Category: Uncategorized

5 Jan 21 – What Did We Learn Online?

My kids go back to in-person learning tomorrow. Aside from all the health fears wrapped up in that, I have a larger looming existential fear we are going to miss a key learning of being forced online.

We saw into kids’ homes. We saw how they would choose to present themselves if they had even more tools. We saw how they would hide if they could. There’s learning there.

Some kids never turned their cameras on. Others made sure a digital background was always present when their cameras were on. Still others arranged their learning spaces in precise ways to share their worlds. There’s learning there.

Some kids showed up in pristine rooms and silence. Others showed up with muted microphones because they were saving their classes from the din constantly surrounding them. There’s learning there.

Some never said a word on camera but dropped mad knowledge in chats. Others begged their classmates to stop sending emojis in the chats because they were doing their best to focus on what they were supposed to be seeing, hearing, and thinking. There’s learning.

Online learning has meant daily home visits across all demographics. Kids we thought lived in stable spaces don’t. Kids we thought were without familial support aren’t. We were way off the mark on some of the kids we thought hung on our every word. And some kids we’d written off as writing us off, showed us they were counting on us to keep investing in them.

There’s learning in all of this. In some ways, we’ve been afforded an uncurated look at who are students are outside the context of classrooms and schools. In others, we’ve seen whom they’d like us to see them as when given powerful digital tools and the comfort of their own spaces. None of it is simple and all of it has powerful potential for our learning and theirs.

I don’t exactly know when, but I hope we get just a couple minutes in the coming weeks to stop and reflect on what our students showed us – intentionally or not – through these online portals into their worlds. There’s learning there.

4 Jan 21 – But I’m Still Right About Other Stuff

I don’t want to seem braggadocios, but I’m pretty good at Guess Who. We play a lot of it over here. I mean, A. Lot.

Tonight, the 9yo and I were playing a round. I was the mustachioed Jake. If it’s been a minute, peep the image below. That’s Jake in the front row center. Shock of white hair, eager gleam in his eyes. Jake’s a paragon of happy-go-lucky. Look at that chin.

But, where is Emily going?

So, the 9yo asks, “Does your person have milk on his face?”

I reply in that tone parents get to use when their kids are charmingly naive, “You mean a mustache, buddy?” Gotta love the “buddy,” right?

He examines the faces before him. “No,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure you mean ‘mustache’,” I repeat. He’s been known to dig his heals in from time to time, so I decide to let it sit for a while. He’ll come around.

“No,” he says, “It’s not a mustache. It’s like milk right here.” He rubs the bottom of his chin.

Looking at my pal Jake and his stunning display of illustrated facial follicles. Poor kid’s confused.

“That’s just called a mustache,” I say, beginning to wonder why he’s having such a hard time with this. Also, why does he think a mustache is on the chin? Do I need to plan a teachable moment around facial hair? “Do you mean a milk mustache?” Placement would still be wrong, but I understand how he could forget the word.

Honestly, though, at this point I’ve used the word mustache at least three of four times. I’m wondering why he’s not picking it up.

9yo let’s out a sigh I swear had a whisper of “okay, boomer” in it. He removes his own playing card from his board, places it face down on the table and turns his board around.

Not pictured, my dignity.

In what I now realize was an enormous act of self control, he says, “Like this. It looks like milk on his chin.”

But his Jake didn’t look like my Jake because his Jake was Jon. That layabout hippie can shave a mustache, but can’t be bothered to shave his milk chin.

3 Jan 21 – Parenting is Cleaning the Kitchen

Parenting is just an ongoing attempt to clean the kitchen. Just when you’re about to get a counter cleared off, a spoon, an empty orange juice container, an errant paintbrush appears. Just as you’re moving to get the spoon to the dishwasher, orange juice container to the trash, and paintbrush to the art closet; you turn to find the neighboring counters have been invaded by things you did not know were in your house in the first place

a pot sitting on a stove in front of a window

And, this is your day, a domestic Battle of Helms Deep. And, you thought you were going to get to the crossword…or a shower.

But you’re not. You will always be cleaning the kitchen. You will always be learning new things. Rubbing alcohol gets Sharpie® off the kitchen table. (It also gets “thinking” putty off a 10yo’s favorite blanket.) Cooking half a cup of red lentils before adding the marinara sauce will help you feel like you’re making a much healthier meal. An at-will snack basket and refrigerator drawer that closes an hour before meals will save more headaches than you can imagine.

Asking for everyone’s high and low from the day at dinnertime will help you to see moments and know feelings you missed during the day. A ritual of putting a penny in an old peanut butter jar after dinner as each person shares what they’re grateful for will sometimes turn around the most violently aggressive days.

Guess Who with cups of cocoa can feel like a hug. Painting rocks can last as many hours as you need because you’ve got unheard of rock access.

Learning which is the trash and which is the recycling is hard. Knowing which goes in which is harder.

You will never know how messy you are until the dogs are away for a night.

Parenting is cleaning the kitchen, and it’s so much better than cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming the living room or cleaning under the beds. It’s in the heart of the house. It nourishes the family. It is warm and hectic. It is never done.

Who cares for me?

Before I dig into this one, a little background on the word choice for this question. If you’ve read Nel Noddings or read what Chris and I had to say about the Ethic of Care in our book, then you might see where this is headed.

Originally posted here.

Taking tremendous liberties with Noddings’s work, let me sum it up this way. You care about the big pictures – poverty, homelessness, racism. You care for the specific humans – someone you know living in poverty, the family at your church struggling to keep their home, your friends who are people of color in a world of too little nuance and empathy.

So, when I think about who cares for me, I’m not considering those who are advocates of teachers or those who champion the rights of queer folks, or the band of people who have joined together to support guys named Zac. I’m talking about the people with whom I am in a caring relation. My parents, siblings, and other family members care for me. For many of us, though not all, this is true.

So, who cares for me in my work? This one gets a bit messier. As a classroom teacher, my students were literally in my care. My responsibility inside and outside of the school day was to care for my students. It’s the responsibility of any educator. It would have been unprofessional and unrealistic to expect my students to care for me. Take off the table the responsibility of the 140+ people with whom I was in most frequent and closest contact, it paints a bleak picture regarding sources of care.

This isn’t unusual. This is part of being a teacher. We are in constant contact with other humans and we would be wrong to expect them to care for us. Maybe you’ve witnessed or experienced a starvation of care this can create. I work with hundreds of educators across the country. Too frequently, I meet teachers who are angry, sarcastic, pessimistic, and closed off about their students. These are teachers who lack a structure of being cared for professionally. They have transferred the inappropriateness of expecting their students to care for them to a lack of expectation of being cared for by their colleagues and administrators. They’ve starved themselves or been starved by systems that fail to recognize caring for all is paramount to success.

Every educator is entitled to an expectation of professional care from the adults with whom they work.

Every educator is entitled to an expectation of professional care from the adults with whom they work.

I ask the question today because I constantly struggle with that sentence pf entitlement.

I deserve the care of my colleagues. To help internalize this, I have taken to reminding myself. My colleagues in my office care for me. Many of the principals and teachers in the district care for me. The coaches, interventionists, and administrative staff with whom I work care for me.

It is difficult for me to rely on others. While I would likely drop everything I’m doing to help out an acquaintance after a few minutes of conversation, I do not afford that same charity to myself. I need to. We all need to.

The people with whom I work and teach and learn every day care for me. Only when I accept that as true and presume it as I do my work will I be able to do better work.

Toward the end of last year, I started posting to Instagram pics I tagged as #TheBigQuestion. The thinking was to throw one question up there each day. Each question was designed to push our practice – yours and mine. It felt like folks responded to the questions, and I found myself carrying each one with me through the day. So, all of this is to say I’m committing to post these questions each day of #2019. I’ll be doing that in the morning. In the PM, I’ll be posting my thinking on the day’s question here on the blog. Since I love conversation, I’m hoping you will also make public your answers as they come. I’ll supply the questions, we’ll all share our answers, and – I’m hoping – have a more thoughtful year.

If Students Aren’t Wondering, You’re Doing it Wrong (33/365)

Photo by Rick Hatch on Unsplash

I spent a day working with a few hundred teachers a while back, helping them think on the topic of “effective questions”. The conversations were wide and varied. We covered the theoretical and the practical. My goal and charge was to make sure this conversation about student inquiry led to everyone in the room having something to back with them Monday to shift their practice in ways that opened the door to more student inquiry.

A some point in the second conversation, I realized I have one overarching, non-negotiable component to effective questions in classrooms and schools – they come from students.

A some point in the second conversation, I realized I have one overarching, non-negotiable component to effective questions in classrooms and schools – they come from students.


You don’t ask effective questions, you open the door for them, create the environments for them to spring forward, and honor them as they surface.

When I get to visit schools, no matter the stated purpose of a classroom visit or observation, I leave with one metric I value above all others – “Do I know what the students in that class were curious about?”

This is different than the question of what can students in that classroom do or what do they know. These are the questions of City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel’s instructional rounds, and they are important.

They also wedge open the door of compliance over exploration. I can leave knowing a student can perform a complex scientific experiment or recite a renowned soliloquy and be rightly impressed.

If I leave these rooms without a clear understanding of what these capable students are wondering, we’ve missed the mark. These are students who are competent, but they are not necessary students who are curious.

Watching a room brimming with evidence of student curiosity is an altogether different thing. Such classrooms are spaces where – were the teacher not to show up the next day – it is entirely possible the students would keep on with their exploration and tinkering.

This is also the reason I’ve latched on so tightly to Rothstein and Santana’s Question Formulation Technique and the brilliance of their book and suggestion of “Make just one change.” For those uninitiated to the QFT, the steps are as follows:

  1. Design a question focus.
  2. Produce questions.
  3. Work with closed-ended and open-ended questions.
  4. Prioritize questions.
  5. Plan next steps.
  6. Reflect.

After that, Rothstein and Santana suggest, a teacher can continue on with their lessons as they would have were the QFT not a practice they’d adopted. Sure, they could, but I find it difficult to comprehend why they would. If you’ve ever seen a classroom of students who are conditioned to a compliant, prescribed model of learning taste curiosity for the first time in their school careers, you know that toothpaste is unlikely to go back in the tube. You know it because of the spark in students, and you know it because of the energy it brings to teaching.

Two weeks ago, I had the honor of guest teaching in some grade 11 English classrooms. No ground was broken. I spent most of the time asking students about conversations and what made good ones and what led to bad ones. Then, I let them practice and helped through some processing. What did they want to figure out about having good conversations, I asked them. The opinions were as diverse as the room.

“You got X to talk,” the class’s teacher said, “That’s the most I’ve ever heard him say in a class all year.” When I thought about his contributions later, I realized the moments of X’s participation that struck me as most powerful were not what he knew, but what he wondered.

Here was a student who had been waiting for the invitation for inquiry for too long. I wonder how many others are waiting for similar invitations. I wonder what it will take to prop open the door.

Dead Words: ‘My low kids’ (29/365)

Photo by Dikaseva on Unsplash

Let’s stop saying, “my low kids,” or “my low readers,” or “my low math kids,” or whatever other ways we homogenize and dehumanize students.

When I was teaching kids writing, my classroom had a dead word wall. It was a lasting tribute to our lexicographical kills throughout the year – the words we determined as overused or ineffective in communicating our ideas. They added imprecision and subtracted meaning.

“Low” is the first word on the dead word wall of teachers. It acts as a pseudo-insulting stand in for the words we can’t say. It’s a kinder, coded version of slow, stupid, and dumb and also has some sort of qualified protection. When we say low, we are abbreviating “low scoring” (often in reference to standardized assessment). Looking more closely, low and low scoring are abbreviating our students.

In a recent conversation with a principal, she said to me, “Our data…” At the finish of her sentence, I asked, “When you say our data, what are you referring to?” Unless we are examining a robust body of evidence chronicling not only a student’s learning trajectory, but also their multiple opportunities to show their learning, I’m not inclined to sit at a table and pretend we are developing a useful understanding of that child.

Low not only abbreviates our students’ performance on assessments, it abbreviates the extent to which we see them, it closes the aperture of our understanding of the full sets of knowledge and ability they bring to learning as well as to the tasks we assess. When I hear teachers talk about students who surprise them on assessment scores, the sentence is something along the lines of, “Even my low students did well.”

I’m tempted each time to ask how many times these low students will have to score high before they earn enough of our esteem to become our middle or our high students.

I suppose, then, we run the risk of everyone being thought of as capable and diminish the value of framing education as a competition. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful day.

I’ve Been My Own Identify Thief (1/365)

blurred image of a figure in outlineI’ve been thinking about the things I tell people about myself. I tell them I’m an educator, I tell them I’m a writer, I tell them I’m a vegetarian. I’m imagining, you do something similar. There are labels you carry with you and offer up to new people when you meet them. They might also be labels you count on as the fascia that binds you to your network of friends and colleagues. I wonder, though, if your labels are anything like mine.

When I say I’m an educator, I hope no one notices it’s been a while since I’ve had to write up unit plans, counsel a student through a tough decision, or any of the day-to-day I remember so well. And, it if’s down to memory, that’s telling.

When I tell them I’m a writer, I hope they don’t notice my contributions have largely been twitter-related in the past few months (and many of them retweets) and that this is the first post up on the blog in nearly half a year.

When I identify as a vegetarian, I hope no one’s around who saw the last time I ordered a tuna salad sandwich for lunch.

Those are the big labels. To open up the smaller assumed characteristics and claimed habits would be a longer conversation than I’ve time for.

In short, I’ve stolen my own identity from a past version of me who got much more use out of it and who might have been a more authentic version of me. It reminds me of when I would call my students “writers” or “readers”. The difference is, they would then read and write.

While this isn’t really a resolution, I recognize and am taking advantage of the spirit of new beginnings that springs forth from this side of New Year’s Eves. I’ll be writing here daily. Hold me to that. I’ll be working on reclaiming some of the other pieces of who I’ve been telling myself and others I am for longer than I can remember.

What about you? Who might you reclaim from the labels you’ve been using, but not necessarily living?

Take 5 Minutes for Civil Rights Today

You may have seen the following in your social media feeds:

ACTION ALERT: Through the Federal Register, the U.S. Dept. of Education is receiving comments on why it’s important to preserve and expand the Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection. The Obama Administration published this request for comments on December 30, 2016 and it is essential that we flood Secretary DeVos with comments that explain why this data collection is essential for enforcing civil rights statutes and helping to protect all students. 
 
Comments are due on Tuesday, February 28. Please click HERE to comment.
 
All you have to say is: “The Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) provides much-needed transparency and information on key education and civil rights issues in our nation’s public schools. This data helps the U.S. Department of Education achieve its mission of ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for all students. Secretary DeVos must preserve, expand, and publicly share the results of the CRDC.”
 
Copy and paste on Facebook, but do not share.
This is a real thing.
Here’s some background:
The CRDC collects a variety of information including student enrollment and educational programs and services, most of which is disaggregated by race/ethnicity, sex, limited English proficiency, and disability. The CRDC is a longstanding and important aspect of the ED Office for Civil Rights (OCR) overall strategy for administering and enforcing the civil rights statutes for which it is responsible. Information collected by the CRDC is also used by other ED offices as well as policymakers and researchers outside of ED.
These data range from enrollment numbers to math course offerings to instances of reported bullying. And, for the first time ever, OCR is including school internet access as a  component of healthy civil rights:
2. Access to Internet While many school districts have used the internet to enhance educational opportunities, there have been concerns that schools and school districts do not have equitable access to high-speed internet. This equity concern occurs at both among and within school districts. For the 2017–18 CRDC, OCR is proposing to collect new information regarding internet access:  Amount of school bandwidth in Megabit per second [see Attachment A-2, page 69 (Data Group 1014)] Do many school districts already collect (or could they easily obtain) school bandwidth data that would allow OCR to determine the existence and scope of any such access disparity? Are there other data about connectivity that OCR should consider collecting to gauge access disparity?
The comments you make, published to the Federal Register, require agency staff to respond to the significant issues raised in comments:

How can I use the Federal Register to affect Federal rulemaking?

Federal agencies are required to publish notices of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register to enable citizens to participate in the decision making process of the Government. This notice and comment procedure is simple.

  1. A proposed rule published in the Federal Register notifies the public of a pending regulation.
  2. Any person or organization may comment on it directly, either in writing, or orally at a hearing. Many agencies also accept comments online or via e-mail. The comment period varies, but it usually is 30, 60, or 90 days. For each notice, the Federal Register gives detailed instructions on how, when, and where a viewpoint may be expressed. In addition, agencies must list the name and telephone number of a person to contact for further information.
  3. When agencies publish final regulations in the Federal Register, they must address the significant issues raised in comments and discuss any changes made in response to them. Agencies also may use the notice and comment process to stay in contact with constituents and to solicit their views on various policy and program issues.

If you are someone like me who cares deeply about civil rights, then please take the five minutes to tell the Department of ED why knowing who is in our schools and how they are treated is still important information for our country.

What are We Hiring For: 3 things to look for in potential faculty members

Interivewees in profile“Hire happy people.”

When asked what he looks for in potential new hires, this was the advice from John Kellam, Head of School for The Oakridge School in Arlington, TX.

Kellam and some other intelligent folks were participating in a panel discussion on hiring in modern schools at last week’s LLI Southwest conference, and his words have had me thinking for the last few days.

As we head into hiring season at schools across the country, what should we be looking for? While I’ve a much longer list in my head detailing what I think every teacher should bring to the classroom, for blogging brevity, let’s keep it to the top three more unusual asks.

  1. Hire learners. It’s one thing to say you are looking to hire great teachers. It’s another bag altogether to say you are building a team of teacher learners. By committing only to ask curious, folks who are driven to find answers alongside the children in their care to join your team, you’re committing to hire not only teachers, but role models of what it looks like to be a scientist in a science class, a writer in an English class, an anthropologist in a social studies class. Yes, capable teaching is necessary. Without the complementary identity of learner though, you’re hiring proficiency without empathy. Things to ask that might get you close to this goal:
    • How do you learn best?
    • What’s something you’re curious about?
    • When is the last time you learned something new?
    • How does who you are as a learner influence your teaching?
  2. Include students. At SLA no interview committee was convened without an equal student voice. Think about it this way, “Why would you exclude from the interview process those people who would be most directly impacted by a person’s hiring?” I can’t quite recall the adults on my interview panel, but I can remember Allison, Jordan, and Sam as clear as day. Not only did they help decide to invite me into the community, but their presence was a strong reason I accepted the invitation. Some prep work if you add students to your hiring process:
    • This is authentic learning, that means dedicating some time ahead of the interview to see what questions the students have and helping them understand key legal requirements of an interview in your district.
    • Avoid cherry picking. Sure, this teacher might have the student council president in her classes, but that’s not the only student who will be impacted by the hiring. Invite a broad swath of students to participate in the process.
  3. Play the whole game. In the same way classroom lessons are most effective when they have students participating in legitimate versions of the work of whatever discipline they’re learning about, our consideration of who we might ask to join our learning communities should ask them to participate fully in the work of the community. Stuart McCathie, Headmaster of Lusanne Collegiate School in Memphis, said on last week’s panel that he asks potential hires to spend the day with the faculty and students. “If they have as much energy at the end of the day as they did in the morning, then they’re a good candidate.” Ways of playing close-to-whole versions of the game:
    • Observe and discuss. Model lessons can give an idea of how candidates might structure learning experiences for students, but they’re not tremendously authentic. No one knows one another and the lessons are usually drop-in. Instead, sit with a candidate and observe the lesson of a teacher who would be a close hire. Afterward, debrief with the candidate and the teacher and listen for questions and comments that signal alignment to your school’s vision and values.
    • Break bread. Whether lunch, coffee, or drinks after school; ask a candidate to join you in an informal setting where food will be eaten. Every new person is a new piece of culture and identity for your school. Understanding how they will fit your puzzle in the classroom and out will help you understand if they are the people you want to learn alongside.

Making the Most of Essential Questions and Exit Tickets

tickets

Most any time I’m visiting a classroom, I’m having a conversation with the students I meet. The first few questions are pretty expected –  “What are you learning about?” and “What are you doing?”

The last two questions I routinely bring to the table working with students are less expected – “Why is that important?” and “What questions do you have?”

I know those last two are less expected because they are met with silence and stares from students – no matter the grade level. For me, it raises the questions of why are students are doing what they are doing and whether they have been asked to consider the deeper implications of a text. Whether it’s a third-grade student reading The Year of Miss Agnes or a ninth-grader wrestling with Regine’s Book, our expectation must be that students can consider key ideas, themes, styles, etc. outside of the pages of what they’re reading.

Much work has been done on the transfer of knowledge and skills, and there are certainly some thoughtful, complex projects students can embark upon to show those abilities. For the purposes of this post, though, I want to focus on two activities that can build students’ understandings of their learning and thinking while helping teachers understand areas of growth and need.

Essential Question journals can help students track their thinking about essential questions within lessons or units of study. For each of the curriculum modules within our elementary curriculum resources, for instance, students are asked to consider essential questions as they read, write, and speak their way through complex texts. Journaling around those essential questions can be easy.

  • Make routine time (5-10 min) once or twice each week for students to journal their answers to the essential questions within a unit of study. As they journal, have them consider what they wrote in their previous entries and focus on what they know or understand now that they didn’t before. Ask students to share/compare their journals with their peers and then engage in whole-class conversations about reading and writing.

Standing exit tickets help your students focus on a stationary target for thinking about their learning while giving you some quick formative information on what they think they are learning and wondering.

  • Have students fill out slips of paper with their names on them at the end of each class or lesson. Have them respond to the same prompts each time – “What can you do now that you couldn’t do at the beginning of class?” and “What is one question you have as a result of your learning?” If technology is available, have students respond via a google form. Imagine being able to conference with students with not only numbers and summative assessment results, but a portfolio of their own statements of learning and inquiry as well.

Not matter their age, all learners improve their abilities and skills if they have consistent, dedicated time to reflect on their learning. By including time to journal on essential questions and checking in at the end of a class, we make that time for our learners and provide ourselves with new windows into how we can alter our instructional practice to meet students’ needs.

Previously published on the professional blog.