To help encourage conversations and dialogue about learning together as a community, our topic/question for the dinner table is: What are you hoping to learn this year? Opening and Providing Space for Learning (Week of 9/21/20)
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
After an exciting, emotional, and rejuvenating (insert other feelings, here, for sure!) first few days of school, I hope that everyone found some time to step back, breathe, and relax. Our own kids started in fully remote (the hybrid plan in Holliston has been delayed) learning, and we are doing our best to fully adapt - I know we are not alone in this reality, as we are all trying to navigate schedules, routines, and changes. At the risk of projecting or over-personalizing, I fully empathize with families, students, and schools - it isn’t easy. The weather this past weekend was absolutely lovely and we did our best to be outside and ‘soak it in’ - taking walks, gardening, and enjoying some bike rides. As one who is far better at preaching the importance of balance than practicing it, I am doing my best to not let self-care get pushed aside - it sure is an uphill climb for me and a constant work in progress.
** The words/reflection/thoughts/sharings below hope to serve as a framework for our learning community for the school year. As has been the practice in past years, my hope and intention is to open up and provide a space for dialogue, engagement, and collaboration - I welcome dialogue, engagement, and questions - it will be important to continue our collegial, communal, and professional culture as we aim to provide a rich and meaningful learning experience for our students...
As we work to establish a foundation for our work, a continued goal that I have (and one that I hope is shared by our entire community - students, staff, and families) for both myself and Blake is that we purposefully, intentionally, and actively strive to maintain a culture of learning, sharing, and transparency with one another and the community. It is critical that we take the time to highlight our work and progress, both the good and bad, in a reflective manner so that we are all held accountable to both our mission and our essential question...
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.
Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Guiding Premises for 2020-2021
These guiding principles/beliefs/convictions are ones we articulated as a staff back in June, with so many unknowns for this school year. I have shared them with students, staff, and families and will continue to do so in the days/weeks/months ahead as I believe and know that they will be the ‘posts’ and ‘guard rails’ that we can (and need to) lean on for ourselves and one another…
- This school year will certainly be different than any other - our mission, core values and beliefs, mantras, flexibility, and grace will guide our work and all of our decisions to best meet the needs of all of our students. I care deeply for every member of the Blake community and know that when we return (whatever it looks like), we will care for our students and one another
- When we return in the fall...we will meet students where they are at, we will meet one another where we are at, and we will all learn and move forward together
- Safety, Health, and Shared Responsibility will be guiding principles throughout this coming year (they have always been guiding principles, but they will be emphasized and articulated more than ever).
- Your well-being is most important - please take care of yourself, your family, and one another. Let us (the 'royal us') know if we can be of any help/support.
- Please take/make time for yourself, your family, and your loved ones - at night, mornings, weekends - this will be helpful for our students/families as well throughout this coming year.
- Relationships, relationships, relationships - that is the most important thing we do and will continue to be the most important thing we do. Everything else is secondary (important, but secondary).
their help in making it happen and willingness to ‘dive in’ - professionalism, care, and commitment to our students and one another was certainly present and felt. John Hattie’s research and findings emphasizes the importance of professional learning and intentional learning of teachers -- ‘...the greatest effects on student learning occur when the teachers become learners of their own teaching and...when students become their own teachers.’ This is our true goal - to be a community of active learners. My intent for our learning community is to take both the proverbial 40,000 foot view and ‘rubber hits the road views’ during these days to ask questions, plant seeds, frame the year, and foster dialogue in an effort to grow and learn. It is through the questions and ideas that we discuss and explore that our beliefs will be formed - these beliefs will then guide our actions.
As we embark on this year of learning, I am highlighting some of the ideas that were shared/posed/discussed (questions, video clips, posts, and quotes) so that they stay current. I hope that our work each day with students (both in person and remote) will align and help us towards our mission - please help me to articulate and examine these together. Much awaits us - hopes for our students and community, ups/downs, successes/challenges, theme of curiosity - and I am hoping we can continue to be learners together and reflect as a community, pushing and supporting our individual and collective growth...
Questions/Prompts to Frame/Consider the/this Year...
- What hopes do you have for this year?
- What fears do you have for this year?
- I am curious about…
- Curiosity in our students looks like and is important because…
- What do our students need from us?
- Why did you become an educator?
Videos/Clips…
Argo - The Best Bad Idea
(0:57) - A clip from an excellent movie - shared with staff that this is what planning felt like for this school year!
Congressman John Lewis "Good Trouble"
(1:38) - Shown to frame discussions on race, racism, equity, and social justice
CHRIS WEBBER "IF NOT NOW, WHEN?"
(3:06) - Shown to frame discussions on race, racism, equity, and social justice
Charlie Wilson's War - Zen master and the little boy
(0:50) - Clip from movie - has profanity within (do not share with students); shown as 'We Shall See...' is a mantra we will be living every day as we just don't know…
The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers
(15:24) - A TED talk by Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant)
Jesse Jackson - I am Somebody
(1:25) - Clip shown at end of 2020 school year to Blake staff and important to come back to
Quotes…
Our job is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it. - Sir Ken Robinson
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. - Justin Reich
My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered the interruptions were my work. - Henri Nouwen
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. - Bertrand Russell
Do we ever ask how young is it too young to talk to a kid about kindness or love or respect? No. We read books to kids about love when they’re coming out of the womb because we want them to love! That’s what we want. We should be doing the same thing with being antiracist. - Ibram X. Kendi
Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers. - Ibram X. Kendi
Hope will never be silent. - Harvey Milk
Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes. - Peter Senge
Each and every school day will bring tens of thousands of reasons to celebrate in schools across the country. - Bill Ivey
The Aims of Education - To enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them to become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens. - Sir Ken Robinson
Three Posts of Interest…
What If We Tried “Radical Acts of Education”?
by Homa Tavangar and Will Richardson in Big Questions Institute
This post is one that I first read back in June - I find myself coming back to it on a frequent basis. By looking at the etymology of the word ‘radical’ (proceeding from a root) and then applying it to our work and vision, we can embrace the openness that it allows in all of our efforts. It speaks to the importance of continually keeping this ‘radical lens’ in place.
As the corona virus rages on, and calls for social justice globally become louder, clearer, and more universal, why do we remain so afraid of being radical? Are the things that matter most to us mutually exclusive of radical acts, or might it be the reverse? In order to realize what’s vital: justice, equity, relationships, stewardship, community, creativity, joy – perhaps thinking radically is precisely what we need?
In our work we are constantly looking to the etymology of words to get to the root of messages and excavate the stories. “Radical” is a good case in point. The Latin origin of the word “radical” refers to “proceeding from a root.” This reference continues in math, where radical, symbolized by √, denotes a square root, cube root, etc.
As UCLA’s Distinguished Professor Emerita, Angela Davis, who embodies “radical,” in whatever way you interpret the word, explained, “Radical simply means grasping at the root.” And: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
Thinking radically helps us imagine a new world, but if it’s overwhelming to begin imagining globally, then “radical” also helps us begin at the roots, or locally. And we get to do it over and over and over again (“do it all the time”), because iteration is a key to trying, adjusting, failing, starting again, taking a risk, and continuously learning.
A School Year to Make a Difference
by Anthony Rebora in Educational Leadership
This month’s issue explores grading, assessment, and feedback - a topic near and dear to my heart! This brief post from Rebora provides an overview of the issue, referencing the necessity for us to ‘overhaul’ practices in light of the lessons we have learned. I could not agree more.
The pandemic, along with recent incidents of racial injustice, has exposed deep-rooted inequalities in our society and school systems and created tremendous hardships for many students and families. It has also forced us to adapt to new and ever-changing formats and structures for teaching and learning. It's important for all of us to ask ourselves whether we might need to break free of some inherited practices and preconceptions to make a difference in these new conditions.
...to better reflect and support student learning, conventional grading systems and practices need an overhaul. Especially at a time like the present, this is an area where school leaders and educators can make schools more responsive and meaningful to students.
Emerging from the Crisis
By J. Peter Scoblic in Harvard Business Review
Scoblic details the concept of ‘strategic foresight’ as a way to move forward from a period of crisis and uncertainty - periods that have been labeled with the acronyms VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and TUNA (turbulent, uncertain, novel, and ambiguous). We are certainly in the midst of such a period, and this post provides a ‘roadmap’ for the ways we can support our students and provide a more productive and beneficial framework to move forward.
Strategic foresight—the history, theory, and practice of which I have spent years researching—offers a way forward. Its aim is not to predict the future but rather to make it possible to imagine multiple futures in creative ways that heighten our ability to sense, shape, and adapt to what happens in the years ahead. Strategic foresight doesn’t help us figure out what to think about the future. It helps us figure out how to think about it.
...uncertainty is marked by novelty, which, by definition, lacks antecedents. At the very moment when the present least resembles the past, it makes little sense to look back in time for clues about the future. In times of uncertainty, we run up against the limits of experience, so we must look elsewhere for judgment. That’s where strategic foresight comes in.
As the current pandemic has made clear, needs and assumptions can change quickly and unpredictably. Preparing for the future demands constant reappraisal. Strategic foresight—the capacity to sense, shape, and adapt to what happens—requires iterative exploration, whether through scenario planning or another method.
...strategic foresight also enables us to identify opportunities and amplifies our ability to seize them. Organizations don’t just prepare for the future. They make it. Moments of uncertainty hold great entrepreneurial potential. As Wack once wrote in these pages, “It is precisely in these contexts—not in stable times—that the real opportunities lie to gain competitive advantage through strategy.”
It takes strength to stand up against the tyranny of the present and invest in imagination.
Curiosity, Care, and Inquiry
At the conclusion of our staff meeting on 9/15, we took the time to watch the end of James Ryan’s well-known HGSE graduation speech from 2016. Although we have watched it several times as a staff before (and I have watched it countless times!), I found that it ‘hit home’ and resonated with me on a much deeper level than in previous viewings. Through his eloquent and grounded message, Ryan emphasizes curiosity, care, and inquiry through the process of asking questions - let’s all work together to keep this framework for our students, ourselves, our families, and our community...
Dean James Ryan's 5 Essential Questions In Life
(6:49)
- Wait, what?
- I wonder...why/if
- Couldn’t we at least?
- How can I help?
- What truly matters (to me)?
I look forward to the success, challenges, and opportunities for growth that await us. It is my steadfast hope that we can keep our Guiding Lights (students, core values, mission and essential question) at the forefront of actions with strategic foresight, grace, and a willingness to adapt so that our precious children (and all of us) feel beloved and supported - I would also be remiss if I did not acknowledge the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and shared some of her wisdom along with words that help to guide our work at Blake…
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Take care.
Nat
#willfulhope #willfulaction #longasIcanseethelight