To help encourage conversations and dialogue about the ways that hope and curiosity help us to learn and improve, our topic/question for the dinner table is: What strategies do you use to stay hopeful when you face challenges? Practicing Hope and Curiosity (Week of 11/2/20)
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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 a snowy (I hesitate to even ask if the snowy weather felt like something ‘out of the norm’ in this very atypical year) and wintry end to the week, this past weekend was a welcome respite. Halloween was definitely a different experience for our kids, but we carved pumpkins, roasted pumpkin seeds, and have been enjoying some warm fires and quiet. The extra hour of sleep also felt like a gift!
Why am I sharing this openly? I promise that my intent is not to seek pity, compassion, or to bring others down. Rather, as I have conveyed before, I think it is important to acknowledge feelings, process them, and stay attuned to my (and our) personal and collective well-being. While I have always held that viewpoint, it has become increasingly more important for our students and school community to actively keep and ‘live’ that perspective. I keep coming back to these words that I have shared the last couple of weeks…
'This pandemic is not about how productive we can be. It’s about getting to the other side emotionally intact.’
- Lisa Damour
So, what do we do with these feelings and emotions? I wish I had a clear and defined answer that could apply to all situations and all individuals. But, that just isn’t the truth. I can share, though, that listening to myself and having others listen helped a great deal. And, I know for sure that we can do that for our students, families, and one another. I also know that ‘leaning in’ with a curious lens allowed some hope to be acknowledged and realized.
By leaning in and listening, with the help and clear reminders from friends and family, I turned to strategies that bring me closer to a curious and hopeful lens. Believe me, this is not easy - and, it does not make everything automatically take an optimistic turn full of ‘lollipops and rainbows’. What the strategies and #willfulhope, coupled with #willfulaction, allowed for me was the creation of space to open up and move forward. Last week I shared the impact that Marc Brackett (@marcbrackett), the author of Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive, has had on me. And, through the creation of space for these feelings, I acted on a few steps that helped…
- Sitting with and naming the feelings I was experiencing
- Covering a class on the remote Wednesday Zoom class - seeing and connecting with students
- Setting aside some intentional time for exercise
- Sitting in for a brief bit of time on Wednesday with our Blake Student Council and Blake Battles Bias group - so amazing, encouraging, and centering
- Reading, listening, and learning - here are a few podcasts (it’s so hard for me not to pass them on!)
- Art Critic Jerry Saltz’s Reckoning with Trauma and Anxiety from HBR’s The Anxious Achiever (36 min)
- Early on in the pandemic, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz wrote a piece about his unusual eating habits that grabbed the attention of many with anxiety, depression, or just Covid-related sadness. In the essay, Saltz recounts a lifetime of using food to cope with trauma and anxiety – until art helped him find a new path forward. In this conversation, he tells host Morra Aarons-Mele how his pursuit of work and paring life down to basics helped him manage trauma and anxiety and find a life he loves.
- Jamie Merisotis on Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines from Getting Smart (36 min)
- This week, Tom is sitting down with the president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, Jamie Merisotis. Jamie is a globally-recognized leader in philanthropy, education, and public policy. Jamie’s foundation, Lumina Foundation, is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. They envision a system that is easy to navigate, delivers fair results, and meets the nation’s need for talent through a broad range of credentials.
- Kim Marshall on a Career in Education from What’s The Big Idea? (45 min)
- In which Dan speaks with Kim Marshall, a retired teacher and principal, on his career and reflections on education and leadership. Kim is now a consultant and publisher of the excellent Marshall Memo, a weekly roundup of ideas and research in K-12.education. Dan and Kim talk about busing in Boston in the 1970s, how you know when you’re ready to move into administration, and what he’s learned from spending every Sunday for years reading education articles.
- Art Critic Jerry Saltz’s Reckoning with Trauma and Anxiety from HBR’s The Anxious Achiever (36 min)
- Allowing the time to move forward
- Holding up a mirror to my feelings and ‘doing the work’
Reading through a small sampling of responses from last week’s question about learning along with the posts below help to bring forth for me (and hopefully others) a sense of hope, centering, and curiosity...
Sampling of Responses from Our Last Topic/Question (Week of 10/26/20): What is one thing you are currently working on to improve your learning?
- I am working on consciously taking deep breaths prior to starting a task I am worried or nervous about. I have found this breathing relaxes my nerves and helps me focus.
- Paying more attention and trying not to get distracted
- Organization
- Learning different math skills
- I am currently working on TURNING IN assignments.
- Something I am currently working on to improve my learning is trying different methods to finish my assignments. You never know which way works the best for you unless you try all of the ways yourself!
- Organizing and submitting work so I don´t have to worry about it later
- I am working on reading more to improve my learning
Is “Hard” The Goal of Good Learning?
by Dean Shareski (@shareski)
Although written in 2015, the title question of this post is one that is as important as it was five years ago. Shareski challenges the language we use to describe learning and emphasizes the importance of focusing on the goal of learning - and, in so doing, hopefully shifting the goal away from ‘hard and challenging’ as the benchmarks.
I often ask people what they believe about learning. I suggest many people view learning and schools synonymously which while they aren’t, I think many schools inadvertently send a message that learning is like Buckley’s cough syrup: “It tastes awful but it works.”...As I explore the way we characterize learning I continually see how much we value words like: “hard, challenging, rigor, and difficult” In my efforts to make school more engaging and joyful, these ideas, while maybe not opposing, are certainly seen in a hierarchy...The classic statement: “Look to your left and look to your right, only one of you will pass this course” shows learning as elitist and rooted in ranking and grades. Knowing they have challenged students is the goal.
“Raising the bar” and “increasing achievement” are terms I question. Not because I think they are wrong but because they send a certain connotation that promotes the idea that we’d rather you be miserable and doing hard tasks than enjoying this that we might not be able to measure.
As someone who sees themselves as a curious learner, I don’t think learning needs to be hard to be valuable. Again, the challenge of that statement is most of us are so ingrained in seeing learning and school as synonymous, we can’t separate them. If we shared examples of what people have learned to do online in the last decade, “hard/challenging” would not be the word that characterizes most of that. This is because what people learn online is mostly their choice. Some skills and concepts are harder to learn than others and usually, the difficulty is related to expectations and time. It’s hard to be a good guitar player if you only play occasionally. While part of this conversation is semantics I also think part of it is about culture. A culture that sets up learning as “rigorous” and “challenging” as its primary characteristics sends a particular message. I’m just not sure it’s the one I want.
Invention Opportunity: Measuring What Matters
by Devin Vodicka in Getting Smart
This post is full of ideas, structures, and resources - the excerpts below provide an overview of the essence within, but the information in Vodicka’s post are worthy of serious thought and reflection. It reflects our current reality in schools and frames it as an ‘invention opportunity’ - a forward-thinking and necessary lens for all of our learners.
Our current K-12 educational system continues to operate on a model of age-based cohorts where students matriculate through a set of disconnected experiences, organized by subject area for elementary schools and by courses for secondary schools, with a net result that few learners complete high school prepared for lifelong learning. This approach, initially inspired by the efficiencies of Prussian schools in the mid-1800s and cemented by the shifts to mass-produced education during industrialism, has outlived its utility and is in urgent need of systemic evolution.
The invention opportunity here is to create new policies, practices, and tools that encourage the development of purposeful goals tied to whole-child, competency-based learning progressions. Building on the successes that we see at the edges of innovation now, we can invent new models that elevate the desired outcomes from a knowledge-oriented perspective to one that includes knowledge, habits, and skills. We can move away from a myopic focus on high-stakes, episodic tests. We can eliminate harmful grading practices like averaging. We can reframe assessment as a means to an end as opposed to an end in and of itself.
Margaret Wheatley encourages us to keep asking “What is possible?” In terms of the invention opportunity, it is clear that we can encourage the development of purposeful goals tied to whole-child, competency-based learning progressions. In fact, the movement is already underway. We can shift from a system over-anchored on assessment to one where learners and their learning is the focus. We can empower learners to see, own, and drive their learning, orienting to adaptive challenges that develop the knowledge, habits, and skills of all students. By promoting agency, collaboration, and problem-solving our learners will learn how to learn, improving their metacognitive capabilities through lifelong learning. Our students will become changemakers, making their communities, our society, and our world a better place. Isn’t that the purpose of education? It is possible here. We need to embrace the invention opportunity together and we need to do it now.
How To Unblock Curiosity And Build Creativity
By Tom Vander Ark in Forbes
Vander Ark shares the work and research from several individuals and resources, highlighting the importance of curiosity as a disposition that leads to innovation, invention, and creativity. The questions that Dr. Gino recommends are ones I hope we can continue to put into practice across all disciplines and contexts - ‘Why? What if…? How might we…?’
Curiosity might be the most important disposition of the new age. It guides the explorations of youth, it powers invention and creation, and fuels chapters of life long learning.
Cultivated through habits of inquiry, curiosity is easily dampened by stress—physical or physiological and blocked by a lack of permission—real or perceived. In an age where curiosity and creativity are more important than ever, pandemic challenges and inequitable conditions block employees and students from the luxury of curiosity.
Curiosity is promoted by safety and security, belonging and attachment, permission and opportunity—and that’s true at home, at school and at work.
“Curiosity is much more important to an enterprise’s performance than was previously thought,” said Dr. Gino. “That’s because cultivating it at all levels helps leaders and their employees adapt to uncertain market conditions and external pressures.”
Four of Dr. Gino’s recommendations apply for any organizational leader: model inquisitiveness, emphasize learning goals, let employees (or learners) explore and broaden their interests and have “Why?” “What if…?” and “How might we…?” days.
The lens of openness and curiosity to feelings, and in turn learning, is so very important and I know this is true for our students. And, perhaps the most impactful strategy that has helped goes back to the phrase that my dear friend Colby Swettberg taught us - ‘making the path by walking it’ - leaning on #willfulhope and #willfulaction. I have been sharing this image below on a consistent basis for some time now as part of the ‘sign-off’ to the Natworthy/blog updates - the words are from the song O-o-h Child by The Five Stairsteps. I absolutely love the song (brings forth so many emotions) and it helps me to stay hopeful about the current and future days that are ahead of us - and, ultimately hopefully keeping the question of ‘How might we…?’ at the forefront of thought and action.
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Take care.
Nat
#willfulhope #willfulaction #longasIcanseethelight