To encourage dialogue and reflection about the habits we want to develop and how practice helps them develop, our question for the week is: What is something you would like to improve over the next few weeks? Nurturing and Practicing Habits (Week of 11/27/22) (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
We enjoyed a lovely Thanksgiving holiday and break, taking time to be with family, relax, and simply enjoy the time together. I hope that everyone was able to do the same and use the time for whatever was/is needed. I know I say this at the end of each month, but how is December already almost here?!?
Throughout the weekend, after having taken some time to decompress, I found myself coming back to the assembly and reflecting on the experiences we work to ‘create’ for our students. Some experiences happen naturally and are embedded into the day-to-day reality for Blakers, while others necessitate increased intentionality and forethought. In either case, knowing full well that there are many ‘in betweens’ as well, it is incumbent upon us to ask ourselves these questions…
‘Do our values, specifically the values we espouse, match our practices? What does ‘practice’ look like for our students to develop the habits that allow them to ‘live’ these values?’
Each age period and ‘band of grades’ has its own unique experiences, and the middle school years and needs of early adolescents certainly frame and guide our vision, work, and practices. The post below, The courage to say 'I don't know' by Leah Hager Cohen, is one that I read this weekend and it helped me to deeply reflect upon these habits/practices and the implicit and explicit messages we send/give every day to our students. Are we giving our students the space to grow and learn? Do the experiences we establish for our students help? Does our intent match the impact? Where are the gaps?
In the context of Cohen’s post, in what ways do we provide students ‘the space’ to say ‘I don’t know’ without judgment or ramifications? Do our students feel comfortable saying these three words? Should it take ‘courage’ if it is such an important and necessary skill (a skill that opens up space to learn and speaks to a growth mindset, humility, and vulnerability)? And, in what ways are our systems we use to provide feedback, both formally and informally, match our values and foster practice and habits?
Many questions floating about, for sure, and I hope we can continue to ‘double down’ and dig into these questions in the pursuit of answers and steps towards supporting all of our learners. The posts below speak to these ideas and also prompted me to rethink some of my own experiences as a student, teacher, and administrator. They also (the Akande post is one I have shared before) provide some frameworks, structures, and systems that foster habits, growth, and learning. And, as we return to our day-to-day from the Thanksgiving holiday, Posey and Rowell’s post can serve as a spark for a systemic approach to support the experiences of our learners with gratitude. Some of the responses from last week’s question (What are you thankful for this year?) will help to shine a light on these practices as well.
The courage to say 'I don't know'
by Leah Hager Cohen in WBUR Cognoscenti
I started to wonder why academic integrity presented so rampant a problem in the traditional college environment. If people regularly feel they must resort to dishonesty, doesn’t that suggest they perceive honesty as bearing an untenable cost? What would happen, I wondered, if I could eliminate that perceived cost, at least within the small community of my own classroom?
And so we talk about fear — my fear, their fear, all of our fear. We lay it out on the seminar table: the big, heavy animal body of our collective fear. It’s usually sleeping by then, so we’re able to talk freely, prod it a little, rearrange its tail, even stroke its fur and comb out some of the mats. We talk about which environments tend to nourish that fear, in which situations we feel most at its mercy. We notice that academia is one of its natural habitats, and we discuss what we can do to make our own environment less hospitable to it. We pledge to start by committing to bravery in the tradition of Mary: we pledge, at least within the enclosure of our classroom, to own our limits without apology, to be forthright about what knowledge we lack.
Fear engenders lying. If we want our colleges and universities to be bastions of academic integrity, we need to look honestly at the ways they might encourage fakery by stoking fear.
So much of the condition of being human involves not knowing. The more comfortable we become with this truth, the more fully and unabashedly we may inhabit our skins, our souls, and — speaking of learning — the more able we become to grow.
Rethinking Resilience: Does the Concept of Pushing Through Actually Hinder Growth?
by Lade Akande in NAIS Online
Maybe it’s time to rethink resilience and the pedestal we’ve placed it on...in the wake of the pandemic, the renewed focus on “resilience,” which calls on us to have a growth mindset, has led to an over-glorification of its role in coping with individual and collective stress and trauma. More than ever, society is desperately leaning on resilience and celebrating the ability to bounce back quickly as a measure of success.
In many ways, resilience has served us well these past couple of years, but perhaps what school communities need now is the space to process, rest, and reconnect with meaning, purpose, and joy. Educators and school leaders need to ask ourselves what can come of the destruction we’ve witnessed and experienced. And we need to ask what role does resilience and the slow, messy, and unique process of growth have within the learning environments we create? But, perhaps rather than relying on the adults to produce new ideas and systems, we should turn to the students, who are most closely affected by the overwhelming call for resilience and who have profound insights that often come more naturally from a less conditioned mindset.
By quieting our innate need to fill empty space and instead trusting the opportunities that can arise internally and in our communities, perhaps we can grow through this collective experience together.
Cultivating Wise Freedom in Middle Schools
by Zak Cohen in ASCD
Middle school is a critical time in a child’s life. Middle schoolers have a surging capacity for self-awareness, self-expression, and self-reflection, but do not yet have the solidifying sense of self that secondary students often possess. Their receptivity to new experiences makes this time in their lives uniquely expansive and singularly formative—and schools should seek to make the most of that.
At its best, middle school is a time for students to experiment, improvise, innovate, and create. Likewise, middle school should be a playground for imperfection, a menagerie of mistake-making, and a laboratory for learning. Middle schoolers flourish in a culture that embraces and celebrates the vicissitudes of change, the fascination of discovery, and the sublime puzzlement of reconciling the known with the yet-to-be-known.
Middle school is about helping young people gain the habit of seeing the virtue and symbiosis in striking a balance between individuality and community responsibility, not only at school but in all the years that follow.
Swiss philosopher Erich Fromm probably best and most succinctly captured the essence of Wise Freedom when he wrote in Escape from Freedom: “Freedom is not the absence of structure, but rather a clear structure that enables people to work within established boundaries in an autonomous and creative way.” With the right framing, an ambitious and embracive middle school culture is possible.
The Scientific Case for Cultivating Grateful Learning Communities
by Allison Posey and Lainie Rowell in Getting Smart
…the interactions students have in our learning communities directly impacts the neurodevelopment of their brains.
When we offer flexible options in our lessons that empower learners to bring their identities and interests into the learning, we share an appreciation for how unique and dynamic our learners are. By planning activities with voice and choice, we strengthen relationships and develop expert learners who make connections between things they are grateful for and what we are learning.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What are you thankful for this year?
- My family
- Supportive and knowledgeable co-workers
- My friends
- I'm thankful for Thanksgiving
- My family,friends, home, sports, health and more
- My home
- I'm thankful for my bed
- My health, my shelter, My family, my food, water, my bed, my dog
- My friends
- I’m thankful for food, my family, and friends
- My parents
- My family, my puppy, and my friends
- Life and everyone who is in it, everything I own, family and pets
- My teachers and how they have taught me
- My dog
- I am thankful for my new puppy
- Family, friends, learning, food, clothing
- Upcoming vacations
- I am thankful for my loving parents and my lacrosse career
- I am thankful that I made A team for basketball
- Family, friends, and colleagues!
- My family
- I Am thankful for my two baby cousins that were born this year
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Take care.
Nat