To help encourage conversations and dialogue about the connections we make with one another, this week's topic/question for the dinner table is: What connection have you made lately that has stuck with you the most? Please see link to Google Form to share your responses: Making Connections (3/6/16) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
As we continue to enjoy the longer days it sure feels good that spring is on the way (I saw that we are supposed to get close to 70 degrees this week)! Katie and I felt like 'passing ships' this weekend, with swim meets, birthday parties, and sports leading our days. We enjoyed a relaxed Sunday afternoon and family dinner - always good to try and slow things down a bit all together before we start the week!
Connectivity has been on my mind a great deal this week. One of our central goals as a Blake community is to foster connections for our students - connections with one another, teachers, and the curriculum. It is clear that when individual feel - genuinely feel - a sense of connection, one's investment in the process (friendship, learning, relationship) increases. It is important that we keep a pulse on our culture and to try and increase opportunities for established connections to be nurtured and new ones to be discovered. This is true for students and adults alike.
Last Tuesday night I enjoyed seeing Jessica Lahey, author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, speak at Dover-Sherborn High School. Jessica was a classmate of my sister's at D-S and I attended the talk with Katie and my mother. Walking through the doors of the auditorium brought back many memories of my high school days and I enjoyed the proverbial walk down memory lane. We arrived early to the talk (I always have my father's words in my head - 'What's the downside to being early?') and talked to Jess for a few minutes before the presentation. She had spent her day at D-S, talking to students and staff and it was fun to hear about her experience. Although we graduated several years apart and our paths did not cross in school, we chatted about our journey through school and the relationships/teachers who had an impact that we still feel today. Her words resonated with me on many levels, and I have shared some of my notes (phrases and reminders) from the evening that I hope to carry forward...
- Autonomy, Competency, and Connections (3 skills to foster)
- Resilience is a worthy goal
- Desirable difficulties are worthy and important
- Praise the process
- Make learning relevant
- Parenting is a long-haul job
- Are we raising kids who will no longer need us?
- Keep the long-term view in mind
- We need to broaden our vision of success
BFFs Forever? Understanding Middle School Friendships
by Jessica Lahey (@jesslahey)
Lahey shares her thoughts about the 'tween friendships' and shares her view that adolescents need to 'try out their outfits', and we can apply the 'outfit analogy' to many contexts during these years. It serves as a good reminder that healthy connections are grounded in an understanding of the 'other' perspective - a skill we want our students to develop.
Middle school is challenging for so many reasons—academics become more difficult, schedules fill up with activities, and, in what might be the most treacherous terrain for kids and parents alike, friendships change.
When they become tweens, friendships become much more complex, and for good reason. Tweens use friendships as a way to try on an identity. Old friends offer sameness and comfort, but the pull of novel ideas of other kids begins to lure them in new directions. Tweens begin to build friendships based on these new priorities. While some priorities, such as social status or fashion choices, may not make much sense to parents, they are just as important to our children’s growth as shared history or values.
Tweens move from relationship to relationship, adopting this detail of a friend’s personality, discarding that characteristic of another, until they have collected the essential elements of their identity. Some relationships will survive this process, and some will not, but every one is an important phase of the journey. We may not love every outfit our tweens try on, but it’s our job to be there when they emerge from the dressing room, when they do a little twirl and wait for us to tell them how grown up they have become.
Seven Ways to Not-Know Like a Leader
by Dan Rockwell (@LeadershipFreak)
Rockwell is an avid blogger about leadership and shares in this post the importance of being open to learning. As educators, we need to model this process of learning, sharing both things we know as well as those things we do not know. This spirit of transparency is critical as he shares some of the 'dangers' of all-knowing leaders (it's important to know that we, as invested adults in our students/children are leaders): Lost credibility; Limited influence; Persistent ignorance; Missed opportunities.
Pretending you know, when you don’t, makes you intentionally ignorant.
Can Technology Transform Learning?
by John Spencer (@spencerideas)
Bridging the ideas of connections into the classroom, Spencer poses a question that has been posed many times - the promise that technology will be the transformative agent for learning. As an advocate of innovative practices in education, I admire and agree with his assessment that the real influence lies in the connectivity and creativity within our students and ourselves.
None of those technologies radically transformed learning. Don't get me wrong. Many of those things mentioned before have their merits. However, each of those strategies were merely a more accurate and more efficient way of delivering content. They assumed students were passive recipients of knowledge....But that’s not how real learning works. Real learning is always active. Always connective. Always creative. We can create more personalized and targeted content delivery systems and we will still miss the point of learning.
The real power isn’t in content delivery. It’s in connectivity and creativity. It’s not so much that technology is amazing in what it can do but that students are amazing in what they can create. I'm less impressed by the newest gadgets than by the newest ideas that happen in creative classrooms. It's possible that technology can transform education. But the real transformative power is in the hands of the teachers and the students they empower.
I look forward to the sharing, learning, and connections that await our students and ourselves this week.
Please click here for Thursday Packet Information.
Take care.
Nat Vaughn