Category: Learning

If you still doubt that the foundation for learning is emotional, not intellectual . . .

Posted on | by Sam

. . . you have some more reading to do. You might start with this article written by a public school principal in Maine. You could continue with a short summary of renowned psychologist (and Nobel Prize winner) Dan Kahneman’s research into how the mind actually works. Or if you wanted to consider a drastically different source, you can listen to Lupe Fiasco’s “He Say, She Say,” and read the lyrics (below) to hear one artist’s prescient insight into a larger problem plaguing his (and our) community, and standing in the way of deep, lasting systemic change in our schools.

As Pedro Noguera said, “unmet social needs become unmet academic needs.”

As soon as everything from federal education policy to the KIPP Network’s six essential questions includes, and transcends, academic measures of success, we’ll have a chance at reimagining education for a changing world.

Until then, make no mistake — we’re kidding ourselves, and the best we can hope for is a perfecting of our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

Listen.

I can’t, I won’t, I can’t, I won’t
Let you leave
I don’t know what you want
You want more from me?

She said to him
“I want you to be a father
He’s your little boy and you don’t even bother
Like “brother” without the R
And he’s starting to harbor
Cool and food for thought
But for you he’s a starver
Starting to use red markers on his work
His teacher say they know he’s much smarter
But he’s hurt
Used to hand his homework in first
Like he was the classroom starter
Burst to tears
Let them know she see us
Now he’s fighting in class
Got a note last week that say he might not pass
Ask me if his daddy was sick of us
Cause you ain’t never pick him up
You see what his problem is?
He don’t know where his poppa is
No positive male role model
To play football and build railroad models
It’s making a hole you’ve been digging it
Cause you ain’t been kicking it
Since he was old enough to hold bottles
Wasn’t supposed to get introduced to that
He don’t deserve to get used to that
Now I ain’t asking you for money or to come back to me
Some days it ain’t sunny but it ain’t so hard
Just breaks my heart
When I try to provide and he say ‘Mommy that ain’t your job’
To be a man, I try to make him understand
That I’m his number one fan
But its like he born from the stands
You know the world is out to get him, so why don’t you give him a chance?”

So he said to him
“I want you to be a father
I’m your little boy and you don’t even bother
Like “brother” without the R
And I’m starting to harbor
Cool and food for thought
But for you I’m a starver
Starting to use red markers on my work
My teacher say they know I’m much smarter
But I’m hurt
I used to hand my homework in first
Like I was the classroom starter
Burst to tears
Let them know he see us
Now I’m fighting in class
Got a note last week that say I might not pass
Kids ask me if my daddy is sick of us
Cause you ain’t never pick me up
You see what my problem is?
That I don’t know where my poppa is
No positive male role model
To play football and build railroad models
It’s making a hole you’ve been digging it
Cause you ain’t been kicking it
Since I was old enough to hold bottles
Wasn’t supposed to get introduced to that
I don’t deserve to get used to that
Now I ain’t asking you for money or to come back to me
Some days it ain’t sunny but it ain’t so hard
Just breaks my heart
When my momma try to provide and I tell her ‘That ain’t your job’
To be a man, she try to make me understand
That she my number one fan
But its like you born from the stands
You know the world is out to get me, why don’t you give me a chance?”

Energy or Entropy?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on Energy or Entropy?

I spent the other morning in my son’s Montessori classroom. It’s a beautiful, old-school room with high ceilings, large windows and plenty of space, which is good because it’s filled each day with twenty-eight 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. No small task.

I’ve been in Montessori classrooms before, yet I was still surprised when the day was never officially called to order. Instead the children took off their shoes, found some work (or not), and began their day in twenty-eight different ways while their two teachers, Ms. Luz and Ms. Allison, surfed in between them to check in and gauge where each child was at on that particular morning – hungry, happy, angry, sleepy.

This flow of atoms continued for the next four hours. When it was snack time, rotations of five children ate in self-organizing shifts – the order determined entirely by the classroom’s five Mardi Gras-style necklaces. (If you weren’t wearing one, it wasn’t snack time.)

Sometimes, the teachers joined a student to inquire about his work or perhaps to add a wrinkle to what she was doing, as Ms. Luz did when my son took out a container of plastic animals. She stood by as he spread the animals out on a colored mat, and then quietly asked him in Spanish (it’s a language immersion school) to identify the different figures. When he found the right one, he would get up and cross the room to repeat the Spanish name of the animal to Ms. Allison, who would either help correct his pronunciation slightly or simply say, “Exacto.” Then he would return to the mat of animals, and Ms. Luz would be ready for the pattern to repeat itself, while all around her a swirl of similar teaching moments provided plot points for the classroom’s chaotic graph of individualized ebb and flow.

When the children gathered in a circle for their first all-class activity, at 11:15am, I watched Leo’s teachers to see how they were doing. I remember reaching this point of the day as a teacher and feeling enervated, parched, and desperate for a break in the action. But because Ms. Allison and Ms. Luz had hadn’t spent the morning trying to corral all 28 students into a single activity (or into a state of singular attention), they mirrored the spirit of the children – fresh, engaged, centered.

Energy vs. entropy. Corraling vs. allowing.

There is great wisdom in a learning environment that allows the motivation and self-direction of the participants to drive the activity, and in which skilled adults work with the natural flow of energy and attention to help children develop a sense of themselves, their interests, and their place in a community. Imagine how much better both child and teacher would feel if this sort of environment was the norm and not the exception?

This is why we need schools that stir in each of us a “blessed unrest”

Posted on | by Sam

According to Martha Graham (and courtesy of my friend Renee Rollieri, whose inspiration from this quote led in part to the founding of the Blue School in New York City):

The greatest thing she ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.“

What is the proper role of government in public education reform?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What is the proper role of government in public education reform?

I read an interesting Op-Ed about education in today’s Washington Post, in which the author wrote the following: “The proper role of government is to ensure the provision of essential services, not always to provide those services itself.”

Leaving aside the author’s particular perspective on K-12 education reform, I’m curious: How many people out there agree or disagree with this general statement as it pertains to education reform? Is the “provision of essential services” a proper understanding of the proper purview of government — one in which a widening circle of choice could in theory not just be the privatization of public education, but moreso a reframing of how government can help support the highest number of high-quality public educational options? Or is the proper purview of government always to provide those services itself — especially when the services in question pertain to the education of our nation’s young people?

A Part of Us is Dying in Chicago

Posted on | by Sam

I can’t reconcile the deep sense of community that filmmakers Amy and Tom Valens have captured in their 10-part video series about a year in the life of a public school in Boston, with the painful public clashes we’re witnessing in Chicago – where 54 of the city’s schools will soon be shuttered.

Indeed, although the nation’s attention is fixed on the historic fight for marriage equality in the U.S. Supreme Court, a part of us is dying in the Windy City – and no one in the mainstream media seems to care.

No one disputes the fact that Chicago, like so many American cities, has real problems to solve. Population is down. Money is tight. School choice is growing. Tough decisions must be made.

By the same token, can anyone dispute that we have reason to worry about the state of our civic discourse when Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, allows the announcement of something as contentious as 54 school closings while he is on a ski trip in Utah? And can anyone blame local community leaders who wonder what to think of the Mayor’s plan to hold additional hearings on the issue? “If nobody is going to be heard at the hearings, what’s the use of having the hearings?” said Marshall Hatch, a local pastor. “If it’s a done deal, then stop wasting everybody’s time.”

A part of us is dying in Chicago because so many of us are so increasingly convinced that on the most important issues of the day, we are voiceless. We know changes need to be made – and we are increasingly abandoning, or giving little more than lip service to, our historic commitment to make those changes democratically, deliberately, and delicately. The issues in Chicago are complicated, from tax policies to population declines to legacies of race-based oppression, but the willingness of elected officials to confront those challenges in a spirit of co-construction with their constituents has become as laughable as, well, the Cubs winning the World Series.

Which takes me back to A Year at Mission Hill, and the ways in which this series is quietly and consistently demonstrating the generative power of a community in which everyone’s voice is valued and actively solicited. Mission Hill is a public school with charter-like autonomy. Its teachers are all unionized, and everything the district requires of its other schools, it requires of Mission Hill. Yet this is a school where, as teacher Jenerra Williams puts it, “We take the state test, we prepare for the state test, and we don’t get consumed by the state test.” This is a school where we see teachers repeatedly working together to diagnose, support, and engage kids. And this is a school where we see highly committed and skilled adults in an ongoing dialogue with each other about the only question that matters: “Of all the things we can do together, what must we do?”

Watching what’s happening in Chicago makes we worry about the extent to which we remain committed to the “we” in that question – We the people. What’s happening there is a national tragedy, and an example of what happens when powerful people recall the first half of the famous quote by Winston Churchill – “Democracy is the worst form of government” – and conveniently forget the second half – “except all the others that have been tried.”

As Mission Hill demonstrates, democracy is messy, it is inefficient, and it is slow. But as I watch its students practice calligraphy and study honeybees, as I listen to its teachers share strategies and struggle to improve – and as I ride my bike past the throngs of demonstrators for and against marriage equality outside the Supreme Court – I’m reminded that examples of our inextinguishable commitment to the spirit of individual liberty and equality are all around us.

Mayor Emanuel, are you watching?

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Making Sense of Steubenville

Posted on | by Sam

As educators, what are we to make of the ongoing tragedy in Steubenville, Ohio – a community in which one teenage girl was raped and publicly humiliated, two teenage boys are being shipped off to juvenile detention, and two other teenage girls are now under arrest after threatening to beat and kill the victim?

First, we must recognize the central role that parents play in helping their children develop a clear sense of right and wrong. As the victim’s mother said in a prepared statement to the court, “We hope that from this something good can arise. I feel I have an opportunity to bring an awareness to others, possibly change the mentality of a youth or help a parent to have more of an awareness to where their children are and what they are doing. The adults need to take responsibility and guide these children.”

Second, we must acknowledge that every community has the potential to allow this sort of behavior to occur. Like other communities, the members of Steubenville High School’s football team were afforded respect and privileges few teenagers can manage responsibly. More troubling, however – and more relevant for those of us who have dedicated our lives to supporting the learning and growth of young people – was the behavior of all the other students who gave implicit support to the boys’ actions by documenting and trading pictures of the assault – and doing nothing to protect the girl, whose drunkenness was so severe it prompted one of her assailants to say she resembled “a dead body.”

Finally, we must take stock of the work we are doing every day in our schools and classrooms – the only factor squarely in our control – and ask ourselves what it is we are explicitly working to instill in the young people we are there to serve. The fact that our state and national policies continue to overvalue academic knowledge (and a myopic definition of academic knowledge at that) at the expense of every other aspect of child and adolescent development is not an excuse for inaction. As educators, we have a responsibility to think long and hard about what kind of people we hope will graduate from our schools – and what sorts of skills and dispositions those people will need to embody – and then make sure the work we are doing each day (and the standards to which we hold ourselves accountable) are aligned with that vision.

The good news is this is already happening in scores of schools across the country – from New Hampshire to Iowa to Colorado. It’s even happening at the state level in Illinois, where every school has not just a set of academic standards – but a set of social and emotional standards as well. And it can start happening in any school, anywhere, as soon as that community decides that the holistic development and growth of children matters more than anything else.

“Human compassion is not taught by a teacher, a coach, or a parent,” the victim’s mother also said. “It is a God-given gift instilled in each of us.”

That’s not quite right. Our capacity for compassion is certainly present in each of us at birth. But it’s equally true that while all of us are born with the potential to behave compassionately, none of us is able to do so without the benefit of strong support, clear guidance, and a supportive network of adults that believe characteristics like empathy are not merely soft skills – they’re benchmarks of what we aspire, on our best days, to become.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)