Chugach Mountains Aleska http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Note: This is developing into a series of “how to” posts. These will roughly follow Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on leadership, focusing on the three big steps in the development of followership. In earlier posts I’ve shared thinking and experiences about the components of followership.  I won’t thrash them into insignificance here; however, a concept that I  mentioned in the earlier pieces bears a bit of attention… beginning with WHY. Sinek points out that, while it is tempting to jump right in with what we should do and how we should do it, the clearer the sense of purpose is and the closer this can be integrated into the activities and practices of an organization, the greater the likelihood of high engagement. Thus, this series begins with some focus on that need. It continues, though, with a greater focus on “how” and “what”.

In my most recent post, I shared the analysis of the unintended consequences the “all in” approach to the standards/assessment reform agenda of the past several decades. What was new to this discussion was the opportunity to share the thoughts of Bernard Chan whose firsthand experience with the results of this direction in Asia provide us with a pretty interesting glimpse into the future of the current direction. As I noted, the picture isn’t a rosy one. As the Singapore experience demonstrates, there is a significant gap between the value of the learning demonstrated by the high performers in Asia and the needs of their society and that of the globalized and interconnected world.

My continued takeaway from this is that, even should we experience greater success with our current direction than we have to date, we still will not be preparing our students for the college and career readiness goals that we have defined as necessary for entry into a world which continues to experience huge shifts in the definition of readiness.

Almost 15 years ago (after my second failed attempt at retirement) when I began my new career as an educational consultant, I had the opportunity to focus on school improvement initiatives. In visiting schools and classrooms around the country and coaching for Rigor, Relevance and Relationships (the 3 R’s of the International Center for Leadership in Education with whom I worked), I frequently found myself suggesting that the teachers seemed to be working hard teaching students who were no longer in their classrooms. As my experiences grew, I began to notice that not only were we teaching kids who were significantly different than we were as students, we were teaching them things that were not preparing them for the world they were entering, regardless whether that was higher education or the workforce.

As the standards and assessment strategy continued to evolve during that time, we responded to continued disappointment with the failure of student achievement to grow at expected rates and, in response to that disappointment, we doubled down on these strategies. To this mix of ever more rigorous standards and ever more complex high stakes assessments, we added teacher ineffectiveness (and accompanying blame), new systems for rating both students, teachers, and schools, as well as a growing number of voices that heretically suggested that we had chosen not only the wrong approaches but, perhaps, even the wrong mountain. Sure we paid lip service to advances in learning theory which contested the wisdom of continued reliance on test and punish strategies. We even paid some attention to the impact of things like poverty, challenges faced by English language learners, etc. But, by and large, we continued and continue to this day to rely on strategies that have been demonstrated to be ineffective.

As the voices of dissent grew in volume and searched for alternatives, we saw opt out numbers grow, as did home schooling, on-line learning opportunities and unschooling options. This search continues, as do discussions about options, now complicated by growing acceptance of ideologically driven agendas, aimed not at improving public schools but in equating public schools with government and opening the door to “market driven solutions”.

So where the heck is this going?

While a superintendent, I was sometimes asked by employees a question that went something like, “What do I have to do to get this promotion?” After some years of being one of the “deciders” about such job promotions, I realized that there were cases in which I would be asking myself “why should I promote this person?” And there were other cases where the question was quite different, “How can I NOT promote this person?”

We are increasingly aware of parents asking a variation on that kind of question about our schools and the answer is the same. As school leaders, the only acceptable question for our parents to ask is, “How Can I NOT send my child to that school.” Any other question is a lose! As school leaders, we have a critical choice moving forward… what can we do in our schools so parents have only that one question, “How can I NOT send my child to that school?”

Addressing the “how” question…

And so to the questions at hand? How do I do create a culture of learning in my school in a way that never encourages parents to ask, “Why should I send my child to that school?” How do I help my school climb the right mountain?

Identifying the right mountain… The first part of this one is surprisingly easy. It’s easy because 90+% of the staff in your school know the answer. Ask them one question. “What do we wish for our kids? Specifically, what do we want our kids to know, to be able to do, and to be as a result of their time with us? I’ve done it enough to know the answers. I’m sure there will be a couple of “all of the important characters in Shakespeare’s plays” or “the seven causes of WWII” or “How do I solve a quadratic equation?”. But what I’m equally sure of is that there will be a strong consensus and high degree of frequency for things like kind, considerate, able to work with others, independent learners, flexible, organized, tolerant, problem solvers, etc.

Note: I prefer to do this as a part of a day devoted to this “compass work”. I’m a fan of public discussion about things with this level of importance. I like the idea of being able coach based on group determined goals and plans.

It’s the second part that is less easy and, often, embarrassing. It involves the development of belief statements and principles upon which we base our work. This is, by no means, a walk in the park. It involves deep and, not infrequently, heated discussions that surface the conflicts about what we (both as educators and as former students) have internalized about schooling, learning, and learners and what research (think Dewey, ) has been telling us.

One of the best summaries about the beliefs that have guided the development of our schools and the experiences of children within them is offered by Sir Ken Robinson in his now famous TED Talk, Changing Education Paradigms.

Robinson offers that our schools and schooling are organized around the following beliefs:

• Schools serve both economic and cultural functions – education achievement is important to the health of the economy and education is the means by which cultural norms are transmitted.
• Traditional belief that the path to a good life is work hard in school, do well, go to college and get a good job
• Intelligence is both related to deductive reasoning and to ability to do well academically
• Not all students are capable of doing intellectual/academic work – i.e., there are smart people and not-smart people
• Arts compete with academic and intellectual goals of the school
• Learning takes place best when
  • It is organized into separate subjects into discrete subjects
  • It is separated by ringing bells and when
  • Students work in isolation within groups organized by age
  • Students learn at the same rate and pace
  • Conformity, standardization, compliance and are high priorities

While these beliefs can be more or less dominant from school to school, in 10+ years of visiting and observing schools around the country I can offer with confidence, it is a rare school community that has re-visited their beliefs and how they affect what happens within the school and, most importantly, how they affect learning and learners.

Contrast this reality with the following quote from “10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning: The Urgent Need Case for Reimagining Today’s Schools” recently published by Will Richardson and Bruce Dixon.

In the modern world, being a self-directed and self-determined learner is the most important skill to develop. School communities without clearly articulated beliefs around learning create wild inconsistencies for students as they travel between classrooms and take part in extracurricular experiences. Without a collaboratively created belief system that is lived each day through classroom norms for learning and a common language, schools cannot develop each child to his or her potential as a learner.

So where to next?

For you?

Can you consider completing two actions with a small group of folks that you’ve already identified as folks you’d to have with you in a life boat?

1. The first task is the easy one. Together compile a “what we want our kids to know, be able to do, to be like” list. Start by asking for at least 10 and then rank them.
2. With the same group, look at Robinson’s summary list (above) and edit it. Add examples of actions that are connected to specific statements. Add new beliefs and/or eliminate ones that aren’t reflected in your school. Hint: Challenge the removal of items from the list and ask for examples of actions consistent with new additions.

For me

Post #2 in the series – How to bridge the belief/action gap. Bringing intentionality to actualizing our beliefs.

When I started this blog, I did so with the intent of committing to add at least one piece each week. Whoops!

And here I sit this morning watching the snow fall here in scenic Little Egg Harbor. It’s just a day after I was taking my sometimes daily walk to the inlet thinking this might be the year I actually put the boat back in the water earlier. Talk about change. I guess I could get cranky about missing my walk (that I might not have taken).

Like many aspects of our lives, I’ve managed to turn my walk into a kind of multi-tasking exercise… I walk because it’s supposed to be good for me. I also walk to think. It’s kind of amazing to think of all of the posts you’ve not been subjected to as I discarded them while working my way along the salt marshes to the beach. I even added another component to my walking and to my thinking time… I pick up trash. No, not the remains of my discarded ideas, but real junk that other users of this road have seen fit to toss.

What a metaphor for life. Multi-tasking is now the norm. To not multi-task is to somehow feel guilty that we aren’t using our time wisely or productively. It’s a change in how we live our lives. Today’s snow after yesterday’s warmth is another reminder of change and a reminder that change is everywhere.

And so, as the universe would have it, this week I encountered an article by Sebastien Turbot in Forbes magazine, “Education: Change Is Here. But Are You Ready For It?”

Turbot is an interesting guy. He is currently the curator and director of the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) located in Qatar. He serves as an adjunct professor at the Paris School of International Affairs, is a Fellow at the Royal Academy for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce and served as the editorial director for TEDx Paris.

He summarizes the dilemma facing educators today throughout the world as follows:

Our education system wasn’t much of a problem until now. The system addressed the 19^th century industrial revolution needs for labour that could perform simple and repetitive tasks. But that era is long over. Our children must gear up for the ‘gig’ economy. By the time today’s graduates are 38, they would have gone through 10 to maybe 14 jobs. Moreover, 15 years from now, 65% of graduates will be going into jobs that don’t exist yet.

He describes a situation familiar to many of us. The changes that we are seeing, some of which have occurred as we continue in our practice, and others which politicians and policy wonks have defined for us, leave us wrestling with how we are to break away from our traditional approaches to teaching and learning.

So my first answer to Turbot’s question “Change is Here. But Are You Ready For It?” is easy. Of course not. The majority of us do not find change easy. Change threatens us. It threatens our sense of efficacy (maybe I won’t be able to learn this new stuff or be as effective as I am now). It threatens our confidence in our ability to adapt (what if I’m one of the “old dogs” who can’t learn “new tricks”?). It threatens our sense of order and comfort (I finally learned how to teach volcanoes successfully and now you want to take it out of the curriculum?). Turbot suggests that the changes we are being asked to accept and embrace may “…resemble the current state of our world: chaotic and ambiguous.”

But denying change or trying to ignore it is futile.. and increasingly stressful. I recently read the following quote and apologize in advance to the author for not remembering the source… “In trying to adapt to change, we have choices. We can crawl or we can run. But we can’t stand still.”

Why can’t we stand still? Why can’t we do school the way we’ve experienced it ourselves and the way we’ve passed it on to kids for the years we’ve been teaching? Or maybe a bit more subtly… But which changes am I supposed to respond to?   My school is a “change factory”. We barely understand one before the next one is thrown at us. I’ve visited numerous schools where we could have filled a wall with post-it notes each naming a new program or change that the school or district has “embraced”. Most of these have one thing in common. No one’s doing them any more!

We can’t stand still for the very reasons that Turbot shares when he offers the results of the WISE study on jobs of the future. Everything about our world today screams access. Access to information. Access to people. Access to learning. And none of these accesses scream school. I needed to wire a three way switch at home. Where did I go? You Tube. I’m learning to paint in water colors. From where? You Tube! My grandson is struggling with statistics. Where does he turn? Khan Academy.

Dr. Christopher Emdin, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University titled his keynote address at the South By Southwest Education conference (SXSWEdu) “We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service.”

“We got it from here” is what kids all over the country are beginning to believe. Dr. Edmin points out that “thank you 4 your service” is just a polite way of saying “you’re fired”. Our value of educators is no longer the transmission of information. It is no longer organizing schools in pursuit of efficiency. It is not even in the organizing and sequencing of content in the courses we teach. If we persist in trying to do these roles better, we will hear with increasing frequency the words “We got it from here. Thank you 4 your service”.

One of the changes we have to learn how to embrace is how to teach our kids to develop a commitment to learning and how to help each kid (and each adult) in our school communities learn how to use the tools and access available to them in ways that help them develop the skills and dispositions necessary to succeed in jobs we cannot predict.

In the years I spent traveling the country and working with schools and districts, I had plenty of chances to see why the Gallup study about student engagement revealed such disappointing results.

Gallup, January 2013 – Brandon Busteed

But during that same time I also had the opportunity to visit schools and programs in which the engagement levels of students and adults were remarkable. We know how to do this. We are doing it. I thought I’d end this post with some examples of alternatives to simply “doing school”. This is by no means an exhaustive list; however, it does provide a kind of cross-section of the variety of ways in which folks around the country offer hope (and, possibly, direction) for those who wish to move from a culture dominated by schooling to one committed to learning. I hope you’ll take a few minutes and explore. Sharing your thoughts in the Comments section is a great way to continue the exploration.

 South Heights Elementary School– Henderson Count, KY

South Heights is a K-5 school serving approximately 570 students. South Heights is one of he poorest schools in Henderson County, is a Title I school, and only 10 years ago ranked in the bottom 10% of schools in Kentucky. The school has been just named a Model School by the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE) for the 7th consecutive year. They have recently been named a “Sustained Model School” by ICLE, one of only two in the nation.

Note: I have visited and maintained a supportive relationship with the school leader, Rob Carroll, who has successfully created a culture of caring, continual growth, and commitment to excellence. Here is their Facebook page.

YES College Prep Charter Schools Network, Houston, TX

YES College Prep is an open-enrollment public charter school serving students in grades 6-12 in Houston’s most underserved neighborhoods. The first YES school opened in 1995 and has expanded into a network of 16 schools serving traditionally underserved populations (96% Hispanic and African American) with a poverty rate (free and reduced lunch count) of 84%. From 2007 to the present YES schools have been named to the Top 100 Schools in the nation (US News and World Report), The mission statement defines clearly the YES goal… “YES Prep Public Schools will increase the number of students from underserved communities who graduate from college prepared to learn. “ The schools offer rigorous academic curricula and assessments, a robust student intervention system, extensive enrichment opportunities, personalized college counseling and support through college. Over 70% of YES graduates are enrolled in college or have obtained their degrees.

Note: I completed a case study on the first YES high school almost 10 tears ago. At that time and, still today, the YES network demonstrated a committed to intentionally creating structures designed to serve the goals of the school and the needs of its students.

Big Picture Schools

The Big Picture Schools exist as members of a network of 65 schools located in the US and abroad. The organization was founded in 1995 with the mission of putting students directly at the center of their own learning. Although begun as a school design model, the organization and network of schools now focuses on the challenge and mission of changing the way we think about schools. Students in Big Picture Schools are grouped into small learning communities of 15 students facilitated by a teacher/advisor. Additionally, each student has an internship where he/she works with a mentor in a real world setting. Each school is organized around 10 “Distinguishers”. While schools in different locations may look quite different from one another, they share in the commitment to these essential elements.

Cristo Rey Schools

The Cristo Rey Network comprises 32 Catholic, college preparatory schools that today serve 10,933 students across 21 states and DC. The unusual focus of the school combines college prep work with a structured, four year corporate work study program, targeted to poor, urban youth.

It is the integration of rigorous academic expectations, equally rigorous support and intervention services, and real world, relevant experience that offers lessons for traditional schools looking to move beyond the current, failing reform strategies.

Apollo School, Central York High School, York, PA

The Apollo School provides an excellent examples of the ways in which school leaders can support the efforts of small groups of teachers wishing to explore new directions inside of a traditional school structure. In some circles, this approach is know as making “little bets” – i.e., encouraging creative responses in ways that are minimally disruptive in order to “test” the viability for larger scale implementation.

In an article that appeared in the Cult of Pedagogy, Jennifer Gonzales shared the following description…

The Apollo School is a program that operates inside a regular public school, Central York High School in York, Pennsylvania. Apollo is a semester-long, four-hour block of classes—English, social studies, and art—all blended together and co-taught by three teachers, one from each subject area. Throughout the semester, students are responsible for designing and completing four major projects, each of which is aligned with standards in all three subject areas.

Jennifer Gonzales, The Cult of Pedagogy, February 2017

As always, thanks for being there.  In the words of Garrison Keillor… Be well. Do good work. Keep in Touch.

The current political climate has placed public schools increasingly in the news and not in a good way. In the last few years we’ve seen a rise in the use of terms like “failing public/government schools”, “failure factories”, “the tenure problem”, etc. Research conducted by Jane Mayer for her book, Dark Money, seems to indicate that this has not been accidental or coincidental. Rather it seems to have been an intentional plan to “normalize” the notion that our public schools have failed. Regardless of the intent behind the use of such terms and increasing calls for more choice options for parents, it is clear that these are troubling times for our system of public education and those who have committed their professional lives to working in it.

Moving Beyond “Other-directed” responses

Responses to this increasing criticism have largely been “other-directed”. This “assault” is part of an ideological agenda being pursued by wealthy philanthropists and business people who seek either smaller government, greater opportunities for access to educational dollars, or some combination of both. Or we have been handicapped in our improvement efforts by the imposition of a 30 year commitment to a test and punish accountability solution that has been demonstrated to be both bankrupt and ineffective. Or an explanation that connects student achievement and achievement gaps to expectations for schools to resolve decades long social issue that we have been unable or unwilling to confront. I know that these are on my list of “other-directed” explanations and they all have at least one thing in common… they distract us from the issues that we can control.

Katie Martin’s recent blog, “The Evolving Role of the Teacher”, offers an important break from “other-directedness” and addresses one of the areas we can control and can change.  She looks at the dissonance between the new knowledge we have about learning and the way this is experienced in many of our classrooms and schools. She offers a couple of examples’ one, which for obvious reasons, she doesn’t choose to identify and another, for equally obvious reasons she recognizes. Take a look…

A Tale of Two Classrooms

In this first classroom, the teacher is calling on her 5th graders, one by one to identify each of state and their geographic location. I talked to one of the students who told me they were learning the states because “the teacher thought it was important to know them” and when I asked if she knew a better way to learn about the states, she pointed to the iPad face down on her desk and said, “the Internet?” As I looked around the room, each of the students had their own iPad that was face down on the desk as they were copying the states from an Atlas into her map packet.

…this lesson, or some version of this lesson, is still happening in many “21st century” classrooms with an emphasis over compliance and standardization rather than deep personal learning. This example illustrates the challenge that exists in many classrooms when we add on new resources and expectations to an old paradigm of school.

Katie goes on to describe a different kind of classroom model. In Ms. Kim’s classroom

…a group of 4th grade students are engaged in a project where they are partnering with local business to understand their challenges and design solutions to impact their local community. In this classroom, groups of students are planning a pitch they are about present to the local water board. At the same time another group is designing a website for their business. Other groups are virtually collaborating with their organization to receive feedback on their product and building prototypes. The technology in this class allows all students access to relevant resources and to connect with people to learn, create, share and solve problems…

How do such variances in classroom/teacher practice vary so much? Ms. Martin provides a clear (and in my experience) accurate summation of where we are in our schools, noting that “Most educators in our schools and district offices have gone through their own education without the access and opportunities that exist today.“

Her analysis coincides closely with that offered by Dr. Phillip Schlechty in his book, Leading for Learning: How to Transform Schools into Learning Organization, published in 2011. Take a look at both Schlechty’s and Martin’s take on the necessary response.

Schlechty’s thoughts…

As a result [of new technologies] students are empowered to take on a more active role in the classroom, which becomes a shared space where teachers and students learn together and from each other. These newer technologies also give students a voice, where traditionally they had none, and provide an authentic audience of potentially millions.

Increasingly, students will direct their own learning and learning will happen in conversations, as opposed to structured lesson plans. And just as in life, learning will be connected rather than happening in isolation. All of this forces us to rethink how we do school.

So much of learning can and does happen outside the four walls of the classroom and with so many more people than the teacher. Learning doesn’t just happen between the hours of eight and three. It’s a continuous process for both teachers and students. We can no longer artificially filter what students are exposed to and instead have to help them learn to filter on their own. The lines between teacher and learner have to be blurred and the very idea of what is considered content has to be reconsidered.

Schlechty continues with a picture of what will occur if the transformation that he encourages does not take place…

And without transformation, about all that can be expected from school applications of new developments in the IT world is the digitization of past practices. More important is the fact that without the needed transformation, schools will play a less and less vital role in what the young learn and will be less and less important in shaping the worldviews the young develop. In the future, students will have increasing choice concerning the form their instruction will take and considerable control of the time and place that instruction will occur.

Remember, Phil Schlechty wrote these words in 2011. He wasn’t some guy peddling ideas on a street corner. Phillip C. Schlechty, who died last year, was an education researcher, speaker, and school-improvement advocate. He taught at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels, and served as a special assistant to the superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s public schools. He also served in faculty positions and as an associate education dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Schlechty was the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform in Louisville, KY., an early initiative to create networks of school districts to experiment with and share best practices in leadership and student engagement.

It might seem that Phil wasn’t much of a futurist. Reading further, though, we see that he painted a picture of a future that seems pretty familiar and his words speak to us today. They add another dimension to our explorations.

With the advantage of an additional 5+ years of development to inform her sense of our needs, it’s interesting that Martin’s sense of the need, although adding some additional detail, does not differ substantially from Schlechty’s.

Martin’s thinking…

To meet the needs of the learners in our classrooms today and align school with the world we live in, there is a need to embrace new mindsets about learning, along with new tools and resources available to make these shifts across diverse classrooms.

She also echoes Schlechty when she notes that if we want our schools remain central in the educational lives of our young people our teacher must move beyond their learned roles of presenter of information, arbiter of what should be taught and when, assessor-in-chief – i.e., we must facilitate a shift in mindsets that both Martin and Schlechty advocate. So what are the ‘new mindsets’ that Katie is looking for?

Martin adds to Schlechty’s identification of needs that not only move the role of teacher from traditional teaching activities to a focus on the design of engaging learning experiences. Schlechty hints at and Martin expands that even this seemingly huge leap in role definition is not enough. She moves us beyond what we should not be to what she identifies as the new roles that we must embrace and enhance.

Her graphic portrays the roles that she sees as critical in the transformation process.

Returning to her “Tale of Two Classrooms”, she uses her experiences in Ms. Kim’s room to add detail to each of the four roles she suggests.

Designers of Powerful Learning

The learning experiences described didn’t come from a curriculum guide. The experience was “co-constructed” with Ms. Kim’s students to achieve the desired goals. In both classrooms, students had technology – i.e., devices. However, they used them quite differently. Ms. Martin emphasizes that while technology can be a powerful tool, it “… no substitute for a teacher who designs authentic, and relevant learning experiences based on the unique contexts, strengths and interests.

Partners in Learning

 Ms. Kim and her students were learning together as they were collaborating with the businesses. She continues…

 When teachers embrace their role as a learner, everyone benefits. With so much information at our fingertips and new content and tools being created each day, it is impossible for anyone to know everything. Teachers and students as partners in learning models lifelong learning and empowers students to explore their passions and interests, rather than solely consume information.

Community Developers

Ms. Martin notes the importance of relationships and the teacher’s role in building such relationships. She adds to this that “the teacher’s role is pivotal in creating the community where students develop relationships with one another.” While the first classroom she described was compliance-based, Ms. Kim created community guidelines and established classroom meetings that “empowered learners to work together, seek to understand diverse perspectives, solve problems and communicate effectively” all of which are skills that are being identified within increasing emphasis by employers and higher ed institutions and which must be modeled and practiced in our classrooms.

Connector and Activator

Martin points out that Ms. Kim “designed opportunities for students to connect with one another…” but also with “with information and ideas beyond what she knew or could provide. She set up opportunities to connect with local businesses and provided the framework that empowered for students to solve relevant problems.”

Supporting the Evolving Role of Teachers

The actions and the implications for leadership…

The question for us as school leaders and as teachers was framed eloquently by Schlechty. His words are a challenge to us to assume control over the future of our schools/our classrooms, to treat learning and students as if minds matter more than the preservation of schooling as we have experienced it.

The questions are whether schools have the kinds of leaders needed to bring about such a fundamental transformation in the authority relationship between students and teachers, and whether the boundaries of the schools can be made sufficiently permeable to safely admit the information that the digital world makes available. Without such leaders, the transformation of rules, roles, and relationships that is required will not occur.

Martin adds to and balances Schlechty’s challenge to school leaders with “on the ground” observations.

…making these shifts across countless classrooms is more than equipping schools with technology or creating creative learning spaces.

To create powerful learning opportunities for diverse learners, teachers need to be supported to develop new competencies: skills, knowledge and dispositions to leverage resources and tools to support them in their evolving role. (Emphasis mine)

Critical points:

This is not about schools as “failure factories”.

This is not about teachers as self-serving, overpaid impediments to improvement.

This is about our willingness to move beyond “other-directed” explanations.

This is about the creation of cultures that embrace the new roles required to move our schools beyond organizations focused on teaching to the organizations we need – organizations focused on the process of learning, both for our children and for our adults.

This is about our willingness to move beyond the comfort of familiar zones of safety that we find in traditional roles of teaching and to explore the implications of engaging in the adoption of new roles.

Which of Martin’s new roles offers the greatest challenge for you?

Pogo the Possum’s quote for Earth Day, April 1970 – Walt Kelly

I shared in my last post that this post would be dedicated to looking at the process of leadership, followership, self –reflection and the first steps to beginning a leadership self-assessment. I lied. At the time I didn’t know I would be lying but…

I find the times unsettling.

I suspect it is fair to conclude that most of us have found the election and post-election activities exciting… exciting in the sense that they generate emotion. Whether these emotions are hope or fear based, it is hard to escape the reality that we may be in for a time of significant change.

I thought I wanted to write about it. I started a piece which quickly became three pieces. I couldn’t make sense of them. I certainly couldn’t expect you to. I looked for connections. Connections were elusive. I watched the president’s farewell address. I was inspired. I was moved to tears. I watched the president-elect’s news conference. I felt like sticking needles in my eye. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the person who inspired me is remembered for ineffectiveness and the person whose thoughts scare me turns out to be effective.

What I want to write is challenging. It’s challenging because it’s critical of the culture of the system in which that I’ve spent almost my entire professional my life. It may be perceived as insulting. I don’t want it to be.

There are lots of things I don’t know about. I don’t know much about international trade deals. I don’t know much about national security. Or quantum physics for that matter. I know less about building walls. But I do know about education. I know this from angles that most folks haven’t had the chance to enjoy.   And here’s what’s challenging. I know that we, as educators, have earned much of the criticism that we are receiving and which threatens now to upend our world.

No, it’s not all our fault. We’ve had the real life version of “A Confederacy of Dunces” telling us what was wrong and what to do and how to do it. Whoever thought that the National Governors’ Association would be a good group to determine what should be learned in our schools? Why would anyone think that a group who could come up with names like No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top or, as a sign of decreasing creativity, Every Student Succeeds could actually develop policies that made sense. No, it’s not all our fault.

But we’re complicit, far too complicit.

It’s why I pulled up the Pogo cartoon. Not because we are greedy, lazy, selfish, fat and happy as too many so-called “reformers” assert. I chose the cartoon to ease into the possibility that we may have spent so much time preserving the comfort, the familiarity, the efficiency of schooling that we have failed to respond to reality that schools designed to meet the needs of the 19^th and 20^th centuries are not suited to meet the demands of this time.

In an earlier post, I referenced a recent Gallup poll which revealed that student engagement levels in our schools drops from near 80% in early elementary grades to around 40% by a student’s senior year. I noted at that time, that if Walmart or Amazon experienced a similar drop in customer satisfaction, their response would not be to continue business as usual.

This morning I had the chance to read the latest post by a young teacher, Jay Armstrong. He writes on a variety of topics and I highly recommend his work. In this piece, he describes an encounter he had with a young graduate who dropped by to see him during the winter break from the college he was attending.   He describes a young man (“M”) who was considered an excellent student in an excellent school system. He was not doing as well in college and he was confused. He asked Jay…

“So what’s the point of school? Because I always thought it was to get good grades. Follow directions. Get a diploma. A means to an end, you know. That’s what my dad always says. But after twelve and a half years of schooling I’m really confused.  I mean really, what’s the point of school?”…

Jay continues…

“See, M was a “good student”. He was respectful, compliant, met deadlines and studied all his notes. And the system rewarded him for with a diploma for his obedience.

Unfortunately, the system never challenged him how to think on his own, to problem solve beyond rudimentary worksheets or to provide himself the audacity to question.

M was lead to believe that a grade of an A meant perfection. It meant there was nothing else to learn.

M admitted he was scared to death to be wrong, to make a mistake. For years he equated his self-worth with his grades. He believed success in school meant success in life.”

I don’t believe that this is an isolated experience. On the contrary, I believe that M’s experience is typical for far too many of our children. The calls for change that we are seeing now and the proposed solutions range from ill-informed to downright stupid. But “M’s” question gets to the heart of the matter. What IS the point of school? This is a question worth asking and it is increasingly apparent that it is one that we, as educators, better answer. For those of us who have devoted substantial portions of our lives to a career in education, the prospect of change and growing acceptance of the need for change is daunting.

We have not responded well to change. Not because we are educators but because we are human. When confronted with change, change which might disrupt the sense of safety and security we have managed to create in our schools, in our classrooms, in our minds, we have too frequently exclaimed “we can’t” when we mean “we won’t”. With the best of intentions we have tried to preserve schooling as we experienced it. We have ignored that ‘schooling as we know it’ has worked best for people like ourselves and far less well for those who aren’t.

As this piece has evolved, I realize that I didn’t really lie. This is precisely about leadership and the need for us to exert the kind of leadership that answers M’s question. To build the followership among colleagues and our communities that will be necessary to reveal sloppy thinking as sloppy thinking, to highlight that trying to do the wrong things right serves neither parents nor students, nor our profession well. This can’t be a time for fixed mindsets.

NOTE: I began to develop this piece after reading an extensive report which detailed the shortcomings of the “free market” approach to school improvement.  I had in mind providing readers with the kind of background that might be helpful in any discussions that might occur as the move to vouchers, choice, and privatization heat up. As you have probably noted, the piece went in a different direction.

Embedded in the report, however, was the story of a man I met quite some time ago and who was instrumental in the development of the voucher system implemented in Milwaukee in the 1990’s. Dr. Fuller, a noted civil rights activist, invested his life in trying to find better opportunities for poor, minority families and their children. As superintendent of schools in Milwaukee and frustrated with his failure to gain community support for his efforts to improve the experiences available to poor, black children, he became the architect Milwaukee’s voucher program.  Last night when I heard John Lewis speak with such deep conviction and quiet dignity, I was reminded of the struggles and courage of Dr. Fuller. In my mind, he picked the wrong solution but I felt it important to highlight the world of difference between the motivation of Howard Fuller and ideologues like Betsy DeVos. I hope you read the report.

Recommendation: With an occasional exception, the focus of my writing continues to be centered on ways to improve learning and the processes involved in facilitating that focus. It’s where I’ve spent the majority of my career. My focus is not intended to minimize the importance of political action and ways in which political action may support or impede the improvement of learning. As I have in the past, I urge you to follow the writing of Jan Resseger for the policy side of educational issues. She is an ardent supporter of public education and a wealth of information and resources for folks seeking to become informed about education in the post-election time. Thank you.

Why Change Doesn’t Change Much…Leadership in the post-election time

From the The Farside Gallery 4, Gary Larson

During the holiday break, I found myself returning repeatedly to the implications of the president-elect’s proposed nominee as Secretary of Education. I’ve found myself swinging between the exciting possibilities for change and the desire to ask my doctor for some strong anti-depressants.

Regardless of which end of the spectrum I found myself, I realized that the word which was dominating my thoughts was “change”. I also realized that, in spite of all of the changes we have seen in the quest for educational improvement, school reform, elimination of achievement gaps, etc., we have seen very little change in the way we educate our children. Oh sure, we’ve seen significantly different areas of focus: behavioral objectives, values clarification, content standards, large-scale state assessments, etc. We’ve also seen our share of “band wagons” and also our share of “train wrecks”. But with a few notable exceptions, all this change hasn’t changed much.

Why is that?

Spoiler alert… I’ve written elsewhere about the increasing awareness that the majority of change efforts that we have witnessed have been examples of trying to do the wrong thing (schooling) better at the expense of doing the right thing – focusing on learning. But there are many factors which are at play in making change result in actual change/transformation. In this piece, I’ll focus on one of these factors – an exploration of a critical connection – the connection between successful change, leadership, and adult engagement. In the second piece in this series, I’ll focus on intentional actions that can increase the probability of positive impact.

So here goes…

For past the 10 years, most of my consulting work has revolved around leadership and leadership coaching. I’ve learned some things and I’ve unlearned others. Here’s what I’ve learned. Many might characterize these as beliefs and I suppose, in some ways, they are; however, I sense that they are more than that because I have seen this work.

People rarely quit jobs. They quit bosses. This “quitting” may be in the form of actual departure, but in many cases, it’s a kind of virtual departure… they just “checked out”. (BTW, one can extend this ‘quitting notion to kids, teachers and content – i.e., kids quit teachers far more frequently than they quit content).

People stay in a job, engage (and stay engaged) when there is a clear sense of purpose (one that they can buy into), when they are trusted to have some autonomy, and when they feel that they are growing (getting better) in their work. See Dan Pink, Drive

Where does this engagement, this sense of purpose, this autonomy, this sense of growth come from?

Leadership. Plain and simple, leadership.

There is a direct and causal relationship between and among 4 factors that enable successful leadership:. Beginning with the end in mind, I’ll begin with followership.

Followership – Leadership can be defined as the capacity to build followership. This assertion comes from a conversation with Tom Sergiovanni, who for years was the leading author of texts used in courses for supervision and leadership. See Moral Leadership: Getting To the Heart of School Improvement. In a presentation I had helped organize, Dr. Sergiovanni noted leadership is based on stewardship and service, not authority, rules or personality…that if you looked behind you and didn’t see anyone following, you weren’t leading.

So how is followership built?

People follow those whom they trust and who make them feel safe.

It is this belief that Simon Sinek, refers to as the Circle of Safety in his TED Talk, “Why good leaders make you feel safe”.

And how is this “circle of safety” and sense of trust built?

It is built through relationships. We have seen this over and over again in classes where students go the extra mile because of the relationship that exists between them and the teacher. We have felt it when, as adults, we extend and even inconvenience ourselves for people who care about us.

And how are these relationships grown and nurtured?

Susan Scott in her work on communication (see Fierce Conversations and Fierce Leadership) shares that such relationships are built or destroyed one conversation at a time. They are destroyed though impersonal, perfunctory, or insincere exchanges. They are built through deep, caring, honest conversations. These are not conversations held via email, they don’t take place in large groups. They occur face-to-face and are sometimes, as Scott describes them, “care-frontational”.

Relationships that come from such conversations foster trust and a sense of safety for risk taking. Such relationships foster in us the confidence that we are not alone and that we will not be asked to do what our leaders/ colleagues would not do themselves.

And so people confer leadership to those who have fostered these building blocks. These factors build upon one another and enhance the development and articulation of a clear sense or purpose/vision which can be shared and understood. When present, these conversations, the development of caring, supportive relationships, and the sense of trust that results from these build the kind of followership that allows the realization of that vision/purpose.

When these conversations, relationships, and trust are absent or only superficially developed, change initiatives, regardless of the nobility of their intent, falter. Want to test this? Recall an initiative that was considered high profile only a few years ago that has been replaced by another such “miracle cure”. I’ve worked in districts where we could have filled wall with post-it notes, each representing a program or new initiative that is no longer in use.

Question: Why did these fail? Why did little or nothing change (other than an unintended increase in willingness to be a part of the next great idea)?

Answer: Lack of followership!

Now look at the intentionality of the efforts. How clear was the purpose? How was it communicated? Who was involved? How frequent and honest were the conversations about the implementation? Who nurtured the relationships? Who made it clearly safe to risk and possibly fail? What was the level of followership that developed?

Here’s what happened to me as I was writing this piece. I found myself reflecting upon my time as an aspiring leader, as a titled leader, and, occasionally, as a good leader. I found myself not liking all that I saw in my reflection. I found things that I would love to go back and undo. I found times when I was blissfully unaware of my role as relationship builder or as role model for meaningful conversations. I recalled times when I saw no one behind me and blamed them.

My reflection didn’t grant me any “do overs” but it did push me to offer such an opportunity to you. And it’s a lead-in to the next post…how to conduct a self-assessment and how can we be intentional about maximizing the interaction of the factors I’ve shared as critical to the development of followership.

In researching some of the resources included here, I recalled a conversation I had one time with Dr. Tom Sergiovanni.  By the time I met him, he had enjoyed a long and successful career. In our conversation, Tom openly shared his disappointment with his earliest work. Leadership, he offered, was not about mastering the mechanics of supervision and management “Leadership, “ he said, “is about the capacity to build followership.”

Struck by this memory, I decided to revisit Tom Sergiovanni’s career and contributions. Dr. Sergiovanni died in 2012. Here’s an excerpt from his obituary contributed by a colleague who recalled the following quote from his friend…

“…the work of educators (should) involve not only their professional skills, but their hearts and souls as well in their commitment to the human integrity of the work of educating the young.” (Read more…)

As homework, I invite you to begin the reflection by responding to just two questions.

How is your heart and soul reflected in your leadership?

What are the challenges you face in bringing this to your work?

That’s the beginning of my next piece…

PS The keys to good leadership didn’t change with the election ♥

Happy New Year! There is something very special about this holiday season. Whether you celebrate it in the context of a religious tradition or simply enjoy the sights, sounds, and family gatherings, I hope you have been able to find and share peace, joy and love during this time. My continued wishes are for health, curiosity and engagement for the New Year.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the terms intentionality, leadership and change and, in the next few posts, I’ll be sharing some thoughts about these,  why change doesn’t seem to change much, and how we can make change happen.

Coincidentally, as I was reflecting on this, I had the chance to have lunch with a long time friend and colleague during the break and, as expected, we spent considerable time talking about our experiences and what the recent election might mean for education. A few days later, Bernie shared the following memo he had sent to his staff when he was a principal and following the presidential election of 2000 which, prior to the recent election, was only the fourth in U.S. history in which the winner failed to win the popular vote.

Because it is You (Sic) Choice

As we enter the DeVos Times, I offer the following essay written as a high school principal for my parent newsletter 16 years ago on the occasion of the “electoral traumas” of the 2000 presidential election.

Bernard Josefsberg

A recent report included among the evidence justifying New York State’s recent school finance court decision the decrepit conditions in P.S. 187 in New York City’s Washington Heights This reference held more than academic interest for me: my own schooling began in P.S. 187, and I still have clear memories of my four years there. Standing under Charles Wilson Peale’s dour portrait of George Washington, I learned the Pledge of Allegiance. In those days, establishing and promoting that allegiance was an unabashed purpose of our public schools.

Many aspects of the current educational and political scene would make it difficult for Dour George to lighten up. In much the same way as P.S. 187 has fallen into disrepair, weeds have crept into our civic space. We seem to educate less for democracy and more for money. As a result, our democracy elicits less intelligent passion from us than it requires while our economic anxieties absorb more of our attention than any other purpose for schooling.

In this vein, the filter of Election 2000 casts some interesting shadows on recently released data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). At issue are the persuasive writing abilities of American high school seniors, Class of 1998. One of the prompt topics used in this assessment required students to advocate a position, either for or against, on the efficacy of voting — i.e., does one person’s vote make a difference, and therefore should one bother to turn out on election day. Responses were rated for quality (as opposed to the position taken) on a six point scale ranging from “unsatisfactory” to “excellent.” Ratings between these two poles included: “insufficient response”; “uneven response”; “sufficient”; and “skillful.”

Four percent of the tested population turned in “unsatisfactory” responses on the order of, “If you want to vote go for it. Because it is you (sic) choice.” Three percent produced “excellent” prose as suggested by the following essay introduction: “Whether a single person’s vote makes a difference in an election is irrelevant. A democratic nation is one that recognizes an individual right to think and formulate an opinion, and voting is a manifestation of that right.”

Between the poles, the population arrayed itself as follows: Insufficient = 21 %; Uneven = 30%; Sufficient = 32%; Skillful = 10 %.

In other words, less than half the population responded coherently.

Perhaps I am drawing too easy a line between “if you want to vote go for it” and last November’s electoral traumas. However, a democratic society based wholly upon individual wants is in jeopardy unless those wants include what a democracy needs. Among those needs are the virtues of mind and character which our schools, alone among our public institutions, are charged with fostering. For this reason, we need to pay the price required to sustain them and keep them vibrant. Someone once described an ideal democracy as “an aristocracy of everyone.” If growing intellectual poverty – in addition to the material kind – widens the divide between the haves and the have nots, I fear we will lose not only the ideal but the reality of our democracy.

So why would I include this “guest blog” here? I see it as a lead in to the next post on leadership. It’s a call to action. It’s a reminder that if we are not intentional about how we will lead the direction of learning to help our kids learn how to know, learn how to do, and learn how to be, we will continue on a trajectory that further advances the privilege of the wealthiest among us at the expense of equity, opportunity and the democratic ideal to which Bernie refers.

Can’t happen you say? Humorist Dave Barry offers the following from his annual  Year in Review. In the article, he has been working his way through the months and is now up to November…

“Election Day approaches, a consensus forms among the experts in the media-political complex, based on a vast array of demographic and scientific polling data evaluated with sophisticated analytical tools. These experts, who have made lucrative careers out of going on TV and explaining America to Americans, overwhelmingly agree that Hillary Clinton will win, possibly in a landslide, and this could very well mean the end of the Republican Party. The Explainers are very sure of this, nodding in unison while smiling in bemusement at the pathetic delusions of the Trump people. Unfortunately, it turns out that a large sector of the American public has not been brought up to speed on all this expert analysis. And so it comes to pass that the unthinkable happens…”

from project50dates.blpogspot.com

“You can’t ever keep your kids from getting hurt, but you can be there for them when it happens”

Steve Yurchak, ca 1974

Happy New Year!

That quote was shared with me in a conversation with a very wise man when I was saddened by something that had hurt one of my kids. In this age of standards, high stakes testing, increasing academic and social pressures, I wonder if we’ve lost the time, freedom and commitment to “be there” for the kids we teach.

I was planning on taking a writing break for the holidays when life suddenly intervened and put an idea in my head. The idea came in the form of an article shared with me by a good friend. The author, Ted Wachtel, wrote about his journey as both a student and later as a teacher. With one sentence, he had me…

“However, not until I read “Deschooling Society”  in 1971 did I realize that the institution of school itself is the obstacle to learning for many young people.”

My reflections on this brought me back to Clark Aldrich’s book, Unschooling Rules, in which he describes the three critical types of learning that our kids need today: learning how to learn, learning how to be, and learning how to do. (For more on Aldrich and his thinking, here is a link to a YouTube presentation by him).This was a private reflection, one that I’ve been hoping will lead me to language sufficiently powerful to move readers to consider the possibility that Wachtel raises, i.e., school may be the obstacle. School may be, as Russell Ackoff asserts, an example of trying to do the wrong thing better and better.

I’ve written about this conflict previously, but something in the piece struck a new chord with me.   I connected it to observations I’ve been making recently about my youngest grandchildren, all four of whom are under the age of ten with three of them less than 5.

Each time we have the kids over or have babysitting duty (which I’ve come to realize is actually babysitting “privilege”), I’m amazed at how they much they learn, how serious they are about learning, how much fun they have doing it, etc. I don’t want to romanticize this process. There are times when they are frustrated, impatient, downright unpleasant. But they are natural learners. They are driven by curiosity and the need to find explanations for the world they are experiencing.

And then school/schooling happens. We’ve all seen it. Our kids and grandkids come home and after their first week we notice that they are raising their hands to speak. The proudly announce that they were named “line leader” for recess. Out nine year old responds to the question, “what was the best part of school today?” with one word “Recess”?

The school that happens to/for our kids reflects the need to “educate” increasing numbers of children, to insure that important information is transmitted to all and to do this efficiently. The result… kids grouped by age, kids moving in age based cohorts, kids being exposed to information organized by discrete content areas, and kids being evaluated largely based on their ability to recall pre-identified facts, etc., etc., etc.

We aimed for excellence and focused delivery of information on the average. We guaranteed the perpetuation of the system with only minor and incremental modifications by staffing the schools largely with those who had “succeeded” in such a system.

Enter the kindergartners or pre-schoolers, full of curiosity, full of questions, experienced in independent inquiry and conclusion drawing. Too often we treat this as a lack of the discipline necessary for learning. It reflects a need to impose discipline so that we can provide learning in the way we have organized it… it is about efficiency. We assume that certain kinds of environments are conducive for learning and we set about to create these conditions.

Because we have organized by age and by a preferred group size (an efficiency issue) we need to provide the environment in which kids thus grouped might be able to “learn” what we have decided they need to know, in the framework that we have determined to be best, and at a pace which is based on average not uniqueness.

Ironically, we do so, too frequently, at the expense of the very things that now, in the 21^st Century, we are hoping to see in our children, in our graduates. We recognize our failings, or perhaps more importantly, we “recognize” the failing of our students and blame them and their teachers.

And we try very hard not to accept the observation shared by Wachtel, “…the institution of school itself is the obstacle to learning for many young people.”  But what if he’s right? What kinds of things might we consider for the new year?

And so here are a few of the primary questions that I’m  hoping we can grapple with…

• How can we transform the “obstacle of school” to the “center for learning”? How can we create “circles of safety”, places dominated by the commitment to personal relationships and support for all?

• What would happen if, at the very earliest ages and thereafter, instead of training young children how to conform to the culture of school, we intentionally focused on the further development of their innate curiosity, their desire for learning, the need to seek and explore explanation for the way their world works?

• What would happen if, instead of focusing our high profile reform efforts on high school programs, we helped our youngest children understand that it’s great to follow their curiosity and decide what they would like to learn and that we can help them do that in our schools?

• What would happen if we built primary and elementary learning experiences for children around what we now know about learning and worked on the development of metacognitive and self-reflective dispositions to enhance their natural inclinations?

• What would happen if we removed obstacles to us “being there” for our children by focusing less at how to score higher on tests of content increasingly removed from the life needs of our students?

• What would school look like if we acknowledged that Dewey was right and focused on the creation of learning experiences that extend well beyond thee walls of the school?

• Would school still be an obstacle? Would schooling and learning still be in conflict?

Please feel free to use the comment option to share some questions of your own and if you know an elementary educator who might like this, please pass it along and suggest that they subscribe.