Practical Theory

[I apologize for not having the exact wording of how the exchange happened, but MSNBC doesn't have it up yet.]

Tonight on MSNBC, as part of the Education Nation event, there was a panel discussion around (because it wasn't about) Waiting for Superman. The panel included Randi Weingarten, Michelle Rhee, Geoffrey Canada, John Legend and Davis Guggenheim, and at one point, Randi Weingarten said that the AFT was willing to work with Rhee in DC, and Rhee interrupted her (interestingly, it did seem like everyone was allowed to interrupt her) and said, "I find it disingenuous that you say you wanted to work with me, but the AFT spent $1,000,000 in the DC Election on the Gray campaign."

And for some reason, Weingarten tried to say that education wasn't the only reason they supported Gray. She was - rightly - pounced on, and she did sound completely foolish. Of course, the AFT gave money to Gray because of education policies. Of course they did.

And the thing is... just say it.

Say, "Yes, Michelle. We went after you because saying after we want to work with you, after signing an historic contract with you, it was clear that wasn't enough for you. You had to have absolute control. For you, 'working together' meant doing whatever you wanted. We realized that no matter what we did, no matter how much we gave, it would never be enough for you until there was no union left to protect teachers. And we couldn't stand for that. So yes, we gave $1,000,000 to stop you. Because we care about teachers. And because we believe you can't truly care about kids unless you care about teachers. Meanwhile, let's talk about how much the billionaires like Ron Perelman and the hedge fund managers gave to Fenty's campaign and ask why they seemed to care so much."

I respect Weingarten for being on the panel, but I don't think she needs to apologize or obfuscate about why she has a different vision for education reform than Michelle Rhee. She made some incredible statements for a union leader - she said that the tenure process is broken, she said that the union has focused for too long on protecting the bad teachers through due process and not enough on supporting the best teachers, and there was no recognition of that by anyone on the panel. Sooner or later, collaboration cannot be one-sided. It has to be a recognition of what both sides of a debate bring to the table. Without that, it's appeasement, and that doesn't last.

Randi Weingarten should not apologize for wanting to work with administrators whose rhetoric is less inflamatory than Rhee's. She should not apologize for believing that teachers must be part of the dialogue of education reform. And she should never apologize for supporting candidates that she believes will work to create a more inclusive vision of education reform.

The message that teachers -- and their leaders -- should be saying over and over again is this -- "We are thrilled that the nation is focusing on education. We welcome so many leaders from such a wide array of professions are now making education a focus. We look forward to working with anyone who is willing to come to the conversation with humility and a willingness to listen, question and change. The task in front of us is so hard, and we understand that teachers and schools must change with the changing times. All that we ask is that you understand that school reform is not something you do to students and teachers and parents, it is something to undertake with students and teachers and parents. That is how we will build the schools we need."

That's what I want to hear from someone - anyone - involved in this week's Education Nation.

Sadly, I'm not hopeful that I will.

One of the mandates for high school principals in the School District of Philadelphia is to give more frequent written feedback to teachers based on the teaching and learning we see on a daily basis on our walk-throughs. It is one of those mandates that is pretty much indefensible in theory, but the devil, as always, is in the details. For me, the trick is to create a way to give teachers feedback that is useful, as observational and non-judgemental as possible, easy to manage, both for teachers and me, and something that can be more than just sheets of paper that are put into a binder and then forgotten about.

So I am going to be using my iPad and a GoogleForm (and Spreadsheet) to get feedback to teachers quickly and (hopefully) wisely and well.

The first thing I did was sketch out some ideas about the way I wanted to give feedback to teachers in a way that was productive, useful, manageable, and as non-judgemental as possible. This is meant for 10 minute quick visits not full observations, so for me, it is as much about simple observations and the questions that come up from those observations as it is about drawing any conclusions about what I see. This is much more of a formative tool than a summative one.

Then I sought out feedback from a bunch of SLA teachers about the rough draft of the form... at that point, I tested out for a day before presenting it to the whole faculty for feedback. We're only a few days into using it, but so far, I find it to be a pretty useful thing, and the teachers have liked it as well.

Here is the form:

Some important pedagogical things:

• It was important for me to use the core values on the observation form - for me, that goes to the "Show me where it lives" idea that I'm pretty passionate about. If I want teachers and students to really embody those values, it should be part of the way I give feedback.


• I think there is value in many kinds of student groupings and instruction, and each grouping has plusses and minuses. I thought it'd be useful to remind teachers what part of the lesson I saw by the grouping, and I also thought it'd be useful to think about the groupings when considering the whole of the feedback.


• The "I noticed, I wonder, what if" protocol is one we use all the time with each other and in our classes. It's a great way to get people to give meaningful feedback without falling back on "I liked" or "I didn't like."


• One teacher has started playing with answering the questions I ask in an extra column of the spreadsheet, which is a neat way to make this process more interactive. Other teachers have stopped by the office later for conversations about what I saw, and it's been a very cool way to increase the conversations about teaching and learning.


• A downside is that this is time consuming, and I have noticed that doing this has made it harder for me to get into every class every day. My usual routine is shorter visits / more visits. I'm going to have to figure out what I think about that over the long term, and I also worry a lot about trying to do this method of feedback as I start to do more formal, period long, observations as well.

The technical side of things:

• Each teacher has their own spreadsheet that is shared only with me.


• I asked every teacher to set the notifications on the spreadsheet so that they get an email every time a new entry is added.


• I created a GoogleSites page for myself with links to all the teachers at SLA so I can get to the forms easily and quickly.


• I can do it without my bluetooth keyboard, although it's faster with the keyboard. The problem with the keyboard is that carrying the iPad and the keyboard is definitely clunkier.

So, overall, I like how it works so far. I don't think it's perfect. The lack of real integration of GoogleDocs on the iPad has been a pain, and while the form ameliorates that somewhat, it still is a bummer not to be able to easily pull up the actual spreadsheet after filling out the form. I think it creates a more authentic tool that teachers can look back on over time and get feedback. I think it lets me give frequent feedback without having to stuff mailboxes with forms that then have to be put into a three-ring binder. I think it provides a great opportunity to enrich the already really wonderful conversations about teaching and learning at SLA - in fact, I think teachers could use the tool for peer observations as well. I do wonder what I will have to take off of my plate if I am doing this for an hour or two every day, but it is my hope that it does provide me with an opportunity to enrich the conversations that I have with teachers about teaching and learning.

I'll keep you posted.

So I haven't been blogging lately.

It's not for lack of ideas. Certainly, with things like the DC election and Education Nation and Waiting for Superman going on, there's been a lot to write about on the national scene.

And at SLA, we've started our first year without the first class. We have made major changes in the way we get work done to better distribute leadership to the people who want to get the work done, we are using GoogleApps for the first time, we have a new walk-through protocol that is all Google-Driven that makes it much easier for me to give feedback, and we are learning what it means to be a school that actually can feel like we know what it feels like to have four years done and can really start reflecting on practice deeply and start revising ideas and begin, in earnest, the transition from start-up to sustainability.

And then there's this idea that I've been kicking around about where and how we should be talking about education reform in this country. The concept is "Leading from the Radical Middle" (which I think I stole from Doug Johnson) but I've been doing a lot of staring at the blank screen on that one. But it's in there, and it's probably a multi-post piece of writing.

But the reason that this post has its title is because, despite all these reasons to write, I haven't been. And here's why. I'm feeling a bit defeated these days. Between Oprah and Waiting for Superman and $100 million for mayoral control to Newark and an increasingly hostile and simplistic rhetoric about public education, I've started wondering what a blog entry here and there or a speech in front of teachers here and there can really do. I mean, how do you go up against the PR machine of Bill Gates and Eli Broad? How do you make a difference when you are outmanned and outgunned on what feels like every front?

And then I listen to the voices of my students in class as they dig deeply and powerfully into complex ideas. And then I read the emails and tweets from the first SLA class at college talking about how prepared they are. And I realize that I have to keep writing and talking and teaching, because this isn't about unions and charters, and it's not about what Oprah wants or about what Bill Gates wants or even about what Arne Duncan wants. It's about a vision of what we want our schools to be and therefore a vision of what we want our world to be.

And I realize the way you do it is to do it.

You write the blog entry.

You speak truth to power when you have the opportunity.

And you serve the children who have put their faith in you.

You let their voices rise.

And you let their voices inform and embolden your voice.

Because that's what's needed.

And that's how we win.

My article in Technology and Learning magazine, Top 3 Leadership Skills, is up online! T&L asked me to write about the top three tech skills administrators need, and fortunately, they allowed me to write about the soft skills that are more important than knowledge of any one tool.

I focused in a short piece on three ideas - Filtering: the ability to sort throgh all the information that comes through these days; Fearlessness - the need to be willing to take risks; and Foresight - the idea that we have to be able to imagine the ramifications of the decisions we make. Are those the most important? Maybe? Probably? Probably not? I don't know. Perhaps more importantly, they aren't explicitly tech skills, and that was the point of the article.

Being a techie is a helpful start to bringing a school into the modern age, but it's not essential. If we counted on principals to be experts in everything at their schools, we probably wouldn't get very far. I'm very comfortable with the idea that I am nowhere near as masterful as my teachers in every content area except English... and there I probably only come pretty close. But I think I can make sense of good teaching when I walk into a class that isn't in my strong skill set, and I do love how much "stuff" I learned from students and teachers in the past few years. I have often found myself doing an observation and losing track of "observing the teacher" because I too busy learning from what was going on in the classroom.

And perhaps those are the most important leadership skills for being ready to change our schools - openness, humility and a true spirit of inquiry. I don't claim in any way to always be good at all of them every day, but I strive to be. Those ideas embody the best of who I hope to be. And they are the skills the students and teachers of SLA need from me if I am going to be the leader they deserve in these very exciting and challenging times.

The trope that the "world is changing" has been beaten to death, but it still bears repeating from time to time. You don't have to know where everything is going, you just have to be willing to let the change in, you have to be humble enough to accept that you really have little to no idea where the world is going, but you still have to try your damnedest to help your kids get ready for it as best you can, and you have to be truly curious about where the world might go... and want to work with your kids to figure out whatever small piece of the puzzle you can.

Approach your students, your schools, and the world with an open heart and open mind. More and more, I find myself coming back to that idea. It seems to me that might be the starting point for meaningful change. And that idea is both incredibly easy and so incredibly, incredibly hard.