Refreshing Wednesday

Professional Growth: Adjusting and Staying the Same

This week, during in-service at my school, I had the chance to talk to our full faculty about some updates to our Professional Growth Process, a homegrown program that helps each teacher collect and process feedback throughout the school year.

I’ve written about this process elsewhere, and answered a lot of questions about it over the years, so I thought I'd share an amended version of my remarks and slides.  It makes for a long (slightly rambling) read about how one faculty tries to grow.  

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I’m hopeful that the changes to our PGP (Professional Growth Process) will seem necessary . . . and not too dramatic.  This isn’t a new initiative. By now, for most of us, it’s an old initiative in need of a haircut and maybe a slightly more serious exercise routine.  

I chose those analogies carefully -- because they are about reducing and simplifying.  The revision of the PGP started in earnest over the summer when the PGP Committee looked at a quotation from the world of software development. 

We were trying to re-build something in a radically simple way -- to clear away clutter and ensure that PGP time will directly benefit your work in the classroom, your work with students.  We were looking for the simplest set of rules to guide us.     

But before I continue, I want to talk about the makeup of the committee that drives the PGP process:

The committee is comprised, and has always been comprised, of a mix of people from all three of our campuses. We insist on having faculty voices and administrative voices and voices that straddle those lines. This helps us to reach our goals as a committee: 1) to surface and vet the best ideas from outside the school, and 2) to listen closely to our own faculty, on all three campuses, as they use the PGP to learn more about themselves as teachers and their students as learners.

So since it’s inception, the PGP Committee has tried to wrestle with research about how educators and non-educators grow best.

We’ve looked at the work of Charlotte Danielson, Liz Wiseman, and John Hattie; been to a Project Zero workshop with Howard Gardner; read Doug Lemov on practice, Robert Kegan on adult learning, and countless other texts.  We’ve kept our eye on Harvard Business Review, Phi Delta Kappan, and Independent School magazine.

Such work has helped us to settle on practices that work for most of our faculty, most of the time.


Since PGP 1.0, the PGP has provided the opportunity for every faculty member to receive a variety of feedback every year.  The process honors the student voice and a kind of collegiality that is focused on thinking and talking productively about teaching and learning.  

As a school, we clearly abide by Robert John Meeham’s dictum:

We have good administrators, don’t get me wrong, but we don’t get better as teachers because someone in authority tells us to.  And we don’t get better at teaching just because we walk into a classroom every day (studies show that we might actually get worse).  We certainly don’t get better because of a single, one-off evaluation.  In fact, the PGP committee was originally charged with marching us away from the conventional evaluation process used in so many schools . . . we were asked to find something better.

That’s why our classrooms are more porous than they used to be, why you could just as well be visited by a peer as by a supervisor, and why we are increasingly comfortable sharing our student evaluations of our own teaching, and our students’ work, with one another.  By helping us map the territory of our own blindspots, the PGP aspires to help us to better understand the true impact of our instructional choices.  That’s been true since PGP 1.0.

For me, one of the most resounding insights from our recent, and ongoing, accreditation and strategic planning process is that people who are outside our community have been so deeply impressed by the quality of conversations that happen within our community – the way we talk about our work and make decisions, the depth of our conversations and considerations.  

The PGP Committee has always wanted to leverage this strength, and that is why PGP 2.0 moved the PGP from an individual concern to a more collaborative concern.  

And that’s why we’ve devoted considerable in-service time, over the past few years, to debriefing various aspects of the PGP.  

Conferring around feedback, as a key component of the PGP, was born of a recognition of the strength of our departments and our grade level teams, PreK - 12.  The committee wants to honor and extend the leadership of these teams, while acknowledging the countless ways people lead from within them.  We trust our teams, and our teams trust one another, forming crucibles for individual growth.

PGP 3.0 plans to capitalize on the successes of the first two iterations, sticking with the three feedback mechanisms that are grounded in research, sticking with the kinds of productive conferring conversations that we do so well . . . while trying to make things a bit simpler.  

Also, we want to extend, in a way we see as logical, the best aspects of PGP 1.0 and PGP 2.0.  If you collect feedback carefully, and confer with your teams deliberately, you are primed for meaningful adjustment.  

You are ready to try something new as a result of what you learned.  This is what we ask our students to do every day; this is what the PGP is now asking of us, as teachers.   

This idea of adjustment is informed, in part, by the synthesis of Peter Sims, a Silicon Valley observer who advocates for the use of small changes, or little bets, to drive innovative practice.  As he writes . . .

To me, that sounds like what we do every day in our classrooms.  We may have a plan, or a direction, in mind . . . but we make adjustments based on what actually happens.  

This shift to adjustment is informed, too, by the recommendations of good executive coaches, who tell clients that the best way to change – after a seminar or conference or class or counseling session or 360 degree evaluation – is to commit to a small adjustment.

And that’s crucial.  These adjustments need not be huge. As Doug Lemov writes, in a book about practice:

So, for example, you might learn from an observation that you should work on wait time.  That’s a small adjustment that could be very useful.  Or, you could do what one of our colleagues did last year.  After reading some research about the importance of Social Emotional Learning, he made a small adjustment that cost him very little but had a huge payoff -- he stood at the door of his classroom every day and greeted each student by name as he/she entered the room.  

The PGP committee hopes that foregrounding the process of feedback and conferring, with an emphasis on adjustment, will allow you, the faculty, to use the PGP to more directly impact the work you do in your classroom.  

At the same time, we hope that such a process will seem so natural and intuitive that you won’t have to think of it as the PGP, or as an event.  We will all continue to collect seasonal feedback – peer observation in the fall, questionnaires in the winter, student work in the spring – but we also want to crystallize this process for anytime, or even everyday,  use.  

If it helps you in a conversation with a peer, that’s great.  If it helps you in a conversation with a student, even better.  If it helps you with an advisee or a parent or a direct report . . . you get the idea.

So we’ve sharpened our process, and we hope,  made it more broadly applicable to our daily work.  And we have also clarified what’s driving the process.

We’re shifting our driver from a “What’s Your Question?” model to a “What’s Our Question?” model, with the shared question being: “How can I most significantly improve teaching and learning in my classroom?”

If this doesn’t seem earth shattering our groundbreaking, that’s good.  Remember where we started . . .

Sometimes the simplest things seem the most obvious . . .

...and yet, because we’re always so busy, simple things are the most difficult aspects of practice . . . to actually practice.  

Think for a moment about your recent peer observation . . . or even your last few classes . . . or about some feedback you received in the past.  Now think about how you would answer the question about how you could most significantly improve teaching and learning in your classroom.  If I were to ask you to confer with the person next to you and then talk about a related adjustment, and then try that related adjustment, you’d be doing PGP 3.0.  

The PGP committee hopes to create that opportunity for that kind of radically simple practice -- time and time again.  

Having one question that we all share allows for focus to shift when it needs to shift. You might bring something back from a conference that sends you down a different path, with a different answer.  And that’s fine. You might work with a colleague on a particular topic, and that’s fine, too.  You might read a book that sends you back into your classroom with a different focus.  You might spend a department meeting talking about the most significant thing you could do for learners in your discipline.  

We’re sharing the same question not because we’re the same, and not because we hope to answer the question in the same way . . . but because we share the same students and the same mission.  We are also planning to adjust the feedback mechanisms of the PGP to ensure they are both as rich as can be and as radically simple as they can be. 

Diane Hulse, who led our accreditation process and is now leading parts of our strategic planning process, asked my favorite question of 2015 during the recent strategic planning retreat. She asked, “what is one value that MKA would hold onto even if it started to hurt you in the marketplace?”

The answer I immediately thought of was our commitment to the growth of our faculty.  Our growth model has changed over the years, but I still remember being hired at MKA and the Headmaster at the time assured me that I would have the chance to get better here.  And that was true.  I know we say the same thing to everyone we hire today -- and that it’s still true.

I’d also suggest that, in answering Hulse’s question, we wouldn’t give up on our belief in the long term, transformative power of what we do everyday.  

Our shared question is a powerful reminder of the possibilities inherent in the very foundation of our school. How do we most significantly improve teaching and learning for young people?  Partially, by being a PK – 12 school and by leveraging the possibilities inherent in this set up.  On any given day, a Pre-K teacher might answer the question -- about significance -- differently than a senior English teacher, but that’s only because these two teachers are meeting the same students at very different stages of their development. 

Constant adjustment and a commitment to mission, no doubt implies a tension.   

We’re asking you to change when necessary, to know you have to grow continuously . . . to adapt, to make small bets.  But we’re also asking you to serve a mission that will not change . . . to play the long game of student learning, which in some cases, requires patience, persistence, constancy, and plain old faith that a student will arrive, in time, at the right place.  

This tension has kept the PGP changing and kept parts of the PGP exactly the same.  Change is important.  Being consistent is important.  At a dynamic school with a strong tradition, growth doesn’t have to be an either . . . or.   

In the past, the PGP led to a fair amount of talk about teaching; PGP 3.0 will ask us, at some point, to stop talking -- to commit to small, significant adjustments and to really testing them when it counts -- in authentic moments with students.  May such work remain messy, vibrant, and in progress . . .

 

Pitchers and Catchers Report in Two Weeks

[I dedicate this post to Dave Flocco and Gillian Branigan, two baseball-loving educators and wonderful parents.  I am lucky enough to work, and raise my kids, alongside them.]

We were headed for one of those perfect fall Saturdays -- crisp air around and above the head, crispy leaves around and below the feet.  My father and mother were due for a visit, and my father had promised that he would "arrive with baseballs and bats and old gloves." Hunter wanted to play baseball; Pop Pop, as my father is called in my home, was more than happy to pull the spiderwebs off his old, grimy, game-day gear.  

Hardly a kiss and a hug were exchanged before part of the family was headed to the nearest baseball field. Things got serious in a hurry -- playing first base and looking up at a nearby tree, I felt a hardball zip past my shin, knicking it enough to alert me to the fact that practice was in session. "Wake up!" my father shouted.  "Yeah, wake up!" my son echoed. I looked to my right and Hunter had morphed from a chess-playing, ninjago spinning boy into a real, live second baseman.  I had never taught him how to field or look like a fielder, since he had never shown much interest in baseball.  We had played catch from time to time -- with tennis balls and other items that wouldn't leave a mark as he learned the finer points of "watching the ball into your mitt." 

I was about to say as much, out of warning, when my father tossed up a ball and whacked it toward second.  I was shocked as the hardball gathered speed on its way toward my son.  The ball bounced off his glove and sputtered toward first.  I looked from my dad to my son to my dad and then said, "slow down, Dad.  He's not used to this." 

My father glared at me a little, told Hunter to get on his toes, and then cracked another hardball at him.  This time, Hunter scooped the ball cleanly.  "Throw it to first," my father yelled, and Hunter sailed the ball right at my chest.  It popped in my mitt and I felt a dose of pride.  The next thing I knew, Hunter was up at bat.

I was a little nervous as this game unfolded, thinking that, at any moment, a bad bounce or a wild throw would change the tenor of the afternoon.  Hunter hit; Hunter fielded; I watched and waited.  But the afternoon did not change except for the light that grew deeper and my son's skill-level that grew deeper alongside it.  I watched him learn to field and hit that day. 

Quickly. 

As I thought more about my trepidation, I realized that it wasn't tied to the fact that Hunter might "take his lumps."  He's a pretty tough kid and a gamer -- he doesn't mind roughousing on the way to meaningful knowledge.  My trepidation (okay, let's just call it  jealousy) was tied to the speed at which Hunter learned when he learned from someone other than me.  My father didn't carry around the history of Hunter's triumphs and setbacks.  He had no idea how long it took him to catch a lacrosse ball or kick a soccer ball; he had no idea and so no reason to finesse the instruction or try to make it palatable to any preconceived notions about how Hunter learned or didn't learn. 

All parents want to nurture and stretch their children.  All parents want to help their children reach their potential.  But it's very possible, in a deeply ironic way, that we limit the extent to which our children can learn by consciously or subconsciously honoring their limits too much.  It's very possible that we  fall into patterns in the way we push our children or don't push them, in the way we challenge them or fail to challenge them, and that these patterns repress progress.  

My father had no idea about my son's limitations on our beautiful fall Saturday.  Or, maybe more precisely, I was the only one on the field that day who had constructed limitations for my son.  My son and I had been playing within those limitations; my father and my son were not; they were just playing baseball.  

 

Turning on the Faucet (Again)

Looking through an old notebook this morning, I realized that it's time to start rolling the Refreshing Wednesday rock up the hill again.  Why?  It's simple, really.  This project started out as a way for me to share images, objects, sentences, or paragraphs related to whatever was interesting or inspring to me during a given week.  It started out as an exercise in gratitude -- saying, publically, "thank you, world, for this _____."  And then each entry became more ambitious, too ambitious, and so the task became larger than it needed to be.  I pushed it aside; I wrote a book; I worked on other things. 

Abandoning RW for as long as I have, though, runs counter to the advice I find myself giving most frequently these days to people who want to do meaningful work in their lives: think about the faucets you most want to turn on in your lives, and then turn them on, even if they are only dripping and dribbling forth a few drops at a time.  If you want to write, write each day.  If you want to run a marathon, run each day.  If you want to improve a relationship, tend to it each day.  If you want to learn to speak a foreign language . . .  Maybe you won't write a book or run a marathon or fix your marriage or learn to speak French in the next six months.  Maybe you won't do these things in the next year.  But honest, dogged, daily persistence will add up, will fill up the days and weeks and months.  That's my opening wager as I return to the long game.  Thanks for sticking with me.

Slow Down to Go Faster

Last summer during a session run by Damien Barrett at one of my school's professional development programs, I was introduced to computer coding.  I don't remember anything about the finer details of what we did that day.  I don't remember the language we learned or the keys we pressed to make websites work.  But I do remember something about one of the habits of programmers.  Coders, according to a video we watched at the outset of our training, are the kinds of people who will spend 25 hours building a program to complete a task that takes only 2.5 seconds to complete. 

Initially, this idea made me laugh.  It sounded absurd and extreme.  But humor is often, as George Saunders said, "what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to." 

What I learned, quickly and directly that day, is that programming is at least in part about slowness.  It's about the long-view -- if a task takes 2.5 seconds but you have to complete it 10 times a day, 5 days a week, for many years, it makes sense to invest some time upfront to save that time on the backend.  This approach only fails to make sense if you feel that you couldn't possibly find the time right now to design a system that could save you time in the future.  After all, 2.5 seconds right now doesn't feel like much.  So you keep writing the grocery list from memory; you keep rushing out the door in the morning and hoping your various family members have everything they need for the day; you keep grading the stacks of quizzes and turning them back in the hopes that such transactions will somehow improve student learning.  We move faster to move faster.  But maybe we're doing it wrong.  If we're not very good at something, doing it faster doesn't seem like a sound plan.  Maybe we should focus on doing it right first. 

To work towards a rule of thumb:

It takes time to slow down, initially, to go faster, eventually. 

Said more economically, slow down to go faster. 

Or, as my friend and colleague Reshan Richards said when I told him about this post, even more economically and eloquently, slow faster. 

From the moment I grasped the "25 hours < 2.5 seconds" idea, I have seen possible applications for it almost everywhere I turn.  It's only slighlty tongue-in-cheek to say that wasted motion, duplicated effort, and the reinvention of wheels are among the chief activities of many people in schools.  But like the drips of leaky faucets, such daily non-efficiencies can begin to wear on one's nerves.  What are you doing to stop the leaky faucets in your school? 

When you grade a stack of essays, do you keep a running tab of common errors or do you rush through the pile in order to return the papers and move on?  The latter is a short game; the former is a long game.  Certainly it takes extra time to perform a meta-analysis of your grading as you grade, but such attention to detail will help you to prioritize your instructional time, and therefore help your students to improve in those areas where they most need attention.  As my colleague Erica Budd pointed out -- just a few days ago -- at a workshop she was running for teachers at my school, there's a big difference between "looking for answers" and "looking for assessment data."  Looking for answers is helpful in producing a grade right now; looking at assessment data is helpful in producing the next lesson plan, the next unit sequence, the next fully formed student understanding...

Another way of posing the question is to frame it for school leaders.  When something goes wrong in your area of school life, do you take the time to examine the conditions that led to the problem in the first place, or do you just put out the fire and rush to the next one?  Do you update policies and checklists to ensure that the small, non visionary work of school functions efficiently?  

A final, and I think most important, way of posing the question is to frame it for students.  How do we model the concept of slowing faster for students who are up against daily deadlines, whose days are arranged like a gauntlet of tiny hourglasses they slide through whether they want to or not?

I saw such modelling done exceptionally well when Reshan Richards (mentioned above) spoke to our juniors and their advisors.  Our junior advising program asks students to think about their developing stories; Reshan met with the junior class to teach them some basic design principles to help them tell those stories more effectively. 

He started with a slide that, to his eyes, was not very well designed.  Notice the multiple font sizes and colors; notice the way the text runs into the bottom image. 

The students in the audience were easily able to identify the problems with the slide, creating a perfect transition for Reshan to share some lessons about fundamental design principles.  He showed the students fonts and color wheels; he gave them advice on selecting and sizing images; he explained the best way to tell a story; he showed them how the best presentations, the best storytellers, are deliberate. 

Then he showed them how he would re-design the initial Three Little Pigs slide, using the design principles he had just discussed.  He started by framing the story in a clear and compelling way:

And then he focused our attention on specific images, placing our heroes at the bottom of the frame, as if they were lost in the cosmos:

He added background:
 

 

He altered colors and zoomed in to indicate that the pigs were moving:

 

And then he introduced the antagonist:

He had the students (and their advisors) hooked.  Even though we had heard the story before, we were compelled to know what was going to happen next.  But then Reshan stopped.  And, for me, this is where his presentation became truly special.  He said, "this is as far as I got . . . and I felt a little bad about that, but then I realized that there's another lesson here.  Doing this kind of work, getting better at design, getting the details right, takes a LOT of time.  You can't do this work quickly.  Especially not at first. You have to add things and then take them out.  You have to try different colors next to each other and then make adjustments.  You have to rehearse and make changes to your presentation.  You have to change the order of the slides and then change them back . . . only to change them again." 

In a way, he was saying, if you want to master a complex discipline, you have to start over and then take your time with each step.  You have to fumble and tinker and discover the textures and nuances of your craft.  You have to think just a little bit like a programmar, who creates his/her code line by line by line, through trial and error, in search of the simplicity that is also known as elegance.  To get there, you have to slow down . . . faster.  We all do.

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As a coda to this post, I think it's worth pointing out that the learning process documented herein would not have happened if I did not slow down to attend (1) a summer workshop on programming run by a colleague, (2) a mid-December workshop about formative assessment run by a second colleague, and (3) a mid-December presentation about design thinking run by a third colleague.  These opportunities were neither convenient for a busy administrator, nor mandatory.  But each of them supported the long-term work (with students, in schools) in which I have chosen to engage.  They support the constant layering necessary to get good at this work.  I should add, too, that the learning process documented herein would not have happened if the colleagues mentioned didn't slow down enough to teach me.  And that slowing down enough to blog about my learning process helped me to crystalize that process.  You get the idea.   Now use it. 

Citations

The leaky faucets comment comes from Dan Saffer (who was paraphrasing Charles Bukowski). 

A Saturday Morning Mindset

Last Saturday morning started like any other Saturday morning in my house.  I woke up first and sat down at my computer to catch up on some writing.  About 45 minutes later, Hunter woke up. 

After he snuck up on me (his usual routine) and then climbed into my lap (again his usual), I played the first few minutes of a video for him.  The video shows Kieran Hebden, better known as Four Tet, explaining how he makes music. 

 

I had been looking for a video like this because Hunter loves to listen to music, but he also loves to talk about how the sounds in songs are produced.  He understands acoustic music ("that's a snare drum," "that's a guitar") and most clear-cut rock music ("that's an electric guitar," "that's a bass"); electronic music is harder for him to see and harder for me to explain.

So we watched the video and then talked about it.  We talked about the way the hardware was supported by software and about how the sound was looped and layered to create the "final" song.  And then we talked about what we noticed about the musician's process.  Hebden seemed to build his song by playing around, by messing around, by trying things out, by listening and learning and adjusting.  In short, the maker tinkered endlessly as part of his process.

Attention spent, Hunter hopped off my lap and approached his piano; I turned back to the essay I was writing; Saturday, as it was, continued. 

I continued to move verbs and nouns around.  Continued to try out different sentence structures.  Followed directions and redirections.  Added and subtracted.  I was, at times, almost deliriously happy, as I can become when I am writing. 

Hunter's piano made a few sounds, and he moved up and down from the bench to occasionally jot down notes.  

And then, suddenly, out of Hunter's jottings and peckings came a tiny song: the first three notes of "What Child is This?"  He almost fell off the bench.

In the moment between nearly falling and nearly catching himself, Hunter clearly felt the same feeling that I had been tapping into all morning as my own broken sentences clicked, as my own paragraphs came together, as meaning emerged, bedheaded and rubbing its eyes. Over the next 10 minutes, I only pretended to type.  I  listened and watched (and took pictures) as Hunter figured out the rest of the song in the same start, restart, false start, true start, start again fashion. 

Only much later did I think about why . . . why this breakthrough?  Here's what I can gather:

On this particular Saturday, Hunter was open to mistakes in a way that he, being seven, isn't always. And, it's reasonable to suggest, this openness happened when all the theoretical bones about mindset and grit and resilience gained some real, live flesh.  In other words, the way we talked about Four Tet's music, the way we talked about "making,"  ultimately made both of our mornings, and whatever art we managed to scrape together, possible.  Hunter was doing what I was doing, and I was doing what Four Tet was doing, and Four Tet was doing what Hunter was doing.  We were all doing the exact same thing.  It was so simple. . . 

I guess I should add, too, by way of stating what is now hiding in plain sight: it was the weekend and we were not in any school.