Month: February 2013

30/365 Vision Must Live in Practice

Many schools have mission and vision statements. Some of those schools also have a listing of core values. Within this subset, we might even find a collection of schools who have drafted essential questions.

What is painfully, distressingly and alarmingly true about many of these schools is the proportion of them that draft these well-meaning documents, file them, and never ever return to them again – until it’s time to craft some sort of improvement plan. This is only slightly better than those who print these driving statements on banners for all who visit to take note as the actions they observe are in stark contrast with the values literally hanging over their heads.

Vision must live in practice.

The same is true of mission, values, and driving questions.

At SLA, we worked to constantly ask how the school’s core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection can be seen in the learning experiences designed for our students. While not every piece of work the students complete speaks to each of the core values, asking the question over and over again helps to ensure we are constantly practicing those things we proport to value most.

The vision of a school can only live in practice if it is shared by all within the community. We have seen many schools where teachers arrive for their first professional development day of the new school year, sip coffee from industrial-sized mugs and listen as the school’s principal stands before them and explains the vision for the new school year. Often, too often, this is a vision devoid of any remanants of the vision of the previous school year.

While it is understandable for a principal to endevour to energize his or her faculty at the start of the new year, shifting course dramatically and often will only lead teachers to pay lip service to the “new” vision while resorting to those goals and values they find most comfortable when they return to their classrooms.

Any principal would be better off to find a vision in which he or she can truly root the desired practice of a school and then seek ways to embody that vision in every action of every individual on the campus. Then, when that has happened, the next step is not to find a new way of saying what you believe, but to deepen the expressions of those beliefs and values key to your institution’s identity.

It is easy to attempt to be what we repeatedly say, but it is always better to do than to merely say.

Coming to terms with what a school believes and is about as a learning organization is a strong first step. As with so many journeys, it is the steps that follow that determine what you will become.

When vision is put to practice, when who we want to be is a constant reflection in practice, then we are able to move closer to the better versions of ourselves and our institutions.

29/365 Initial Thoughts on Caring in Online Spaces

I’ve written extensively here about the Ethic of Care, and it’s something I’ll speak about to anyone who’ll listen.

Lately, I’ve had the chance to talk and listen to people about a quesiton that’s been jumping around my brain. Namely, how do we enact an ethic of care in online spaces?

Today, I had a conversation with a former student. She’s in college now, studying to be a teacher, and wanted some advice on what to disclose to her eventual students and what to keep private.

Her concern was driven by her experiences in school and the realization she would have benefitted greatly from an adult in her life who’d been open about being where she’d been.

She wanted to know how I’d approached similar situations in my practice.

She’s in Philadelphia.

I’m in Boulder.

What’s more, I was in class at the time.

The conversation popped up through the google voice plugin I’ve installed in Chrome.

She was texting me. I was typing back on my browser.

As I built my understanding of qualitative theory and research practices, I was also attempting to guide a future teacher in her thinking about her practice.

Somewhere in there, care resides.

She had the number because I’d created it when I was in the classroom so that I might ask kids to submit questions or responses using their phones. If they had no phones, they were able to send the text via a chat client.

She kept the number.

I’m glad she did. (I hope others did too.)

If I can continue to care for my students, let them know my care for their learning didn’t end at Day 180, I’ll leverage whatever tools possible to do that. I understand the counter-arguments to this approach. It can be abused and used for nepharious purposes. I understand this to be true. I have a hard time seeing how those who would abuse these tools are going to be convinced to stop using them because those who would use them to help students refuse to consider the tools.

If anything, this is an argument for their widespread adoption of these practices by thoughtful and caring professionals who are driven by high standards of compassion and see their work as nurturing their students in safe spaces. Without such a precence, digital environments will be devoid of care. Minus that care, danger fills in the empty spaces.

I’m still tinkering with a more unified theory of care in online spaces. The conversation today helped me to see it in action, and that observation helped me to understand the power and necessity of such connections and availability.

It also left me with questions. Would this student have recognized my care for her if we’d not interacted in face-to-face environments? Did she benefit from our conversation in the same way she would have if we’d been in the same physical space? Was the caring relation reciprocal in the same way if can be in face-to-face interactions?

I don’t have answers to the questions, but I’m glad they’re getting more specific as I look more closely at trying to understand the issue.

28/365 ‘All Wretch and no Vomit’

My days, as of late, have been spent deeper in the study of “why X isn’t happening” than I’m used to or comfortable with. I knew a piece of this would likely happen when I moved from teaching and the daily amazement of the classroom to the life of a graduate student last year. I knew the conversation would likely become more insular when I started a research doctoral program this year.

Still, I’ve never felt comfortable not making things, not doing things, not moving. My elementary school report cards (the last ones to include narrative feedback) noted this discomfort: Zac is a joy to have in class, if he could just stay in his seat and curb the talking.

While those are tasks I’m able to master when fully focused nowadays and the talking is usually questioning, they’re not my default. I like to do things.

Dense readings and statistics assignments, though, have a way of asking you to sit down, shut up, and then do that some more.

Today, Anthony (a friend I’ve not spoken to since I finished undergrad) posted the video below to the book of faces, and I watched it. This is a rarity. Most Facebook videos elicit a scroll-by from me. For whatever reason, I watched it. I’m glad I did, and I wish I could make it so that every next faculty meeting planned at schools across the country start with this video and then proceed to a deep conversation of, “How can we help our kids answer this question and realize their hopes?”

I’m not familiar with Alan Watts (yet) and infinite voices are likely able to list the myriad reasons why what he describes isn’t possible for so many of the children in our care. I find myself uninterested in those reasons or at least not paying them the insurmountable heed  most conversations in education tend to lend them.

What other reason to work in education than to be aspirational? I can think of no word or sentiment that so finely describes what drew me to the classroom each day or what I hoped for my students. And, while I aspired for their success, education and teaching were about my own aspirations, that I might be the better version of myself that I hadn’t quite become the day before for whatever reason.

Let us do more with aspire than emptily attach it to the name of some new school. Let us enact it. Let us use it to drive our decisions, our questions, and our care.

Thanks, Anthony.

27/365 Let’s Have a Better Conversation

My friend Sam Chaltain is telling “A Different Story About Public Education,” and I get to help him. Not only that, a great many voices are part of this conversation.

For 10 weeks, Sam and other edu-thinkers will be considering one episode per week of a series called A Year at Mission Hill that documents a year in the life of a successful public school.

In true trans-media spirit, the series promises to be a convening of those who are asking questions and doing the great work of improving public schools. More than that, it’s a portal that invites involvement in both the better conversation and the great work.

EPISODE ONE:

For my part, Sam’s given me space on his EdWeek blog to consider contemporary research relating to each chapter and try to filter it through the lens of a classroom teacher who might be interested in using the the work of ivory towers to improve their practice. My first attempt is here.

If nothing else, follow A Year at Mission Hill because it promises to ask, “What’s going write in public education?” rather than operating from the deficit perspective that’s all too familiar for anyone who’s listening to the rhetoric surrounding our schools. Let’s celebrate the greatness that’s possible, and ask how to help it spread.

26/365 A Great Way for Students to Prep for Quizzes

In observing some of my student teachers this semester, I noticed they were approaching in-class quizzes in some pretty traditional ways. In debriefing the lessons after observing, I kept wanting to explain how my friend and colleague Matt Kay has his students review their reading and prepare for quizzes. Luckily, Matt’s a great guy and agreed to type up his practice so I could share it here.

When he mentions SATs, that stands for Student Assistant Teachers. At SLA, seniors who have room for an elective in their schedule can sign up to be SATs and work as assistant teachers alongside those teachers they’ve connected with during the course of their high school experience. It’s a beautiful piece of built-in mentorship, and Matt highlights its possibilities here.

From Matt:

My classes are divided into Small Learning Communities that I call “Pods.” Each one has 3-4 students. In the first quarter, they are chosen at random, but for each quarter after that, they are created with a purposeful mix of ability levels and social observations.
These pods meet up the day after any assigned reading. The students walk into class and sit immediately into their pods. They then have 10-12 minutes to discuss the previous night’s reading, and the notes that they have taken the night before. I have found that the struggling students are far more willing to ask each other questions than they are to ask during whole-group instruction. When this time is up, the students move to their seats and take the quiz.
Right now, my student assistants are making the quizzes. They are all factual questions that are not answered in spark notes or cliff notes. (I assess richer understandings in different ways). The SATs come to class with seven questions, and I pick five while the pods are meeting. The SATs give the questions, then they grade the quizzes.

25/365 The Hidden Racism of Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board

It’s been a while since I’ve really looked at Brown V. Board of Education. I could quote you the key line, “Seperate is inherently unequal,” but I haven’t had occasion to sit and read the decision since I was an undergrad.

I welcomed the chance when both the initial decision and SCOTUS’s second decision directing states and districts on the path to equity as part of my education policy class this week.

As is usually the case when I return to a text after some time, my perspective has changed.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Warren wrote, “We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education.”

This is great. Not surprisingly, I found myself agreeing whole-heartedly with Warren’s words.

What was surprising was the degree to which I found myself bristling at what I interpreted at the implicit value statement of the entire decision. If you take the time to read through the text, it starts to become clear that the Court was working to protect African American students from the negative effects of being segregated from white students.

Though never quite naming the move, the Brown v. Board decision has a subtext of, “You’re right, we should make sure black students can hang out in our schools, because our schools are great.”

Warren even quotes the lower Kansan court:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.

What a missed opportunity.

In this brief opinion, the Court had the chance to gently nudge a reframing of the way we think about what it means to go to a school that is dominantly black or dominantly white. It could have taken a sentence to point out that it was white students who were also detrimentally affected by segregation. Instead the decision reified the position of white schools as more legitimate places of learning.

True, to make such a move would have invited the application of whatever the 1954 version of “activist court” was upon the justices. Then again, there’s was already an activist interpretation (thank goodness).

As history and Chief Justice Warren have robbed me of my druthers, I’ve started considering the multiple times teachers have spoken to me, taught me about Brown v. Board. Each one, to a person, has framed the decision as one allowing black kids to be around white kids (though I’m simplifying language).

And so, it makes me sad. Sad that I was 31 years old before I tripped over this new understanding. Sad I’m not in a classroom to have this conversation with students. Sad that several times along my way I’m sure I’ve reinforced this traditional interpretation of the decision that reinforces white privilege and undermines human value of African American students.

I’m sorry for that.

24/365 We Lost a Hero

The world shines less brightly today.

I’m not sure what to write about Bus Drive Charles Albert Poland Jr., but I feel like the least I can do to honor his heroism is to say something here.

Tuesday, when a man boarded Poland’s bus demanding he release his young passengers, Poland said no. This 66-year-old retiree, who was driving a bus to help make ends meet until his wife could retire, put himself between danger and the children in his charge. For that, he paid the highest of prices when Jimmy Lee Dykes shot Poland four times and killed him.

Poland’s son has said, “when a child boarded his bus, ‘they were no longer their parents’, they were his.'” Tuesday, Poland tragically proved that to be true.

There is much to be said about Dykes, and much likely will be in the coming days and weeks.

For this moment, though, let us focus on Poland, a man who found himself in an impossible situation and refused to abandon his commitment to the safety of those in his charge – the least among us.

I did not know anything of Albert Charles Poland, Jr. before Tuesday (let a lone that he was a hero of mine).

Sadly, I know now.