Month: September 2011

Things I Know 233 of 365: Kids could do with a bit of boredom

Meditation brings wisdom; lack of mediation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.
– Buddha

Any classroom observation form worth it’s government subsidy includes a box for the evaluator to note engagement. Sometimes it’s a likert scale – Suzie was very engaged. Sometimes it’s a percentage of the students – 75% of the students were engaged. Sometimes it’s a percentage of the class period – the majority of the class was engaged during 65% of the observed lesson. It could even be a checkbox – Were the students engaged during the observed lesson? X
Among other standards, we’re obsessed with engaging our students. If they’re not looking at us, talking to their peers, copying notes, raising their hands, tracking, SLANTing or otherwise participating, the train has clearly jumped the track.
Any sign of inertia and the lesson is damned, the teacher is ineffective and the children have been failed.
I say inertia.
When I was a little kid, we called it boredom.
There’s space for boredom in the classroom.
A few years ago, on the advice of an occupational therapist, I started having my students make a single sound together. Somewhere between a om and hm, the sound was a bit of a “mmmmm.” Everyone took a deep breath together. On the exhale, we all started making the sound. As individuals’ air ran out, they fell silent – no forcing it or trying to outlast your neighbor. After a bit of practice, we finished in complete silence. Our brains were a little bit empty.
“Can we do it again?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I feel calmer.”
“Good.”
The Buddha knew what I’m talking about. He understood the power of doing nothing and thinking about nothing.
We pretend to do this sometimes in classrooms.
“I’m going to give you some ‘think time,'” the teacher will say to the class. “I’m going to wait five seconds before I call on anyone.”
In my experience, it takes more than five seconds for the answers to come.
According to the Wall Street Journal, at Boring 2010, journalist and author Naomi Alderman put it best, “When we learn to tolerate boredom, we learn who we really are.”
I’m not arguing for classrooms of total inertia or a return to authoritarian silence as the teacher readies his lessons.
Some boredom, some interia, a piece of quietude, though, could be a lovely thing.
If every once in a while we helped students jettison their warp drives and find some silence, maybe it would help them find out who they really are.

Things I Know 232 of 365: I met the Car Talk guys

Don’t drive like my brother.

– Tom and Ray Magliozzi

Did I ever tell you the one about the time I met the Car Talk guys?

Monday, I had the chance to speak virtually to the District Technology Leaders of Orange County, CA about what digital spaces and digital learning can and should be. Rather than risk running late for class or getting cut off from my apartment’s super sketchy Internet access, I travelled to campus and reserved a room in the library so I knew I’d be able to hardwire into a network connection. At the appointed time, I spoke for an hour to and with what I was told was a room of about 20 people from around Orange County about the spaces they could imagine online and they affordances of such spaces. It was a learning experience in how to shape a talk around of people I can’t see or physically interact with.

The Car Talk guys were not a part of the talk.

Feeling suitably pleased with the talk, I headed to the Crema Cafe in Harvard Square for a lunch. Normally, I’d head to the commons on campus, but I was feeling pretty good, so I thought I’d splurge.

At Crema, I ran into a few other folks from my program. They were sitting at the bar whilst I was waiting for my grilled cheese, and I struck up a conversation. Three of them needed to head to class (none of them the Car Talk guys), and I took one of their seats next to Meaghan and Eric to catch up on our weekends.

I took off my bag and set it at my feet between the wall of the counter and my chair.

Ten minutes later, as Meaghan and Eric were standing to leave, I heard Meaghan say, “Where’s my bag?”

I looked to where I’d seen Meaghan’s bag when I sat down, “It’s right over…” Nope.

We looked around. I looked from table to table, pointing to the bags at strangers’ feet, “Is that it?” as if we were playing some impromptu game of I Spy.

None of the bags was Meaghan’s.

I looked down at my own bag.

Well, I would have, if it were still there.

My bag, too, was missing.

Again, I surveyed the immediate area of the cafe – this time for my bag.

Nope.

I stood and walked the length of the building – nothing.

I walked up the stairs to the loft seating – nothing.

In the initial moments, my thinking was that someone we knew had moved our bags and was going to pop up from behind the counter – that rapscallion. And then we’d have a pint of ale and sing sea shanties.

No such luck.

Our bags had been stolen.

We had been robbed.

We caught the attention of one of the women behind the counter and explained what had happened. In an understanding tone, she said they’d had a problem with that before and said she’d go get the phone number of the police.

I called and the voice on the other end said an officer would come to us. After I hung up, I learned Meaghan and Eric had asked if the place was outfitted with security cameras.

“Yes,” said the lady, but not on the space where we were sitting. They were more focused on the front of the cafe, near the entrance.

“Could we see them, just the same? Whoever had taken our bags had to leave somehow.”

We needed to talk to the owner.

Excellent, how could we do that.

The lady pointed to the front of the shop. The owner was showing around a new hire. She’d be with us as soon as she could be.

While we waited for the police officer to arrive, the lady told us they’d had a meeting just that morning where the employees had talked about how their weren’t adequate security camera’s in the place and that they needed more.

This was offered in a tone I suppose was meant to help us feel better.

“See,” she seemed to be saying, “we weren’t ignorant of the possibility that your day would suck a few minutes after you sat down to your iced tea and grilled cheese.”

So kind.

We went outside to wait, away from the noise and frustration of the cafe.

Eventually, an officer arrived to take our report.

While we’d been waiting, I popped my head in to let the lady we’d been speaking with know we were outside when the owner was done.

We never heard from the owner.

At some point, a new lady, a manager, came out to talk to us. It was as she was reiterating the lack of adequate camera coverage and the fact that they’d had a running problem with bags being taken that the police officer showed up.

She stood their for the first part of the conversation, and I’m not sure when she headed back in.

The officer took our details.

We described our bags and their contents. For me, it meant my laptop, iPad, course packs, statistics notes and two books for class were gone.

Meaghan lost her laptop, course packs, a paper due that day, her wallet, cell phone and keys.

The officer, after explaining the process for filing our case and the assignment of a detective, tried to make us feel better.

They’d had several cases of bags being taken, he said. From this place, particularly, he said. They tried to increase their presence, he said.

We thanked him kindly for his time, and he headed off to do more policing.

“Should we go talk to the Car Talk guys,” I asked Meaghan and Eric.

I’d noticed when I walked outside that the voice of one of the men sitting at one of the cafe’s outside tables sounded like a voice on which I’d been brought up.

As soon as the man to whom the voice belonged stood up and said, “Do you want anything, Tommy?” I knew it was the voice of either Click or Clack of the Tappit Brothers. They’re otherwise known as Tom and Ray Magliozzi .

“I guess we might as well,” said Meaghan.

The table had been feet away from us as we talked to the police officer, and they were clearly interested in what was going down.

We exchanged pleasantries and told them the story of what had just happened.

I found myself rushing through the explanation of the events to get to the end. After we’d said our piece, we were met with “That’s terrible,” and “That’s horrible,” and “I’m so sorry.” They were to be the refrain of the next couple days.

I accepted their condolences tersely and said, tripping over my excitement, “Are you the Car Talk guys?”

One said yes, the other said no, and that sealed it.

We told them how important they’d been to us as we were growing up and that we’d been longtime listeners, and they said thanks in their trademark self-depricating fashion.

We didn’t ask for autographs. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Anything we would have asked them to sign had just been stolen.

We walked away wondering at the weirdness of the universe.

In the day since, I have learned exactly what kind of community I am a part of here.

Our program director, Lola Irele, sent us immediately to the head of Student Affairs, Liz Thurston, when she learned what happened.

Thurston asked us what classes we were in and what had been taken. This morning, I had an e-mail explaining that replacement course packs were waiting in the registrar’s office.

I received an e-mail from one of my professors, asking me if I needed anything and letting me know I had extra time on an upcoming assignment if I needed it.

Thurston e-mailed all of our professors to let them know what happened.

Classmates I met just a few weeks ago started e-mailing offering to help, lend course readings and let us know they were sorry to hear the news.

Charlotte, one of the three who left the cafe just before I sat down, started a chipin campaign for people who were interested in helping to offset the costs of replacing what had been stolen.

All day today, I’ve been getting e-mails letting me know people have been contributing.

I won’t be going back to Crema Cafe. It’s not because that’s where my bag was taken, but because the owner never paused from showing the new employee around the place to see if we were okay.

I will be thankful for the community here at HGSE. People who I’ve spoken to only once or twice have gone out of their way to help out when there was no pressing reason to do anything.

Plus, I got to meet the Car Talk guys.

Things I Know 231 of 365: Let’s kill school

Kill the mothership.

– Kendall Crolius

In 2006, the former head of San Diego schools Alan Bersin commented on his controversial approach to improving the district’s schools. Not surprisingly, I reacted strongly to much of what Bersin had to say. One comment has remained lodged in my brain since I first read the piece:

In the elementary schools, we moved schools out of the bottom deciles through a common instructional program.  In the secondary schools, the surest way to remove schools from the academic cellar was to shut them down.

I don’t disagree with Bersin, not generally. He’s certainly not the first to suggest hitting the “do over” button as a path to rejuvenating failing schools. I’m sure he won’t be the last.

In Disrupting Class, Christensen, Johnson and Horn tinker around the idea when they suggest fixing ailing schools is akin to repairing an airplane mid-flight.

An apt analogy.

Watching the design teams present today at Reimagine:Ed’s Next Chapter summit, an approach other than powering down and deconstructing occurred to me.

Shut everything down but the library.

Build out from there.

Start a 1:1 laptop program in the school with online and blended classes. Staff the library 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Host study sessions at regular intervals in each discipline. According to student interest, begin pouring money into music, drama and visual arts programs.

Still, no straight physical classes.

Still, a 24-hour library.

During the day, have students design and form student organizations with faculty sponsorship. Technically, these organizations will count as electives. They will range from urban farming to bicycle repair to yoga. At the same time, start up school sports teams with the same eligibility requirements the school had in place before (or more stringent).

In the meantime, students begin repurposing the physical space with funding saved from the reduced overhead of operating the school.

This classroom is a student-run thrift store. The school paper is next door and actually serves as a periodical for the entire neighborhood.

Across the hall, what was a long-neglected home economics room transitions to a coffee shop.

As students determine their interests, they use the library to find the resources they need to draft the business plan the school requires of any student-led venture. Most of these initiatives feature parent volunteers who have parallel careers acting as community advisors.

At night, through a partnership with the local community college, students take college-level courses with local community members. The courses are joint-funded by the school and the college. They are taught by the school’s faculty.

Students comment the spaces make them owners of the school and provide them with the flexibility and support they need while expecting high levels of learning. Teachers comment they able to design more dynamic curricula, build close relationships with their students and  emphasize knowledge, skills and understandings in ways that are authentic and deep. The parents, at first resistant, are amazed how involved their kids are in the school community. They admit life is easier now that their kids have class schedules that fit with their natural internal clocks.

College admissions offices confide they’re amazed to have applicants with diverse interests and college credit. Secretly they worry their universities’ lack of entrepreneurial options might make it difficult to attract the students of the school. Community members – frequent guests and participants at the school – feel a sense of ownership and protectiveness for the space. They take credit for the reduced crime rate around the school since their neighborhood patrol has started guarding what many of them see as the center of their communities.

no straight classes.

24-hour library

robust arts programs

student-led organizations

student entrepreneurship

community involvement/ownership

college preparation/credit

I’d want to teach there.

I’d want to learn there.

Things I Know 230 of 365: I’m here to provoke

“[Key] part of design process is to have empathy for a user. And you [as a designer] are not that user.”

– Jeff Sharpe

I’m in Atlanta this weekend happily working with the good folks at Reimagine:ED as they host their Next Chapter summit at The Lovett School. For three days, librarians and designers from around the country are assembled to talk about the future of K-12 librarying. Good-hearted and creative people are imagining through a design process to decide what this ancient idea and act can come to mean to the students of now and the future.

Last night, the assembled thinkers chose from a collection of crowdsourced collection of questions and challenges surrounding library. The three challenges of the week are ideas any school or thinking and creating space would do well to wrestle with:

  • Design a successful ‘unquiet’ library.
  • What must K-12 libraries do to spur continual innovation, to make libraries the places and spaces our learners crave going forward?
  • Like a city provides a park the people can use in the myriad of ways, how can the library of the future be designed like a park of possibilities?

I hope the people around my siblings’ learning spaces are thinking about these things or other iterations of them.

I’m considering continuing to use the title printed on my name tag long after I’m done here – Provocateur.

I know about making things and I know about books, but I’d clarify myself as neither a designer nor a librarian. My work here is to push thinking. As a student, as a teacher and as an improviser – I’m one of several provocateurs here this weekend traveling from cohort to cohort, pushing thinking.

It’s a title that comes close to what I’d like to do (and what I like to do).

According to etymonline.com, a provocateur is “a person hired to make trouble,” or “challenger.” I like that.

With care and compassion, listening and questioning, I like the idea of being a person hired to make trouble.

Thanks to Laura Deisley, Jeff Sharpe and Christian Long for asking me to be involved. And thanks for the new title.

Things I Know 229 of 365: I’ve seen Problem-Based Learning from the other side

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

– Napoleon Hill

I just turned in my second statistics assignment. I should note (and I’m sorry Mr. Curry), when I took statistics during undergrad it became a sad march toward intellectual self-destruction. I hesitate to say intellectual, but the professor certainly attempted to steer my thinking that direction.

More often, my thinking was, “How does this count as math? I know calculus. How is this math?”

It wasn’t pretty.

My current statistics professor came with glowing reviews – from everyone. Everyone.

And he’s fantastic.

A lecture hall can be a stuffy space.

A statistics course can be a stuffy space.

The intersection is potentially numbing.

Not with Terry Tivnan.

In a course explicitly designed with the beginner in mind, Professor Tivnan works to set a pace and climate that has yet to have me feeling out of my depth.

Given the laughter and applause that pepper our classes, I’d say my classmates are in a similar situation.

And then the assignment came.

Now, remember, I have been teaching in an inquiry-driven, project-based school for the last for years and another school for two years before that that was doing those things, but didn’t think to say so. Not only is this learning I believe in, it’s learning I’ve assigned as well.

Until recently, it hadn’t been learning I’d experienced. Seems appropriate I dove into the process in a field for which I’ve less natural predilection.

Without going too deeply into details, our assignment gave us two data sets, some information about national trends regarding that data, and asked us to compare the data and write up a report for a fictional school board regarding our findings.

That’s it. No one outlined steps. No one said this is the information you must report.

“How are these two things related, and what does that mean?” we were asked.

It hurt my brain.

A lot.

Unclear as to how to approach the problems and feeling the wait of my mathematical past, I avoided the assignment for as long as I could.

I worked to help classmates make sense of the work, while avoiding my own.

And then I realized what he had done.

He wanted us to own the process. I’ll get nowhere if I have to look to an authority each time I need to decide when and how to use a “z score” or the importance of a weighted mean. I needed to own it.

The process needed to be mine.

Now, these are things I’ve professed for years. I’ve stood in front of audiences and classrooms and argued the importance of this kind of learning.

Here’s the thing – it’s tough.

As incredibly difficult as shaping a lesson or unit plan for problem-based learning may be, learning that way is incredibly difficult.

From several classmates I heard cries of, “Why won’t he just tell us what he wants or what to do?”

I’d heard that before.

“But how do I do it, Mr. Chase?”

As supportive as I’d meant to be, I never truly understood the difficulty involved in adapting new habits of learning.

I expect it’ll get easier – not quickly – as we’re expected to do more on our own with the knowledge and understandings we’re acquiring.

For this go ‘rough, it was tough. I need to remember that.

Things I Know 228 of 365: I’m developing new work and life flows

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

– Igor Stravinsky

The last 48 hours have been a reminder of the future in which we live.

Yesterday, when completing an assignment for one of my classes, I needed only to open a google doc to see the notes for the readings I hadn’t done.

Through e-mail, my reading group and I divided the readings for the week. I suggested we use a 3-2-1 reading strategy to capture the most important information. We added a section for “key words and phrase” and it was done.

Another member of my group e-mailed a draft Word document of what we’d decided on. I took the doc, fed it to Google Docs and shared it to the rest of the group.

Over 72 hours, the notes came rolling in – synchronously, across all of our computer screens, with no files or iterations of files to keep track of.

Where I had questions or comments, I got to add them in and my group members added their as well.

This morning, I created a Google Collection for all the files for the course. I created a file for next week’s readings and dropped my assignments so far in there as well. Collaboration, right?

This morning, I paid for my coffee and bagel with my phone – and I wasn’t at Starbucks.

Paying attention to my surroundings, I saw a decal on the window of my local coffee shop advertising LevelUp. A download later and I was outfitted with my own QR Code for paying at local businesses. Not unlike other apps designed to get patrons to visit businesses, LevelUp has a built-in savings plan and daily deals. The piece that sold me, no receipt. It gets emailed to me and sent to my phone. Later today, I’ll be setting up an inbox filter that channels my receipts out of my inbox and into a designated folder.

Speaking of designations, I got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for month – mint.com.

Now, more than any other time in my life, tracking my spending and keeping a budget are key constructs. In undergrad, my job at the paper supplemented my income and insured me a paycheck would be on the other end of each fortnight.

Though I’ve some contract work and a newly added research assistantship, I need some help making sure my finances are under tight control.

Shifting from a productive member of society to a straight-up consumer of goods, services and knowledge calls for a shift in thinking as well.

Mint is there to help. In about 10 minutes, I’d created a profile linked to my bank and credit card accounts as well as my student loans. Replete with budgets, savings analyses and comparisons of financial services, Mint is a financial advisor for those of us who can’t afford financial advisors. If I were a parent sending my kid to college, mint would be a requirement before I let the kid out the door.

Part of the joy of being a student that’s satisfying the curious portion of my brain has been developing new work and living flows. I’ve been working to leverage what’s free and available to me so the things I stress about are the things I care about.

Things I Know 227 of 365: You can’t sell accountability, we already own it

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

– Jacques Barzun

In 2006, then-chancellor of NYC schools Joel Klein delivered some remarks tot he Academy of Management in Atlanta, GA outlining the changes Klein and Mayor Bloomberg set in motion in New York.

Klein claimed the aim of the changes was to accomplish “three fundamental cultural shifts”:

  1. To move from a culture of excuses to a culture of accountability.
  2. To move from a culture of compliance to a culture of performance.
  3. To move from a culture of uniformity to a culture of differentiation.

Ignoring for a moment the semantic argument to be made that compliance and performance are not mutually exclusive ideas, I’m interested in Klein’s case that he was moving to true accountability through his policies.

“These principals,” Klein said in reference to the principals who signed documents against their union’s advice, “accepted the challenge and signed performance agreements, explicitly taking responsibility for student performance outcomes.”

The agreement “also specifically spells out the ways we will leave them alone to do their work.”

Klein went on to say the principals had put their “tails on the line” with the agreements, committing to their accountability to student learning.

They bought in to Klein’s accountability measures and they’d signed contracts to that effect in the same way they would have agreed to a car loan or mortgage.

And in the same way as either of those examples, the principals didn’t really own what they’d signed on for.

It was closer than most efforts had likely come to giving principals ownership of their schools, but it wasn’t the same thing.

When Klein stepped down in late 2010, I wonder how many of the principals pulled their contracts out of their filing cabinets to see if they were still accountable for their students’ learning.

My guess would be none.

My guess would be that the principals who signed on to Klein’s initiatives held themselves just as accountable for learning in their schools as they did before Klein took over the chancellorship.

They already owned that responsibility. They showed up everyday to live it and it probably consumed their thoughts before they drifted off to sleep at night.

What Klein was selling wasn’t acceptability for learning. You can’t sell someone what they already own.

He was attempting to sell principals on changing the way schools, principals and teachers go about helping students learn.

That’s an impossible sell.

To make it work, to get Klein’s initiatives off the ground, they couldn’t be his.

The only way to move, to make change, is to share the ownership, not sell it.

Things I Know 226 of 365: The way we talk about teachers matters

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

Michael Gersen had a Thursday Washington Post piece dealing with the current Rick Perry/Michele Bachmann imbroglio around Bachmann’s erroneous assertions about the HPV vaccine.

Given the amount of reading from classes that’s filling my brain these days, I’m surprised the column made its way to my browser.

It wasn’t even about education.

Except it was a bit.

In his lede, Gersen mocks Bachmann’s medical and personal health expertise, writing he’d rather hear from “a blunt, part-time football coach — or whomever they draft into teaching health classes nowadays.”

I wish he hadn’t done that.

As a comedian, I wish Gersen hadn’t gone for the easy joke.

As a teacher, I wish Gersen thought about the negative unintended consequences for his direct or indirect audiences when arguing  Bachmann’s rhetoric could have negative unintended consequences for her direct or indirect audiences.

Sure, the current national tenor in talking about teachers hasn’t exactly raised the bar of respect for those in the classroom.

The effects of words like Gersen’s can ripple in several directions. but two possible ripples (I’ll call them the ripples of greatest velocity) concern me the most.

In the first place, one liners or quips of the sort common from anyone looking to rough teachers up for their lunch money work to lower public expectations of teachers. In this instance, it was those people who choose to coach children or teach them the habits and mindsets of healthy citizens whose worth by perception was chipped away.

In a quick move, Gersen added his voice to those allotting permission and acceptance to the idea that any idiot can teach and those who do are the ones we trot out when we want to exemplify people we expect to know the least.

I have a rather low tolerance for ignorance, and some of the most thoughtful, intelligent people with whom I surround myself are teachers.

I doubt I’m alone in that.

Still, any time we orchestrate jokes featuring teachers as their butts, we work at cross purposes with making certain each teacher in the classroom is the best person we can get. Few people will be drawn to the job from which the public expects little. Few of the right people anyway.

If we are to stand behind the research showing an effective teacher as the most impactful factor in a student’s education, perhaps we should start treating teachers with the respect proportional to that impact.

The second ripple of Gersen’s remark, and those of the same ilk, that gives cause for concern is the erosion of good faith of the teachers doing the work Gersen implies is both simple and easy.

I’ve stood before an assembled class of high school students and facilitated discussions of sexual content in the texts we were examining. That alone was a mine field of possible pedagogical missteps requiring constant awareness and dedication.

I can only imagine the awkwardness, resistance, frustration and discomfort inherent in engaging a room of adolescents in a frank discussion of their sexual health.

Put to health teachers next to one another and I want the one who’s been repeatedly made aware we expect the highest standards of care and knowledge as she works to prepare the students in her charge for the increasingly complex interpersonal world they’ll come to know. Give me that any day over the teacher who reads continual negations of the importance of her knowledge and professionalism. The teacher who has come to realize America’s not expecting much from her as a practitioner and caregiver.

The thing that happens to the latter teacher – the we should all worry about as the ripple effects of remarks like Gersen’s – isn’t that the teacher will leave the profession.

No, we should worry that she’ll listen and realize we’re not expecting much.

Then, it’s no long walk to not expecting much from herself.

Things I Know 225 of 365: Oprah taught me

You get a car.

– Oprah Winfrey

New standards, new students, new schools, but no Oprah.

For the first time since I was in kindergarten, students starting their educational trek through began their school year in a post-Oprah world.

To most, it’s likely a subtle shift. I hadn’t even thought of it until today in class when we were learning about Lawrence Cremin’s concept of the “ecology of education.”

The interaction between educational institutions featured heavily in Cremin’s ecology. As Prof. Lawrence-Lightfoot pointed out, this included any number of institutions. We were, after all, talking education, not just school.

Several examples of these institutional interactions were offered, but it was the Prof. Lawrence-Lightfoot’s calling out of talk shows as redefining our conception of “how we think about talk, public/private boundaries and intimacy vs. voyeurism” that set me reeling.

Though not the everyday fixture in our house that she was in some of my friends’ homes, Oprah had a place in our family. She belonged. In fact, she was the only African American adult with whom I had consistent interaction until I got to college.

Though I remember the highlights of the Christmas shows or the celebrity exclusives or those damned book selections, something more subtle was taking place each time an episode was airing.

While I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons because my mom didn’t appreciate the message, Oprah was acceptable.

Some piece of that daily hour of television was worth inviting into our home, though we never spoke of or attempted to agree on its value. Its presence vouched for its value.

And, as Cremin would likely agree, that shifted my education. It altered my understanding of what it meant to talk and the possible public discussion of taboo.

I hadn’t considered it until today, and I haven’t a clue as to the depth, but I know she’s embedded in my thinking the same way Mr. Rogers’s airing of the film on how crayons were made created the first inkling that the things I played with and counted as wholes within my world had once been disparate pieces.

Millions of students began school this year in a post-Oprah world. Though no new episodes will be blaring as they come home to work on or blow off their homework or enjoy their after-school snacks, I wonder at how ever-so-slightly, perhaps imperceptibly, their classrooms, their interactions and their learning will be shifted by the echoes of Oprah.

Things I Know 224 of 365: Ownership matters

And I would argue the second greatest force in the universe is ownership.

– Chris Chocola

“He needs to get buy-in,” someone in class said today as we discussed a case study of a school where those in charge were failing to get all teachers swimming in the same pedagogical direction.

From there, the room was flooded with off-hand mentions of “buy-in.”

Some agreed, some advocated the opposite of buy-in and argued the use of administrative power instead.

I sat thinking for a while.

By the time I raised my hand, class was running short on time and many other voices needed heeding.

What I wanted to say was this:

If buy-in is your goal, if it is what you are shooting for as you advocate change, you are working toward something less shimmering, less amazing than what you imagine when you put your dreams to bed.

What I wanted to reference, as my access was sleeping in my bag, was the idea of ownership vs. buy-in.

I’m not certain when, but a few years ago, I started noticing buy-in as a main descriptor in conversations around project formation. Whether it was planning professional development or building units of study for students, people were worrying about buy-in.

“I like this project. I’m just worried about how I can create buy-in with my kids.”

“This is a great approach, and I’d love to take it to my faculty, I’m just not sure how I can get buy-in with my teachers.”

It came up so often that it started to permeate my thinking.

“A bunch of people are talking about ‘buy-in,’” my brain kept saying.

Enter ownership.

I honestly can’t remember who it was, that pointed out to me a distinction that has doused my thinking in intellectual kerosine ever since.

When making change, when starting the new, when shifting thinking; it is ownership toward which we should work, not buy-in.

Henri Lipmanowitz, former chairman of Merck International and board president of the Plexus Institute, draws a line between “buy-in” and “ownership.”

“Your implementation will inevitably be a pale imitation of what it could have been had you been an ‘owner’ instead of a ‘buyer-in’…” Lipmanowitz writes.

I have trouble disagreeing.

When thinking about larger educational policy or thinking about the workings of my classroom, ownership means more than buy-in.

If the system is working, we work toward ownership.

If ownership is established, I do not need to become a salesman.

If ownership is established, I do not need to worry about customer relations down the road.

If ownership is established, I am not in an idea alone.

If ownership is established, it will take more time.

For the latter, Lipmanowitz has a counter argument. To those who argue the involvement of all players at the inception will take time, he responds, “People that are affected will inevitably be involved.”

The difficulty for the classroom and for the shaping of policy or systemic norms is the paradigmatic norm of time allotment as incremental.

I’ll design the unit.

I’ll take time to show it to my peers.

I’ll explain it to the students.

I’ll teach it.

They’ll have questions.

I’ll answer them.

We’ll struggle as they work to buy my vision.

We’ll get to the learning…

Lipmanowitz’s believe (and mine) is based around the assumption that spending the chronological capital at the outset to insure ownership will smooth the road later on.

“In complex situations,” writes Lipmanowitz of the concept of ownership, “it is the only one that is likely to generate superior results. It requires giving people space and time for self-discovery.”

That’s tough.

That’s worth it.