Starting from Where the Learner Thrives

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A scenario I think about often and am trying to process through writing.

If every student in your class has access to a device and a child’s learning thrives with pen and paper, would you be bothered if that was taken away from them?

If taking away pen and paper from a student who is successful using these things would bother you, would the opposite action upset you as well?

Now, some might say, “Well some kids that would want a device would be distracted by it,” and I could agree with that statement.

The focus should not necessarily the student prefers but, more importantly, what is beneficial to their learning. Those are not always the same.  If I were a kid that had a classroom with flexible seating, I would still prefer the couch, but I know (now) that my learning would be so much better at a high table with a stool.  One would relax me while the other would help me to process and create.  I know what benefits my learning as an adult, and our students would benefit if we worked through this process with them as well.

It is also imperative that we distinguish what we mean by “better for their learning” and not merely relegate that to “do well on a test.” Those are not always the same, but if we are being honest, both are realities.

Whatever student needs to be successful should be where we begin.  If we keep that in the forefront, we will always be on the right path.

“Let’s teach kids the skills and
de-criminalize supports they need to prevail!
They will self regulate their learning
and get what they need BEFORE they fail.”
Shelley Moore

The Value of Learning From Our Students

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In the follow-up to “The Innovator’s Mindset,” my book written with Katie Novak titled “Innovate Inside the Box” (expected release mid-August 2019), I identify three critical areas for learning by educators and why they are crucial.  They are the following.”

  1. Learning about our students
  2. Learning for our students
  3. Learning from our students

The first two are pretty obvious and discussed often.  Learning about our students is about knowing those in front of us and adjusting learning to not only help our students grow but to also tap into their strengths and passions as well.  I always say that the most fundamental research we can do as educators is knowing the people you serve.

Learning for our students are looking at our professional learning and developing not only as teachers but as learners. How do we immerse ourselves in the learning that we expect from our students? We should never skip to the teaching without doing the learning.  For example, if we want to implement digital portfolios with our students, do we create these for ourselves to understand the opportunities and knowledge that can be developed through this process?

The last, learning from our students, is about creating an environment that we understand there is a wealth of knowledge in every classroom and community that we serve that we do not have.  Tapping into the wisdom of our students not only helps us grow but often inspires our students to want to further their learning to share their expertise. When I first started teaching, one of my courses was on technology, and I will admit, I knew little about the topic. Although I had some knowledge, I would often ask students to share their knowledge and expertise or help me when I ran into roadblocks. Once students knew I struggled in some areas, they would go out of their way to find other things that I didn’t know, and you could see the pride beaming from each opportunity they had to share something with me that I didn’t know.

I understood that with technology, you couldn’t know everything, but I also realized that this is true with every subject.  THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE TEACHER IS NOT THE EXPERT!  But any person that is sincerely aspiring to be a master learner in any topic knows it’s impossible to know everything and that any chance we have to learn from others, no matter age or level of expertise, is a path to continuous growth and development.

When we create a community that we not only share our expertise but tap into and bring out the knowledge of those we serve, growth becomes the norm for all of us, not only our students.

Image result for each of us had something to learn from the others and something to teach in return

Breaks Are Good

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Image result for the importance of taking breaks quote

Many educators across North America are either about to go on break or are already on their summer break.  I don’t know if the term “break” is accurate (I saw someone refer to it as “recovery”) because I know from experience, that many (if not most) take advantage to grow with formal and informal learning opportunities.  That is great, but I am also an advocate of taking an actual break where you step away from it all and do what you need to do.  The important thing is to read your mental health and do what you need to take care of yourself.  No profession seems to get as much guilt from those outside the profession (and sometimes within) for actually taking a break.  Sometimes stepping away actually brings us back rejuvenated as it helps to recenter our focus and remind us of what we love.

There was one year in my career where I thought it would be my last in education. I was frustrated and wasn’t sure if teaching was for me anymore.  I went away for the summer and just got away from education, and I will tell you, it was the best thing that I had ever done.  Not only did I come back refreshed, but I also had changed my attitude significantly.  There were things that I was frustrated with and what I realized is that there were some elements that I could not change because they were out of my control, but I could change how I looked at things.  That break saved my career and changed my perspective from wanting to leave education to loving it more than ever.

Breaks sometimes are not only about stepping away but are about personal growth.  How that growth happens is going to be different for each person, and that should be celebrated.  Catching your breath might be the oxygen you need to keep going.

The “Un-Bucket List”

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Eckhart Tolle Quote: “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”

In the post, “The Most Surprising Thing that Came from NOT Achieving My Dreams” via Marc and Angel, they share this idea of an “Unbucket List.” I had never heard of that until now, and it was an interesting exercise focused not on the future, but appreciating the past. The author shares the following:

As I approached my 40th birthday last year I decided I would do something concrete to combat the disillusionment I could be feeling about my thwarted dreams. So I made an un-bucket list. I didn’t want to make another list of all the things I wanted to do over the next 40 years. Instead, I wanted to focus on all the things I’d done so far.

And the exercise was very enlightening. Firstly, I realized that this mediocre life I thought I was living was far from mediocre. I’d ‘achieved’ far more than I gave myself credit for. But secondly, and more importantly, my list included things that made me love myself.

I think that this is not only a good exercise for anyone to do personally but professionally as well.

The obsessive focus that education has on being “future-focused” often negates the importance of placing value of what has already been done.  Yes, we want to prepare our students for their futures, but we should all acknowledge the critical steps and achievement that have already been made for and by our students, or else we will be lead to feeling defeated based on the things that we have not achieved yet.

We get so lost having our eye on the future we sometimes lose sight of the significance of our past.

Make your un-bucket list and take time to appreciate what you have done.  The future will be there tomorrow.

The “Why” Before the “What” and the “How”

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I found the title of this article, “Dear Teachers: Please Don’t Make Your Lessons Relevant” by Peter Greene kind of clickbaity (is that a word?) and I got suckered in and had to read it. I enjoyed it and appreciated this point:

Once you look at a lesson and ask, “How am I going to make this material relevant,” you have admitted that the material is not actually relevant. If that’s true–if the lesson is inherently irrelevant–then you need to ask a bigger question. Why are you teaching it at all? Because it’s on the test? Because your boss said you have to? These are lousy reasons to teach anything.

After I read that part, this analogy grabbed my attention:

Those connections don’t need to be profound. For instance, I maintain that one of the benefits of being a well-educated person is that you get more jokes. Education makes the world funnier. Some disciplines are about building mental muscles. When I inevitably heard the “when are we ever going to use this” question, my reply was a sports analogy. Our football players always spent the offseason lifting weights, even though no football game in history ever stopped for a bench press competition. The players are never going to use their bench pressing skills, so why bother? Because they would use the muscles that weight lifting built.

Reading this, I made my own connection as sometimes we want to play in the game without doing the practice, but if you don’t practice before you play, the game probably isn’t going to go so well.  I do my best to paint a picture of why what I am talking about is essential before we get into the “what and the how.”  If you jump into the second part before the first, the question that will continuously pop up is, “Why are we doing this?”  I found that the time I spend explaining “why” often saves time and helps us dig deeper into the “what and the how.”

Not everything in school or life is meant to be fun or something you will use all of the time, but we have to develop some of those foundational skills in ourselves and our students before we get to the big picture.  Helping students understand that journey to a more significant destination is crucial for their growth and ours.  If you can’t explain it, as Greene says, then why teach it?

Image result for understanding why quote

On Humility and Confidence

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In the article, “Think You’re Wise in Your Own Eyes? 4 Steps to Develop Leadership Humility,” they discuss the importance of humility in leadership.  The article starts with these thoughts:

Leaders who are wise in their own eyes seem to be the ones who get the most attention in our world. They’re the outspoken, big personality, larger-than-life characters who always seem absolutely convinced of their own wisdom despite any evidence to the contrary. They capture the news headlines, private equity investors, and achieve personal wealth and fame. The only thing they don’t seem to possess is a healthy dose of humility.

Yet a number of research studies have shown that humble leaders are more effective at bringing people together, marshaling resources toward a common goal, and accomplishing organizational objectives.

Humility, especially in leadership, is crucial. But in a world where social media can provide open doors that did not exist before, it can also fuel arrogance. This is not to say we shouldn’t be proud or advocate for our work, but it is crucial we highlight others, online and offline.

Understand that a confident leader can still have humility. In fact,  confidence is necessary for serving others. I love this quote:

The thing about leadership is that it is not about you. It is about how you lift others up to do great things.  Personally, my goal every day is to share a few posts of others to use any platform that I have to highlight others.  The best compliment I received about my last book was that I had highlighted so many others. That meant a lot. If we limit ourselves to our own thinking in education, we not only restrict ourselves but our students. 

My former boss had done so much for me, and every time I tried to thank her, she always put the light back on me.  It meant a lot, and it is something that I am working on myself.

She also told me, “either be humble or be humbled.”  The line between confidence and arrogance is humility.  To keep that in our mind is to remember that leadership is always about serving others.

The Importance of Classroom Observations

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Notice the title of the post…”The Importance of Classroom Observations.”

When you hear the term, do you think of observing and evaluating teachers or of the logistics of the space?

To me, the term means something different, and it is more of an evaluation of administration than it is of teachers.

Let me explain…

When I worked as a principal and eventually at central office, I would often take my laptop into classrooms with the permission of a teacher and simply sit in the back of a class and answer email or complete documents that I needed for my work.  I would spend easily 2-3 hours in a classroom, and I would often explicitly tell the teacher that I was not there to observe them, but the environment we helped create in the classroom to support them.

For example, I remember having a conversation with our IT department on how our computers only took two minutes to login. But that “two minutes” with 25 students in front of you and one of them going wrong could turn into 30 minutes, and eventually lead to a teacher not wanting to use them again. You see, the “two minutes” was the time it took a single adult.  When I noticed this, we had conversations on how we would lower the “login time” for technology (we moved to Chromebooks) to remove a barrier in the classroom for all of our teachers so they could see more success in the process.

“Class size” may seem inconsequential until you sit in a classroom for two hours and notice that it does have an impact on meeting the needs of individual students.

Seating in a classroom may seem insignificant until you have to sit at the same desk a students does for multiple hours in a day.

If you are in a role that makes decisions for what the environment looks like in a classroom, you need to be present in those classrooms.  Teaching might seem like a singular responsibility, but if we want to ensure the success of our students, we have to understand that it is a team sport.

Image result for "being a leader is not about you" susan vobejda

Memorization is Not a Bad Thing

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Here is a scenario:

The year is 2030, and you are having a conversation at a dinner party.  Eventually, people start talking about a significant historical event, and you have never heard about it before. You quickly check out of the conversation and go to your mobile device (it is totally going to be called something else but bear with me) to figure out what people are talking about because your school was against memorization of anything because you could just “Google” it.  Soon, no one wants to talk to you because they know the conversation will be one that is focused solely on you looking at devices for reference. How boring is that?

Is this scenario REALLY going to happen because a school has put less of an emphasis on “memorization”? Some think so, and others don’t, but here are a few things to consider.

  1. Memorization is not a bad thing, but what we spend time locking into memory will change.  I spent a lot of time as a student being tested on dates of events rather than discussing the implication of the events themselves.
  2. When you focus on a deep understanding of an idea, event, concept, etc., memorization is more likely to happen long term for a learner, but if you focus solely on memorization, this doesn’t mean you understand the concept.
  3. Do you need to memorize something before you understand it? I don’t think so but if you think of all the concept in “Bloom’s” they are meant to be connected as you go up the “pyramid” and are not intended to be separate.

 

Image result for blooms taxonomy

Image from: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/

 

I saw John Medina, author of “Brain Rules,” speak years ago and he said something to the extent of “Creation without consumption is the equivalent of playing the air guitar; you might know the motions, but you won’t actually know how to play.”  Yes, you can Google anything you want today, but that doesn’t mean you understand the concept with any depth.  With access to all of the information in the world, we should focus on creating schools that develop our students to become smarter and more knowledgeable than we ever could be without it.  Memorization is a part of it but definitely should not be an endpoint.

 

What does “better” mean to you and your students?

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World IntellectualProperty Day

I have been re-reading the book “Empower” by AJ Juliani and John Spencer, and I loved this portion from John:

Here’s a quick confession: I (John) used to hate the word “innovative.” See those quotation marks right there around the word? Those are actually air quotes that I would use whenever I used the term. “It’s a buzzword,” I would say. “It’s overused,” I would point out.

But the truth is, sometimes a word becomes trendy because it’s tapping into something we all agree is important. Is it misused? Sometimes. Is it overused? Often. But so are the words “love” and “awesome” and “friend,” but I have no intention of ditching any of those words. I think I reacted poorly to the word “innovation” because it had a certain overly glossy, high-tech connotation to it. It made me think of the EPCOT Center and of the Astrodome and of the Flowbee (a true innovation in haircutting that combined a hair trimmer and a vacuum). But that’s not innovation. That’s novelty. That’s disruption.

I have been discussing innovation for probably the past ten years, and I agree with John here, 100%.  When people use the word “innovation” to describe something new (usually technology related) than it does become a buzzword.  This happens a lot in education where a term becomes “trendy” and is used without thought of what it means, which in turn makes the word a buzzword.  It is not saying that the word in itself is terrible, but it is in the way that it is used.

In my book, “The Innovator’s Mindset,” I defined the word innovation as the following:

I’m defining innovation as a way of thinking that creates something new and better. Innovation can come from either “invention” (something totally new) or “iteration” (a change of something that already exists), but if it does not meet the idea of “new and better,” it is not innovative. That means that change for the sake of change is never good enough.

The “better” part of the definition is the most crucial. The word “better” is vital when it comes to traditional practice or innovative practice. Some traditional methods work better for our students in learning, and that is crucial to understand.  If we gravitate toward the “new” only because it is trendy and lose our students along the way, it is not innovation; it is bad practice.

Blake Harvard discusses this idea in his post, “What if Better isn’t Better?“:

But what constitutes ‘better’? How do I know when a new way is a better way? For me, better is equivalent to students learning more. Whatever the ‘better’ is assists my students with learning/remembering/retaining more information in a more efficient and/or effective manner. What does ‘better’ mean to you? I think this is a vitally important question to consider and I’m not sure all educators sincerely know what their ‘better’ is.

The question I have bolded is essential, not only for individuals but as schools and organizations.  What does “better” actually mean? If you are looking for an answer from me, I won’t give it to you directly.  Here is why; what is often measured as “better” in schools is all about higher scores.  But understand, this doesn’t mean it is better learning.  For example, a lot of studies that discuss “effective practice” totally correlate it to test scores, but in your experience as an educator, have you ever seen students that could ace a test but not truly understand the content? I will admit that I have taught that way in my career because the sole measure of my effectiveness what was if kids did well on a test. We promote the importance of scores in education, yet many organizations that scores are not an accurate indicator of someone’s ability. I am not against students doing well on standardized exams, but I also know that some of our smartest kids in our schools are weak academically.  There is more to learning and understanding than we could ever possibly measure on a standardized test.

We also need to understand that people other than the students often define the “better” for our kids.  This is why I have often discussed the importance of having students define what “success” looks like for them.  Do we genuinely become as passionate or resilient in achieving goals that are solely set by others? I struggle with the thought that sometimes the “scores” are placed at the forefront because it is an easier way to show the success of the adults than it is to show the success of our students.

I believe that as a school if we are talking about “best practices” or “innovation,” or anything else, we have to figure out what “better” means for our students, and from our community. How we assess this “better” will drive practice, not the other way around.

Simplest Gestures Are Often the Most Memorable

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When I was in Grade 4, my teacher, Miss Butler, ended the year by giving everyone a personalized card that wrote about the unique things she saw in me in the classroom.  As my parents owned a restaurant, she thanked my family for providing pizza for the class, and also acknowledged my sense of humor in the classroom (which was sometimes seen as a detriment in later grades).  I call it a “card,” but it was a cutout on thick paper of a blue smurf because I loved the smurfs (don’t judge).

Everything about this simple card still sticks in my head today. The thought of acknowledging my strengths while knowing things I was interested in, and tying it all together in one card. I won awards in elementary school, but those memories are heavily blurred at best. But I can remember getting that card handed to me, the feeling I had when I received it, and how much I cherished it after. These things always stick with me, and it was the reason that I did the same thing for my elementary classes when I became a teacher.  That one simple act of acknowledging me sticks out to this day.

This quote resonates:

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When I talk to educators about the hopes for my daughter in a classroom, I share that she will walk into school feeling valued, appreciated, and you will try your best to not only develop her weaknesses but focus on bringing out her strengths.  These are things, no matter the mandate, Miss Butler proved a student could feel not only with how she treated us throughout the year but with that simple gesture.

What little things did you experience as a student that you remember to this day?