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.

This past Monday, the Wall Street Journal posted an opinion piece by Fran Tarkenton in which he postulated what the NFL might be like if it had to play by what he called “teachers’ rules.” Tarkenton says:

Tarkenton’s argument is not particularly new—the idea of performance or merit pay for teachers has been around for at least 60 years—but it is increasingly popular with the public. No Child Left Behind created a system for rating and ranking schools and districts, and recently there has been a move in a few cities like Los Angeles and New York to extend that system to individual teachers. Never mind that the scores are flawed at best; to those who believe intuitively that linking teacher pay to teacher performance can only be a good thing, Tarkenton’s essay is like an interception that was returned 99 yards for the game-winning touchdown.

Behind his arguments, however, are flawed assumptions and metaphors twisted to fit them. Let’s dissect his arguments and consider the real differences between the world of education and Tarkenton’s fantasy football.

1. Salary schedules. Tarkenton derides a “union-created system [which] provides no incentive for better performance,” preferring a purely performance-based system of pay. But the NFL itself has a salary schedule, bargained collectively with the NFLPA, which, guess what, dictates the minimum salary a player must earn based on their years of performance. A rookie in 2011 will earn no less than $375,000, while after ten years, a player at the top of the scale earns a minimum of $910,000. Repeat: those are minimums.
2. Funding. In 2009, all 32 NFL teams paid a combined $3.4 billion for player salaries. Revenues from stadium ticket sales for those teams were slightly over $7 billion for 1,700 players (53 per team). In contrast, according to the US Census Bureau, in 2009 there were more than 15,000 public school districts in the US, with almost $591 billion in revenue and $209 billion spent on 4.3 million teacher salaries. Thus, the education system has 469 times as many employers as the NFL but only 84 times the revenue paying 61 times the salaries for 2,500 times the employees.
3. Supply and Demand. According to the NCAA, there are an estimated 317,000 high school seniors playing football in a given year. Of those, only 250 (or less than a tenth of a percent) will get drafted into the NFL. When you get rid of a “bad” football player, there is a long line of potential replacements ready to fill the slot. Teaching is not nearly as competitive: there are places in every state where teachers are so in demand that the federal government offers bonuses to people willing to teach there. Many positions remain unfilled, or are filled by underqualified staff.
4. Results. In the NFL, evaluating quality is relatively straightforward. Teams with good players win, and teams with bad players lose. End of story. The same is actually roughly true in education: better learning happens where there are better teachers. But the analogy falls apart when you consider that the NFL is explicitly designed to elevate one “best” team every year at the expense of the other 31. But education’s goal is different: we want every child in every classroom to learn and meet a minimum standard of acceptable achievement. We won’t tolerate a competitive system where some kids win and most kids lose.
5. Coaching. Tarkenton says that in the NFL, as in “every other profession: if you’re good, you get rewarded, and if you’re not, then you look for other work.” If only it were really true: every Sunday there are thousands of armchair quarterbacks who would be very quick to give their opinions about which players are the bums that should be rushed out the door. But the reality is that in the NFL, if you’re not good, you are coached, you get intensive training and assistance and the opportunity to work your butt off to get better. And you get repeated opportunities over multiple attempts to prove your value to the team before you are cut.
6. Causality vs. Correlation. In the NFL, team scores are a direct result of the performance of the players on the field. Better players produce consistently better performances which result in consistently more wins. In education, although the teacher’s skills affect student learning, it is an indirect and fuzzy relationship. There are so many other factors involved that to load all of the responsibility and all of the consequences of the outcome onto one person is unreasonable and unfair. Correlation? Yes. Causal? Not so much.
7. Continuous Improvement. There is an assumption in education that schools and teachers will get better and better every year with no dips, no slumps, no gaps, and no plateaus. This isn’t realistic, at least not where humans are involved. Even the best NFL players can have a game or two where things don’t go well. Spectacular teams can even crash and burn–just look at this year’s Philadelphia Eagles, who were widely believed to have assembled some of the nation’s best talent, and started their season 1–3.

Let’s imagine what the NFL would really be like if it played by current education rules. Every town in the US would be required to have a professional football team. Every team would get nine months of practice leading up to one and only one game. Every team in the league would be expected to win that game every year, and in fact would have to increase its score year after year, or be labeled a “failing team.” Every resident of the town would be required to attend every game, whether they wanted to or not, and the town would hold a referendum to determine ticket prices.

Every player on that team would be expected to score a minimum number of points during the game or be labeled a failing player. Players who whined that they didn’t have the support of their teammates, or who had a poor coach, or played for a team that didn’t have money for footballs, would be told that those were just excuses, and that if they really were good players they could overcome those challenges and win anyway.

On the other hand, if Tarkenton’s fantasy of teaching like football really did come true, then rookie teachers would make $375K. Maybe he’s onto something after all.

Damian Bariexca (@damian613) brings us the seventh in what is now an ongoing series of posts on the future of gifted education. Damian brings a unique perspective to this conversation from his experience as both a school psychologist and high school English teacher in New Jersey. This article is cross-posted at Damian’s blog, Apace of Change.

I’m a school psychologist, so my professional life is a minefield of labels and acronyms — FAPE, IEP, SLD, OHI, IDEA, PLAAPF, ICS, FBA, “gen ed >80%”, “gen ed 40%-80%”, “gifted”, “learning disabled”, etc. While labels like these are the reality for now, I have a vision of education in the 21st century that reduces or possibly even eliminates the need for these labels. Although my professional focus is on students with learning disabilities (giftedness is not a special ed classification in NJ), I believe that LD and giftedness fall under the same umbrella in that they represent atypical learning styles and abilities, and must both be accommodated accordingly.

My issue with labels stems, in large part, from my own childhood, when I was identified as a “gifted” child in grade 3. I remained in my district’s pull-out “Gifted & Talented” program through grade 8, when the program ended. While I did enjoy getting to leave class to work on more challenging projects, there were the constant comments of “there goes the nerd herd”, etc., whenever my classmates and I would leave. A friend of mine was recommended to the G&T program in 6th grade but declined; when I asked him why, he said, “Because everyone will think I’m a nerd like you guys!” At age 11, that cut me to the quick, and it’s awfully telling that I can remember that conversation and his response verbatim over two decades after the fact.

From early on, my “giftedness”* was a double-edged sword: it was seen as desirable in terms of school (was it a competition that I was “winning”?), but socially it became an albatross around my neck. I’ll spare you the tortured self-analysis, but suffice to say I’ve thought a lot about it over the years and have drawn some pretty solid conclusions that are probably better discussed over some beers than in a blog post. While I don’t think this is the only issue, consider, for instance, the physical removal from the general classroom: if my academic needs could have been met through in-class differentiation, perhaps that stigma would not have been so significant (and perhaps my friend would have gotten the challenging curriculum he deserved).

But forget about the academic implications for a minute; labels and categorization are detrimental to our students as people. They overwhelmingly inform students’ sense of self and their relation to others; they pigeonhole, they segregate, and they ultimately do more harm than good. Even when those labels are more socially desired, like “gifted”, I feel it’s still kind of like saying, “but saying all Asians are good at math is a good stereotype!”

My vision for gifted education in the 21st century is much the same as my vision for special education in the 21st century, which also happens to be similar to my vision of general education for the 21st century: to reimagine not only the curriculum, but also the physical and geographic elements of our schools. I wrote about this a few months ago, but to briefly re-cap: rethink the necessity of the 7.5 hour, Monday-Friday school day, rethink the role of the instructor as deliverer of content, and rethink the role of the student in terms of steering their learning in ways other than choosing a few electives each year once they’re in high school. My hope is that individualizing students’ formal educational experience as much as possible will reduce the need for labels such as the ones I describe above, either by allowing a wider variety of needs to be met within the traditional classroom, or by eliminating the traditional classroom completely.

In the initial email Gerald sent me to invite me to write this post, he indicated when he unveiled his new mission statement for his district’s gifted education program, “In among the many positive and encouraging responses, a few people commented that, while the statements were nice, aren’t these things we should be doing with every student?” Indeed, none of what I’m putting forth in this blog post is revolutionary; Vygotsky, Piaget, and Dewey laid the groundwork for this type of thinking a long time ago. Despite, or perhaps especially in light of, that fact, the question remains: why are we not doing this for all our students? Are the roadblocks physical, philosophical, geographic, financial, or other?

*Yes, I’m probably considered “smart” or “bright” by most academic measures, but consider: doing simple mental math is very difficult for me, I still take pause to consider my left from my right (bonus fun fact: up until my mid-twenties or so, I relied on a trick I devised when I was about 5 and owned shoes that had Winnie the Pooh on one sole and Tigger on the other), I must write down everything I need to do or it won’t get done, I can’t change the oil in my car, and the most basic of household handiwork tends to flummox me. Who’s gifted now?

I consider my blog a place to work out not-quite-crystallized thoughts and start conversations. This post is an example of a topic that I need to wrestle with, and I’m looking for your help to do so.

I wrote the other day about how Educon challenged some of my assumptions, and is continuing to do so. I have also been thinking about where I personally land on the school reform movement. Much of what the “reformists” say grates on me and feels wrong for kids, but I believe part of that is because it feels like a personal attack on my calling, my chosen profession, and my passion for helping kids learn. I also realized that my understanding of the movement is based primarily on what other people tell me it is. I have not spent enough time with the primary source material.

So I decided to check it out for myself. I visited the Students First web site, and read through the policy agenda posted there. (A caveat: I have not read the entire document thoroughly—what follows is based on the summaries at the site.) I was a bit surprised to find that they endorse many things that I believe are critical to improving education: putting students first, elevating the profession of teaching, striving for excellence, using public resources wisely to support learning.

Let me also say up front that I support the principle of accountability and for eliminating inequities in public education. I am not afraid of being held to a high standard of performance and getting constructive feedback and working at improvement when I don’t live up to that standard. (An aside: as an administrator, I am now faced with the challenge of how to provide that kind of feedback and help my teachers raise their game. I have not yet mastered that skill and am constantly reflecting on how I can do a better job.)

Digging into the Student First agenda a bit further, I realize that they have used language that it would be difficult to disagree with. It puts them in a powerful position to potentially argue, “If you oppose our movement, then you must not want to put students first,” or “you must be against elevating the teaching profession.”

Hardly. Where we differ though is on the assumptions behind the words. Let’s take the issue of student achievement. I absolutely want students to achieve. I also think that our students (speaking globally, not about my district in particular) probably aren’t achieving at the level they are capable of. So how can I possibly disagree with Students First?

I don’t. What I disagree with is their definition of achievement (which, by the way isn’t explicitly stated at the site, unless I missed it). By inference, and through my experience with NCLB, achievement to this organization means performance on high-stakes reading and math tests. If this inference is wrong, by the way, I welcome feedback from anyone familiar with the organization to point me to more thorough definitions of the term so I can better understand it.

Please don’t misunderstand: I want my students to have excellent reading and math skills. I just don’t believe that an annual, week-long, multiple choice test is adequate to judge these skills.

But I also think achievement is a more complex, more subtle thing than this, and I’m not certain Students First understands or is interested in this. Again, if I’ve mischaracterized the organization, show me—help me understand where I have it wrong, but to me their goal doesn’t really seem to be to help teachers get better, it seems to be to categorize all teachers as either “good” or “bad” and then to get rid of the bad ones.

The debate will never be resolved, and we will never be able to really communicate and work together to create the best possible education for our children, until we can agree on the definitions and assumptions that form the foundation of the goals. The conversation first needs to be about what achievement means, what excellence means, what quality means. Only then can we work on creating effective ways of evaluating it—and I’m certain those ways will involve multiple measures and multiple criteria.

We could, and should, examine much of the language on all sides of the debate about school reform to find the underlying assumptions. I know I am looking much more closely at my own, and I challenge you to do the same. What assumptions do you have that color your responses and drive your thinking? What am I not considering here that I need to be? Where are the points of agreement we can work from to build consensus?

Yesterday, I wrote about two of my big picture takeaways from the first day of Educon. Day 2 indeed continued that pattern. I still heard references to student voice and student passions in every session. And my assumptions continued to be challenged, and are continuing to be challenged today as the “Educon hangover” sets in and the extra thoughts that didn’t fit into the weekend are leaking out into the Twittersphere.

There were a couple of other big themes that surrounded everything at Educon this year. They aren’t anything new, but I believe that because they keep coming up and aren’t going away, they might qualify as enduring understandings about learning.

Connect

Earlier this evening, Dean Shareski tweeted:

I believe that connection is a multiplier. When we learn something alone, it has power. But when two people learn and share together, we both get twice as much out of it. There’s a (forgive the word) synergy in the learning process when we are connected with other learners.

Then when we share the learning with others and they share it, it gets multiplied exponentially. There’s some truth to the criticism that the edublog community (and many of those who attend Educon) can become an echo chamber of the same ideas circulating round and round, over and over. But consider that every day, new faces join this community. They have some catching up to do, and when we “rehash” an old idea in getting them up to speed, we can also refine and rework it.

Every person who chews on an idea and then passes it along to the next person adds a layer of value. Chris Lehmann constantly reminds those who praise him for what he has done at SLA that he “stands on the shoulders of giants.” We also stand on each others’ shoulders.

It can be intimidating to enter a connected community. It’s easy to bounce around, watching everyone else who’s already connected and think that there’s no room left. I understand that a few people experienced this at Educon and left feeling isolated. I’ve been contemplating whose responsibility it is to correct this. I do believe this community is a welcoming one: in the couple of years that I’ve been actively Tweeting and blogging, I’ve found dozens if not hundreds of people willing to hear my ideas and engage in the conversation with me. Those who jump in and start contributing and looking for ways to connect won’t be disappointed. (As if to reinforce this exact idea, as I was writing this post, I saw a link to this document from Chris Lehmann’s session at Educon. Check out the highlighted sentence that one of the participants added.…)

But I think we also need to go out of our way to invite new voices into the conversation. We need to model our own learning community after the ones we want to see in our classrooms and schools. If any student feels alienated, we’ve not done our jobs as educators. Likewise, if a fellow teacher-learner feels we’ve created barriers to entering the conversation, what does that say about what we really value in a learning community?

Act

The last theme is that we need to take action. This also happens to be the eventual cure for the echo chamber. This also happens to be the hard part. In several sessions, we were really good at explaining our reasoning, at expounding on the principles, at building a case and building a theory. When the leader asked, “So what do we do with it? How do we put it into practice? How do we make this happen?” There was generally silence.

I’ll be blatantly honest: I’m not sure I know the answers to those questions either. But I do know that this year—instead of having an awesome weekend of connecting with other educators and learning from them and reflecting on the process in a blog and then forgetting about it until next January—I’m going to follow Lisa Thumann’s lead and create an action plan.

At the same time, I’m reminded that talking or writing about something is taking an action. Words are powerful, and words can change the world. For me, words are often the best way for me to have an impact on someone else, so blogging and talking about these ideas is my first step at taking action. But I don’t think we can stop there.

I wrestled a great deal this weekend with whether change needs to happen through evolution or revolution. This isn’t a new dilemma, but I thought about it from the action angle this week. In my sphere of influence, it often feels like all I can do is chip slowly away at bits of the corners, and I wonder if that will be enough to ever make any kind of difference for kids. Then I realize that while I’m chipping, I can also keep talking about the ideas, and perhaps I can help others decide to start chipping at their own corners of the problem. If enough people chip slowly, it won’t be slow any more.

I’m partway through my second Educon, and as I found the first time around, my brain is having trouble keeping up with the intensity of learning that is going on. I continue to be amazed at the number of educators willing to spend an entire weekend, almost around the clock, thinking deeply and richly about education and how we can make it better for our students. And I’m not just talking about how to improve computation or comprehension or proficiency scores. I’m talking about people who are constantly poking at the whole idea of what education is for and how it should work at a fundamental level and what it needs to look like today, next year, and in the next few decades.

If you want an example of what’s good and great in education today, if you want to meet the best of the best educators, come to Educon.

Also as I discovered last year, there are a few big themes that seem to be emerging from the conversations, both formal and information, that I have participated in so far. I imagine that some of this is a result of my own bias and self-selection–I do tend to end up with people and in sessions that already lean the same way I do, after all–but these seem to be pretty consistent no matter which particular cluster of people I land in. I’m not going to attempt here to analyze these themes in any great depth (I’ll save that for future posts), but simply to put out some of the raw thoughts for your consideration. Push back, pick at the parts I am not considering or grasping properly, and continue the conversation that is going on in Philadelphia this weekend.

Voice, Choice and Passion

We talk a lot about student-centered learning in education today, but much of it revolves around differentiation and keeping student abilities and needs in mind as we deliver our prescribed curriculum. But what about student-DRIVEN learning? Give students more freedom to express themselves, to explore and discover what they are passionate about.

We are wrestling with the very nature of what school and education are for here. What is our role? What are the limits of that role? Or are there any? Part of me believes that more than simply training kids to be competent adults (which I do think is part of our mission), we have a bigger question to help students answer: Who am I, and what is my place in the world? On the other hand, I’m not sure I want schools to shoulder all of that responsibility. That’s what families and communities and faith are for, too.

I believe part (or perhaps most) of our job is preparing kids to make a contribution to the world (I could well be wrong about that, of course). Different kids will make different contributions. Different kids SHOULD make different contributions. So should we be working harder to mold students into our box, or should we be refitting the box to accommodate the students? The Educon conversations seem to be pushing that even further: we need to let the students design and build their own boxes.

Challenging Assumptions

Another frequent theme that is arising this weekend is the idea that we can’t be content with our assumptions. More times than I can count, I have been involved in a conversation where the comments settle into a comfortable place where we mostly agree on the principles, then someone (sometimes me) says, “Wait a minute,” and points out that the assumptions behind the principle aren’t necessarily givens.

There are dual dangers, I think. If we get too complacent in what we “know” is true about students, or schools, or education as a whole, we can’t innovate and adapt to the world. But if we are too skeptical, if we only ever act as if all our assumptions are potentially wrong, we may never actually act on anything.

But I think we probably ought to lean much harder towards regularly stepping back and analyzing what our assumptions are. Students change and the world changes quickly enough now that things that really were true last year may not be true this year.

A question I am starting to ask myself in every conversation and with every book I read is “What are the biases and preconceptions that are framing my point of view, and what happens to the argument if I turn them upside down?”

Now I need to figure out how to bring these ideas back to my district and what to do with them in the context of every day school life. What are the practical applications of these ideas about student passion and assumptions? What do they look like in a classroom? How does productive change happen? Maybe today’s sessions will move me towards some answers.

[This article is cross-posted at The Teachers Lounge blog. Thanks to Brandi Jordan for the invitation to guest blog there.]

Last week, my family and I went to see a stage adaptation of The Little Prince. A scene in it reminds me of the always-complex, sometimes-awkward relationship between parents and school administrators, particularly when it comes to determining what is best for a child.

In the play, the Little Prince meets a fox in the Sahara desert. The Prince is cautious of the fox, but is also curious. Then the fox makes an unusual request: for the Prince to tame him.

1. Administrators are human beings. This is both a positive and a negative. We are imperfect. We have feelings, strengths, and limitations. We need to learn and grow, just as you do. We get anxious and tired and frustrated just like you do.
2. Administrators care about your child. Our level of concern is different, and we care in different ways, but I do not know a single school administrator who thinks of your child as simply a test score, a “student of the month” certificate, or a discipline report. We are in this business to help children, and we work hard to make that possible for every child in our care.
3. We are not the enemy. That we have a different perspective and possibly a different solution to a problem does not mean we are opponents. Entering the process with the assumption we are looking forward to putting up roadblocks and launching counterattacks just invites anxiety.
4. This is not a contract negotiation. A corollary to #3 is to remember the objective of any meeting with a school administrator. The goal is not for one “side” or the other to “win,” and if either party enters the situation with the sole purpose of getting what they want, then the only loser will be the child. There are no sides, or rather there is one side: the needs of the child. Enter instead with the intention of agreeing together first about the problem, then to work as a team to create a solution that works for everyone.
5. Administrators have the same goal as you.… We want your child to learn, grow, and succeed. Just as you do. You know your child as an individual far better than we ever can, and just as the fox advises the Prince to do, a wise administrator will spend a great deal of time patiently listening to a parent in order to understand.
6. …but our context is different. Please remember that the administrator knows the teachers, the curriculum, the school and the field of education far better than you do. It is also our job to ensure that school resources are used equitably and responsibly, and we are often forced to make difficult compromises. A little time invested in trying to comprehend our world will go a long way in building a good working relationship.

Just like the fox and the Prince grow to need each other, so do the parent and the administrator. Neither of us can do our jobs well without the support and collaboration of the other.

Parents may feel intimidated or defensive when meeting with administrators, and this leads to meetings where the parent comes in “armed for bear” (or perhaps foxes) and anticipating a fight. Try instead to tame the school administrator with a little patience and understanding. Steven Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, includes this as Habit 5: Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood. Do this, and you will probably find that you and your child have an excellent experience with the school.

One last tip: Unless you happen to know that they are fans of The Little Prince, it may not be a good idea to actually tell an administrator you are trying to tame them. Let that just be between us.

Fences exist to separate the things inside from the things outside. They provide a boundary to define and separate space, and safety for those inside.

Teachers and administrators put up both literal and metaphorical fences in schools. Rules, firewalls, expectations, codes of conduct. “They are for the protection of the students,” we say, and we believe it. We feel that schools should be safe places for our children, and we want to create an environment in which they can learn.

But what do our language, attitude, and focus say about these fences? Why are they there, and which side of the fence is in? These things matter, and they reveal a great deal about our schools.

Student handbooks, policy manuals, and our daily interactions with students are filled with words like these: don’t, can’t, control, confine, restriction, infraction, escalate, intervention, penalty, enforce, and impose. The chatter in the faculty room revolves around the “good kids” and the “bad kids”.

Think about the frame of reference where you are. Which term below represents the attitude and focus of the adults? What is the central principle around which the system is set up?

• Compliance or Citizenship?
• Conformity or Courtesy?
• Enforce or Encourage?
• Obedience or Respect?
• Restrictions or Boundaries?
• Don’t or Ought?
• Penalty or Result?

What are we really trying to protect? The students? Or the school?

There are consequences to our choice of vocabulary, our attitude towards kids, and the things we choose to focus on every day. Students pick up on these things, and their own behavior, attitude, and language reflect the environment they experience.

What are you and your school saying to your students? Does the environment communicate safety? The opposite is not, “You aren’t safe here.” It’s worse. It actually says, “You are dangerous.” Which puts them on the outside of the fence looking in. And that’s no place to learn.

One of the things that has drawn me to the particular collection of educators whom I follow on Twitter is that they have a passion for helping students learn better. Over the last couple of years, I have heard and participated in a lot of conversations about so-called “21st century” learning, education, teaching, etc. There seem to be a lot of assumptions about what this means.

We have the Parternship for 21st Century Skills, of course, but this seems to be only one dimension of what many talk about when they mention 21st century education.

I’ve been having a hard time wrapping my head around it, so to get some help from my colleagues and compile all of the various thoughts and ideas about the concept into one place, I’ve put together a Google document called “Compare & Contrast 20th/21st Century Education”. OK, not a spectacular title, I admit. But I thought that if we could generate a list of how modern education can, should, or does differ from the “old way” of doing things, maybe that would help me get a better handle on it. And if it helps some other people in the process, so much the better.

To take it to another level, Kim Printz (@paperwerksart on Twitter) asked me this tonight:

So I’ve added a section at the bottom of the document to share ideas about what to do with this list. Where should it go? How can we use it to impact schools and students? Come join both parts of the conversation, and add your thoughts to the list. Then take the list and share it with someone: a colleague, a parent, a principal. In the end, what matters most is not how we define 21st century education, but how we apply it to help students learn.

“Who are the learners in your school?”

What answers would you get if you asked this question tomorrow? I suspect that in many cases, if the askee didn’t just look at you like you’d lost your mind, they’d say, “Uh, duh, the students?”

If that’s the only answer you get, though, there’s a lot of work to do. Everyone in a school needs to be a learner, needs to think like a learner, and needs to be treated like a learner. Teachers, volunteers, parents, aides, facilities staff, bus drivers, and administrators all need to understand that they are part of a learning community. Everyone still has something to learn, everyone has something to teach.

We make an effort in our family to eat dinner together as often as we can. Even if it’s only a brief time, we are deliberate about making it happen. Dinner often interrupts stuff the kids are more interested in, like playing outside, surfing the Web, reading, and so on. Our youngest son typically will pick at his food, eat a few bites, and say, “I’m full.” While, we’re not looking to get our kids in the habit of eating when they’re not hungry, we’re also responsible for making sure he’s not malnourished. So we’d tell him, “You can’t possibly be full yet. You need to eat a little more before you can leave the table.”

What was funny, and now a family joke, is that it didn’t take long for him to catch on, and instead of telling us when he was done, he started asking, “Can I be full yet?”

I don’t believe there is a single person involved in any school who has the right to ask “Can I be full yet?” The answer should always be no.

I’m thinking that this would be a great interview question. The answer would tell you a lot not only about the perspective of the applicant, but also how they are likely to work with their colleagues and parents.

I’m curious too about your thoughts: What are the implications and consequences of asking (and answering) this question? I’d also be interested in finding out about people that actually do ask this, and what kinds of answers you get. What are you going to do tomorrow to start changing what answer people give?