To encourage dialogue and reflection about how our interests and strengths affect learning, our question for this week is: What do you love learning about? Learning to Love Learning (Week of 4/9/23) (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
The sunshine and spring-like weather this past weekend felt like a gift and we spent some time outside over the past few days - taking walks, gardening, and just relaxing. A treat was going to the Celtics together as a family on Friday night, and we enjoyed having Maggie home with us. On Sunday we spent time with my family - always fun to have the cousins hang out! For those who celebrated Easter or Passover this past week, I hope that they were enjoyed.
- Asset-centered vs Deficit-centered approaches in schools
- ‘If you want something out of a child, accuse them of it first’
- Building systems for learning
- Navigating tensions in schools
- - Instead of asking ‘What’s wrong with this kid?’ Ask ‘What happened to this kid?’
There are many more as well (as indicated in last week’s Natworthy!), but these are the ones that seem to be at the forefront of my thoughts and reflections. In different ways, they have each helped me frame ideas and offer perspective when making decisions, in meetings, and planning some programming. They also speak to the need - and, it’s a need that I feel is becoming increasingly more and more important to recognize and meet - to look at the systems we have in place to work towards our goals for students and learning.
The three posts below (two recent and one from a few years back) all lean into broad areas of focus for schools - skill-based and forward-thinking structures and systems that will support our students. Although they do not outline how these areas translate to the day-to-day details in the classroom, the systems of thought and action provide the framework and guidelines for a coherent approach to be realized. As we look to re-examine, consolidate, and enhance our approach to feedback at Blake with our Learning Skills, I think each of these posts provide some ‘food for thought’ that is worthy of collective reflection and dialogue.
Q&A: Michele Borba on Teaching Students to Thrive
by Sarah McKibben in ASCD
The bottom line is that as a teacher, you know your students best. What do your students need, particularly your struggling ones? Build those strengths that will make your students healthier, happier, and more productive. That’s how we're going to raise up a stronger generation.
We have to do a reboot. Our children have been primed for good test scores—and they're doing quite well. They're a very well-educated and smart group of kids. Their IQs are going up, but their skill sets in terms of handling the next bump in the road aren’t. This generation is going to need to be resilient.
The best schools and classrooms I’ve visited are ones where everyone is on board—where, for example, they decide to work on developing self-control, but not in a generic way.
The first thing we need to do is realize that parents are out of tools themselves. Even last night, I was on a Zoom call with parents and several of them broke down crying because they desperately want their kids to be happy and succeed, but they don't see that happiness and success isn’t achieved through a GPA. Parents need to help their children find their strengths and assets.
Empathy, empathy, empathy. We have to make sure that we stay human in our connections with each other…Next to empathy, I believe curiosity is essential for an AI world. To be able to think outside the box and to anticipate, “OK, what's my plan B?” To really be open to ideas and possibilities. The fascinating thing I discovered in my research is the multiplier effect. You put any two strengths (or traits) together, they multiply the outcome. So, what you really need is empathy and curiosity together. That’s what's going to make you innovative.
The Five Questions That Most Define My Work
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
…our lives are driven by questions, and the pursuit of interesting questions is the vehicle through which we learn most effectively. Think of any great invention, any great achievement, for that matter almost every act in our lives; they all start with questions, large or small. And like adults, kids learn most profoundly around questions that matter to them.
- What happens to schools at a moment when information, knowledge, teachers, and technologies for learning are readily available and carried in our pockets?
- Why is there a disconnect between what most educators say they believe about how learning occurs and what they practice in classrooms?
- What are the skills, literacies, and dispositions that our kids will need in order to flourish in their lives?
- How do we bring relevant, sustainable change to legacy systems of education?
- What don’t I know about how people, and specifically kids, learn with or without technology?
Five Themes for Educators in 2023
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
…while there are too many topics to mention in one post about what we might focus on in this new year, we want to share five themes that will comprise much of our attention as we continue to try to make sense of this complex moment we find ourselves in.
Artificial Intelligence –The second half of 2022 was literally breathtaking in terms of how quickly advances in generative writing, art, and other AI tools have taken hold. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that nothing will have more of an impact on how we think about the practice and outcomes of education moving forward.
Regenerative Design – It’s a hard reality to acknowledge, but it’s now clear that our environmental challenges are becoming more and more difficult to overcome, and that our students will be living as adults in a period of great disruption and hardship. There is now a compelling argument that schools must redesign their most fundamental systems, practices, and pedagogies to focus on the regeneration of all life on the planet.
2043 – Given the uncertainty of what’s ahead, it’s more important than ever to develop cultures and systems that have “one foot in the future.” School communities must engage in building the collective capacity to develop a futures lens through which to make every decision about the experience of school they create for students.
“Epistemic Humility” – With the increasing scale and complexity of the information we are being subjected to every day, individual educators and school communities must now learn and employ new strategies for separating fact from fiction, determining truth, and creating and contributing knowledge in ethical and effective ways. The very nature of literacy is in question.
Urgency – The last few years have taught us that we no longer have any time to waste when it comes to a focus on relevance, wellness, justice, and sustainability in schools. 2023 may very well be an inflection point where we either commit to interrogating our current missions and visions and move to articulate new ones, or we risk being overwhelmed by the existential challenges that now face teaching and learning and education writ large.
…these are the realities of our times. There are challenges, for sure, but there are also opportunities to do great and meaningful work this year. We hope to engage in these and other topics in ways that continue to make you think, and, importantly, act.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What helps you embrace change and why is change important?
- Change is good for you and your body. It is important because it helps you grow and learn as a person.
- Always looking at the bright side of things and seeing how they really help.
- Embracing change may be hard for everyone, but that change may change the world for the better.
- stepping into the shoes of the people bringing on the change, it's important because the only thing that doesn't change, is that everything will always change, and it is very important to recognise that
- Change is important because it teaches you to adapt. Without learning to adapt, you will go through many hard things in life, too stubborn to change but too weak to learn.
In an effort to align with the spirit of Spring and continue celebrating National Poetry Month, Wordsworth’s poem below felt appropriate to share this week.
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Take care.
Nat