To help encourage conversations and dialogue about how we can foster a sense of community, our topic/question for the week is: How can/will you contribute to the Blake community this week? Fostering Community (Week of 9/10/17) (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.
We enjoyed a very quiet, relaxed, and low-key last Friday evening at our house as we watched the 'XQ Super School' special about 'the future of high school'. It definitely sparked some good conversations in our house and provided some good for thought about our own beliefs and structures. This past weekend also marked the beginning of the kids' fall sports and we celebrated Grayden's 8th birthday with a few of his buddies, ending with a pizza and 'make your own sundae' party! We are hoping to have family dinner tonight to 'prepare' for our first 5 day week!
What hopes do you have for this year?
What fears do you have for this year?
How can we empower our students?
These three questions were the ones we all reflected on as we began our 2017-2018 year together as a staff. The intent behind these prompts is to encourage individual and collective reflection and foster a sense of shared purpose, commitment, and community. At our opening assemblies with each grade level we emphasized our core values and the important and critical role that our students play - setting the tone for our school, the 'power' they have to have an influence on another's day, leadership opportunities, and by pure numbers the reality they have in shaping the culture of our community. Driving home after our 8th grade Parent Information Night last Thursday I was energized by the sense of true community from the evening and I hope we can continue to find opportunities to sustain that energy in a collective manner.
In an effort to keep it simple this week, I am sharing visualized responses that were offered from our staff to the question asking how we can empower our students...
Normalize Setbacks By Asking Your Kids For Advice When You Struggle
by Katrina Schwartz (@KSchwart) in MindShift
This brief post resonated with me as both an educator and a parent - thinking about ways that we can support our students and help foster the skills we want them to have. It is a great reminder of the importance of modeling and embracing vulnerability and engaging them in our learning and growth as well. The clip within the post (Adam Grant's Advice for Raising Resilient Kids) is interesting as well.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant says protecting kids from struggle may be counterproductive. He shared one tactic he uses with his own children with The Atlantic at the Aspen Ideas Festival. It’s not hard to do; he asks his kids for help when he faces a setback. He not only gets good advice from his kids, but he can reflect that wisdom back to them when they struggle. And, by putting his mistakes out in the open, he’s normalizing the experience of struggle.
“What is Good Gets Done”
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
Richardson is an educational leader and thinker, and one I consider a 'must follow'! Within this post is an interesting framework to reflect upon leadership styles and the resultant impact on the community. Richardson always makes me think and I love the notion of embracing this framework - 'what is good gets done'. It should spark some healthy conversations.
What about your school are you most proud of? What’s an example of the best work your students and teachers are doing? What’s the most interesting use of technology that you’ve seen in your classrooms? What’s your most interesting question right now? What principles drive your work?
The gist is that leaders are distinguished by which one of three “rules” they follow. The first is “What is rewarded gets done,” in which students, teachers, parents, and others are driven by extrinsic gain of some type. The second is “What is rewarding gets done,” where those groups are driven more by their intrinsic motivations. The third, which Sergiovanni labels “transformational,” is “What is good gets done,” where people are motivated by duty or obligation in a moral sense.
Very few places that I’ve been, very few leaders that I’ve worked with adhere to the rule “What is good gets done.” Unfortunately, most seem comfortable with the “What is rewarded gets done” mode of schooling. They want to add some tweaks to what that looks like, perhaps, but at the end of the day, the extrinsic rewards of high test scores, magazine badges, and college acceptances drive the work. It’s a struggle for them to truly aspire even to the “What is rewarding gets done” mode where students and teachers have more agency to pursue their interests and create value for themselves.
I look forward to the work that lies ahead for all of us.
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Take care.
Nat