To help encourage conversations and dialogue about deliberate practice, adjusting a process, and directing your learning, our topic/question(s) of the week is: What can you change in your current 'practice of learning' to improve? What will that look like? Deliberate Change (Week of 2/4/18) (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.
With another chilly Friday evening, Katie and I welcomed the weekend with the boys watching The Jungle Book. We never saw it in the theater and it was awesome - such a visual thrill! The rest of the weekend was busy with sports, driving to birthday parties, and taking care of chores that were pushed aside during the week. On Sunday we had the winter piano recital for the boys before the big game - although the outcome was not what we wanted, we had fun with the kids and their friends!
It has been a particularly reflective week for me...
I think I have shared that last year I began a practice of putting a 'resolution/intention' reminder in my calendar every Friday afternoon to prompt attention and accountability to my New Year's resolutions. If I'm being honest, some weeks I welcome the reminder and others I dread it (in fact, there are some Fridays I have entertained deleting the 'event' from future weeks!). That said, overall it has proved to be a real positive - helping to keep me 'on track' and providing a sense of focus going into the weekend. Down time can be a challenge, so this focused intention entering 'days off' has proved to be a helpful strategy - pushing me to click on the event and read what I outlined for myself...
Resolutions/Intentions for the 2018 calendar year...
- Slow it down (with an eye towards simplicity)
- Embrace and model authenticity and vulnerability
- Explore ways to 'go deeper' and find more meaning
- Find time for music and fun
- Focus on ways to better listen and understand change
- Practice intentional time for self-reflection, mindfulness, and growth
- Think about ways to connect more directly with students (focus groups, check-ins, discussions)
- Broaden and redefine some methods of sharing and growing (networking, connecting, collaborating) within Blake, Medfield, and beyond
This past week, both with the turning of the calendar to February and simply with events on the calendar, felt like an appropriate time to check in as well with resolutions/intentions...interim reports for Term 2 (marking the halfway point of 17-18), our midyear professional development afternoon as a staff, the annual budgetary presentation to school committee Monday evening, meeting with Jamele Adams (Dean of Students at Brandeis) to begin conversations around a potential partnership with our students and staff for a better understanding and action with our theme of diversity, job-alike meeting with principals at Wayland Middle School discussing strategies to support social-emotional learning for students, beginning to map out transition and listening to the keynotes at the #LearnLaunch2018 conference in Boston on Friday.
These check-in points all helped me to 'slow it down' (one of my key intentions for this year) and go a bit deeper (another intention) with my own learning. I realized in doing just that (felt like an aha moment of simplicity!) that my own learning was enhanced by just making time for the actual intentions that I had outlined for myself - a cyclical process, if you will. In reality, that process in many ways touched on all of the intentions - simply noticing and finding meaning in the activities at hand. And, that is authentic learning for me, and hopefully, for others.
I am an optimist at heart and want to believe that from now on I will always welcome the 'resolutions/intentions' Friday afternoon reminder on my calendar, based on the positive experience this week. However, my practical side tells me that may not always happen...but, I do believe in the process of learning and want to stay with it. Simply the act of naming the event on the calendar (being deliberate), trying out a new strategy (adjusting to a new way of doing things), and sharing with others can only help enhance my learning - it certainly will keep the learning moving forward.
To help manifest the reflections of this past week, I am sharing some of my notes from Friday's keynotes/sessions at LearnLaunch, as well as two posts that I believe speak to critical elements (deliberate practice and a willingness to change and act on that change) that we must continue to embrace towards our mission at Blake for our students, ourselves, and our community, and a couple of quotes (can't help myself!)...
#LearnLaunch2018 - A few notes...
- Ask two questions - Who cares? What's possible?
- Lots of failure along the way - lots of successes in the end
- Amazon - intent to create the ideal reading experience
- iTunes - intent to create the ideal music experience
- Starbucks - intent to create the ideal coffee experience
- Schools - intent should be to create the ideal learning experience
- Students should leave school wanting to return tomorrow
- We are never done with our work
- Traditional models work for some students, but it does not work for so many more
- Our learning experiences must be measurable, meaningful, and malleable
- UDL is a shift in mindset and places the 'problem on the curriculum rather than on the student'
- Put down the adult structures and create learner structures
The Science of Deliberate Practice: What it Means for Education
by Getting Smart Staff in Getting Smart
This brief blurb outlines/previews the book Unlocking Student Talent: The New Science of Developing Expertise. The book explores the roles that motivation, deliberate practice, and coaching play in developing talent and abilities in students. The blurb outlines the three sections of the book: student engagement, deliberate practice, and the development of independent learners. As I think about where we are at this time of year (just past the mid-year point) with both student learning and professional learning, it is this aspect of deliberate practice that intrigues me most.
The second section recommends how deliberate practices can be incorporated into general education. Kerns and his co-authors describe how students, after actively engaging in classroom activities, can perform repeated tasks with immediate feedback to build skill and change behavior. Guided instruction and designed practice can help struggling students improve their performance and achieve at high levels.
But We Must Do It A New Way
by Dominic Rollins in Medium (HGSE)
Rollins is the inaugural Senior Diversity & Inclusion Officer at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and this post shares his perspective and connection between the work he is doing and the 'world of education'. I like the imperative nature of the title of his post as the response we often encounter is 'We've always done it that way'.
Currently, making the education sector more diverse, equitable, and inclusive is a stated goal for many leaders, yet few organizations have deeply changed how they do business to achieve more diversity, equity, and inclusion...In our organizations, despite having new goals, our attachment to old and original ways of being surface regularly. Often, it sounds like: “But we’ve always done it that way.”
...our reluctance to change — in our personal and our professional lives — not only limits progress, it also prizes old ways of doing and being that, by design, were exclusive. When we rely on the ways we have always done it, likely we are also relying on our past efforts, and history on many fronts tells us that our past efforts weren’t the most inclusive or equitable.
When applied to education, striving to make the experience, learning, and environment more inclusive and equitable requires that we change and do the enterprise differently. It is not enough to have a more enhanced goal. Collectively, we have never had nor known systematically inclusive and equitable schools, colleges, or nonprofits. Building these kinds of places requires that we think outside of the box, imagine beyond what we have experienced, dream big, and create past what we presently know. Resting on our current models and understanding will only yield the same thing that we already have: inequality and inequity.
Strategy is a style of thinking, a conscious and deliberate process, an intensive implementation system, the science of insuring future success. - Pete Johnson
The students watch us all the time. We must honestly ponder what they see, and what we want them to learn from it. - Ted and Nancy Sizer
I look forward to the work that lies ahead for all of us.
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Take care.
Nat