IT Knowledge Exchange – CC Geeks & Pokes

I’ve been spending some selfish learning time recently.  Today my wife and I took some time to drive over to the ocean, to walk, and to watch the beauty of the moving water in our local inlet.  A beautiful way to spend a very hot day.

As you may recall, I’ve been participating for a while now in a virtual community focusing on school change, Modern Learners.   It continues to be a fascinating and engaging learning experience for me. Recently, the group’s community manager has begun to add a monthly focus topic.  For July, the group explored the importance of devoting time to our own refreshment, health, and re-creation.  This month’s topic deals with the importance of relationship building in the learning process (for adults as well as students) and the ways in which relationships can be fostered.  This has been a topic of consistent interest to me.

Earlier today, I opened  today’s post by Jan Resseger.  She titled it, “How We Define Teaching Makes All the Difference”.  I hope you’ll read it.  It’s magnificent.  It offers a stark and disturbing picture of the costs of the culture of efficiency that has dominated the educational experiences of our educators and children since the publication of A Nation At Risk.

Jan introduces her piece with a reference to a Philip Roth novel, I Married a Communist. In the book, the main character, Mr Ringold, is by most standards a model teacher.  Ringold teaches children from his neighborhood. He understands them, He cares about them. He cares what they read and insists that they think about what they read. He is in relationship with his students.

Jan includes a brief excerpt from the book as told by Nathan, one of his students…

Mr. Ringold had stepped over to where the books had tumbled from the basket onto the pavement at the foot of the stoop and was looking at their spines to see what I was reading. Half the books were about baseball… and the other half were about American history. One is about the life of Tom Paine.

“‘You know what the genius of Paine was?’ Mr. Ringold asked me. ‘It was the genius of all those men. Jefferson. Madison. Know what it was.?’”

“‘No,’ I said.”

“‘You do know what it was,’ he said.”

“To defy the English.”

“A lot of people did that. No. It was to articulate the cause in English. The revolution was totally improvised, totally disorganized.  Isn’t that the sense you get from this book, Nathan? Well, these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose.”…

In  Ringold, Roth offers a definition of teaching… the challenging of oneself and one’s students to develop probing intellectual habits.  No doubt Ringold hasn’t had many conversations with today’s education “reformers”.

Jan continues to expand on the notion of “defining teaching”  with the writings of Larry Cuban, professor emeritus at Stanford University.  He offers a picture quite different from that offered by Roth.  He doesn’t speak of relationships or intellectual habits.  Cuban describes instead the “wave of accountability:

The current donor and business-led resurgence of a ‘modern cult of efficiency,’ or the application of scientific management to business can be seen at a host of companies and in U.S. schools…  Turn now to schooling. The… focus on student outcomes can be seen in the standards, testing, and accountability movement launched over three decades ago…. Determining which teachers are productive, i.e., ‘effective,’ using students’ test scores has occurred in many states and big city districts. Such outcome measures should not shock anyone familiar with the spreading influence of the business model (e.g. earning profits, market share, and return on investment) upon schooling.  Policymakers’ concerns over inefficiency in sorting effective from ineffective teachers… led to an embrace of an economic model of providing incentives to increase organizational productivity and efficiency… Faster and better teaching through new technologies producing improved student outcomes in less time and money….

Jan then continues with words from Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of Education…

Technology can play a huge role in increasing educational productivity, but not just as an add-on for a high-tech reproduction of current practice.  Again, we need to change the underlying processes to leverage the capabilities of technology. The military calls it a force multiplier. Better use of online learning, virtual schools, and other smart uses of technology is not so much about replacing educational roles as it is about giving each person the tools they need to be more successful—reducing wasted time, energy, and money. By far, the best strategyfor boosting productivity(italics mine) is to leverage transformational change in the educational system to improve outcomes for children. To do so, requires a fundamental rethinking of the structure and delivery of education in the United States.

A fascinating dichotomy… developing probing intellectual habits vs. boosting productivity.

To those of us engaged in rethinking learning and the ways in which a focus on learning can move us beyond the process of boosting productivity, Duncan’s educational reform is a dead story. It has cost us the development of probing intellectual habits.  It has cost teachers and students the time and intentionality needed to see the expansive possibilities of our students.  It has fostered fear. It has disrupted the kinds of caring, trusting relationships that make it possible students and teachers to take risks inherent in moving beyond the simple recall of facts.

In contrast to the standards, assessment, evaluation cycle which so clearly defines the past thirty years or so of “educational reform”, Jan offers the writing of Mike Rose, an education professor at UCLA.  She shares a quote from a piece offered by Rose…

“’ The thing I love about Ms. Marovich,’ says Helen of her technology instructor, ‘is hat she looks at you, she sees the finished product.’ What a remarkable kind of seeing Helen describes: An act of perception that envisions growth and that helps make that growth possible.

Rose continues…

Over the past several years I have been interviewing a wide range of people, from students in high school and community college to professions…about experiences in or out of school that had a transformative effect on their education, that changed the way they thought about school and what school could enable them to do with their lives… (The students noted that some) teachers seem to operate with an expansive sense of human ability and are particularly alert to signs of that ability, signs that might be faint or blurred by societal biases or by a student’s reticence or distracting behavior – or that the student him or herself might barely comprehend… We don’t hear a lot about this powerfully humane element of teaching, for so much current discussion of teacher education and development is focused elsewhere: from creating measures of effectiveness to mastering district or state curriculum frameworks.

In a new movie,  Eighth Grade, director Bo Burnham addresses an issue untouched by the reform, boost productivity, efforts…the issue of learning  how to be.  This is an issue that confronts each and every one of us as children and, even sometimes as adults. In an interview with Julie Beck for The Atlantic, Burnham discusses his exploration of how one student is feeling her way “through the dark forest of middle school social life”. For the main character, Kayla, the scenery keeps changing.  How should she act in the classroom, at a classmate’s party, at the mall with friends, on the internet?  It seems critical that we consider the possibility that the support that Kayla needs to successfully navigate this time, lies more with the connections she makes with caring, supportive adults than in the mastery of Algebra II.

In his book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein speaks about stories… Stories of Our People, Stories of Separation, and of stories that have died.  He speaks of connections, of practicing empathy, of building relationships, of writing new stories.  The story of educational reform is, for many of us, dead.  For others it is dying.  For educators, in whatever role we are at the moment, can we continue, Nero-like, to “fiddle” while the kids who need us burn in fires of ideologically-driven reform “solutions” ?

It’s time for a much better story.  Are we willing to write it?  Or will allow the next story to be written by the next version of Arne Duncan?

Be well.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently about the problems caused by the lack of  agreement about the real purpose of education.  It’s been a bit like my experience with YouTube when I get lost in following the suggested clips related to my original search and then wonder how I lost an hour or so of my day.  In the next week or two you may (or may not) see the fruits of this exploration. In the meantime…

I’ve been occupying myself and my need for learning with participation in a group (ChangeLeaders Community) organized and facilitated by Will Richardson, Bruce Dixon, Lyn Hilt, and Missy Emler as a part of the work they do as the founders of Modern Learners. BTW. I’d recommend joining.

This week, they posted a piece written by Will that I thought should be required reading for educators.  Here it is.  I made a choice in posting this.  While Will’s links work, they do not always return you to the post here.  Rather than eliminate the links which represent a lot of learning in themselves, I decided to offer this warning about the potential clumsiness of the linking process.  My bad.  Not theirs. Be well.

EdTech is Driving Me Crazy, Too

By Will Richardson

There’s a growing sense that we’ve reached a breaking point with technologies in the classroom. France is banning all mobile devices from middle and high school next fall. Privacy concerns continue to mount around Google Classroom and other school wide “solutions” that attempt to manage the daily interactions between teachers and students. And now, as AI and VR and AR begin to attach their tentacles to education, concerns about how to marry tech and teachers are reaching new heights.

Good times.

Yet, as someone who celebrated his 17-year blogging anniversary this week, I’m still in the camp that says humans and technologies can work together in powerful ways in classroom learning contexts.

The problem, however, is that most of what ed tech is selling us isn’t really about learning; it’s about teaching. I was reminded of that once again this week when I walked up to the booth of a big name vendor at a small regional conference and asked the rep what seems to be the toughest product-related question you can ask these days: “So, since you’ve plastered the word ‘learning’ all over your booth, I’m curious, how do you define that word?” (I tend to do that a lot just for fun.) The response was typical: a few stammering sounds followed by some mumblings about “deep understanding” and “applying knowledge” and other such figuring-it-out-on-the-spot phrases. I doubt that rep had ever been asked that question before. I doubt that company every really talks about what learning really is.

More often than not, ed tech is something done to the student rather than done in service of the student. And there’s no better example of this than a new tool called “Emote” that preys on our current fears around the socio-emotional state of our students and sets a whole new bar for “helicopter educating” (which, I’m sorry to say, is not the first time that phrase has been uttered.) John Warner in Inside Higher Ed does a great job of teasing out the insidiousness of Emote, an app which makes it easier for the adults to record any time a particular student looks depressed or sad or anxious. As Warner notes:

When a child arrives in school, if they are observed to be angry or upset by a staff member, this is logged into the app. Later, a teacher may see additional evidence, creating another alert. The goal, according to Emote CEO Juilan Golder, is to prevent “escalation.” Student behavior can also be tracked longitudinally. Maybe a student is grumpy or sleepy every Monday, suggesting something is amiss at home. The app will know.

No one will be shocked, either, to hear that the CEO says “There’s more interest than we can handle at this point.”

Warner calls this a part of the “Problem with Surveillance” which “discusses the encroachment of real-time data collection and tools of surveillance – such as ‘parent portals’ or apps like ClassDojo – into student spaces. These are part and parcel of the ‘problem of atmosphere’ as students are tracked and monitored throughout the entire school day. These technologies are already doing damage.” And he adds, “There is simply no evidence that real-time data collection or instant feedback is conducive to learning.” There ya go.

I’ll save you the discussion of FaceMetrics, which will no doubt leave you shaking your head in despair. And if you’re really into self-abuse, scan down this Twitter thread from Benjamin Herrold, a writer from EdWeek who has been diving into this explosion of tracking and monitoring apps. (Note: There are so many compelling links in that thread that I probably should just thank you for stopping by at this point and wish you well on your journey onward.) I know I should just put the tl;dr version of all of this at the top of this post, but if you’ve made it this far, here it is: Purveyors of ed tech are jumping whole hog on the socio-emotional learning bandwagon, and we in education seem more than happy to focus on clicking and collecting our way to cataloguing  the symptoms rather than searching for the cause.

Thing is, we know the cause. As Warner writes:

There is mounting evidence that school is demonstrably bad for students’ mental health. The incidence of anxiety and depression are increasing. Each year, more students report being “actively disengaged” from schools.

And this post in Mindshift this week certainly makes that case, adding that parents pushing for “success” in the traditional school sense aren’t helping either.

I’m not saying school is 100% to blame for the mental health issues so many of our kids are experiencing these days. But if you listened to my podcast interview with David Gleason from a couple of months ago, you know that we’re not helping matters much. We’re putting tons of pressure on kids to stay on an increasingly narrow path to “success” because if they don’t, our own self worth as institutions are put at risk.

Read that again. In many ways, we’re choosing ourselves over our kids.

At that same conference I referenced earlier, I listened in on a session that was about improving the mental health of students. It was standing room only, overflow crowds in the hallways craning their necks to hear. The very well-meaning and concerned superintendent talked extensively about how to bring on board more counselors and therapists, how to increase the interventions, and how to monitor students’ mental health more closely. I don’t want to in any way suggest that he didn’t care deeply for his kids. He did. We all do.

But how many therapists or prescriptions or apps could we get away without if we attacked the mental health issues our kids are experiencing through a different lens, one that starts with the premise that we’re the ones that are broken, not the kids? What if we rewrote the script and put mental health above “achievement” or “success” as measured by grade point averages, the number of AP classes we offer, college acceptances, and other “narrow path” measures?

And if you really want to get crazy, why don’t we create an app for students so they can track every time our “narrow path” narrative makes them anxious or stressed, or every time we deny them the agency to pursue learning that matters to them, or hint at their value as humans by the test scores or GPAs they get, or whenever we deny them fundamental democratic rights, or refuse to act in ways that suggest that we are the problem and not them? We could call it “Ed-mote” or some other silly Silicon Valley play on words, and the software would send DMs to superintendents and principals when an intervention is required, like an immediate two-hour play period for everyone in the school. (We could also, by the way, encourage them to track the many positives about their school experience as well.)

Who wants to build that out?

So, yeah, the current crop of ed tech “solutions” is driving me a bit mad because they’re not solutions at all. They’re masking the problem. Which unfortunately seems to be what we want. Because treating the real problem is “more than we can handle at this point.”

Five More to Read This Week:

Children, Learning, and the ‘Evaluative Gaze’ of School – A must read essay from Carol Black on the problem with assessing our kids.

Stackable Degrees Could be the Future of Higher Education, Experts Say – Keeping track of the trends in credentialing.

A Shakeup in Elite Admissions: U-Chicago Drops SAT/ACT Testing Requirement – Big news.

What Teens Really Say About Sex, Drugs, and Sadness – New research has good and bad results.

Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking – It’s not a new skill, but it’s an important skill

I was in Houston last week at the time of the recent shooting in nearby Santa Fe.  In the aftermath of this event, the chief of police posted on Facebook that he had reached his point of no return… that, in spite of his upbringing and his feelings about gun ownership, he could no longer support the notion that the Second Amendment was somehow an expression of God’s permission to own a gun.  It was, in Texas, a pretty startling statement and was quickly followed by a statement by the state’s Lieutenant Governor that the problem was not guns but the lack of “hardened” schools.

Observing the aftermath of the tragedy at close quarters, having the opportunity to discuss the situation with a Texas state trooper who will soon be a member of the family, combined with a 4 hour plane ride gave me a lot of thinking time and a lot to think about.

It seems we’ve reached a point in positional thinking about guns in which each side has so refined its thinking, talking points and commitment to its deeply held beliefs, that no compromise is possible.  With each positional justification, the language gets harsher and the response by those holding the opposing position increasingly visceral. In a conclusion that will not shock regular readers of this blog, I found myself considering the Russell Ackoff theory… i.e., the difference between trying to do things right and doing the right thing.

What if the debate about who should own guns, which guns, and how many is a just a distraction from a much larger issue… one that may be more frightening than a school shooting? What if our inability to arrive at acceptable regulation of gun ownership is based on a faulty analysis of the problem? What if the problem is much deeper and much harder to accept? What if the problem is more related to our historical and persistent reliance on violence as a solution?

I recalled a piece about the then recent Parkland shooting by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.  It was entitled “If We Want Kids to Stop Killing, the Adults Have to Stop Too”.  I decided to revisit the piece and wanted to share the basic ideas offered by Taibbi and some very serious implications for education/educators. I think you will find it equally interesting and troubling.  More important, however, are the possible conclusions and implications that we might need to consider as we help our students learn how to be in their world.

In introducing his thinking, Taibbi offers

Nikolas Cruz, the 19 year-old just arrested for shooting and killing 17 people in Parkland, Florida, supposedly … There will be lots of hand-wringing in the coming days about gun control, and rightfully so – it’s probably easier to get a semi-automatic rifle in this country than it is to get some flavors of Pop Tarts – but with each of these shootings, we seem to talk less and less about where the rage-sickness causing these massacres comes from.

On the rare occasions when we do talk about it, the popular explanation now is that guns themselves cause gun violence. As the New York Times put itafter the Vegas massacre, “The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.”

This makes sense. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we tried real gun control as a solution (we won’t, of course).

Taibbi describes the variety of explanations for the violence that lies behind these tragic events… deep seated racism, violent video games, music lyrics, movies, etc.  While each of t hese likely plays a role in the growing acceptance of violent solutions, Taibbi notes that in offering such explanations, we continue to show off “our amazing incapacity for introspection”.  The story of our land is filled with violent conflict. So deeply ingrained is this thinking that we declare “war” on problems such as poverty, drugs, illiteracy, etc.

Taibbi continues…

OK, sure. But what about the fact that we’re an institutionally violent society whose entire economy has historically been dependent upon the production of weapons?

And how about the fact that we wantonly (and probably illegally) murder civilians in numerous countries as a matter of routine? Could that maybe be more of a problem than 50 Cent’s lyrics? No? Really?

In an era of incredible division and political polarization, military killing is the most thoroughly bipartisan of all policy initiatives. Drone murders spiked tenfold under Obama, and Trump has supposedly already upped the Obama rate by a factor of eight. The new president apparently killed more civilians in his first seven months in office than Obama did overall, making use of our growing capacity for mechanized murder.

Taibbi acknowledges that his observations about the relationship between societal endorsement of military killings and societal violence among civilians might be considered “hippie-ish whining”, but when we look for why violence is so prevalent how can we not at least entertain the possibility of a deep relationship.  Our steadfast refusal to examine such a relationship is captured in the response to a proposal by Congressman Dennis Kucinich in 2001 to create a “Department of Peace”.

Although he never said we shouldn’t have a defense department … “He just happened to believe we should make nonviolent conflict resolution a organizing principle in our society”.

The corresponding Peace Department’s goals were to be aimed at transforming the way we look at the world, and would: “…promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; strengthen nonmilitary means of peacemaking; promote the development of human potential; work to create peace, prevent violence, divert from armed conflict and develop new structures in nonviolent dispute resolution…”

The bill languished in “legislative purgatory” until Kucinich’s retirement in 2012.

It is here that Taibbi offers the point of entry for us as educators.

We’retrained(italics mine) to accept that early use of violence is frequently heroic and necessary…We just don’t believe in peace. We don’t believe in nonviolence. The organizing principle we’re going with instead involves using technological mastery to achieve order by killing exactly the right people.

This is despite the fact that “precision” killing turns out to be less than precisein reality, whenever anyone bothers to check. And we don’t dwell on the misses, like those millions of Indochinese men, women and children we once massacred with bombs and chemicals and evil little pellet-mines. It’s always the enemy who doesn’t value human life, who thinks “life is not important,” as General William Westmoreland – one of the early users of the term “body count” – once said about “the Oriental.”

The point of entry for us…

Do we as educators believe in violence as a problem solving strategy?  Do we believe in Kucinich’s non-violent conflict resolution as an organizing principle for our school “societies” ? What do we believe?  What policies and practices are intentional/accidental in our school cultures that reinforce our beliefs? What policies and practices should we change to focus on doing the right thing?  How might Gleason’s research on what he called “the bind”** affect our thinking, our actions?  What fears might be keeping is from creating cultures of non-violence in our schools? What experiences do our kids have in our schools that reinforce physical or emotional violence as the default response to conflict, to hurt, to disappointment?  What experiences might we provide for kids to make non-violent response their default reaction to these things?

** David Gleason’s research, based on the recent UCLA study about dramatic increases in pre-adolescent and adolescent stress, anxiety and depression, indicates that we, as parents and educators find ourselves in “the bind” – the realization that the stories we have helped to transmit to our children no longer work but our fears cause us to continue to adhere to them and, further, to continue to transmit them to our children.

Final thoughts from Taibbi…

Gun control? I’m all for it. But this madness won’t stop until we stop believing that killing makes us strong, or that we can kill without guilt or consequence just by being “precise.” What beliefs like that actually make us is insane and damaged, and it’s no surprise that our kids, too, are beginning to become collateral damage.

A while back I shared what I consider to be the key components of leadership.  My reflection stemmed from a conversation I had a long time ago with Tom Sergiovanni who suggested that “leadership was the capacity to build followership”. In piecing together my own experiences in various leadership positions and the lessons learned from my work as an executive coach, I identified both what I considered the key components of leadership as well as the process by which prospective leaders moved the  “capacity to build followership” into actual followership.

The “journey” begins with honest, sometimes “fierce” conversation, builds these into deep, caring, trusting relationships and creates what Simon Sinek calls “circles of safety”… places where the presence of such caring, trusting relationships help us overcome our fears of change, of risk-taking, of ‘following’ to places that might be unfamiliar.

This week I had the opportunity to read in a local paper a tribute to a superintendent who had died suddenly in tragic circumstances.  I’ve included the link to the piece  here and I urge you to read it. It is more than the story of one very talented and highly respected educator.  It is a course description of leadership… of the skills and dispositions that resulted in a kind of “holy” followership.

The author, Rob Anthes writes…

Two years have passed since a car driven by a Robbinsville High School student struck and killed the Robbinsville Schools superintendent and his dog, Gertie, April 19, 2016. That day and the days that followed changed Robbinsville forever.

But it quickly became clear that [Steve] Mayer wouldn’t be defined by how he died. He had long been mindful of his reputation and the path he led, and the school district followed suit.

This could be applied to practical things, such as the way the school district looks for alternative revenue sources, the cultivating of the Robbinsville Extended Day program, the creation of an energy savings improvement plan and the hiring of a school resource officer.

It could be seen in the way he approached education, believing in opportunities and access for all students. He felt strongly that students needed to learn how to be citizens and to have a voice, which is why he encouraged involving students in discussions. The district continues to hold student focus groups so the education in Robbinsville Schools reflects those the district serves.

It’s seen in Robbinsville’s curriculum, which prioritizes research and communication skills thanks to Mayer’s push.

…But, on the surface, these are things every superintendent does. So why does Mayer continue to serve as a guide for the Robbinsville community?

The district’s current superintendent, Kathie Foster, explained…

“He made so many deep, abiding and personal connections,” Foster said. “That’s why we talk about him. He was such a genuine person. His heart was so big and so visible. He shared with everyone. You talk with people, and they say that he was such a close friend of theirs. You hear that from so many people. Part of that is the openness to love everyone. That’s who he was. He was not afraid to love and accept.”

This has been made apparent to every person who walks through the front doors of a Robbinsville school. In the vestibule of each of the district’s three schools, there’s a plaque. On it is Mayer with his trademark smile and the phrase, “Make someone’s day today.”

Anthes continues…

The district has worked so its students learn these attributes, the ones that made Mayer so special—empathy, compassion, resilience. The corporate world calls these “soft skills,” but people who crossed paths with Mayer know better than most there’s nothing soft about them. Foster suggested a more suitable term would be “human.” For it was with those skills, Mayer changed countless lives—merely by embracing others’ humanity. It’s also what those same people miss most about him.

Anthes concludes his piece with an excerpt from a description written by Dr. Mayer’s administrative assistant.

Steve Mayer…Boss. Friend. Seeker. Good Steward. Family Man. Scholar. Sports Fan. Nature Lover. Teacher. Leader. Champion of Justice. Inspiration.

An open minded enthusiast for children, families and the Robbinsville community, Steve had a passion for new ideas and loved the process—and the challenge—of helping people to see the world in new and different ways. He had a quick mind and was rarely at a loss for words. My friend was as smart as he was fun. He was committed to excellence and couldn’t help but look to uncover the quiet hero in every individual that crossed his path. By nature, he was an optimist who fostered independence in others by encouraging them to fly. He provided me, and countless others, with wings to soar and a soft place to fall in the event of a crash landing. I am just one of many whose lives are richer and more meaningful for having had the good fortune to have known him.

I recall a story written about Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln, in the throes of the Civil War did not grant interviews.  He did, however, invite a reporter to spend the day with him as he went about his work.  At one point the reporter was ushered into a room in the White House which had been converted into a miniature battlefield. The reporter asked Lincoln, if he was, as Commander-in- Chief, trying to plan a victorious battle. Lincoln replied. “No. I’m trying to save lives. For if too many soldiers die in this war, it will be impossible to reunite the country.”  The reporter wrote a short article praising Lincoln and asking readers if all wouldn’t want a leader whose goal was to save lives.

When Lincoln was assassinated, in his pockets were a few dollars and a dog-eared, folded piece of paper.  People then recalled that in times of stress, Lincoln frequently pulled a small piece of folded paper from his pocket and read it.  It was a copy of the article.

In our work as leaders here are a few words to carry with us…

He was committed to excellence and couldn’t help but look to uncover the quiet hero in every individual that crossed his path. By nature, he was an optimist who fostered independence in others by encouraging them to fly. He provided me, and countless others, with wings to soar and a soft place to fall in the event of a crash landing.

Recognizing and stopping our contribution to the rise of childhood stress, anxiety and depression.

Hello again,

I know it’s been a while.  Although some of my colleagues might dispute this, I’ve never been particularly good at writing simply to fill up space. As I’ve noted previously, this has been a time of reflection… a time to immerse myself in the thinking of others and to see where I might find connections or patterns that might be useful.

As was reflected by my last post, I’ve been touched by the increasingly persuasive data that tell us that our young people are suffering. What struck me about the situation was the description offered by psychologist Dr. David Gleason about our role as educators in the process.  He uses the word “bind” to describe the conflict facing parents and educators… We are relying on a narrative of hard work, good grades, college entrance and completion to insure our kids of a future that we quietly fear may not be as possible for them as it was for us. We know that this increases stress but know no other path.  We fear that if we take another path we might fail and fail them. So, with the help counselors, psychologists and outside resources, we do our best to identify and provide help for those in most obvious need, while at the same time we continue to resist making changes to the systems which are, at least partially, causal in the increases in stress, anxiety, and depression.

I want to call your attention to the work of Will Richardson, Bruce Dixon and their team in not only highlighting this problem but also offering a guide to what can be done and how. My hope is that you will find in this post, and in their work, a growing recognition of our unintentional role in contributing to the dilemma facing our kids, their parents, and their teachers and see the possibilities/steps offered by Bruce and Will as a viable alternative.

Background:

For the past few months I’ve been participating in an on-line professional growth group, Change Leaders Community, that is focused on supporting folks who are interesting in, or who working on, bringing new learning opportunities to our students and change to our system of schooling.  The group was begun and is moderated by Will Richardson, Bruce Dixon and their very talented team at Modern Learners.  Bruce and Will bring an incredible depth and range of experiences and have founded the community in recognition of the need for those involved in the change process to have access to others attempting the same work. Participants come from a variety of countries and bring a wealth of experience and experiences to our discussions.

This week’s call was focused on the sharing of a recently published eBook, 7 Strategies to Win the War on Learning, written by Bruce and Will.   This is a very practical work (I believe there is more to come) and, as a concrete sign of their commitment to change, they have generously offered it under a Creative Commons license allowing for the free sharing of the material.

Note: The link provided above will take you to a free download page which also serves as a bit of an introduction to their work.  While there is a fee attached to participating in the Change Leaders Community, this is a “no strings” download.

And so…

The book focuses on what Bruce and Will consider one of the largest areas of need for change… assessment.  There is a growing understanding of the failure of our current system of assessment and large-scale state testing to provide any kind of reliable information about the learning of our students or the effectiveness of our teachers.  Perhaps of even greater importance is the growing recognition of the role that our current assessment systems play in adding to the stress on our students. When we look seriously about how schools contribute to the rising levels of stress, anxiety and depression among youth, our system of assessments ranks as one of the top factors.  It is in recognition of these two issues, that Bruce and Will decided to focus on assessment as a critical aspect of school change.

Another Note: I’ll be looking at the issues of grading and the growing interest in mastery transcripts in my next post. 

There are three pieces of the book that struck me.

The first of these is a superbly organized (and well researched) section about the origins, development, and misuse of testing.  What I found fascinating about these chapters was the recognition of the need to help parents, students, and other educators (who have had some form of testing a part of their schooling for as long as any of us have been alive) understand that their initial distaste for tests was well founded.   Not too many of us sat there breathlessly and excitedly anticipating our next big test! Bruce and Will handle this insightfully and usefully. I consider this the “WHY” of the book.

The second piece that captured my attention was the “WHAT” section… the 7 Strategies that they identified. They entitle these: 7 Strategies to Support Assessment That Supports Learning.

1. Beliefs must drive assessment.
2. Challenge assumptions, biases, and orthodoxies that influence assessment practice.
3. Communication beats compliance.
4. Explore status-quo busting assessment solutions to provide more authentic and real-world choices.
5. Let students learn about how they learn.
6. Measure what matters.
7. Invest in TRUST.

Moving people way from their long-held beliefs involves a lot of “unlearning”.  This is no less true when we think about assessment.  Note that their focus is not to eliminate assessment but to design, select and utilize assessment practices that support learning.  The strategies they describe and explore represent steps that, while they may differ in sequence and depth from school to school, are critical to the success of any change plan.

The third piece that interested me was the way in which they had formatted each section of the “7 Strategies” descriptions.  Each strategy contains an expansion of key aspects of deep explorations: Why This Matters, From Strategy to Action, Questions to Further the Conversation, and Resources.  For me this was the “HOW” of the book.  It is less a concrete action plan that a guide for engaging stakeholders in the kinds of conversations/explorations that encourage ownership of the conclusions rather than and expectation for compliance with a new orthodoxy.  Having facilitated such change processes in school as a consultant (often with mixed results), I appreciated the guidance they offer.

Your turn

I hope you’ll take the time to read 7 Strategies and share your thoughts with us.

“Be well. Do good work. Keep in touch” –  Garrison Keillor

Pixabay – 2012

Hello. It’s been a while.  It’s interesting that I feel guilty and a need to apologize for not keeping to a schedule I never really set.  I’m thinking that a significant part of life might be a series of agreements that we don’t recall making.

As I found myself struggling to maintain “my schedule”, I decided to take stock of why I’m writing.  I find that I write for two reasons.

Often my writing is driven by a need to pass along some insights that have been shared with me. I use “that have been shared with me” deliberately because they come to me from a variety of sources most of which I can’t remember. I can recall only that they are rarely original and frequently reflect a clarity of insight that I continue to find elusive. It would be wrong to claim ownership. I have learned, however, that the clarity of such insights comes to best in stillness. In such times I sense both clarity and an obligation to share it. This has not been a “still” time.

My second reason for writing is more selfish. I write to bring order to the thoughts that I encounter. Most times it works.  But in the past several weeks I’ve begun 4 pieces. They didn’t actually begin as separate pieces; however, in each case new thoughts intruded, demanded attention, and added not clarity, but further complication. They apparently paid no heed to my pursuit of clarity. They reminded me that I don’t find clarity. Clarity finds me.

All this us by way of saying that I’m going to take a week or two to do some reading and find stillness. Retirement afford me that luxury. During that time, I’ll be revisiting some authors I’ve previously read and adding some that I’ve recently encountered and want to experience more deeply.

Here’s a short annotated list in case you’d like to join me in the explorations.

I’ve referred elsewhere to the writing and thinking of Charles Eisenstein. Eisenstein had me with the following, taken from the “About” page on his website.

Eisenstein writes…

”There is a tide of separation (separation from one another, from our planet, from our institutions) that is generating a convergence of crises – ecological, medical, educational, political, etc. …Why does money seem to be a force for injustice and destruction? …It’s just a system of agreements, a story. … What would a new story, a new system of agreements look like that were aligned with a healing planet?”

Can Eisenstein offer insight into our education crisis? What would a new series of agreements, a new story, look like if we were to remove the story of separation from our thinking?

Russell Ackoff – I’ve referred to Ackoff frequently, referencing his distinction between doing things right and doing the right thing.

He describes better than I could why I want spend more time with his thinking in an essay he wrote in 1999 for The System Thinker, published by Pegasus Communications entitled “A Lifetime of Systems Thinking”.

Most large social systems are pursuing objectives other than the ones they proclaim, and the ones they proclaim are wrong.

Example: The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers – and teaching is a major obstruction to learning. Whoa!

In discussing Ackoff’s work and thinking, Will Richardson suggested that I read one of Ackoff’s books… Turning Learning RightSide Up : Putting Education Back on Track. It’s on my list.

Peter Gray, PhD, “The Joy and Sorrow of Rereading Holt’s “How Children Learn”. In Psychology Today, December 26, 2017.

Gray’s article stems from his rereading of Holt’s book on the publication of the 50^th anniversary edition of that work. He addresses what he terms the sad reality that so little of Holt’s insights have made their way into contemporary education practice in our schools. He offers what he considers to be Holt’s major insights and contributions and begins with what most consider to be Holt’s most significant observation.

Schools try to teach children skills and knowledge that may benefit them at some unknown time in the future.  But children are interested in now, not the future.  They want to do real things now.  By doing what they want to do they also prepare themselves wonderfully for the future, but that is a side effect.

In taking license with a recent post recent post by Will Richardson in which he describes the commitment and capacity to turn this “now” oriented learning approach into a desire to learn more as “the artistry of teaching”, I combine this with Aldrich’s 3 purposes. For me it seems that the artistry of teaching is the commitment and capacity to turn the student’s “now” orientation into the desire to learn how to know, to learn how to do, and, of ever increasing importance in our current “story”, to learn how to be.

If you have the time and inclination to join me in this exploration of stillness and clarity, I hope you will add your own thoughts and experiences in the comment section. In the meantime…

“Be well. Do good work. Keep in touch” – Garrison Keillor

Welcome (back) to what is becoming a fairly sporadic blog. I decided a while back that the world has a sufficiency of words and doesn’t need more from me when I don’t have all that much of significance to say. If the stars line up, my assessment of significance will coincide with yours and we’ll all be pleased with the result. By choosing to subscribe, if you haven’t already done so, you’ll get a friendly reminder from the WordPress folks when I’ve posted something new and exciting and I’ll get a healthy dopamine hit when I see that someone has chosen to read my thoughts.

I’ve written recently about what I see as a significant flaw in our growth as a species. It is the combination of impatience and arrogance which has led us to look for quick solutions and avoid deep analysis. Our superficial analysis and misguided solutions yield greater and greater negative consequences as our world increases in complexity. I recently encountered the work of Charles Eisenstein (more about that in a bit). For context, you might want to look at his  About page on his website and check out his thoughts here and here here.

I spend a fair amount of my thinking time trying to connect my professional life experiences with a larger context. The current political climate certainly encourages the posing of big(ger) questions – questions which seem to extend well beyond the realm of public education. It’s in this context that I’d like to share a recent experience.

As many of us have been experiencing, recent weeks have brought a new definition of cold to our region. While the former ski instructor in me would have reveled in the cold and the opportunity for days and night of snow-making, the new, warm weather fisherman in me shivered at the mere thought of having to go out and start the car. As an alternative, I decided to continue my efforts to organize my files and filing cabinets. In the process I found several pages of notes that I didn’t recognize about an author whom I also didn’t recognize.

I found the thoughts summarized on these pages fascinating and later asked my wife if she new the author and anything about the pages I had discovered. She looked at me as if I had only seconds before dropped in from Mars and, recognizing that I was almost beyond hope, she gently suggested that I might like his website. I did just that. Recalling a line from a movie I don’t recall, “He had me at hello”, Eisenstein had me at his About page.

“… I was always consumed by questions like, Where did I come from?” ”Why am I here?” “Where am i going?” so of course, embedded as I was in a culture of science and reason as a source of truth, I tried to “figure out” the answers… My quest had an emotional dimension as well. From an early age I sensed a wrongness in the world. Sitting in a classroom doing worksheets, part of me rebelled. “We are not supposed to be doing this! It isn’t supposed to be this way.” It was half-formed thought, embedded in a cloud of indignation and bewilderment. This perception, abetted by a growing awareness of ecological devastation and social injustice, presented me from whole-heartedly embracing a normal career.”

I suspect I’m not alone in my resonance with Eisenstein’s questions, his concerns, his search.

What I share here is, in large part stolen from my wife or, more accurately, lifted from my wife’s notes about Eisenstein’s book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. This is a new venture for me. In reading Eisenstein’s work, I found a deep longing to gather a group of adults and explore. I see this as an invitation to create an “electronic coffee shop”… a book club discussion group. It’s truly an exploration and an invitation to discuss ideas.

What I’m going to share here is and isn’t about education. Eisenstein isn’t writing about education, but his writing is filled with ideas that beg educational reflection. Here’s Cliff Notes version:

Eisenstein suggests he has found an answer to his question about wrongness in the world. He suggests beginning our own explorations with his most recent book, The More Beautiful World… In it, he introduces the concepts of separation and stories. He suggests that (a) we are all living the same story; (b) It is the story of separation – we are separate individuals in a world that is separate from us; (c) our story creates competition; (d) it tells us that self-interest is the primary characteristic of what it means to be human; and (e) it has a formula that we are told will lead to a happy life.

 Our story tells us that we should (a) go to school; (b) get a job; (c) have a family; and (d) plan for retirement. That story is changing rapidly and, for many, is no longer believable. Other components of the story form a kind of mythology that most of us have bought into. Eisenstein identifies the following examples:

• The myth of technology enhanced life — Based upon the promise of the 50s and 60s; specifically, the technological utopia that we were told would result in a more leisurely way of life has not come to fruition. Rather, the opposite is true. We are working more and netting less. We are on an unsustainable treadmill.
• The myth of global leadership — In the 50s and 60s we were told that America was the bringer of peace and democracy to the world. We are now not only hated, but also laughed at by many,
• The myth of conquest — human mastery of the political and natural environment.

These myths have conditioned us how to see the world.

In his work, Eisenstein posits that this formula, if ever true, has disintegrated. We can see it all around us. Our traditional institutions are a mess – Financial, Education, Health Care, Religious, Political.

These myths have conditioned us how to see the world.

Living Between Stories

“We are exiting an old story that explained to us the way of the world and our place in it. Some may cling to it all the more desperately as it dissolves, looking perhaps to Donald Trump to restore it, but their savior has not the power to bring back the dead. Neither would Clinton have been able to preserve America as we’d known it for too much longer. We as a society are entering a space between stories, in which everything that had seemed so real, true, right, and permanent comes into doubt. For a while, segments of society have remained insulated from this breakdown (whether by fortune, talent, or privilege), living in a bubble as the containing economic and ecological systems deteriorate. But not for much longer. Not even the elites are immune to this doubt. They grasp at straws of past glories and obsolete strategies; they create perfunctory and unconvincing shibboleths (Putin!), wandering aimlessly from “doctrine” to “doctrine” – and they have no idea what to do. Their haplessness and half-heartedness was plain to see in this election, their disbelief in their own propaganda, their cynicism. When even the custodians of the story no longer believe the story, you know its days are numbered. It is a shell with no engine, running on habit and momentum.”

Charles Eisenstein, Essay – The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

We are living in an age of hate-based politics which points not further than to a superficial diagnosis: It’s not us. It’s them. This is a reiteration of the war mentality – find the bad guy, go to war. (Wars on Drugs, Poverty, immigrants…or…Trump supporters).

We are using superficial ways to diagnose a complex problem and in the process we are missing a deeper matrix of causes. As Trump supporters judge immigrants or the lying media or the left for wanting to “rewrite our nation’s history” by wanting to remove statues honoring confederates, what are we doing that is any different from what they are doing? Are we not judging them just as harshly? In spite of what we might see as our righteous indignation are we too not contributing to the Story of Separation? Do we not feel morally superior to those on the other side? Are we not implicitly implying that if we were in their shoes we would do it better than they? Both sides are operating from a deficit of understanding. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that you can use hate as a weapon but you can’t use hatred to defeat hate.

Eisenstein suggests that, when we rethink the fury, what lies underneath the rage is a longing for reunion. We are suffering the collective wound of separation. Hate is a bodyguard for grief. Profound change comes only through collapse. And the world around us in collapsing. People feel powerless. They don’t feel valued. They feel alone. We can feel a sense of wrongness that we often can’t describe or can describe only in terms of “It’s not supposed to be this way.” Our idea of what’s normal has come unhinged. Can you hear these feelings, these frustrations in your professional life? Is this a connection worth exploring?

We express this low level suffering indirectly: addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, rage, chronic fatigue, laziness, depression. These are all ways we withhold our full participation in and engagement with life. When our conscious mind can’t find a reason to be okay with the mythology we have been told is true, we express it unconsciously.

Eisenstein believes in a new story: The Story of Interbeing. The Story of Interbeing replaces a conscious of judgment with a consciousness of empathy. He feels that this has already begun. Grandmothers… kindergarten teachers… anyone doing something out of love, in anyway.

One of the fundamental precepts of the new story is this. We are inseparate from the universe and our being partakes in the being of everyone and everything else. This is why we can feel hurt when we hear of another coming to harm. This is why we hurt when we see mass die offs and bleaching of the coral reefs or see a picture of a pelican tangled up in plastic. We can no longer hold up the barriers that protect us from our feelings. We are a mirror of all things. Everything that happens to the world is happening to us.

The world outside of ourselves is not just a bunch of unrelated stuff but a mirror of self with qualities like consciousness and intelligence that are not just in humans but in all things.

We feel isolated and powerless because we have numbed ourselves to knowing that we are all connected. Everything we experience is geared toward showing us that we are not connected. So we think we can protect ourselves by building more prisons or building walls to keep the bad guys away.

We are destroying our health, we are destroying ecosystems, and we are on an unsustainable path.

The Story of Interbeing says that my very existence depends on the existence of all beings. A basic practice – a way to replace the culture of judgment with a culture of empathy is to ask what is it like to be you? To have more than just superficial conversations with our Trump supporting family and friends…to discover what led someone to become racist.

By simply taking the stance that the other is wrong, we just gratify our egos “You are bad…I am good.” “I am right….you are wrong.”

Eisenstein and School Culture

I believe we seek to make sense of the world through the lens of our own experiences. I believe that Charles Eisenstein speaks directly to us as educators. I see the separation that he describes. I see the end of a story that we have grown up experiencing and accepting. I see the sense of frustration, isolation and powerlessness. But I have been fortunate in my life to have experienced moments of connectedness… moments where a commitment to empathy transcended significant differences in social status, in lifestyles, in ways of thinking and created the beginnings of interbeing and community. I cling to these memories and experiences as proof of the possible.

The war on evil has gone on for several thousand years. It has not worked. Maybe it’s time to give peace a chance. Where better to start than helping our colleagues and young people experience leadership through empathy.