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? Planting Seeds for Learning (Week of 9/2/19) (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 a fulfilling and energizing first week of school, the Labor Day weekend was thoroughly enjoyed by our family. Amidst sleepovers, sports, and some errands we were able to garden, take some bike rides and walks, practice yoga, read, and relax. I hope that everyone was able to find ways to recharge and take advantage of the last bit of summer that is so often associated with Labor Day!
Adapted from Dare to Lead
Teachers are some of our most important leaders. We know that we can’t always ask our students to take off the armor at home, or even on their way to school, because their emotional and physical safety may require self-protection. But what we can do, and what we are ethically called to do as teachers, is to create a space in our schools and classrooms where all students can walk in and, for that day or hour, take off the crushing weight of their armor, hang it on a rack, and open their hearts to truly being seen.
Teachers are the guardians of spaces that allow students to breathe and be curious and explore the world and be who they are without suffocation. Students deserve one place where they can rumble with vulnerability and their hearts can exhale. And what I know from the research is that we should never underestimate the benefit to a child of having a place to belong—even one—where they can take off their armor. It can and often does change the trajectory of their life. -- Brene Brown
At the outset of each school year I share these sentiments/thoughts...
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?
Our opening days together as a staff provided a forum for reflection, visioning, and community. I want to thank our entire staff for 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 the 40,000 foot view during the opening 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 posed (questions, video clips, posts, and quotes) so that they stay current. I hope that our work each day with students 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 courage - 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 to Frame the Year...
- What hopes do you have for this year?
- What fears do you have for this year?
- Courage in our students looks like...
Brené Brown | Daring Classrooms | SXSWedu 2017
(33:33)
Sir Ken Robinson on Role of a Teacher
(2:23)
The End of Average: Harvard's Todd Rose on Why Individuality Is the Key to the Future
(4:24)
Jaime Casap Discussing How Learning is Changing
(2:08)
The Responsive Organization
(5:25)
Bonus: Malcolm Gladwell debates Adam Grant
(5:25)
Quotes...
And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been. -- Rainer Maria Rilke
Our task 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. -- Ken Robinson
When I see people stand fully in their truth, or when I see someone fall down, get back up, and say, ‘Damn. That really hurt, but this is important to me and I’m going in again’—my gut reaction is, ‘What a badass.’ -- Brene Brown
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
Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up. -- Brene Brown
My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered the interruptions were my work. -- Henri Nouwen
I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned. -- Richard Feynman
Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. -- Brene Brown
We've become so used to the concept as a measuring and sorting tool, that it and its correlates - below-average, above-average - are everyday speech. We don't even question the language, although the challenges we face require a different mindset. -- Todd Rose
...a generation of kids that are growing up learning on the web...how they learn how to do things is different than the way we learn how to do things and we need to keep that in mind. -- Jaime Casap
The severity of one’s disability does not determine their level of potential. The greatest barriers that persons with disabilities have to overcome are not steps or curbs, it’s expectations. - Karen Clay
Best thing we can do for kids...instead of teaching them to be successful...teach them how to respond when they are not successful! - Principal El
If the world is changing, the research and evidence become irrelevant if you don't consider a new context. - Katie Martin
Change almost never fails because it's too early. It almost always fails because it's too late. The time to get ready for that change is now. - Seth Godin
Hope will never be silent. - Harvey Milk
Each and every school day will bring tens of thousands of reasons to celebrate in schools across the country. - Bill Ivey
Two Posts of Interest...
Moving from Feedback to Feedforward
by Jennifer Gonzalez (@cultofpedagogy)
Gonzalez’s post references the work of Marshall Goldsmith and Joe Hirsch (author of The Feedback Fix), highlighting the concept of ‘feedforward’, rather than ‘feedback’. It supports the very essence of our efforts to provide a method and structure to provide meaningful feedback to students that is future and progress-oriented. The visual really helps to outline the distinctions between the two.
It turns out there’s a different way to give feedback that works a lot better, a way of flipping its focus from the past to the future. It’s a concept called “feedforward,” which was originally developed by a management expert named Marshall Goldsmith. As far as I can tell, not a lot of educators are familiar with the practice of feedforward, and I really think if we learned how to do it and started using it more consistently, it could make a huge difference in how our students grow and how we grow as professionals.
“People can’t control what they can’t change, and we can’t change the past,” says Hirsch. “And that happens to be the focus of most of the feedback that we give or receive.” More specifically, backward-looking feedback doesn’t often get good results for three reasons:
- It shuts down our mental dashboards.
- It focuses primarily on ratings, not on development.
- It reinforces negative behaviors.
by Orly Friedman in Education Next
Friedman’s post is one that helps provide a framework for analysis and assessment - focusing on the process vs the results. This is important on both micro and macro levels in education and the implications are important for our work with students and one another. Within the post Friedman references a London-based Education Endowment Foundation website - a tool that assesses and ranks the effectiveness and costliness of interventions.
What’s required to remedy this situation is re-elevating the process of achieving academic results, and using outcomes not for external judgment, but for internal calibration. This can happen by asking districts, schools, and teachers to clarify the inputs that are most important to getting their desired results and evaluating them on the quality of these inputs.
There are at least three distinct reasons for measuring inputs in addition to outputs. The first is to prevent misguided strategies for raising the outputs...A second reason to measure inputs along with outputs is to facilitate learning about which inputs work...A third reason to measure inputs in addition to outputs is that some outputs are difficult to measure.
What would a shift toward measuring inputs look like in practice? For a school, this would mean judging success not on test scores, but on the conditions that go into creating academic results...Measuring school success based on the quality of inputs encourages diverse approaches that are responsive to the community each school serves, but also does not limit the collection of standardized assessment data.
The power of measuring educators on the quality of what goes into their programs is in the culture that this process supports. Evaluating inputs requires schools and districts to have, and be able to explain, a theory of change. It helps individuals and schools own their own results and trusts them to use the results as feedback in an iterative process of improvement. Ultimately, evaluating inputs over outputs encourages a culture of learning, which should be at the heart of every education organization.
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 and thoughts so that we may come closer to ‘realizing’ Hattie’s work and our ‘whys’ for all of our precious children...
Dean Ryan HGSE Commencement Speech 2015
(24:28)
You understand that our collective aim, as educators, is not simply to atone for that sin, but to prevent it from happening in the future. That’s what it means to change the world, and my final charge to you is to get busy on that task, and to never settle. So pay attention to the tug at your sleeve, lend a hand, right wrongs, speak up, and as you leave Appian Way today, see what needs doing and do it without being told.
I look forward to the work that lies ahead for all of us.
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Take care.
Nat