To help encourage conversations and dialogue about the steps we each can take to adjust our learning, our topic/question for the dinner table is: Share one (or more) change or adjustment you have made this year as a learner. Incremental Gains (Week of 11/4/18) (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.
After attending the wonderful performance of Dracula: A Comic Thriller Friday evening, we had a very full weekend - sports games, MCPE Fall Ball Saturday evening, and trying to fit in ‘family time’ and plug away at our ongoing ‘to do’ lists. Seeing the students come together for our theater performances always affirms and renews my beliefs and admiration in and for our students - coming together as a community for a common interest in an inclusive manner. Special thanks to Tracy Allen and Maureen Doctoroff for leading this work with our students and bringing it all together along with the help of Nancy Deveno, Nancy McLaughlin, Kerrie Krah, Amy Ferry, Karen Shaffer, Melissa Landis, Melissa Zilinski, Carrie Traub, and Bruno Joline. It was great to see many families and staff at the shows supporting our students - thank you!
This past week was an invigorating one full of personal and professional engagement with learning on many, many levels - I would like to say that this is true every week (and in many aspects it is), but this felt deeper for me. From meetings and discussions with teachers at Blake to conversations to readings to formal professional development, I was happily immersed in learning…
- Engaging with Blake educators at our faculty meeting and our Site Council
- Learning about Norfolk Aggie at the presentation for our 8th grade students
- Meeting with professors from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education (Christine Power and Nathaniel Brown), engaging with our department chairs in discussions about assessment, feedback, and the endeavors we are currently involved in at Blake - Calibration and Coherence is key!
- Attending DESE’s Leading with Equity and Access conference and learning more about SEL curricula and Implicit Bias
- Listening to Yong Zhao speak as part of the Diane Ravitch lecture series at Wellesley College - both provocative thinkers and educators
As I reflect upon Andy’s words, I know that my learning comes from listening, sharing, and experiencing. Thinking about the ‘sense of urgency’ or ‘time is now’ mantras, coupled with the notions of ‘steering the cruise ship’ or ‘it’s a marathon, not a sprint’ mantras, I am sharing some of the learning I have experienced below over the past week. The mediums below (articles, blogs, lectures, engaging with students/educators/community for their perspectives, and conversations) all help inspire me to take action steps - both small and large - to embrace change and move forward with the hopes of enhancing the learning environment (as always, I welcome questions and further dialogue - my door is always open)…
Leading With Access and Equity Notes/Thoughts/Mindsets
(Keynote by Eric Gordon - @EricGordon_CEO, Implicit Bias Workshop, and SEL Workshop)
- There is no excellence without equity
- Where are we doing these things and where are we not?
- SEL should be part of cultural norms - ‘not one more thing’
- ‘Not One More Thing’ - it’s all on the ‘Continuum of Learning’
- What do you know already that you will find?
- What do you know already that you will find?
- #1 For Some Report - ‘Massachusetts is Number One in education — but only for some students’
- Think about policies, structures, and programs that enable or promote inequities
- People who think what they do about marginalized kids are smart enough to hide it
- People are smart enough to hide their biases - don’t wait for them to change thoughts; change the structures so they do not have the choice
- Lack of intentionality can be just as damaging as intentionality
- Time to ask - ‘What is it that we did not anticipate?’
- Mindsets vs Behaviors; Programs vs Structures
- MA is a leader in public education
- Shift ‘design for the average’ to ‘designing for the margins’
- ‘They only get one third grade’ - I don’t have the patience
- What are the behaviors you allow? What are the behaviors you don’t allow?
- Race is a social construct that was not borne out of reason or science
- We deal with ‘all or nothing’ - there is a spectrum
- Shift blame from students to practitioners
- Shift from ‘sympathy mindset’ to ‘empathy mindset’
- ‘Being good is a practice’, engaging with our imperfections - We must re-conceptualize how we define being a ‘good person’
- Pedagogy of the Plenty vs Pedagogy of the Plentiful
What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education Lecture - Yong Zhao (@YongZhaoEd)
(With an introduction by Diane Ravitch - @DianeRavitch - these three notes)
- We have the obligation, duty, and responsibility to pursue truth and facts - burden of scholarship
- We must speak on behalf of those who do not have a voice
- If people in privatization weren’t paid, they would move on - they are not invested
Yong Zhao (@YongZhaoEd)
- We have become a ‘creativity killing machine’
- Data and tests have instilled fear in United States
- A long history of bad test-taking in US (look at slide)
- Side Effects in Education - Should be warnings for education - may improve reading scores, but might make your children hate reading forever
- High stakes testing sorts people - trying to become a very intolerant system
- When schools become intolerant, you suppress diversity and stifle growth
- Diversity is biggest driver of prosperity
- ‘Kindergarten Readiness’ - as if kindergarten is a job!
- NAEP has not changed - it has ‘hurt kids’; NCLB - never closed the gap and we have hurt children a lot more while doing so
- We can’t run schools like a country club (selection criteria) - you weed children out
- NCLB has hurt kids
- Poor testing and system has deprived kids of other opportunities they might have succeeded
- Public schools are only place they may have access to arts, music
- We have hurt more than helped
- Good intent - but not good results
- Poor testing and system has deprived kids of other opportunities they might have succeeded
- Side Effects
- Need to make a choice - what are we sacrificing?
- Homogenizing students kills diversity
- Need to make a choice - what are we sacrificing?
- Positive for some means negative for others
- Medicine may kill 3, but will save 4 - is that worth it?
- Big Questions in Education…
- Is evidence having a positive effect or negative effect?
- What are you really looking for in the end?
- Is evidence having a positive effect or negative effect?
- Everybody is valuable and has unique personalities
- Best environments rely on biodiversity
- Schools should be a nature reserve - every talent grows in its own way
- Schools should be a nature reserve - every talent grows in its own way
- To address achievement gap, move away from deficits models to strengths-based models
- Intrinsic motivation is driven by choice
- Any test misses more information about a person than a test will report
- ‘What makes us more human can not be measured by any score’
Topic/Question (Week of 10/28/18): How have you grown as a learner this year?
- I think I have had more practice
- I think I am spending more time asking students questions that relate to sports and their life in general. I have told them that I learn as much as they do every day. There are many areas that I have limited information.
- I'm learning how to create a "routine" in the art room so that students look to a routine when they come to class and have an agenda established ahead of our meeting.
- social emotional learning through project happiness, social thinking, and other resources
- I am learning more about mindfulness and mindful practice. I am reading 10% happier to continue to learn more
- I’ve learned and understood things I was confused in.
- I now know a bunch of stuff like what middle school is like
- I have been able to learn how to manage my time wisely.
Small Tweaks, Big Impact
by Katie Martin (@katiemartinedu)
Orla Berry shared this post with me earlier in the week and it is a nice framework for our work with students and one another - naming and articulating the steps we are taking towards change, while grounding all of our work in a ‘personalized learning’ environment.
Many educators understand that by structuring the process so much, we often short change the learners but it is difficult to change our practice without clearly understanding what it could or should look like. Designing powerful learning experiences that meet the diverse needs of the individuals in your classroom is rarely a matter of finding the right curriculum or the best “program.” It is much more about knowing your students and having a clear sense of the skills, knowledge and dispositions needed to be developed. This is not something that can be scripted in a textbook and very skilled teachers have different ways of doing this effectively.
Having a clear understanding of the vision is critical, yet shifting our practice requires small steps to get there. Each tweak teaches us more and allows for a continuous evolution of our practice. Getting from point A to point B is more about a series of small tweaks rather one dramatic shift. Effective teachers are always assessing the students they have in their class creating experiences that meet the needs of the students they serve. They set high expectations and create safe learning environments as they model and guide diverse learners. But to foster mindsets that empower creativity and innovation, they know they must step back and let students grapple with problems so they can truly own their learning.
The two posts below are written by Beth Holland and Justin Reich, educators and friends who inspire me and push me to be a better thinker, educator, and leader. These posts are their ‘farewell posts’ to EdWeek - their words encourage me (and hopefully others) to keep asking questions, use research to inform thinking, and to be open to change.
Farewell and Thank You to EdTech Researcher
by Beth Holland (@brholland) in Education Week
After a lot of reading and writing, I have grown to realize that deeply understanding the system of education requires examining not only what happens in schools but also in the broader social, economic, and policy environments that impact teachers and students. As I have written in a few posts recently, we need to consider the history of education and how we got to where we are today; the perspectives offered when examining education through multiple lenses; the role of digital equity; and even our agreed upon purpose of education.
There is a tendency in education to look for a single solution or an easy-to-implement strategy when reading blog posts. Most times, as a writer, I feel pressured to deliver concrete "take-aways" for teachers and leaders. However, through EdTech Researcher, articles often conclude with more questions than answers, opening the door for new lines of inquiry and encouraging diverse ways of thinking about how to bring academic work into the reality of classrooms and schools.
Farewell to EdTech Researcher
by Justin Reich (@bjfr) in Education Week
In 303 posts on this site, I've tried to look at these technologies as they've passed through their moments in the sun, examine the evidence that we have about their use and effectiveness, and question the narratives around these technologies as transformative...The real challenge for educators is figuring out exactly how a new technology or technology-mediated approach might be productively integrated into the complex, political, multifaceted world of schools.
...research can help answer these questions. The patient, inquisitive exploration of new technologies, finding connections between a new innovation and its historical antecedents, looking at patterns in data about who has access to technology and how they use it, examining measures of effectiveness and learning--from these kinds of activities we can take steps towards understanding where new technologies might lead to useful new strategies for learning. To say that any new technology has potential educational value is not the same as saying that these values will be obvious.
Scrutinize new tech skeptically, but be open to potential ways that new technologies can support learning in new ways. Most of these gains will be modest, but piling up incremental gains is how we make progress in education.
We have a responsibility as educators and individuals to be truly invested in our most precious ‘commodity’, our students, and to tangible steps as we make incremental gains in the interest of learning and growth. In order to do this (and I am talking to myself right now, too!), I think the words below from James Ryan, Ted Sizer, and Justin Reich will help us on our path - reminding us that this is an ‘imperfect journey’ that requires change and coherence…
Enjoy the week and take care.
Nat