Jan 15

Plan for Letting Go

Posted on by

When I first did the Cyber-Mentoring project as a young English teacher, there was a day when my ninth graders had a work period in the computer lab, and kids were emailing their mentors, revising their papers, peer editing, and for a few moments, no one needed me. I literally had nothing to do.

It was a deeply weird moment for me. So I walked around the class and looked over a lot of shoulders and “hmmmmm-ed” profoundly. I probably ended up interrupting the students more than anything else. And I remember thinking, “This isn’t really teaching, is it?”

And of course, it was. It might have been my best moment of teaching up to that point in my career.

I wasn’t needed.

Isn’t that what we want for our kids – the ability to work and learn without us?

But, of course, that moment didn’t happen in isolation. Behind that fifteen minutes of class time where no one needed me was hours of work setting 30 kids up with mentors who could help them with their writing, and emails to the mentors explaining what the kids were working on, and teaching 14 year old how to collaborate with adults who were their teachers – to say nothing of trying to create an assignment that kids and adults could engage with. And the fruit of that labor were those moments where everyone involved could really work and learn.

But many of us — myself included — it’s harder than it should be to do that, because of our teacher ego. And I don’t say that dismissively at all. The best teachers I’ve known get a great deal of satisfaction out of being useful and helpful. It’s why Dan Meyer’s rallying cry of “Be Less Helpful” is so important. We want to be helpful. It’s almost in a teacher’s DNA.

And of course, we won’t stop being helpful… both in the classroom and outside of it. But we have to take the next steps and see our work as curriculum architects where there’s more hard work in the design of our spaces, in the design of the work, so that the work of the classroom is just that — about the work.

That’s what I see when I walk through SLA. I see English classes where kids are doing genre-studies in book groups. I see science students building circuits or doing experiments, I see math students applying statistical models to the world around them. I see teachers who are teaching without needing to be in the front of room. I see teachers willing to let students learn from and with each other before jumping in to be the hero. And I see teachers designing the framework that allows kids to learn in their classes and for the rest of their lives.

And then I’m seeing kids create artifacts of their learning that were beyond what any of us thought of when we first envisioned the idea for that unit ourselves.

If we are to create the kinds of schools and classrooms that kids need, we have to understand that our helpfulness isn’t just in that moment where the kids are in front of us, but in the invisible work that happens outside of class as well. We have to understand that letting go is hard, but necessary. And we have to understand that we can only let go when we have created the framework that helps our kids learn to fly.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Jan 14

“What’s Good” is Better than “What’s New?”

Posted on by

We live in amazing times.

This time is a time of faster technological change than anything ever seen before in human history. And with that technological change has come incredible changes in the way we live our lives.

And while schools are historically slow to change, we are now seeing rapid changes in the way schools operate. More students are taking courses online. Teachers are bringing new technologies into the classroom every day. And the digitization of student performance has led to a new focus on analysis of data in a way that has never been seen before.

And while we should be sure to evolve our schools and work to incorporate new ideas into our schools, we should also remember that very smart people were teaching before us. And in our haste to rush to the new – the shiny – we must not forget the lessons we have learned in the past.

To that end, we must be scholars of our own profession. We must work to understand the reasons that schools have become the institutions they are, and we must understand how innovation has — and has not — happened before. When we do this, we will be more equipped to innovate and evolve.

What we cannot do is just blindly follow whatever trend is hot this week, changing when the trend fades and leaving schools always playing catch up with a set of core values to serve as anchors.

The best ideas we can create are when we take the best ideas of the past and marry them to the world we live in today. We can create something new, grounded in the best of what we have been, but with an eye toward what our kids need to become today. To that end, when we look to innovate, we must ask ourselves “What’s good?” more than we ask ourselves “What’s new?” New fades. Good endures. That is a goal worth chasing.

Jan 07

Take the Work Seriously, But Don’t Take Yourself Seriously.

Posted on by

When I was sixteen years old, my three best friends and I decided to see how many tissues we could shove in our mouths. There was no reason. It was after school one day, and it was something we could compete over. I was “winning” this contest when the gag reflex kicked in and I came closer to choking to death than I’d like to admit.

I tell this story to say this — no matter what I do in my life, I am still the same moron who nearly died in a tissue-mouth-shoving contest. That’s important.

Think of the most ridiculous thing you did in high school. You are still that person. You will always be that person. It doesn’t matter how much wisdom you have accumulated in the intervening years, you are still that person.

And that’s a good thing for so many reasons.

A career in education is a powerful way to spend your life. The work we do is important, meaningful, and incredibly challenging. We should take the work of helping children learn incredibly seriously. But we should remember to never take ourselves all that seriously. Because, to quote the kids, “It’s just not that deep.”

When we have the humility to remember all the twists and turns in the path that got us to where we are today, we are more likely to be understanding of the twists and turns in the paths our students take.

When we don’t fall in love with our own ideas, we remain open to change and grow. We are more likely to allow our ideas to be influenced and made better by our students and our colleagues.

When we remember to laugh at ourselves, we display an openness to students that is so important to model.

When we have enough sense of the long view of our lives, we laugh more easily, smile more broadly and are more likely to share a sense of joy with the people around us.

When we are not overly invested in our own seriousness of purpose, we remember that we are the lucky ones – we get to spend our working lives teaching and learning with our students, and really, that’s a pretty awesome way to spend our time.

When we don’t take ourselves too seriously, we remember that the work isn’t about us. It’s about the kids.

So let’s find a reason to laugh with the kids and our colleagues every day. Pick up the guitar and play with the kids, even if we sing off-key. Play basketball with our students – even if they cream us. Let’s let them see us as whole people, so that they might let us see them the same way.

And, then when we can really all talk to one another without the view of each other’s egos in the way, we can ask them what they think about our schools, and we can listen deeply to their answers and let their ideas change our own.

Jan 07

The Worst Consequence of Your Best Ideas

Posted on by

[I've talked about this idea a lot, but I wanted to actually put down both the reasons and some of the pathways to do this down in writing. Hope you find it useful. -- Chris]

You have to wonder why desks in rows and textbooks on the desks have survived as long as they have as the dominant instructional model when so few people think that it’s actually a good way to teach and learn.

And then you realize that while it never goes all that right, it rarely goes all that wrong either. Teachers don’t usually get in trouble when administrators walk into their classroom and see kids with books open, doing work, even if the work isn’t worth doing.

And all those other ideas that we love so much – inquiry, project-based learning, technology, real world application of student work – they get so… messy. And something always seems to go wrong. And we have to face that education is a somewhat reactionary field to work in. The death of so many good ideas is when something goes wrong and someone decides that we should never do that again.

And the desks get put back in rows and the textbooks land on the desks again.

But there’s a way around that, and it involves thoughtful planning. It doesn’t involve coming up with the perfect idea, because let’s be clear – there is no perfect idea.

Again – there is no perfect idea.

Everything has a downside. Everything.

At SLA, the best thing about our school is the incredible empowerment of our students. And the worst side of that is those same kids who are so incredibly empowered occasionally become really entitled, and then we have to deal with that.

But we realized that would happen before we started. And every time it does happen, we remind ourselves that it is a natural consequence of what we love, so our reaction has to be tempered so we don’t lose the soul of our school.

And so, whenever you have a new idea, ask yourself and your colleagues:

What is the worst consequence of my best idea? What is the thing that, even if we do this really well, will frustrate me, frustrate kids, frustrate parents?

And then follow-up with these questions: How will we, as a community, mitigate that consequence? What are we willing to live with, if it means we get something incredible out of it as well? What are the risks we are willing to take? How will we front load the negative possibilities of this idea to our stakeholders so they are prepared for it as well?

Don’t just do this alone. Do this as a community, because the author of an idea is often the last person to see the scary side of the idea. Do this not so you can just dismiss fear, but so you can acknowledge it and lessen the factors that cause it.

An easy, concrete example for us was thinking through the policies around being a 1:1 laptop school. We made a decision not to lock down the machines, because we wanted the kids to really feel like they could use the laptops to their fullest potential. That meant that the kids went home with a fully unlocked laptop to unfiltered home networks. We had to talk to students and parents beforehand about issues of internet porn, around good digital citizenship, around being safe and smart with your digital footprint.

And then we had to expect that no matter how much we did that, kids would make mistakes. And because we agreed, as a community, that the benefits of all the kids being able to access the full power of the laptop outweighed the negatives of some of the kids using the laptops inappropriately, the laptops are still open seven years later. And we’re better for it.

And most of the time, there is still the thing you didn’t think of. But the very act of going through the iterative process of trying to solve problems before they show up has made us more willing to acknowledge that our ideas aren’t perfect and that problem-solving will always be necessary. The goal isn’t perfection — it’s pragmatism.

Whether it is a new technology, a new pedagogy, a new program in the school, we have to be thoughtful in the way we evolve as schools. We have to acknowledge the good and bad in the changes we make if we are to do right by the kids in our charge. And we have to own the limits of our ideas, so that we can hold onto those ideas and not regress to a vision of school that, while easily recognized, is loved by no one. Owning our flaws and learning what we can mitigate and what we have to live with is a way to power past fear once and for all.

Jan 04

Lenses, Not Silos

Posted on by

In the current incarnation of most high schools, classes are essentially silos of information that are not only specific to a discipline, but to a subset of information in that discipline. Not just science, but Biology. Not just mathematics, but Geometry. And so on. That creates a rigidity of thought in both student and teacher.

And while there is a lot of talk about interdisciplinarity these days, too often that just means that science teachers use some math in a project or an English class reads a Civil War novel while the US History teaches about the Reconstruction. But that misses the power and potential of what is possible when we see the intersections of our courses as more than just the occasional overlapping project.

As long as we continue to be bound by the regulations of teaching specific courses, we should strive for the idea of viewing our courses as lenses not silos. In this model, we learn science so that we can apply a scientific lens to the world around us. History becomes about case study and the tools of the historian to learn from a moment in time for what it holds for us now.

And then those tools can transcend the courses when students can ask real questions and solve real problems. This is what leads SLA students to analyze pollution trend data in a science class, overlaying socio-economic data with pollution data onto the map of Philadelphia and asking questions about what they find, or take on a local issue of importance to them in an English classroom and design and implement a direct action campaign to affect change. Or when they do real world data modeling in an Algebra I class, using variable manipulation to solve architecture problems and sports forecasts. Or write essays on identity in Spanish while designing masks that are representations of who they are.

And these projects are not specifically “interdisciplinary” in that they don’t have to be joint projects between two teachers. They are an ancillary benefit of teachers seeing themselves as teachers of kids before being teachers of subjects. It places the student use, application and transferral of the skills and information at a much higher priority than merely learning it. And you know its working when teachers no longer have to be the drivers of interdisciplinarity, rather students draw the connections between what they learn in different classes and bring their ideas to bear on the problems they want and need to solve.

Two ideas for schools to better structure for lens-driven classes:

  1. Stream students in courses, so that students take a group of courses as a cohort. At SLA, students take English, History and Science as a cohort in 9th through 11th grades, so that students and teachers work with the same group of students all year, thus increasing the likelihood that ideas will resonate across classes.
  2. Use grade-wide themes and essential questions as through-lines for students to come back to that are not specific to one discipline over another. At SLA, the 9th grade theme is Identity, the 10th grade is Systems, and the 11th grade theme is Change.

What are your ideas?

Jan 03

Find Meaning Every Day

Posted on by

When I was first out of college, I lived in Washington, DC, and part of my daily walk to work took me past the Capitol building every day. When I first started doing that, I was awed by what it meant to walk past that building, but it quickly just became my routine, and most days I barely even noticed it.

It’s inevitable that even the most amazing of environments becomes routine, and when it does, it becomes easy to lose sight of what makes it so special in the first place.

This can be true of the most incredible schools as well. In the end, no matter how empowering, no matter how amazing, no matter how meaningful, there are going to be days when the work feels like, well, work. And the most powerful learning experience can be unappreciated.

That’s o.k. We shouldn’t fear that. If anything we should embrace that.

We live in a world where we expect the spectacular, and more often than not, people are disappointed when the everyday lives we lead fall short of that. Schools can help us celebrate what we have that is special — and help us re-value the every day.

When I lived in DC, it often took someone from outside the daily routine of my life — a friend who was visiting from out-of-town — to make me realize and remember how special my surroundings were. And at SLA — as EduCon quickly approaches — our entire community will be reminded anew of how lucky we are to be together when 500 or so teachers from all over the country descend upon us.

But it shouldn’t take that. We can make the everyday meaningful in some very basic ways in every school. Here are two simple ideas to make sure that the work we do has meaning and the relationships we have stay vital.

First – students and teachers should take time every day to ask of their work, “What does this hold for me? Why am I learning and teaching what I am teaching today and what relevance does this have?” When this becomes habit, we really can train ourselves as teachers and students to make the work meaningful.

Second – and this again is true for teachers and students alike – we can ask ourselves every day, “What did I do of value today?” And while this may seem like a related question — and it is — it is also important to note how it is different, because it forces us to reflect on our own actions and challenge ourselves to be of value.

There are days when those questions are harder than others. But if we can make those questions routine in our schools, we can work together to look inward and outward as a community every day.

Dec 26

Humility Matters

Posted on by

The death of any great idea is when its inventor falls in love with it.

The death of any great student is when they decide they are smarter than all their classmates and therefore have nothing to learn from them.

The death of any great teacher is when they fall in love with the sound of their own voice and stop hearing the voices of the students who would do more than parrot the teacher’s voice back at them.

The death of any great principal is when they think they are the only one who can move the school forward and stops listening to the students, teachers and parents s/he serves.

Humility matters.

The work of teaching and learning is hard. It requires courage on the part of everyone involved to take the kind of risks necessary for real learning to happen. That kind of courage can also create surety that is dangerous. We have to understand it, because it is rampant in schools of all kinds, but we also have to work to combat it when we see it in others and in ourselves.

Real strength, the kind that doesn’t come because one has a title that says “Principal” or “Teacher” or “Honor Roll Student” or even (or perhaps especially) “Education Reformer” requires an almost zen-like state where we move from centered core that is confident enough to listen to dissent and difference.

But humility isn’t just about listening to dissent. It’s about giving up control. It’s about stepping back and letting others do for themselves. It is about letting people own their ideas and create things you would never have thought of. It means knowing enough not to presume that you know every outcome. And it even means, sometimes, giving up things we love doing so that others can do them too.

Sometimes we have to learn those moments the hard way. When I was a young English teacher, I tried to give extensive feedback on every draft of every paper my students wrote. They needed me to do that for them. I was the teacher, and I understood better than anyone else in that classroom what good writing looked like.

Except I wasn’t sleeping, trying to keep up with the paper load.

So I tried peer editing, remembering it from a graduate school class. And then I noticed something – the comments kids made were different than mine, perhaps, but they weren’t worse. In fact, in many cases, the students had insight into each other’s work that I didn’t have. And the kids realized that they could help each other, and that might have been more important than any comma splice that I would have caught. But suddenly, I had to admit that I wasn’t the only expert voice in the room. I couldn’t be that “hero teacher” who would single-handedly teach all the kids to write.

What a wonderful myth to have to give up.

And that taught me another profound lesson about humility. True humility means understanding that one’s personal empowerment can never come at the expense of the empowerment of someone else’s. There’s enough to go around.

Dec 23

Poverty, College and A Dream Deferred

Posted on by

[Influencing this Post: For Many Poor Students, Leap to College Ends in a Hard Fall.]

The New York Times had an amazing front page long-form story today about how three young women who grew up in poverty in Galveston, TX struggled with the transition to college. All three women were excellent high school students who should thrive at the next phase of their life. Those girls are the kids that a high school puts their faith in. At SLA, approximately half of our student population come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and many of our students will be the first in their family to either go to college or complete college.

But what is scary is how many students who struggle with staying in college. We have heard story after story of SLA kids who found that a college changed their financial aid or how a raise in tuition meant more loans or how the hustle it took to earn scholarships for 1st year was hard to duplicate once in college. We joke around about providing the Extra Care Card to SLA alumni so that they know they can still use us as a resource in college and we spend a lot of time in senior year Advisory on preparing kids for what they will face in college and overwhelmingly, SLA kids do navigate the challenges, but the reality is that, for many kids of poverty, there is little safety net once they get to college.

This is the problem that KIPP faced when they realized that only 32% of their graduates were also graduating from college. This is what we – as a magnet school – fear when we sit down with parents in January and help them fill out FAFSA forms and then again in April when we go over financial aid packages. And again, we’re a magnet school with a college-going culture that can prepare kids for some of these challenges, and I don’t think we’ve come close to solving this problem – merely mitigating it to the best of our ability.

And let’s understand this — this problem affects kids well before they ever get to college. Every kid in an economically challenged neighborhood in Philadelphia knows someone like those girls – the kid who did everything right and still ended up on the block, thousands and thousands of dollars in debt, without a degree and struggling to get by. The dream of a college education as the ticket out of poverty is dying a faster death in our cities than policy makers and college presidents want to admit.

And if that dream dies, we’re in trouble as a nation. As the New York Times article suggests, we are dangerously close to a permanent underclass in America, and as the idea of class mobility fades, we face questions that I don’t think we want to face. It was over eighty years ago that Langston Hughes wrote A Dream Deferred:

What happens to a dream deferred?

 

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?

Perhaps it is time we all take heed.

Dec 10

NY Times Room for Debate: Federal Standards and Federal Funding

Posted on by

The New York Times Room For Debate asked me if I would weigh in on the following question:

The Common Core State Standards, adopted by 48 states and supported by the Obama administration, have worried liberals who question their quality and conservatives who fear they erode states’ traditional responsibility for education. At the same time, the budget pressure of the impending “fiscal cliff” could reduce federal support for education, which would add to the state and local responsibility.

As these trends collide, Americans can take a step back and ask: Should education standards and funding vary by state?

This gave me the opportunity to talk about an issue that too often goes un-talked about in the current education debate – inequitable education funding. Little did I know I would be debating the question online with folks like Pedro Noguero, Jeb Bush and Rick Hess. Here was the start of my response:

The Common Core standards are the latest federal educational initiative, making the argument that creating national standards will somehow raise achievement nationwide while ignoring what is a far more important state-to-state and district-to-district variability: funding.

Disparate funding levels in the United States are the single most anti-democratic policy in our society. Where children live should not have bearing on how much money is spent on their education. And the variability in funding levels is deep and profound.

The rest is over at The New York Times, please go give it a read. (And wow… the New York Times. I’m kind of really excited. Really, really excited.)

Dec 09

A Thought From #BlackInAmerica

Posted on by

[Influencing this post - tonight's CNN documentary - Black in America]

I watched Black In America for a lot of reasons tonight. First, much of the documentary was shot at SLA, focusing on the incredible work of the poets of PYPM and one of PYPM teacher / mentors, Vision. Whenever you get to see people you like and care about on television, doing amazing things, you watch. But the show was thoughtful and powerful and explored issues of racial identity and how that racial identity is defined. One of the stories they followed was the evolving sense of self of a young bi-racial woman, raised by her white father.

I’ve seen a lot of bi-racial students struggle with identity over the years, and much of it has been about the word “or.” “Am I black or am I white?” And, in so many ways, that’s an impossible question that forces kids to somehow deny some piece of their identity. It strikes me that American racial dynamics — largely defined by a dominant white culture — has been so oppositional for so long that we want these kids to choose a single identity, rather than embracing the complexity of what makes them who they are. It should not be as hard for a kid to say, “I am black and I am white” or “I am Afro-Latino” as our society makes it.

I watch the kids of SLA deal with issues of race and racial identity in ways that both seem familiar to the questions of twenty-five years ago when I was their age and also deeply unfamiliar. I see them engage with the issues of race with an openness and honesty that I would have been unable to do when I was their age. But I see so many of the same challenges and issues still around. And I still see too much pain as kids figure out the complexity of who they are in a world that still wants to put people into too many neat little boxes that rarely represent the complexity of their lives.

Thank you, CNN, for focusing on the amazing poets of PYPM, and thank you for the work you are doing with Black in America. With luck, it made a lot of people think tonight.