Refreshing Wednesday

I tried this today and it worked

From Seth's blog, of course: http://sethgodin.typepad.com

 

Carpentry 2.0: Why I Continue to Blog

Life in the infomation stream (that we now call life) can be random, overwhelming, or downright numbing. It -- the information -- just keeps coming, washing over us, indefatigable.

We can drool and mope in the vastness, or we can find a way to make meaning, to derive wisdom, to synthesize. In short, we can waste or we can make.  We can doze or we can learn.  

On good days, I make and learn.  I find things in the stream and nail them together, word by word, with the grammar I learned from Mrs. Fitzgibbons.  This carpentry yields something, however rickety: a small craft on which to float a while longer, asserting the words of Maxine Greene, "I am what I am not yet." 

Raise Both Hands

I teach in a 1:1 school, which means I am lucky enough each day to walk into a classroom that has everything I could ever need, technologically speaking.  My students and I share the same suite of applications, the internet connection is steady and dependable, and if something breaks, our tech team provides loaner equipment.  Classroom demos range across the media landscape with a few clicks, a few searches.  Presentations are seamless.  Collaboration is easy.  Did I mention we are lucky?

Heading into 1:1 programs like ours, a common refrain heard among teachers is that the "students know more than the adults do about technology."  And another: "students can quickly pick up any program or application that we need them to learn."  Fine.  I accept that.  I take it for granted that my students can learn how to use Google docs if I ask them to . . . or learn how to use Keynote.  I take it for granted that technology, for many of them, is intuitive. 

What I no longer take for granted, though, is that my students have any idea how to use their laptops as learning tools.  I don't find my students, as a "generation," to be intuitive about the ways technology can extend their learning.  This insight dawned on me slowly -- maybe more slowly than it should have -- due to a simple question that kept popping up in my classes. 

"Mr. Valentine . . . what does_____ mean?"  The word in the blank was usually a  word that either came out of my mouth or out of one of the books we were discussing. 

Variations of this question include: "How much would _____ dollars in the year _____ be worth today?"  Or, "How do I cite something for my paper?" Or, "What's a linking verb again?"

Every time one of my hyperconnected, MacBook-Pro-wielding students asks me one of these low-hanging-fruit style questions, part of my teacher-soul dies.  Why?  Because the questions imply, forcefully over time, that I haven't empowered my students to serve themselves at what is a veritable buffet line of knowledge and skills.  Put more directly, I haven't empowered my students to answer their own low-level questions by searching the Web, identifying valid and legitimate websites to answer their questions, and quickly synthesizing and applying what they learn. 

Here's why building this habit matters: there are questions and then there are Questions.  Class time should be spent as much as possible on the latter.  My students can look up the proper format for an MLA citation; we should spend class time talking about the resources being cited and how those resources might be used to craft an argument.  My students can look up grammatical rules; our class time should be spent figuring out ways for each of them to develop their writing voices by leveraging grammar the way rocks leverage slingshots.   

Therefore, I'm implementing a new policy in my English classes today.  I'm going to ask my students to raise both hands if they had a question and found the answer on their own.  When I call on them, I will ask them to present their question, tell the class why they wanted to answer it, and then share the answer they found. 

I'll let you know what we find. 

Which Store is Your School?

A few weekends ago, I landed the enviable task of having to track down and purchase a humidifier.  Without much thought, I phoned the nearest store that I felt would carry it at a decent price.  The person who answered the phone sounded upset when she answered.  And she sounded upset after I asked my question.  And, it turns out, she couldn't answer my question.  Did they carry the humidifier that I wanted?  She wasn't sure.  I drove to the store anyway, figuring I could look myself since I had seen it there in the past. 

When I arrived in the store, I felt like a stranger in a strange city -- didn't know the customs, didn't speak the language, didn't belong.  People who worked in the store quietly went about stocking the shelves or checking their cell phones or talking with other employees.  They seemed to be working hard to avoid making eye contact with me or engaging me in any way.  Twenty minutes later, after learning, on my own, that they didn't carry the product I needed, I took out my phone and decided to place some calls.  

I called two similar stores; they didn't carry the humidifier either.  Then, just for kicks, I called the same store I was in, in another town.  Worth a shot, this version of the store was four miles down the road.   

Four miles down the road might as well have been four thousand miles.  The person who answered the phone was cheerful and informative.  He found the product in the store and offered to hold it for me.  When I arrived in the store, every employee I came into contact with, including the gentleman collecting carts in the parking lot, greeted me with a "hello" or a "can I help you?"   I spent twenty minutes in the store -- the same amount of time I had spent in the previous store -- and felt over-served, over-welcomed, and overwhelmingly good, considering that I was shopping on a Saturday afternoon.  I bought the humidifier and a few other items as well.    

I need to reiterate here: I was in a store with the same name as the first store; I was in a store that shared the same advertising platform as the first store; I was in a store that put forth the same brand, the same mission statement, the same promises as the first store. And yet it was a completely different store, a completely different world.

I'm sure your school exists within a commutable distance of at least a few schools.  This fact leads to another fact: families choose you.  Families choose you.  With that said -- twice -- do the people who answer the phones at your school understand the impact they have on the people who have made a conscious choice to interact with your school?  Do the people who walk the halls and run the classrooms and advise the advisor groups and serve the food and paint the walls understand that they are part of a promise, a commitment, and a mission that draws families to your school?  We school people are busy, there's no doubt, but if we forget how the small things reflect the really big things, we can end up like the first store, the store that alienates its customers, the store that is living off its name or, worse, living off the profits of other stores that fit in the same category. 

Let me put that another way... The small things don't just reflect the really big things; the small things are the brustrokes that create the evolving painting of your school.  You might envision a masterpiece, but if your brustrokes are undisciplined or uninspired or unkind, the actual painting won't look anything like the ideal.  And, given the resources present in most independent schools, what a shame that would be. 

2 minutes and 2 years

I set up Edmodo accounts for my classes last week, and I was so enthusiastic about the results that I blabbed about them to anyone who would listen.  One particularly pragmatic colleague asked me an essential question: "How long did it take you to create an account and get your kids logged in and everything else?" 

"Two minutes!" I blurted out, punctuating my enthusiasm, but then I paused as I remembered that I had been wanting to subscribe to Edmodo for two years. 

I had originally settled on Edmodo after a Twitter experiment had gone wrong in one of my classes.  I was using a private Twitter feed to communicate with my students, but someone hacked into it and started spamming us -- so I retired the account.  I asked my tech coordinator if she could think of another, more edu-friendly system, and she immediately suggested Edmodo.  I wrote the name on a to-do list, looked at it from time to time, moved it to other to-do lists, even put it on a calendar, but I never spent the two minutes it would take to create an account and help my students register for my course. 

I now use Edmodo with my students for the same reason I once sought to use Twitter: microblogging, in just the right dose, is an ideal way to help students crystallize what they learn.  My daily question/task with Edmodo is simple, and it now happens at the end of each class: "Write down, in crystal clear language, the most important thing you learned today in class."  Students think back through our various activities . . . they summarize and evaluate . . . they type . . . they walk out the door . . . Edmodo populates . . . we have a running record of insights.  I, as the teacher, have a handle on the geography of understanding in each class.  Students, as the learners, can see what other students learned and how they articulated that learning.  If I see something that's wildly off base, I can course correct by adding a comment.  It's neat AND it works. 

But this post isn't (only) about the value of microblogging in the classroom.  It's about examining my habits and the habits of others by asking a (the?) proverbial ed-tech question: what the heck took me so long? Why did it take me two years (and two minutes) to discover a solution that was sitting, literally, at the tips of my fingers? 

I can only say that the power of habit is much stronger than I sometimes think it is.  Years can go by while you're thinking about making a simple, even slight, change.  Breaking work patterns is difficult; breaking the cycle of applications we use and the websites we visit is difficult; doing what works better rather than what works okay is difficult.   

I'm a big fan of the work of Tony Schwartz who in a recent HBR video says that we (busy professionals) need to "develop productivity rituals," completing "highly specific behaviors . . . at precise times" so that they become "automatic."  But I can't think of a name for the habit or productivity ritual that would entail systematically breaking certain habits or rituals that prevent us from moving out of our comfortable rhythms, away from our comfortable ways of working -- especially when these rhythms and ways of working are producing work that is passable or even good.  

Or maybe the solution to the problem can be found in the language we use to describe it . . . that is, we have to routinely and deliberately go to war with the passable and the good.  How?  By scheduling unscheduled, unscripted time to be around people we don't know, people who approach us in unpredictable ways.  Or we have to meet our own colleagues in different contexts; we have to move beyond our work-conditioned responses to questions and conundrums and people and problems.  Case in point: I finally got started with Edmodo because I went to a conference, decided to go to one of the keynotes, and heard Richard E. Miller say that  teachers must "model for students what it means to focus online."  He feels, like most of us, that too many students misuse the public and so-called private spaces of the Web.  As such, he encourages us, the adults or lead learners, to get into the "muck" and live there responsibly, showing students how they might do the same.  He convinced me on the spot -- helping me to overcome my Edmodo inertia. 

When I got back to school, I wanted to do something different; I wanted to show students that we might use short bursts of digital writing in a different way than they sometimes do when they communicate via text or twitter or DM or wall post.  The energy I took back from the conference helped me to jump the track of my habits.  Now my English classes use Edmodo to focus, to share their best and most precious insights, and to express membership in a learning community.  Getting there was worth two minutes (and two years).

Notes from Richard E. Miller's NYSAIS Conference Speech

At the NYSAIS Assistant Division Heads conference last week I discovered an exciting thinker, writer, teacher, and agitator named Richard E. Miller (Rutgers U. Professor). He tread some well-worn ground in what felt like new ways, and I found his eloquent restlessness to be refreshing.

Here are some of the things I wrote down during his speech, along with some jabs at implications:

Quote: "The challenge of teaching in the age of twitter is to get anyone to be anywhere, ever." Implication: We have to teach students (and remind ourselves) about how to participate in discussions; we have to be deliberate in the ways we nurture community in the classroom; we have to talk to our students about what it means to be present with others and (maybe even) work to sell them on that concept.

Idea: New mastery = resourcefulness. Anybody can get their hands on content. Implication: Every discipline has a stake in information literacy.

Quote: "We must not sacrifice depth and complexity."

Idea: Composition now has many "spokes" (including images, maps, animation, sound, video, graphs) and writers have to work them. Implication: We have to assign writing assignments that go beyond the five-paragraph structure.

Quote: How can we "construct meaning in a world that is just trying to entertain us?"

Idea: Writers have to learn to "write with the web," not just "on the web."

Idea: Teachers must "model for students what it means to focus online." Implication: More teachers and administrators have to cultivate lively, thoughtful, coherent online lives that are fully in view of their students.

Quote and Key Question: "What makes your school a significant physical place to be?" Implication: If administrators are carrying around only one question for the next five years, this should be it.

Thanks Professor Miller.

Seth Godin is Working for You

Like a lot of people I know, spanning several industries, I often read Seth Godin's blog posts, pause for a few seconds, and think, "yup." He's a master at getting a few steps ahead of what a lot of people are thinking and then mapping the territory in blog-sketches that are easy to digest and difficult to forget.  He's usually dependable, unusually solid . . . like a good neighbor or postman or butcher of the weltanschauung.

Lately, though, in my opinion, he's been better than good, and I want to use today's post (and the tiny, barely-there sliver of influence that comes with it) to highlight three of his posts and explain why I think they are valuable:

1. Godin is spot on when he cautions us against "tracking favors" on the internet.  If you love something on the Internet, you should pass it along, shout about it even, and expect nothing in return.  Godin is promoting Internet agape, plain and simple, and we who trade in the link economy should heed his advice.  Put another way, we will ruin the sandbox if we expect every favor to pay off in a direct way.  On the contrary, we will improve the sandbox if we share in ways that are genuine -- because we care about what we are sharing and the person with whom we are sharing. 

2. Godin's parable about El Chubasco, a restaurant in Utah, is good enough to share with any leadership team in any setting.  I shared it with a committee that I chair after a particularly long, hard-fought meeting where we sweat every detail, argued with passion and honesty, and walked out a bit unsure of what we had actually accomplished.  Godin's post reminded me to remind this team that our school is special because we are willing to "invest the energy in so many seemingly meaningless little bits of being extraordinary." (This post is also a great reminder that leadership lessons are everywhere, and that part of the joy of blogging is the ability to shine a light on local businesses like El Chubasco.)

3. And finally, this passage, called "The First Thing You Do When You Sit Down at the Computer," has happily haunted me every morning of my work week, reminding me that the first decision I make each day is fraught with possibilities.  I have found it valuable to scale Godin's challenge by 1000 -- this thought experiment makes said possibilities more terrifying, on the one hand, and more exhilarating, on the other:

(The first thing you do is to see how "others have reacted/responded/insisted to what happened yesterday") X 1000 days = ______________.

Vs.

(The first thing you do is to "lay tracks to accomplish your goals") X 1000 days = ______________.

~~~

Whether you are self employed or punching someone else's clock, an artist or an executive, Seth Godin is working for you. 

Chloe and the Adjacent Possible

I blog about my kids, I've realized, because they combine two of my favorite things in the world: my kids and learning.  Watching them, being with them, teaching them, talking with them is like having a front row seat in a great, travelling classroom . . . one that surrounds us wherever we go. 

Most recently and somewhat surprisingly, the mall became our classroom.  I broke off with my daughter so that my son and wife could finish up a transaction.  Chloe, being 2.5, isn't great with lines or dressing rooms or the magazines outside of dressing rooms.  It's all just monkey-bars to her. 

Wandering, we flowed toward the things we love best -- bright colors for Chloe, espresso for me -- and we landed, wound-up and caffeinated, in the Brain Store.  Amazingly, we settled in and settled down.  Amazingly, we found a focus . . . Chloe on the games and gadgets, me on Chloe as she tinkered with the games and gadgets.

She moved, methodically, from item to item, taking note of the details and finding ways to play with everything, every part of everything, including a chess board.  She didn't knock anything over or break anything; she didn't get frustrated or bored; she didn't look to see if I was around.  In short, she didn't act her age all that much. 

One magnetic, stretchy toy really caught her attention, and she molded it and remolded it into about a dozen configurations.  Discovering me, she handed it to me and told me she was building with it and that I should try too.  When my phone buzzed -- my wife and son were ready to move on -- I decided on the spot to buy the toy for Chloe.  I crouched down and explained to her that I was buying her this toy because she was a builder and that she could use it to build things.  I didn't think much about the explanation -- I really wanted her to know that we didn't buy things we wanted, just because we wanted them -- until later. 

Later, three days later to be precise, I overheard Chloe explaining to her brother that she was stacking blocks because she was a "builder."  Another time, I overheard her explaining the same thing to her mother -- she was building a bread boat.  And I've heard all about "the builder," too.  Being a builder, at least for now, is framing the way my daughter approaches challenges and materials, both in and out of our house.  

I'm not sure if my daughter's builder phase will last, but I know that the lessons in the story will last for me as both a parent and an educator. 

The first lesson is that environments and materials are incredibly important for creativity and education.  Though I should have been apprised of this when I read Steven Johnson's fabulous Where Good Ideas Come From, I needed to visit the Brain Store with my daughter to understand the power of environments and the need to stack the deck in favor of discovery and curiosity.  Johnson writes, "innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts -- mechanical or conceptual -- and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts" (41).  He suggests that "the trick" to developing your own good ideas is "as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or . . . maintaining certain habits" (41).  What does this mean for me?  Literally, more magnetic, stretchy toys for my daughter . . . figuratively, more magnetic, stretchy toys for my students.  I can nourish the young learners in my care by nourishing the environments in which they explore what's possible. 

The second lesson, maybe a bit less obvious, is that naming counts -- I called my daughter a builder, and somehow this gave her permission to see herself as such.  I call her "sunshine" and "honey," too, but this isn't the same as calling her "builder" or "leader" or "technologist" or "tinkerer."  Likewise, I call all of my students English students, but this isn't the same as calling them "writers" or "philosophers" or "world changers."  This isn't the same as calling them "builders."  The permission granted in naming is a powerful thing -- just one of those small details that I sometimes fail to see. 

Hunter's Town and the Practice of Professional Wonderment

This story begins a few years ago when my wife went to our son's preschool to pick him up.  She was hustling through a routine, but on this day, the teachers invited her into the classroom.  Having heard a few horror stories from my work as a school administrator, she wasn't sure what to expected.  Being cornered by teachers and administrators, she had learned, often means that bad news is about to be doled out. 

Instead, the teachers walked her over to a corner of the room where our son, Hunter, had split off during a class activity to design his own town.  The teachers, it turns out,  were proud of his work.  They wanted to show my wife examples of Hunter's growing mathematical ability and signs of his attention to detail.  These were facts that they had been trained to observe, and as they walked her through the town, they helped my wife to see them, too.  She was impressed. 

But there was something else in their telling, in their observations, that impressed her even more: they seemed truly curious, truly happy about their discoveries, truly competent in their wonderment. 

Professional wonderment is what I call this trait now, and all teachers should have it  and work to never lose it.  As a 9th grade English teacher, I need to help students understand usage errors and errors in logic and structure; but I should also help them understand when they have done something truly wonderful.  True, a "wonderful" moment in a 9th grade paper might not be the same as a wonderful moment in a paper from an AP senior.  As a professional, though, my wonderment should be attuned to the students in the room . . . and I should be willing and able to share it.  I should have both the eye -- for excellence in my discipline -- and the vocabulary -- of praise and wonder -- to see and name the outstanding achievements in the work of all the tiny builders in my care. 

What Steve Jobs Can Still Teach Teachers

[This article is cross posted on ed Social Media.]

I just read a great article by Cliff Kuang in the October 2011 issue of Fast Company magazine.  Called "What Steve Jobs Can Still Teach Us," it reads Jobs through a design lens for FC's United States of Design issue.  

At first glance, I thought the "us" in the title referred to a group other than educators.  But then I realized that the beauty of the title rests in the ubiqutous "us" with which it ends. The editors of FC are smart; Cliff Kuang is smart; they chose "us" because they mean "us" . . . everyone trying to make or market or sell or share a product or service or idea, educators included. 

Here's why I can make that statement pretty conclusively: I see my aspirations in school, and the aspirations of my closest colleagues, all over this article:

"Jobs," according to Kuang, "may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation.  But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live."

To emulate in the classroom Jobs' way of working, teachers wouldn't have to be the best scholars in their field or the most technically, and pedagogically, excellent.  Both of those characteristics can be helpful, as it was helpful for Jobs to have access to great technologists and great engineers.  But Jobsian teachers would have to be great learners themselves, and they would have to design every classroom experience as learners, for learners.

For example, when designing a Moodle page (or other online learning environment), teachers emulating Jobs would think relentlessly about the way students would experience the space.  They might use labels to add categories; they might add slides from presentations so that students could download them for later use; they might use class time, from time to time, to ask the students to provide feedback about the usability of the page, reminding them that the page is for them.  These are simple, small matters -- but, according to Kuang on Jobs, they make all the difference.  

For Kuang, every Jobs product extends his approach, his mindset, his "obsession:" "the iMac" then, is "a piece of hardware designed with an unprecedented user focus." 

As a teacher working in the wake of Jobs, I might ask myself, what is my iMac?  What is the key product that I extend to students, and does it have a user focus?  This makes me think again of online learning environments like Moodle and Blackboard, but it also makes me think about my classroom itself, my lesson plans, my homework assignments, and the way I use time in class.  Do I design my classroom the way I, as a teacher, like it, or do I design it in a way that promotes and extends learning?  Do my lesson plans unfold the curricular story that I want to tell, in the order that I want to tell it / am comfortable telling it -- or do they speak to the story that students are ready to hear, in the order that they are ready to hear it?  When I enter my students' at-home lives, through homework assignments, am I bringing with me an awareness of the ways in which they actually do their homework, and the things that they actually need from homework, or am I trying to tether them to a homework treadmill that I, myself, have never questioned?  And as for time in class, am I breaking up class time in a way that is focused, in an "unprecedented" way, on the way high school students actually learn best?  I'd go one better here, too: am I truly thinking about the ways I might leverage social media to capture the attention and the imagination of my students?

Kuang cites Jobs as having "an ability to think first and foremost as someone who lives with technolgy rather than produces it"

Approaching teaching that way, as someone who uses school to learn rather than teach, signals another possible shift for educators.  Getting organized to teach a daily class requires a certain kind of preparation.  It's possible that getting organized to prepare students to learn on a daily basis would require a different kind of preparation.  To fulfill the latter requirement, in addition to knowing your content inside and out, you would need to know your students well.  You would need to group them accordingly -- when setting up group work -- question them accordingly -- when leading a discussion -- and comment on their work accordingly.  You would have to know how they prefer to learn, the geography of their blindspots, and the passions that stir them.  Looking to communicate with them outside of class, you would have to email some of them, IM others, call a few, and tweet at the rest -- just like you do with your colleagues.  In short, you would have to rethink, deeply, some of your most common assumptions.   

Jobs thougth deeply about everything related to Apple, including instruction manuals.  "His focus was, continually, on what it would be like to come at a product raw, with no coaching or presentation but simply as a new, untested thing."  As a result, "every year, Apple's instruction manuals grew thinner and thinner, until finally, today, thre are no instruction manuals at all.  The assumption is that you'll be able to tear open the box and immediately start playing with your new toy."

When I think about where I want my English students to be when they leave my class, I realize that I want them to be able to meet the world head on, to come at the world "raw, with no coaching."  If they have to approach a writing assignment in college, they should know how to ask the right questions before starting and they should understand that each written answer to each assignment calls for its own unique organizing principle.  Likewise, when they write their first cover letter or legal brief . . . or read something that wasn't framed for them in a deliberate sequence in a curriculum, they shouldn't need a teacher to tell them how to proceed.  Jobs, it seems, had a deep faith in his "users" -- that they had the inclination and motivation to be creative and bold.  His job, in some ways, was to make sure his products didn't get in the way of what his users wanted to do with them.  The best teachers, ironically, know how to stay out of the way of their students, as well; by the end of their time with their students, they prepare their students to no longer need them. 

So does Apple still need Steve Jobs?  At the close of Kuang's article, he poses that question through other questions for Tim Cook, the man now running the Apple show.  He implied that Cook will have to do more than simply play to his strength (i.e., supply chain management); he will need to find a way to see Apple "from the outside view of a user." 

I think we can say the same thing of schools, especially schools with lofty tuition: to survive, we will need to place students, again and again, at the center of the educational experience.  Steve Jobs, indeed, has plenty still to teach us.  

"I'm Going to Be the One to Tell You"

I’m a fan of the work of Jim Collins, but I’m also a fan of Jim Collins’ editor – or of the editorial choices that Jim Collins, himself, makes when finalizing his publications.  If you’ve read his work and skipped to the main course – the leadership guidance – you’ve missed some very nice appetizers.  At the start of his slim Good to Great and the Social Sectors, for example, he includes this autobiographical tidbit:

During my first year on the Stanford faculty in 1988, I sought out Professor John Gardner for guidance on how I might become a better teacher.  Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, founder of Common Cause, and author of the classic text Self-Renewal, stung me with a comment that changed my life.

“It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting," he said.  “Why don’t you spend more time being interested.”

If you read Collins' essay from a few years earlier (2003, USA Today) to learn more about his idea of a “stop doing list,” you will see a similarly enlightening confession running alongside the main point of the article:

Each time the New Year rolls around and I sit down to do my annual resolutions, I reflect back to a lesson taught me by a remarkable teacher. In my mid-20s, I took a course on creativity and innovation from Rochelle Myers and Michael Ray at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and I kept in touch with them after I graduated.

One day, Rochelle pointed to my ferocious work pace and said, "I notice, Jim, that you are a rather undisciplined person."

I was stunned and confused. After all, I was the type of person who carefully laid out my BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals), top three objectives and priority activities at the start of each New Year. I prided myself on the ability to work relentlessly toward those objectives, applying the energy I'd inherited from my prairie- stock grandmother.

"Your genetic energy level enables your lack of discipline," Rochelle continued. "Instead of leading a disciplined life, you lead a busy life."

She then gave me what I came to call the 20-10 assignment. It goes like this: Suppose you woke up tomorrow and received two phone calls. The first phone call tells you that you have inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second tells you that you have an incurable and terminal disease, and you have no more than 10 years to live. What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?

That assignment became a turning point in my life, and the "stop doing" list became an enduring cornerstone of my annual New Year resolutions — a mechanism for disciplined thought about how to allocate the most precious of all resources: time.

It goes without saying that Collins has plenty to teach leaders -- but, in these two anecdotes, he also has a great deal to teach learners.  I'm amazed -- and even a little bit jealous -- by the simple fact that Jim had the kinds of teachers in his life who were willing to cut, decidedly and without question, to the proverbial chase.  They helped him adjust his work by telling him what he would have to adjust about his life.  My reading?  His "life's work" has been special, at least in part, because it has been nurtured by honest, direct feedback, by teachers who knew him better than he knew himself.

Additionally, he was willing, and able, to listen and adjust.  It couldn't have been easy to hear what he heard or change as he changed.  Not at all.  The feedback he received told him to walk in a new direction, to resist what was natural in him, to surrender what he thought were his greatest weapons . . . just as his career was getting started. 

The title for this post, then, has nothing to do with the Jim Collins we often quote in leadership circles (you know, the Jim Collins of the "relentless culture of discipline" or the "hedgehog" or the "level 5 leadership"); it has to do with the Jim Collins who is willing to show his followers a bit about how he learned to approach enterprises with openness, warmth, and the clear, quick analytical mind that has been so helpful to so many.  He jumpstarts much of his best work by paying tribute to the biggest jumpstarters in his own life -- straight-talking mentors. 

Some of you might have seen the recent cover story in Bloomberg Business Week about Facebook's "second in command:" Why Facebook Needs Sheryl Sandberg.  It, too, is in part about feedback, and specifically, the kind of feedback that Sandberg provides.  It's also where I found the title for this post:

In some ways, Sandberg is still a creature of Washington. She holds parties and events at her house almost constantly, evoking the high-powered hospitality of the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in her heyday. She doesn't bring a laptop into meetings, preferring instead to scrawl notes in a day planner. And she's made great use of her political skills, praising subordinates in public and keeping reprimands private. "She is super direct," says Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's vice-president of engineering. "She pulls people aside privately and says, "I'm going to be the one to tell you, this is what people are expecting from you and here's what you need to do to improve."

Feedback like Sandberg's is hard to deliver, hard to receive, and in my mind, absolutely essential for those of us who aspire to do important work well.  

I'll leave you with a few questions:

• Do you have a John Gardner, Rochelle Meyers, or Sheryl Sandberg in your life?  Do you have someone willing "to be the one to tell you, this is what people are expecting from you and here's what you need to do to improve?"

• If so, are you willing to truly listen when this person offers you feedback?

• If not, are you in the process of cultivating the kind of relationship wherein you could ask for, and receive, such feedback?

• And finally, are you someone's Gardner, Meyers, or Sandberg?  Are you willing to offer him or her essential feedback, tough feedback, the kind of feedback that can take his or her life's work, to borrow a page from Collins' work, from good to great?

First Day of School - That's Just What We Do

I was playing Batman and Robin with my son the other day.  I was Robin, as I always am, because, according to Hunter, Robin is a "secondary superhero."  Batman and Robin were asleep on the floor, and Robin woke up first.  Sensing an opportunity to influence the direction of the game (rare, when you're a secondary character), I said to Batman, "I had a terrible dream . . . I dreamed that the bad guys were coming to get us."  Batman / Hunter looked at me and said, "Robin, don't worry about that dream.  Even if it comes true, that's just what we do.  We fight bad guys.  Let them come."

That's just what we do. . . That's just what we do. . .

I've been repeating that quote ever since -- while preparing for the first full faculty meeting, while writing opening speeches, while greeting both happy and grumpy students, and today, while finalizing the details for my first class.  These five words have helped to focus me, to move me past any trepidations I might have as I begin another school year. 

Here's why, I think: by acknowledging that working in schools, like donning the costume of a superhero, is an act of doing, an act of being, I have freed myself to convert the usual late August jitters to a form of energy.  I have set them up as a stone upon which to sharpen my educational practice. And we're off . . .

Summer Offering

My latest print article is called "The Professionalization of Independence." Since  Independent School magazine was kind enough to post it online, I think I can fairly say that I've said enough for the next few Wednesdays. 

 The article describes some tensions in school life that, I think, keep us fresh, awake, and challenged.  I see them as a road-map (at least my own personal road-map) for work in schools over the next few years.  They include:

• Planning and Improvising
• Looking Outward and Honoring Our Missions
• Managing Shallow Filters and Cultivating Deep Filters
• Becoming the Teachers We Want to Be and the Teachers We Need to Be

Along the way I tie together the movie Dead Poet's Society, the musician Brian Eno, the business writer Peter Drucker, and energy guru Tony Schwartz, to name but a few of my references.  (It's true, I guess: our lives are shaped by what we love.)

In the slow days of summer, I hope you'll have a chance to read the article.  If the urge strikes, send me a note telling me what you think:

refreshingwednesday@gmail.com.

Leading and Learning Online

For a while now I've been watching the way people lead and learn online in the same way I would watch a baseball game -- with a sense of enjoyment and awe as strategy and improvisation unfold, as careful, intentional action mixes with raw talent and pluck.  And I'm starting to extract some lessons.  Below you will find my cherry pickings, in no particular order:

1. Say thank you.

Online (and, I imagine, offline) Jonathan Martin, Head of St. Gregory in Arizona, practices relentlessly the habit of gratitude , making his corner of the online world a place that is dignified, safe, and encourages people to share. Here's a typical tweet from this masterful online leader:

2. Connect people with common interests or people who are trying to solve similar problems. 

For a while, Ravenscroft CTO Jason Ramsden (who wrote the book on much of what I'm driving at in this post) was waging a Twitter campaign to encourage people to serve as learning matchmakers. 

In practice, this simple formula serves as a nudge for one educator to "follow" another educator on Twitter, making a small argument for why such a gesture will be worthwhile. 

This formula also demonstrates Jason's knowledge of the way others are working. He's clearly paying attention to the best that people have to offer.  In an age where attention is butchered on a daily basis, leaders (I think) should do what Jason does: model what it looks like to focus and concentrate on individual contributions.  Which leads to # 3:

3. Become a "trust agent" for your online community.  If you send a link to someone or post a link on your blog or share an article -- make sure you have digested it enough to know if it has value.  Don't share something unless you think it is truly worth the time of the people who will receive it.  The best example of this kind of discipline that I've seen comes from the blog of Jonathan Martin (the guy from point # 1 above).  Last December he published a post called"A Few of My Favorite Blogs."  In it, he listed education blogs that he finds valuable, explained why he felt that way, and then linked to his favorite posts on the blogs.  As a reader, this saved me a lot of time . . . and turned me on to a few new bloggers who now inform my practice.  It was a great gift from a thoughtful leader.

4. If you run a blog for a group of people, provide them with feedback at regular intervals.  I wrote a related post about how Bill Stites models this concept a while back.  He taught me that when we run websites or blogs, we have access to reams of data.  By making sense of that data and sharing it with contributors, we help them to become more aware of the way their writing is influencing the community they are trying to reach or shape.

5. Be transparent about your learning goals and your learning. I can't say I agree with even 25 percent of what Tim Ferriss does or says, but he's a dynamic learner and he shares his new knowledge as well as anyone (through videos, blog posts, and best-selling books).  Recently, Tim Ferris invited his followers, via Twitter, to view his public highlights from his Kindle:

Imagine if a team at your school shared their Kindle highlights during an entire school year.  Even if the team didn't have time to discuss the books, they would be quietly informing each other about the ideas and information they were exploring -- and what they felt was most valuable.

~~~

So those are 5 suggestions for leading and learning online.  That they're not much different from what we should be doing offline is encouraging.  The web is and can be a human place, a community of learners, but only if we insist that it be so.  

What School is (Also) For

Dear Teachers,

What have you done lately to equip your students to make meaning of the world? 

How have you modelled for them the messy process of making meaning of complexity, of contradiction, of all the ways the world doesn't make sense?

. . . The process of continuing to return to a subject,

continuing to scratch one's head,

continuing to consult one's conscience,

continuing to refocus one's lens, until,

finally,

coherence emerges?

3 Thoughts & an Example

1.

There's wisdom everywhere, and the creative teacher, teacher-leader, or student grabs it indiscriminately, applies it, figures out if it works, and then either keeps it or chucks it.

2.

From Simon Rucker's HBR Blog post "How Good Designers Think": "[Good designers] bring expertise in other categories and industries to bear on problems in others. They pull together threads from different functions, disciplines, fields, and sectors, and integrate them into a new and (the dreaded word) 'holistic' understanding."

3.

In the May 2, 2011 Sports Section of the New York Times, Greg Bishop crafts a story around the idea that Manny Pacquiao, one of the world's greatest boxers, is an "emulator" of Bruce Lee: "It is this style -- part performance art, part technical wizardry, unique to Pacquiao -- that defines perhaps the best boxer of his generation.  And it started with a videotape of the martial artist who became his idol.  It started with Bruce Lee."

And an example . . .

Recently I have been reading about great coaches.  John Wooden, Pete Carril, Mike Krzyzewski . . . these folks are undisputed masters of human development.  And it doesn't take a genius to apply some of what they do, or have done, to some of what we do, or might do, in the classroom.  Back in 2006, Michael Sokolove wrote a great piece (called "Follow Me" and published in the New York Times Magazine) on Coach K.  The following quotaion contains as good a piece of classroom wisdom as I have heard in a while:

Duke players constantly consult with one another on the court without looking to the bench for direction or approval. Krzyzewski believes that even a practice should have a certain sound, by which he means he should hear his players communicating back and forth constantly.

Since reading this passage, and taping it to my desk, I find myself listening for certain sounds in my classroom and during my meetings.  To prepare for such listening, I work to articulate what a good class or meeting should sound like.  I ask myself a reoccuring string of questions: What should the people in my classrooms and meeting rooms be saying to each other?  What tone do I expect to hear, and why?  When should silence fill the air waves?  When should argument erupt?  What marks a constructive, rather than a destructive, argument?  What does good discussion sound like?  When should I interject my own voice?  And, perhaps most important, when should I remove, by design, my own voice, my own answers, and even my own intentions?

9 Words for April

Things heard around the office in April:

Working here is like "drinking from a firehose." (One teacher, one administrator)

"April is the cruelest month." (That's my colleague, quoting T.S. Eliot.)

"I worked more on Monday and Tuesday than most professionals work in a week." (Me)

I'm so busy I don't even know where to start. (paraphrase; teachers and parents)

Yes, it's the time of year when school overwhelms even the most prepared and organized people in the building. 

A rule of thumb, boiled down from my 109 page book on the subject, is

KEEP THE KIDS IN FOCUS; THEY'RE HOLDING ON, TOO.

Leadership and Slowness

If you aspire to lead schools, whether as a Dean or a Division Head, do yourself a favor, do your school a favor, and slow down. 

Too many emerging school leaders seem to be in a rush to "climb the ladder."  They want the next job. Or the job after the next job. (Yes, this even happens in organizations like schools where careerism is often seen as a dirty little secret.)

Move through your jobs too quickly and you lose the daily, fundamental lessons that will make you an exceptional leader rather than just a person who "got the job."

In conversations with a few Heads of School, I have found that their paths to the "top" have been varied. Some of them have come up through the system as disciplinarians; others have a more academic or curricular background. But each and every one of them can talk, in almost mind-numbing detail, about a few big projects that they worked on or led along the way.  The "mind-numbing" part is important.  You can only talk about a project in "mind-numbing" detail when you have worked through it from every angle, when you have chewed through it and truly inhabited the work. 

Take, for instance, a Headmaster who worked to transform a dress code while working as a Dean of Students.  She would have met with everyone from the parents' association to the sophomore girls who were most vocal about the change.  She would have made presentations to rooms that vilified her and rooms that cheered her.  She would have assembled and run committees.  She would have writtten the language in the dress code, revised the language, added a comma, removed a comma. . . . She would have developed elaborate metaphors to help the student body understand the importance of the dress code. And, as she completed these tasks, she would have learned about how schools function. She would have learned about compromise, about how to temper idealism with pragmatism, about the delicate dance of people that makes a school a school. 

~

To fully understand what I mean when I talk about slowness as a prelude to leadership, think about each job at school -- whether it's a stint as a coach or a chaperoning gig on a class trip -- as its own leadership novella.  The people committed to becoming the best leaders they can be take their time with each page.  They puzzle over the things that happen or fail to happen.  They follow character arcs and themes and red herrings and conflicts.   They read and reread and read again key passages in the work.  They gain a feeling for which sentences are workhorses for the plot, which sentences allude to other stories, which sentences help the narrator stall, and which sentences are just damned beautiful.  And they enjoy the process; they enjoy the science and art of close reading.

~

I worked at J.R. Cigars when I was younger, and I had the good fortune of spending some time with J.R. himself, a man who experienced tremendous successes in the business world, especially when the cigar trade was booming.  In some circles, he was, and still is, a legend; for me, he was the man who signed my checks as I tried to make some money before heading off to college. 

I came upon him once in the back of the store building.  I was throwing out some trash and he was hammering together cigar boxes that had fallen apart, a small stogie lodged in the corner of his mouth.  When I asked him why he was hammering the boxes together, he said, "I can sell em . . . or put cigars in em . . . and plus I just like the work.  It reminds me of when I was an up-and-comer." 

~

Up-and-comers, please slow down.  When you're in charge, when you're running a school and making crucial decisions about budgets and faculties and students, you're going to want to know how to hammer together the cigar boxes.  You're going to want to know the story of school, line by line and, as they say, by heart.

A Father's Ode to Belief

Most weekends once the weather warms, my son and I walk in the woods. Almost any woods will do, but lately we prefer the Mills Reservation in Essex County. It has most of what we need -- endless paths, rocks large enough to ponder and climb, and more than enough "summits," on the Montclair end, to make a five-year-old boy and his dad feel like they've accomplished something.

Last week, while we were walking, Hunter and I found the plaque commemorating the origin of the reservation. 

Being Hunter, Hunter wanted me to read the plaque. Then he wanted to me to explain what it meant. I did my best, trying to summarize what happens when a family or foundation leave their property to their heirs. I then explained that some people leave their property to "everyone." And this is where the walk walked off with my heart. 

Hunter paused. Then started moving again. Then talking. "That's like Martin Luther King," he said. "I learned about him in school." 

Hunter's point, as he continued, was that Martin Luther King, like the foundation that gave Essex County the Mills Reservation, shared with the world a message about how all people, regardless of the color of their skin, should live together.  "His message wasn't just for one family."

At this moment, I was proud of my son. He had made a connection. As an educator, I was proud too of his school and his teachers. A beautiful curriculum was emerging before my eyes, as unrehearsed and alive as the wildnerness all around me. And then the mood shifted and deepened when my little boy who loves soccer and Spider Man and ice cream said, "someone killed King, you know."  

I tensed up a bit.  I knew.  Of course I knew.  But I didn't know that my son knew.  This was real death, and he understood that a real man had been removed from the real earth.  Part of me wished that I had been the one to lead him to that real truth first.  Wasn't it my job, as Hunter's father, to manage such awakening? 

I had to know more of what he knew to understand what kind of parenting was then required, so I asked a question: "Do you know why that man killed King?"

Hunter hopped over a rock and a root, echoed a bird's call, and said, "the man who killed King didn't believe in love, Dad." 

And with that he took off running and said "you can't catch me, you'll never catch me."  I was afraid. I was not afraid. I ran. 

Failure, in Detail

Here's a speech I recently gave at the Sussex County Scholar Athlete Banquet. I thought it was an important, though maybe ironic, message for a group of young "achievers" to hear.  I'll skip my opening jokes and get right to the point. . .

______

I make my living in a few ways.  I’m an administrator at the Montclair Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey, and I write books and magazine articles.  Along the way I have made a few films, nothing you would have heard of.  These activities have allowed me to travel and meet interesting people and build a small audience of “fans” who follow the work that I do. 

But none of these things qualify me to speak to you today.

What qualifies me, I think, is a respect and reverence for the time of life that you are on the verge of completing.  I’m a firm believer that high school is not just a pathway to college.  It’s not a means to an end.  It’s a process that can give you much of what you need to build a successful life.

Sure, you will need to pick up certain skills to be a surgeon or a lawyer or a teacher or an accountant, but high school can give you the intangibles – it can teach you about how to treat people and how not to treat people; it can teach you about how to pursue your dreams with honesty and integrity.  It can help you establish, in other words, firm foundations for your character and your ethics. 

I’m not implying that you have to go out and learn these things tomorrow or in the coming weeks before your graduation.  I'd bet that you have already had enough rich experiences to yield a lifetime of learning.  Maybe they happened in your freshmen year.  Maybe they happened last week.  You just have to go back to them, dust them off, pull out the lessons, and return to them as needed.  You have to relfect on what you've been up to for the past four years.

For me, when I reflect on high school, two moments stand out as particularly instructive.  They guide me almost daily, since they relate to teamwork on the one hand, and individual performance, on the other.  Since basketball was pretty much my life in high school, these are both basketball stories.  I’m going to tell them to you today not only to share the lessons, but also to model for you the process of learning from your past and particularly of learning from your high school experiences.

The first story is called “The Worst Best Team in Sussex County.” 

When I was a sophomore, I was lucky enough to be called up to the varsity – or at least I thought I was lucky.  The team was filled with talented seniors.  They could shoot the lights out and play great defense.  They were physically tough and aggressive.  A few of them were even college prospects.  I was excited to lace up my shoes next to them, excited, even, to be the punchline in their jokes.  But the shine only lasted a few days, a few practices.  I quickly realized there was something wrong with the team.  I was young, so I couldn’t put my finger on it.  But something just didn’t feel right in the locker room or on the bus.  Something just didn’t feel right on the court.  We were losing games we shouldn’t have lost, and barely winning games we should have won by double digits. 

I’ll never forget the practice when my coach told us to meet in the film room rather than on the court.  We crowded around the television as my coach played a video he had edited.  There were two scenes in the video.  In the first one, one of our players fell down before the ref blew the whistle.  The game stopped and he got up to go to the foul line.  The second scene was a bit more exciting – one of our players dribbled the ball past a few defenders and slam dunked.  Our coach let us watch each scene a few times, and then he asked us what we noticed.  We described the dunk but said that the rest was pretty boring.  He played both scenes again – and eventually we were silent.  We were dry.  So he explained:

In the first scene, when one of our players fell, no one helped him back to his feet.  Not a single teammate offered him a hand.  He picked himself up.  In the second scene, when one of our players dunked the ball, a crowing achievement for a high school basketball player from Sussex County, no one on our team gave him a high five or a pat on the back.  He looked around, half-expectantly, and then ran back down the court. 

Our coach ended by saying that these two scenes told the whole story of our season.  They demonstrated exactly why we we were not winning more games and exactly why we had not lived up to our potential.  He was right.  And he’s still right.

You can be the greatest athlete on the court or the smartest person in your company . . . but if you can’t make your team work with you, if you can’t build a great team around you, you will never go as far as you should.  You can’t win a team game alone, and most of what you will do in your lives, outside the classroom, is a team game.  When you’re asked to collaborate on a group project in college . . .  when you’re part of a study group in law school . . . when you organize an event for charity . . . when you start a family.  All of these are team games.  And if you don’t help your teammates up when they stumble or pat them on the back when they soar, your teams will underachieve.  You will underachieve.

The second story is called “The Worst Best Pass of My Life.” 

This one involves the same coach in a different season.  It was my senior season this time, and my team was having a good year – a much better year, in fact, than we should have had.  With only a few seniors on the team, and only one senior with any true experience, we were exceeding all expectations, winning games we shouldn’t have been winning and blowing out teams we should have only beat by a few points.  I was certainly a little bit arrogant by the mid-point of the season.  In one game, a game we were easily winning, I caught a long rebound near the left side of the court.  I looked down the court and saw one of my teammates streaking toward the basket.  I reached back like a quarterback and launched a hail mary pass – he caught it and laid it in the basket and the crowd went wild.  They went so wild, in fact, that I didn’t hear my teammate calling my name when he came in to replace me.  My coach had pulled me out of the game right after the pass, and he left me at the end of the bench for the rest of the game.

I was outraged and humiliated, and I sulked until I had the chance to confront him the next day. 

“Why’d you bench me, coach?” I asked him. 

His answer was simple: “When you throw a pass like that, everyone in the gym can tell exactly where the ball is going.  That pass only worked because the team we were playing wasn’t very good.  If you throw that pass against a great team, they’re going to steal it.  And if you throw that pass at the wrong time in the game against a great team, we’re going to lose.  It’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen.  It’s your job, as a captain, to understand.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that my coach, Tom Fox, won hundreds of games and ended his career as a local legend.  At that moment, like moment from my sophomore year, he was teaching me about the way the smallest details contribute to our success and our failure.  To have enduring greatness, to win seasons instead of just games, to have a great career, you have to practice perfectly.  You have to practice the way you hope to play – whether you’re playing the game of basketball or the game of life. 

You’ll notice a trend in each of these stories.  They are all about failures.  A failed team, a moment when a coach benched his senior captain: if you had asked me when I was your age if I would talk about these moments in public when I was my age, I would have laughed in your face. 

It’s difficult to try to learn from failure while it’s happening . . . it’s much easier to try to learn from an event like your Scholar Athlete banquet, where someone else is telling you that you’ve made it – where the stars seem to be aligned and the applause is tied directly to your actions and efforts. 

Don’t get me wrong, I hope you enjoy the rest of the evening . . . you deserve it.  And I hope you enjoy the rest of the things that go well in your high school careers and beyond.  But don’t forget about the things that don’t go well or that didn’t go well.  Don’t bury these experiences.  They just might contain lessons that will last, lessons you can return to as you shape a meaningful, productive, and happy life for yourself. 

Spring Break Has, Happily, Been a Blur

Princes, Papers, & Augmented Reality

Readers of this blog know that I sometimes look to the world of primary school education to challenge my assumptions about upper school education.  I am fortunate enough to have some great primary school colleagues and friends who share their passions and perspective with me on a regular basis.  And my son Hunter is in Pre-K at a vibrant, creative, and nourishing school.

I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when he came home two days ago talking about fairy tales.  And I wasn’t surprised when, in a short leap, he moved from talking about fairy tales to participating in them.  He announced that he was changing his name from Hunter to “The Prince.” My wife, meanwhile, was crowned “Sleeping Beauty.”  As he went to bed, Hunter told me he had a “plan.” 

I forgot about the plan until quarter to six the next morning when I was sipping coffee and reading and my son started calling my name from his bedroom.  I jumped up from my seat, nearly spilling my coffee and actually spilling my book . . . in his entire lifetime, in situations like this one, he had always called for “mommy.”  Thinking this might be a turning point in our relationship, I bounded up the stairs and breathlessly asked him what he needed.  He was sitting on the edge of his bed, wide awake and ready to go.  He said, “I need you to help me get dressed.” 

When I asked him why, he said he “needed to wake Sleeping Beauty” and that he couldn’t possibly greet her in pajamas, let alone glow-in-the-dark skeleton pajamas.  I obliged; he was deeply involved with a narrative, and I wasn’t about to break the spell. 

After assisting him until I was no longer needed, I returned to my book and awaited the report from my wife.  She emerged from our bedroom, the “palace,” with a beaming smile, easily looking the part of an awakened sleeping beauty.  What a morning. 

~~~

By 8:15, I was knee deep in a Romeo and Juliet discussion with my students.  We were relating the downfall of Romeo and Juliet to a downfall in their relationships with their parents.  In the play, their parents fail to be close enough to them, fail to know them. In turn, the young people turn to outside advisors (the Nurse, Friar Lawrence) who, in some important ways, lead them astray.  We talked about why this happens so often to teenagers, and I suddenly found myself telling the story of my morning with "the Prince" as a counterbalance, as a reflection of a different stage of life that, try as we might, we can’t hang on to.

My students stayed on my mind all day and into the early evening when I again greeted my son, still in character.  That night, after he was in bed, I asked myself some difficult questions, and I’m going to close this post with them:

Most Upper School students “take home” their school experiences in a different way than my son does.  They re-enact those experiences through an engagement with papers, test prep, or homework assignments.  These extensions of the school day help them to master subjects and demonstrate mastery of subjects . . . or they help them to practice skills or cover material. 

But when do they have the opportunity to organize their knowledge the way my son does – that is, when do we help our students organize their knowledge in ways that are deeply personal, in ways that spark their imaginations, or in ways that augment their reality?  (The last part of this question is particularly important to me since so many members of the tech sector seem to have their minds set on being a platform for reality augmentation, but I digress.) 

How do we free up students to enter fearlessly their own worlds as writers and scientists and mathematicians and artists and historians?  When and how do we help them try on new costumes?  When and how do we step out of the way as they enter kingdoms of their own making?

Of Flies and Feasts

How do we ensure that the curriculum spirals properly from the beginning of students' experiences in our schools to the end? How do we ensure that students have the skills they need when they leave a certain course or grade level? How do we connect three campuses (upper, middle, and primary), which often seem like three ways of knowing the world, in a way that best serves students? How do we transfer knowledge about students? How do we ensure the proper connection between various departments, various offices, various positions?

For years, educators I know have been asking themselves what I call “school-spanning” questions. Such questions  pop up whenever we think about the total student experience -- either moving horizontally, across disciplines in a grade level, or vertically, from grade to grade to grade.

One of the fundamental underpinnings of school-spanning questions, one of the elements that make them difficult to answer, is the way work relationships are configured in schools. Teachers do much of their primary work -- that is, planning, teaching, and grading –- alone, some of their primary work in small groups, and a little bit of their primary work in departments or teams. 

So, mostly in solitude, they wonder why students aren’t as prepared as they think they should be. They wonder why students who come from a good English department can’t write lab reports. They wonder about these things, react to them in the moment as if they are swatting down a fly, and then they move on with their relentless workflow. These folks recognize school-spanning problems, but they are in no position to address them.

Which leads to the work of administrators, the ones responsible for institutional well-being. As a group, administrators often think a great deal about school-spanning questions. And some even go so far as to structure time for the faculty to confront such questions. But once the faculty heads back to the minutia of school, the questions linger in the air for a while before being swatted away as the “urgent” reappears.

What’s more, the typical work patterns generated by teachers' typical work relationships reappear. Here’s a perspective from The Other Side of Innovation (Govindarajan and Trimble) that seems appropriate to school environments, especially when we read around some of the business lingo:

Work relationships evolve to meet the needs of the Performance Engine. They adapt to achieve efficiency through specialization of labor and through repetition. The work relationship in the Performance Engine are defined, in part, through formal understandings and arrangements about who is responsible for what and who has power and authority. But they also evolve informally. After you work with someone for a while, you develop many implicit agreements about how you work together. Once in place, the work relationship between a pair of individuals is very difficult to change. Even under the best circumstances – removing the pair from their Performance Engine roles and responsibilities – it takes a conscious, explicit, and determined effort to do so. There will be substantial inertia. The pair will naturally continue to relate to each other in the way that they always have, even if the work challenge in front of them has changed dramatically. (31)

Reflecting on this quote leads me to think about school-spanning questions as relational questions . . . to think that we'll never make any progress with some of these questions unless we think about good, old fashioned relationship building. Here's a quick sketch of what such a thing might look like:

Once you have identified a question along a span, it seems to me, it makes sense to identify the team that exists along that span. For example, if students are having trouble moving from eighth-grade English to ninth-grade English, the team that exists along the span is comprised of eighth-grade English teachers and ninth-grade English teachers.

After you have identified the team, start thinking about the relationships of the various members on the team. Do they trust each other? Have they surfaced their true feelings, fears, or hunches about the work that the others are doing? Are they even aware that they are a team or that they have to trust each other . . . or that they might have feelings about each other’s work? Or, more directly, how can such a "span team" even begin to function?

My initial answer might sound simplistic, but the teams I am on that solve the most school-spanning problems are the teams that, somewhere along the line, had the chance to have a long dinner together . . . or travel somewhere together. They built their relational muscles before they exercised them.

(I want to repeat this last point with a slightly different emphasis: the teams that work best in schools build their relational muscles before they exercise them.)

When I’m in a room with the best problem-solving team I know, I can say anything to them. I can critique their ideas, and I welcome their critiques of my ideas. As Rob Evans might say, the conversation isn't personal -- we're in a room together to spur student learning. When things get tense with this group, if things get tense, we have common experiences to fall back on, a common language, and even long-running jokes to relieve stress and return us to focus.

School-spanning questions (and the problems they imply) will be around for as long as schools are around. But like flies, they will merely bounce off the people who need to address them if these people aren’t brought to the table, both literally and figuratively. To conclude, then, here’s a wild idea:

At your next in-service day, if you have this kind of pull, assign seats at lunch based on your most urgent, school-spanning questions. Then, ask the people at each table to avoid –- yes, avoid –- talking about school. Have them tell their stories instead. How did they arrive at your school? How and why did they find their way into the classroom? What motivates them to get out of bed in the morning? What keeps them up at night?

Serve great food, play great music, and give them plenty of time. The next time one of them is faced with a school-spanning question, she might know exactly who to call. She might not be afraid to make a tough inquiry--horiontally or vertically.  As a result, two colleagues might just work toward a real answer about a real problem. Why? Because they will be more than just two people who share space in a school building. They will be two people who are beginning to truly know each other.

Bill's Model and the "Long Class" of Writers

I received an email yesterday that disrupted about a decade of my thinking about how to teach young people to write.  Or maybe it just shifted it into another gear.  Regardless . . .

The email came from Bill Stites, a friend and colleague.  He’s the Director of Technology at my school, but he also serves as the Blogger-In-Chief for edSocialMedia.  Yesterday, he sent out an email to ESM contributors. 

He started by thanking the writers.  Gratitude is great, and Bill’s not afraid to show it.  He then introduced a few new writers.  (Also great.)  But then he went a step further, and this is where he started to push my thinking.  He shared “the numbers.”  He told the whole group the following:

• The number of visitors to the site
• How much time those visitors spent on the site
• The bounce rate of those visitors
• From where the visitors arrived
• The top posts for the month (along with the number of visits)
• Some advice for how writers might use ESM to drive traffic to their own blogs

As I was reading this, I was half thinking about my own English classes – and then fully thinking about them.

I had used class blogs sporadically in the past, but I had never treated those blogs (or those writers) as forthrightly as Bill treated his blog and his writers.  What I mean is, when blogging with students, I had never shared the backend numbers with the class. 

At this moment, I smacked my own head and said “duh” and “eureka” at the same moment . . . Bill’s model for his ESM writers might help me to achieve my goals with my student writers. 

I still have a lot of logistics to ponder, and I fully understand that I'm probably behind the curve on some of this, but here’s what I'm thinking today:

I value authentic writing.  In the past, to achieve this, I have used peer reviews or posted student work to websites.  If I were to actually help students build an audience for their writing, through the use of a blog, what could be more authentic?  They would learn that, in today's world, it's not enough to write something -- you have to find a way to publicize it.  You have to cultivate an audience.  And this takes a great deal of time and care.   

I value moving away from the front of the classroom.  I’m happy to share what works with students, but I also realize that every student writer deserves to be coached in a slightly different way.  The “teacher as expert” model couldn’t be further from what many student writers actually need.  Bill functions almost like a managing editor for the ESM writers.  He encourages them to pursue stories about which they are passionate, and he then shares the impact of those stories.  In all my years as a writing teacher, I have never seen myself as a managing editor of a small newsroom, but that’s exactly what an English class could become, given the right platform and the right feedback mechanism.

I value individualized instruction and feedback.  If asked to blog on a live site with a real audience, students would certainly learn a great deal by receiving an individualized report about the number of times their posts had been visited and the amount of time that readers spent on the site itself.  They would be encouraged to try new things in their writing (a good thing for emerging writers) in order to drive more traffic to their posts. 

I value collaboration in my classroom.  By sharing the top three posts with the class and asking them to dissect them, figuring out why they sparked a nerve with readers, we would all build our understanding of the written word. And we could take another step together, by comparing the top blog posts to the top scholarly papers submitted in a given year.  As a class, we would learn about one of the most difficult principles to convey to a group of young writers -– good writers make choices.  They choose a style in order to connect with a certain audience or achieve a certain point.  A scholarly paper should be different than a blog post.  A blog post should be different than a cover letter.  A cover letter should be different than a personal narrative.  Students need to learn this lesson constantly.

I value continuous improvement.  Why can’t a class blog go on from year to year, creating a kind of “long class?”  Each year, the new students could study what the previous students achieved.  They could compete with them in at least two arenas: the quality of the writing and the number of eyeballs viewing the writing.  Truly ambitious writers could try to claim the top, all-time spot.  The entire class could work to improve upon the work of the previous class.  I could imagine beginning the class with the numbers from the previous class, and telling the class that they had to improve upon those numbers.  I can't imagine a group of students who wouldn't be interested in this challenge.

Finally, I value innovation.  The five-paragraph essay is not the final frontier of writing, but in school we often treat it as if it is.  In reality, it’s a starting point and a healthy discipline.  But any student who will become a real writer will have to break its rules -- will have to develop a flexible, individual, unique, poignant voice.  Blogging, and understanding the impact of one’s blogging, could be the beginning of that process for some students.  I can imagine it helping the A student who never wants to take a chance on his / her formal papers (so as not to make a mistake).  And I can also imagine it helping the student who can’t see a use for formal writing, who simply can’t get into it. 

One more point: When I follow what someone like Seth Godin is doing with/to publishing, I realize that, in the coming years, writing might belong to the people who can connect quickly and decisively with an audience, not the people who can fit their ideas into a form or format that someone else decides for them.  But I can't predict the future.  I can only teach toward it.

___

Special thanks to Bill Stites for inspiring this post.  See his related post here.

We Teach Down the Hall from Each Other

David and I teach down the hall from each other.  On Wednesday, we both published new posts on our respective blogs.  Read next to one another, these posts show two very different ways of approaching a humanities class. 

Is this a sign of a school with no guiding philosophy?  Absolutely not.  Different approaches like ours are the sign of a school whose teachers are constantly tinkering, constantly trying to get better, constantly trying to meet the needs of their individual students. With that said, here are the links to both blog posts:

Post from the "1:1 Diaries." (Why David lectured.)

Post from "Refreshing Wednesday." (Why I stopped lecturing.)

You might consider reading them (alone or with your faculty), figuring out where you stand, hashing out the merits of both, and seeing if they lead you in a new direction in your classroom.

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This will be my last post of 2010.  I'm proud that it highlights the work of a great colleague and emphasizes the thinking that goes into the practice of teaching.

Happy Holidays!