SLA (and I) are featured as the Video of the Week on ScholasticAdministrator.com. They really did a nice job of capturing a sense of the school in a four minute video!
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Tags: SLA, ScholasticAdministrator
A View From the Schoolhouse
SLA (and I) are featured as the Video of the Week on ScholasticAdministrator.com. They really did a nice job of capturing a sense of the school in a four minute video!
Tags: SLA, ScholasticAdministrator
I’ve been thinking a lot about coaching lately. Partially, I’m sure, because I’m reading Making Learning Whole by David Perkins (thanks, Gary!) but also because I think so much of the way we learn and the way we set up smart systems can be seen in smart coaching.
When I first became an Ultimate Frisbee captain in college, one of the former captains of the team told me, "Don’t try to do everything in a time out. Give everyone three things to think about and nothing more." It was great advice because it was always very tempting to go over EVERYTHING I saw on the field in every time out. But whenever I did that, folks never retained everything, and now everyone walked away with a different piece of what they thought was important.
This became great advice as a high school coach as well… and not just for timeouts. One of things I learned as a coach was not to try to do everything at once. Before every season, I laid out all the skills and concepts I wanted them to master, and then I laid them out across the season — how I would introduce ideas and then constantly spiral back to them… so that we could build slowly and smartly together. But I also learned how to focus on certain ideas, certain concepts, player by player, skill by skill. And I learned that, whenever possible, connecting ideas together, so that players could see how what they did related back to the whole was incredibly important.
But I also realized that I couldn’t teach everything. I know coaches whose teams had twenty plays with multiple offensive and defensive sets, and more often than not, those teams could be beat just by out-executing them. Our teams did what we did very well, and what we did was rarely scripted, but rather we put in systems that relied on players to know what they were doing very well and then make smart choices based on what they saw in front of them.
Yeah… allegory, right?
But what made me think about this was not about teachers teaching kids, but how too many places deal with teacher learning and school improvement. So much about the current school improvement ideas are about trying to improve twenty different things at once, and I don’t think that works. It sounds good — especially because we can all see that there are often many, many problems in schools — but it rings hollow, because the sum of all those parts rarely add up to a whole.
What amazes me, more and more, is how few schools have a clearly defined pedagogical practice that can be articulated simply and powerfully, and are therefore, even more susceptible to this kind of problem.
Let us think about how we build smart teams and build smart schools. Let us realize that we’re better off picking the things we want to do well and then work tirelessly to do those things well. Let’s be smart about what we want to be, how we want to get there, and how we get there collectively and individually, and then let’s stop trying to go over all the ways we want to get better in a 30 second time out.
Today, President Obama nominated a very experienced center-left jurist for the Supreme Court. The nominee is a Hispanic woman. If confirmed, she will be the first Justice of Hispanic descent to serve on the Supreme Court.
Today, the Supreme Court of California ruled that Proposition 8 — the ballot initiative that outlaws gay marriage — was legal under the California Constitution.
Today when White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about President Obama’s reaction to the California decision, he responded with a very politic non-answer:
He didn’t. And as a result, he missed an opportunity to speak about real change. He missed a chance to speak out for policy change that affects millions of Americans. Instead, he leaves himself open to criticism — from the left and the right — that his pick of Judge Sotomayor is (from the right) tokenism and (from the left) empty symbolism.
A year ago, I went to my friend Jason’s wedding in San Francisco. I was able to return the favor he paid me nine years ago by standing with him as he married the love of his life. For Jason and Kevin, it meant that the state could claim that their love was any less meaningful, valuable or powerful as the love another couple may share. It was a wonderful day, and as his friend, it meant the world to me that he was able to have that day.
Several months ago, I stood with my friend Steve as he had to bury his husband after a horrible accident. We spoke at the wake, and he talked about how much harder it would have been if he had to fight to be allowed to make funeral arrangements, deal with his husband’s finances, etc… At his lowest, most difficult moment, his marriage meant that his grief, as overwhelming as it was, was not compounded by the anger and frustration of not being married in the eyes of the law.
During the campaign, time and time again, President Obama appealed our ideals of what our country could be. He spoke of equality and equity. He appealed the progressive ideals of young and old across the nation. Today, while on the one hand, he made an historic nomination to the Supreme Court, he betrayed those same ideals by staying silent when his voice was dearly needed.
I hope Judge Sotomayor is confirmed. I hope that she is more than a center-left jurist. I hope she does pass judgement with compassion and empathy. And I hope that she serves as a living symbol that our government is of all the people and for all the people. But on a day when a judicial body in this country dashed the hopes of millions in California (and millions more across the nation,) President Obama could have — and should have — made plain and powerful the link between the need for jurists like Judge Sotomayor on the Supreme Court bench and the need for the courts to overturn unjust laws like Proposition Eight. That’s what we needed today. That kind of leadership was the change I could believe in. Anything else, is sadly, to quote Vice-President Biden, more of the same.
Tags: politics, proposition 8, SCOTUS