To encourage dialogue and reflection about learning and growth, our question for the week is: What are you hoping to learn this year? A Learning Community (Week of 9/6/21) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
It was so great to be back at school this week (both with the staff on the professional days and all together as a community when the students returned on Wednesday) and the days together were fulfilling, energizing, and inspiring. We have enjoyed the Labor Day weekend as a family, taking time for gardening, bike rides, yoga, reading, and some ‘nothing time’. I hope that everyone was able to take these days for whatever felt needed, as we all held on to the last hurrah of summer!
** The words/reflection/thoughts/sharings below hope to serve as a framework for our learning community for the school year. As has been the practice in past years, my hope and intention is to open up and provide a space for dialogue, engagement, and collaboration - I welcome dialogue, engagement, and questions - it will be important to continue our collegial, communal, and professional culture as we aim to provide a rich and meaningful learning experience for our students...
their help in making it happen and willingness to ‘dive in’ - professionalism, care, and commitment to our students and one another was certainly present and felt. My hope is that the sharings below (a reflective summary of our professional development days, along with some annual guideposts) will serve as a ‘window into our work’ (the ‘why’ that leads to our ‘how’ and ‘what’).
John Hattie’s research and findings emphasizes the importance of professional learning and intentional learning of teachers -- ‘...the greatest effects on student learning occur when the teachers become learners of their own teaching and...when students become their own teachers.’ This is our true goal - to be a community of active learners. My intent for our learning community is to take both the proverbial 40,000 foot view and ‘rubber hits the road views’ during these days to ask questions, plant seeds, frame the year, and foster dialogue in an effort to grow and learn. It is through the questions and ideas that we discuss and explore that our beliefs will be formed - these beliefs will then guide our actions.
Our work each day with students will align and help us towards our mission - please help me to articulate and examine these together. Much awaits us - hopes for our students and community, ups/downs, successes/challenges, theme of imagination - and I am hoping we can continue to be learners together and reflect as a community, pushing and supporting our individual and collective growth...
At the outset of each school year I share these sentiments/thoughts and they are ...
As we work to establish a foundation for our work, a continued goal that I have (and one that I hope is shared by our entire community - students, staff, and families) for both myself and Blake is that we purposefully, intentionally, and actively strive to maintain a culture of learning, sharing, and transparency with one another and the community. It is critical that we take the time to highlight our work and progress, both the good and bad, in a reflective manner so that we are all held accountable to both our mission and our essential question...
Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Guiding Premises for 2021-2022
The essence of these bullet points below have served as guiding principles/beliefs/convictions that were articulated as a staff in June 2020, as we entered a time of real ‘unknown’ and ‘uncertainty’. They are not unique to a pandemic, remote learning, or in-person instruction, and they are important to state and live - they are our ‘guard rails’ that we can (and need to) lean on for ourselves and one another…
- When we return...we will meet students where they are at, we will meet one another where we are at, and we will all learn and move forward together
- Safety, Health, and Shared Responsibility will be guiding principles throughout this coming year (they have always been guiding principles, but they will be emphasized and articulated more than ever).
- Priorities for the year: Care/Flexibility/Grace; Theme of Imagination; Diversity/Equity/Inclusion/Belonging; Culturally Responsive Teaching; Meaningful, Actionable, Authentic, Learner-Centered Feedback; Our Mission - Adaptability (keeping BCAP in mind); Priority Standards
- Your well-being is most important - please take care of yourself, your family, and one another. Let us (the 'royal us') know if we can be of any help/support.
- Please take/make time for yourself and your family - at night, mornings, weekends - this will be helpful for our students/families as well throughout this coming year.
- Relationships, relationships, relationships - that is the most important thing we do and will continue to be the most important thing we do. Everything else is secondary (important, but secondary).
- What hopes do you have for this year?
- What fears do you have for this year?
- Imagination will allow our students to...
Simon Sinek - Start with Why
(5:00)
What is Culturally Responsive Teaching?
(5:00)
Yong Zhao: The Future of Education
(2:30)
Jaime Casap: What Problem Do You Want to Solve?: Innovation You
(6:39)
Marty Baron Commencement Address
(18:29)
Jesse Jackson - I am Somebody
(1:25)
Quotes…
Our job is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it. - Sir Ken Robinson
Don’t ask kids what they want to be when they grow up but what problems do they want to solve. This changes the conversation from who do I want to work for, to what do I need to learn to be able to do that. - Jaime Casap
Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. - William Pollard
We don’t need school to be better. We need schools to be really, really different. - Will Richardson
Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. - Peter Drucker
Your work is your own private megaphone to tell the world what you believe. - Simon Sinek
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. - W. Edwards Deming
If you think of it the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re NOT, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized. - Ken Robinson
If we look at the schools that have grown the most in the last five or ten years, schools that have made really significant improvements for their students in learning, these are the places that have had teacher communities that have been willing to come together and pull their oars together towards the same coherent goals. - Justin Reich
My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered the interruptions were my work. - Henri Nouwen
The reasonable man adapts himself to the word: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - Bernard Shaw
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. - Bertrand Russell
Hope will never be silent. - Harvey Milk
Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes. - Peter Senge
Each and every school day will bring tens of thousands of reasons to celebrate in schools across the country. - Bill Ivey
The Aims of Education - To enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them to become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens. - Sir Ken Robinson
Posts of Interest and Relevance for Our Work
5 Changes, 5 Shifts, and 5 Implications for What’s Next in Education
by Tom Vander Ark in ASCD
Despite the challenges of remote learning during a crisis, there were pockets of innovation as well as instructional wins. Behind the scenes, around the edges, and in the most capable schools, five positive shifts in education continued during COVID-19. Some of these trends accelerated, some were stymied, and some surfaced in new forms. Twenty years or more in the making, these shifts continue to provide the long-term direction for education innovation.
1. Beyond narrow conceptions of achievement
These advocacy efforts and many others have encouraged K–12 schools to develop community agreements that embrace broader measures of success related to career and civic contribution.
2. Deep learning experiences
Recognizing the growing uncertainty and complexity in every aspect of life and work, more communities are adopting broader learning goals and with them project-based learning and design/maker experiences.
3. Credentialed learning
Employers increasingly recognize that course credits and degrees have been weak proxies for developed capabilities. As a result, several skills-based hiring initiatives were launched during the pandemic.
Another promising development in helping learners tell their story is the Mastery Transcript Consortium, a network of 400 innovative high schools collaborating on a transcript system that goes beyond courses and grades to share developed competencies.
4. Meaningful equity work
It’s unquestionably challenging work: “You cannot have conversations about DEI and anti-racism and be comfortable,” said Brown. But it can be invitational, “Calling people in rather than calling them out—welcoming folks, inviting folks, and supporting folks on their journey.”
5. New learning models
...innovative educators continued to create nanoschools and microschools and start new schools and after-school programs—all engaging youth in community-connected project-based learning. Some of these are equity focused, some seek to close the opportunity gap.
5 Implications for This Year and Beyond
1. Be learner-centered
2. Onboard talent
3. Say yes to LX
4. New agreements
5. Advocate for what’s next
The pandemic recovery presents an opportunity to move beyond the old framework of standards-based reform. Leaders can advocate for what good learning looks like and policies that support it—in particular, measurement systems and protocols that could replace current regimes of standardized testing. The next national policy framework will emerge from state and local leadership—it’s a formative time to be an educator and your voice matters.
We can start, however, to reverse these accelerating inequities with intentional leadership, community-connected ecosystems of learning, and by putting learners at the center of every decision.
What If We Tried “Radical Acts of Education”?
by Homa Tavangar and Will Richardson in Big Questions Institute
This post is one that I first read back in June - I find myself coming back to it on a frequent basis. By looking at the etymology of the word ‘radical’ (proceeding from a root) and then applying it to our work and vision, we can embrace the openness that it allows in all of our efforts. It speaks to the importance of continually keeping this ‘radical lens’ in place.
As the corona virus rages on, and calls for social justice globally become louder, clearer, and more universal, why do we remain so afraid of being radical? Are the things that matter most to us mutually exclusive of radical acts, or might it be the reverse? In order to realize what’s vital: justice, equity, relationships, stewardship, community, creativity, joy – perhaps thinking radically is precisely what we need?
In our work we are constantly looking to the etymology of words to get to the root of messages and excavate the stories. “Radical” is a good case in point. The Latin origin of the word “radical” refers to “proceeding from a root.” This reference continues in math, where radical, symbolized by √, denotes a square root, cube root, etc.
As UCLA’s Distinguished Professor Emerita, Angela Davis, who embodies “radical,” in whatever way you interpret the word, explained, “Radical simply means grasping at the root.” And: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
Thinking radically helps us imagine a new world, but if it’s overwhelming to begin imagining globally, then “radical” also helps us begin at the roots, or locally. And we get to do it over and over and over again (“do it all the time”), because iteration is a key to trying, adjusting, failing, starting again, taking a risk, and continuously learning.
Why a ‘Growth Mindset’ Won’t Work
by Peter DeWitt in Education Week
...the reason why growth vs. fixed mindset has a low effect size is due to the fact that adults have a fixed mindset and keep treating students accordingly, so right now the effect size is low, and will continue to stay low unless we change our practices in the classroom. We put students in ability groups, they get scores on high stakes tests that help label them, and then we place them in Academic Intervention Services (AIS) which adds to their fixed mindset. Once students enter into AIS or Special Education, very few leave.
If students aren’t doing well in our classrooms it may not be due to them and may require that we change the way we teach. “Change the environment and not the child.” When we use ability groups, categorize students by test scores, and do not instruct in a variety of ways, we will continue to treat students with a fixed mindset. Our fixed mindset puts them at a greater risk of having a fixed mindset.
We talk a lot about the growth mindset but our actions may be counterproductive to putting it into action. A growth mindset is so vitally important for adults and students. Adults need to have that mindset for their own growth but more importantly for the growth of their students.
Talking about the growth mindset is not good enough. Our actions are where the rubber hits the road. If we believe the growth mindset is important, and believe that it should have a higher effect size, then we need to follow up with the actions to make it happen.
The Dark Side of Rigor
by Olaf Jorgenson and Percy L. Abram in NAIS
The dominant contemporary notion of academic rigor is the latter—it rests on the premise that difficulty is defined by a student’s workload rather than the depth and richness and intensity of the intellectual journey. From the Latin, rigor means stiffness, rigidity, cold, harshness. Dictionary definitions evoke equally menacing terms—inflexibility, strict precision, exactness—rigor is “a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable.” (Think rigor mortis.) Indeed, these iterations of rigor all too frequently illustrate the learning environment in college-prep high schools today.
...parents have come to associate rigor with stress and, by extension, stress with desirable outcomes like matriculation at highly selective colleges and elite universities. As a result, we’ve—astonishingly—normalized adolescent stress and its debilitating effects on our students. Whether parents want to inflict this sort of rigor on their children, many of them cast the K–12 school experience as a clash among young combatants driven by fierce competition toward an elusive outcome. In this prolonged, every-student-for-themselves siege, the prize at the end—selective college admission, ostensibly, with an accompanying network of influential contacts and the promise of a launching pad to a career—makes the stress, exhaustion, and misery of high school worthwhile.
This is not to suggest that academic achievement, ambition, or aspiration aren’t worthy and noble drivers, but there is an argument to be made against unnecessary, unhealthy, and inhumane academic distress—about the peril and the ethics of putting student achievement ahead of student wellness, and the fallacy that the two are competing aims. We need to question the role that rigor—and the needlessly stressful, content-focused learning design it perpetuates—plays in secondary schools today, at least as the predominant model. Not only is this sort of rigor unhealthy for kids, it’s not what they need to grow and thrive.
...prior to the pandemic, studies repeatedly ranked school and apprehension about getting into college as the top sources of stress for teens; these stressors, still weighing on adolescents in all of our schools, are compounded today by layers of anxiety brought about by COVID-19.
It’s important here to distinguish between eustress and distress. Eustress is normal psychological stress that’s beneficial, such as the familiar stomach butterflies we get before delivering speeches or our elevated concern about an approaching deadline. Distress is harmful stress that impairs us physically and emotionally and can have a lasting impact on our health. Distress is what young people today deal with when punishing homework loads, compulsion to stack their résumés with accomplishments, and relentless pressure to achieve—especially under the constraints of distance learning and fears about the virus—all masquerade as rigor.
Where do we go from here? We can begin by reframing what matters when preparing young people to thrive in college and life, to equip themselves for citizenship, and to find fulfilment in their learning experiences—starting with redefining rigor. In the 21st century, rigor should mean “the degree to which a student is in equal parts intellectually challenged, engaged, enriched, and empowered by an instructional program or course of study.”
Note that challenge remains the anchor term of the definition. But we must draw a distinction between the difficult workload that overwhelms students striving to read and memorize and dredge it all up for the test in schools today and the provocative, stimulating, sometimes vexing challenge of grasping complex ideas that make learning meaningful and rewarding (as well as empowering) to master. It is, after all, the love of learning, the questions that beget more questions, and the desire to know and discover that we educators wish for every student in our classrooms and which, sadly, is often snuffed out by the so-called rigor that buries their creativity and suffocates their curiosity.
Reimagining rigor that engages, enriches, and empowers students will require courage, patience, and grit from school leaders as they seek to upend deeply set misperceptions about what matters in education and devise a compelling parent education campaign. For a reimagined paradigm of rigor to take hold in our schools, parents must understand and value intellectual challenge, engagement, enrichment, and empowerment just as they currently embrace rigor-as-suffering. That is a tall order, and it must happen over time. But as rigor for rigor’s sake today continues to take a toll that for too many young people outweighs its elusive and costly payoff, demand for an alternative way is building among parents. In time, this demand will shift parental perceptions of value toward a more humane, student-centered, and meaningful conception of rigor.
Rigor today should mean more than suffering. As schools courageously embrace a new conception of rigor that rises above merely a crushing workload, we expect to see both increased student wellness and higher levels of more meaningful academic achievement. We owe it to our young people, and to our future, to make this happen.
All Students Need Anti-racism Education
by Christina Torres in Learning for Justice
Looking at anti-Blackness or inequities brought about by systems rooted in white supremacy and racism is something all students should be doing. While more institutions, including primarily or historically white ones, are committing to this work, white teachers with primarily white students can feel hesitant to discuss these issues since they may not feel it affects them. This idea is a fundamental misunderstanding of what anti-racist work actually is.
Doing the work in spaces of privilege may look different, but educators cannot pretend that anti-racist work doesn’t exist simply because their student body isn’t directly harmed by racism. There are clear aims that primarily white and otherwise privileged institutions must work toward in the fight against racism.
Students from communities with white privilege need to hear voices from other perspectives in order to grow their own thinking.
Students from privileged communities can struggle to understand privilege since they may feel that they have had to work hard or struggle at times in their lives. Teachers must help students understand how privilege works at a systemic level that may have given students an edge that, while it may be one they didn’t ask for, is still very real.
Most of us were taught to praise white-dominant cultural ideas: financial success, rugged individualism, paternalism. Because of this, cultures with different priorities may not be seen as “successful” or “valuable” in our eyes and in the eyes of our students. We need to teach students with privilege not to be “saviors” for historically disenfranchised communities, but rather to listen to, value and stand in kinship with them so we can work together toward justice.
Administrators, faculty and staff at primarily white or otherwise privileged institutions must question how this has affected their school, students and community. If you don’t have any Black students, why is that? If your school primarily serves folks with high socioeconomic status, what policies and events led to that? Schools need to consider how they can help create more integration in their community by having open and honest discussions with their parents and caregivers about the benefits of diverse schools (including for white students) or questioning policies (such as requirements regarding tardiness and truancy and dress codes) that have made it historically difficult for more diverse populations to join their school community.
Reprioritizing Standards for Middle and High School Students
by Heather Wolpert-Gawron in Edutopia
The next school year will not be off and running the way normalcy allows. We’ve learned too much. Those first couple of weeks will be about building community in the school and building community in the district. Those first couple of weeks will be about ensuring that students know the social and emotional resources that have been developed during this time: how to find the wellness center, how to make an appointment with a counselor, and how to set up a peer-to-peer meeting. This is the time to begin learning the students’ strengths, their interests, and their Covid stories. It’s the time to administer a quick academic or skills-based assessment, not for a grade, but to learn about each student’s growth area and about the leaps they may have made during this time. But it isn’t going to end after two weeks. This touching base will be ongoing because grief and sadness come in waves. And many of us will be reentering life in August still grieving the loss of a school year.
The need to prioritize and cull our standards has not ended. We can no longer go page by page through the textbook or the pacing guides that were designed in 2019. We need to examine what standards and skills are most vital and trim without remorse. This may also take focusing on more student choice and more skills-based assignments. It may mean more cross-curricular opportunities with other teachers to teach more efficiently and share the burden.
When I think about prioritizing standards, I think about three tips I learned from PBLWorks. These can help you decide on a focus for a project, sure, but I think they can also help you prioritize your quarter or semester as well.
1. Is the standard a foundational one? Is it one from which others are built?
2. Does the standard require deep thinking? Or is it merely Google-able?
3. Is it a cross-cutting skill that needs to be taught in other subjects as well? Does it need to be reinforced in order to highlight transference between subject areas?
We say we are prioritizing the standards now, but really, by prioritizing the standards, we are prioritizing the students. All the rest may not have been that important in the first place.
Patterns Broken: The Opportunity of the Mastery Transcript
by Ben Rein
As I developed my craft, my efforts at driving engagement moved from youthful “edutainment” (effective at times, yes, but exhausting and overly teacher-centered) to the pedagogical art of immersive, real-world, student-driven learning experiences and shared exploration. But for all my growth and development as an educator, I don’t think I ever fully succeeded in separating my students from the enduring question: “What do I have to do to get an A?”
As educators, our job is to do our best by each and every student in our care, and we have an obligation to think carefully about the impact of every aspect of the learner’s journey. While there is some legitimate discussion about the efficacy of grades as a predictor of student success in college—particularly in comparison to standardized test scores—there are few in education who would argue that the traditional grading system inspires deep learning and engagement from students. In fact, for most, there is an obvious and unhealthy disconnect between the two.
Grades may be the way that most teachers currently signal how well students are doing in the classroom, but they don’t necessarily signal what students know and can do. The purpose of schools should be to grow learners, not sort them, and we should never hesitate to question the systems that make this work more challenging. Changing grading isn’t simply changing school policy. It’s changing the way we understand how we learn, how we discover who we are, and how we relate to each other.
And in truth, it can’t be done at the margins. Only a wholesale and honest examination of these entrenched mechanisms and the impact they have on learners will allow us to recognize where changes are needed and the steps we can take to go about making them.
The Secret to Raising a Resilient Kid
By Erik Vance in The New York Times
Never has resilience — be it physical, mental, emotional or financial — been more important to our society than in the past year and a half, and never have I been so determined to pass it on to my son. He may not climb mountains, but life will always have a disaster, disappointment or pandemic to throw his way. If he can’t roll with the punches, his life will be very, very hard.
...most experts say resiliency is something that can be fostered, nurtured and developed in children from a very young age. You just have to build a safe foundation, find challenges and watch kids thrive.
Creating resilience in children isn’t just chucking them into the deep end of a pool to see if they can swim, it’s about the bedrock of support you give them every day.
Children need to feel they have a stable home base before they can take risks and learn to bounce back. If a child skins her elbow falling off a bike, the best way to help her get back on is to make sure she knows she’s loved no matter what. Dr. Masten said resilience is less a specific trait and more a network of overlapping ones, like flexibility, confidence and even societal supports, like health care and schooling. But the crucial part is that children feel safe and supported. In order to weather a storm, you need a solid shelter.
“You are always teaching by how you handle things yourself,” Dr. Masten said. “What parents do when they get upset, their kids are observing that.”
“One of the great skills of parenting is knowing how to challenge, when to challenge, how much to challenge,” Dr. Masten said. “There’s no one right way to foster resilience, just like there’s no one right way to parent.”
Inquiry and Imagination (Priority Standards for Our Work)
I have shared and viewed James Ryan’s 2016 HGSE graduation speech countless times, and while the words do not change their message and import grows each time. Ryan’s emphasis on curiosity, care, imagination, hope, and inquiry through questions are what I believe should be the ‘Priority Standards’ for the Blake faculty and staff…
Dean James Ryan's 5 Essential Questions In Life
(6:49)
- Wait, what?
- I wonder...why/if
- Couldn’t we at least?
- How can I help?
- What truly matters (to me)?
I look forward to the success, challenges, and opportunities for growth that await us. It is my steadfast hope that we can keep our Guiding Lights (students, core values, mission and essential question) at the forefront of our thoughts, mindsets, and actions with strategic foresight, grace, and a willingness to adapt so that our precious children (and all of us) feel beloved and supported (Knowing our Why, Starting with Why, Sharing our Why, and Acting with Why) on this important and imperfect journey.
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Take care.
Nat