Tag: goals

What’s Happening with Superintendent Gill’s Goals?

As out local daily newspaper’s capacity to cover local news has been greatly reduced, I’ve decided to offer some minimal coverage of our local school board. The plan is simply to offer up things that could go unnoticed for folks who don’t tune in to things like local school board meetings. I’ll likely add context and some commentary where I think it might be helpful.

The Gist

  • Eight out of every ten district students test below proficient in reading.
  • Four out of every ten district high school students won’t graduate in four years.
  • The Superintendent made public six goals to improve these conditions and committed to four public progress reports on those goals.
  • Those reports never happened.
  • School Board members either forgot about the progress reports or ignored the fact they didn’t happen.

The Whole Story

This might seem like reaching into the wayback machine to find something to write about, but stick with me.

First, let’s start with some facts.

According to state data, District 186 had a 4-year high school graduation rate of almost 63% in 2023. Looking out six years, that rate improves to 72%. The four- and six-year rates lagged 25% and 16% behind the state average, respectively. Put differently, four out of every 10 students who started high school in Illinois’s capital didn’t graduate in four years.

Proficiency across ELA, math, and science gives some indication as to why District students may have difficult graduating on time. Not only do district averages continue to lag behind the state, but approximately eight out of every ten students failed to show proficiency in English on 2023 state assessments as well.

Eight out of ten.

I’ll likely be bringing up these and other data as I write about the Board.

For now, let’s let these two images ground the question driving this post: What’s happening with Superintendent Gill’s goals?

During the 1 May 2023 board meeting, Superintendent Gill outlined her six strategic goals for the district:

Goal 1 is to address with urgency the most underperforming elementary, middle and high schools, based on ISBE designations and other data sources such as attendance, assessment (both qualitative and quantitative) data, student conduct and support systems in place. Gill asked that a Board committee be formed to work with her on this goal.

Goal 2 is to examine research surrounding the data processes and the recommendation of retention or social promotion in District 186 schools. In particular, to analyze data surrounding students promoted to high school from 8th grade.

Goal 3 relates to Freshman on Track, a measure that is part of the overall school designation program for the ISBE School Report Card data released each fall. Gill noted this goal will monitor programming and individual growth of students in all high school programs to make sure 9th grade students are on track, as well as monitor student supports, as needed. These supports could include mentoring, tutoring, attendance supports, and so forth.

Goal 4 is to design communication and support structures for students to address graduation rates of all District 186 credit bearing programs.

Goal 5 is to conduct a study surrounding the issues of declining enrollment in district schools, utilize future forecasting of enrollment and analyze its relation to the community’s overall population. Gill noted that the analysis will be presented to the Board of Education by the end of the 2023-2024 school year.

Goal 6, to monitor and communicate with the Board of Education regularly on the hiring, recruitment, promotion, and support for all staff as the district navigates an overall teacher shortage in education. Additionally, Gill reported that as the Consent Decree, which is based on the Desegregation Order of 1976, is supported, she will communicate matters concerning minority recruitment, hiring, support systems and promotions.

In light of graduation and proficiency data, these goals align to pressing needs. Related to Goal 3, state data show 69% of district 9th grade students were on track to graduate in 2023.

In this same presentation of her goals, Gill committed to the Board that she would report progress toward these goals across four future meetings: Nov. 23, 2023; Jan. 16, 2024; March 18, 2024; and June 17, 2024.

Here’s the thing – she never did.

Not only do Board minutes show no record of any progress reports from Gill in those meetings, they also show no indication any board members inquired about this progress.

Eight out of ten don’t show proficiency in reading.

Four out of ten don’t graduate in four years.

Three out of ten aren’t on track to graduate.

No one checked to see if we’re making progress to help turn that around.

29 Jan 21 – She ran up a wall

Starting a good many months back, I signed the kids up for Ninja classes through a local gym called Warrior Playground. It’s an obstacle course gym in the vein of American Ninja Warrior or my favorite Ultimate Beastmaster.

In these pandemic times, classes are limited to 4 students, which is pretty amazing. Among all the obstacles, the warped wall has most been the focus of both kids’ efforts. It’s what it sounds like. In the first weeks, they were able to run up and summit the 8-foot wall. No problem.

Next, Coach Glenn challenged them to get to the top of the 12-foot wall. So, for more than 4 months, that’s what they’ve been trying to do.

Well, today, the 11yo did it. For week’s she’s been within 6-8 inches. But those 6-8 inches have proven too much. It has led to many a “Can we go home now?” midway through class.

Running into and up a wall more than twice your size can take the spirit out of you on a normal day. When it’s the wall you’ve been running up against for months, it can feel literally insurmountable.

Tonight, at dinner, she said, “And, Coach Glenn said, ‘Believe you can do it.’ So, I closed my eyes and decided to believe I can do it. And, I did it.”

Simple as that.

I don’t need to list all the walls she’s faced. I don’t need to warn her of all the walls ahead. She knows what they were, and she’ll know them when she meets them.

“So, I closed my eyes and decided to believe I can do it. And, I did it.”

Keep going, love.

Practicing the Practice of Practice

Yoga

Last year was a year of running and a year of writing for formal publication. In a twelve month span, I ran more than 1,100 miles. Similarly, I co-wrote prepared for publication three different texts. If I wasn’t reading/writing/editing/revising, then it felt I was running or recovering from a run (and getting ready for something to do with writing).

At the end of the year, I had publications and miles. I also dreaded sitting down to write or putting on my shoes to head out for a run. I’d forgotten what it meant to have myself as an audience and I had a right IT band threatening revolt.

The resolution for this year was simple – practice better practice.

For my life and for my teaching, that means listening to what’s necessary, what’s out of balance and making whatever moves best bring balance and meet the most pressing needs.

This has meant more yoga in my life this year. Learning and refining my goal-setting practice from last year, means I don’t hold myself to daily yoga sessions. Instead, I do what I did this afternoon and say, “Some yoga would be nice here.”

That’s best practice – knowing what’s needed in the moment and adjusting to meet those needs.

I haven’t headed out for a run yet in 2016. I’m listening to that IT band and trusting it will tell me when we’re ready.

Writing is getting a similar treatment. These blog posts back and forth with you come from daily questions, and I listen to my brain before I sit down to write. If it’s still full from the day or worn out, then I allow myself to write today’s post tomorrow (or the day after that). The standard is writing, the practice is knowing when I have something to say.

That’s best practice – knowing what’s needed in the moment and adjusting to meet those needs.

This past week, I was in Orlando for FETC. I was part of no fewer than 4 conference presentations over the course of two days. In each one, I paid attention to the audience who had decided what was going on in our room was more worthy of their time than what was going on in other rooms.

As such, I tried to adjust the planned presentations to offer room for questions, discussion, and exploration. Tellingly, the reaction was often silence. Conferences are still conferences, as it turns out – our worst versions of school. I worry the practice we’re utilizing in these spaces is one of subjugation of the assembled audience to the belief that whoever’s wearing the presenter’s badge will decide the needs of the room. When given the chance at self-determination of their learning, the audience doesn’t know what to do.

I most worry this is how we’re running classrooms.

 

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Learning to Stop Chasing the Miles I Haven’t Run

At the top of 2015, I set the goal of running 1,200 miles in 12 months. I’m not going to make it. As of this writing, I’ve run 1,100.993 miles. It’s conceivable that I run just under four marathons in as many days, and it’s not likely.

It took me a minute to get comfortable with this. At the beginning of December, I had 207 miles to go, and I did the math. Twenty-one runs of 10 miles in one month? Sure!

Except – running isn’t all I do. Enter those character-building life lessons my mom has always been such a fan of. Up until about a week ago, my focus was on all the miles I haven’t run this year. They were all I could see. 

Focusing on all the miles I haven’t run would mean fatigue, injury, missed time with friends and family.

Those miles began to take the joy out of running. Every run was a task to complete, ticking away at the miles still out there waiting for feet on pavement. I’ve already run five times as many miles as I did in 2014. In the past thirty days, I’ve run 88 miles farther than the average for men 30-39. I feel better about my health and fitness than I have since my first few years as a runner. I haven’t been able to appreciate it until now, and if I were to hit 1,200, I probably wouldn’t be any see past 1,200.

This is what I’ve learned from running in 2015. As much as moving toward those 1,200 miles has pulled me into or out of bed early because, “I’ve gotta long run in the morning,” missing the goal has made me see the need to let go of some things to get to others. In November, when work had me reading, re-reading, and reading again to edit the National Ed Tech Plan and October’s marathon had brought a tendon strain to my foot, my mileage fell to 25 miles. That, as it turned out, was what I was mentally and physically capable of, and running forced me to find a way to be okay with that.

Slavishly working toward my goal in these last few days of 2015 could get me there. Focusing on all the miles I haven’t run would mean fatigue, injury, missed time with friends and family. It would mean starting 2016 resenting running rather than appreciating the lessons it continues to teach me.

I’ll run between now and the new year. It won’t be to run toward the realization of an arbitrary goal. It will be to run through whatever is happening in the moment and with appreciation of how far the last 1,100 miles have brought me.

Asking Who I Want to Be

Mirror

A few weeks ago. An email from a friend, “I just took this job, and I got an offer for this other job. What should I do?”

My response, “Who do you want to be in this situation?”

End of conversation.

That was the guidance necessary, not an answer, but a question to which I did not know the answer.

This is often the case.

At SLA, Chris will often say his hopes for the students are that they will leave the school thoughtful, wise, passionate, and kind.

I want those things too, but it’s not my answer. My answer with anyone is that I hope I can in some way help them on their way to being the better version of themselves.

It’s my answer for myself too.

Today, in a conversation at work, I found myself faced with a colleague whose approach was to point out the problems we were facing and then stare at me. The eyes I saw across the table said, “Problems everywhere. Probably more problems on the horizon. Might as well pack it in.”

If you’ve spent any time with me, it’s clear I’m not keen on dwelling for long on the difficulties problems present. Sitting across the table, I could feel the little stress ball starting somewhere between my stomach and my chest.

In that moment, I asked myself, “Who do I want to be right now?” The act of asking moved me from loudly inquiring, “How did you let these problems happen in the first place?” and moved me to, “What are do you suggest we do next?”

To be sure, I was still frustrated. I still am. The difference was asking who I wanted to be when I found myself sitting in frustration. In the second it took me to think of my answer, I was able to change tack. As I’m recounting this story here, I realize I’m closer to proud of that version of me than I would have been if I’d let loose what I was feeling in the moment.

It’s a question I’ve had to ask myself quite a bit in the last week as I’ve watched the aftermath of Charleston, people’s response to today’s health insurance decision, and either way the gavel falls on marriage equity in the next few days.

“Who am I?” is important.

“Who do I want to be?” is equally so.

Let’s Start Setting SMIRT Goals

Two pieces of otherwise unrelated writing came across my screen this evening that have me thinking about goals.

The first is a post over at the No-Meat Athlete blog titled, “Why Everything They Told You about Goals is Wrong.” It’s a short piece that is summed up best in this passage:

If your goal is compelling (huge! ridiculous!) enough, then when those inevitable obstacles come up, you’ll plow right over them. Or around them. Or through them. And when all of those approaches don’t work, you won’t be able to sleep until you find one that does.

The second was an email from today’s listserve winner, Dan Shipton, who writes:

I had resigned to not write anything, but was gently reminded how I got this far in life by a couple word magnets strung together on the side of a fridge at my office. Those words struck a chord with me today and I want to share them with you: “build to win big”

I like these two lines of thought because of what I don’t usually get to see at schools. As a teacher, I was always hungry for something larger when I got to chime in on the drafting of the annual improvement plan. Without fail, though, we were asked to make our goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).

I could wrap my mind around SMRT, but A always struck me as mired in fear of failure. If it’s a goal you know you can achieve, you should already be doing it.

Instead, I want SMIRT goals where the I (depending on your level of comfort) stands for impossible or improbable.

Something like:

  • “Every student in this school will love reading by the end of the year.”
  • “All of the students in this algebra class will be able to explain the quadratic formula to elementary school students, and the younger kids will understand.”
  • “Our science class will develop a cure for the common cold.”
  • “No one will be sent home from school as a negative consequence for their behavior.”
  • “Every student will have enough to eat as they move through the school day.”
  • “Teachers at this school will have 100% job satisfaction.”
  • “All parents will feel proud enough of this school that they will recommend it to their friends.”

This is just a smattering. Sure, you might fail, but so might the kids fail at any of the seemingly impossible things we ask them to do in the course of growing up and mustering through schools. That doesn’t stop us from asking. The least we can do is set goals at a similar scale.

A Running Resolution for 2015 (Putting $ in My Miles)

I’m usually hesitant to make New Year’s resolutions. For the past decade or so, my instinct has been to make birthday resolutions. They felt more personal. It didn’t matter when the calendar was starting its new trip around the sun, I wanted to make change based on when my trip started. This year, for whatever reason, I’ve changed my tune.

I’ll be writing about some of them here.

 

Running Shoes on StairsFirst up, my running resolution. While I’m still working on a marathon in every state, that’s not the resolution this year. Instead, it’s simply getting out there.

This year, I’ll be running 100 miles per month. Along with me on those miles might be the Nike+ app or MapMyRun or any of the other apps I rotate through trying to find the one I like the most. The app I’ll definitely be using – CharityMiles. This is the second half of my running resolution.

Through CharityMiles, which donates to a you-selected charity for every mile you log running, walking, or biking, I’ll be selecting a charity each month and running to donate to that cause for the month. It won’t be much, the $.25/mile for running and walking from CharityMiles will add up to $25 for each charity. Then again, this will be more than they were getting otherwise, and it will be tacked on to what I already try to donate to worthwhile causes each year. At the start of each month, I’ll post here about the charity I’ll be running for.

January Charity: Back on My Feet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WCD8L5EDtc

The Gist.
Back on My Feet uses running as a means to engage local populations of people experiencing homelessness “to create self-sufficiency.” Started in Philadelphia, the charity has 11 chapters nationally. Participants in the program join other runners and local coaches for morning runs three times per week. After 30 days in the program, participants qualify for Next Step services which can include counseling, applications for financial aid and other services. According to BoMF, “on average, nearly 75 of Members are in the Next Steps phase of the program. Finally, once Residential Members achieve employment and housing, they become Alumni Members who often continue to run with their original teams.

Why?
I started running in 2002 for a lot of reasons. Mainly, after turning 21 and with many pieces of my life up in the air, I wanted some sort of goal toward which I could work. June 1, I signed up for the October 13 Chicago Marathon and tried to run 2 miles. It was disasterous, and the days that followed were painful.

When I crossed the finish line with a net time of 4:53:59, I started crying. While a good deal of that was likely exhaustion, its foundation was in being the kid who felt awkward, left out, and in the way in anything to do with sports and athletics while he was growing up. That kid would never have considered running a marathon while relegated to shopping for clothes in the poorly named “husky” section growing up. I wish I’d found running earlier.

At the same time, running has taught me the importance of running my own race. Running and I met each other at exactly the right pace. I can’t say that I’d have recognized the possible joys and self-reflection involved in showing up at my doorstep with heavy legs, soaked clothes, and a face encrusted with salt from evaporated sweat if I’d found running earlier.

The Members of BoMF are each on a journey much different from my own and different again from those on their teams hitting the pavement at 5:30am three times a week. I’m running for this organization this month because I know, if only in my small way, what kind of journey running can set a person on.

83/365 Success Must be Defined by All

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

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

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

And we’re off to the races.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

39/365 What We Want for Students, We Must Want for Teachers

A friend of mine, a classroom teacher with more than 15 years of experience working with students at all grade levels, found herself a new school in a new city after years of experience in another school system. Because of tough economic conditions, few teaching positions were open, and she took a job at a school about which she’d heard mixed reviews.

A few months later, she resigned from the school. She left it broken in places no teacher should be broken by a school.

What we want for our students, we must want for our teachers.

Within her school, my friend was constantly being evaluated and given feedback that she had not met the expectations on the school-wide evaluation form. During one observation, when a student spoke out, rather than awarding that student with a demerit as policy dictated, this teacher approached the student and spoke to him as a person about community and what it means to be a member.

At the end of the lesson, the teacher’s observer commented that she’d failed to follow school protocol and would be marked “unsatisfactory” as a result.

This is a story of a particular time and place, but it could easily be the story of innumerable schools across the country. We are treating our teachers, practicing professionals, as though they step into the classroom devoid of wisdom, care, and creativity.

We must stop this. Teachers must refuse to subject themselves to this kind of treatment. When teachers are not trusted or allowed to connect with their students in human ways that help to model how to be members of a community, when they are forced to award consequences devoid of conversation, when their professionalism is called into question when they treat children as people – it diminishes our democracy let alone the professionalism of teachers.

In many cases, it is our youngest teachers, drawn to the profession (often with minimal training) who find themselves in these schools. As it is there first foray into professional teaching they may not know to be insulted by the feedback they receive. Indeed, because of the feeling of treading water that comes with any novice teachers, they may welcome the feedback as the only chance to improve.

In time they may become dependent on this feedback, relying on the outside judgement of others in place of developing their own since of success based on their professional opinion. Worse yet, some may master the criteria of the observation form, receive “outstanding” ratings in all areas and come to think of this as a mark of completion. For those teachers who were, themselves, the schooliest of students, counting success as the approval of their assessors will make perfect sense.

We must want more for teachers.

We must want more for teachers because we want more for students and for society.

Oftentimes, those who call for the improvement of the teaching profession employ the same deficit model of thinking they apply to rhetoric about those students who come from communities in poverty to the teachers they’re attempting to “improve.”

I am reminded of the passage from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation where he describes fast food’s attempt to alter their production lines so that workers with no experience and limited or no English proficiency can prepare food based on a system of pictures.

While the school reform movement has not made it this far, such a horizon is not as distant as some might think.

Scripted curricula, check-off observation forms – these tools and those like them not only generate a stifling “one size for all” mindset about schools, but they ask less and less of our teachers, not more.

And we should ask more of our teachers – more creativity, more imagination, more inquiry, more investigation.

As it sits, though, we are asking for more conformity, as though our children come from one mold, as though our teachers should as well.

Things I Know 302 of 365: Begin with the end in mind

I want our students to be thoughtful, wise, passionate, and kind.

– Chris Lehmann

I asked Codman Academy’s Co-Founder and Executive Director Meg Campbell what she hoped for the school’s graduates. She said the following:

They know how to learn and ask for help.

They know about their passions.

They have a big dream and a plan for it.

They are engaged members of society.

They have a healthy life and relationships.

They are life-long learners.

That’ll do.