To encourage dialogue and reflection about the ways we can practice and establish habits, our question for the week is: What habits help you to become a better learner? Establishing and Practicing Habits (Week of 10/3/21) (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.
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
The beautiful weather on Saturday felt like a real gift and I hope that everyone was able to get outside, even if just for a bit. Amidst a few sports games, we enjoyed a pretty low-key weekend - getting pumpkins, doing some gardening, and catching up on a few things that had been pushed to the side. Although the late start prohibited me from watching the whole game, we enjoyed watching the Brady-Belichick showdown Sunday evening!
When taking a big step back and thinking about our mission, core values, and work with our students, a lot of our ‘end game’ or long-term goals come down to the establishment of habits and practices for learning. Of course the content plays a role, but the content is really the mechanism to practice the learning skills, habits of learning, and competencies that our students can use to transfer and generalize into new and unanticipated situations/experiences. And, by the same token, we must continue to closely examine all of our systems to assure that they help further our students along this path of development and growth.
In a similar vein, I thought about the workshop all of the MPS evaluators attended this past Friday on our systems and practices for educator evaluation. Much of our discussions and ideas centered around the practice of reflection - fostering it through questions and feedback. And, in essence, these are habits and practices that we, as evaluators, must employ, model, and practice on our own. The hope is that our feedback (the parallels with our students are clear and important as well) will continue to be internalized to increase meta-reflection and continuous growth. It is a habit that must be articulated, practiced, and mirrored. And, it is a work in progress. The ‘bullet points’ below are a sampling of notes that I took throughout the day...
Notes from Workshop with Dave Castelline
- Exceptional leaders succeed because of how they use their time, and their time prioritizes teacher development.
- 2 Roles of a Supervisor
- Facilitator
- Coach
- Facilitator
- Central Goal of Supervision
- To develop the habit of self-reflection in teachers
- To develop the habit of self-reflection in teachers
- # 1 teaching strategy that has the greatest impact on student learning is to have students assess their own learning (John Hattie)
- Questions lead to understanding
- Make your thinking visible
- Affirm what’s effective
- Teaching is an open competence
- ‘Every time I meet, I want to put a pebble in their shoe’
This last phrase/point (‘pebble in the shoe’) was shared by Dave - if my memory is correct, he said that it was a quote from a book on leadership. The author noted that her hope was that her conversations would always leave people with ‘something to think about’ - the pebble is not an annoyance, rather something that sticks and stays with them. I love this idea - similar to ‘planting seeds’, the ‘pebbles in our shoes’ will help keep the ‘key things’ on the forefront of our collective thoughts and practices. And, hopefully, habits will be developed and internalized. The responses and posts below are my ‘pebbles in my shoes’ for this week, as they have helped me to reflect on both a ‘ground floor level’ and ‘40,000 foot lens’ about the habits, practices, and systems we have at Blake - I hope they do the same for others...
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: When you make time for yourself, what do you like to do (interests, activities, hobbies)?
- I like to find time to exercise
- Play video games in bed. Hanging out with my pet lizard.
- I make time on the weekends. My favorite hobby is basketball so I practice a lot.
- TV or Sports
- Watch TV, color, play the keyboard.
- Go for walks with my dog.
- Yoga, walk and listen to audio (podcasts or books on tape), read, hike
- I love to read, watch a good documentary or go get a pedicure!!
- I love to Dance! I also like to play basketball, play the piano, and play field hockey.
- I do sports like field hockey and lacrosse
- Playing sports. (Baseball, Basketball, Golf). Hang out with friends. Go on my phone or play on my PlayStation.
- Yoga, anything outside, read, be quiet.
- Play the piano, go for a walk, yoga
- I am able to take some time early on the weekends, before the day gets started!
The Point Of School Isn’t To Become Good At School
by Grant Wiggins in TeachThought
Arguably transfer is the aim of any education. Given that there is too much for anyone to learn; given that unpredictability is inevitable; given that being flexible and adaptive with one’s repertoire is key to any future success, it stands to reason that we should focus our ‘backward-design’ efforts on the goal of transfer, regardless of what and who we teach
The point of school is not to get good at school but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life...Learning stuff is not the goal, it’s the means.
[Transfer is] the ability to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts. Educators hope that students will transfer learning from one problem to another within a course, from one year in school to another, between school and home, and from school to workplace. Assumptions about transfer accompany the belief that it is better to broadly “educate” people than simply “train” them to perform particular tasks.
John Wooden famously and paradoxically said that his aim as a coach was to be surprised by what his players did in a game. A player who has been so well educated and challenged can innovate, and often must, to win. The same thing is arguably true in all academic subjects.
...the key idea in aiming for and (especially) assessing for transfer is that the student has to successfully confront a “novel” challenge before we should conclude that they really got it. What “novel” means here is: an unfamiliar-looking task (as framed) that nonetheless should be doable by the student – if they really learned the related content with understanding.
America’s schools need a new paradigm: personalization
by Paul Reville in The Boston Globe
One potential paradigm shift for the school system would be to abandon the batch-processing factory model of education adopted in the industrial era of the early 20th century and replace it with a customized, personalized system that meets each child where they are and gives them what they need to thrive both inside and outside of school.
...children’s needs vary widely as must the strategies for meeting them.
...there needs to be a new paradigm for child development and the education system: personalization. Education too often relies on an outdated concept of “teaching to the average,” even though there’s no such thing as an average student — which has been vividly underlined, once again, by the differential effects of the pandemic on children’s education and life experiences.
Every student has the right to be seen, heard, and responded to as a unique individual.
The personalization of education, customizing the system to meet every child where they are and give them what they need, should not be a heavy lift. While personalization would be a paradigm shift for education, it’s a familiar way of treating children. It’s what all families try to do for their children, but not everyone can afford to do it thoroughly. America needs a cradle-to-career pipeline that works for all students in order to ensure the future of our economy and democracy...Meet them where they are, give them what they need. Now’s the time.
As I reread these posts in writing this reflection, it became even more clear to me that we must continue the uphill climb to change the narrative away from the narrow, traditional definitions and labels of ‘success’ for our students and communities. Our mission and efforts need to be focused on individual growth and well-being, and it is incumbent upon us, as educators and caring adults, to put systems into place that mirror these efforts. These words from Adam Grant spoke to me this week and I hope they can help serve as a compass point for our work...
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Take care.
Nat