Category: TIK365

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 284 of 365: We should feed teachers

Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are.

– Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

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.

One of my favorite rituals at SLA was the Back-to-School potluck that welcomed 9th grade students and their families to the school. I still remember the first year when Chris was worried we wouldn’t have enough food. Then, families’ favorite dishes started walking through the door.

Food, the breaking of bread, is a fine way to build community.

It’s also a way to show you care.

This semester, I was feeling as though a small group I was a part of in one of my courses wasn’t quite clicking. It was an evening course, and I wanted to do whatever I could to help the group jell.

Each week, on my way to class, I started picking up a snack the five of us could share. It wasn’t much, maybe chips and salsa or trail mix – but it was a way to build community and show I cared for the other members of my group. Two weeks ago, three of us brought snacks to share, and other groups commented on our spread of food.

Not only can food help build culture or welcome newcomers into a culture, food can be how we share culture.

One of my favorite cinematic moments occurs in It’s a Wonderful Life when Mary Bailey welcomes a family into their new home with the words, “Bread… that this house may never know hunger. Salt… that life may always have flavor. And wine… that joy and prosperity may reign forever. Enter the Martini Castle.”

Given the close ties of food in culture in my brain, it should come as no surprise that I suggest gifting a meal to your or your child’s teacher this holiday season.

This is a little trickier, but definitely worthwhile. Here’s how I’d do it:

  • Give the teacher a card or certificate explaining the gift.
  • Ask the teacher to send home a note or e-mail when they would like to redeem the meal.
  • Inquire as to any allergies or dietary restrictions.
  • Let the teacher know how much lead time you’ll need on the preparing the meal, e.g., one calendar week.

The meal can either be delivered to take home for dinner or prepared to be consumed for lunch at school. If it’s the latter, go all out and provide the recipient a real plate, real silverware and a proper glass.

I can think of few ways to show care and respect for the work a teacher does to nourish the lives of students than to offer a moment of sustenance for that teacher.

Food is our culture, and food is how we build culture.

Things I Know 283 of 365: Financial literacy is digital too

It’s never too early to teach kids about properly managing their money.

– Ken Chaplin, senior vice president of Experian Consumer Direct

I spent a bit of time this evening checking out the Secret Millionaires Club. The site from Warren Buffett is designed to help kids build financial literacy and provide parents and teachers with resources for building those skills. The few cartoons I watched kept my attention and embedded their message in an easily-understood manner. If I were bringing up a kid or teaching basic personal finance in 2005, I’d definitely use the site.

***

The other day, I walked in to my local coffee shop for a muffin and a coffee. The sign hanging from the register alerted my fellow patrons and I we could only pay with cash. Through some mixup with the phone system, the line was dead and credit card purchases couldn’t be processed.

I had no cash.

I still managed to get my muffin and coffee with no cash changing hands. I didn’t even have to wash dishes.

I pulled out my phone, opened my LevelUp app and the store’s cell phone snapped a pic of my personalized QR code. Seconds later, I received a text with my digital receipt (preset tip included). Later, I found a matching e-mail for my records. Each time I spend $60 at the shop, I earn a $6 credit.

***

A few weeks ago, I was at dinner with some friends and learned about Venmo. Users set up an account and are able to network payments to friends. The idea here is making it easier to move money back and forth when you split a check over anything. If you carry a balance from friends when you picked up the check, that’s the money (not your linked account) that gets moved to friends. The service is almost an intermediary bank.

***

This is to say nothing of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s customer-side service attached to his latest venture – Square. Enabled on iPhones and Android phones, the app knows when you enter a Square-enabled establishment and opens a tab when you walk in the door. According to Square’s website, “Give the cashier your name at checkout. Pay without touching your phone or wallet.”

***

Time was, a financial literacy curriculum could be considered forward-thinking if it gave passing mention to PayPal. PayPal is old news now. What counts as money and how people interact with it are shifting concepts. While each of the services I’ve mentioned here purport and appear to be safer and more trustworthy than a credit card, I have much to learn before I can know that for certain.

What’s more, all of these are shifts to the foundation of financial literacy missing from Buffett’s lessons. I know my grandparents will never dream of signing up for any of these services. For any child born in the last 5 years, though, a wallet will likely be something on whatever turns out to be the equivalent of a cell phone. (Cows and whatever animal we get velcro from can breathe a sigh of relief.)

With recent signs pointing to the idea people had no idea what they were doing operating under the “business as usual” model, perhaps we should get head start on teaching kids about “business as unusual.”

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 280 of 365: UNESCO has built us an online community

November 1, UNESCO launched its new Open Educational Resources Platform. According to the blog of one UNESCO Programme Assistant, “It will offer selected UNESCO publications as Open Educational Resources in order to support adapted and improved quality teaching.”

If you already know about the platform and have been interacting in the community, this isn’t news to you.

I’m thinking this is likely news to many, in North America at least.

We’re great at discussing the global community and encouraging the teaching of global citizenship, but much of what I read on the subject points to teachers connecting their students and not the building of a global teaching community.

The new platform allows teacher to be global colleagues and citizens at the same time. UNESCO puts it better than I could:

For UNESCO, OER can significantly improve the quality of education by facilitating policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building. It is a very simple and low cost concept whose impact is far from being modest: it offers vast new opportunities for learning. Until recently, most learning materials were either only accessible through teachers, or locked up behind passwords. Furthermore, learning resources have always been considered as key intellectual property in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. As such it is a revolution.

By proposing a radical new approach to the sharing of knowledge, they also raise basic philosophical issues including the nature of ownership, of collective goods and even altruism. In a world where learning resources and knowledge are key to economic success, this is a very paradoxical situation.

Take 30 minutes and work your way around the WSIS Knowledge Community (formerly the UNESCO OER wiki). Some great starting points include these forum discussions on OER usage, this page with the current WSIS-KC site communities, and this listing of the site blogs.

One of the most useful and thought-provoking pieces for me has been this United Nations University guide to “The Why and How of Open Education.” It provides a strong foundation in the history of OER as well as a description of some of the newest frontiers of their usage.

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?

Things I Know 278 of 365: UncommonGoods and Etsy are goto sites for teacher gifts

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.

I’m a fan of the unusual, useful and responsible. If I can find all three in a gift, I go for it.

Two online sites can be counted upon to give me options in this regard – uncommongoods.com and etsy.com.

Here’s what defines UncommonGoods apart:Shopping either site for a gift for a teacher will head you in the right direction.

Featured Artist: UncommonGoods highlights the stories of our artists and designers throughout our website as well as our print catalog.

Handmade Goods: Look for the blue hand icon throughout the website to find our handmade goods.

Uncommon Knowledge: UncommonGoods posts surprisingly uncommon information and facts related to certain product categories or featured items on the site. For example, did you know that early candles were often eaten rather than burned? Or that Leonardo da Vinci invented the scissors?

Our Commitment to the Environment: UncommonGoods strives to work in harmony with the environment: our print catalogs are printed on recycled paper (30% post consumer waste) and all our merchandise is produced without harm to animals. Look for the green recycled icon throughout our website for products made of recycled materials.

Better to Give Program: We donate a portion of each order to your choice of non-profit organizations: American Forests, AmeriCares, City Harvest, and the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN).

And Etsy:

Our mission is to empower people to change the way the global economy works. We see a world in which very-very small businesses have much-much more sway in shaping the economy, local living economies are thriving everywhere, and people value authorship and provenance as much as price and convenience. We are bringing heart to commerce and making the world more fair, more sustainable, and more fun.

Both Uncommon and Etsy had the added benefit of supporting creative communities and independent artisans. Each time I make a purchase from either site, I have the feeling I’ve just purchased a gift that will be unique and special to the individual for whom I’m shopping.

The range of prices on both sites allows for diversity of choice without getting too spendy, and I’ve never felt as though my purchase was anything less than high quality.

Any gift for a teacher from UncommonGoods or Etsy has the added bonus of sending the message that you see the teacher as unique to your or your kid’s education. And that’s a message worth sending.

Things I Know 277 of 365: Parent conferences can be student conferences

It is critical that both parent and teacher know that the goals for the child are indeed shared goals, both teacher and parent want what is best for the child/student.

– Sue

Twice each year, the folks at SLA sit down with their advisees and their advisees’ parents and have a discussion of each student’s progress. It’s not an unfamiliar process, but the structures at SLA are different than those I’d experienced in any previous schools I’d attended or taught in.

Growing up, my parents would disappear two nights each year to meet with my teachers.

Upon their return, we would all sit at the kitchen table where my mom would work teacher-by-teacher beginning each review with, “What do you think she had to say about you?”

A torturous process in the moment, I see now what she was trying to do and the habits of mind she was attempting to build.

Last year, at SLA, I felt as though I’d finally gotten my vision of these conferences to line up with the actual practice.

The key was to prep our advisees as much as possible. In years prior, I’d told my advisees they would be responsible for leading the conference discussions, but failed to give them adequate practice in anticipating what they might want to say and how they would make the conversations run as effectively as possible.

How would they steer their parents clear of obsessing over the one low grade to the exclusion of the other A’s and B’s? If the narratives and report cards fell short of their own explanations, how did they plan to reverse course in subsequent quarters?

I’d forgotten my time and training as a teacher had provided me with myriad ways to navigate these waters.

Childhood, adolescence and schooling had provided my students with two strategies – But mom… and (silence).

Neither proved tremendously effective in fostering a discussion or ownership of learning.

Diana asked me earlier today if I had written anything about what made last year’s conferences so successful. I hadn’t. Here it is.

  1. My co-advisor Matt Kay and I showed our advisees both their report cards and narrative report cards in the advisories prior to the conferences. We asked them to compare the grades on the report cards with the comments from the corresponding teachers’ narratives. What did they notice? What surprised them? What made them feel seen? What did they want to highlight with their parents?
  2. Each advisee filled in a table with columns labeled, “What I want to stay the same,” “What I want to change,” “How I’m going to change it.”
  3. Looking at their report cards, their narratives, and their tables, our advisees planned the flow of their conferences. Matt and I offered guiding questions. Would it be better for your parents to hear disappointing news earlier or later? Does it make more sense to show your report card before your narratives or the other way around?
  4. Once it was planned, we asked one student to volunteer for a mock conference where two other advisees played the parents. The rest of us watched. After the mock conference, the whole advisory debriefed and reflected on possible topics or situations we saw that might come up in their own conferences and how they could be approached.
  5. On the day of the conference, the students were the leaders. Matt and I had digital copies of the narratives and report cards, but we kept mum. The entire time, my internal monologue was, “Shut up, Zac. Your only job is to support.”

When all was said and done, I saw more student ownership and parent-child conversation along with teacher restraint in last year’s conferences than any others I’ve been a part of.

How do you conference?