To encourage dialogue and reflection about discovery, articulating hopes, and our paths of learning, our question for this week is: What are your hopes for the end of this school year? How do you want to grow as a learner? Discovery, Hope, and Learning (Week of 4/23/23) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
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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 vacation week was a nice and restorative time for us and I hope that was also true for everyone, in whatever ‘form’ restoration looks like for you. We had a nice staycation - walks with Lila, yoga, gardening, movies, and going to Game 2 of the Celtics playoffs (Maggie was a little jealous!). It was so nice to enjoy the weather and be outside as much as we could. As noted below, I tried to catch up on bookmarked podcasts, articles, and clips that I set aside or have been shared with me by many of you. Katie and I are still thinking about a recent 60 Minutes episode about artificial intelligence (The AI revolution: Google's developers on the future of artificial intelligence)- so many implications and things to think about!
In this process of reflection, I have also been trying to hold onto and actualize a mindset and framework that Justin Reich has shared at different times as he encourages us all to have a…
‘High internal locus of control as a teacher; recognize and have a low internal locus of control as a citizen’
This is a challenge for me as I often want to ‘take everything on’ all at once, and it has helped me to remember that we can each act and ‘take things on’ in a productive and ‘next step’ orientation. There are many patterns/themes/threads within the ‘shares’ below - as I processed each of them (some multiple times), I found myself coming back to our theme of discovery, the importance of articulating hopes, and the paths we create and refine for learning. And, in turn, I challenged myself to see how they connected to me within my own locus of control as an educator. I welcome thoughts, dialogue, questions, and processing from all - truly.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What do you love learning about?
- Science
- Art
- History
- History and dinosuars
- I love learning about american history
- I love learning about new things in life.
- Science and Math
- I love learning about morbid things. I can't help it, it just interests me.
- lacrosse
- social studies
- I love learning about different cultures and the holidays/celebrations different cultures and religions celebrate.
- human anatomy and ww2
- History is one of my favorite subjects, especially Mediterranean history.
- I love learning about biology in science statistics in math ancient india in Social studies and prepositions in English. I just like what I'm learning I just hate having to do MCAS.
- chess
- math
- I like learning about the different time periods in social studies
- I love learning about science, social studies, and english.
- Sports
- I LOVE LEARNING ABOUT HISTORY
- Space
- Fossils
- Historical events
- I can learn new things and expand my mind.
- Social Studies
- Our past history and the stuff that they had to go through.
- military aircraft
- Social studies
- I love learning about animals
- I love learning about things in science
- Biology and astronomy
- I love learning about math and what to do in different problems.
- the normal topics, but in a philosophical way
- mandarin!
- everything
- I like space
- I like learning about math
- science, social studies, PE, art,
- I love learning about HOW I learn best!
- everything.
- Math
- gym and sports
- I like learning about anything in math.
- New topics.
- The more knowledge that enters my brain, makes me feel more powerful and knowy
- Art
- I love learning about new things that will happen in the future.
- Geography
- I love getting to learn new things and things that will help me in the future.
- 1. SCIENCE: The universe 2. SS: ancient things
- sometimes things about history.
- History (In BCE)
- Writing
- interesting things that can help in the future
Intentions for the 2023 calendar year (some carry-overs from previous years)...
- #slowingitdown with intentional time for self-reflection, mindfulness, and growth
- Defining ‘personal time’ and ‘professional time’ (an uphill climb for me)
- Practice #willfulaction with #willfulhope
- Lead with flexibility, understanding, and grace
- Align beliefs with practice (hope with action) in the realms of anti-racism, social justice, equity, diversity, belonging, and inclusion (personal, professional, leadership)
- Intentionally strive to integrate practices of belonging, inclusion, equity, and diversity into all facets of life and work
- Explore musical interests (playing and listening)
- Listen to understand rather than listen to respond
- Embrace and model authenticity and vulnerability
- Explore ways to 'go deeper' and find more meaning
- Think about ways to connect more directly with students (focus groups, check-ins, discussions)
- Broaden and redefine some methods of leading, sharing, and growing (networking, connecting, collaborating) within Blake, Medfield, and beyond
Some posts/podcasts that resonate…
To Improve a Child's Education, We Must Be Willing to Let Old Practices Die
by Isabel Bozada-Jones in EdSurge
What are we willing to lose in order to change a child’s life?
We are still buckling under the weight of the inequitable education system that preceded the pandemic and the makeshift solutions created during the pandemic. At the same time, we fear losing what has kept us going. In order to answer this question, we need to shift from a mindset of scarcity and claim abundance.
Sometimes we must lose what we have to make space for more important things. This loss is generative and necessary, but it is difficult to welcome the expanse that emerges from simply letting things die.
If our goal is transformational educational experiences for children, experiences that change their lives and our communities, some things must go.
I am committing to letting go of what no longer serves us to create space for the imagination, creativity and hope that brought me to this profession. Together, we must move from scarcity to abundance to manifest education justice for all.
Use "Creative Abrasion" As a Source of Energy
by Annie Murphy Paul
That term—creative abrasion—captures the truth that conflict can be a potent source of creative energy. A group in which everyone engages in tepid agreement is unlikely to generate much in the way of creative sparks. In a study of technology companies, Stanford professor Kathleen Eisenhardt and her colleagues found that working groups with low levels of conflict tended to produce ineffective and uncreative solutions.
The key to creative abrasion, then, is fostering a very particular kind of conflict. Here, five steps to doing so:
One: Recognize and play up your own distinctiveness.
Two: Stake out a strong and authentic position.
Three: Throw away those familiar brainstorming instructions.
Four: Make sure it doesn’t get personal.
Five: Be flexible enough to allow for convergence.
According to Stanford’s Robert Sutton, we should strive for “strong opinions, weakly held.”* The practice of creative abrasion entails allowing our ideas to get roughed up—changed, enhanced—through contact with other ideas. Sutton also puts it this way: “People should fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are wrong.”
8th Grade Insights Into ChatGPT and the Future
by Sarah Cooper in MiddleWeb
Like so many teachers, I’ve felt both excitement and unease about the potential this AI language model has unleashed: excitement at the many ways this tool could enhance brainstorming, revision and problem solving, and unease at the possibilities for cheating.
Insight 1: Search feels so much more fluid now, leading to more conceptual thinking and applications.
Insight 2: Ethics is front and center for our students.
Insight 3: ChatGPT is asking us to define which skills are truly human.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if ChatGPT’s impact meant we moved away from tech to areas tech can’t touch – to more face-to-face discussions and idea-generating sessions? Such sessions could be summative assessments, Harkness or Socratic seminar style, or formative assessments, leading to a video, podcast or even students’ own AI creation – an interactive product we can only dream of right now.
Here’s to more dreaming, inspired by the students in front of us every day.
Reinventing Education beyond 2020 with Michael Horn
(44 min) from the New View Edu Podcast
No one can deny that the events of 2020 changed education in America, and arguably, worldwide. But three years after COVID closed schools, what is the actual state of our educational system? What lessons did we really learn, and what mistakes have we made? What opportunity lies ahead for transformation? Michael Horn returns to New View EDU to share the findings from his new book about education after the pandemic, From Reopen to Reinvent.
Vivek Murthy — To Be a Healer
(57 min) from the On Being with Krista Tippett Podcast
We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Surgeon General. And for years, he's been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition.
It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity — and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn.
Pay Attention, Class: Here Come More Facts for You to Forget
by Alfie Kohn
Students will soon forget much of the information they’ve been taught. The truth of that statement will be conceded, either willingly or reluctantly, by just about anyone who has spent time in school. We commit a list of facts, dates, or definitions to memory, but before long we couldn’t recall most of them if our lives depended on it.
Before sitting down to plan a course, therefore, every high school and college instructor ought to ask, “What can I reasonably expect students to remember from it a few years from now?”
…our ability to (accurately) recall information is limited no matter how it’s taught. And those limits have been confirmed by investigations conducted in the three decades since Semb and Ellis published their review. For example:
* In a study that Semb and Ellis themselves coauthored, students forgot about two thirds of what they had been taught a few years earlier in a college psychology course, and those who had received an A remembered only slightly more than their classmates with lower grades.5
* Medical students forgot 30 percent of basic science facts after one year and 50 percent after two years.6
* A study that tracked down students who had taken a course in consumer behavior discovered that “most of the knowledge gained in the course is lost within two years.”7
* Retention of facts from a course in agricultural education was “abysmal” after only six weeks had passed.8
The more that schooling is devoted to teaching a bunch o’ facts, the more of those facts we’re likely to forget.
Did Liberal Arts Colleges Miss a Chance to Become More Inclusive After the Pandemic?
(46 min) from the EdSurge Podcast
Two longtime professors hoped the pandemic would reset the small liberal arts colleges where they taught. So they wrote a book-length manifesto laying out a vision for making the colleges more accessible — and true engines of social mobility. Three years into the pandemic, they reflect on how that’s going.
Remember More, Forget Less
(49 min) from the Hidden Brain Podcast
It happens to the best of us — we blank on someone's name, or forget an important meeting, or bomb a test we thought we'd ace. Today on the show, we talk to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham about the mysteries of memory: How it works, why it fails us, and how to build memories that stick.
What Does Gen Z Want From Education?
(27 min) from the EdSurge Podcast
With every new generation of students there’s an effort to understand what’s different about them, and what motivates them as they enter society and the workforce. For Gen Z, a key factor is their skills in organizing on social media and interest in working across traditional partisan divides on issues like gun control, environmental protection and racial justice, argues Timothy Law Snyder, president of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who calls them the “solidarity generation.”
A few annual pleas/requests (paraphrasing of thoughts/notes shared in past years)...
Unless the weather brings forth some unforeseen changes, our last day of school this year is June 15 and it is my annual 'ask' to do your/our best (and I include myself in this ‘ask’) to not 'count down the days'. I have seen similar posts of this nature before, but Pernille Ripp (@PernilleRipp) shared her thoughts in a very thoughtful way six years ago (On Counting Down the Days) - I appreciate her sincerity and honesty and staying centered on the important work that we do...
Because while the countdown may be fun on the surface; another way to show off student accomplishment – you made it through 7th grade -it also sends a much deeper message; we are done with the year. I am done with you. I cannot wait to be done and finally get a break. Is that really what we want to tell our students?
It is not that we don’t know how many days are left. I have 38 days left to be exact and so much still to teach. It is just that we don’t advertise it. We don’t actively remind children how much better summer will be than what we are doing. It undermines the entire mission we have had all year of instilling the importance of the work we do. It undermines every single time we have said that school is important. So now, when a child tells me that they are excited about summer, I tell them I am too, but also that I will miss them, that I will miss our learning, that I will miss our classroom. That we have so much learning still to do. That we will work to the very last day because our time is valuable. Because we need every minute we can get.
Couros's post, The Policies in Your Head, is one that I often return to when I have a hard time 'getting out of my head' and in times of reflection: Don’t hesitate to ask questions in the pursuit of doing what is best for kids. Otherwise, the thing that might be holding you back is your own thinking, and nothing else. I have shared this before (and have needed to remind myself of this and needed others as well to help me with the reminder!) - I do not always enjoy the feedback that you or others may share but I know it is important and I welcome the dialogue and conversation. I am looking to improve and rely on questions, open communication, and feedback - and please know that I thank you for it.
Continuing the practice suggested several years ago in an Educational Leadership post by a retired principal named Dave Weston, this week I am asking all Blake staff to share their thoughts in response to the following questions...
- What’s going particularly well for you this year?
- What concerns/issues do you have at this point?
- What can I do to best support you right now?
- If you could get some professional development right now, what would it be?
- Anything else?
And, my 'broken record' charge for our community of learners...
A concerted focus on our mission and essential question will help us to embody our mantra of a 'willingness to adapt' and, if all goes well, learning and growth as we aim to 'get out of our own heads', establish productive conditions for learning, and foster and further a cohesive thread throughout the school…
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Take care.
Nat