To encourage dialogue and reflection about the practices of rethinking and reflection, our question for this week is: What is something that you have known or believed to be true that you are willing to rethink? Rethinking and Reflecting (Week of 2/6/22) (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.
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
Last Friday’s ‘ice day’ (is that it should be called?) provided a nice respite to take a break with the kids - they were so thrilled to get the news that school was canceled - a reminder that no matter the age, that call from the Superintendent brings forth excitement!
Checking Our Beliefs, Assumptions, and Understandings
…as Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant), shares - it will point us towards an evidence-based approach to supporting our thinking, beliefs, and convictions...
“How do you know? It’s a question we need to ask more often, both of ourselves and of others.”
In a podcast (link is below) that I have referenced with our staff (and with what feels like anyone that will listen and indulge me!), Grant shares a strategy via a question to help bridge the gap that may exist with differences of opinion.
A Slight Change of Plans - Adam Grant Thinks Again
(38 min)
Psychologist and author Adam Grant talks with Maya about the science of changing peoples’ minds, including our own. Adam also takes some of his own advice and rethinks some of his ideas.
He shares (and I am paraphrasing)......
In order to recruit someone else's agency in a discussion, debate, disagreement, or challenge, ask this of others:
'What evidence would you need to hear/read/know in order to change your mind?'
This question allows one to name the evidence that is needed and takes what can feel like a ‘defensive posture’ out of a dynamic. It also pushes and begins to engage each of us in the practice of self-reflection.
It is definitely a humbling practice to embrace, but I have found that each time I do so it gets a little bit easier. The two ‘images’ below from the end of Tuesday’s faculty meeting (Glennon Doyle’s words/thoughts referencing ‘productivity detox’ and the pic of one of my favorite t-shirts) are ones that speak to this idea of setting time for reflection and rethinking in a productive manner…
We’re Trying To Do “The Wrong Thing Right” in Schools
by Will Richardson (@willrich45)
Richardson is on my list of 'must follows' and this post sparked the focus of my thinking - within, he references the work of Russell Ackoff, an organizational theorist and professor at Wharton. There are several important messages here with implications for our work, and the questions within are important to reference on a regular basis. Although he wrote this post in 2016, the meaning is as pertinent as ever.
Words from Russell Ackoff: “Peter Drucker said ‘There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.’ Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake and correct it you become wronger. So it’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Almost every major social problem that confronts us today is a consequence of trying to do the wrong things righter.”
Sadly, “doing the right thing” for our kids in schools is difficult. In education, our structures, our histories, our nostalgia for trying to do the “wrong thing right” runs deep. Regardless of how we got here (and the story is complex,) we are profoundly wedded to what now constitutes this “education system” that dominates our learning world. The roles and expectations of students and teachers and administrators and parents are so clearly reinforced by our own experience, our cultural representations, and by those who have millions of dollars invested in the status quo that any serious suggestion that we might be doing the “wrong thing” is simply layered over by a new initiative, a new technology, a new curriculum, or a new success story to avoid having to grapple with the more fundamental question.
Doing the right thing in schools starts with one fairly straightforward question: What do you believe about how kids learn most powerfully and deeply in their lives? Once you’ve answered that as an individual and as a school community, the question that follows is does your practice in classrooms with kids honor those beliefs? In other words, if you believe that kids learn best when they have authentic reasons for learning, when their work lives in the world in some real way, when they are pursuing answers to questions that they themselves find interesting, when they’re not constrained by a schedule or a curriculum, when they are having fun, and when they can learn with other students and teachers, then are you giving priority to those conditions in the classroom? Are you acting on your beliefs?
Willing to Be Disturbed
by Margaret Wheatley
This piece is an excerpt from Wheatley’s book, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, and the phrase ‘willing to be disturbed’ is one that helps to open up conversations. This mantra will help us to listen to one another and examine our own practices - a key component of a learning community. There is much about this excerpt that I love, but the creativity element really speaks to me today.
As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally—our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.
It is very difficult to give up our certainties—our positions, our beliefs, our explanations. These help define us; they lie at the heart of our personal identity. Yet I believe we will succeed in changing this world only if we can think and work together in new ways. Curiosity is what we need. We don’t have to let go of what we believe, but we do need to be curious about what someone else believes. We do need to acknowledge that their way of interpreting the world might be essential to our survival.
Sometimes we hesitate to listen for differences because we don’t want to change. We’re comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we’d have to get engaged in changing things. If we don’t listen, things can stay as they are and we won’t have to expend any energy. But most of us do see things in our life or in the world that we would like to be different. If that’s true, we have to listen more, not less. And we have to be willing to move into the very uncomfortable place of uncertainty.
We can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for the new. Of course it’s scary to give up what we know, but the abyss is where newness lives. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing. If we can move through the fear and enter the abyss, we are rewarded greatly. We rediscover we’re creative.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: If you had unlimited time and resources, what would you choose to learn about?
- I would use the time and resources to approach learning as a person like Malcolm Gladwell does. read widely across a wide swath of content and find interesting connections and truths about the human experience.
- I would like to learn another language.
- I would choose to learn more about life
- LGBTQ+ issues and history, also astronomy, astrology, and witchcraft
- I would choose to learn about statistics.
- Photography
- I would learn why everything is what it is. Why does the universe exist? Why are animals biological structures the way they are? Why?
- How to do hair
- The whole history of African-Americans.
- The brain; art history; Cooking
- How to end war
- I would choose to learn about statistics.
- People’s families!
Throughout the month I am continuing to share words to honor #BlackHistoryMonth - the two quotes below speak to the importance of ‘pushing in’ and embracing ‘the struggle’...
As always, let me know of any questions/concerns.
Please click here for Blake Updates.
Please click here for District Community Notices.
Take care.
Nat