To encourage dialogue and reflection about the conditions and environment that foster and nurture learning, our question for the week is: What do you need to help you learn? Intentional Conditions for Learning (Week of 9/12/21) (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
We felt fortunate to have such a lovely September weekend and took time to be outside as much as we could, and I hope that everyone enjoyed the sunlight and fresh air. Although we have been back in school together for a pretty short period of time, it sure feels as though we are getting into the swing of things!
As I have been reflecting (thinking about our opening assemblies, reading the learning inventory responses from our students/families, meeting with staff, articulating plans/goals for this year, etc.) upon these conditions for our students and school, I have been trying to be sure to do the same for myself. During our opening professional days, I asked everyone to think and reflect in their sketchbooks intentions for self-care. I have come to learn (and continue to learn) how important self-care is for my own learning, and more important that I must be intentional with this practice. In the spirit of sharing and acting on this important intention, I know that making space for reflection and reading/listening are essential for my own learning and sharing the learning enhances the process. The ‘shares’ below (I have attempted to categorize them a bit) are intended to help articulate and open up dialogue (and hopefully action) for how we can establish systems for a continuous culture of learning, adaptation, and growth for our students.
Reading/Listening and Sharing
The posts below directly and indirectly address and outline conditions that foster authentic learning - pushing me (and hopefully others) to reflect upon the ways we are currently meeting and not meeting these conditions. This reflective process will help us to better understand our own practices and systems to hopefully improve and grow as a community.
How Might Change Be Driven by Coherence?
by Homa Tavangar (@HomaTav) and Will Richardson (@willrich45)
In our best world, all of our actions center the greater, or public good. We share a vision for a just, equitable, thriving society, and we contribute our ideas and our work in service to that. We are a community. We are truly neighbors who care for and support each other’s aspirations because we know achieving them will serve us all, not just the individual. In our current world, however, most of our actions serve the private good. We seek to “win” at the expense of others. We value the tangible things upon which we can measure our success. We put ourselves in the center of the story, and we feel impacted only by what we see in front of us.
In order for our species to survive and thrive, we must act for the global good. It’s not so much about allegiance to our cities or towns or nations as it is the collective of humans on the planet. This moment is telling us that how we act impacts all others and the world itself. It should just be a reminder, but for some it feels like a brand new lesson.
...coherence will only be found when we acknowledge our profound connection to everything around us. Only when we begin to not just articulate values and commitments that center justice and equality and respect but to also live those values as well can we begin down the path to coherence. And that, too, is where schools must start now. Change conversations can no longer be focused on how we might live differently in our schools but how we might live differently as schools in the world. We must start with a commitment to shared values that contribute to the global good, and we must fiercely inquire about and interrogate the gaps between those values and our practice.
Martin Reeves on The Imagination Machine
by Getting Smart Staff in Getting Smart
“Becoming skillful at harnessing imagination means becoming skillful at exploring and moving things from the unreal to real.”
“In a healthy business, no one thinks that they have the answer.”
“Impart curiosity – celebrate questions. My family celebrates especially if [I] don’t know the answer… and if mankind doesnt know the answer.”
“Algebra takes out the most important part of problem-solving — framing the problem. It already tells you what kind of problem it is.”
“Complacency and fear kill imagination in an organization.”
“Technology can power up our imaginations by detecting anomalies and serving as fuel for creativity. [Educators should ask themselves] is what’s being taught in the domain of things that machines will/can do? Or are they uniquely human traits?”
Knowing Students Deeply is the Most Important Thing We Can Do
by Pamela Cantor in Getting Smart
The dominant narratives about “Covid learning loss,” trauma, and historic inequities are not lost on young people. They play to fears many of them have about their futures. Worse, they can become internalized as personal failure and damage. Labeling themselves this way can be harmful and runs counter to everything we know from developmental and learning science about human resilience and potential. So how can schools be ready, really ready to welcome all of this, the good, the great, and the challenges they will soon see every day?
...recognize that variation, individuality, and potential are the essential ingredients of human development. The approaches taken thus far to education have not fully challenged assumptions about learning—is it highly variable or does it fall into a bell curve? Intelligence – is it defined by our genes or does context drive their expression? Skills – are they malleable or fixed? Talent – is it plentiful or scarce? Or human potential – what might any child be capable of under the right conditions? We need to stop offering menus of labels and interventions and instead conceive of a response that reflects a new, equitable purpose for education that is relationship-rich, holistic, rigorous, supportive, and profoundly engaging for students.
If we optimize the contexts for learning, we optimize the possibility that our young people will not only catch up and recover from the effects of this past year—we will have also made a down payment on the learning settings we need to build for our kids and their futures.
Thus far, large-scale efforts to improve opportunities for deeper learning have focused on interventions and programs that generate incremental change, and only for some children. What we need now is a transformational shift.
We all have a role in building this comprehensive, integrated web of environments, relationships, and experiences that will boost each child’s learning and healthy whole-child development. If well-designed and intentional, these webs can provide the foundation for the development of complex skills and competencies that ultimately reveal the talent, passions, and potential of each and every child.
Year of Listening
by Kelly Niccolls in Getting Smart
I’m not quite sure the exact time when I finally started listening. There had been many messages and communication attempts. No matter how many times I heard them, it took me a while before I listened.
Zora Neale Hurston said, there are years of questions, and years that answer. This is a year of answers in my educational leadership journey. And many of us are finally listening. We stand on the edge and we hear it: the sounds of our mentors. The sounds of future generations. The sound of the genuine. The reason why we entered into the work. And then, many of us look around and see nothing familiar. We are lost. We have been consumed by the institutional machine and were unable to look and hear clearly, until now.
The future of public education is dependent on if/how leaders at the edge will listen and respond. Some of us are stepping off the ledge, venturing out beyond what we can see, and finding our truth there. Some of us are retreating back, afraid of the risk. Some of us are stuck and unable to move or be moved.
Now is the time for us leaders, steadying on the edge, or out beyond, to shine our souls and find each other. To:
- Extend our hands, and connect.
- Find our footing in collective strength and know we are not alone.
- Hear each other and trust our wisdom so that we do not retreat or fall off the edge, but rather cross the threshold into the future of public education.
- Be wholehearted, unapologetic, and relentless in our pursuit of what is best for our young people and communities.
- Continue to listen to and trust each other.
- Believe our communities when they show us who they are, and listen for what they need us to be.
- Know where we stand, and regularly ask if we are where we need to be.
- Be willing to act as soon as we know what we need to do.
Asking and Listening
Asking questions (of our students, families, community, and ourselves) is a critical practice as it validates one’s voice, identity, and perspective. It is incumbent upon all of us to continue asking questions - and to listen...
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What are you hoping to learn this year?
- I really like science and I love doing group projects.
- I am hoping to learn how to be more efficient!
- I'm hoping to improve in the band this year.
- I am hoping to learn how to do square root
- About current events and animals.
- New topics
- I am hoping to learn something unique and interesting from my students each day.
- I'm hoping to learn more effective and engaging strategies for guiding my students to become more confident and proficient readers.
- I hope to learn more skills in math!
- I'm hoping to learn to be a bit more measured when I am stressed.
- How to help my children better manage stress and anxiety!!
- I'm hoping to learn more about ancient Greece and Rome in Social Studies.
- Anything and everything
- I am hoping to learn more about Standards Based Reporting at Blake.
- I am hoping to learn about the 6-8 grade curriculum and how to make my interventions practical and aligned with state standards.
An Openness to Change and Action
The words below from William Pollard speak to me on many levels as they address one of the real challenges we face in education as we look to meet the needs of our current students. We must stay current and forward-thinking, respecting past practices but making sure that these past practices do not always suffice and ‘hold up’ to meet the needs and challenges that are the present reality.
Last week Dr. Roger Weissberg, co-founder and Chief Knowledge Officer of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), died and his words below have been shared in blogs, education outlets, and social media throughout the week. They speak to the essence of our work and I believe they can serve as a compass point for our learning community as we continuously reflect upon our intentions and systems/practices/actions, always looking to bridge the gap that may exist between them.
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Take care.
Nat