A Hiccup of IMAGINATION

Posted on May 11, 2011 by boadams1

“Anyway,” said Old Wrinkly, “it might be just what this Tribe needs, a change in leadership style. Because the thing is, times are changing. We can’t get away with being bigger and more violent than everybody else any more. IMAGINATION. That’s what they need and what you’ve got. A Hero of the Future is going to have to be clever and cunning, not just a big lump with overdeveloped muscles. He’s going to have to stop everyone quarreling among themselves and get them to face the enemy together.”

As a minister-friend of mine is fond of saying, “That’ll preach.” The paragraph above comes from Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon. My family fell in love with the movie this year, and my six-year old son is now reading the books. He reads to himself mostly, but he asks me to read a few pages each night. That paragraph on pages 63 and 64 really hit me. When I read it, I stopped for too long, and PJ had to spur me out of thinking to keep reading aloud. The movie and the children’s literature possess that amazing, rare quality of transcending the age of the viewers and readers – if you are paying attention, there is something profound for you…no matter what your age.

What a metaphor system exists in the story…in just that short paragraph about a Viking grandfather giving his grandson some advice about his different approach to an issue. For me, I am in the mindset to think of the dragon as school or education. We teachers and school leaders need to examine the 150 year old paradigm of school and re-think if the Prussian military model – the “overdeveloped muscles” – is the correct method for guiding the formalized learning of this iGeneration. Perhaps we need more IMAGINATION.

I certainly mean to point no fingers at anyone. When I point a finger, three point back at me. Maybe we could quit all the quarreling among ourselves and face the enemy together.

Last night, I attended the CFT Talks. The Center for Teaching hosted its Learning and the Brain Cohort for a TED-talk-style evening so that this team of teachers from Westminster and Drew Charter could share their action research projects. The event was superb and inspirational. On Twitter, you can trace the stream with the hashtag #CFTtalks. I learned so much from these “pracademics” who were meshing research and practice in their own learning-lab classrooms. At one point, two of the speakers shared two quotes:

“If students don’t learn the way we teach, why don’t we teach the way they learn?”

“If your job is to develop the mind, shouldn’t you know how the brain works?”

They spoke of “green light” and “red light” teachers. I hope you can see the summary of these terms by clicking on the image below (captured at event). In my mind, I saw the red light teachers as big, muscle bound Vikings who were trying to strong arm learning through something akin to force. I saw the green light teachers as Hiccup, the protagonist of How to Train Your Dragon – full of imagination and willingness to meet the learning dragon as a learner himself…mutually growing as a team that could synergistically thrive together. Maybe we all need a “hiccup” to cause us to draw up an unexpected breath and free the thing that defines us most as children…as the original-learner prototype – IMAGINATION. May we use it to address these changing times. May we inspire it and motivate it in our colleagues and students. May we learn together, as Old Wrinkly say, “the HARD WAY!” Together we can do this. Together we should do this. It’s about our children’s present and future. It’s about learning!

Reflecting from aFAAR

Posted on May 10, 2011 by boadams1

In the Junior High, tis the season of conducting Student Course Feedback and, for some, it seems, completing Peer Visits – two of the five components of our Faculty Assessment and Annual Review (FAAR) process. Additionally, a third component of our formative assessment plan – Admin Observation – has been occurring all year. After seeing the note “re-review and process Synergy 8 SCF” on our respective to-do lists for months, Jill Gough and I have finally spent five meetings of second period reviewing and reflecting on our Synergy 8 student course feedback (SCF). Not only did we re-review the feedback to reconsider how things went during the first-semester course, but we also revisited the data in May so that we could pre-plan more effectively for the next iteration of Synergy 8. As we returned to the SCF and discussed the results, we remembered connections in the data that linked to things we read in our peer visit summaries and admin observation notes. We were reminded that student course feedback does not exist by itself. The components of our FAAR process are not intended to be isolated, siloed pieces of professional learning. They can be wonderfully integrated and whole. Also, they are not intended to be summative or evaluative – they are not judgmental pieces of professional evaluation. They are meant to be formative…lenses through which we can view our teaching and learning so as to grow and develop as educators…so that we can adjust our course.

What’s more, by reviewing and reflecting together, we enhanced our field of view and gained richer understanding from the blend of each other’s varied perspectives and reactions. During each of the five periods that we engaged in this collaborative work, we would independently review the data and write to the prompts on the narrative summary tool (“option #2”) for reflecting on one’s SCF – one reflective prompt at a time. Then, we would read and discuss each other’s responses. While this took more time than working through the reflection alone, we both believe we benefitted immensely from the writing, sharing, and dialoguing. We missed things in our individual reflections, but very little fell through any cracks by canvassing the feedback as a team of critical friends.

To share our system of feedback, we decided to use an online, cloud-storage, sharing tool called “Box.” By using Box, we could design some simple webdocs that literally show and archive the connections among the feedback and reflections. Box has a number of great features, including the ability to tag documents post comments. To view our Box-stored system of feedback, please visit the “Synergy 8 – FAAR” folder.

Soon, our next collective endeavor will be to prepare our 2011-12 Goals and Self-Assessment (a fourth component of FAAR). Because we co-facilitate Synergy 8, we intend to employ the critical friends process again as we continue to prepare for our next team of Synergy learners. The manner in which we reviewed and reflected on our system of feedback has set up and primed our ability and enthusiasm to enhance the Synergy experience for the upcoming school year.

In addition to our course-specific questions, we are also engaged in thinking about some critical learning questions for ourselves and our FAAR process (and they may be good questions for you, too):

Can you learn more deeply reviewing feedback with a colleague? How can we assist each other in learning more deeply?
Have can we build a common understanding of the needs of our learners? How can we find a richer understanding of ourselves as teammates and co-facilitators?
Do you have a team of critical friends? What feedback are you collecting and considering so that you can grow?
Would you learn more by sharing the results of your feedback with another for reflection and co-interpretation? How will we grow and learn together if we are not sharing our struggles and our successes?
What have we learned from this process that we can facilitate for our younger learners next semester? How can we model and implement a richer reflection and critical friends system as part of the course?

NOTE: This post is cross-posted at Jill Gough’s Experiments in Learning by Doing.

A fair comparison

Posted on April 15, 2011 by boadams1

Yesterday at lunch, I commented to a faculty member how impressed I was with his/her entree into video production of short lesson clips. Who knows what this kind of visual recording and representation could lead to – some great innovation in the future. Not to mention the postive effect it had for some other learners right then and there, in the moment. This person had made a mark to start (see The Dot, by Peter Reynolds). I was genuinely proud of the efforts and outcomes, and I had seen this person’s excitement earlier. After I named a few specifics, the faculty member said something like, “Thank you. But I can’t do it like [so-n-so] can.” Then, we talked about how so-n-so’s been making short video clips and screencasts for over a year. At that point the conversation turned to our children…about a very related issue.

My younger son, JT, thinks he should be able to do everything my older son, PJ, can do. The younger son is 2 1/2 years younger than the older. PJ has had a lot more practice running, scootering, playing video games, drawing, etc. I wish I could think of a convincing, “sticky” way to explain this to JT. If JT wants to make comparisons, which I wish he would’t, then he should compare himself today to PJ 2 1/2 years ago. We could compare (still wish we wouldn’t) PJ frozen in time at 4 years old, so that JT could make an apples-to-apples comparison. Even that, though, would hold its own margin of error and inaccuracies. They are two different people who have practiced different skills.

My lunch colleague has two children, and their family experience has been similar. The youngest wants to “advance artificially” to the level of the oldest. The less experienced makes an unfair comparison to the more experienced. We can understand that children do this, but why do we adults fall prey to such bad comparison practice? [Especially those of us who have read Mindset!]

If we want to use the inequality between the less and more experienced, we could do so just to mark a current reality and a future vision. We could set a goal of what proficiency and mastery look like at various levels of practice and development. Then we would know what a reasonable and fair target would be for a beginner at a new activity, an intermediate at a practiced activity, an advanced at a long-practiced activity. And there wouldn’t have to be a “100,” because the level of proficency and mastery may improve and grow in such a way that a ceiling cannot be artificially set. The ceiling could be broken just like the floor of the 4:00-minute mile was broken by Dr. Roger Bannister. When he did so, a “new possible” emerged, and a number of runners broke the previously sacred barrier in a matter of weeks and short months.

Maybe the most important thing is just to be in motion – to be trying new things and making the mark of current reality – even if one is a brand-new beginner – and setting a goal based on future vision. The gap between current reality and future vision can be frustrating and/or exciting. The distance one travels in the journey is called learning, I think.

We all start as beginners, and we can all can get better through feedback, support, determination, practice, and persistence. Ignore the voices that say we aren’t good enough yet. Pay more attention to the bright spots – what worked that I can do more of to improve. A strong fortress is built one brick at a time. One well-made brick on top of another. One bright spot on another. One successful attempt after thirteen failures and feeling what that success felt like…then reproducing it. It’s not about comparing ourselves to others. It’s about comparing ourselves to standards of future vision so that we can mark our growth and progress, like a child sometimes marks his growth over the years using a door frame and a pencil. But the first step is making a mark on that wall. Then one must grow to see a change in the height of the mark. And only relative to oneself.

It’s not about measuring apples and oranges. It’s about measuring apples to apples. It’s about learning.

What will be your next endeavor? What will you start from scratch? What do you want to get better at? What models of proficiency and mastery will you use? Will you unfairly compare yourself and get frustrated, or will you use another’s example as a future vision of what is possible with effort and practice? Will you maybe even ask them for help and how they got to their current level? Will you make a mark?

Our kids sure could use our good example. So could our colleagues.

A note of celebration and a tapestry of bright spots

Posted on April 15, 2011 by boadams1

Don’t you love getting little notes – notes that thank you for something and name the specific thing for which you are being thanked? Makes me feel celebrated when I get one of those. I instantly hit “send to OneNote” and place in a “sunshine file” for a proverbial rainy day. As a principal, I have a lot of opportunity to celebrate folks. To be honest, I am not very good at public celebration, but I am working on it – celebrating publicly is a learning goal of mine. But I do try to send email notes (I write better in pixels than on paper) as often as I can.

Yesterday, though, my learning partner and co-facilitator of PLCs beat me to the notes. She wasted no time in celebrating the bright spots of our teams. Specific behaviors were named and resulting outcomes were celebrated. What inspiration that is to a receiver to keep doing those things and improve. Of course, the notes reveal the situations and moments and behaviors that were celebrated, and those notes collectively tell a story about some truly amazing work in our Junior High math-science PLC, which meets four days a week, for about an hour each day. Some days the entire community of JH math and science teachers is together, and some days we break into course teams or other teams.

Enough from me…GO READ ABOUT IT at Experiments in Learning by Doing.

Who can you send a note to today? What bright spot can you celebrate? Pick one and do it! It’s about learning.

Threads of a Braided Cord…and Myelinating my Network

Posted on April 1, 2011 by boadams1

This morning, I read about 30 blog posts from my feed reader. How blessed I feel to be connected to so many powerful thinkers – working hard to figure things out – via Twitter, Google Reader, WordPress, etc. Are you a school leader? You don’t need a formal title to be such, of course! How’s your PLN? Is your personal learning network full of ever-expanding nodes held together by evolving silks of connectivity? Are you taking risks, reflecting out loud, writing with your students, and getting up after every fall?

In the past 20 years, we have learned so much about the brain…about how synapses that “fire together, wire together.” Since I began tweeting and blogging, I have magnified the sparks that are firing and wiring my brain. And my social network is a professional network that functions similarly to the biology of my brain. I am grateful for my co-learners who are helping me to myelinate my thinking about schools of the future and the future of schools.

Of the 30 blog posts I read this morning, three in particular seemed to weave together for me. To write is to see what we think…and to write requires active reflection…and developing these habits means making errors and mistakes from which we can learn and grow and improve. Here are the three links to the braided cord of my morning’s thinking…my most recent myelination. What’s wiring your brain? Are you practicing writing, reflecting, and getting up after a fall? Who is in your neural network? Who is challenging you and spurring you to grow?

“Everyone’s a writer. NWP taught me that,” from Bud Hunt and the PLP network

“A Lesson in the Importance of Reflection,” from Jeff Delp (@azjd)

“Fall down seven times, get up eight: The power of Japanese resilience,” from Garr Reynolds

NOTE: Some people fear the “opening up” of so many feeds. I often hear, “I have enough to do without adding Twitter and RSS reads to my list.” If you dare, look at what Bill Ferriter and John Burk have written lately about how social networking saves you time. And never be afraid to “prune.” When I get overwhelmed by my feeds, I sometimes click on “mark all as read” and start with a clean slate. What about all that stuff I am missing? I would have missed it permanently if they were never in my feed reading. I – ME – I get to be in control of my reading…it does NOT control me. Take a chance today…try Twitter…start a blog. You will fall down, but you should get back up. Find the threads of a braided cord for your thinking. Provide some threads for others. That’s truly what learning is all about!