To help encourage conversations and dialogue about the environments and conditions that need to be in place for learning, our topic/question for the week is: What needs to be in place to help you learn? Environments for Learning (Week of 3/2-3/6) (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
Between the combination of the ‘full tilt’ reality of getting back in the swing of things and weather we have been having, it feels as though spring has already sprung - the crocuses and daffodils are popping up throughout our garden! Katie and I enjoyed a quick dinner out last Friday and celebrated a friend’s wedding on Saturday night - great to connect with some friends and people we had not seen in a long time. On Sunday it was fun to watch Owen’s basketball game as he played against the 7th graders in Medfield - the two worlds ‘collided’!
I have shared a great deal lately about my ‘obsession’ with podcasts, particularly the Modern Learners and WorkLife with Adam Grant. Each focus on the environments, conditions, and attributes of ‘work’ and I enjoy them on both the personal and professional levels of understanding. They challenge my status quo, push me to reflect, and I find ways to apply the thinking and concepts that are introduced - all elements of true learning. That is our consistent hope for our students, and it is incumbent upon us to have explicit discussions about learning. These discussions happen in different formats, and a recent trip with some Blake teachers to Oak Middle School in Shrewsbury was one such format. I always value the opportunity to ‘get outside’, observe, listen, and find meaningful implications for our community. Having visited Oak Middle two years ago, it was inspiring and comforting to witness their iterations and evolution of growth on their path towards meaningful feedback for students and parents. I look forward to the reflections that will come forth from our visit and working collectively to help us make progress with our work.
By perusing a sampling of responses from last week’s Topic/Question, and the four posts shared below** (thinking about the environments we want/need for learning - a willingness to listen, examine deeply, understand thought patterns and systems of beliefs, and a willingness to look internally) we hopefully can be inspired and centered to stay true to our mission and mantra within our mission (‘A Willingness to Adapt’), our core values, and a true spirit of learning...
** Note that the posts this week are ‘rich in nature’ and the selected excerpts for the posts are greater than ‘the usual’.
Responses from Our Last Topic/Question (Week of 2/23/20): What qualities, behaviors, and attributes make someone a good learner? Why?
- Listening in class, participating, and wanting to learn.
- When they pay attention and respect others.
- I believe that curiosity and perseverance are key. They impel and sustain the learner.
- Persistence, curiosity, able to feel secure with confusion and challenges
- Hard work and dedication make someone a good learner, but sometimes people are just born good learners, like if they have good memories and are naturally intelligent
- Taking the time to absorb and digest information before voicing a response.
- For me and students, I would have to say that transferring language and working with "making" or the other way around, where the learner can make and create and then move into the language area, (some significant artists leave the language area for the viewer to make their decisions), is a great learner and can communicate on both levels: language and material.
- Knowing when
- Respect, Flexibility, Focus, and Self Control.
- You’re not distracting others and letting them learn and work with you.
- Someone who cares, is attentive to their learning, someone who pays attention and doesn’t goof off.
- Actively listening and determination
- Someone that listens wholeheartedly to everything expressed and asks questions afterward. The learner is also persistent in their work....even at times when it is difficult or there is uncertainty in where they are going.
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.
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.”
School as Fiction
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
This post is one that I have come back to several times since first reading it over February vacation. As the title of the post indicates, Richardson offers a perspective of school as ‘fiction’ - ‘social constructs’ that were created at a given time. 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.
Why Teenagers Reject Parents’ Solutions to Their Problems
by Lisa Damour in The New York Times
Damour’s post offers sound explanations and suggestions for helping to facilitate the ‘parental response’ to the problems experienced by their teenagers. The article offers four frames of mind: They Need a Sounding Board; They’re Seeking Empathy; They Could Use a Vote of Confidence; They Want Ideas, Not Instructions. Two sound principles ring true - listening and understanding.
Adolescents, just like adults, may find the best relief from simply articulating their worries and concerns. Indeed, it’s an aphorism among psychologists that most problems feel better when they’re on the outside rather than on the inside, and this holds true whether the difficulties are big or small.
Above all, aim to solve the problem with, not for, your teenager. However inspired we might think our advice to be, it’s best to hold it back until we’ve heard our teenagers out. “When adults offer up a solution too quickly,” notes Isla, the California 15-year-old, “it feels like they’re not really listening or understanding what I’m going through.” And it often turns out that listening and understanding is all that teenagers want or need.
Our mission will serve as our guide with an inherent ‘willingness to be disturbed’ and practices of listening and understanding in all of our endeavors…
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Enjoy the week and take care.
Nat