Practical Theory

[Today, I found out that one of my colleagues from my teaching days in NYC, Jon Goldman, passed away. Jon started at Beacon the first year of the school and had taught for several years before that. Jon was ten years older than me which doesn't seem like much now, but when I was a 25 year old first-year teacher, that made him a wise old veteran of teaching in my eyes. Jon was one of those teachers who looked out for other teachers. He always felt that the job had to be livable…. that as amazing as we wanted to be for the kids, we had to make sure it didn't come at the cost of our own sanity. It was an important lesson for a young teacher like me to learn, and one I've kept with me ever since. It is with Jon in mind I write tonight.]

The overwhelming majority of the teachers I know work incredibly hard. When one factors in the paper grading, calls home in the evening, email answering and lesson planning (to say nothing of coaching and other extra-curricular work), the hours spent can easily push up and over the 60-70 hour a week level. Moreover, the hours themselves can be incredibly intense, working with students who bring all that they - good and bad - to the classroom each day. Learning how to successful navigate the minefield of student emotions, classroom expectations, state standards, test scores, parent expectations and every other pressure point in the teaching life can be daunting, and it doesn't surprise me when people cite statistics about how many young teachers leave the profession. Turns out, the job is hard.

So it falls to teachers and administrators and policy makers at every level to really look at the teaching life. What do we ask of our teachers every day? How can we figure out how to do this job well, do it with true commitment and care, and do it over time, such we can develop a truly masterful teaching faculty in our country… one that can see a roadmap to teaching for a career with passion and grace. The energy of a youthful teacher must transform into the skill and technique of a veteran teacher so that the job does not always need to be done by Herculean effort alone. And we must always ask ourselves - how much gets put on a teacher's plate? Is it always a livable life? Hard? Sure… but doable, achievable, rewarding for good, hardworking people of honest intent.

If we want teachers to be advocates for our children, we must ask ourselves - are we advocates for our teachers? Let us make sure we build schools that understand the value of sustained and sustainable excellence of all members of our school communities.

Rest in Peace, Jon. Thank you for teaching me that valuable lesson.

Something every principal faces is the inevitable conflict between students. For me there's always a frustration in that I wasn't there, I didn't see what happened, and it is always too easy to see both sides of the story. In that moment, students will look to us as leaders, as principals, to take their side, to do what's right, even when we know that taking a side isn't necessarily what's right.

The hardest thing about those moments is getting aggrieved parties to listen to one another. It's a natural instinct in that moment to want to be valid, to want to be told that your actions were not wrong, to know that what happened to make you feel hurt was not your fault. And certainly, there are moments where one student is simply trying to pick on another student - and yes, we must always be vigilant about bullying in our schools. But it is my experience that days where one person was absolutely right and another was absolutely wrong are not as common as one might think and most confrontations between students happened because both parties were acting from their personal place of hurt and, in that moment, could not see another solution except to cause hurt themselves.

It's not that students don't see that they were causing another pain, rather what they felt in that moment was that causing pain was justified because of the pain they were in. And to me, that's the moment where we can step in and teach. That is the moment of empathy. Because when the student is in pain, and when they feel justified in acting out of that pain and therefore causing others harm, we can ask them to combine both emotional intelligent and rational intelligence to draw a lot of conclusions of their actions. The problem is, too often we are looked to in that moment to mete out some sort of justice, as if a suspension or detention or some sort of punishment can make up for the harm caused. And while there are moments where that is needed, more often than not the best solution is to help students see the world through other eyes, to teach empathy, and rarely can we ask people to be empathetic when we are punishing them or telling them that their feelings which caused the actions were wrong.

So when a conflict between students reaches my desk, I try hard to look for reasons not to punish. I try hard to listen to both parties, and I try to get them to listen to one another. It is in those moments that inquiry often is most useful. When we can ask questions, when we can ask students to think both about their own feelings and about the feelings of others, when we can ask students to ask questions of each other – honest questions, real questions, questions asked with an open heart and an open mind – we can help students see the world from a wider perspective than their own.

In the end, the punishments students want us to enforce on the other are often the punishments they feel that they were create in the confrontation itself so they look to us to finish the job. In those moments, we should seek not to broker a winner's peace, but instead ask students to listen to one another, ask them to ask questions of one another, and ask that they increase the amount of empathy in the world, starting with the way they treat – and listen to – one another.

There are those in the educational and political landscape these days who would dismantle the entire institution of school, and those people would use the tools we love so much to argue for the irrelevance of school itself. It can be a seductive argument especially when so many schools frustrate us with the degree to which they underserve children. However, the fundamental purpose of public school -- the idea that create physical spaces that are comitted to educating a nation -- is a good one.

There’s no question that how we conceive of school must change, but the why we have them remains as vital today as it ever has been. In an age where segmentation of markets, segmentation of society, keep people apart from those who think differently, who look differently, who live differently than they do, schools bring us together to learn from and with each other.

There is a subtle and yet vital difference in the fundamental role of school in the modern world. For the past 100 years, in most American schools, the school was important because it was where the information was... it was where the teacher was. The classroom was important because it was where people came together to get the information from the teacher. And while this is an oversimplification of the pedagogy of the past 100 years, it is, sadly, an accurate description of the dominant paradigm in American education. It is the Prussian model that Horace Mann brought back from Europe and instituted across the country with great success.

And let’s be clear - this model educated a nation with greater success than the world had ever seen - and so it is understandable to see why it has been so hard to let go of the old vision of what schools look like. Much of we see with the “No excuses” charter school model, No Child Left Behind and other current “reform” movements seem like an attempt to recapture the hazily remembered nostalgic days when students sat and patiently absorbed information from caring teachers. But to quote the song, “the good old days weren’t all that good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”

So if the reason to come together in a classroom isn’t because the teacher is there to dispense the knowledge, why come together in a classroom?

It’s because that’s where we come together to learn.

Let’s never forget that.

A vibrant classroom, filled with active learners is a wonderful place that deserves to be nurtured. Learning can happen in many ways, and not all moments of learning have to be social, but equally, not all learning moments should be solitary as well. All over the world, there are classrooms where students learn together with caring, dedicated teachers. In these places, the social learning means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the promise of these classrooms, these schools that we must grasp onto.

And they are not as rare we think.

In every school, there are teachers who make the classroom into something special. They listen to students, push them to reach beyond what they knew their grasp could be. There are students who look forward to class those classes so that they be in deep learning environments. And in all those places, the learning goes far beyond acquisition of knowledge and skills and content. In all those places, there is meaning and wisdom and passion.

And at schools like High Tech High in San Diego and MET Academy in Providence, RI and Science Leadership Academy, students and teachers and administrators have come together to build entire communities that learn this way. And there are many, many more schools that have build powerful learning communities out there. We just have to do a better job of looking for them.

That is what school can be. As a nation, we can imagine many different models for school, but the fundamental idea that we build places where all children can come together to learn remains one of the best ideas we’ve ever had as a society.

We shouldn’t lose it. We just have to make sure our schools reflect the time in which we live.