To help encourage conversations and dialogue about the practice of self-reflection to gain a better understanding of ourselves as learners, our topic/question for the dinner table is: Share something you have learned about yourself as a learner this year. Gaining Understandings (Week of 10/6/19) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
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Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
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With the pages of the calendar turning to October this past week, it was hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that we have only been in school for a month! I love this time of year with the cool, crisp air and I am looking forward to this stretch. This weekend has been full and fun - seeing the Avett Brothers and Lake Street Dive with Katie at the DCU center on Friday and celebrating my mother’s 78th birthday with family on Saturday, all amidst sports games for the kids. I feel as though I could use a weekend from the weekend!
- At our faculty meeting discussing the principles of MTSS (Multi-Tiered Systems of Support), with the intent of examining our practices to better support all learners
- Meeting with the Challenge Success team as a status check, mapping out some plans for the year
- Participating on the Future Ready Coalition team for Holliston High School, as the community works on their ‘portrait/vision’ of a graduate
- Reviewing the results from the 2019 MCAS and thinking about interventions and systems of support
- Checking in with our Advisory committee on the progress of the year
- Meeting with a student who will be interning us for the next few months
- Drafting grant requests for Blake PTO, SEPAC, and MCPE
As with everyone the list of activities, lessons, and meetings that we are all a part of could go on and on - and, no list is more important than any other, necessarily. But what struck me was this heightened awareness during the interactions noted above was not only my own vacillation from the moment to the implications, but also the necessity to vacillate between the two. And, with this awareness came a realization (one I have had before, but is certainly cycling back now), that that is simply the nature of our work…
- Addressing individual needs in the moment, but never losing sight of the big picture
- Putting systems in place at every level (individual student interactions, meetings, classroom lessons, master schedule, systems of support, administrative structure) to align with our mission and vision
- Continually asking questions and listening
- Acknowledging and listening to challenges and frustrations, but taking and embracing a ‘solutionary’ approach
- Highlighting successes and looking into the roots and paths that led to these successes
All of these things are not new, I know - yet, the practice of noticing has certainly helped me to move forward. In this practice of reflection I continue to learn more about myself as a learner - and, that is what I hope we can do for our students and one another. I hope we increase our own collective ‘understandings’ - of ourselves, our students, our community, and the implications that inevitably will result. The responses from last week’s question and two posts also touch on these ideas - asking questions that prompt reflection and putting some thoughts to paper, gaining strategies, examining implications for our work and sharing out - I hope they help to foster inner and collaborative dialogue...
Topic/Question (Week of 9/29/19): How does collaboration help you learn?
- I highly recommend the book Range by David Epstein. In it he cites numerous examples of how collaboration, especially among groups with diverse backgrounds and interests often produce deeper and more meaningful conclusions than a single minded approach. When you are accepting of others ideas and see how those ideas can deepen your own understanding, good things are bound to happen.
- Collaboration challenges me to see how my practice differs from others.
- Seeing other’s ideas and how I contrast with their ideas, and the same ideas we have.
- Collaboration helps people share ideas and builds communication skills
- Collaboration helps me learn because its more than one perspective on the same piece of work
- As a teacher, I need to be mindful of different students' learning styles. When collaborating with other teachers, I often learn of different ways to present material, approaches that had not occurred to me.
- I learn more when I lean on others a little. I'm very stubborn but I really try and ask for help or look at things through another person and their way of looking at solutions to problems and life in general
- You can flourish your ideas with all the people that you’re working with, and have a great project, presentation, paper, etc...
- Other people can help you learn
- You can bounce ideas off other people that will help you come to a conclusion on a certain topic.
Mindfulness at Work: A Little Bit Goes a Long Way
Interview with Lindsay Cameron in Knowledge@Wharton
This interview highlights the work of Wharton management professor Lindsey Cameron on mindfulness. Her research has shown that incorporating a little bit of mindfulness each day makes employees more productive and helpful.
First, from the higher-level picture, we did find that mindfulness made people more helpful at work...in terms of mechanisms, we found that perspective-taking — being able to look at someone else’s perspective — was one of the reasons that mindfulness helped people become more effective. Empathy — the ability to feel what other people are feeling — also made people more helpful at work.
The key takeaways are that mindfulness works, and that you don’t have to invest in an intensive eight-week intervention to be able to get the benefits from that because we all know that workplace life is deeply relational. You’re with co-workers. You’re with supervisors. We spend more time at work than we actually do with our family, and sometimes there can be frictions. People are working in teams, so mindfulness can act like a buffer to improve relational coordination and functioning. And we’re showing this with really short doses of mindfulness — seven to eight minutes. Even with a one-time intervention, you’re getting smoother, pleasant, more helpful workers. That’s one of the key benefits.
...what we found in this study is that there are no differences between the two different types of mindfulness, that they both led to people being more helpful at work. That lets workers have more choice to try a practice that resonates with them more clearly or more strongly. And you’re still going to have the benefits from the practice.
The Real World Is Not an Exam
by Abigail Zuger in The New York Times
This post from 2014 offers an interesting perspective about the value of standardized tests in preparation for the work force, specifically in the medical field. Zuger challenges some ‘status quo’ notions, offering a perspective that applies to our work with students.
...test-taking savvy may have little to do with job performance. Medical educators have been contemplating this possibility for years. But the problem particular to medicine may be the sheer volume of these tests, and the standard hysterical preparation they engender, which constitute a form of training in itself. Educators may not actually teach to the test, but students think to the test, in linear multiple choice.
Some medical educators have tried to bend the linear algorithms of the multiple-choice experience to the nuances of the actual clinical world. One set, from the Mayo Clinic, specifically set out to teach against the test. Instead of the usual call-and-response questions, the educators took their students through complicated, contradictory cases for which there were no clear “best” strategies, but many reasonably acceptable ones.
The ‘push and pull’ realities of our work are not unique to our vocation, but I do believe that the practice of naming and recognizing them are important. The discussions, self-reflection, and sharing out of our own learnings can serve as mechanisms to enhance the learning for our students. And, in so doing, the metacognition of our own practice may then serve as a lever to further the metacognition of our students.
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Enjoy the week and take care.
Nat