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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You 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.

It’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:

Disappointed in the latest @edutopia newsletter. Test prep strategies do not align with these: is.gd/YeGm3Z

— Gerald Aungst (@geraldaungst) February 9, 2012

Later that day, Edutopia responded:

@geraldaungst Thanks for your comments. We’d love to talk to you more about what you’d like to see. If you have time, pls DM us.

— edutopia (@edutopia) February 9, 2012

 
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?

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.

“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.

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.