In forty minutes the sounds will come. For some, the pulsing beats of a siren. For others, the blaring notes of the radio. A roll to the right. Left eye. Right eye. A roll to the left. Stagger seventeen steps and then it hits. The slow glance up to the mirror and the questions arise:
What will today bring?
Am I ready for this?
Can I do this job?
What have I gotten myself into?
What new thing are we going to have to do today?
Is this worth it?
What difference can I make?
Am I a fraud? Can I really do this?
Will there be a problem at my desk when I arrive?
One hundred minutes later, the journey begins. Each member of the quest begins down the same exact road but sees a different path before them. Each member bringing their own hopes, their own dreams, and their own fears. For this is who we are. For every external moment of confidence their is an inner moment of doubt. For every external moment of doubt their is an inner moment of faith.
Four hundred and fifty minutes later the day will pass. Us a little step further down the path as we realize that for all of our questions, our companions have the same within themselves. Our fellow adventurers also have faith. A belief not that we are already the expert that we imagine that we need to be but rather a fellow adventurer who is growing into the companion we want to have.
And thus the journey begins. Novices and experts, veterans and rookies, companions walking together on a road to becoming something greater than what we are and possibly who we hope to become.
When asking teachers and principals what are they looking for when they work with students, I frequently get the response, " I want them to be engaged in the learning." Sounds great! In the simplest terms it is true, we want them to be engaged with the learning, but do we have a common understanding of what does that mean and how we create situations in which engagement occurs.
For many, engagement is the act of demonstrating on task behaviors. Children's eyes looking at the teacher. Children dutifully completing assignments. Quiet calm as children do the work of schools.
However, these behaviors of completing assignments and paying attention to the teacher are acts more of compliance than engagement. Students fulfilling the obligations of school rather than meaningfully participating in the learning process.
Engagement seems like it should be more. Engagement means an active involvement in thinking about the task, taking personal ownership, and creating something over their own. Students intake a new challenge or concept, play with the idea, converse with other, and the learning evolves into a dialogue or product. Engagement involves energy, investment, passion, and creating something of personal connection.
In order to accomplish this, one needs to question our assumptions of what a class needs to look like. It may look like children actively sitting in the desks reacting to instruction and completing assignments. It also may be students on the floor building recreations of ancient castles, filming stop motion pictures of life within the castle. Engagement may be argument over whether the "patriots" or "loyalists" had the moral high ground during the revolutionary war. Engagement requires students to take a stand and actively cultivate a personal position. It is then, when learning is personal it is meaningful. Learning experiences that require solely compliance last only as long as they need to be completed. However when learning experiences create engagement, the skills, competencies, and knowledge are sustained for a much longer period of time.
The Swiss Army knife was the first guy gadget that I remember. My dad had one. In fact, I think most dads had one. I remember in the late 70's, my dad pulling it out and cutting a rope with it or pulling out a sliver from my had with its tweezers. It had so many useful tools. We tightened screws and opened bottles with it. There seemed always a need to have the knife around. I remember going in stores and looking through the glass cases in awe of the different Swiss Army knives. Over time, my dad purchased a different Swiss Army knife. This one was larger and had even more contraptions inside. It was the early Swiss Army knife version 1.8 or 2.2. I remember getting one for my Bar Mitzvah, but as a 13 year-old kid in the 80's you were never allowed carry a knife so it never became a habit for me and I had the ultimate useful gadget of my generation, the digital watch. It could do splits for me as I swam underwater. Some of my friends even had ones with calculators.
Growing up in the 80's, I never understood why school's loved textbooks. They were big, heavy, and often had too much in it. Becoming a teacher in the 90's, it dawned on me. The textbook was the Swiss Army knife for teachers. If you wanted to teach poetry, "BOOM!" there it was. Need a short story on the Civil War, "SHAZAM!" you had it. What's more, in the 90's textbook companies started getting smarter. Like the ever expanding Swiss Army knife, they added kits of manipulatives, leveled readers, and audio tapes for listening centers. Then the Internet happened and they added web links and evolved into carrying audio CD's. As a teacher, a textbook system was your gadget of gadgets, it had a resource when you had a need. It was a powerful tool that over time has perhaps even become just too much stuff.
So now 1:1 devices are our powerful tools. Whether you use Chromebooks or Netbooks you can welcome your students and teachers to a wonderful world of productivity. They can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. They can share their work and collaborate on projects together. One can search the Internet for resources and record their data on a spreadsheet. They can even annotate and take notes on the screen. For the same price one can also choose a tablet such as iPad Mini or a Nexus 7 v2 that can accomplish all the tasks of the laptop-like devices and add the value of mobility. One can have reminders that beep in the hallway, use the camera's to record a lab test and screencast a reflective dialogue on it later, have a personal reader for annotation, and keep a practical calendar.
These are all wonderful gadgets, but like me carrying around a Swiss Army Knife now they are a whole lot of tools without a defined purpose. If schools want to make these tools effective, they need to create a Learning Ecology to support the tool. Using self-created websites - whether shared internally via Google Docs or externally on the web, schools need to build a system for teachers and students to apply these tools in areas within and beyond the curriculum. We need to connect the curriculum objectives to possible learning targets, assessment rubrics, usable content resources and supplementary video supports. It is too much to ask students and teachers:"Hey, go learn about recycling. There is a lot of information on the Internet about recycling. Go find it, curate it. Select the important parts. Make a product. Share with us the product. Can we have that on Friday? Great!" Handing teachers and students digital devices is wonderful, but sending them out on walk-about for resources to make it useful is a recipe for disaster. Many districts are holding iPad seminars or Chromebook institutes to help teach teachers with ways to support classroom management and workflow with digital devices. These are wonderful and necessary. However, they are just the start. If we want to seriously integrate these into learning, Curriculum Departments need to openly connect and make available to the teachers, students, and parents clear resources that connect links between curriculum objectives, content, assessment, and digital tools. We must do more than say go look on Khan Academy. Rather we should directly link the items in Khan Academy to the learning we want to occur.
Students and teachers will always search for more ideas than we provide. Twitter and Pinterest seem to be endless sources of ideas, materials, and support for most of our instructional team. These tools are great supplements. As a district it is our obligation to provide core digital resources to make the system go. The starting blocks for our teachers to expand out from. Give them a plant and they will create a magnificent garden.
The fire on the grill was burning low. The coals almost spent. The kids were roasting marshmallows. The process was arduously slow. Logan didn't have the patience for it to turn golden brown and popped it in his mouth after the marshmallow had warmed. She, on the other hand, counted slowly. The entering kindergartner stated digit after digit up to 30 before she flipped the marshmallow to the other side and methodically completed the process again. As she spoke, the native English speaker calmly stated the 30 digits in Hebrew.
For many years, the standard for completing kindergarten would be for a child to name, write, and identify objects up to 30. In the new Common Core State Standards, the students need to complete the process to 100. I'd feel pretty safe thinking the young marshmallow roaster could complete this task right now. I'll admit my evidence is anecdotal. Observations of a child's work in practice only completed to 30. But with some quick assessment it could easily be assessed whether she had completed this standard.
In my second month on the job as Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction, I shared this informational video on the Common Core State Standards from the Common Core Website. In three short minutes it spoke of even steps grade by grade. It spoke of children throughout the country learning the same thing. Right now my family has children attending school in Washington, California, Georgia, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. The film is captivating, graphically appealing, and simple in its message. It feels positive. A message that hits home.
The film's message looks to eliminate differences in learning opportunities across the land. This message focuses on the delivery of instruction. It complements the message being distributed from the Department of Education regarding Achievement Gaps. The Department has a significant interest in reducing the gap in performance between different subgroups of our population. In this analysis, the Department would like schools and educators to eliminate the performance disparities between white, black, and hispanic performing children in their schools and districts, the disparities between socioeconomic groups, and between regular education, special education, and non-native English speakers. All of this measured by standardized tests.
The marshmallow roaster counted to 30 in Hebrew. What will her journey be in school? If the school follows the Common Core, will she sit on the sidelines for a year, or two, or three as they work on those students with needs until the content and skills are that which she actually needs to learn. Do they promote her upon entrance? Thus, removing the benefit of 13 years of public education already because her parents helped her learn as she grew. I ponder this possibility and think of my oldest child. The young lad who entered Kindergarten doing reading and mathematics at the entering 3rd grade level. Sure he could have done most of the academics with the 8 year olds but emotionally and with his writing he needed to be with the 5 year olds. How much of his school experience should be one of sitting and waiting for everyone to catch up in order to lower the achievement gap, and how much should be him moving forward?
The authors of Common Core will note that they Raised the Bar. Our marshmallow roaster needs to count and identify numbers up to 100 where previous learners needed only to count to 30. She will naturally in the Common Core system have most of pre-Algebra in 7th grade and most of Algebra in 8th grade. She, like all American students from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, will have a more "rigorous" learning experience. They will be expected to learn more content and experience harder assessment questions.
I look at the children around me and for some, Raising the Bar is not enough. It would be years before the education system catches up to those children. For others, Raising the Bar is too much. If they are expected to make equal gains and catch up the process will be overwhelming. And thus the failure of Common Core, the very foundation of common steps to eliminate Achievement Gaps and to Raise the Bar for everyone falters at the point of impact with the child learning.
Each day that our children go to school I hope they learn. I hope their teacher identifies their instructional level and helps them move forward. Whether it is my child attending school in the Chicago suburbs or his cousins in Seattle, Washington, neither of them should be held up waiting for the other. Instead of worrying about narrowing the Achievement Gap or Raising the Bar, we should be working to meet our clients where they are at and helping them move forward. We should look at education not as horizontal steps up a staircase but rather vertical rungs on a ladder, pre-kindergarten through post-doctorate. Encouraging each child to grab up onto the next rung. Don't worry if your brother, your cousin, or your friend is on a different rung, but rather to take that adventurous reach and grab the next rung. Learn the next step higher. Use each day to learn more.
If we want the educational foundation of our society to improve, we need to focus on the growth of every student. Under the No Child Left Behind legislation, schools focused on moving at-risk students to becoming barely meeting expectations students. Over that decade we left a whole lot of meeting and exceeding expectation students behind. Yes, they were performing well. But could they have grown more? Could we have even higher performing students entering college had they not been systematically ignored by the legislation of No Child Left Behind and the regulations of the Department of Education? We need to focus on the growth of all students. If we honestly care about each child moving forward, progressing, challenging themselves. If we think in terms of vertical learning and provide that next step of challenge. They will grow faster and farther. It won't be about Raising the Bar, because some of our students will not reach the bar that year. It will not be about narrowing the Achievement Gap, because all groups are being pushed forward with energy, time, and focus. It will instead be about challenge, adventurous reaches, and climbing a vertical ladder to personal and societal success.
Growth matters. Personal development matters. I have sent two very different children to school, one a below grade level reader, one a ridiculous 4 grades above grade level reader. Born two calendar days apart in different years, they were at the same developmental age when they entered public school as 5-year olds. If their teachers got them to grow at the same rate, 1 year and 2 months per school year, when they entered middle school in 6th grade, the low reader would have caught up to "grade level" by the end of 4th grade and enter 3 months ahead of grade level going into middle school whereas the above grade level student would enter middle school 5 years and 3 months ahead of grade level. Both children equally pushed, equally challenged. Over time even the lowest surpasses the Raised Bar. The Achievement Gap remains but through the power and focus on vertical learning, school can be a challenging place where all children learn more.
I'll be honest, I am not invested in closing the Achievement Gap. I am not invested in Raising the Bar. I am invested in the families and children I work with. This past week, I have had the honor and privilege to work with 40 students as they learn programming code. The children are between 8 and 13. Each has different skills. Each has a different knowledge base. Some have significant background in mathematics and grammar. They know what a semicolon is. They understand what variables are and what functions do. However, age doesn't seem to be a barrier in the class. Background knowledge is only a minor barrier. We give children a learning framework but encourage them to advance at their own levels. We give space of choice and exploration. They help each other solve problems, analyzing each others code, discovering their mistakes. They push forward, create unique programs, dazzle us with how quickly they can progress. It is truly a vertical learning environment, one in which children are taking adventurous reaches to move themselves and their friends forward.
The fire burns down and the children head towards bed. We remember that they are still young, none older than seven. We marvel at the unique way each of them approaches their life and their world. We hope that when we share them with their teachers, their principals, and their schools that those leaders will embrace them the way we do and encourage each of them to make that next adventurous reach up the vertical ladder each day.
I was no different than anyone else. Freshly graduated from one of the best colleges in the state, co-winner of the senior award for education. I had the energy and gusto of both Laverne and Shirley in their television opener. I entered the world feeling I could do anything, I knew so much, and nothing could stop me. Thank goodness, the feeling passed. It took time, but slowly I began to realize not how much I knew but rather how much I didn't know. And when this new feeling resonated I had a choice. I could double down on my ego and demonstrate that I knew more or check my ego at the door and began to learn from others. As a teacher, an educational leader, a parent, and a person, I have seen people take both choices. Those who double down on their egos become powerful. They are vocal leaders in schools, communities, and friendship groups. Their voices are heard frequently and loudly in staff meetings declaring how the world should be. They often have large opinions and react to change slowly and defiantly. Since these individuals have figured it all out they are quick to share their wealth of knowledge with the world.
The journey of realizing how much one doesn't know is risky. Three or four times a year I have the opportunity to facilitate a Boot Camp for New Dads. In these sessions 8-15 gentleman come together preparing for that "new bundle of joy" to enter their world. Some have been uncles, raised kids before, or even the babysitter for their younger siblings. Most walk in having only held a baby once or twice in their lives. They come looking to find ideas, support, advice, and companions on the quest to raise a healthy child and to be a loving husband. Each gentleman leaves a little more informed, a little more confident, and a powerful connection with gentleman everywhere trying to make a difference. It is in this they realize they have taken a powerful step in their personal journey of fatherhood.
I received an email from a teacher just the other day. The teacher explained that the individual was applying for two different positions. The email was reassuring in the fact that the individual loved their job, but also began to see opportunities to try new things, grow and begin a journey a new. Powerful. Scary. A willing risk to begin a new step in a journey of both self-discovery and opportunities to help other learn and grow. Some will question this teacher's integrity. Double down on what they think a loyal teacher should be. Others will understand that for this individual to grow they must be a pioneer and explore new horizons.
Each day I watch my mother-in-law change and grow. She has raised to bright young women. She helped thousands of inner-city children learn and grow. She worked each day to make a difference. Nearly sixty days ago she lost her best friend, her mother. It was both a moment that one knew would come someday yet we all were in disbelief when it came. In sixty days, my mother-in-law has been both resolute in the idea that she can handle this challenge and move forward and taken a back in how to handle it. Each day she takes a step into the unknown trying new things to help improve her life, her families life, and handle her grief with sincerity. Like the self-discovering teacher she discovers what Rabbi Hillel the Elder identified long ago:
The idea that we need to advocate for ourselves yet advocate for others. If we don't change now, when will we change. The adventures of the new dad, the teacher, and my mother-in-law are all the same. Each is beginning a scary journey into the unknown that will change their paradigm forever. They go as willing participants, not with the ego and energy of the new graduate but with the humility and nervousness of adults with conscious hopes and dreams of a better life. They are strangers entering a strange land beginning with a single step into the unknown. We can make dreams come true, but only by taking the chance and going on the risky adventures together.
