"Skills and Attributes" or "Level Up!"

It was 1970 or 80 something and like many weekend afternoon's I would be sitting in the family room with my friend's Jim and Dave and we would be playing a version of Dungeons and Dragons. It probably wasn't D & D, more likely Robotech, Living Steel, or Car Wars, but we loved living in the role playing game world. We would create characters, take on different situations, act through challenges, and problem solve our way through the game. It was definitely what young nerds of the 80's did, but we loved it. 

Part of the fun was make characters. You role dice to identify the level of your hero's strength, dexterity, intelligence, and charisma. These were attributes. Things the character was born with. Resources to help guide them through their mythical dungeon wandering lives. Then you selected skills. Things your character could do. Capacities that they could increase their level of proficiency during the game. Skills increased frequently during the game. Attributes adjusted slowly. Simply  attributes where who the character was and skills were what they could do.

As you wandered the mazes and played through situation after situation, you grew in experience. Your earned skill points and occasionally you would get the rewards of "leveling up." Identifying new skills you had learned, new proficiencies achieved, and slow changes to your attributes. 

While I may not have realized while I was rolling dice at Jim's kitchen table, role playing games were more like life than I could ever imagine. In a role playing game, characters develop at different rates. They get skills at different times. Each character has different skills, accomplishes different achievements, and grows in different rates. They leveled up at different times. School and life aren't any different. When we create learning experiences for kids, they don't enter with the same attributes, they aren't ready for the same challenges, and they don't walk away with the same skills at the same proficiency level. Simply bundling students by their date of manufacture and reporting a letter grade on their skills doesn't help us understand their character sheet or program for their next opportunity to level up.

Schools need to become a little more like role playing games. Teachers and administrators more like the dungeon masters. Our records a little more like character sheets. We need to recognize the character profiles of our students and put in front of them the challenges that they can master in order to level up. We can't start our students beating the "big boss" when they are not ready for they would be crushed nor can we start them slashing through fields of gnomes that they are much  more capable then. We need to set appropriate challenges in front of each of them, because we don't simply level up because it's the end of the year, but rather when we have accomplished meaningful challenges before us.

All of those geeks of the 80's sitting in their basements rolling 20-sided-dice are grown up now. Many of them with families and children of their own. It's our turn to help the most important characters in their lives develop their personal skills and attributes and level up!

Darth Vader

Chuck Level's Up

A Plan or a Journey

I remember senior year of high school fairly well. Probably most of us do. It is a capstone year. Thirteen years in the making. For me, it was 24 years ago. Bush Senior was president. We had gone to Kuwait and Iraq for the first time. I had applied and been accepted to Kalamazoo College, bringing my lovely 3.0 gpa and looking forward to swimming, foreign study, and becoming a diplomat. Nearly a quarter-century ago, that was the plan. I was prepared for it, having taken Spanish, French, and German in high school. At the time my Hebrew was somewhat decent as I had learned it through camp, Hebrew School, and Sunday School. I had some basics civics classes and a pretty decent background in world politics. That was the plan. Like Laverne and Shirley, I was ready to take on the world.

I remember senior year of college fairly well also. This may be even easier for many of us. It was the capstone year in which we have trained, learned, and explored. Now it was time to take on the world. For me, it was 20 years ago. I was graduating from Kalamazoo College with a double-major in Chemistry and Political Science. Got my teaching certificate on the side as it was only 3 extra classes at the time. I had spent 3 months in Spain a couple of years earlier for foreign study but was planning to use that at all. I had a great job lined up to go teach Chemistry and coach swimming at Lee M. Thurston High School. And I did... for 4 years.

Since then, I've had a fair number of jobs. All that made sense at the time. All that created new opportunities. All that were fun. Few that "college and career readiness" prepared me for. I went from a High School to an elementary school. At the stop after that I was principal and Dual Language coordinator, which required me to dust off my Spanish that I hadn't used in over a decade. Stop after stop, the only thing consistent about them is that the titles made sense in vertical order. What I discovered is we can have the greatest plan in the world, the greatest skill set in the world, but each stop in the journey is unique. Each place, each role, each situation requires us to work with awesome, special, invigorating people. Each task requires unique solutions that quite frankly will work only for that situation. Each job requires us to create, communicate, innovate, accept others, and grow.

I'm pretty sure many of the classes I took in high school and college have very little application to what I do today. The most relevant classes maybe the Spanish classes as I do need to communicate in the language more than I ever imagined. Somewhere along the line, I learned to think. I learned to become a situational engineer and solve problems. I learned to accept that nothing was going to be the same from day to day or from job to job.

As we talk about college and career readiness. As we prepare students to enter the world. Maybe we need to have a different thought process. Maybe it's not the content and coursework but rather the thinking, problem-solving and communication skills. Could our work with students be more valuable if we were placing thinking challenges in front of them, encouraging them to collaborate, and having them share their solutions? Rather than covering a course, would solving real problems in the field result in a deeper level of skill development.

Many of us make a plan for our lives but life seems to happen while we are making plans. The journey is a winding road with many starts, many stops, successes, and failures. It's not the skills we have developed but rather our willingness to think, change, adapt, and restart that determines our ability to succeed. The journey is not over until we decide it is. Each day a step forward towards some unknown horizon. We can have a plan all we want, but it's the journey that matters. As we discovered in Bull Durham, "Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains."

Box of Chocolates

No Longer Widgets

In order to prepare children for the future, one needs to think about the future. No, I'm not thinking about warp drive and teleportation. Although, I hope my eldest son can solve the teleportation challenge, it would make walking home through the rain much easier on him. I'm thinking about the challenges and opportunities before him. For many of us, we were in elementary school and high school prior to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Life was simple. There was us and there was them. Red countries and blue countries. Schools raced to prepare children for math and science. We needed people to out think, out prepare, and be ready to counter the Red Empire. Army and Navy recruiters waited for the next round to churn through their doors. It was a easily polarized world. And then the wall fell. Germans raced together. Families separated for a generation found each other. A wall that separated the world for nearly 28 years crumbled.

In the 26 years since, the world has changed in remarkable ways. A world once physically divided has become remarkably interconnected. A child in Illinois can video chat a child in Jaipur, India with only a momentary delay. No longer do we prepare children to blindly serve their army or nation but rather to prepare our world to become a better place.

It's interesting that the foundations of education and those who would reform education from the outside still see the structures and products within the frame of the Industrial Revolution and the Cold War. They see the factory model: curriculum as a deliverable, math and science learning widgets mastering content, and children as outcome measures comparable by a standardized metric. They see teachers, principals, and superintendents as cogs in a machine. A system that is either too expensive that it has become burdensome for the society or too ineffective in producing the math and science widgets that it needs to be outsourced to another less expensive vendor.

It is interesting that those who lead and those who would reform aren't observing our world and thinking about our future as many of those within the system. Our greatest strength as a society is our ability to innovate. We are no longer able to move thousands of workers from Kansas to Texas in a moment's notice. We aren't going to have enormous growth of inexpensive factory workers working two shifts at the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. Our success is our ability to innovate. Whether it is the internet boom of the 90's, the growth of Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, or Google. Our leadership in the world is our ability to create, innovate, to solve problems in unique ways and think of new challenges that no one even considers. "Designed in California" means something more than simply an Apple product. It means that while products can be built anywhere the ideas and engineering begin here.

In order to prepare children for a future that makes our world a better place. A future in which they are asked to create, innovate, and design answers for problems we haven't considered. In order to be ready for this world, we need to stop treating them as deliverable widgets and cultivate opportunities in which they create innovative solutions. The curriculum can't be the deliverable of the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. It can't come out of a book in which we say all teachers must teach this and all students must learn this. Rather it needs to look like the experiences of an engineering class. A set of problems, challenges, and objectives that the students need to figure out. The teachers can no longer be widgets providing the same inputs to each child and expecting the same outputs. Rather they are sensei & Jedi masters: providing challenges for their pupils and expecting unique products that overcome the challenge. The teachers can no longer be factory workers putting together the same batch of 25 products a year to standardized specifications. Instead they must be doctors, diagnosing each child's strength and growth areas and providing regimens to help their patient improve their quality of life.

Our future is not fantasy land. It's not a world of teaching widgets producing learning widgets. The future doesn't need more of the same. It needs people who will consider ways to heal it, innovate within it, and make it a better place for all of that. In order to prepare our children for this world, we need to allow them to grow up in that world. So maybe this year, instead of every child writing the same five-page persuasive paper, maybe this year we hand them the challenge and say, "make a product that convinces me." The students aren't widgets and neither are we.

Making Widgets

What Could Be?

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins identifies that there are many good corporations out there. Companies that do a job well. They reach a moderate level of achievement or achieve at a high level for a brief period of time. In his analysis of a range of companies, Collins reaches a similar conclusion as Voltaire, "good is the enemy of great." Good companies frequently reach contentment in their products, their ideas, and their vision. They loose the drive to move forward, to discover uncharted products, ruthlessly self-analyze while maintaining deep faith in their ability to make the next leap.

I think of the new teacher. One who is preparing to interview now. Fresh with ideas, with vision, with promise. I think of what is inside them and how do we nurture it. How do we prepare them to be successful initially? How do we prepare them to reach the status of accomplishment so they feel successful each day? And in doing so, as we get them to good, how do we feed that internal desire to drive them to achieve greatness?

What is greatness in teaching and learning? Is it mastering the content? Is it having well developed lessons? Is it covering the material of the course? Or is it more? We all have memories of great teachers. For many of us, it's not that they really understood the Revolutionary War or the Pythagorean Theorem, but rather how they empowered us to have ownership, voice, input, and engage with whatever content we were learning with them. Greatness didn't come because the teacher had funny jokes or led with incredible demonstrations, but rather greatness came because we were partners in the experience. It wasn't what he or she did, but what we did.

I think of the teacher who is finishing his/her second year. They have figured out the topics, come to understand how to engage kids and how to facilitate a class. They are good and they are at a crossroads. Do I continue to hone my processes as they are or do I take a powerful risk and ask, "what could be?" Do I ask what learning would look like if I am no longer the center of daily life, but the students are? Now that I know the topics, do I ask what it would look like if I handed the children the topic and said go discover? What would it look like if the children were researching the information and sharing it in small groups, assessing each others' progress and working to ensure that their classmates understood it. What could it be if I shared the reigns of each lesson? I know what it is that the children need to learn. I understand the outcomes. What would it look like if I handed the children the chance to make the process theirs?

Good is the enemy of great. So often we ask these questions and in the end, it is so much easier to stay the course of good. Leave leadership and empowerment in the hands of the teacher. Allow a little token empowerment and ownership on an assignment here and there. Occasionally there is a teacher who takes the step. The one who makes the jump. And the class leaps forward. It's not his class or her class, but rather their class. The students and teacher as one, learning, growing, and discovering. What could be? What can be? What will it be? 

The Power of Children's Decisions

Finding Their Voice

As a parent, I often feel sorry for my parents. There are moments when I'm sure they had to be thinking to themselves, "oh my, do I have to see this." You know, those moments during which you wish you could cover your eyes and not see the world in front of you. I can imagine back in the late seventies or early eighties them walking through open house and looking from diorama to diorama seeing all the beautiful menageries and then wandering to mine built on 60 minutes of me arguing and 20 minutes of me pathetically gluing 4 lego guys and a horse so I could call it the western frontier. Or maybe it is seeing the walls of essays as they go. The amazing dialogues written by John, Janet, or Noel, and then my illegible paragraph. I feel for my parents because I provided a lot of those opportunities for them.

Life has a way of circling back to you. The calendar has turned to May and it's open house time. I too have the opportunity to walk through the buildings and see how much have we grown up as a society. I too have the opportunity to see elementary classrooms and the products of children. I get to see from the inside how much pressure teachers put on themselves to show a million products of students' work and the worrisome faces of those few parents who have a child like me. The ones that look at the essays and realize it's their little girl who only writes three sentences or their little boy who didn't finish the all about me poster. And at times, I too have those children who realize their poster doesn't look as nice as the others.

There are times I've wondered why middle schools don't have open houses. Parents know less of what their children do their and there are more teachers involved. Then it dawned on me. The middle schools have figured it out. They don't celebrate children's sameness but rather children's diversity. There are different celebrations of children's strengths. Whether it be a music concert, poetry reading, art competition, or basketball game. Each child's strength is nurtured and allowed to breathe.

I wonder if we need to rethink our products in the elementary school. If we are all about learning, why is it that so many products need to be the same as every other child. If the learning target is to use descriptive vocabulary, maybe John, Janet, and Noel may choose to write an essay. Maybe Tommy, Julia, and Katrina write and perform a song. Maybe Aaron and Susana create a movie. And maybe, just maybe, my child narrates a Minecraft lets play video, describing all of the colors, images, and actions. The learning target would be accomplished, each child my succeed in their own strengths, and quite frankly, more of us could celebrate our children's wins.

My oldest is a middle school child now. I see how he grows, what he wants to share, and how he spends his time. He works hard at his work, but his passion for the last few months has been Geometry Dash. Not simply playing the game. That fascination went quickly by. It's been creating levels, developing challenges, collaborating with others to make the game better, answering forum questions, and interweaving music into the challenge. He has taken pride in others creating YouTube videos of his levels. Yes he does his math and his Spanish homework. Yes he spends time reading and writing essays, but it is here in the world of his own innovation he finds passion.

All children need at times to write the essay. All children at times need to make a drawing. All children need to accomplish the learning targets. We don't all need to write the essay at the same time or draw the same drawing as we accomplish the same learning target. It's time to open ourselves to the innovative possibilities children can create to accomplish their learning because in doing so, we will help them find their voice.

One of the Many Level Showcases Others Have Made of his Level