To help encourage conversations and dialogue about the ways our beliefs and an awareness of our beliefs will help inform our learning, our topic/question for the week is: How can your beliefs help to guide and improve your learning? Leaning On (And Learning From) Our Beliefs (Week of 4/27/20) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
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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
With the bookends of rainy days on Friday and Sunday, we thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine on Saturday - getting out in the garden, going for a walk with Lila, simply soaking in some light. We also took advantage of an online delivery of baking supplies from King Arthur and enjoyed pancakes, blondies, and homemade donuts are on the menu for next weekend (Grayden and I are becoming experts)! I hope everyone was able to find time for yourself, whatever that may have been.
I have always thrived on routines, both at home and at work, and this holds to be true and feels really important for me right now. With home now being my place of work, I’ve done my best to establish some routines and structures of physical space and ‘chunks of time’ - time for exercise, time for family, time for work (this one is hard to separate from the others - always has been a challenge, now more than ever!), etc.
In an effort to help center myself at the start of each day, my routine has been to hop on the exercise bike, listen to a podcast or two, and then practice yoga - it has provided an outlet for me, allowing a space to think, reflect, process, and learn. In addition to the centering practice of exercising, music has been an outlet and source of comfort, inspiration, and solace. One song, in particular, keeps playing in my head and on my Spotify playlists - ‘Let’s Be Still’ by Head and the Heart (a few lyrics here)...
The world's just spinning
A little too fast
If things don't slow down soon
we might not last
So just for the moment, let's be still
This concept of ‘being still’ holds greater meaning now and is one that I am leaning into, through periods of comfort and discomfort. On Saturday morning I found myself coming back to these lyrics after listening to a podcast (What's the Big Idea? by Dan Kearney) with Dan Kearney interviewing Missy Emler (@MelissaEmler) from Modern Learners. Within this podcast Missy emphasizes the importance of having a foundation of shared beliefs for educators and schools. An individual’s core set of values and beliefs are critical, but it is the shared and communal belief system that will help schools thrive, grow, and learn.
By visiting, revisiting, and exploring my own beliefs, and our beliefs as a learning community, we will be able to see and understand implications for our context and practice as educators. In this path of self-reflection, I have found myself leaning on learning from the past while also learning towards the new. We do not always need to reinvent - we sometimes need to look a little differently or relook at things from our past. With ‘being still’ in mind while leaning on beliefs, I am sharing some recent learning/listening, a small sampling of responses from this past week’s Topic/Question, and revisiting posts from ‘past shares’ that resonate - this routine of reflection will hopefully spark some thoughts/dialogue for our community...
Recent Learning...
In e-mails and during staff check-ins I shared these notes and I think they are worth re-sharing - each time I read them, I learn a bit more. This recording of the webcast
Teens in Lockdown Recording (44:53) with Lisa Damour (@LDamour) and notes below led me to her post from The New York Times...
- For students right now, school feels like 'All vegetables, no dessert'
- Under normal conditions, teens hate being told what to do
- Anything you try and do now and ‘make up’ will feel like a real distant second for children
- This is a ‘shared experience’ for all
- Emotional distress is not something to be frightened of - Humans are designed to withstand emotional distress
- We can’t always be the parent (or teacher) we want to be…
- Teenagers make us feel what they feel - externalization…rather than telling us what they feel
- Kids are missing their independence from parents (they usually get this during the school day)
Helping Teens Make Room for Uncomfortable Emotions
By Lisa Damour (@LDamour) in The New York Times
Over the past several years, I have watched a general misconception take hold about the definition of mental health. Many people have to come to assume wrongly that psychological health — like physical health — means feeling good. Psychological health, however, is not about being free from emotional discomfort, but about having the right feeling at the right time, and being able to bear the unpleasant ones.
We can help our teenagers square up to their unwanted emotions and guide them toward the most adaptive ways to manage their psychological distress. Here’s how to start…
Don’t confuse emotionality with fragility
Manage discomfort (don’t become a punching bag)
Let teens know that enduring hard times can pay off
If we can take this moment to help our teenagers embrace a view of psychological health that includes feelings both easy and hard — to find that they can withstand emotional discomfort — they’ll come out of this pandemic with more freedom than they had before.
Responses from Our Last Topic/Question (Week of 4/20/20):
How can an awareness of your feelings and emotions help you learn?
- It can help to prioritize tasks and focus on which ones I might be best suited for in that moment. For example, if I am feeling tired or distracted, something requiring a lot of focus may not be the best task to do in that moment.
- It allows me to channel their energy, whether positive or negative in a productive outlet!
- Knowing that I’m supported
Posts from ‘past shares’...
What strikes me most from this sampling is the relevance of the themes within that are so very pertinent, holding great meaning for today (and future days that lie ahead as well)...
- Willingness to be Disturbed and Comfort with Discomfort
- Focus on Learning or Focus on Education
- Beliefs and Coherence
- Messiness of Learning
- Skills of Learning
Willing to Be Disturbed
by Margaret Wheatley
This piece is an excerpt from Wheatley’s book, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, and the phrase ‘willing to be disturbed’ is one that helps to open up conversations. This mantra will help us to listen to one another and examine our own practices - a key component of a learning community. I have shared this post before and it resonates every time I read it.
As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally—our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.
It is very difficult to give up our certainties—our positions, our beliefs, our explanations. These help define us; they lie at the heart of our personal identity. Yet I believe we will succeed in changing this world only if we can think and work together in new ways. Curiosity is what we need. We don’t have to let go of what we believe, but we do need to be curious about what someone else believes. We do need to acknowledge that their way of interpreting the world might be essential to our survival.
Sometimes we hesitate to listen for differences because we don’t want to change. We’re comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we’d have to get engaged in changing things. If we don’t listen, things can stay as they are and we won’t have to expend any energy. But most of us do see things in our life or in the world that we would like to be different. If that’s true, we have to listen more, not less. And we have to be willing to move into the very uncomfortable place of uncertainty.
We can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for the new. Of course it’s scary to give up what we know, but the abyss is where newness lives. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing. If we can move through the fear and enter the abyss, we are rewarded greatly. We rediscover we’re creative.
Coherence is Signature Quality of our Most Effective Schools
by Justin Reich (@bjfr)
I have referenced Justin's posts before and am sure I will be a 'broken record' with them as we look ahead at the learning experiences we want for our students, staff, and community at Blake. The signature quality of our most effective schools is coherence. In our best schools, everyone in the building has a shared vision of what high quality teaching and learning looks like. They have a shared set of hopes for their graduates, and they plan around a common set of outcomes. They have a shared instructional language that lets people talk back and forth about what high quality teaching should look like, and a common language and set of goals let’s faculty work together to measure their progress towards those goals.
As existing schools look to these exemplars for models of improvement, the key insight is that it is more important to try to get one system right than it is to pick the one right system. Really great schools can be different from one another in pedagogy and approach, but what they have in common is a shared set of goals and understanding among the faculty. It’s this shared understand that sets the conditions for effective collaboration and continuous improvement.
If we look at the schools that have grown the most in the last five or ten years, schools that have made really significant improvements for their students in learning, these are the places that have had teacher communities that have been willing to come together and pull their oars together towards the same coherent goals.
Discovering Learning or Delivering an Education
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
Within this post are some wonderful resources that delve deeper into where ‘we’ put our emphasis in schools - is it on education or is it on learning? The structures and trends certainly lead towards ‘education’, but the hope is that we can shift and foster environments towards ‘learning’.
While I spent 22 years teaching and administrating in a public school, I can’t say that I spent a lot of time thinking about learning during my career, specifically how kids learn. And I don’t remember “learning about learning” in my teacher preparation programs either. It’s taken a decade of being out of schools to finally focus on what is the most important part of schools. The irony is not missed, believe me.
In short, I think it’s arguable that we are focused on education at the expense of learning, because the fact is that most of what constitutes an “education” is quickly forgotten and/or never used. An “education” is more about checking a series of boxes than it is developing the skills, literacies, and dispositions to learn. And I get it; an “education” as it’s currently constructed is a heck of a lot easier to assess than that learning thing.
An emphasis on education reduces agency for the individual learner, because an education must be “delivered” and the easiest way for that to happen is if the system and the teacher organize it and mete it out in a fairly standardized way. If we set learners free, who knows what type of an “education” they would get? This scares us deeply because it reduces our certainty of the outcome, (even if we may know that the outcome is just a guess to begin with.)...an emphasis on education drives us toward a culture of teaching in schools rather than an culture of learning. (In my experience, many struggle with what a culture of learning even means.) Innovation, risk-taking, learning from failure, using technologies to make things…all of those and more suffer in the process...an emphasis on education sustains old narratives around what schooling should be, and about what learning looks like. In other words, it sustains a “superficial and fuzzy conception of learning.”
Being OK With Discomfort
by Leigh A. Hall (@leighahall)
I came across this post on Twitter this week and the title of the post drew me in right away. As one who can have a hard time embracing change, it is a mantra/belief that I am learning each day to appreciate more and more.
And as I was experiencing all this, I realized something – my being ok with discomfort has some implications for how we think about our teaching.I do things in my classes that push on students’ comfort level all the time. Sometimes I know to expect this, and others times I am surprised when it happens. I ask students to do more than sit for a lecture, write a paper, look for “right” answers, and pass the class. I expect them to contribute – even have input on how the class is shaped – and sometimes I give very loose directions for assignments on purpose (see the Explore Project as an example). I don’t set up assignments/experiences for students with the sole intent of making them be uncomfortable. I just recognize that some of what I do may come across as non-traditional to them (I really don’t think it’s that out there) and as a result make them uncomfortable.
So we all get stuck. Sometimes getting unstuck requires you to engage in a certain level of discomfort. I’ve been lucky in that my yoga practice has forced me to learn how to engage with discomfort. Well, no it didn’t. It presented me with the opportunity and at some point I started to engage with it. I’m sure I ignored it for awhile because it’s not fun. Engaging with discomfort is all kinds of not fun, but it’s how we learn. It’s how we grow. In my teaching, I look for ways to push myself. This means that I am constantly putting my self in situations where I have no idea how things will go and yes, I am uncomfortable. As a result, my students might experience some discomfort. I can’t make them engage in it. But I hope they know that doing so is a powerful way to grow.
Embrace the Messiness of Learning
by Megan M. Allen in Education Week Teacher
As much as we may like to think that thoughtful planning and structure will provide for a clean, linear learning process, we all know that the process is messy and non-linear. With any growth or learning opportunity, we need to acknowledge and welcome the messiness - Allen's words hold true.
I remind myself learning is messy, confusing, and nebulous, especially in the beginning. It's uncomfortable.
Why do we, as adults, expect learning to be easy for ourselves? Why are we quick to give up if it's messy, but teach our kids and students to stick it out? Are we practicing what we preach as adult learners? My call to action, for myself and for you: Learning is messy. It's ugly. But proceed. Deep learning takes struggle and discomfort. Let's model it for our kids. So pick up that guitar, try out a new hobby you are curious about, or take lessons on a beautiful foreign language. Get uncomfortable. Get messy. Reconnect with the murkiness of deep learning again, so you can remember what it's like to be a student in your classroom. Let's wade on in together.
Dancing with Robots: The Skills Humans Need
by Justin Reich (@bjfr) in Education Week
This post from a couple of years ago references a white paper written by Richard Murnane and Frank Levy - Dancing with Robots: Human Skills for Computerized Work. This important paper helps to provide direction for what we need to focus on for our students - critical thinking and complex communication.
Levy and Murnane argue that computers do a few things very well, and they do those things very cheaply...Computers, however, are still not very good at certain kinds of tasks, and Levy and Murnane put these into three big categories: solving unstructured problems, working with new information, and carrying out non-routine manual tasks.
It's not that unstructured problem solving or working with new information are new skills for the 21st century, it's that they are newly important in the 21st century as computers replace routine-based work. In economic terms, humans have a comparative advantage over computers in these domains.
The Secret to Schools that Keep Getting Better
by Justin Reich (@bjfr) in Education Week
Justin's post is part of a series of posts based on a new online course, Launching Innovation in Schools. The notion and principle of establishing a school as a 'learning organization' is meaningful, important, critical and salient for the Blake community.
The magic of our best schools is really simple. The places where people are year after year making schools better and improving teaching and learning, they are places where the faculty are having fun learning and improving their teaching. When people can find joy in their learning, they keep learning. When people can find joy in working with their colleagues, they keep collaborating. Our goal as leaders in schools--teachers, parents, principals, librarians, everyone--our goal is to create schools that are learning organizations, places where the explicit goal of the system is to sustain not just student learning, but learning for everyone involved in the organization.
The beauty of these places is that they are fabulous learning environments for students. Students learn more from who we are than from what we tell them. We know that for students to thrive in a fast changing and uncertain future, they just need to be constantly learning, not just for 12 or 16 years but for their entire lives. The best way for students to absorb that message is to live with a community of adults who are constantly trying to get better at their jobs, who are constantly trying to make curriculum more powerful and more meaningful, who are constantly finding way to help students become better versions of themselves.
School as Fiction
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
I shared this post right after February vacation and it resonates now more than ever. Our ‘stories’ of learning and school are rapidly changing and we need to recognize the ‘fiction’ and ‘givens’ we have been experiencing and practicing. As I noted a few weeks ago, by challenging the ‘givens’ of school that we have come to accept, we will be able to see schools as ‘stories’ that can evolve and grow.
The idea of schools as “fictions” is bracing at first. But if you flip the idea over a few times, less so. The narrative of schooling runs deep, but it is simply that: a narrative. A story. One that depends on our “communal belief” in it to wield the power it does. (And no one doubts the power of the school narrative, right?)
I think it’s fair to say that many are losing faith in the traditional story of school, primarily because it doesn’t serve all kids equitably and it’s increasingly out of step with how the modern world operates. But while there are some indications as to what the new story might look like, (more child/learner centered, focused more on skills and dispositions than content, etc.,) we’re nowhere near any “communal belief” in it. It’s not clear enough, yet, that there is a new story to fully “embrace.”
Our current fiction about schools attempts to take the very natural process of learning that is a part of all of us and make it happen in the very unnatural setting of the classroom where few of the conditions that all of us know are needed for learning to occur actually exist. It’s our greatest unpleasant truth that schools are not really built for learning.
It makes a compelling case that the true reform of the original system was the one that was driven by the consumers of education, not the creators and purveyors of it. While we say that schools and education are the most effective way to attain our highest aspirations and ideals as a society, schools are also the primary way that we accomplish our greatest individual ambitions and “stave off our worst fears.” And that last part, in fact, has become the primary motivation behind the story in schools that we’re currently living.
When we choose (or allow ourselves) to be motivated by pragmatism and individualism over idealism and collectivism, we run the risk of ignoring what’s best for our kids and for our society and world.
The vast majority of what we measure in schools, those things that count, literally, are most often quickly forgotten, never again used, and a barrier to the conditions that great learning requires. Our emphasis on “outcomes” and grades creates real emotional stress that is absent when we are learning the things that matter to us. I mean, what kind of emotional stress and anxiety do you feel when you are learning something that you find deeply and powerfully important and useful?
Our greatest challenge as educators is to write a new story of “school” that more effectively serves our students and our society given the moment in which we live and whatever future we can glean. Acknowledging that that too will be a “fiction” may actually make the work easier. But more than anything, understanding and acknowledging the motives of the current story will make that work more urgent, more relevant, and hopefully, more powerful.
Our beliefs will continue to be challenged and I look forward to these challenges - it is my sincere hope that we will keep our ‘willingness to adapt’ and desire to learn, listen, and reflect as compass points for our students, ourselves, and one another. I welcome thoughts, reflection, and dialogue - although the necessary practice of physical distancing is in place, please know that my ‘remote door’ is always open and I hope our conversations, collective growth, and learning continue as we work towards our shared mission.
Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
I look forward to the work that lies ahead for all of us.
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Enjoy the week and take care.
Nat