Practical Theory - Ed-Admin

Saving Lives v. Changing Lives

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:39:00 -0700

I went to a principal workshop today and the presenter had a lot of really good things to say. (And I'll be honest I can be a tough audience.) Much of the powerful take aways dealt with building capacity for change in our schools, and how principals can unwittingly build resistance for their ideas rather than support. The talk was based on the book Transforming School Culture by Anthony Muhammad, And the talk was good enough - persuasive enough - that I'm going to give the book a very careful read. And at a very basic level, I was appreciative of the fact that the presentation asked us to be reflective about our practice in a way that did not make me, or anyone else from what I saw, feel defensive about our work. That, in and of itself, is a worthwhile workshop.

But there was one piece of the presenter's talk that I felt uncomfortable with. Multiple times, he reminded us that we were, "In the arduous task of saving lives." And on one level, he had the chops to make that claim. He and his faculty, and without question he made sure we understood that his faculty did amazing work, took a school that had less than a 60% graduation rate and raised it to a 91% graduation rate in 6 years. Moreover, as he told his own story of being an English language learner and how he felt his own life was saved by a teacher who cared for him, it was clear that, for him, the work is around saving lives.

But I worry about that as a mantra - a lot.

And I say this knowing full well that I've used that phrase. I don't think I've used it in the talks I give, although it's possible I have. But I know that I've said it to SLA teachers when they have gone above and beyond over and over again to impact the life (thank you to Dave Childers for that phrase today) of a student. And so I am struggling with these ideas even as I write them. What better thing to blog about, perhaps.

I worry that when we say, "We are in the business of saving lives," we run the risk of doing several things wrong. I worry we over estimate our role in a child's life and under estimate the vital, powerful and important role of the parents, the community, and their culture, and in doing so, run the risk of becoming paternalistic in our dealings with both children and their families.

I worry that in the name of saving children's lives, we can use that as an excuse not to take care of the adults doing the work as well. Because, after all, how can you stop working if your job is to save lives?

Perhaps most of all, I worry that the idea that we are saving lives perpetuates the Messiah myth of the teacher and that myth leads to hubris which can blind us in so many ways.

And yet

I do believe we are engaged in the work of changing lives. I believe in the transformative school. I believe that a school that engages in deep learning within ethic of care can have a positive and profound impact on the lives of all of those who live in it. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the students and teachers and parents of SLA forever changed my life for the better, and I hope their interactions with me have changed theirs for the better as well. Enough of them have told me so, that I have faith it is true.

Maybe this is a semantic argument, but it doesn't feel like it to me. Schools should be places where young people and adults grow together. Yes, the adults are little older, a little more knowledgeable, and hopefully wiser, but hopefully still open to grow and open to learn. I believe students and teachers and principals can impact and change each other for the better. Change feels like a two-way street to me, but if we feel like we must be saviors, I worry that closes us off to be changed to ourselves, and in doing so, we make it that much harder to do the work we set out to do.

Good People Doing Great Things Together

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 22:41:18 -0700

One of the things that drives me nuts about the current corporate education reform dialogue is that so much of it atomizes it down to a wrong level, talking about how we need more "great teachers" and how we need to get rid of the bad ones. That's one of those seeming "Well, duh" statements that is so hard to disagree with on its face, but it fundamentally (and one might argue deliberately) misses a major piece of what is needed to make schools into better, healthier, more authentic places, and by doing so, runs the risk of doing real damage to the very folks who are doing the work every day.

While we can all agree that getting more amazing people into our schools would be great and yes, there are some people working as teachers who should not be to think that this overly simplistic "More Good, Less Bad" argument is dangerously misguided for any number of reasons. But the one I want to focus on is this: teaching is not an individual affair -- or at least it shouldn't be. Teachers are better when they work collaboratively - a point Yong Zhao made in his ISTE keynote last week - but even more than that, teachers teach better and students learn more when the school has a vision that actually means something and a plan to make that vision a reality.

Right now, the overriding mythos around teaching is the Hero Myth - that one teacher who can change a child's life, make a difference, and then get played by Hillary Swank or Edward James Olmos in a movie. And while yes, there are teachers filling that role in schools across the country every day, that is not the path to a systemic reform. There are over 4,000,000 teachers in America, and under the best of circumstances -- and we are not in the best of circumstances these days -- it is unrealistic to think all 4,000,000 teachers will be those "amazing" teachers who have a seemingly never-ending store of energy and passion for the kids. And, for the record, it is worth asking how that model is sustainable for all but a very few.

What we need to figure out - writ large - how to do is to build systems and structures that allow good people of honest intent to do great things. It is realistic to assume that we can build an educational system in this country around good people and smart systems. That does not mean teacher-proofing. That does not mean standardized content that strips the job of all of its creativity and passion and joy. It means understanding that people work best when they work in service of something that they can believe in. It means understanding that people work best when there is a pathway toward excellence. And it means understanding that people work best when they can collaborate. Good people are capable of great things under the right circumstances. But absent those circumstances, schools will squander the good will and best intentions of everyone - students and teachers - who work within them.

Coaching, Care and Kids

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:34:31 -0700

So I've come out of retirement.

I'm coaching again.

Roz Echols and I are coaching SLA Ultimate - we've got 30 kids coming to practice at 6:30 am every morning to work together build two amazing teams and one incredible community. And I've been reminded of how much I really, really love coaching. There is something incredible about working with kids first thing in the morning, all of whom have chosen to be there, working toward a common goal that is bigger than ourselves as individuals that has always just been incredible to me.

I love it. And I missed it even more than I realized.

And it got me thinking about the way we progress in the education realm, where with every move "up" away from the classroom, there is less and less direct contact with kids. I'm a really hands-on and involved principal, but, with the exception of my advisees, I have never been able to be as close to a specific group of kids as I was to the kids I coached. (Individual kids, sure but not a group)

And that seems wrong.

Having that incredible relationship where we, as educators, really have the opportunity to care for kids and have that transactional relationship where both teacher / coach / mentor and student make a difference in each other's lives, is a big part of what makes teaching such a profound profession.

Why is it that, in most districts, we discourage our administrators from working directly with kids?

What would happen if curriculum directors were still basketball coaches? If special education case managers ran the drama production at a school? If assistant superintendents ran after-school math help a few days a week? What if a district prioritized that and created the time and space for it?

How about this what if corporations that had products in the "education sphere" actually had their employees and executives volunteer in school several days a week - not just as a one-off, but actually establishing the kind of caring relationships that we desperately need?

What if we worked to ensure that everyone who works with schools or works in education didn't merely talk about how important it is to make a difference in the lives of kids, but rather actually did. Not indirectly, not through a policy or a product, but by working directly with and caring directly for kids.

Wouldn't that move us just a little closer to building the kind of educational community -- in and out of schools -- that we so very much need?

(Oh... and Go SLA Ultimate!!!)

Sustaining the Teaching Life

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:00:19 -0700

[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.

A Winner's Peace

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:54:47 -0700

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.

Why Releasing Teacher Test Ratings Is A Horrible Idea

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:46:23 -0700

New York City released the rating of thousands of teachers in grades 3-8 on Friday. These ratings are flawed for any number of reasons, as detailed in a lovely article on insideschools.org. And even Bill Gates - arguably the father of the teacher rating movement - has come out against releasing the scores, and his argument is a good one.

For me, my reasons against releasing the test scores comes down to one simple statement.

You will never, ever bully a teacher into caring for children.

Period.

How can anyone think differently is beyond me.

Beyond The Great Teacher Myth

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:03:06 -0700

The "great teacher" myth continues. This is the myth that says, "If only we could get rid of the really bad teachers, we'd have better schools." It's particularly pernicious because it sounds so easy, right? Let's just dump the bottom (5% / 10% / 33% - depending on who's writing) and even if we only replace them with "average" teachers, we'll be better off, right?

Right?

In his NY Times column today, Nick Kristof would have you believe it were so.

I'm not going to take this one on from the "how do you really know who the great teachers are?" lens.

I'm not going to (directly) take it on from the "we have a massive young teacher attrition rate that research has shown has little to do with pay and more to do with working conditions, so where are these great (or average) new teachers coming from?"

I'm going to ask this question, "When are we going to start asking ourselves why we make it so hard to be a great teacher?"

And this isn't about professional development for struggling teachers.

This is about school-level reform.

The nation - or at least its politicians, its pundits and its billionaires - has made this debate about labor (read unions) by atomizing this debate down to the teacher level. And while there is room for conversation there, it misses the larger picture. Our schools are structurally dysfunctional places which, therefore, makes teaching and learning much harder than it needs to be, so that teachers -- and students -- have to succeed despite the system, rather than because of it.

As long as high school students have to travel to eight different classes where eight different teachers talk about grading / standards / learning in eight different ways, students will spend far too much trying to figure out the adults instead of figuring out the work. When that happens, too many students will fall through the cracks and fail. If we built schools where there was a common language of teaching and learning and common systems and structures so that kind people of good faith can bring their ideas and creativity and passion to bear within those systems and structures and help kids learn, we will find that more teachers can be the kind of exemplary teachers that Mr. Kristof wants.

As long as there is little to no time in the high school schedule for teachers and students to see and celebrate each other's shared humanity, too many students will feel that school is something that is done to them, that teachers care more about their subjects than they do about the kids. As long as teachers have 120-150 kids on their course roster, and there is little continuity year to year so that relationships cannot be maintained, too many students will be on their own when they struggle. If we build schools where teachers and students have time to relate to one another as people - if we create pathways for students and teachers to know each other over time, so that every child knows they have an adult advocate in their school, we make schools more human -- and more humane - for all who inhabit them.

Let's stop falling victim to the soft thinking that just finding more "great teachers" and getting rid of all the bad ones is the way to reform education and start asking ourselves - "How do we create schools that make it easier for all students and teachers to shine?"

Debugging, Common Language and Watching Openly

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:12:11 -0700

I sat in Mr. Latimer's Algebra II class today during my walk-arounds. I watched two students struggle as they attempted to figure out where they went along in a multivariable multistep equation. It was interesting because I watched them struggle with the step-by-step process, they couldn't see clearly how change in one line affected everything that came after. Mr. Latimer and the rest of the students in the class worked with the students to work through the process, and then Mr. Latimer talked about ways to get through being "stuck" in the middle of a complex problem.

What struck me as I was watching was that they were trying to debug the equation. And on some level that's not a radical thought. We know that math and computer science have profound links. But what struck me next was that the science teachers talk about this kind of process all the time too when they talk about experimental design and changing only one variable at a time. And I realized that we had at least three places in school where we talked around what, in my brain I was calling debugging, but kids weren't seeing the cross-connections. They weren't realizing they were doing the same thing.

So I went looking for Mark Miles, our computer-science / math teacher and he agreed that that was a skill that crossed discipline-based boundaries, but he called what I was talking about "incremental problem solving." And Gamal Sherif talked about how they teach the kids about dependent variables for much the same reason.

And the thing is, I don't care what we call it I just want kids to realize that we're talking about the same thing.

And that's where common language comes in. It is good to help kids understand that we may call the same basic skill different things in different contexts, but it is also good to help them develop that common language so that they don't up spending a lot of time relearning something they already know in a different context or as Diana Laufenberg put it when I was talked to her about it, "We have to allow for skill transference."

And that's at the heart of common language. Lower the bar of figuring out the adults, and you raise the bar of what kids can actually do by helping them get to the work more quickly and powerfully.

So Mr. Latimer (who is also chair of our Academic Standards Committee) and I sat down at the end of the day, and next Tuesday, when our Math and Science teachers sit down to talk about ways we can better craft common language between the two disciplines, the notion of debugging or incremental problem solving or whatever will be on the table as one of the ways we can tighten our language so students can transfer skills across disciplines more easily.

And why I chose to write about this tonight was because this wouldn't have happened if I was sitting in Mr. Latimer's class with a checklist of things I was looking for instead of just watching and using the more open protocol of "I noticed," "I wonder," and "What if." It put me in a place where I could watch and think about what I was seeing and dream a bit too. And it wouldn't have gone anywhere if SLA teachers were defensive about their teaching or if they didn't make the time to talk to a colleague or a principal who was excited and working through a half-baked idea or if we didn't have structured time to talk about improving our practice or if we didn't have a commitment as a school to creating common language wherever we can.

One of the school-wide goals we made this year was to spend more time in each other's classrooms watching and thinking. There will be days we go in after having talked about our UbDs so we can look specifically for how we move from plan to execution. There will be days we walk through looking for opportunities for using the grade-wide themes. And there will be other lenses from time to time, too. But importantly, there will be plenty of time where we go in and just notice, wonder and dream, without a specific lens or notion of why we are there. Because the art of active observation and the will to question and dream are as important and powerful -- if not more so -- than any other lens might be.

Parenting, Fear and the Crook of our Arms

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:14:59 -0700

[This post is my attempt to make sense of, and reflect upon, the many conversations I have had with parents recently. Some of those conversations left me deeply at a loss for words, and the best I felt I could do was to show a parent how much I love the person their child was that day.]

Not surprisingly, I've had roughly 37,000 conversations with kids over the years about parents. Teenagers often talk about how their parents don't understand them, and even more often, teenagers talk about how parents let them do what they want to do or overreact when the kids make mistakes.

What I try to explain to students is this, that as much as one would think that the number one emotion is love, it often times is not. It's fear. Before I was a parent, little scared me. The world seemed to make sense, and I thought that I could exert a fair amount of control on my universe.

Then I became a father.

And the world terrified me. Every car that drove down our street became a threat. Every situation had to be examined for potential dangers.

It is my life's goal not to pass that fear onto Jakob and Theo, and so far so good, I think. But it's hard.

That fear is probably the thing I was least expecting about being a parent. It is the thing that is hardest to deal with, and while I know it comes from deep and profound love that I have for my children, I struggle with it. And I know many others who do as well.

So when students come to me and ask why their parents act the way they do, why they react so strongly, I say simply,

Because you used to fit in the crook of our arms. And every parent I have ever known remembers that feeling. Our bodies remember that, and there is no way to make it make sense to you, not now, not yet, Not until you become a parent too. But you used to fit in the crook of our arms. And every parent remembers that And remembers thinking, "I will keep you safe."

And I try to remember that when I work with parents, especially when I am the bearer of bad news. The young adult in front of me used to fit in the crook of that parent's arms, that parent has promised to keep them safe, they got them to SLA, and they still worry and fear for all of pain the world can inflict on their child.

In our best moments as schools, we can help parents build that vision of their children for the wonderful, amazing young adults they are. We can help parents understand who their children are today and see that person they are today as part of the continuum from birth to adulthood. We can help parents see that children take what they need up their parent's dreams and use them, add to them, change them to build their own. And in our hardest moments, we have to comfort parents and understand them when circumstances arise such that that fear that every parent knows is given cause to rise to the surface.

Taking the Time

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 22:10:55 -0700

The adults at SLA spent the last week working.

We took apart the stuff we do and put it back together again. We spent several hours talking about standards based reporting, time on our senior capstone, time working in our grade groups, time going over our goals in each advisory grade, and more. We came to some decisions with difficulty, because consensus is pretty hard, but we worked through issues and made the school better because everyone took the time to do so. I ran somewhere around 15% of the workshops, the rest were run by the teachers who were incredibly thoughtful in their strategies to create meaningful workshops for their colleagues.

We use our Title I money to pay for the time to do that every year. And every year, we wonder, now that the school is a little older, a little more mature, do we still need that much time? And every year, we can't believe how important every minute of that time still is.

Every Wednesday afternoon this year - like every other year - we will gather in the library for two hours and work and talk and make our school better through the process of working together. We leverage student internships and capstones and our museum partnership to make that time available.

It has to get easier for schools to make time for that work.

I talked with friends in other schools and they talked about having two mandatory days before school to come in and get ready for the school year, and I think, how? How do you make shared decisions about the trajectory of the year in two days? How do you take time to revisit the ideals of a school in only two days? How do you let faculty work together to tweak policies and procedures in two days?

And then, even worse, how do you have to wait a month or two before you all get to spend an hour or two in the same space for some reflection and some refocusing?

And yet, at the vast majority of schools all over the country, that's exactly what happens.

One of my core beliefs about school these days is that we need to get teachers off of the hamster wheel of the current school-day model. Teachers need time to collaborate, to plan, to innovate. And schools need to find ways to build frequent - I believe weekly - time for everyone to sit in a room and work together to make schools better.

I had an amazing week of working with the most amazing group of educators. I finished the week - paradoxically exhausted and deeply ready for the work ahead.

Teachers and administrators need time to make schools better. There really is no shortcut to sitting together in the room and working it all out together.

For SLA, I wouldn't want it any other way.

Be One School

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:05:47 -0700

I've seen a fair number of people tweet out a link to the Salon.com story, Confessions of a Bad Teacher, so I read it.

It's a pretty sad, although powerfully familiar and believable story about a second-career teacher who finds himself overwhelmed by the job of teaching and undermined by bad administration. I wondered as I was reading it, what was the point of publishing it? It reads a little like the third season of the Wire, the well-meaning teacher realizing how hard the job is kind of storyline, but also, the administrators are portrayed as tyrants who contribute to the problem, right up until the last line where the writer - who leaves mid-way through the year - writes:

Good teacher? Bad teacher? I suppose it's how you measure it. As far as I know, there is only one scrap of positive data in my personnel file at the DOE, a memo from the assistant principal commending me for passing enough students to put Latinate's pass rate in the Department of Education's "safe harbor."

As far as I know, he and Ms. P return in September.

And I think the reader is supposed to empathize with the teacher who, when struggling with kids is told by the principal "Take them to lunch" and "Frame everything in a positive way," and "Don't say 'don't.'" As if that's terrible, terrible advice.

And that's what got me thinking - the advice the principal gave wasn't terrible.

The problem was, as we accept the writer's description of events, she didn't live it herself.

This gets me back to one of my strongest beliefs as an administrator:

You have to be one school.

You cannot want one thing for students and another for teachers. The principal in the article tried to bully the teacher into caring about the kids, when everything we see about her behavior showed that she did not care about the development of this teacher.

If taking a student who isn't being productive to class out to lunch to get to know the student better is a good thing (and I believe it is,) then shouldn't principals and teachers share lunches and learn about each other's needs and ideas?

The writer had a bad boss, yes, but only in the way he thinks he did. It's not that he got bad advice, it's that there was a profound disconnect in what the administrator wants for the children of her school and what the administrator wanted for her teachers.

It's hard sometimes. Teachers are adults, and they get paid. So, as administrators, we want and expect more from them. But the values we hold as an administrator will be reflected in the values teachers manifest when they work with the kids. Both kindness and cruelty flow downstream.

If we want classrooms to be active places, so must our faculty meetings be.

If we want to feel cared for by teachers, then we must care for teachers.

If we want students to be able to engage in powerful inquiry, so must teachers.

The biggest crime of the story is that the principal wants kindness and care from the teachers to the students, but is unwilling to do the same for the adults in her care.

We must endeavor to be one school.

SLA, 3i, Finding Common Ground and Looking Backward to Go Forward.

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:44:00 -0700

[Influencing this post - Chris Lehmann, Alan Shapiro, and sitting on a Philadelphia floor, almost 40 years ago by Ira Socol]

So I spent last night re-familiarizing myself with the 3i program, an alternative high school program in New Rochelle, NY that existed from 1970-1983. The school was born out of a moment in time when people believed change was possible, and it was steeped in the work of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's classic text of resistance, Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The school was started by Alan Shapiro in collaboration with Postman and Weingartner, and it was part of a time in American schooling where many people believed school could be different.

I was doing this reading because of the dialogue between Ira Socol and me on his blog post-EduCon. It's a good place for me to be right now because SLA rarely gets challenged from the left-side of the educational spectrum. We spend a lot of time explaining what we do to those on to the right of us on the continuum that it's good to be stretched on the other side too. Given the personal experience Ira had in going to 3i, and the research and scholasticism he has shared since then, it might be a little ridiculous for me to write about 3i, but it's what is on my mind. I hope I honor the spirit of inquiry with what follows.

Postman and Weingartner's work was based in the belief - and SLA is, in many respects, a descendent of this belief - of inquiry education. From the wikipedia entry on inquiry method, good learners share the following traits:

Self-confidence in their learning ability

Pleasure in problem solving

A keen sense of relevance

Reliance on their own judgment over other people's or society's

No fear of being wrong

No haste in answering

Flexibility in point of view

Respect for facts, and the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion

No need for final answers to all questions, and comfort in not knowing an answer to difficult questions rather than settling for a simplistic answer

And teachers worked to live these ideals:

They avoid telling students what they "ought to know".

They talk to students mostly by questioning, and especially by asking divergent questions.

They do not accept short, simple answers to questions.

They encourage students to interact directly with one another, and avoid judging what is said in student interactions.

They do not summarize students' discussion.

They do not plan the exact direction of their lessons in advance, and allow it to develop in response to students' interests.

Their lessons pose problems to students.

They gauge their success by change in students' inquiry behaviors (with the above characteristics of "good learners" as a goal).

And the 3i Program, a school within the larger New Rochelle school, was built on those principals.

In reading those documents, you can see the valiant struggle to create something meaningful and powerful and democratic for students in the school. Kids and teachers made decisions together... classes were purely democratically chosen... students powerfully owned their learning. But I also read some of the same problems that we've seen in varying degrees at SLA. Student motivation to make those decisions or find learning on their own waxed and waned.... figuring out what to do when given ownership and freedom was hard... and maintaining the spirit of the revolution, so to speak, could be exhausting.

And that isn't to say that the struggle was bad... or that the school was not a success. So many folks have spoken to the power of classrooms and schools like this all over that something incredible was going on. I wonder, though, as I look at the staff page, and I see how many teachers spent only a year or two there... how hard was it to teach there? (Gloriously amazing, yes, but hard, I'm sure.) How Zen did teachers have to be to be completely able to let go of all of the authoritarian nature of the role of teacher. There are times, so many throughout the day, where trying to 20-30 people to pull even a little bit of the same direction - even in a student-centered classroom - must have gotten frustrating. Did teachers get frustrated when projects were started and abandoned? Or when decision-making on everything became too much... and folks just generally let the most involved, the most committed make the decisions... until a problem arose? I thought Sam Chaltain had a great quote this weekend in the Sunday morning panel when he said, "Teachers need to be authoritative, but never authoritarian." Did that describe a 3i teacher? Or was that still too "teacher-y." And yet, I have no doubt that Alan Shapiro led... servant leadership, for sure but leadership nonetheless. And his writings have a powerfully defined moral center. It is easy to imagine that moral center came through in his teaching... not in a didactic fashion, but still powerfully from his role as teacher. (Read "On Falling Apart" for a sense of that voice and powerful moral core.)

And what were the bargains the school made as a part of the larger whole over time? By 1981, there were two hours of SAT test prep a week built into the schedule, and the documents suggest that trying to let students run their own gym was an uphill battle. 3i lost the battle to keep the Project Week at some point. And by 1983, with no lack of sad irony the same year A Nation at Risk was published, the school was closed - reabsorbed back into the larger school. The struggle had ended... at least it ended there.

But what a wonderful struggle. I am sure that so many of the kids in the program felt it was worth fighting for. And I have no doubt that many kids (and over the course of the program, there were between 50 - 125 kids in the program across all high school grades) found it to be a life changing and empowering form of education. (Ira's writing - he might argue his life - is proof of that.) And while there was a class schedule and times for things to meet, kids went or didn't go, and for much of the school's existence, there was a week in the middle of the year where the only thing kids did was work all day on a project of their own design. (Interestingly, Masterman HS, not exactly a bastion of progressive pedagogy, does that for senior project. There are the seeds of 3i in many places.)

And I think SLA is one of those seeds. We are not 3i. We are far more structured. And I am more communitarian than individualistic, and I can point to many ways that influenced the choices we made. For example, that led to our belief in grade-wide essential themes and questions that allow student-driven interdisciplinarity because kids draw the connections between classes. That decision precludes multi-age classes in all but our elective courses. And believe deeply that it is incumbent on every member of the community to figure out (with support, help, care, love) how they can be themselves within the larger community... and strengthening the community in the process. I don't believe (as some principals do) that you should suspend / punish / whatever kids for skipping classes, but I also admit that it drives me a little batty when kids do... not because I think whatever I might say is so important, but because I think what the student might say is. I think we make a social contract in our classes that together we will make meaning together. And I want every brain in the room for that. I miss kids when they are not there. (That being said, as an aside, when kids tell me that they made choices to not go to a class because they were still working on another class' work, I am powerfully confronted with the limitations of any and all class schedules.) Is that better or worse than the decisions 3i made? For who? When in their academic career? The better or worse question is, to me, profoundly unhelpful, because it assumes that difference must assume a hierarchy of best to worst.

What I want... what I think we need... are schools that do things for reasons. I believe - and I think Ira believes - that if we were more reflective, more critical about why we do things, that more schools would move toward the progressive / inquity-driven edge of the spectrum. Maybe not to where 3i landed or maybe not to SLA landed, but they'd move. So little of what happens in school today is thoughtful... or based on a deep-rooted but still living and growing philosophical core. I want schools to make decisions based on what we think we can do - kids and teachers both - rather than what we can't do. I want education to be based on the best of what we be, not on the deficit model of "Make sure everyone doesn't suck quite so much" that is driving the language and policies of education today.

And in the end, I come back to a few places that feel like familiar ground for me and a few that are less common.

I still love the question, "What is the worst consequence of your best idea?" There were so many moments in writing this post where looking at both schools through that lens made the issues make more sense.

If any of this is too hard to do, it will never grow beyond the edges. And that is true for teachers and students both. We have to find the way to make the pathways to this kind of work easier. That trends too close to scalability / replicability for me, but I think we may have to figure out what transferability (is that a better word) looks like so others can learn from models and change without having to start from scratch every time.

Yeah, it can't be hard, but at the same time, it is incumbent on teachers to be scholars of their own profession. I might have missed the chance to connect with / connect to Ira had I not read Teaching as a Subversive Activity and researched the 3i school years ago. So many teachers are not scholars of their own profession, and we have to own that played a role in letting those who spoke with authority about their "research-based solutions" command the debate when we have so much research that has taught us so many... as long as we never forget it, and as long as we pass it along.

"What do you think?" and its cousin "How do you feel?" are the questions that connect Nel Noddings' Ethic of Care and Postman's Inquiry Education. It is what allows teachers to care about and know their students and learn from them too.

The teaching life must be livable. So must the the student life.

The other movement that this kind of education draws on is a powerful humanistic streak. This is about seeing each other as people... and caring about each other as people too. And if we keep that in mind, we've got a good place to start.

On a less positive note, As I write this, a part of me is angry. Because the seeds of 3i live in private schools and the slow-growing, but growing (private) free school movement more than they live anywhere right now. No inquiry-driven teacher would ever say to my son, "I don't get a chance to know the kids, because I need to get them ready for the next and stay on the curriculum guide. And I worry that the only kids who will get to experience an inquiry-driven approach to school will be kids who can afford it. (In much the same way that I'm kind of really annoyed that Harvard came out and said that Harvard isn't worth the money... but I don't see them charging less. We are at a very dangerous moment in time where we could regress quickly to the point where children of privilege will receive an education and everyone else will get trained.)

But the thought I want to end with is that our inquiry must lead us to action. We must ask questions that matter, work together to make sense of the answers and then be prepared to make change based on what we discover. We also have to always listen, with an open heart and an open mind, to those who disagree with us. If we are unwilling to do that altruistically, do it selfishly, because we learn so much when we do.

And by the way, Ira, in a nod to the past... we wish we had a gym too.

What I Ask of SLA Teachers

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:08:15 -0700

[Cross-posted to Scott McLeod's blog, Dangerously Irrelevant.]

I want to thank Scott for asking me to do this and I want to curse him a little for making me go last. This is not an easy crew to follow.

I couldn't get my head around what "administrators" in general ask of teachers, so I chose to focus on what I ask of Science Leadership Academy teachers. For the record, I think SLA teachers are, as a group, about the hardest working group of people I could ever imagine, and I think that is more because of the collegial atmosphere than anything I could ever do. So "work hard" isn't making the list. So without further ado.

Top Ten Things I Ask of SLA Teachers.

10. Take care of yourself. Teaching is a marathon, not a sprint, and SLA teachers do put themselves out there early and often. I want my teachers to take time for themselves every day. I want SLA teachers to take trips, go to conferences, spend time with family and spend time with each other when they don't talk about school.

9. Understand that your class is but one of five or six or seven classes that kids have. Understand that school is one of many things in a teenager's life. And while what goes on in your class is important, I ask that teachers remember that, at any given moment in time, there are pressures on their kids' lives that makes what goes on in our classes seem powerfully inconsequential.

8. Never be afraid to bring an idea or a critique or a thought to me. Never be afraid to tell me what you think.

7. Be as transparent as possible. That means giving students opportunities to publish their work to the world. That means opening your door to colleagues, to parents, to visitors. That means never playing "gotcha" with the kids with your expectations.

6. Remember that benevolent dictatorship may make for an orderly class, but it rarely helps kids become better people. Giving kids opportunities to feel ownership of the classroom is important because, in the end, you can get what you want or you can get much more.

5. Remember that inquiry isn't just for kids. If we want our kids to always push themselves to question more, dig deeper, figure it out for themselves, we must be willing to do that too.

4. Take ownership of major pieces of the school outside your classroom. SLA works because everyone takes on pieces of it. Run a club, chair a committee, write a grant, do the thing you always wanted to do in a school but never thought the structure of school could support.

3. Be part of a community of teachers and learners and speak the same language. Kids spend too much time in schools figuring out teachers, and that detracts from the powerful work they can do for themselves, not for us. It is why I ask all teachers at SLA to always incorporate the core values into their planning, why we all use Understanding by Design to plan our units, why we all use the same rubric to grade all our projects. When we speak the same language about the way we teach and learn, kids can get down to the work of learning more quickly.

2. Treat your class as a lens, not a silo. The goal is for our kids to be well-rounded, thoughtful citizens. Remember that if you're lucky, 10% of the kids in your class will major in your subject. Make sure the other 90% understand how what they are learning with you helps them to be a better person.

1. Remember that we teach students before we teach subjects. I ask that all SLA teachers understand and live the profound difference between the statements, "I teach history," and "I teach kids history." Children should never be the implied object of their own education.

And one more - Be kind. Be kind to your students, to your colleagues, even to your principal. Whatever you do, be kind.

Daily Walkthroughs with GoogleApps and the iPad

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:57:35 -0700

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.

What Comes Before Filtering, Fearlessness and Foresight

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 22:08:35 -0700

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.