Posted on March 26, 2012 by in Education, Leadership

21st Century Administrators: New Roles, New Responsibilities

In a way, the job of school dis­trict admin­is­tra­tor is like a tug­boat. If you have ever watched a tug­boat work, it appears far too small for it’s job of maneu­ver­ing huge ships around a crowded har­bor. Yet a smart tug­boat pilot knows exactly where to push or pull on that ship to ease it into the needed loca­tion. Admin­is­tra­tors, like­wise, need to lead through influ­ence, and must choose care­fully where they nudge and tug on the enor­mous mass of a school dis­trict orga­ni­za­tion to guide it exactly where it needs to be.

There is a great deal of con­ver­sa­tion around 21st cen­tury skills for stu­dents, and how teach­ers need to help stu­dents accom­plish them. Some­thing that has come out of my con­ver­sa­tions at ASCD this week­end is the need for 21st cen­tury skills for admin­is­tra­tors. Our roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties must change in order to meet the needs of our stu­dents and teach­ers. The ships are dif­fer­ent today–they are big­ger, heav­ier, and bal­anced dif­fer­ently. The har­bors are dif­fer­ent, too–different lay­outs, depths and orga­ni­za­tion. The key pivot points, there­fore, are in new places, and require a dif­fer­ent touch.

Some things I believe 21st cen­tury admin­is­tra­tors need to know, under­stand, and be able to do:

  1. Get con­nected. Tom Whitby, Eric Sheninger, and George Couros are three of the biggest pro­po­nents of admin­is­tra­tors get­ting con­nected with other edu­ca­tors. Unless you know and inter­act with other peo­ple in your field, your point of view and your under­stand­ing of the con­text will be nar­row and skewed. The world is much larger than your build­ing or dis­trict office, and chances are that some­one else has already been through what you’re about to go through. Hav­ing a coach, or bet­ter yet, a whole col­lec­tion of coaches, empow­ers you to accom­plish things you couldn’t oth­er­wise do. Tug­boats some­times tag team, and so should we.
  2. Be Hum­ble. The tug­boat is the least flashy, least vis­i­ble, least inter­est­ing boat in the river. And yet the har­bor would not be able to func­tion with­out it. The admin­is­tra­tor is essen­tial to the func­tion­ing of a school. Our job, how­ever, is not to be the fig­ure­head. Instead it is to facil­i­tate every­one else’s job. The tug­boat does not deliver any goods; that is the cargo ship’s job. The tug­boat just makes it pos­si­ble to get into posi­tion to get the deliv­ery done. Be trans­par­ent. Open up to your staff and com­mu­nity about what is work­ing, what you are strug­gling with, and how you are think­ing as you move through any process.
  3. Model. If you are pro­mot­ing 21st cen­tury skills, know them and prac­tice them. Be cre­ative, col­lab­o­rate, prac­tice good com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and think crit­i­cally. Use tech­nol­ogy in authen­tic and embed­ded ways. Be glob­ally aware (which con­nects back to #1). Inno­vate. Encour­age a safe envi­ron­ment for learn­ing and risk-​​taking. Are these easy to do? No, but they will not hap­pen in class­rooms unless they are hap­pen­ing on a build­ing and dis­trict level.
  4. Be a Life­long Learner. We expect our stu­dents to become life­long learn­ers; it is stated or implied in the mis­sion state­ment of just about every school dis­trict. We expect our teach­ers to be life­long learn­ers so that they can model this for the stu­dents. How can we expect it for all of them with­out hold­ing our­selves to the same stan­dard? Read vora­ciously, take courses, par­tic­i­pate in book stud­ies, attend con­fer­ences (in per­son or vir­tu­ally), read some more. Sit in on classes and work­shops run by your teach­ers, not because you want to observe and super­vise them, but because you want to learn what they’re teaching.

What other skills are impor­tant for a 21st cen­tury admin­is­tra­tor? What have I left out or not con­sid­ered? How might even these skills change in the next few years, and how can we antic­i­pate them? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Posted on March 25, 2012 by in Leadership, Learning

The Ultimate Secret to Education Reform

Yes­ter­day evening, I was speak­ing with Tony Bal­dasaro who noticed a theme run­ning through sev­eral of the ASCD ses­sions he had attended. That theme echoed one I had been notic­ing as well, and which I have reflected on sev­eral times in the past. “It’s all about rela­tion­ships,” he said. I believe this may very well be the Ulti­mate Secret to Edu­ca­tion Reform.

Carol Tom­lin­son talked about this in her ses­sion, Dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and the Brain. From the book of the same title on which the ses­sion was based, “The foun­da­tion for suc­cess­ful learn­ing and for a safe and secure class­room cli­mate is the rela­tion­ship that teach­ers develop with their stu­dents” (p. 33). The impli­ca­tion? Suc­cess­ful learn­ing will not hap­pen if the rela­tion­ship isn’t there first.

I heard it in my pre-​​conference ses­sion on Fri­day, too. Real learn­ing isn’t about the recall of large amounts of infor­ma­tion. It’s about stu­dents rec­og­niz­ing, under­stand­ing, and cre­at­ing rela­tion­ships between all of the facts and skills they work with.

And then in a ses­sion on Lead­er­ship for Excel­lence and Equity: man­ag­ing the change process and lead­ing an orga­ni­za­tion requires vision and per­se­ver­ance, but mostly it depends on how admin­is­tra­tors and lead­ers relate to their staff mem­bers and the com­mu­nity. Change doesn’t hap­pen sim­ply by leg­is­la­tion and policy.

Even Reed Tim­mer (star of Dis­cov­ery Channel’s Storm Chasers) dis­cussed how behind the scenes, the three “com­pet­ing” teams of researchers and the Dis­cov­ery pro­duc­tion team are actu­ally very inter­de­pen­dent and col­lab­o­ra­tive. They share infor­ma­tion and sup­port each other through­out the sea­son to get the data they need and keep each other safe.

The Edcamp team (who I wrote about yes­ter­day) also empha­sized how impor­tant the first hour of an Edcamp is. This is when the sched­ule is built and the par­tic­i­pants meet each other, often for the first time. Instead of a tra­di­tional con­fer­ence where you race right into your first ses­sion, at an Edcamp, there’s an hour or so when you sim­ply social­ize over cof­fee and sticky notes. This relationship-​​building, accord­ing to Kris­ten Swan­son, is crit­i­cal to set­ting the tone for the day and mak­ing the ses­sions pro­duc­tive. She sug­gested that a school dis­trict con­sid­er­ing imple­ment­ing this model might be able to get away with out it, “because you already have an estab­lished com­mu­nity.” I dis­agree. I think it is, if any­thing, even more impor­tant, because teach­ers rarely get to see their col­leagues out­side of their build­ing (or their depart­ment), and to cre­ate the right envi­ron­ment for col­le­gial shar­ing and open dis­cus­sion, they need this unstruc­tured time.

So my pre­scrip­tion for edu­ca­tion, and the Ulti­mate Secret to Reform, is to invest in rela­tion­ships: per­sonal and con­cep­tual. Con­nect peo­ple with each other. Con­nect ideas. Just connect.

Posted on March 24, 2012 by in Education

Edcamp as PD: Shifting Mindsets (Part 2)

To fol­low up my ear­lier post with a thought that was still mar­i­nat­ing before, another thing that I have been work­ing on at school is cre­at­ing more pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment that looks like the kind of learn­ing we want to see in our dis­trict class­rooms. As a leader, I am respon­si­ble not only to set a vision and goals for my area of super­vi­sion, but to model best prac­tices for my teach­ers. If I want teacher-​​centered class­rooms with stu­dents pas­sively absorb­ing vol­umes of con­tent, then that’s the kind of pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment I need to con­tinue doing.

But if I want student-​​centered, learning-​​focused, dif­fer­en­ti­ated, problem-​​based instruc­tion, I need to cre­ate the same for my teach­ers. Pro­vid­ing a lec­ture on how to do active learn­ing projects is not the way to get it done. I had a pro­fes­sor in grad­u­ate school from whom I learned a great deal. But I didn’t learn much from the actual class time. The pro­fes­sor had an enor­mously thick binder for each course stuffed with neatly-​​typewritten (as in an actual type­writer) notes, each page care­fully slid into a plas­tic sheet pro­tec­tor. He began each 3-​​hour class by stand­ing at a lectern, open­ing the binder to the page where he left off last time, and read­ing aloud to us from the script. Peri­od­i­cally he would salt the lec­ture with sto­ries from his expe­ri­ence as a teacher, prin­ci­pal or super­in­ten­dent; these were usu­ally mod­er­ately inter­est­ing. Sev­eral times in each course (and I had at least half a dozen courses with him) he would admon­ish us not to teach as he taught, and that he was too old to change his ways.

Where I really learned were from his assign­ments. He had a way of gen­er­at­ing spec­tac­u­lar ques­tions and prompts which forced us to dig, ana­lyze, and make con­nec­tions between what we were read­ing and dis­cussing in class. What would make them even more pow­er­ful would have been to turn them into col­lab­o­ra­tive exer­cises where we worked together to research and prob­lem solve.

Where the Edcamp model really shines, and where I think it pushes the enve­lope to the edge, is going even beyond student-​​centered learn­ing to student-​​driven learn­ing. When we allow stu­dents (in this case, the edu­ca­tors) to fol­low their pas­sions and inter­ests, to explore the things that already have mean­ing for them and to wres­tle together with each other over those mean­ings and appli­ca­tions, the learn­ing that can take place will be immense. Angela Maiers is a huge pro­po­nent of this approach, and her work would prob­a­bly help us to design bet­ter teacher pro­fes­sional development.

I plan to explore ways to embed teacher-​​centered learn­ing into pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment that still moves us towards district-​​initiated goals. Just as we can have teacher-​​selected goals and still plan student-​​centered learn­ing, I believe we can embrace teacher inter­ests and needs with­out giv­ing up the over­all mis­sion and direc­tion of a dis­trict ini­tia­tive. What are your thoughts about how this could work, or how it might back­fire on me? Has any­one done this before? What are your expe­ri­ences? Tell me in the comments.

Posted on March 24, 2012 by in Learning

Edcamp as PD: Shifting Mindsets

I just attended a ses­sion by three of the founders of Edcamp, Kris­ten Swan­son, Ann Leaness, and Chris­tine Miles. They shared an inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic: in the two years since the first Edcamp Philly, there have been 101 sep­a­rate Edcamp events around the world. There has been a great deal writ­ten in the blo­gos­phere (includ­ing this blog) about the value (or lack thereof) of this model for improv­ing teacher PD. I’m not going to extend that con­ver­sa­tion here, though I think it is still a valu­able one and worth pursuing.

What struck me, though, in the crowded ses­sion, was the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance that was going on when the teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors in the room tried to wrap their heads around the con­cept. Many of the ques­tions by the par­tic­i­pants pointed out that most of us still see pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment as district-​​centered, administrator-​​led train­ing ses­sions where all of the teach­ers receive the same packet of knowl­edge and skills in a “sit-​​and-​​get” session.

The idea of putting a bunch of edu­ca­tors in a room and just let­ting them be, well, edu­ca­tors together was just not work­ing for many of those in attedance. Sev­eral com­ments were clearly com­ing from a per­spec­tive where there was fear that the time wouldn’t be pro­duc­tive and the teach­ers would goof off, grade papers, or sim­ply cut class. Behav­iors which, frankly, we often see in tra­di­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment ses­sions. If we don’t closely con­trol the day, the think­ing goes, noth­ing will get done.

One of my own roles in my dis­trict is plan­ning pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment with the rest of the cur­ricu­lum team. One of the biggest requests I hear from teach­ers is, “We need time together as a group to discuss/​work on _​_​_​.” Why not sim­ply give it to them? The les­son from Edcamp, and events like it, is that given the oppor­tu­nity to learn together, teach­ers will actu­ally learn together, and the learn­ing that hap­pens will be valu­able (because they gen­er­ated it them­selves) and the time pro­duc­tive (because they invested it them­selves). Will it be the spe­cific, tar­geted, standards-​​based objec­tives that the cen­tral office wants to make hap­pen? Maybe, maybe not. But it will con­tribute to an improved cul­ture of teach­ing and learn­ing, and it will help build capac­ity within the teach­ing staff. That in itself is a wor­thy goal.

Posted on March 24, 2012 by in Education, Networking

Connectedness and Uncomfortable Thinking

I am attend­ing the ASCD annual con­fer­ence in Philadel­phia, and spent yes­ter­day in a day-​​long pre-​​conference ses­sion by Bobb Dar­nell about encour­ag­ing an envi­ron­ment for high achieve­ment for all stu­dents. Dur­ing the ses­sion I learned some new things and gained some new tech­niques that I will bring back to my dis­trict and share with other staff mem­bers. I was also par­tic­i­pat­ing in a backchan­nel con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter (use hash­tag #ASCD12 to fol­low the con­fer­ence if you like). I was tweet­ing inter­est­ing points from my ses­sion, but also fol­low­ing one or two other ses­sions through the hash­tag. Through the day, I was reflect­ing on my own prac­tice and the cul­ture of con­nect­ed­ness I have become a part of, and I dis­cov­ered that one of the things that makes it worth­while to me is that it keeps me uncomfortable.

[Full dis­clo­sure is war­ranted before I con­tinue: I am attend­ing ASCD at no cost as a mem­ber of the “press.” ASCD invited me to come and report on the con­fer­ence through this blog and my Twit­ter feed. I am grate­ful not only for the oppor­tu­nity, but also that ASCD put no con­straints on my use of the pass. I have full access to the entire con­fer­ence, and there were no expec­ta­tions or require­ments for what I write or how I por­tray my expe­ri­ence. I was not asked to pro­mote or men­tion any resource or prod­uct. All opin­ions are mine alone.]

Why would dis­com­fort be a good thing? Through Twit­ter, pri­mar­ily, I am able to stay con­nected with a num­ber of other edu­ca­tors, many of whom are con­stantly push­ing my think­ing. Through­out the day, I was respond­ing to tweets and prods by many of my net­work which helped me ana­lyze and rethink the things that I was hear­ing in the session.

As I thought about the var­i­ous tech­niques and research that were being shared, I became very uncom­fort­able with a num­ber of things. My net­work keeps me grounded on one hand, but also reminds me to keep step­ping back to look at the big pic­ture. My work and my own pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment expe­ri­ences recently have high­lighted for me that so much of what we do in schools is at a gran­u­lar level. We run one-​​day (or one-​​hour) work­shops to pour a bunch of new strate­gies into teach­ers and then hope that one or two of them might get used occa­sion­ally. But how often do we step back and think about the under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy behind the strat­egy and whether it is aligned with the other strate­gies and philoso­phies we’re imple­ment­ing? How often does a school dis­trict have an explicit stance on these philosophies?

Exam­ple: A fair amount of the tech­niques I heard about yes­ter­day had to do with tech­niques for improv­ing stu­dents’ acqui­si­tion, reten­tion, and recall of infor­ma­tion. Chunk­ing data, for exam­ple, or scaf­fold­ing with graphic orga­niz­ers. All are research-​​supported meth­ods that do in fact accom­plish what they are intended to accom­plish. But with­out a con­scious philo­soph­i­cal stance to pro­vide con­text, I fear that dif­fer­ent peo­ple will have walked away with dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple will have dif­fer­ent beliefs about the impor­tance of fact mas­tery, explicit knowl­edge, and direct instruc­tion. If you aren’t aware of those dif­fer­ences, though, you won’t be able to rec­og­nize when a strat­egy doesn’t align. A teacher work­ing in a dis­trict with­out a philo­soph­i­cal posi­tion may try to imple­ment many dif­fer­ent strate­gies with­out a coher­ent plan or cohe­sive struc­ture of teach­ing and learn­ing. The result will be con­fused and erratic, and results will suffer.

My net­work, how­ever, and the ques­tions and infor­ma­tion that are con­stantly shared through it, help me to keep stretch­ing my aware­ness not only of my own phi­los­o­phy, but also the con­trast with that of oth­ers, and it helps me also to make bet­ter choices about how I design learn­ing expe­ri­ences and cur­ricu­lum for my teachers.

I am intrigued by the con­trast between the cul­ture at ASCD com­pared with that at another large edu­ca­tion con­fer­ence, ISTE. At ISTE, nearly every pre­sen­ter shares their Twit­ter name, and many of the peo­ple in my net­work are those who I first con­nected with by attend­ing a ses­sion by them. The backchan­nel con­ver­sa­tion there is full, rich, and varied.

At ASCD this week­end, by con­trast, I have seen only a few names in my stream, and none of the pre­sen­ters to this point have even men­tioned being acces­si­ble on Twit­ter. They share their email addresses, but that is by neces­sity a sta­tic and pri­vate communication.

The value in the Twit­ter con­nec­tion is that the con­ver­sa­tion is not lim­ited to a few min­utes at a con­fer­ence with a lim­ited audi­ence. It is ongo­ing, reflec­tive, and pub­lic. I am con­stantly refreshed when a new voice jumps in and pushes back at me to rethink—again—an idea or a posi­tion, and it also frees me to do the same for oth­ers. I’m reminded every day that if I get too uncom­fort­able with my own think­ing and am not con­stantly reflect­ing on it, I am not grow­ing any more as an educator.

Posted on February 26, 2012 by in Collaboration, Math

Hacking the Math Curriculum

Monopoly Hackjam 1You know it’s not your typ­i­cal inser­vice day when you find the Assis­tant Super­in­ten­dent play­ing Monop­oly with a group of third and fourth grade teach­ers. That is exactly what you would have seen last Fri­day, how­ever, as some of our ele­men­tary teach­ers learned how to hack their math curriculum.

In an attempt to model the kinds of learn­ing I hope to see teach­ers using in their own class­rooms, to engage my learn­ers, and estab­lish a con­text for the work we would be doing the rest of the morn­ing, I used stole hacked an activ­ity which I learned about from Chad Sans­ing and Meenoo Rami. Although I hadn’t attended their ses­sion at Educon, I read a few Twit­ter and blog posts by oth­ers who did, after which I promptly began kick­ing myself for miss­ing it.

After an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with my super­vi­sor (Me: “Can I spend a lit­tle money on my inser­vice work­shop?” Boss: “Of course, what do you need?” Me: “Do you trust me…?”), I began plan­ning how I was going to use the Monop­oly Hack­jam. My goal was to use the game as a way to get teach­ers think­ing (as Seth Godin says) at the edges of the box.

We were going to be work­ing with two fairly mun­dane top­ics: plan­ning for the last three weeks of math instruc­tion prior to our state exam, and devel­op­ing resources for our high­est achiev­ing learn­ers to use when they test out of a unit. I had two goals: to stretch the con­straints (both real and per­ceived) to get to the most effec­tive plans pos­si­ble, and for the teach­ers to own the process.

What bet­ter way to prime the day than with a Monop­oly Hack­jam? Teach­ers entered the room to find at each table a brand new Monop­oly set and a large zip top bag con­tain­ing a fairly ran­dom assort­ment of other items: paper clips, sticky notes, small stones, etc. The guide­lines were sim­ple: on your turn, hack the game by chang­ing a rule or intro­duc­ing a new one.

A few teach­ers were uncom­fort­able with such an open-​​ended task. “I thought we were going to be work­ing on PSSA plan­ning,” one said. “What is the point of this?” asked another. I reas­sured them there would be a debrief­ing after­wards and I would con­nect it to our other work. The groups for the most part dived in with gusto, how­ever, and soon we had some rather inter­est­ing variations.

My friend Kris­ten Swan­son, vis­it­ing the ses­sion as an out­side observer, made an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion: the group in which the Assis­tant Super­in­ten­dent was play­ing had cre­ated the most con­ven­tional of the games; they made straight­for­ward and incre­men­tal changes. The group next to them, how­ever, had the most extreme ver­sion. The first player began the game by flip­ping the board over to its blank, back side. Almost imme­di­ately, there were real cash and credit cards out on the table, and it wasn’t long before they were using sticky notes to cre­ate their own spaces, includ­ing my favorite, “Make Mike tell you his PIN number.”

There was a wide vari­ety of direc­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions in the room. One group started the game with all prop­er­ties in fore­clo­sure and the play­ers had very lit­tle cash. Another char­i­ta­ble group cre­ated a rule that the first prop­erty you bought had to be given away to some­one else. A third group was more self-​​centered and each per­son was cre­at­ing rules that ben­e­fit­ted only them­selves, includ­ing this by the youngest player at the table: “The win­ner is always the youngest player.”

Dur­ing the post-​​hack debrief, there were a num­ber of thought­ful reflec­tions, some of which are para­phrased here:

  1. Even in the extreme group where the final prod­uct least resem­bled the orig­i­nal Monop­oly, the rules set­tled towards a group norm, and later rule changes tended to tweak or finesse the game rather than cre­ate major upheaval.
  2. All of the games were gen­er­ally rec­og­niz­able as Monop­oly, and the broad para­me­ters were essen­tially respected.
  3. Despite the wildly dif­fer­ent direc­tions and think­ing, the pri­mary goal was accom­plished: all the par­tic­i­pants ended up with a game they loved and enjoyed playing.

We fol­lowed with a dis­cus­sion of what hack­ing was, and landed on an under­stand­ing that hack­ing was not whole­sale rein­ven­tion of some­thing, but rather tak­ing some­one else’s work to remix and remold for your own purposes.

The group now began to tackle the task of hack­ing the state assess­ment. I am not a fan of test prep for the sake of test prep. I do believe, how­ever, that there are some valid things we can do to enable each stu­dent to approach the assess­ment with suc­cess and con­fi­dence. Let me be clear: by “hack­ing” the assess­ment, I was not propos­ing any­thing ille­gal, immoral, or uneth­i­cal. What I did want the teach­ers to do was think about their instruc­tion and sched­ules in flex­i­ble, even unusual ways, to make the most of the time. Some of the para­me­ters were hard bound­aries: we can­not push the test back, and I was not will­ing to sus­pend reg­u­lar math instruc­tion to replace it with addi­tional test prep. But even with these restric­tions, teach­ers came up with some inter­est­ing and thought­ful proposals.

We applied the same kind of hack­ing thought process to the enrich­ment mate­ri­als. Ear­lier in the year, I had intro­duced cur­ricu­lum com­pact­ing as a strat­egy across all class­rooms in grades 3 and 4. Because of some mis­takes in the way I com­mu­ni­cated the process, it came across to many teach­ers as a need­lessly rigid and restric­tive man­date. To cor­rect this, I asked the teach­ers to hack the process. Given a few non-​​negotiables (there must be a pre-​​assessment, stu­dents who test out will get replace­ment learn­ing activ­i­ties), the teams worked for about an hour to remake my work into a use­ful and usable tool instead of just one more dis­trict initiative.

The teach­ers who com­mented on the morn­ing to me seemed to think it was both pro­duc­tive and fun. For me, how­ever, the real win was in the con­ver­sa­tions I heard as I was cir­cu­lat­ing to assist and answer ques­tions. Every one of them was cen­tered on what we can do to improve teach­ing and learn­ing for all our students.

Posted on February 14, 2012 by in Assessment, Leadership

To Prep, or Not to Prep

Finish Line, by Mad AfricanIt’s the most won­der­ful time of the year: the final press and grind to the fin­ish line that is called, where I live, the PSSA. That mirac­u­lous, mys­te­ri­ous month when our atten­tion and resources are focused to laser-​​precision, hon­ing our chil­dren so that dur­ing test week they are bright, shiny, and sharp, ready to take on any mul­ti­ple choice ques­tion that is thrown their way, fully pre­pared for meet­ing the chal­lenge of mak­ing the school look good in the news­pa­per next year.

That para­graph is only partly sar­cas­tic. Over the ten years that I have been work­ing within this sys­tem of account­abil­ity, my think­ing and beliefs about it have gone around in cir­cles. I’m ambiva­lent about it all at this point, because I have seen first-​​hand both the ben­e­fits and the detri­ments. I have seen schools that all but ignored the dif­fer­ences between their white stu­dents and chil­dren of color shift to a mind­set of actively watch­ing the achieve­ment gap and deter­mined to do some­thing about elim­i­nat­ing it. But I have also seen thought­ful, cre­ative teach­ing reduced to monot­o­nous drill for weeks or months on end.

Most of the year, I man­age to live with the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance of being an admin­is­tra­tor in a pub­lic school dis­trict. As the ele­men­tary math super­vi­sor, it is my respon­si­bil­ity in part to mon­i­tor and ana­lyze the reg­u­lar bench­mark assess­ments we give and sup­port prin­ci­pals and teach­ers to work with the stu­dents who are lag­ging behind so that they will be ready for the state test come March 13. But as the gifted super­vi­sor (my other hat), I am charged with see­ing that the most highly able stu­dents in the dis­trict always have their needs con­sid­ered and are able to work at an appro­pri­ately high level of chal­lenge. These two goals are usu­ally not in con­flict, but at times, like dur­ing this month before the state assess­ment, I some­times feel like any effort I make on one front is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive on the other.

I am not a fan of high-​​stakes test­ing, and I believe that despite the pos­i­tive focus it has brought to mak­ing sure every child is suc­cess­ful, the over­all effect has been to make instruc­tion nar­rower and shal­lower. We have replaced striv­ing for excel­lence with striv­ing for ade­quacy. (Another neg­a­tive effect of this is that we end up label­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing kids, as I dis­cussed in my last blog post.)

But I have become more aware of how these tests do help us rec­og­nize when stu­dents aren’t suc­ceed­ing (at least in the nar­row range of read­ing and math skills we test), and I do rec­og­nize that if some stu­dents aren’t even meet­ing these min­i­mum expec­ta­tions, we are remiss if we don’t do some­thing about it. What pains me, though, is when lim­ited resources are shifted rad­i­cally to serve the few stu­dents who are most likely to help us look good.

The dichotomy came out of hid­ing this week when I received my weekly email newslet­ter from Edu­topia. I am a big fan of their work and their web site, and I par­tic­u­larly appre­ci­ate their ded­i­ca­tion to cer­tain Core Strate­gies, includ­ing project learn­ing and rich, com­pre­hen­sive assess­ments. I was shocked, there­fore, to see this head­line embla­zoned across the top of the email: “Test Prep Sea­son: Tips for Sur­viv­ing and Thriv­ing.” The first two arti­cles were on how to do “bet­ter” (if there is such a thing) test prep. One was writ­ten by a test-​​prep spe­cial­ist, what­ever that is.

I felt betrayed. Et tu, Edu­topia? I couldn’t imag­ine that this orga­ni­za­tion which stood for higher prin­ci­ples and true inno­va­tion would stoop to the level of the test prep work­books that I have worked hard to avoid bring­ing into our dis­trict. “Prac­tice Bub­bling,” crowed one of the arti­cles, and “Teach Them To Speak Test.” One arti­cle encour­aged us to take advan­tage of the mul­ti­tude of ded­i­cated test-​​prep web­sites avail­able on the inter­net. I actu­ally became phys­i­cally ill scan­ning the mate­r­ial. I couldn’t look at it any more, and sent out this tweet:


Later that day, Edu­topia responded:

 
A brief pri­vate exchange fol­lowed, which prompted me to both re-​​read the newslet­ter arti­cles and reflect on my own think­ing. First, the sug­ges­tions in the arti­cles, though still not as rich as what I nor­mally find in Edutopia’s mate­ri­als, were prac­ti­cal and at least made an attempt to find ways to keep the test prep in its larger con­text and not reduce it to an absurd mechan­i­cal drill.

Sec­ond, I rec­og­nized many of the same thought processes, and yes, ratio­nal­iza­tions, that I have used over the years to jus­tify why a gifted teacher, and now admin­is­tra­tor, would bother with any­thing as mun­dane as how to do bet­ter on a test of basic skills. I argued that I would only focus on the higher level think­ing and problem-​​solving that was nec­es­sary for respond­ing to open-​​ended ques­tions. The real­ity is that much of what I taught as prob­lem solv­ing was applic­a­ble to very lit­tle beyond the kind of struc­tured prob­lems we see only on these tests. There were cer­tainly some legit­i­mate com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, for exam­ple, and metacog­ni­tive prac­tice, but for the most part, it was not much deeper than “Prac­tice Bubbling.”

I go back and forth on this all the time. The tests are impor­tant, if only in the lim­ited sense that any arti­fi­cially imposed con­se­quence can be impor­tant. I cer­tainly wouldn’t call them Impor­tant in the grander scheme of the world. But given that they exist, and given that we have no choice but to accept them, how wrong is it to quit swim­ming against the tide?

I hear teach­ers every day who feel crushed by the bur­den of the state test on their shoul­ders, who dream of a day when they can once again teach more than just the micro­scop­i­cally seg­mented skills and facts that we need to pump into kids to make sure our school names are printed in green ink in the news­pa­per, and not red. Those teach­ers point their fin­gers at us admin­is­tra­tors who tie their hands and send them pack­ets of work­sheets and cal­en­dars titled “Count­down To PSSA” and ask them to work mir­a­cles with the two-​​fers and three-​​fers. Those are the stu­dents who are bor­der­line pro­fi­cient and who fall into more than one of our AYP report­ing cat­e­gories: minori­ties, IEP stu­dents, and eco­nom­i­cally disadvantaged.

I can’t even begin to count all the kinds of wrong that this is, and yet I find myself flow­ing with that tide. Is it because I, along with my other admin­is­tra­tive col­leagues, am really a hyp­o­crit­i­cal, narrow-​​minded bully who is only intent on get­ting bet­ter scores at all costs, no mat­ter how many stu­dent and teacher bod­ies are piled up along the way?

No. But we our­selves are stuck. We want what is best for all stu­dents. We want our strug­gling stu­dents to suc­ceed and thrive, just as we want our high-​​achievers to do. We are not will­ing to give up on any stu­dent. Do we like this sys­tem more than the teach­ers do? Not par­tic­u­larly, but it’s what we have, and rail­ing against the test by stead­fastly ignor­ing it is counterproductive.

So I can now see that Edu­topia did not fail me. Not much, any­way. What I would truly love to see, how­ever, and what I hope to begin think­ing about myself, are ideas and strate­gies to:

  • help admin­is­tra­tors to keep the focus on kids and not scores
  • use data to inform but not drive deci­sions and instruction
  • keep the impor­tance of the test in its proper con­text and scale

If you are an admin­is­tra­tor, what have you done to sup­port your teach­ers in these ways? If you are a teacher, what would you want from your admin­is­tra­tors to help you with this? What about par­ents: what can your school do to cre­ate the appro­pri­ate atmos­phere for your child to learn and grow?

Posted on February 2, 2012 by in Differentiation, Leadership

Truth in Labeling

I am a big fan of the pro­gram Fresh Air on NPR, hosted by Terry Gross. Every day she presents an extended inter­view with a pub­lic fig­ure in con­tem­po­rary arts, news, or cul­ture. Her genius is that she approaches each inter­view with gen­uine inter­est and curios­ity, get­ting into the lives, and often the heads, of her sub­jects with a depth that I have never heard else­where. Instead of tack­ling the inter­view from a spectator’s posi­tion, ask­ing rou­tine and super­fi­cial ques­tions, she finds a way inside, bring­ing the lis­tener along. Gross presents her sub­jects in a way that hon­ors and respects the pas­sions, the intel­lect, and the work of each, while still ask­ing chal­leng­ing and thought-​​provoking ques­tions that pry back their facade.

On count­less occa­sions, I have tuned in to the pro­gram to dis­cover that Gross is going to be inter­view­ing some­one out­side of my area of inter­est. Per­haps it is a rap musi­cian, or a romance nov­el­ist, or an activist pur­su­ing what I per­ceive as a fringe issue. My ini­tial reac­tion to these is always to turn it off, since I’m likely to be bored. I’ve learned to resist that urge, how­ever, since with­out fail, Gross is able to put me in a place where I not only appre­ci­ate the depth of their work but under­stand their life jour­ney in a deep way. By meet­ing the per­son where they are and walk­ing along­side, she deftly splin­ters my expec­ta­tions, and I spend the hour watch­ing them blow away in the wind. Inevitably, the next time I see that person’s work, I have an appre­ci­a­tion of where it came from. I may still not like it much, but I can relate to it.

Last week I sat in a meet­ing at one of the schools in my dis­trict with sev­eral other staff mem­bers talk­ing about stu­dents and what we need to do to make them more suc­cess­ful. A wor­thy con­ver­sa­tion, no doubt, and I know that each one of the adults in that room was look­ing out not only for the school’s needs, but more impor­tantly the best inter­ests of each indi­vid­ual child. But I became very aware of a dis­turb­ing ten­dency. It’s one I’ve been con­scious of for a long time, but have recently become increas­ingly con­cerned about. Through­out the con­ver­sa­tion, no stu­dent was men­tioned by name.

Instead, we dis­cussed clus­ters of stu­dents as if each clus­ter was some­how uni­form and homo­ge­neous. There were the stan­dard labels we attach to stu­dents in these kinds of meet­ings: the “Basic” and the “Pro­fi­cient” kids, the “gifted” and the “ELL” and the “Spec Ed” kids. Then there was the term that jolted me the most: the “Cusp Kids.”

Who are the Cusp Kids? These are the stu­dents who, on the most recent bench­mark test, are just a hair below the cut off score for pro­fi­ciency. They are the ones who are “on the cusp” of pass­ing the state exam. “What are we doing for the Cusp Kids?” one of us asked. And the dis­cus­sion for the next few min­utes focused on the col­lec­tion of inter­ven­tions we were going to enact to ensure that the Cusp Kids were boosted up to pro­fi­cient in time for the state test next month.

Don’t mis­un­der­stand me. We did not ignore any of the other groups. Teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors in that school are very con­scious of work­ing with every child and doing every­thing pos­si­ble to ensure they are achiev­ing at their high­est pos­si­ble level. Though there was a hint of a mind­set to focus our resources and atten­tion on the group that would give us the most return (in terms of AYP) on our invest­ment, there was never any inten­tion, explicit or implied, that we would ever ignore a group because they were a lost cause.

My worry is that we have lost sight of the indi­vid­u­als. We have lost sight of the fact that each one of those Cusp Kids is a per­son, with unique needs, inter­ests, desires, back­ground, fam­ily, knowl­edge, skills, and pas­sions. Yet we treat them as if they are all the same, and that the only thing we need to worry about is get­ting them “up to pro­fi­cient” (which in itself is a con­cern­ing phrase to me, but that will have to wait for another blog post).

Labels have great power. As soon as we attach one to a person—whether that label is “rap musi­cian” or “fringe activist” or “Cusp Kid”—we imme­di­ately assign all of the traits and ten­den­cies asso­ci­ated with that label to the per­son, and we neglect to dig beyond that.

Labels do have their uses, how­ever. It makes broad con­ver­sa­tions and strate­gic plan­ning more straight­for­ward. Our dis­trict, for exam­ple, has a sig­nif­i­cant racial achieve­ment gap, and if we were to always look at just the indi­vid­u­als instead of clus­ters of kids, we would never be able to rec­og­nize that gap or do any­thing to alle­vi­ate it.

So what do we do? How can become more like Terry Gross in our approach to chil­dren? How do we get inside their heads—individually—and honor them as peo­ple instead of mem­bers of an arbi­trary clump? How do we cre­ate truly student-​​centered schools and class­rooms where the child (sin­gu­lar) is the most impor­tant thing we think about? Some of the influ­ences that affect this are out of our local con­trol. State tests, fund­ing issues, reg­u­la­tions; these drive much of what we do every day. But there must be things we can do even within those con­structs. What has to change in our admin­is­tra­tive struc­tures, our cur­ricu­lum, our con­ver­sa­tions, that can move us towards the goal of know­ing each indi­vid­ual child?

I am wrestling with these things every day, and would love to hear your thoughts. Keep the focus on real actions. As I heard in a ses­sion at Educon this week­end, stop say­ing, “Yeah, but,” and start think­ing, “What if?” If we can start mov­ing towards treat­ing chil­dren like peo­ple instead of labels, it would truly be a breath of Fresh Air.

Posted on November 5, 2011 by in Gifted

Gifted Education Is Not a Wall Street Bailout

No Bailout (by Joe Newman)“Unfair.”

That is the word that I have often heard used to describe the 2008 bailout of Wall Street finan­cial firms. The think­ing of detrac­tors is that these are com­pa­nies which already have amassed obscene amounts of prof­its, and have exec­u­tives who get paid more in a day than the aver­age worker earns in a year. And then they have the nerve to run to the gov­ern­ment for free cash when some of their high risk gam­bles turn out to be—surprise—unwise and they are in dan­ger of mak­ing a smaller profit than they hoped.

Sup­port­ers of the bailout, of course, argue that it was a cri­sis sit­u­a­tion, and that they were “too big to fail.” They say the con­se­quences of allow­ing all of those firms to fail would have been cat­a­strophic, rip­pling down to thou­sands of small busi­nesses that depended on the big ones for financ­ing and insur­ance, poten­tially caus­ing the whole econ­omy to collapse.

I’m not here to argue either side of this par­tic­u­lar debate, but it strikes me that the tone is not far removed from the con­ver­sa­tions I hear around gifted education.

While no one argues that we shouldn’t edu­cate gifted students—that would be an awfully rad­i­cal posi­tion to take—I do hear peo­ple argue that we should not be doing any­thing “spe­cial” just for gifted stu­dents. After all, they already have had so much handed to them, they are already priv­i­leged to be smart, and now we are going to give them even more? It’s the bailout all over again.

The counter to this is usu­ally some­thing along the lines of argu­ing that gifted stu­dents are the future lead­ers and inven­tors and job-​​creators, so to do any­thing short of max­i­miz­ing their poten­tial is to short­change our entire soci­ety. In short, they say, gifted kids are too big to fail.

This is the wrong argu­ment, how­ever. For one thing, under­ly­ing the debate is the assump­tion that gifted stu­dents are supe­rior to other chil­dren in some way, which log­i­cally implies that other chil­dren are infe­rior. The argu­ment that gifted stu­dents are des­tined for great­ness pre­sumes that such great­ness will elude all other chil­dren. I do not believe this.

What I do believe is that dif­fer­ent peo­ple learn dif­fer­ently. Some peo­ple have a capac­ity for learn­ing more and faster than oth­ers. This is not an elit­ist thing. It is sim­ply a recog­ni­tion of the vari­a­tions in human beings. Just as some peo­ple have a nat­ural capac­ity for sports or music, oth­ers have a tal­ent for math or lan­guage or under­stand­ing human relationships.

These capac­i­ties do not develop on their own. Pey­ton Man­ning has an unde­ni­able tal­ent for foot­ball, but he did not reach the high­est lev­els of the sport by coast­ing on that tal­ent. He works very hard to hone his skills, to iden­tify his rel­a­tive weak­nesses and improve them, and to keep his nat­ural abil­i­ties at the absolute peak of performance.

Edu­ca­tion is not a zero-​​sum game. Pro­vid­ing some­thing to one group of stu­dents which helps them to grow does not some­how deny it to another group, unless you explic­itly build it that way. Rec­og­niz­ing high abil­ity and nur­tur­ing it does not mean that we ignore the needs of stu­dents who strug­gle to learn.
Instead of a bailout metaphor, then, I sug­gest that gifted edu­ca­tion is more like infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment. The growth of our country’s econ­omy is depen­dent on hav­ing suf­fi­cient infra­struc­ture to allow it to func­tion. Roads, bridges, util­i­ties, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems aren’t sexy, but they allow us access to peo­ple, resources, and ideas out­side of our imme­di­ate neighborhood.

Every child has the poten­tial to become an adult with some­thing valu­able to con­tribute to our world. Each one’s con­tri­bu­tion will be dif­fer­ent, how­ever. I do not pro­pose we should begin try­ing to iden­tify in sec­ond or third grade what a child’s des­tiny is; how­ever, we should begin try­ing to iden­tify what a child’s capac­i­ties are and to find out how they learn best. Is that not what school is about any­way? And if a child learns more effi­ciently, then pro­vid­ing that child with the right match of con­tent and instruc­tion to allow them to develop fully is not giv­ing a hand­out to a rich CEO, it is rec­og­niz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties in an untapped region and build­ing the infra­struc­ture there to allow it to fully develop.

And here is the really excit­ing part about it. If we shift our focus from “what’s best for all” to “what’s best for each,” then it will ben­e­fit not only gifted stu­dents, but every stu­dent, and the out­come can only be good.

Posted on October 31, 2011 by in Storytelling

You Want Me to Write a WHAT?

A novel.

Yep, you heard me, I want you to write a novel. Don’t look behind you, I mean you.

And not just that, I want you to write it in a month.

I know, you have all kinds of excuses why you can’t pos­si­bly. So do I. And all of them are legit­i­mate and seri­ous. (Well, OK, most of them.)

Which is why I’m going to do some­thing utterly ridicu­lous: I’m going to take my own advice. I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in this year’s NaNoW­riMo, oth­er­wise known as National Novel Writ­ing Month. The chal­lenge is to write at least 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.

Can’t be done, you say? Well, in its first year, 21 peo­ple gave it a try, and 6 of them won. “Win­ning” NaNoW­riMo has noth­ing to do with writ­ing a bet­ter novel than Char­lie Sheen. It’s sim­ply the accom­plish­ment of reach­ing the word-​​count goal, and while your text has to be val­i­dated at the project web­site in order for you to be an offi­cial win­ner, the whole thing is essen­tially on the honor sys­tem. If you copy 50,000 words from Wikipedia and paste it into the val­ida­tor, no one will know you cheated but you.

But that’s kind of the point. This isn’t about writ­ing the great­est novel ever. It’s not even about get­ting pub­lished (though some NaNoW­riMo nov­els do). It’s sim­ply about the accom­plish­ment. And last year, over 200,000 peo­ple from around the world par­tic­i­pated in the event, with 37,500 reach­ing the goal.

So why am I doing this? And why do I think you should too? The most impor­tant rea­son is, “Just because.” But I do have a cou­ple others.

  1. Writ­ing is learn­ing. When I write, I learn about the topic I’m writ­ing, and I learn about myself. Things come out in my words that I had no idea were inside me. I am often amazed when I go back to some­thing I wrote a long time ago. Many times I don’t even rec­og­nize the lan­guage or vocabulary.
  2. Writ­ing is liv­ing. Life, I believe, is ulti­mately all about rela­tion­ships. And rela­tion­ships are built on com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I’m lim­ited in the num­ber of peo­ple with whom I can com­mu­ni­cate verbally—writing extends my reach and my vision to con­nect me with peo­ple who I would oth­er­wise never know about.

So why write a novel? Can’t I just start with a short story? Or maybe a sen­tence fragment?

I can’t answer that ques­tion for you. I do know for me, part of it is so I can say I did it. Part of it is that I real­ized that unless I just sit down and do it, it will never get done. And the absurdly ridicu­lous dead­line is going to make me pour out the words and not worry about how good it is. Which, by the way, is one heck of a good rea­son you ought to not only do this your­self, but encour­age your stu­dents to do it. But that’s another blog post.

For now, I’m count­ing down to mid­night, when I can start writ­ing, and get a cou­ple hun­dred words under my belt and finally get this story out of my head and onto the computer.

I hope you’ll join me. If you do, add me as a writ­ing buddy. And I’ll see you at the fin­ish line on Novem­ber 30.