To help encourage conversations and dialogue about paying attention to ourselves and our hopes and needs, our topic/question for the dinner table is: What is a hope that you have right now? What is one thing you can do towards that hope? Paying Attention (Week of 10/12/20)
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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
The three-day weekend was a welcome gift for our family, and we felt fortunate to be able to head to Orleans for a change in geography. We enjoyed the down time - taking walks, enjoying the wind by the water, reading, and resting. I hope that everyone was able to make or find time to do whatever was needed - rest, play, relax, or simply be. It sure is important.
On My Mind: RBG, Surge Capacity, and Play as an Energy Source
(33 minutes)
In this episode, I share my thoughts on the power of dissent, what happens when we max out our surge capacity during a crisis, and how time spent without purpose can refuel and reconnect us.
The free-flowing ‘brain dump’ from Brene was wonderful and I highly recommend it for everyone. My key take-away was simply affirming my decision to pay attention to my own needs at the time - something that I think is challenging for many, and I know is particularly challenging for myself. By acknowledging this ‘need’, I found myself more present and recharged and I hope that I can continue to remember this ‘lesson’ - one I have learned and continue to forget, unfortunately. A hope I have for our community is that we can help one another to identify and pay attention to our own needs and hopes - this is a key part of learning and growth, and often easier said than done.
From my own ‘paying attention’ to the need for me to step away from school and work this weekend, I am sharing a few ‘resources’ that helped me to recharge (yes, they do directly/indirectly relate to ‘work’, but I also know that the practice of reading and reflecting is important for my own centering) - a quote about ‘dissent’ from Brene’s podcast, some responses from last week’s Topic/Question, three posts worthy of sharing and consideration, and Harvey Milk’s words about the importance of ‘hope’...
Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.' But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.
-- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Sampling of Responses from Our Last Topic/Question (Week of 10/5/20): How does the practice of listening help to improve your ability to learn?
- If we actively listen, we can begin to notice not only what people say but the significance behind what they are trying to say.
- Listening is essential to all learning. While it is important to formulate your own thoughts, that cannot be done with depth and breadth without considering the thoughts and opinions of others. Listening allows for consideration of others thoughts and opinions.
- Listening is something my father-in-law is very good at. When I speak to him he really takes the time and effort to give me his full attention. Sometimes I wonder if I am a good listener. The world is so fast-paced and I am always trying to stay on pace. I want to work on listening better which means also slowing down. Having said that, I love to learn new things, especially things I haven't thought of yet. Listening makes space for that to happen. Listening is a skill in itself.
- When I’m listening, I’m focused. And when I’m focused, I’m more likely to remember the information.
- Because you can focus better
- It helps us develop and understand.
- The more you listen the more you understand when the speaker is saying. For example if someone said the same thing over and over, you would understand it more every time the person repeats.
- Practicing listening allows me to be able to ask questions when I need them and it can help me understand and retain information
- It helps me because I like to hear people talk about the work then have to read it
- It strengthens our mind. When we listen to something that we are expected to learn, we must not only just hear it correctly, but also comprehend it and remember it.
- The practice of listening helps your ability to learn because if you don't listen it would be hard to learn
- It helps because you have a better understanding of what you are learning and you know what you have to do in order to succeed.
- The practice of listening helps me improve my ability to learn by making the material fresh in my mind.
- It helps the brain remember what you're learning when heard out loud instead of reading it in your head.
- When you are a good listener you can take in more information and become more focused.
- If you just listen your brain will retain more of the information that’s being shared.
- If you practice listening it can improve your learning because you will be able to take in more of the information if you listen.
- It helps me do my best if I know what I am doing
- It helps because the only way you are going to learn, is if someone else tells you.
- When you listen to the people talking your brain sucks that information so u never forget
- You process information when you listen.
- It helps me because it’s easier to take notes
- If you practice listening, it will be easier for you to learn when the teacher gives verbal directions.
- Because by practicing listening you can listen better and if you don't listen you may miss something that the teacher or a classmate said that might be important.
- The practice of listening helps to improve my ability to learn because it helps me to understand things better.
Build Muscle for Uncertainty to Deal With Life's Curveballs
By Christian Busch in Fast Company
Our mission of a ‘willingness to adapt’ has certainly come to life over the past seven months, and this post underscores the importance of intentionally practicing and enhancing our own ability to cope with, understand, and thrive in a state of uncertainty. I was particularly struck by the concept of ‘serendipity spotting and the art of reframing’.
...the most important skill needed to ride this wave of change rather than get crushed by it is this: building a muscle for the unexpected so that uncertainty becomes a welcome source of opportunity—and a mechanism for sustained success.
Developing a muscle for the unexpected means that luck ceases to be a passive force that happens to us, but rather is one that we can grasp, shape, and hone. Like a muscle, this mindset can be strengthened over time to better position ourselves for success, thereby making us agents of our own “smart luck.”
The human desire to control everything is one of the reasons why our inability to plan much of anything right now is so stressful. A challenging but important aspect of cultivating serendipity is accepting that we cannot plan or know everything. Accepting imperfection as part of life allows us to more easily reframe situations so that where others might see a problem (say, unexpected budget constraints), you see an opportunity (making the best out of whatever resources are at hand), thus allowing more creative outcomes to emerge.
One of the easiest adjustments to make along the career path to serendipity is asking better questions, and being open to exploring unexpected answers.
The societal and workplace challenges brought about by COVID-19 are considerable, and many are likely here to stay. A serendipity mindset is not designed to make these problems go away, but rather to give us the skills to find opportunity—and importantly, delight—out of the unexpected.
Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty
By Liza Featherstone in JSTOR Daily
Paulo Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was one of the first education books I read in college - and, it is one that is certainly worth reading from a pedagogical and contextual understanding of education. I came across this post on Twitter - and my key take-away is the importance of engaging in educational theory as the examination and re-examination of beliefs will help us to shape our current structures and practices for students.
...something vital about knowledge: it comes from lived experience —the teacher cannot just dictate from on high. In that moment, Freire realized that although his intentions in giving his Piaget lecture had been progressive, his pedagogy was not: he had treated his students as empty vessels—or as he would later write, vaults in a bank—waiting to be filled, not as interlocutors or partners in the learning process. He had not understood that he and his students were co-creators of knowledge; in dialogue, they would learn from one another.
...its enduring popularity and influence attests to another, even more intractable context: even as many more people around the world have access to education, schooling everywhere remains intertwined with systems of oppression, including racism and capitalism, and traditional models of top-down education don’t work well for everyone.
How much learning is really ‘lost’ when children aren’t in school buildings?
By Valerie Strauss in The Washington Post
This post is a republication of Alfie Kohn’s (@alfiekohn) recent blog post, speaking to the question shared by Strauss that seems to be on everyone’s (including my own) mind: How much learning are kids losing during the coronavirus pandemic as a result of being out of school buildings for months? Kohn continually pushes my own thinking, and this post pushes all readers to question some of our ‘cultural and traditional norms in school/education’ such as a reliance on standardized testing as an indicator of learning and the inherent (and understandable) desire to return to the status quo of schooling (a status quo that, in my mind, is long due for reform and change).
The research that fuels dire warnings, which largely extrapolates from claims about “summer learning loss” (SLL), is much less persuasive than most people realize...More important, none of the research on this topic actually shows a diminution in learning — just a drop in standardized test scores (in some subjects, in some situations, for some kids).
...as numerous analyses have shown, standardized tests are not just imperfect indicators; they measure what matters least about teaching and learning. And their flaws aren’t limited to specific tests or to how often they’re administered or to the way their results are used. Standardized testing itself, particularly when exams are timed or consist primarily of multiple-choice questions, mostly tell us about two things: the socioeconomic status of the population being tested and the amount of time that’s been spent training students to master standardized tests.
...concerted efforts to raise scores often have the effect of lowering the quality of teaching and learning, which means that improved test results may actually be bad news. Indeed, several studies have found that higher scores can signify shallower thinking.
...some studies have shown that the capacity for thinking not only isn’t lost over the summer but also may show greater gains than during the school year. As Peter Gray at Boston College, who reviewed some of that research, puckishly proposed, “Maybe instead of expanding the school year to reduce a summer slide in calculation, we should expand summer vacation to reduce the school-year-slide in reasoning.”
Too often, schooling consists of cramming bits of knowledge into students’ short-term memories — by means of lectures, textbooks, worksheets, quizzes and homework — all enforced with grades. Many of these facts and skills are indeed forgotten, but that doesn’t mean that being out of school is calamitous. Rather, it suggests that we should reexamine what too often takes place in school.
Warnings about academic loss are not just dubious; they’re dangerous. They create pressure on already-stressed-out parents to do more teaching at home — and, worse, to do more of the most traditional, least meaningful kind of teaching that’s geared toward memorizing facts and practicing lists of skills rather than exploring ideas. Parents may just assume this is what instruction is supposed to look like, partly because that’s how they were taught (and no one ever invited them to rethink this model).
When schools are finally able to open their doors again safely, let’s not return to the status quo ante covid-19, with its emphasis on the kind of test-focused instruction that can be lost. The good news — at a time when we’re all desperate for some — is that when the learning was meaningful to begin with, it doesn’t slip away.
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Take care.
Nat
#willfulhope #willfulaction #longasIcanseethelight