To encourage dialogue and reflection about shifting our ‘ways of doing things’ and embracing an imaginative spirit through questions, our question for the week is: What problem(s) do you want to solve? Why? Shifting Our Thinking (Week of 10/31/21) (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
The rainy and gloomy weather we had throughout most of last week certainly contributed to the ‘Halloween feel’ as we ended the month of October, but I am enjoying the sunlight that returned Sunday afternoon!
As we all are experiencing, acknowledging, and sharing, this year has been a challenging one and we are not alone with these sentiments. Each day and week brings its own unique challenges, and each individual experiences these differently. It is so important to acknowledge and listen - and to ask questions. Kath’s ‘Why I Teach’ reflection reminded me of this process and of the importance of questions as a means for connection, growth, reflection, and learning. The three prompts are straightforward and relatively simple in nature…
- Why did you get into teaching?
- Why do you work with middle school students?
- What fulfills you in your work?
Although the structure is straightforward and ‘simple’, the responses, interpretations, and paths that each individual takes in their ‘sharing’ is heartening, encouraging, and enlightening. And the implications for student learning are important to consider. There is no one ‘correct’ answer, and the answers can also change over time (and still be right). Although some of the content we teach and students learn do have ‘clear/right’ answers, the deeper learning and experiences have more ‘shades of gray’. And, I hope we can continue to get to those areas of deeper learning - learning experiences that foster the process, foster reflection, and foster growth. And, yes, these can also (and need to) be reflected in the questions/answers that do have a ‘linear’ or ‘one correct’ answer.
The two posts below speak to the role that ‘questioning’ plays in deeper learning, along with the ways that these questions can help us adapt and ‘comfortably’ live/thrive in a complex reality - a reality that continues to get more complex for all...
The Power Of A Question
by Greg Satell in The Creativity Post
As Warren Berger explains in A More Beautiful Question, while answers tend to close a discussion, questions help us open new doors and can lead to genuine breakthroughs. Yet not all questions are equal. Asking good questions is a skill that takes practice and effort to learn to do well.
“Why?” questions can be frustrating because there are rarely easy answers to them and they almost always lead to more questions. There’s even a technique called the 5 Whys that is designed to uncover root problems. Nevertheless, if you want to get beyond fundamental assumptions, you need to start with asking “why?”
While asking “why?” can help alert us to new opportunities, asking “What if” can lead us in new directions and open new doors.
Asking “Why?” and “What if? questions can open up new opportunities, eventually, we need to answer the “How?” question. “How?” questions can be especially difficult because answering them often involves knowledge, resources, and capabilities that we do not possess. That’s what makes “How?” questions fundamentally more collaborative.
...while researching Mapping Innovation, I found that the best innovators were not the ones who were the smartest or even the ones who worked the hardest, but those who continually looked for new problems to solve. They were always asking new questions, that’s how they found new things.
The truth is that to drive innovation, we need to build a culture of inquiry. We need to ask “why” things are done the way they are done, “what if” we took a different path, and “how” things can be done differently. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover and if you don’t discover, you won’t invent. Once you stop inventing, you will be disrupted.
Complicated To Complex
by David Culberhouse (@DCulberhouse)
For it is not just clarity and coherence that seem to be lacking in the midst of the current context of heightened complexity, it’s realizing that the same thinking, the same processes, and the same behaviors and actions that led to viable solutions for the technical problems we previously faced, will be no match for the rash of adaptive challenges and dilemmas that we are beginning to encounter.
...today’s leaders will have to move from deftly providing solutions and certainty, to dealing with dilemmas that have no “right” answer, while managing the plethora of tensions that accompany those challenges. Which necessitates acclimating quickly to a new way of thinking and leading, toward a deep mindset shift that might possibly be at odds with the current organizational and institutional thinking of the time.
It is in realizing that complexity also requires a sense of adaptability, of being able to move away from the polarity of (either/or) thinking, to engage in (and) thinking. To not only seeing the system that you are working in, but being able to effectively manage the tension between the polarities and growing number of dilemmas and adaptive challenges that are erupting across our societal systems, without snapping back into the comfort of solutionitis and (either/or) thinking.
Ultimately, we will need to engage new and non-obvious thinking and strategies for building new understandings toward this exponentially changing world and the complexity that is emerging from it.
A junction where the complicated and complex have come face to face, a crossroads where they come head to head in a world that is in the midst of its own massive upheaval that is spilling out in broad swaths of uncertainty that are spilling out across our societal, organizational, and institutional ecosystems. Understanding this dynamic will be vital for the future of leadership and building more effective systems across our organizations and institutions. As well as realizing how our organizations and institutions have truly become complex adaptive systems, and what has worked before, what has worked effectively in the past, may very well not work in the future.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What are the 'things' that matter most to you?
- One thing that matters a lot to me is that when I am older I do something big or small to help someone or something in one way
- Family and love
- My well-being and that of my family, friends, colleagues, students
- Helping others to make a difference.
- Faith, hope, inspiration, love, relationships, family, progress, growth, purpose.
- Meaningful relationships, a safe place to explore and grow, and snacks.
- Knowing at the end of each day that I have put forth an honest effort in my work and took steps to treat others around me in a positive and supportive way.
- my family
- My family, my friends, my house, my teachers, my school, Dance, Basketball, Field Hockey, Piano.
- My family because I don't want to lose them
- Family, a good college, ART
- Family friends sports school
- One thing that matters a lot to me is that when I am older I do something big or small to help someone or something in one way
- Family and love
- Gymnastics and Henry and teddy (my stuffed animals) my friends and my family
- Something that matters most to me is soccer. Soccer means so much to me because its my favorite sport.
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