Tag: yearatmh

118/365 Mission Hill is What Theory Looks Like in Practice #YearAtMH

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

One of the great joys of A Year at Mission Hill is the glimpse it provides of the entirety of the teaching and learning experience. In Chapter 5, we are provided continued access to both the planning and implementation sides of teaching as we see and hear teachers planning lessons around a school-wide investigation of Chinese culture.

We find 2nd/3rd Grade Teacher Jenerra Williams (1:40) discussing the needs of her students in a planning meeting that draws a connection between both her professional expertise and the place of educational theory in the classroom, as she explains to her colleagues that they must take into consideration the cognitive development of their students while planning the introduction of new concepts.

There is beauty in Williams’ informal connection to Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and its application to the “concrete” thinking Williams and her colleagues notice as prominent in their group of students.

While this episode is primarily concerned with the artistry and learning of the students, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the artistry and learning of the teachers as well. Williams weaves formal and informal assessments of students into her knowledge of cognitive theory to make sure the team is pacing the learning in such a way as to provide access for everyone.

So too, is there beauty in Kindergarten and 1st Grade Teacher Kathy Clunis D’Andrea’s interaction with a student (3:09) who has a “great idea.” Not only has D’Andrea created a space where her students continue to feel the safety and freedom to share such ideas, but her response shows a dedication to letting students play such ideas out in their own heads. D’Andrea’s reaction to the student is not to judge, criticize, or question the idea, but merely to repeat it back to him as a literal sounding board and then keep the space open for him to build on it publicly from there.

Such moments are excellent embodiments of Eleanor Duckworth’s ideas of “messing about” as described in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas. They are also spoken to in Art Teacher Jeanne Rachko’s description of how she sees her role in the classroom.

Rachko’s dedication to letting students “discover who they are as artists,” and “empowering them in their own choices,” is revealed not as some soft bohemian philosophy, but one borne out in research and educational theory.

In a sense, Rachko is co-discovering who her students are alongside them. Such practice answers the call made by Dave Rose in his book Why School?, when he wrote that “teaching carries with it the obligation to understand the people in one’s charge, to teach subject matter and skills, but also to inquire, to nurture, to have a sense of who a student is.”

Such an obligation is fulfilled in each of the considerations Mission Hill makes because the school attends to both the needs and the curiosities of its students. It motivates by creating situations that invite students to play and include the four key tenets of situated motivation as described by Scott Paris and Julianne Turner: choice, challenge, collaboration, and control.

Making room for each of these components, co-discovering who their students are, and applying educational theory to what they discover allows Mission Hill’s teachers, and others like them, to make practical decisions that are artfully executed.

117/365 How Can Schools Meet the Developmental Needs of Children? #YearAtMH

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

Of the many poignant moments in Chapter 4 of A Year at Mission Hill, my favorite is of teacher Jada Brown sitting and rocking a student (1:50). The image, as well as the rest of this episode, helps to draw focus to the physical and socio-emotional needs of students in all schools. Sadly, these are the needs most often lost in the current conversation of how we can build the sorts of schools our students most sorely need.

As Mission Hill’s teachers repeatedly point out (and as any teacher who works with children knows), students who step into our classrooms do not come into existence the moment they cross the threshold into the school building. They bring with them all of their experiences, all of their memories, and all of their needs as developed over the course of their lives up to that point.

And, they are children. While the majority of adults can filter these things as they move through their days socially and professionally, students often do not have such filters in place; they are at various stages of developing the tools needed to manage their interactions with others and intrapersonally.

While full-inclusion schools such as Mission Hill are also working with students with more pronounced needs around the management of their emotions and the filtering of stimuli, it’s worth noting that this work is important for all children.

Learning is better when we attend to the needs of the whole child.

Such is the reasoning behind ASCD’s Whole Child Initiative. Launched in 2007, the Initiative is designed to widen the narrowing thinking about what it means to educate children and prepare them for their futures based on the following tenets:

  • Each student enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle.
  • Each student learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults.
  • Each student is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community.
  • Each student has access to personalized learning and is supported by qualified, caring adults.
  • Each student is challenged academically and prepared for success in college or further study and for employment and participation in a global environment.

Recognizing that sending these tenets out into the world alone would only help a certain segment of the teaching population, ASCD and its partner organizations have compiled research and action plans to help teachers and school communities begin the process of setting their unique courses to better supporting the children in their care. These are the types of conversations we see embedded throughout the practice of the teachers at Mission Hill.

Returning to the image of Jada Brown comforting her student in the rocking chair, it is important to look more deeply at what is happening in the scene. Yes, there is socialized comfort at play. Brown is offering a safe mental and emotional space for the student and likely offering helpful verbal de-stressors.

Another key component often overlooked or never considered in most schools and classrooms is the balancing of the student’s sensory diet Brown is offering through her positive touch and the rhythmic rocking of the chair. In short, she is helping to balance the chemistry of the student’s brain toward the goal of greater control of behavioral outputs. It’s the kind of work occupational therapists like the late Bonnie Hanschu do every day: considering how students’ tactile, proprioceptive, and vestibular systems can be brought into greater harmony. Sadly, it’s also the kind of work many teachers never hear about in their pre-service or professional development work.

For more information on occupational therapy, try these resources compiled by the American Occupational Therapy Association.

Seeing the students in our care as their whole selves and building our understanding of how strong physical, sensory, and socioemotional supports work together to build clear pathways to academic success is work worth doing. More than that, it is work that must be done.

Learning Grounds Ep. 019: Scott Nine discusses the Lessons Learned through ‘A Year at Mission Hill’

In this episode, Zac talks with Scott Nine, executive director of the Institute for Democratic Education in America about Scott’s learning throughout the web series A Year at Mission Hill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

90/365 Can Caring Change Classrooms #YearAtMH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, this is difficult work.

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

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

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

44/365 What is the measure of greatness of a school?

I’ve been asked by Sam Chaltain to contribute to the conversation over at EdWeek around the series A Year at Mission Hill. I’ll be offering a take on each episode and interpreting some of the research that might be relevant and trying to make it practical. My second piece went live today. You can find it here. For now, you can find the first episode of the series and my first piece below.

In last week’s introduction to the new 10-part series, A Year at Mission Hill, we’re asked an important and timeless question: “How do you create a great school?”

Like most important questions, to answer it we must ask other, deeper questions such as, “What do we mean by great?” “What is the measure of greatness of a school?” and “What greatness has come before us?” Together, our goal will be to use the lens of Mission Hill as a way to collect and translate some of the best thinking and research about how to improve schools and build their capacity for greatness.

Back in 1992, Richard Elmore named a key obstacle to great teaching, and, I would argue, great schools: failing to build the collective capacity of educators beyond the application of “research-based” strategies and tricks. “In current research,” Elmore wrote, “learning means the development of understanding, or the ability to perform complex cognitive tasks that require the active management of different types of knowledge around concrete problems.” To foster this kind of learning in their students, teachers needed — and still need — a different set of tools.

If this is how the students learn, then it must also be true of the teachers.

As Mission Hill Principal Ayla Gavins points out, “Everyone has value.”

Great schools work to uncover each person’s value, and make it explicit.

Some of the most impactful work I’ve seen in this area is the work of Norma Gonzalez, Luis Moll, and Cathy Amanti in their exploration of “funds of knowledge.” Rather than performing a study in order to publish it in a journal article for a select few, these educators chose a different and more practical tack: they trained teachers in the methods of social sciences, and then deployed teams of them into homes throughout the Mexican community of Tucson, Arizona.

These teams were not there to teach parents or students how they could better students’ performance in classrooms. Instead, they were there to discover what knowledge was implicit within these communities. Rather than view the families as impoverished citizens in need of being rescued, these researchers approached the homes they studied as places already rich in value, knowledge, and learning practices. In short, they began from the assumption that when Tucson’s Mexican-American children were at home, they were continuously fulfilling Richard Elmore’s definition of learning. And then they turned their sights on the classrooms from which the teacher-researchers originated and asked: “How can we integrate these deep funds of knowledge into our own teaching practices?”

Not unlike the conversations we’ve already seen taking place at Mission Hill, the Arizona teacher-researchers engaged in after-school conversations designed to compare what was going on in their classrooms with what they’d encountered and grown to understand about their students’ homes. Simply put, they were aligning their professional practices with the lives and experiences of their students.

These stories remind us that teachers who take the time to understand the “funds of knowledge” that surround their students outside of the classroom will learn to see their students as unique individuals with distinct abilities and needs. And while it’s true that this work is insufficient by itself in making and sustaining a great school, it’s equally clear that building such an understanding among adults is an essential ingredient toward deepening a school’s capacity for greatness.