To help encourage conversations and dialogue about fostering a happy and healthy learning environment, our topic/question for the dinner table is: How can we make learning a happy experience? Please see link to Google Form to share your responses: Happy Learning Environments (Week of 11/7/16) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Hopefully the extra hour with daylight savings this past weekend was enjoyed and relished by all! I am still smiling thinking about #Projectoldschool and the festive spirit of the Blake staff last Monday - a special thanks again to Susan for her enthusiasm, persistence, and efforts. And, as she said, if it were not the for the willing participation from everyone, it would not happen - thank you! After soccer games and some yard work on Saturday, we had a nice time getting together with our British friends Sunday afternoon for their annual Guy Fawkes Night party.
I was fortunate at the end of last week to attend EdTech Teacher's Innovation Summit in Boston. The format of this conference has evolved from the iPad Summit in an effort to broaden the scope and focus of the collaborative network of learning. In talking with Tom Daccord, it was interesting to hear his thoughts about the challenges he/they wrestled with in designing the two days - trying to meet the needs of all educators, schools, and presenters coming from a wide range of structures and experiences. The parallels to the day-to-day challenges we face in our classrooms with our students was tangible.
As is often the case with me and my early-bird nature, I was the first attendee to arrive on Friday morning for the keynote speech. As I settled in and began to check e-mail and do some work, I also took some time to reflect on the nature of professional development and conferences - so many attendees from all over the country and Canada coming, I'm sure, for different reasons. I think it was Tom's conversation on Thursday that sparked these thoughts. So, I think it is important to ask - Why do we go to conferences and what are the parallels we can find and discover for our students and the learning we want for them? I know I am drawn to professional development and conferences/workshops such as these for multiple reasons - to foster connections with colleagues, learn more about a certain topic, grow as a leader, be exposed to new ideas, affirm one's work, and to bring ideas back to Blake (this list could go on and on). On Thursday and Friday I found myself in the role of a true learner, both active and passive, as I was both presenting/sharing as well as seeking and receiving the learning. The two keynote speakers (Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Jaime Casap, Chief Education Evangelist for Google - yes, that is his title!) were enlightening, inspiring, centering, and meaningful. I look forward to sharing the ideas in the near future and, as has become my practice, have highlighted some of the mindsets, questions, notes, and thoughts that I noted during the two days below - you will see the acronym SIDKY - 'Something I didn't know yesterday'. In addition I am sharing three posts that I hope you will find of interest - bringing together some of the ideas that are relevant to our work at Blake.
Mindsets/Notes/Thoughts from the Innovation Summit (please let me know if you have questions or want to hear more - I welcome those conversations)...
- Importance of appreciating the work of the practitioners
- Technical challenges vs Adaptive challenges (Ron Heifetz)
- Inventions vs innovations
- What will the school of the future look like?
- First principle of all innovation is vision, asking the question 'What is the future we are seeking today?'
- Gordon Brown - 'To be a teacher, you need to be a prophet'
- We need to learn together differently
- There is no more institution than school to create change
- We need to find mechanisms to 'break the loop'
- Starting points - recognize the challenge
- Have a bias towards action (Someday/Monday) - a bias towards starting
- 'It's really ok to screw up' - mantra and attribute of innovative cultures
- Recognize the symbolic role of hierarchical authority
- Ask the question - 'What do we not want to change?'
- Caring parents are often in a 'state of fear' or 'state of close to fear'
- SIDKY - Something I didn't know yesterday
- ‘If it isn’t student centered, it isn’t something we should be doing’ - Martin Moran
- If something is worth doing, it is worth assessing how we are doing it
- ‘If you want to build a robot that works, build a robot that doesn’t work and fix it’
- ‘What does awesome look like’?
- ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know if you’ve arrived?’
- Go back to the why
- At the end of the year, who do you expect your students to be?
- Doesn’t make sense to ask ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Ask ‘What problem do you want to solve?’...’What do you need to learn to solve that problem?’
- Are we asking old education questions or new education questions?
- Magic Triangle - Purpose, Autonomy, and Skills
- We need iteration and innovation
- We are impacting kids/students we will never meet…
The Skills Agenda: Preparing Students for the Future
by Zoe Tabary in The Economist
This article and the image within was highlighted by Day 2 Keynote speaker Jaime Casap, Chief Education Evangelist at Google. The post highlights key findings from an Economist Intelligence Unit report on the skills being taught in education around the world and the extent that these skills match those needed in the workplace. It affirms the work we are currently doing with Standards Based Reporting and Learning Skills.
Problem solving, team working, and communication (commonly known as “21st century skills”) are the most-needed skills in the workplace, according to our recent surveys of business executives, students and teachers.
...the young have become more comfortable learning on their own, especially on topics of interest: 62% of teachers report that students are becoming more independent and able to gather information themselves. As one expert interviewed for the report puts it, “young people have an innate affinity with technology, and it would be a shame not to utilise that effectively”.
In Praise of the Incomplete Leader
by Deborah Ancona, Thomas W. Malone, Wanda J. Orlikowski, and Peter M. Senge in Harvard Business Review
As Senge outlined in his Day 1 keynote, collaboration is at the heart of all learning. The model of distributed leadership outlined in this post has a framework of four key capabilities: sensemaking, relating, visioning, and inventing. It is a liberating read, as the principles rely on our 'leaning on others' to grow and find success.
It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person at the top who’s got it all figured out. In fact, the sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be. In today’s world, the executive’s job is no longer to command and control but to cultivate and coordinate the actions of others at all levels of the organization. Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete—as having both strengths and weaknesses—will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.
All this work has led us to develop a model of distributed leadership. This framework, which synthesizes our own research with ideas from other leadership scholars, views leadership as a set of four capabilities: sensemaking (understanding the context in which a company and its people operate), relating (building relationships within and across organizations), visioning (creating a compelling picture of the future), and inventing (developing new ways to achieve the vision).
Sensemaking, relating, visioning, and inventing are interdependent. Without sensemaking, there’s no common view of reality from which to start. Without relating, people work in isolation or, worse, strive toward different aims. Without visioning, there’s no shared direction. And without inventing, a vision remains illusory. No one leader, however, will excel at all four capabilities in equal measure.
Even the most talented leaders require the input and leadership of others, constructively solicited and creatively applied. It’s time to celebrate the incomplete—that is, the human—leader.
How A Happy School Can Help Students Succeed
by Kat Lonsdorf in NPREd
This brief post emphasizes the importance and impact of a happy and healthy school culture, something we strive towards every day at Blake (#projectoldschool comes to mind!). I appreciate principal Pam Hogue's goal 'to be an educator and not a principal'.
A study published in the Review of Educational Research today suggests that school climate is something educators and communities should prioritize — especially as a way to bridge the elusive achievement gap. The authors analyzed more than 15 years of research on schools worldwide, and found that positive school climate had a significant impact on academics.
Pam Hogue sees school climate as a launching point — a way to catapult kids toward opportunities outside their immediate environment.
"What we want to do is give our kids not only the skills but also the attitudes — things like confidence — to choose where they go in their life," Hogue says. "I want them to have the skills and the confidence to make that change."
Much of what we talk about is how to bring about change - for our students, our community, our learning environments, and for one another. Acknowledging our own flaws, biases, and areas of growth is an important step and I hope we can continue to foster a culture that fosters that sense of openness - for students, staff, parents, and the greater community. The challenge lies in the reality that we are complex and schools are complex. At the end of the proverbial day we want to establish a happy and healthy learning environment. Let's continue to keep that at the forefront of our thoughts - please let me know how I can do better and we can do better in this endeavor.
I look forward to the work that lies ahead for all of us.
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Take care.
Nat