Category: Post-A-Day

82/365 We Can Do More than Admire the Problem

Building things is difficult. Building things with others – even more so. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in a conference presentation. Assembled in a poorly lit room with mean, uncomfortable chairs, professionals assemble, ostensibly to learn, grow, and take new ideas back to their home bases.

Ask those assembled to begin by turning to those around them and sharing their names, titles, and locations of origin, and you’re on the right track. You’ll get no argument when you ask for a few volunteers to share out what’s wrong, broken, or difficult about the systems in which they work.

In education, we like very much to do what my friend Kristin Hokanson once described as “admiring the problem.” If allowed to roam free, it’s likely an entire conference session could be dedicated to admiring the problem. If conference sessions don’t fit your context, imagine a faculty lounge at lunch break, faculty meeting, learning community meeting, etc. Any place professionals are meeting, it’s likely they can fill every cranny of a space with admiration of the problem.

Ask them to take a moment to consider a possible solution to that problem, though, and the mood will change. Perhaps more to the point, the mood will stay the same and the solution will be sentenced to death by “yeah, buts.”

No matter the research, evidence, data, and testimonials behind a solution, the “yeah, buts” will tumble out of mouths in an avalanche of negativity.

We are no longer simply admiring the problem, we’ve fallen in love with it.

In the schools we need, we must take a stance of “yes, and…”

“Yes, and…” is the fundamental principle of improvisational theater. Where no lines, no script, no direction are driving a scene actors must trust that their scene partners will accept what they say and do and immediately build off of it.

Imagine the power of such a mindset when someone presents an assembled audience with a teaching practice that has opened up learning for her students. Instead of, “Yeah, but that would never work for our kids because…” the answer becomes, “Yes, and here are the ways we’d need to tweak what you’re talking about for it to fit our scenario.”

Do not misunderstand, “Yes, and…” does not avoid conflict. Instead, it embraces conflict and builds from the difficulties rather than seeing the problem as the conclusion.

Another way to think about this is in the shape of the “barn raising” approach described by Don McCormick and Michael Kahn. Pointing out the stonewalling that can often take place in a college seminar discussion where all voices are attempting to be heard by means of either ignoring or tearing down those ideas that come before them, McCormick and Kahn suggest another approach.

They make four suggestions:

  1. The classroom battle is not a good way to teach thinking.
  2. Even if it were, it makes idea-conversation so unpleasant that students do their best to avoid it, in college and afterwards.
  3. It is a significant contribution to the building of a society of contention and enmity.
  4. And, as an alternative, there is another way to talk about ideas which obviates those difficulties.

McCormick and Kahn utilize the metaphor of a barn raising in which all parties are working to build something new and useful to the group. While each may have a different skill or task to complete, they are working toward a common cause of creation rather than destruction or limitation of the others. To be successful, all must be succcessful.

Both “Yes, and…” and barn raising take reality as their foundations. Both acknowledge the present situation or problem as the starting point for any work to be done. They find their usefulness in refusing to stand around and take into account all the factors that make finding a solution so difficult. “This is the reality,” these approaches say, “and now we will work together to build a new and better reality.”

81/365 Listen to Understand

Faculty meetings can be fascinating places.

Sit in the corner o f a faculty meeting of any given school, just listen, take a few notes, and you’ll be able to say much about what goes on in that school’s classrooms based on what you see.

Author Robert Fulghum writes about his time as a teacher and how he will go down in the history of his school as the guy who tried to kill himself with a pencil to get out of a faculty meeting. To be sure, in no other setting does a pencil present itself as a weapon as in a faculty meeting.

This needn’t be so. One important skill to put into practice for transforming school culture among faculty is to practice assuming positive intent.

Another tool, equally as powerful, and perhaps more important, is that of listening to understand.

In the schools we need, adults listen to one another to understand. They listen to the children with this goal as well. If what we want for students we must want for teachers as well, then it makes sense to begin with the teachers.

Listening to understand is not a new concept by any means. For many, it is as simple as Atticus Finch’s advise in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

This may seem like a long and drawn out process, trying to figure out all of the things contribute to a person’s thinking and then attempting to take on that perspective. If you were trying to do this for each member of a faculty, you’d likely retire before you’d completed the project.

Instead, listening to understand means marshalling the forces of focus and curiosity to truly hear what another person is attempting to communicate. It means hearing not only what they are audibly saying but moving from those initial utterances to questions that show that you were listening and want to understand at a deeper level.

Here, too, community will be co-created. Building understanding of those we work with helps us to understand how their goals, needs, and drives find common cause with our own goals, needs, and drives.

To listening to understand can take many paths, to get started, though, here are a few suggestions:

Look and listen. It’s commonly known that the majority of communication is transmitted through non-verbal means. If you were are truly listening to understand, you must listen with all of your senses. Pay attention to physical cues being sent your way.

Ask. So often, our gut instinct in conversation when others are trying to explain themselves or make a point is to react with a statement of agreement or disagreement. If we take an extra beat, consider the information we have, and ask the next logical question, then the conversation and our understanding will be all the better for it.

Say what you think you heard. In any line of communication, there is interference in the form of mishearing, getting distracted, or pouring our own thoughts into the process. By taking a moment to say to the person you’re seeking to understand, “Here’s what I think I just heard you say…” we open the path for clarification.

Listening to understand is different than listening to hear. While both are preferrable to remaining quiet until it is your turn to talk, listening to understand has the benefit of developing purpose that is specific to those to whom we are listening.

80/365 Assume Positive Intent

No matter the class size – from 5 to 50 – every teacher knows the experience of walking out of the building at the end of the day and thinking, “They were out to get me today.” For some, this happens more frequently than others. For some, it happens daily.

Somewhere in the teaching of children, the relationship sours, and teachers lose track of the fact that they teach individuals, growing, young individuals whose emotions and their ability to process those emotions are not fully formed.

Forgetting this key fact about the development of children can lead to another lapse of memory – that of professional perspective. This is the perspective that comes with our ability to stand back and recognize that no child is out to get us, that none of the thousand tiny frustrations throughout our days was set in motion by students’ willful intent to ruin our days.

This must be remembered if teaching is to be a sustaining profession which retains its members through the years.

To build the schools we need, we must do more than remember students are not out to get us, we must assume positive intent.

Writing in 2008 for CNNMoney, Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi described the benefits of assuming positive intent, “Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response. You don’t get defensive. You don’t scream. You are trying to understand and listen because at your basic core you are saying, ‘Maybe they are saying something to me that I’m not hearing.'”

Assuming positive intent in our students opens the door for us to seek to truly understand those forces driving those actions and words we would otherwise find frustrating rather than yelling at, punishing, and alienating students.

Assuming a positive intent does not equal assuming that all students enter our classrooms and schools with the intent of learning something new or reaching some new level of academic achievement that day. Depending on circumstances, the intent may be, “I want to keep myself safe and protected.” When students lack the socio-emotional capacity to say these things, their actions may present themselves as lashing out and degrading those around them. Assuming negative intent in these moments only leads us to compounding the problem and fosters a self-fulfilling prophecy that students may find unavoidable.

Assuming positive intent in these moments, asking ourselves what students may be attempting to accomplish through their actions can help us to bring the processing and reflective tools to the table that a student may be lacking in his communication. Sometimes, the most powerful tool is time and space away from the perceived problem.

Whatever the needs, assuming positive intent also builds a self-fulfilling prophecy that can lead students to new ways of meeting their needs that they had not known or considered possible before.

Assuming positive intent in students can be difficult. In a system that does not always build up its teachers or recognize them as professionals, there is almost a conditioning of thought that can drive teachers to assume negative intent to avoid the psychological wounds they may have suffered at the hands of the system.

To assume negative intent, though, is to further that system, to take a defensive stance that says, “I am not going to let you beat me,” when the more disruptive and proactive stance of, “I am going to listen and give you the help you need.”

79/365 Start Surplus-Model Thinking

They cross the threshold to our schools and our classrooms as complete people with lives, memories, and experiences embedded in their senses of being long before they begin first grade or fourth or twelfth.

We must, now, right now, abandon our deficit-model thinking about teaching and the students in our care. It must happen.

In the absence of such a model, we must not rest on the idea of students as neutral beings. Eliminating our assumption of difficulties is a start, but it is not enough. Agreeing teaching is not designed to overcome is only the first step, and it leaves us assuming students come ready for whatever we throw at them. Such a mindset leaves us ready to throw whatever we like at these empty containers of knowledge.

The schools we need operate on a surplus model of thinking around the students they serve.

For many, this will be a difficult shift to make. It will mean acknowledging that students come to us with more than we can imagine and more than we are able to comprehend. It will mean a sense of humility that will leave those who have been the kings and queens of their classrooms for decades in a difficult spot.

Still, we must.

We must understand that the experiences students have outside of the classroom are more complex than whatever we could hope to set in front of them. They are certainly more complex than worksheets and packets of practice problems to be completed by the end of the week.

We must understand the student who takes three buses to school and sets out before the sun rises has a greater understanding of systems thinking, motivations, academic preparedness, and internal locus of control than is likely to be taught in any civics or leadership class.

We must understand the complex narrative threads that exist in the communities of our students outstrip any put to page by Hemingway, Joyce, Dickenson, or Morrison. And, we must up our game.

A surplus model of education means understanding the funds of knowledge that Luis Moll et al. found when they trained teachers in sociology, took them into students homes and asked them to keep track of the knowledge that was important and active in these spaces.

A surplus model of education means looking at the work of the Institute for Democratic Education in America and recognizing that they are tapped in to educational organizations around the country who are doing right by the communities they serve.

This draws on another important surplus in education – teachers. We must recognize the wealth of knowledge our teachers bring to classrooms each day and free them to activate and implement that knowledge.

The teacher who is able to see that her students are coming to school hungry must be able to act on that knowledge and devise the creative solutions she knows will work by leveraging community partners to help her students access nutritious meals.

The teacher who knows that the district-prescribed reading curriculum is not truly helping his students become life-long readers must be honored by those to whom he answers so that he might help his students find this love of letters and grow into it.

The biology teacher who examines the scripted curriculum she’s been prescribed and finds it wanting compared to the experiments, expeditions, and inquiry she has in mind must have the freedom to pursue and implement those notions to make scientists of her students.

Our teachers and our students have a surplus of abilities and ideas simply by being human, curious, and present.

When we design systems that assume this surplus and operate on the belief that the people walking through our doors are capable and accomplished, what they will achieve will be awe-inspiring.

78/365 We Must Deconstruct Our Learning Experiences

Ask most any teacher why they became a teacher and more likely than not, you’re going to get a story of one teacher somewhere along their academic career who brought their love of their chosen discipline to life.

You might hear the story of the English teacher who instilled a love of great literature and deep readings of texts through the classics. Another might tell you of a physics teacher who illuminated the wonder of understanding the world by seeking its most basic building blocks or the math teacher who showed the artistry of balancing equations and solving for X.

Dig a bit more deeply, and these stories of “that one teacher” are likely to reveal hopes that these younger teachers can teach in the same fashion, shape the same experiences that led them down their vocational path.

It makes sense that a teacher would like to create the same sense of wonder they found in these classes for their own students.

This is not enough.

The schools we need teach not as teachers were taught, but as students need to learn.

For each teacher who found their path through the practice of a single illuminating teacher, there were likely dozens of other students sitting alongside who were left in the dark. For whatever reason – and they were likely myriad – what happened in those classes didn’t speak to many of the other students. While the English teacher was crafted into a lifelong reader and lover of words through a sharply focused examination of The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice, she must remember in her own practice that she is responsible not for uncovering the handful of students who will also fall in love with these texts.

She is responsible for opening up the world of letters to all her students. She is responsible not for convincing all her students to be English teachers or English majors, but for helping all her students find themselves in the pages of some text and being able to carefully consider what they find there.

This is difficult.

While we will often profess to wanting to help all of our students find pathways to learning, we generally create pathways that look much like those that led us to our own destinations. We find sanctity in trying to recreate the experience that were created for us by our own teachers. Perhaps not explicitly, but certainly implicitly, doing what was done for us is a way to honor our past.

The better way of honoring that past in the classroom is by building a bigger tent. We must pause, deconstruct our learning experience, no matter the subject and rebuild our classrooms and our teaching practices as hubs providing multitudes of entry points for any students willing to ask a question, voice an opinion, or challenge a long-held idea.

Such classrooms leave in intact those paths that led us from the teachers we learned from to the teachers we became while recognizing that these are not the only paths to deep, passionate, and lifelong learning.

77/365 Community is Co-Created

“I’m glad you didn’t observe me today,” a teacher comments, “We lost the lesson plan for 20 minutes while we had a whole-class disscussion about what language students thought was appropriate in class conversations.”

That’s a conversation worth observing. More importantly, it’s a conversation well worth having. Such conversations, and other informal, unplanned interactions between and among students and teachers are the only authentic way to forging community within the classroom.

In the schools we need, community is co-created.

Most any thoughtful teacher – novice or expert – will tell you they want their classrooms to be communities and they want their students to see themselves as community members. They have their students sitting in groups. They assign projects where students turn in work with more than one name attached to it. They mistake adacency with community, thinking that being in proixmity of one another is the same thing as community formation.

In staff development, administrators ask teachers to group together vertically, horizontally, by discipline – all in the name of forming professional learning communities. Teachers are asked to talk about the work in their classrooms, discuss students, revise lesson plans. Such a thing, though, does not a community make.

Communities – at least the communities these teachers and administrators are attempting to foster – are not created by fiat. While any number of things could result intended communities looking more like committees, there are a few conditions that are likely to allow or even encourage community formation.

In his book Facilitating Group Learning, George Lakey outlines several tips for living up to the text’s title. Perhaps the most important and oft-forgotten is the creation of space for disagreement or argument in learning spaces. He speaks to the need to understand that people coming from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds are also coming from different approaches to disagreement. When there is safe space for argument, there is safe space for community to be built and for members of that community to come to understand where their voice fits within discussions and what others’ voices sound like at different levels of engagement.

To assist in navigating conflict in the search for common cause is the work begun by Gordon Allport on contact theory (sometimes called the contact hypothesis) which states that contact with groups identified as “other” will reduce bias.

While much work has been done to expand on and examine Allport’s theory in the intervening years, his for components of theory stated the following were necessary for successful communication:

  • equal status between groups
  • common goals
  • intergroup cooperation
  • and authoritative support

It’s easy to see some of these in place in the scenarios described above. It’s also easy to note where schools and classrooms can easily fall down in their efforts to facilitate communication toward community.

Sometimes the work gets too hairy too quickly for those in positions of authority to be able to sit back and recognize that tumult is inherent in the forming of healthy group dynamics. Better described in the work of Bruce Tuckman, groups develop in stages commonly labeled forming, storming, norming and performing.

Classroom and school-level leaders see the first stage of forming happening at a relatively peaceful pace. Once a group enters the storming phase, though, many leaders mistake the train for jumping the rails. In actuality, this is a sign of the uphill trek of individuals figureing out who they are as members of the group. Finding new identities is never easy. If the difficult isn’t seen as natural, many leaders will change course, thinking they’ve made a poor decision. Thus, groups miss the chance of developing their own norms and, more importantly, performing the tasks necessary to reach their common goals.

The classroom teacher who is willing to throw out a lesson plan for twenty minutes of students finding their way to community hasn’t left learning behind, but has made space for a kind of learning often winnowed out of curricula in the pursuit of facts. The skills earned through the creation of community and navigating the experience of working with others are key not only to higher quality academic work, but they are the skills of the advanced citizenship schools should be fostering.

Learning Grounds Ep. 016: Dean Shareski and Creating Online Community

In this episode, Zac talks with Dean Shareski about the difficulties unique to attempting to create a sense of community in online courses compared to face-to-face learning as well as other unique difficulties in community creation in conference presentations.

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75/365 The Harm We Do to LGBTQ Students in the Classroom is Often Unintended

While we can see the academic identities our students craft and have had crafted for them in our classrooms, we must remember their student selves are not their whole selves anymore than our teacher, administrator, counselor selves are our whole selves.

There are other facets of our students’ identities we must acknowledge even if we cannot know them. One such facet on which schools have historically fallen down is that of sexual orientation of its students and their families.

The schools we need are spaces welcoming of students of all sexual identities.

Acceptable in schools (though arguably still painfully underexamined) are discussions of race, socioeconomic status, and learning differences.

To illustrate the point, consider the last time you heard or participated in a conversatino around race in a school. Perhaps it was within history class, maybe it was a discussion in an English course, or it could have been a variable studied in statistics.

Silenced are conversations drawing on anything other than an opposite-sexed normalizing of sexual identities of students.

In her book Dude, You’re a Fag, C.J. Pascoe examines how schools work to re-enforce heteronormative thinking and the othering of queer youth.

Describing the implicit curriculum, Pascoe describes the classroom of one teacher she studied, Ms. Macallister, as a “shrine to heterosexuality,” and explained Macallister’s use of language rooted in the assumption that all of her students could relate to examples of opposite-sex coupling and ignored relevant examples which might speak to LGBTQ students or their families.

“She instead reinforced, with the help of the students, a narrative of heterosexuality that depends on a similar age of the two partners, involves the state sanction of that relationship, and encourages procreation as central to such a relationship,” Pascoe writes.

Ironic, too, is the fact that many educators would likely claim to be accepting of students of all sexual orientations, even taking on the moniker of ally to signify that their classrooms are safe spaces. The numbers, though, tell a story that perhaps the enacted beliefs in schools are not living up to those espoused by these open-minded teachers. According to the 2011 GLSEN School Climate Survey, “56.9% of students reported hearing homophobic remarks from their teachers or other school staff, and 56.9% of students reported hearing negative remarks about gender expression from teachers or other school staff.” While it’s possible that none of these utterances was made by teachers who considered themselves allies of LGBTQ students, it’s highly unlikely.

Creating a safe space for LGBTQ students means more than a sticker on the door and a showing of a selection of “It Gets Better” youtube videos. It means thinking about the language we use in our classrooms, monitoring and discussing the language students use with one another, and considering the messages sent by the artifacts we use in our teaching.

Many teachers may point to the conservative views of local communities or discomfort or awkwardness around making explicit an effort to shift a normalized belief. The answer to these teachers must be, “Be the adult in the room.”

We must remember that we are often the most powerful force for keeping our students safe in the classroom, that each time we let hurtful or careless language or acts go by un-examined or un-challenged, we indicate tacit agreement. The message of that agreement does not serve our students, no matter their sexual orientation, it speaks and shouts that it is acceptable to other those in our community and suggests some people are worth respecting and others aren’t because we do not care to understand who they are.

For those not ready to walk into the classroom and have a frank and open discussion of sexuality, some need for time and reflection is understandable. The key, though, and the immediate step that must be taken if you are not ready to start tomorrow is to stop doing and saying things that lead any students to feel as though they are less than. That, we can all do today.

Learning Grounds Ep. 15: Darren Hudgins and Bud Hunt Talk Learning Design Challenges

In this episode of Zac talks with Darren Hudgins and Bud Hunt about design challenges for learning with a focus on teacher development. The guys also talk risk aversion in education and where it might start.

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73/365 Schools Have Built-In Audiences

While outside audiences must be curated, and it’s a skill rightly worth teaching, there are other considerations for audience in learning and how schools can leverage them more effectively. Most specifically, students are a built-in audience, and we could leverage better.

The schools we need realize audience is built in.

The easiest way to think about this is the English classroom. Students are assigned essays to write. Even the most traditional teacher is likely, from time to time, to ask students to share their work with one another during the editing process and peer edit. In technology deserts, this is usually the act of trading handwritten drafts, asking students to read what’s on the page and mark them up. It’s a start, and we can do better.

Simply trading papers leaves the editor with a lack of direction. She’s likely to read through, mark the most glaring punctuation errors, write “good job” and hand it back to her partner.

Without guidance, students aren’t likely to get the feedback they want or need from their pre-published audiences. They’re also not likely to reflect on what that desired feedback might be. Using a more structured approach like the writer’s memo described by Jeffrey Sommers in his article “Behind the Paper: Using the Student-Teacher Memo” asks both writer and audience to think about their focus in the feedback process and what will be most helpful to the writer.

Tools like the writer’s memo take better advantage of the in-school audience than the traditional trade-and-mark approach and ask students to reflect on what they’ve created as well.

Once student work has reached a published phase, we can take better advantage of built-in audiences as well. We can ask students to make the work useful to their audience rather than a simple exhibition of the skills they’ve been working on. The most misguided example of this is the use of social video sites for school projects.

In a math class, the teacher may ask her students to create a video explaining the concepts taught (and hopefully learned) during a unit of study. The students work alone or in groups to complete the assignment, upload their videos to the designated site, and the teacher reviews them, makes comments and sends them back. In some cases the teacher might take class time to highlight some of what she has deemed as the best productions.

These videos can be more useful.

This is surely not the last time these concepts will be taught in the school. The next year or next semester, other students will follow and need to learn these concepts. Too often the teacher will forget the video archive students have created and leave them to languish. Instead, leveraging built-in audience means realizing these new students can start their learning with the previous year’s videos and utilize the commenting function to activate the prior students as tutors or co-teachers of the content. Suddenly, the videos live on and the previous students are asked to re-activate knowledge in the service of this new audience.

A year is a long time to wait, and there’s no need. Sticking with our math video example, consider the power of teachers of subsequent math classes collaborating and the teacher of the higher-level math class asking what concepts the lower-level math class will be learning about first. Then, the higher-level students review the previous year’s content and craft learning tools to help the younger students. Given the spiraling of most math curricula, this return to more fundamental concepts is likely to shore up the higher-level students’ skills while providing lower-level students learning objects that are crafted in language divorced from the formality of textbooks.

As the Internet has opened the world up to our schools, the temptation has become to think of the world as our audience. Remembering the audience already in our classrooms and schools can help to deepen knowledge and work to create local learning communities.