To encourage dialogue and reflection about change, our question for this week is: What helps you embrace change and why is change important? Leaning Into Change (Week of 4/2/23) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
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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
After our professional day last Friday(#DLDMedfield), I have found myself processing many thoughts and learnings throughout the last couple of days. The rainy weather on Saturday provided a nice environment (excuse?) for me to ‘hunker down a bit’, read through some of my notes, do some reading, and simply reflect some more. The boys had basketball throughout the weekend and a real highlight was participating in Hunter’s Run Sunday morning. This was my first time participating, and it was so wonderful to witness the care, support, and sense of community for Hunter and his family.
Across the U.S., our schools are struggling to serve all students, and to help all students succeed. On the journey to create more equitable schools, teachers make thousands of choices each day that impact the lives of their students. From Oakland, CA to Boston, MA, we follow teachers into the space where real change happens: the classroom. As educators grapple to find out what every student needs, they’re working to make school a place where all students can thrive.
We Have to Do Something Different is designed to help educators make change in their own schools. The film provokes important conversations about the big challenges facing schools by taking a detailed look at the small steps teachers around the country are taking every day to help their students succeed. These dedicated teachers provide hope that, while the systemic inequities in our schools won’t disappear overnight, educators can make a positive impact, starting now.
With the intent and true desire to engage with others and openly reflect, below are some of my notes (in no order of priority) that I hurriedly jotted down while watching and listening to the follow-up forum with Justin and Aimee (stay tuned for future reflections from the rest of the day!). As I read and processed these notes over the last 72 hours, I keep thinking where and how they may relate or ‘fall’ within the ‘Someday/Monday’ structure of progress and change.
A thematic element that holds quite true is something that I often come back to that of ‘coherence’ and ‘radical teacher autonomy’...I can not think of a time that I have heard Justin speak that he has not referenced or alluded to these ‘dynamics and realities’ in schools. The charge or missive of the documentary is clear in its title - We Have To Do Something Different - and I would be remiss to not acknowledge the innate and natural feelings that come forth with the process of change. It will continue to be critical for us as a school community to openly acknowledge all of these feelings, dynamics, and realities as we lean into the necessary changes that will support all of our learners (students, staff and families) in a coherent manner.
Notes/Mindsets/Take-aways
- You need to know yourself to teach
- Focus on the assets
- Pick texts they wouldn’t read otherwise
- Give them other voices (not ones they already see)
- We all have biases (important to recognize them)
- Despite all interventions, we have an unnerving academic/discipline/achievement gap
- ‘We have to do something different’
- Looking for a more perfect union in our schools
- How to address inequities in our schools
- Enduring questions: ‘What does it look like? What are practices I see that I might not see in other places?’
- All learning is about relationships
- Need to do our own identity work first (allows us to see our students more clearly when we see ourselves more clearly)
- Tired of kids being shut down from the beginning
- ‘If you want something out of a child, accuse them of it first’
- Creating personal relationships opens up the space
- I can’t control a lot of things, but what I can control is what I think about a student
- There is no student in my class who is not accused of something exceptional
- Don’t figure out what’s broken in kids - figure out what’s amazing in them
- Increase the # of positive interactions
- Instead of asking ‘What’s wrong with this kid?’ Ask ‘What happened to this kid?’
- Everybody needs something different, and it’s my job to help find that
- I look for trauma now more than ever before
- Every kid wants to be a good student
- Design for students at the margins
- You are worthy enough to take this class
- Kids have different interests, different minds, different things that pull them forward
- We need to find the different access points
- Allow students to define what success looks like in a project
- Narratives we often teach are not about resistance all of the time (race in America)
- Have students ask…Why haven’t we learned this before?
- My job is to help kids make sense of what is happening in the world
- In order for students to reach their fullest potential, they need to unpack their identity
- What’s the fire in your belly?
- Skills should not be taught in isolation from everything else
- ‘It’s not easy to build a house, but it’s easy to change someone’s life with that house’
- ‘I need you to bring your whole self to this class’
- Background knowledge is every experience you have had (your lived experiences)
- Cultural relevance of MCAS?
- Is it interesting? Is it joyful? Is it engaging?
- There should be opportunities to see ourselves in the curricula
- Need to get at the ‘why’
- We have not faced up the original sin in our country; plays out every day
- If we have any chance, we have to have the adults to be able to talk about this stuff
- Our job is to help them make sense of what is happening in our world
- We need to unpack their own sense of identity
- To open myself to the world, I need a strong sense of self
- Is my identity valued and held in our community?
- Design often involves balancing tensions
- Asset framing vs deficit thinking
- Kneel down with your students (be with them)
- Be an accuser of extraordinary things
- Scale makes a difference
- Can you find ways to slow it down?
- Stop pretending like the world is not on fire
- Keep humanity at the center of education
- We are the space where change can really happen
- We are in the human business
- Relentless pursuit of knowledge and constantly reflecting on everything that happened today and how we can make it better
- Believing that every kid has something to offer
- You fix the environment, not the kid
- Rich Milner - ‘Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There’
- 4 tensions in schools
- Deficit thinking vs Asset framing
- Equity and Equality
- Engaged around issues of differences
- Avoidance vs engagement
- Context-centered vs context-neutral
- Root our work in primary sources
- Angela Daniels…accuse your child of something brilliant every day
- Committing to difficult dinner conversations
- Move from ‘sitting with the disappointment’ to giving them power and action
- ‘I want to help people be better versions of themselves’
- Journalists’ intuition - need to hold power to account
- Find wisdom in their critique to see what we could do better
- Mindsets and practices
- Change the way we think about stuff
- Change what we do
- ‘If faculties across Medfield committed to more perfect unions…what would that look like?’
- What is one thing you can try on Monday that you could do differently tomorrow?
- If you ask students serious questions, they will give you good stuff…if you tell them you’ll take it seriously
by Justin Reich (@bjfr) in Education Week
Really great schools can be different from one another in pedagogy and approach, but what they have in common is a shared set of goals and understanding among the faculty. It’s this shared understand that sets the conditions for effective collaboration and continuous improvement.
One of the signature challenges of leadership in schools is trying to create that coherence especially in schools that have been around for a long time with a really strong tradition of what we might call radical teacher autonomy: letting every teacher go to their own classroom, go to their own space, and teach and improve however they want.
If we look at the schools that have grown the most in the last five or ten years, schools that have made really significant improvements for their students in learning, these are the places that have had teacher communities that have been willing to come together and pull their oars together towards the same coherent goals.
How Might Change Be Driven by Coherence?
by Homa Tavangar (@HomaTav) and Will Richardson (@willrich45)
In our best world, all of our actions center the greater, or public good. We share a vision for a just, equitable, thriving society, and we contribute our ideas and our work in service to that. We are a community. We are truly neighbors who care for and support each other’s aspirations because we know achieving them will serve us all, not just the individual. In our current world, however, most of our actions serve the private good. We seek to “win” at the expense of others. We value the tangible things upon which we can measure our success. We put ourselves in the center of the story, and we feel impacted only by what we see in front of us.
In order for our species to survive and thrive, we must act for the global good. It’s not so much about allegiance to our cities or towns or nations as it is the collective of humans on the planet. This moment is telling us that how we act impacts all others and the world itself. It should just be a reminder, but for some it feels like a brand new lesson.
...coherence will only be found when we acknowledge our profound connection to everything around us. Only when we begin to not just articulate values and commitments that center justice and equality and respect but to also live those values as well can we begin down the path to coherence. And that, too, is where schools must start now. Change conversations can no longer be focused on how we might live differently in our schools but how we might live differently as schools in the world. We must start with a commitment to shared values that contribute to the global good, and we must fiercely inquire about and interrogate the gaps between those values and our practice.
Why Competency-Based Education Is Exciting And Where It May Stumble
by Katrina Schwartz (@KSchwart) in MindShift
This post references some of the challenges we face when transforming towards a competency-based framework of education and highlights some of the work that Justin Reich (@bjfr) has done in this field. I appreciate the underlying premise that Justin promotes - that of coherence - and the recognition that it is a process.
Educators all over the world are thinking creatively about ways to transform the traditional education system into an experience that will propel students forward into the world ready to take on its complex challenges.
Competency-based education has piqued the interest of many communities because of its promise to make learning a more personal experience for students….Wouldn’t it make more sense if everyone could move at their own pace, investigate their unique interests and demonstrate their knowledge in the ways that are most meaningful to them? In its purest form, that’s what proponents of competency-based education want to see.
“It forces or compels people to think really carefully about what it is we want students to know, to do, to believe, and to have conversations that are not just within one person’s classroom or department, but across departments, “ Reich said. “They’re thinking really carefully about what it looks like for students to be on a trajectory.”
That kind of coherence is key to innovative change, Reich said. And often it's the incremental changes, not the huge innovations, that ultimately transform systems. So while competency-based education in its most radical form may not end up being a viable solution for many schools, elements of the reform may make a big difference for educators and students where these conversations are happening.
The Greatest EdTech Generation Ever – LIVE Blog of Justin Reich’s Keynote (iPad Summit 2015)
by Beth Holland (@brholland)
This post was Beth Holland's (@brholland) live blog of Justin's (@bjfr) keynote from the iPad Summit in November, 2015. Justin's keynote at #DLDMedfield back in March, 2017 carried forth many of the same elements and ideas, and I strongly encourage everyone to read, reread, and come back to these words. They push me to reflect and also affirm our endeavors at Blake and hope they do the same for you. I particularly like his 'call' to make sure we maintain a focus on learning that helps students to acquire and grow these skills...
- Solving Ill-Structured Problems: solving the problems that require imagining novel solutions.
- Complex Communication: anything that requires social interaction with a human being. Think about the role of automated customer service. Any time a computer tries to pretend to be humans, it becomes laughable fairly quickly.
As educators, one of our most critical challenges is to develop students into these learners who can take advantage of both formal and informal education systems. In order to do this, people need two skill sets: be employable in the near term and be prepared to learn and adapt over time. In many ways, schools need to accomplish the goals of both vocational systems (prepare for specific tasks) and liberal arts systems (prepare to be thinkers).
Justin then tells about the peer-learning strategies employed by Eric Mazur of Harvard. Abundant evidence exists that actively engaging students in learning experiences is more effective than having them passively receive information via lecture.
“Given our results, it is reasonable to raise concerns about the continued use of traditional lecturing as a control in future experiments.”
That statement essentially makes it unethical to use lecture as a control in experiments because it is so ineffective. All learning should be active as it has been proven to be exponentially more effective.
…we have to address these goals as a community, and the hardest part is going to be rewriting a contract that has never been written. Right now, there is an unwritten contract of radical teacher autonomy. While that is attractive, it is not a robust system for making schools better. Instead, we need teachers to come together and share their learning as well as be able to share that learning as a way to get better.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What are some questions that you are thinking about these days? What questions would you like to find the answers for?
- How can I improve in math?
- Can we have recess every day?
- How does artificial intelligence work?
- Who will win March Madness?
- Why is the letter Y only a vowel sometimes instead of always being one?
- What is climate change?
April is National Poetry Month and each week I will share a poem or two to foster connections and dialogue about poetry in our lives. The two below from Rumi are ones that speak to hope, potential, learning, and growth.
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Take care.
Nat