Archive | December, 2008

Unfiltered Relationships

Posted on December 31, 2008 by in Education

I’ve decided that one of my goals for the new year is to look at peo­ple with dif­fer­ent eyes. I’ve blogged recently about how this affects me in my career as a teacher; I have col­leagues who quickly pigeon­hole their stu­dents into cat­e­gories like “smart” or “lazy” or “trou­ble­maker”. Every­thing they do from that point on is seen through that fil­ter. Of course, since only cer­tain qual­i­ties make it through the fil­ter, from that point on, every­thing the chil­dren do just con­firms the bias, strength­en­ing the filter.

The only cure for this vicious cir­cle is to remove the fil­ter. See peo­ple with clear eyes, and treat them the way I’d want to be treated. Cyn­ics will say that this Chris­t­ian approach to rela­tion­ships is old-​​fashioned and naive. But it works, as attested in this story from March. (Thanks, by the way to Alec Couros for draw­ing my atten­tion to this via Twit­ter!)

So I’m going to make every effort this year to see every­one with whom I interact—students, col­leagues, friends, family—without fil­ters, with­out assump­tions, with­out pre­con­cep­tions. In a lot of cases, I’m going to have to con­sciously remove the fil­ters, and in all like­li­hood it will take more than one attempt to do so.

I can already hear those cyn­ics again, telling me that I’ll get taken advan­tage of if I do that. Very pos­si­ble. But if I can improve one rela­tion­ship, or help change one other person’s atti­tude, or make one person’s life a lit­tle bet­ter, then I don’t see the prob­lem. I’m not going to be stu­pid, cer­tainly. If someone’s track record indi­cates they really are lazy or untrust­wor­thy, then I’ll be cau­tious. But I won’t auto­mat­i­cally fun­nel each new act or choice that per­son makes into the same cat­e­gory. I’ll first con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that they may be capa­ble of chang­ing and growing.

After all, it’s what I’d hope from them. I have made and con­tinue to make mis­takes and bad choices in my life. It doesn’t mean that every­thing I do from here on out will be a mis­take or a bad choice. I want to start treat­ing other peo­ple with the same consideration.

The Linus Syndrome

Posted on December 19, 2008 by in Leadership

Teach­ing is more than my pro­fes­sion. It is my pas­sion. My joy. My call­ing.

Lately, though, I won­der if that call­ing has left me. The joy cer­tainly has, and the pas­sion is fading.

I’ve thought about why this is, and there are prob­a­bly more rea­sons than I can really nail down. Some are of my own mak­ing, and I’m work­ing on cor­rect­ing those. But two other sig­nif­i­cant ones keep com­ing to mind: chang­ing atti­tudes and what I’ll call the Linus Syndrome.

Teach­ing was once a respected and noble pro­fes­sion. No longer. Lately when I read news reports about pub­lic response to pub­lic edu­ca­tion, there only seems to be blame and dis­dain, and much of it ulti­mately falls on teach­ers. I’m begin­ning to won­der how long it will be until “teacher jokes” are as ubiq­ui­tous as lawyer jokes.

Even more sig­nif­i­cant, though, is the Linus Syn­drome. Next year marks the 50th anniver­sary of the first appear­ance of the Great Pump­kin in the comic strip Peanuts. Every year at Hal­loween, Linus eagerly awaits the arrival of the Great Pump­kin, which he believes will rise from the “most sin­cere” pump­kin patch to deliver toys to the world’s children.

Linus is of course the only one who believes this, but this fact doesn’t quell his sin­cere faith in the Great Pumpkin’s exis­tence. Year after year, he sits sur­rounded by lesser orange squash, believ­ing that this time his patience would be rewarded.

I’m begin­ning to feel like Linus. I believe, year after year, that this is the year I can make more of a dif­fer­ence, that as I sit among other edu­ca­tors who want to change the lives of the chil­dren with whom they work, we will col­lec­tively see real oppor­tu­nity to make that change. But year after year my wait­ing is for naught, and I’m get­ting weary.

I’m not the only one. (I’m not sure, by the way, whether that makes me feel bet­ter or not.) Will Richard­son wrote on Wednes­day about his own weari­ness:

I am so tired of wait­ing for some­thing, at this point almost any­thing, to mean­ing­fully change in our col­lec­tive story of edu­ca­tion. I look at my own kids every day and grow more and more frus­trated with their edu­ca­tion, one that is not unlike mil­lions of other kids in this coun­try and one that is no doubt degrees bet­ter than mil­lions more.… We gen­er­ally seem to have lost our imag­i­na­tion when we think about edu­ca­tion. And to me, that’s just such a huge irony right now. In the twenty-​​five years since I entered pub­lic schools as a teacher there has never been a time with so much rea­son to dream, to imag­ine the possibilities.


There are days I feel like I’m the last hold­out in my dis­trict, that I’m the only one left who still believes in the Great Pump­kin, and that the rest of my col­leagues smile and walk on, shak­ing their heads and won­der­ing how I could still be so blindly ide­al­is­tic to think that edu­ca­tion could pos­si­bly have any­thing to do any­more with mak­ing kids’ lives bet­ter.

And with all of that, is it any won­der that we’ve stopped dream­ing of what can be? Of all the teach­ers I’ve had the priv­i­lege of speak­ing and work­ing with in the last few years, I doubt that many of them can even now really dream of a dif­fer­ent way, one that cel­e­brates learn­ing and con­nec­tions and inde­pen­dence in the ways that many of those net­worked class­rooms we see. They might be able to visu­al­ize it, but I don’t think many see it as a poten­tial real­ity in their class­rooms, in their schools. There are too many rea­sons why it can’t hap­pen. Too many obsta­cles. Too lit­tle vision.


I want to still have hope. I don’t want to suc­cumb to the Linus Syn­drome. I don’t have any illu­sions that I’ll be the one to find the cure, but I’d like to think that I can be part of the con­ver­sa­tion that con­tributes to it.

A tweet from Vicki Davis the other day lifted my spir­its and helped me see the value in per­se­ver­ance:

“Many of the great achieve­ments of the world were accom­plished by tired and dis­cour­aged men who kept on work­ing.” Don’t give up!


The prob­lem is that nearly every day, I read some­thing in a jour­nal or a blog, or hear a con­ver­sa­tion at school, or see a news report, that squashes the hope right back out, and it’s hard not to give up.

For now, I’m stay­ing in the pump­kin patch. But I’m not hold­ing my breath that the Great Pump­kin is going to show up.

Hope Scores a Point

Posted on December 15, 2008 by in Collaboration, Differentiation, Leadership

Yes­ter­day I wrote about feel­ing con­flict­ing emo­tions about truly mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in edu­ca­tion. This morn­ing I read an arti­cle by Lisa Parisi which scores a point for hope against futil­ity. If enough teach­ers could really get on board with this and really live dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion instead of just talk­ing about it, maybe we could start to turn the ship. Now how do we coor­di­nate the effort and have more impact? One blog post at a time, I suppose.

More on Seeking Potential

Posted on December 14, 2008 by in Differentiation, Leadership

The more I think about this idea of look­ing at stu­dents in terms of their future instead of our present, the more I expe­ri­ence two simul­ta­ne­ous yet con­flict­ing emo­tions: hope and futility.

The hope comes when I hear other edu­ca­tors pro­mot­ing sim­i­lar ideas. Bar­bara Barreda wrote today about this, com­ment­ing that when she sees alumni return­ing to her school,

…who they were as stu­dents and who they have become often are very dif­fer­ent. Their growth, wis­dom and direc­tion some­times chal­lenge the assump­tions we made when they were stu­dents. We have had many pleas­ant sur­prises but what is trou­bling me is that I was sur­prised! I was cha­grinned that I still held some under­ly­ing assump­tions about these students.


Barreda also refers to an arti­cle by Damien Lopez which argues con­vinc­ingly that we need to think about edu­ca­tion for ele­men­tary stu­dents in terms of prepar­ing them for col­lege. It isn’t that we expect every child to go to col­lege, but that we have to stop assum­ing that cer­tain chil­dren won’t.

Both of these arti­cles high­light the impor­tance of see­ing a child from her future instead of deter­min­ing that future based on our present.

But while I feel hope about the pos­si­bil­ity of see­ing this kind of shift in per­spec­tive, I can’t help but feel that the whole attempt is futile. There are so many forces push­ing back on edu­ca­tors to pre­vent just this kind of think­ing. As just one exam­ple, con­sider the way we eval­u­ate the effec­tive­ness of schools today. The entire sys­tem is explic­itly designed to take our atten­tion and energy off of long term goals and look only at incre­men­tal improve­ments in a few nar­rowly defined categories.

I believe, like many oth­ers, that edu­ca­tion is in the midst of a sig­nif­i­cant change. My hope is that I will live to see a bet­ter sys­tem on the other side of the change. My fear is that the change process will crush my pas­sion for edu­cat­ing chil­dren and drive me out of the pro­fes­sion. My dream is that I would rise above the fear and make some kind of dif­fer­ence. There is a plaque on the wall of my house that dis­plays a quote by Janos Arany, “In dreams and in love, there are no impos­si­bil­i­ties.” May it be so.

Finding the Ace in Every Child

Posted on December 12, 2008 by in Differentiation

Over the last cou­ple of days, I’ve had an inter­est­ing email cor­re­spon­dence with Jackie Winch. It turns out she dis­cov­ered the blog post in which I quoted her, and felt oblig­ated to add more to the story. In the process, I’ve found that behind the celebrity we see on Ace of Cakes is a fas­ci­nat­ing story that I think per­fectly high­lights the impor­tance of gifted edu­ca­tion and dif­fer­en­ti­ated instruction.

What she shared struck me as very typ­i­cal of the kinds of things I have seen in gifted stu­dents I have worked with:

There is a lot to say about Duff.

I do remem­ber in McLean, VA where Duff went to the school for the gifted and tal­ented for grades 3–6 that many of his class­mates were “unique”. Many of them were socially dif­fer­ent, “weird”, trou­bled mis­fits. I ques­tioned my wis­dom for putting him in the pro­gram because I didn’t want him to be like them. Some had an elit­ist sense of enti­tle­ment and some were just odd­balls. Luck­ily Duff kept his cool and did rather well despite the rather ugly fam­ily life he was expe­ri­enc­ing at the time with our divorce.


Often I have heard teach­ers describe their stu­dents as “weird” or “dif­fer­ent” or “trou­bled,” and they were often right. But these same teach­ers, at least the best ones, still saw them as human beings and real­ized there was great pos­si­bil­ity in each one of them.

In third grade, Duff wrote a paper on “The Body”. I was oth­er­wise occu­pied with more seri­ous mat­ters and didn’t even know about the assign­ment, much less have time to help him with it. I received a call from his teacher to come to the school. This paper was…[a] mas­ter­piece. It was all in his own words, and [when we read] the sec­tion enti­tled “Pri­vate Parts” we nearly laughed our heads off. The teacher gave him an A. I asked why the A, because of all the lack of atten­tion to cap­i­tal­iza­tion, gram­mar and spelling, etc. He said the school didn’t want to bog him down with “details” want­ing to fos­ter the cre­ativ­ity. The details would come. Later. I’m still waiting…


What is most enlight­en­ing about this to me is look­ing at it in reverse: know­ing about the suc­cess­ful adult first, and then look­ing back at the child. It’s easy now to look at Duff, the cre­ative chef and highly suc­cess­ful busi­ness­man, and see his child­hood behav­ior as just quirky, even nec­es­sary to his devel­op­ment and cre­ative expres­sion. But it would have been easy at the time to lump him into the “trou­bled” cat­e­gory and to write him off as a lost cause. If we could look at a child and see the adult he would become, we would almost cer­tainly treat him differently.

I believe that’s an essen­tial part of our job as edu­ca­tors, and one that often gets lost in the day-​​to-​​day minu­tiae of teach­ing. We must learn to see the potential—the real potential—in every child, and fig­ure out ways to help him real­ize it. We must learn to help him imag­ine the pos­si­bil­i­ties and, like Duff’s third grade teacher, do what­ever we can to inspire him to real­ize those possibilities.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t have stan­dards or expec­ta­tions or that we ignore the “details.” But the rel­a­tive impor­tance of those details will not be the same for every child:

There’s another thing which comes to mind: Duff’s older brother made very nice grades in school and worked for them. All Duff had to do was show up and he’d make sim­i­lar grades. When he asked me why I didn’t get as excited over his grades I said that he was given a gift of “easy learn­ing” and that I was only going to be impressed with what he did with it—it was up to him. I didn’t push for grades as much as his father did, but I know he under­stood exactly what I was telling him. What kept him bal­anced as opposed to some of his class­mates, is that he never lost sight of the impor­tance he felt by pleas­ing oth­ers. I think that’s the les­son some­times not addressed in the schools—the bal­ance of pleas­ing one­self cou­pled with the impor­tance of social acceptance.


Step back and look at the big pic­ture. Let’s see the chil­dren our class­rooms from the per­spec­tive of their futures, not our present, and design their learn­ing expe­ri­ences accordingly.

Managing Perfectionists

Posted on December 4, 2008 by in Characteristics

Accord­ing to Tom Green­spon, a fam­ily ther­a­pist and expert on per­fec­tion­ism, teach­ers and par­ents need to under­stand four key things about per­fec­tion­ism:

  1. Per­fec­tion­ism is emo­tional. It can be a vicious cycle for the per­fec­tion­ist: mak­ing a mis­take causes fear, which makes the stu­dent want to be even more per­fect, lead­ing to anx­i­ety which causes more mistakes.
  2. Per­fec­tion­ism is social. Per­fec­tion­ists may feel that they won’t be accepted unless they are perfect.
  3. Per­fec­tion­ism doesn’t make peo­ple more suc­cess­ful. It is not the same things as striv­ing for excellence.
  4. The envi­ron­ment influ­ences per­fec­tion­ism. Per­fec­tion­ist behav­ior may be learned from the behav­ior of oth­ers around them. A chaotic envi­ron­ment also con­tributes to feel­ings of need­ing to be perfect.

Here are a few thoughts, then, on how teach­ers can deal with per­fec­tion­ists in their classrooms:

  • Cre­ate an envi­ron­ment of accep­tance. Avoid “zero-​​tolerance” poli­cies in your class­room. Pro­vide sec­ond chances when­ever appro­pri­ate. Set high, rea­son­able expec­ta­tions, but show under­stand­ing and accep­tance when stu­dents inevitably don’t meet them. Focus on pos­i­tive char­ac­ter qual­i­ties in each child rather than on shortfalls.
  • Cel­e­brate imper­fec­tion. Let stu­dents know that not only are mis­takes are nor­mal, they are expected and even essen­tial to the learn­ing process. When a stu­dent makes a mis­take, cel­e­brate the effort, or point out any good think­ing that went into it. Tell sto­ries about learn­ing that hap­pened because of a mis­take, and point out that school is a place for learn­ing, not for per­form­ing. Give each stu­dent a “mis­take pass” to allow them to make an error any time with­out penalty. Or maybe give them two. Give stu­dents full credit for a mis­take if they can tell what they learned from it.
  • Allow play time. Gifted chil­dren are still chil­dren, and let­ting stu­dents play with­out a spe­cific goal allows them to explore thoughts and ideas with­out the pres­sure to per­form. As any Kinder­garten teacher will tell you, a great deal of learn­ing takes place dur­ing unstruc­tured play, and it is just as true for older stu­dents. The form of the play will look dif­fer­ent: gifted stu­dents in upper ele­men­tary and beyond will play with ideas, words, and images, and num­bers. Let it be what it is; don’t try to force it into an aca­d­e­mic box.
  • Show your own flaws. We’re not talk­ing about air­ing dirty laun­dry, here. Just let stu­dents see that you aren’t per­fect your­self, and give your­self the same sec­ond chances that you give stu­dents. Make mis­takes in class (delib­er­ately if nec­es­sary) and allow stu­dents to cor­rect you with­out penalty.

What else do you do to help your per­fec­tion­ists loosen up a little?

Gifted Thinker, Meager Writer

Posted on December 2, 2008 by in Technology

Caught in the Fence, by Neal Sanche

Caught in the Fence, by Neal Sanche

In con­ver­sa­tions with sev­eral teach­ers this week I have observed the same scene repeated. They have highly ver­bal gifted stu­dents in their class­rooms who, when asked to write, pro­duce min­i­mal out­put. Their first draft is often their only draft, and the process seems excruciating.

We spec­u­late (admit­tedly with­out any direct evi­dence or research) that for these stu­dents, the mechan­ics of writ­ing get in the way, slow­ing down the process to the point that the student’s thoughts race ahead of the pen­cil. In fear of los­ing the ideas that flow so read­ily, the stu­dents give up rather than try to keep up.

With some exper­i­men­ta­tion, we have cre­ated an approach which seems to be work­ing well to get these stu­dents putting out writ­ten work which matches their ver­bal abil­i­ties. We have installed Audac­ity, a free open-​​source sound record­ing and edit­ing pro­gram, onto sev­eral class­room com­put­ers. The stu­dents have the option for each assign­ment to begin the writ­ing process ver­bally instead of on paper. They sim­ply record what they want to say, save the file, then later can go back and tran­scribe their words onto paper or into a word processor.

The results have been won­der­ful. Even some stu­dents who didn’t seem to have par­tic­u­larly strong ver­bal skills have asked to use the pro­gram and are pro­duc­ing some of their best work this way. Teach­ers have caught me in the hall­way or pulled me aside in the class­room to tell me excit­edly that they are see­ing great results already, and that stu­dents who were for­merly reluc­tant to write are now eager to get to their next writ­ing project.

The exper­i­ment is still in fairly early stages, and I’m sure we will run into glitches along the way, but so far, it seems to be a win-​​win!

Creativity vs. Discipline

Posted on December 1, 2008 by in Differentiation

There is a tug-​​of-​​war going on in edu­ca­tion. Let me say at the out­set that I’m fully aware the debate isn’t as clear cut, nor are the debaters as cleanly divided, as I present things here. The debate does exist, though.

At one end of the rope we have a team decry­ing the col­lapse of rigor and dis­ci­pline in schools, ask­ing for more account­abil­ity and a return to focused instruc­tion on the essen­tial skills of read­ing and math. Michelle Rhee is one of the out­spo­ken anchors for this approach. She bluntly dis­par­ages any approach to edu­ca­tion that, in her words, is too “touchy-​​feely.” If it doesn’t result in improved stu­dent per­for­mance, it doesn’t belong in her schools. And she isn’t afraid to ruth­lessly remove any­one or any­thing that she feels will slow down progress towards her goal of mak­ing Wash­ing­ton, DC, schools the best in the country.

At the other end we have those who believe that the basics have changed, and that stu­dents now need less empha­sis on rou­tine skills and more on cre­ativ­ity, prob­lem solv­ing, and inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships. Karl Fisch gives just one exam­ple of the change here. (As an aside, if you haven’t seen his “Shift Hap­pens” video, stop read­ing now and go watch it. Really.) Daniel Pink argues in his book A Whole New Mind that this shift will require an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of edu­ca­tion: one that indeed focuses on the right-​​brain skills of social col­lab­o­ra­tion and cre­ativ­ity. See this post of his for one example.

But isn’t this the whole point of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion? Dean Shareski clearly explains why we can’t have just one approach to edu­ca­tion for all stu­dents. We need to stop look­ing at which sys­tem of edu­ca­tion is going to be more effec­tive for all stu­dents, but what each indi­vid­ual stu­dent needs to thrive and learn.

Con­sider this state­ment by Jackie Winch, speak­ing about her son, Jef­frey Gold­man. Gold­man has a gifted IQ, and in high school spent a good por­tion of his spare time doing his art­work in public—as graf­fiti.

I could have been a lit­tle tougher, maybe? But when he was down there graffiti-​​ing with the most fab­u­lous graf­fiti you’ve ever seen—it was really creative—how can you get mad at that? I’m out there tak­ing pic­tures of it! I’m aid­ing and abet­ting! That’s what a mom does, I think. I mean, that’s what this mom did.

I could see what was hap­pen­ing. You can’t give chil­dren lines like a col­or­ing book. You can’t say, “You can’t go beyond this line.” That is the oppo­site of what you’re try­ing to get peo­ple to do. You’re try­ing to get them to think with­out lim­its. With­out lines, with­out bor­ders, with­out any­body say­ing stop. You can’t force cre­ativ­ity. You have to give it room to happen.


Gold­man was not a good fit for his school sys­tem and got in trou­ble with mall secu­rity reg­u­larly enough that they knew him by name. Chances are that you do too. He is now known as Chef “Duff” Gold­man, and is the owner of Charm City Cakes and star of the Food Net­work show, Ace of Cakes.

Despite his poor per­for­mance in school, he is a suc­cess. It is his cre­ativ­ity and charisma that have brought him to where he is.

What do we do with this? Duff found a way to thrive despite his school­ing. How many stu­dents don’t rise up like he did and achieve their potential?

I’m not argu­ing here that we need to throw out rigor and dis­ci­pline in school. Quite the con­trary. There are many stu­dents who need it and thrive on it and for whom the struc­tured envi­ron­ment pro­vides them secu­rity and a safe place to grow. Indeed, kids like Duff could not suc­ceed with­out discipline.

For just as many stu­dents, rigor imposed from out­side sti­fles them, cramps them, and cuts off the shoots that they try to send out into the world. For them, the dis­ci­pline comes from within, and grows out of the relent­less pur­suit of their pas­sions. They don’t need more bound­aries, they need free­dom to explore.

If pub­lic schools had the lux­ury of hand-​​picking the stu­dents who would best fit into their modes of instruc­tion and the design of their cur­ric­ula, then we could allow each team in the tug-​​of-​​war to develop its own schools and cater to the stu­dents who would fit best. But since we don’t, I don’t see any option other than to diver­sify, dif­fer­en­ti­ate, and pro­vide a menu of options for both cur­ricu­lum and instruc­tion which will address all the needs of all the stu­dents who find their way through our doors.