To help encourage conversations and dialogue about choices and continuous learning, our topic/question for the dinner table is: What do you want to learn more about? Continuous Learning (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Happy April! I would be lying if I said that I woke up Saturday morning embracing the rain, but after going for a run (yes, I went for a run outside in the sleet - yikes!) and then yoga, my mindset had definitely shifted. I'm hoping that the saying is true that April showers (or sleet!) will bring May flowers. After dinner out as a family on Friday night, we have enjoyed a pretty relaxed weekend. We saw Beauty and the Beast with the boys (a must see!) and are enjoying the calm before the storm of spring sports kicks in!
Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
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.
One of the posts below from Justin Reich speaks to the importance of 'coherence' in effective schools and organizations. The principle of coherence starts with our mission and essential question, and to be direct, really should bring to light the image of the 'broken record' - we should keep coming back to them so that they simply become part of our natural thinking. I hope that is true for our students, our staff, and our community. This past week and the week ahead brought forth and will also bring forth opportunities to truly live our mission...
- Sending a team of teachers from Blake (and the district) to visit Thurston Middle School in Westwood and Wilson Middle School in Natick
- Hosting teams of teachers from both Thurston and Wilson
- Engaging in dialogue with these teachers about day-to-day teaching practices, philosophies, and opportunities for future collaboration
- #EdcampBlake professional learning for our April faculty meeting - trying to provide a structure for our educators to have a voice in professional development and have individual needs met - the discussions and breakout topics look awesome!
- Thoughtfully planning for our students to take the Next-Generation MCAS assessments - a big thank you to Kelly Campbell and Tania Manuel for their work and preparation!
- 7th Grade Greek Week
- Celebrating our students' experiences and successes outside the 'traditional classroom' - the upcoming performances of Shrek, hearing about our students' involvement in Destination Imagination, the MICCA music festival (I know I am missing some, so I apologize for omissions - these are just a sampling)
- Embarking on a cross-district slow Twitter chat - #xdistrictchat - with other districts this month on the topic of Growth Mindsets
- Beginning to review the results of our annual Blake Survey with the Blake Site Council
- Hosting Career Day for our 8th grade students
- Celebrating many of our student-athletes who are participating in the 5-town Special Olympics on 4/7/17 at Medfield High
- Engaging in thoughtful discussions with our staff as they expand and pilot standards-based reporting in more disciplines and grade levels in Term 3
I wish I had recorded the notes - 'wonderful culture...spirit of support and collaboration amongst students and staff...appropriately relaxed environment...very student-centered...innovative practices...so willing to help and listen' - thank you! As Maura Interrante whispered to me at lunch - 'This must be a proud principal moment' - an understatement, for sure! So, thank you.
I know changes will be taking place and obstacles exist and difficulties lie ahead, but I am so encouraged by our students, staff, and community every day - students learning, teachers learning, engaging in dialogue with parents and families, and growth taking place. That is what it means to be a community of learners.
The three posts below speak to some key elements that we should be sure to keep in place - a willingness to learn at new structures and ideas, the principle of coherence, and the need to stay grounded/humbled and recognize the 'elephants' that unsettle our thinking...
Teachers Need Less Training, More Learning
by David B. Cohen in Education Week Teacher
I shared this post last year and again this year with our staff as we embarked upon #EdcampBlake - it pushes me to think about the 'balance' of collective and individualized professional development. The words below ring true in regards to a 'community of learners'.
...teachers need new challenges that engage us along with our students. We are not at our best modeling lifelong learning if we're no longer learning. We are ill-equipped to help students understand a so-called 21st century workplace if we don't work in one, if we lack opportunities to collaborate, create, and engage in critical thinking about our work.
Coherence is Signature Quality of our Most Effective Schools
by Justin Reich
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.
9 Elephants in the (Class)Room That Should “Unsettle” Us
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
Richardson outlines nine ‘unsettling truths’ about current practices in school and encourages all of us to ‘minimize the gaps’ between what we know about learning and the day-to-day reality that is in place. I firmly believe this is an important place for us to start to center each and every conversation we have about student learning. He is a 'must follow' and has helped broaden and enrich the dialogue for meaningful and relevant educational experiences for our students.
1. We know that most of our students will forget most of the content that they “learn” in school.
2. We know that most of our students are bored and disengaged in school.
3. We know that deep, lasting learning requires conditions that schools and classrooms simply were not built for.
4. We know that we’re not assessing many of the things that really matter for future success.
5. We know that grades, not learning, are the outcomes that students and parents are most interested in.
6. We know that curriculum is just a guess.
7. We know that separating learning into discrete subjects and time blocks is not the best way to prepare kids for the real world.
8. We know (I think) that the system of education as currently constructed is not adequately preparing kids for what follows if and when they graduate.
9. And finally, we know that learning that sticks is usually learned informally, that explicit knowledge accounts for very little of our success in most professions.
Lately, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with our unwillingness to acknowledge these “elephants in the (class)room,” if you will, because the new contexts for modern learning forged by the networked world in which we now live are creating an imperative for new ways of thinking about our work in schools. I’ve been collecting a list of these “things that we don’t really want to talk about in education” in hopes that it might challenge us to bring those elephants out into the open and ignite some much needed conversation about how to deal with them.
Acknowledging these “elephants” should be unsettling. Our current practice and systems in school don’t hew to these truths very much if at all, and that should leave us wondering about how effective our schools actually are at preparing our kids for their real lives. But we can do something about it. We can acknowledge the gaps between what we know to be true about learning and what we do in our classrooms, and be willing to at the very least engage in conversations aimed at bridging those gaps for the sake of our kids. And if we put these unsettling truths front and center in our conversations about education, we might just truly transform the learning experience in schools.
There will always exist the challenge of taking on too much at once that exists, but keeping the principles of coherence in mind with Sizer's words will lead us in a positive direction and truly transform the learning experiences for our students, staff, and community.
Please click here for Blake Updates.
Please click here for Thursday Packet Information.
Take care.
Nat