, this gathering finds its bookend. The obvious guess would be graduation. That would be wrong. Graduation ceremonies are for the students and their families. Everyone, dressed in their finest, gathers to recognize what may be the students’ proudest achievement to that point. We get together for graduation because we honor what these students have accomplished and the new journey they are beginning.

No, the bookend comes after graduation. The faculty gather together, walk a few blocks to a local restaurant and, weather permitting, sit under the sky alongside their colleagues who each knew these students for at least a semester, and close the chapter on the work of the last four years.

For teachers, this is as much a get together of grieving as it is of celebration. Many will never know where these students end up or what they do with their learning of the last four years. The teachers have done their job and they are now to prepare for the next class, the next back-to-school night and all the students in between. They share food, drink and memories. Some pass the hastily scribbled cards for students for whom they played a key role in the last few years.

These get togethers are as important to the teachers as they are to the students they will meet in the coming Fall. It is a reminder that they have done what they were charged to do, and that it is more than a job. It is also a reminder that time will march on and that this is not a profession for martyrs, but for practitioners.

Getting together, being together, is important in the life of a school. This is different from meeting or happy hour. It is a kind of formative and summative reflection for a community that plants a mile marker for the organization. “We are here, now, together, and we will acknowledge it and remember where we’ve been.” Without taking the time to get together, no group can go anywhere together.

86/365 We Must Practice a New Research

Time used to be that you knew what research meant when a teacher announced to the class that they’d be conducting it. The library would be reserved (God only knows what would happen if more than one group of students were in there at once). The librarian could be counted upon to deliver the perfunctory “Here’s How We Use the Library” speech. And, the class would be released to find the handful of books related to their respective topics.

For those in high school who took an old school approach, research also means a plethora of notecards – source cards, quote cards, outline cards. Cards galore.

It was a simpler time, a calmer time, and, quite frankly, a better time for notecard manufacturers.

Say research now, and any myriad of scenarios run through students’ heads. Maybe a library is involved. Maybe they turn to their phones. Maybe it’s a computer lab or laptop cart. Perhaps it’s both. If it’s the latter, an Internet connection is handy, but the options only open from there. Will students use the simplified per-for-use services? Will they Google? Will they plagiarize? Will the teacher catch on?

The possibilities are endless.

Research is different now.

The schools we need see research questions as “what” and “how”.

To accomplish this, they must work to make sure teachers know how to find felicitous answers in any landscape. This doesn’t mean another seminar on how to use the latest subscribtion database. Teachers are as likely to pay attention to the intricacies set out for them as students are. Helping schools be centers of research means helping teachers develop the habits of practice that help them to make informed and efficient decisions within an information landscape.

All of this should be driven by the same things we hope for students – inquiry and projects worth completing.

Schools working to become learning organizations are asking questions. Their teachers have ideas and questions as to what need be done to improve the teaching and learning of the space, and they are asked to do generative work that moves practices forward.

Teachers as researchers in the now are much more likely to be better teachers of researchers at the same time.

Presented with the staid practices of notecard-based research or any derivatives thereof, students are likely to notice (and rightly so) that they’re being presented with strategies that ask them to devolve what are likely highly complex methods for tracking down information.

Instead, we must realize we are beyond being beholden to what can be found from a single source. Hypertextual sources mean students are able to track from one source to another to another ad infinitum. Anyone who’s jumped down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia knows this to be true.

The “how” and “what” question is ever more important.

In helping students to be researchers, teachers must pose and invite inquiry around some key questions:

What information is relevant to what I want to know?
What information is irrelevant to what I want to know?
How will I know the difference?
What kinds of places might hold interesting knowledge about my questions?
Whom might I want to access to better understand my interests?

Some key components about these questions should jump out immediately. In a super-informed space, it isn’t only about what information can be found, it is important to consider which information is both relevant as well as interesting. When we were counting on the five books from the library, we needn’t discern between what is interesting and what wasn’t. It was a seller’s market and we took notes on every mundane fact we could find to be able to reach our page requirement.

Contemporary researchers are flush with relevant and irrelevant as well as interesting and uninteresting information. Teaching to make the distinction is key.

Books also held us to their author’s page-contained views on a topic or a journalist’s one-off article on an event. Contemporary researchers have access to people as well as ideas. In asking whom they might want to contact, students are more likely to consider how they might leverage social technologies to communicate with sources in real time. From email to twitter, students can publish a report Friday that includes information from an interview Wednesday.

Research today must ask better questions with respect to the “how” of the questions we’re asking. It must also allow teachers to practice the kinds of information-gathering and synthesis they’re asking of students. Such an ecosystem is one driven not only to ask complex questions, but to craft complex answers as well.

85/365 Experts are Necessary

In a conference panel presentation on the crafting of public policy and the policy discussion, the floor is opened to questions from the audience.

Throughout the conversation, mention has been made of how new technologies have opened up pathways for dialogue between policymakers and citizens toward the goal of a more democratic society.

In this vein, an audience member steps up to the microphone and suggests the possibility of crowdsourcing a policy on something like telecommunications or open government policies. “Wouldn’t something like this be the ultimate in democracy?” he asks.

It is a fair question given the direction of the conversation up to this point. The answer, though, is better than the question. It is a stark reminder that, despite the proliferation of information, some of us know things other people don’t.

“I’m not sure how that would work,” one of the panelist responds, “and I think it’s a good idea to remember there are experts on these topics who understand the nuance of these issues.” She points to two fellow panelists who have worked at the highest levels of city and federal government. “I’m glad that we have people like these to whom we can turn for these complex issues.”

In the schools we need, it’s important to remember experts are acceptable.

The most obvious application of this principle is to the role of teachers. In an infopresent age, it is tempting to suggest the death of the expert. When anything from auto repair to ordination can be found within seconds, the roll of the teacher could appear to be hazy. In truth, it has never been more important to bring precision to what we see as the place of the teacher in learning spaces. Those who have paid lip service to their rolls as “facilitators of learning” and “helping students on journeys of discovery” while retaining teaching practices that feature long lectures and worksheets will be forced to decide whether they pass their own muster.

John Dewey had designs on such a role in his thinking on education as he maintained the need for an authority in children’s lives as they learned to help guide them in finding questions worth asking and materials worth utilizing. Learners need experts.

Dewey’s other major goal for education – the crafting of educational experiences – is also more within reach than ever before. Tools and connectivity mean students can take on roles as junior experts in areas they find interesting without committing to a full journeyman model that has then apprenticing for nearly a decade to vocations that they’re only interested in as hobbies.

Here too, experts are valuable. They offer a bar for comparison as students mess about in learning experiences. These bars help students remember they are not experts after completing what David Perkins refers to as the “junior version of the game.” Yes, they’ve gained understanding and ability after participating in the aquisition and synthesis of knowledge, but there’s always more work to be done, and there’s always someone to learn from.

Experts are valuable in the sense that the panelists pointed out in response to the questioner. They help us to navigate some of the more complex nuances of the issues and problems we try to solve. They’re helpful in the classroom in helping to find the right questions to ask and in the organization of learning experiences. Perhaps most importantly, experts help us to understand what we don’t know in a straightforward sense and as a basis for comparison in our own development. The schools we need see and appreciate each of these expert spaces, and the adults and children in these schools know when to turn to experts as they work to turn into experts.

84/365 Collaboration Requires (formal) Space

Collaboration, as anyone talking about the evolution of education will tell you, is a good thing. Some will argue collaboration to be a 21st century skill as though civilization would have had any chance at progressing to this point had people not been collaborating for various virtuous and nefarious purposes up to this point.

As we have stumbled upon collaboration again, perhaps we could be more purposeful in its execution.

Nary a school leader will voice opposition to the adoption of a collaborative mindset in their space. Indeed, ask a principal if they want their teachers to be collaborating with one another and you’re unlikely to find any who say no. You are equally likely to hear multitudinous reasons why it’s not happening. Chief among these is some variation on, “Well, I’ve done my best to encourage collaboration among my staff, but they don’t seem to want to collaborate with one another or to take the time to collaborate.”

This is not surprising.

In the schools we need, we must not only encourage collaboration, we must make space for it.

Those same principals who lament the lack of faculty interest in collaboration are rarely mindful of the space they’ve created for such culture shift in their schools.

Proclamation of a collaborative spirit must be accompanied by both physical and temporal space for the implementation of that spirit.

To a principal it can appear that their encouragement has fallen on deaf ears. To teachers, this is often not the case. They have heard the calls for working together to design, execute, and refine new teaching practices, but they are left wondering what, if anything, they can let go to make space for such efforts.

Without the leadership and permission of ending certain practices, then principals’ encouragement to begin collaborating will be heard as asking to do more with less.

To foster collaborative spaces, schools must consider re-designing schedules in ways that allow the breathing room for teachers to work together without the pressure to complete other prescribed tasks. In some cases, this will mean keeping time on the schedule clear of administrative minutiae. In others it will mean moving to privilege teacher time to remove unofficial encroachments on things like duty-free preps or lunch periods.

If collaborative time is to be privileged within a school, then it must be prioritized clearly and without conditions in a school’s schedule.

Similarly, collaborative physical spaces must be designated within schools. These are spaces where teachers know they can go to sit alongside their peers, share ideas, and gain helpful feedback on what they are creating. These are spaces where school’s resources are aggregated, shared, and celebrated to encourage their examination and remixing by anyone interested. For some, this may sound like a school library. For others, it might be a faculty lounge. For many, it may sound like no space that yet exists within their schools. For all, they should be spaces that help to serve as a physical hub of collaboration.

A final space necessary for collaboration is actually that which principals try to create before or in spite of these formal temporal and physical spaces. They hope that some sort of amorphous collaborative space will happen within schools and school days. Such collaborative seepage will happen, but it will not happen if collaboration is not privileged beyond the messaging of a school.

Professing a collaborative atmosphere is one thing. Having a collaborative atmosphere requires the ability to point to the times and spaces where collaboration has been given formal space to grow and leak into the culture of a school.

83/365 Success Must be Defined by All

The setting is a familiar one. A teacher sits across the table from an administrator. Both have note taking devices in front of them. The teacher – a spiral notebook and a pen he found on the floor after his last class. The administrator – an iPad with stylus.

They begin their debrief of the lesson the administrator has just observed. She pulls up the lesson plan the teacher submitted the day before using the district-approved template.

“I noticed the learning objective wasn’t on the board,” the administrator begins after some small talk.

And we’re off to the races.

While several pieces of the above scenario are glaringly unsettling, the piece to be focused on is not even mentioned.

In the schools we need, the adults must be working from a common and co-created definition of success.

When our teacher and administrator and their real-life counterparts at schools across the country sit down to de-brief, they are not likely to have a conversation about what a successful lesson looks like in the eyes of each other.

As such, any debrief conversation is likely to sound much like each person talking about an element they saw as successful (or not) and the other responding by attempting to fit that element into their own definition or argue against its importance.

A favorite question to ask school and district leaders at the top of any school year is, “What are three things you would like to achieve in order to count your school or district as successful this year?”

For most, such a frank and open question is met with a long non-answer that ends with, “all children being successful.” If we’re really lucky, they’ll also throw in “lifelong learners.”

Learning spaces that engage in conversations about their definitions of success are doing more than setting goals, they are setting culture as well. As Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Richard Elmore says, “Language is culture.”

By defining success together, administrators and teachers sidestep a language imbalance where discussions of teaching and learning are loaded with the language of administrators and result in teachers attempting to translate what they do into that language. Such unequal conversations are classroom-level instances of educational colonialism where the teachers are the colonized.

Instead, imagine a meeting at the close of a school year where all of the adults in the school sit together and are asked to write their responses to two questions:

  • Were we successful this year?
  • What makes you say that?

Two simple questions with the ability to uncover great swaths of unspoken cultural beliefs within the organization.

Move forward to the re-convening of the school the next Fall. Rather than standing in front of those assembled and speaking to them as though the year ahead and the people it will include are wholly separate from the previous school year, the principal returns to the questions with which the school concluded that last year.

“Here is how we defined success last year,” she says and distributes a listing of people’s anonymous responses grouped by similarities. “The question we must decide moving forward is, “How will we, as a learning organization, decide to define success this year?”

From there, the hard work begins of moving from a group of adults tacitly assuming they’re working toward the same measures of success to explicitly stating the standard toward which they will be working that year. Uncovering assumptions is a difficult and sometimes painful task. It may result in some teachers realizing their visions of success do not align with the goals of the school and thereby asking them if they are willing to re-align their definitions or asking if it is time for them to find another community better-synced with their beliefs.

The difference here is the co-creation of success and the ownership of all adults of the definition.

Returning to our teacher and administrator de-brief, imagine the conversation they are able to have and the language they will share as a result of their shared definition of success. Imagine the democracy of such a school.