To encourage dialogue and reflection about keeping having and keeping a focus, our question for the week is: What is one goal you have for Term 2? What steps will you take towards that goal? Keeping a Focus (Week of 12/10/23) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
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Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
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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
The month of December always seems to come up quickly and ‘move’ quickly as well - hard to believe it’s December 12! After an evening of fun at Holliston High School for Holliston basketball on Friday, we enjoyed a pretty quiet weekend - felt like a little bit of a ‘calm before the storm’, knowing what lies ahead. With only a few commitments it was nice to be able to relax and get some things done.
At Think Tank this week we talked a bit about the changes that are taking place and what we have seen - some cyclical, some new, and some that await us. For the changes that lie ahead (responses below reflect some thoughts from our community), our learning skills will remain critical…
S1. Collaborates with others
S2. Engages in learning
S3. Meets expectations for work completion
S4. Makes connections to extend learning
Yet, they will look different - and that is an area of focus I am leaning towards…
What do these skills look like today? What will they look like ‘tomorrow’? How can we foster them? What should/will the experiences look like? What needs to change?
These are just a few questions, but it is a focus that I hope we can help refine and clarify for our work. And I will be thinking about my own ‘personal steps’ to take towards the exploration of the questions above while also looking to broaden and foster the shared exploration for the Blake community.
The two shares below are ones I came across this week (one current and one from 2019), and they have helped me to dive in a bit deeper into this area of focus - hoping they may do the same for you as well.
Shares of Interest
Can Kids Grow Up If They're Constantly Tracked and Monitored?
(48 min) from EdSurge Podcast
Students these days are under constant watch with digital tools — whether it’s friends posting pictures on social media, or learning management systems sending parents alerts about missed assignments. And that can make it hard for students to learn to solve their own problems, argues Devorah Heitner, an author who advises schools on social media issues.
Can Everyone Be Excellent? - Alfie Kohn
by Alfie Kohn
…we hatched a thought experiment. Suppose that next year virtually every student in your state met the standards and passed the tests. What would the likely reaction be from politicians, businesspeople, and the media? Would these folks shake their heads in frank admiration and say, “Damn, those teachers must be good!”?
The inescapable implication, Debbie and I realized, is that the phrase “high standards” in the context of education reform means standards that all students will never be able to meet. Because if everyone did meet them, the standards would just be ratcheted up again — as high as necessary to ensure that some students failed.
…our little thought experiment uncovers a truth that extends well beyond what has been done to our schools in the name of “raising the bar” (a phrase, incidentally, that seems to have originated in the world of show horses). We have been taught to respond with suspicion whenever all members of a defined group are successful. That’s true even when we have no reason to believe that corners have been cut, or that the bar was suspiciously low. In America excellence is treated as an inherently scarce commodity.
Reframing excellence in competitive terms can’t be defended on the grounds that setting people against one another leads to improvement in their performance. Indeed, a surprisingly consistent body of social science evidence shows that competition tends to hold us back from doing our best — particularly in comparison with cooperation, in which people work with, not against, each other. Rather, excellence has been defined — for ideological reasons — as something that can’t be reached by everyone.
But boy, do we love to rank. Worse, we create artificial scarcity such as awards — distinctions manufactured out of thin air specifically so that some cannot get them. Every contest involves the invention of a desired status where none existed before and none needs to exist. This creates an adversarial mentality that makes productive collaboration less likely, encourages gaming the system, and leads all concerned to focus not on meaningful improvement but on trying to outdo (and perhaps undermine) everyone else.
Perhaps it’s time to rescue the essence of excellence — a more common-sense understanding of the idea that is also more democratic: Everyone may not get there, but at least in theory all of us could.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: How do you think schools and education will change in the next year?
- I think trust in older systems will come into question, for better or for worse.
- More focus on how to have students use AI
- I think there will be more electronics and less paper. (Personally though I prefer paper)
- Learning from prior mistakes
- More opportunities to reflect on kids' mental health.
- I don't think the education will change much because there is not a lot to change
- Every year schools learn more about the students at their school and adapt to what they do.
- I think the schools will become more modern and achieve new ideas
- Everything will become more hard
- I don't know
- There will be more technology to help people when they are stuck on a problem.
- Next year, I think schools and education will use more AI.
- More discoveries less homework for less stress
- I think schools and education will be revamped next year.
- Change things that they tried but didn't work out.
- I think that the teaching will become easier.
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Take care.
Nat