To help encourage dialogue and reflection about what learning could look like for each individual, our question of the week is: If you could design your own day of learning, what would it look like? Designing Your Learning (Week of 3/28/21) (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
Waking up on Saturday morning to the warm temperatures, sunlight, and clear blue sky felt like a wonderful gift. I continue to be reminded of the impact that environmental factors have on my temperament and perspective - it may sound obvious, but this is certainly one of ‘affirmed’ or ‘relearned’ lessons of this last year. Our daffodils bloomed at the end of the week and I hope this trend continues!
I look forward to the sharing and collaboration of our collective learning from #DLDMedfield, and hope the sharing serves as initial (or continued) steps along the path towards our mission/vision for our students. Whether we are articulating and exercising Tom Daccord’s ‘Someday/Monday’ practice after a day of learning (Someday I will…, Monday I will…), taking time at a faculty meeting, reading and doing research on one’s own, journaling, having a conversation with a student/colleague, or whatever might work for each one of us, one of the keys for learning lies in the balance of the individual with the collective group. By keeping this question in mind - How can we help each learner (students, teachers, families, community) learn? - we will keep these thoughts, hopes, and potential/articulated actions on the forefront of our work.
In my own continued practice of learning (holding myself accountable and hopefully providing a way for others to hold me accountable as well), I am sharing an assortment of ideas, thoughts, and principles that have stayed with me from #DLDMedfield…
Two quotes/notes from Malika Ali (@Malika_Ali)
- ‘My identity walks with me into every room I enter’
- ‘When you care enough to try to understand, that goes a long way’
Some notes from Justin Reich (@bjfr)
- 3 things we should all be doing...
- Reflecting upon what we have learned
- Celebrating what has been gained
- Grieving what has been lost
- Reflecting upon what we have learned
- To help change the narrative: ‘Talk and listen’
- We want to foster more self-directed, independent learners
- ‘Equalizing doesn’t respect individuality’
- This past year we had to put a mantra into practice - ‘We literally had to meet them where they are at’ (in their homes, in hybrid, in person)
- What are environments where people really learn? What do they look like?
- We need to listen to young people
- Talk to students and listen; Promise to take students seriously
- Talk to students and listen; Promise to take students seriously
- Students/teachers/families - surveys
- Connect and extend challenges
- We convey what we value by what we teach and how we teach
- We need to embrace a spirit of tinkering and continuous improvement
- Human development is critical
Quotes from Katie Martin and Monica Martinez...
Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
(10:47)
3 Factors Lead to Better Performance and Personal Satisfaction
Autonomy - desire to be self-directed; if you want engagement, self-directed is better; Genius Hour; Passion Projects
Mastery - Urge to get better at stuff; musical instruments at weekend; fun, you get better at it, satisfying; YouTube; WikiPedia; doing sophisticated, technically challenging work; challenge and mastery - wanting to make a contribution
Purpose - want to have a transcendent purpose; purpose motive; a reason for the work (a mission, a reason, a mantra); we are purpose maximizers
What fosters and what inhibits sustainable change?
Towards the end of this past week, I listened to these two episodes from The Tom Schimmer Podcast - the ‘Leading Change in Assessment’ sections drew me in and led me to the article below from John Kotter, written in 1995. The episodes and posts are relevant to #DLDMedfield and our work today as educators - we are in a period of change (and we always will/should be in education), and the lessons within these resources are ones that I found to be both affirming and prescriptive.
Happy for Others | Peter DeWitt | Leading Change in Assessment
(1 hr 36 min)
In Don't @ Me (2:45), Tom examines the question of why it's so hard for us to be happy for others. Then, Tom is joined by Dr. Peter DeWitt (17:38) to discuss what it means to be an instructional leader. Finally, in Assessment Corner (1:19:07), Tom uses Dr. John Kotter's research to explore the important phases necessary to transform the assessment & grading culture of a school.
Relentless Outrage | Matt Townsley | Leading Change in Assessment (2)
(1 hr, 32 min)
In Don't @ Me (1:24), Tom takes aim at the relentlessly outraged and details why we are all at risk of losing all perspective, resiliency, individuality, & common-sense. Then, Tom is joined by Dr. Matt Townsley (15:30) to discuss the implementation of standards-based grading at the Secondary level. Finally, in Assessment Corner (1:11:40), Tom (continuing from last week's episode) uses Dr. John Kotter's research to explore the important phases necessary to transform the assessment & grading culture of a school.
Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail
by John P. Kotter in Harvard Business Review
The most general lesson to be learned from the more successful cases is that the change process goes through a series of phases that, in total, usually require a considerable length of time. Skipping steps creates only the illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result. A second very general lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating hard-won gains.
Error #1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency
Error #2: Not Creating a Powerful Enough Guiding Coalition
Error #3: Lacking a Vision
Error #4: Under-communicating the Vision by a Factor of Ten
Error #5: Not Removing Obstacles to the New Vision
Error #6: Not Systematically Planning For and Creating Short-Term Wins
Error #7: Declaring Victory Too Soon
Error #8: Not Anchoring Changes in the Corporation’s Culture
Reading to Frame Thinking
The posts below are ones that have been helpful for me over the past few months, as we think about the ways our learning structures, expectations, and environments have adapted over the last year - and, in turn, the possibilities and potential for our students and schools.
Rethinking US education: What if everything we believe about education is a lie?
by Robert Pondiscio in The Hechinger Report
If there was ever a time to ask big, heretical questions about American K-12 education, it’s when schooling has been thrown into chaos by a pandemic, and Americans’ faith in institutions, including schools, is at ebb tide. Let’s consider for a moment if our egalitarian impulses, however well-intended, have prevented us from pursuing a vision of public education that could be more fruitful and satisfying for vastly more students, and healthier for civil society.
Perhaps it is better merely to value and valorize diversity as an end in itself, because a virtuous society wants its children to have a warm and trusting relationship with authority figures from the broadest range of backgrounds. It is a very different thing to ask, “What do we want every child to achieve?” and “What do we want every child to experience?”
To be clear and emphatic: Education is our most optimistic and aspirational business, so we should never abandon our fondest hopes for it. Neither should we countenance a grim, deterministic view of human ability and allow schools to be mere sorting mechanisms. But with so much in flux right now, perhaps we should take advantage of our national inflection point to question our assumptions and ask what schooling would look like if the goal of education were not to “improve outcomes” but to enhance individual flourishing.
What Covid-19 Revealed About Schools and Education - Make Schools More Human
by Jal Mehta in The New York Times
There is little doubt that going to school is, on average, better for students. They are frequently tuning out of virtual learning. In higher poverty communities, older students are working to help make ends meet or have simply disappeared from the school rolls. What parents have seen streamed into their living rooms often reflects uninspired curriculums and pedagogy. Students think much of what they are learning is irrelevant and disconnected from their identities and the world around them.
These are not new problems — they are just newly visible because of the pandemic, and in some cases exacerbated by it.
There has been considerable attention to the health crisis, and some to the economic crisis. But there hasn’t been a serious commitment to the corresponding educational crisis. We need to rebuild and reimagine schools. We now have a chance to do both.
We’re Trying To Do “The Wrong Thing Right” in Schools
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
Richardson is on my list of 'must follows' and this post sparked the focus of my thinking - within, he references the work of Russell Ackoff, an organizational theorist and professor at Wharton. There are several important messages here with implications for our work, and the questions within are important to reference on a regular basis. Although he wrote this post in 2016, the meaning is as pertinent as ever.
Words from Russell Ackoff: “Peter Drucker said ‘There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.’ Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake and correct it you become wronger. So it’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Almost every major social problem that confronts us today is a consequence of trying to do the wrong things righter.”
Sadly, “doing the right thing” for our kids in schools is difficult. In education, our structures, our histories, our nostalgia for trying to do the “wrong thing right” runs deep. Regardless of how we got here (and the story is complex,) we are profoundly wedded to what now constitutes this “education system” that dominates our learning world. The roles and expectations of students and teachers and administrators and parents are so clearly reinforced by our own experience, our cultural representations, and by those who have millions of dollars invested in the status quo that any serious suggestion that we might be doing the “wrong thing” is simply layered over by a new initiative, a new technology, a new curriculum, or a new success story to avoid having to grapple with the more fundamental question.
Doing the right thing in schools starts with one fairly straightforward question: What do you believe about how kids learn most powerfully and deeply in their lives? Once you’ve answered that as an individual and as a school community, the question that follows is does your practice in classrooms with kids honor those beliefs? In other words, if you believe that kids learn best when they have authentic reasons for learning, when their work lives in the world in some real way, when they are pursuing answers to questions that they themselves find interesting, when they’re not constrained by a schedule or a curriculum, when they are having fun, and when they can learn with other students and teachers, then are you giving priority to those conditions in the classroom? Are you acting on your beliefs?
Teresa Thayer Snyder: What Shall We Do About the Children After the Pandemic
Posted by Diane Ravitch
I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement and greet the children where they are, not where we think they “should be.” Greet them with art supplies and writing materials, and music and dance and so many other avenues to help them express what has happened to them in their lives during this horrific year. Greet them with stories and books that will help them make sense of an upside-down world. They missed you. They did not miss the test prep. They did not miss the worksheets. They did not miss the reading groups. They did not miss the homework. They missed you.
Listening
The answers to last week’s question serve as a great framework for the ways that we can think about designing our own learning - and, hopefully, helping our students to design their own learning as well...
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: How do you define learning?
- I think learning is getting more knowledge or experience.
- mastery through experience over time.
- Understanding and being able to do / explain something that you could not previously do.
- Learning is acquiring skills and the compassionate perspectives that allow us to use them to better our community.
- Learning is something you know when you see it (or better yet feel it), but almost impossible to define. The work of educators is to wrangle it with a rope, except learning continuously evolves, it is infinite, and its border are porous, soft, jelly-like, slippery. Finally, when one has thought they have captured learning, it changes, and then the teachers learns they need to begin again. That's why I love it. We are never done.
- The gaining of knowledge. But not always wisdom.
- Expanding your brain's sight of the world.
- I define learning by sitting down and someone teaching their knowledge.
- To me learning is when you don't know something and then when you do you learned what you didn't know.
- Answering questions.
- A way to obtain knowledge and how to be smart
- Hard and sometimes fun
- I define learning as getting more knowledge than you had before.
- I define learning as helpful for you in life.
- Learning is as delicate as the summer breeze,
- Granting you knowledge if you choose to accept
- The miracles that can be achieved if you only choose to believe that you can go beyond the stars, reaching past the moon because you believe that with intelligence, and a kind heart, anything is possible.
- I would define learning as a way for children and adults to be knowledgeable of different topics of the world. Learning can happen in many different ways, for some people learning is an easy thing to do but for others, learning a certain topic can be difficult but it can be done with the help of others.
- Learning is discovering new and interesting information!
- When you learn something new
- Learning something new
- Getting smarter
- A way to better understand you and the world.
- I would define learning as our brain and body receiving information. I think that you can learn anywhere at any time. We are always learning, I have never gone a day without learning something. Learning is not something you're taught how to do; you just take in information and store it away for safekeeping.
- I define learning as taking in new knowledge to learn more about the world around us.
- Learning is a way you gain knowledge but you can only gain knowledge if you push yourself and try new things.
As we look to the transitions for our students (and teachers and families, of course) both for this spring and the coming fall, the words from John Dewey and beloved children’s author, Beverly Cleary, who passed away at the end of this past week, can serve as guideposts and compass points...
As always, let me know of any questions/concerns.
Please click here for Blake Updates.
Please click here for District Community Notices.
Take care.
Nat