Summer is briskly passing by. July is coming to an end. Soon administrators and teachers will be returning from their various adventures to begin the new school year. As we prepare for the August rituals of administrative leadership training, new teachers' week, and institute days, we look at the time available and ponder what learning opportunities can fit within.
One would think in year four, their would be a formula for this. Here is what we do for this group and this is what we do for that group. Call this person to work with this team and that person to work with that team. However, each year our leaders are different. They may be the same individuals, but as we continue the journey, they change, they grow, their needs and their desires change. As such, providing the same learning opportunities in year one as year four would be insufficient. Our new teachers are different each year. Yes, they teach different subjects, but also hopefully we are hiring them with different skills and attributes to help our district move forward. Finally, our teaching staff changes. Each year our baseline understanding of the roles, obligations, and goals of the organization is hopefully more advanced than the year prior. Simply pulling out the same formulaic opening learning experience would be insufficient to meet the needs of our team.
If it's true that the adults in our organization change and advance both individually and collectively within the organization, is it possible that the students do also? Could it be that the 8th grade class of 2016 has significantly different needs than the 8th grade class of 2012 had or the 8th grade class of 2020 will have? Our 8th grade class of 2016 will be the first to have spent the last 3 years with a 1:1 device. Their resource utilization and problem solving capacity is very different than prior generations. How we support them, challenge them, and engage them is hopefully more personalized and more challenging than that of prior years. Hopefully as the learn with us, they also will help us grow.
Once we understand that students and adults are different each year, it requires us to question the very essence of our curriculum. Is our curriculum, whether it is staff professional development or student learning experiences, something we deliver to the learner or challenges that we engage the learner with to help them move forward? Curriculum that is delivered, a geometry course, local history topic, CRISS training, implies that all individuals will benefit from learning the same set of skills and concepts. Curriculum that is challenges such as investigate this phenomena, design a solution to this problem, research this concept, develop a lesson to meet the needs of these students, implies that our teams need tools but are independent and collaborative problem solvers. Curriculum that is delivered can be consistently applied and measured. Curriculum that is challenges promotes growth and cultivates capacity. In a delivered curriculum, the learner may or may not leave with new skills and capacities. In a challenge curriculum the learner builds upon skills they have, learning new capacities based on the challenges before them.
Is it time we rethink what we mean by curriculum? As we approach this year, whether we are working with adults or children, should our baseline skills and competencies be at the front of mind? Or should we be looking to develop more, should we be looking to help each member of our organization reach to infinity and beyond?
I remember sitting with them for the first time. Three of them, wearing white tops and jeans. The silver haired one looked across at me and said, "you know, what we do is important around here. Many of our kids, they wouldn't have much of anything to eat if we didn't make it. Their parents are working hard, just trying to make it. What we do, setting up breakfast and lunch, it's important. It might be the best they get all day." They were the lunch ladies. All three of them. And you know what, they were right. For many of our kids, those were the only meals they'd see that day. I'd walk in during the morning and the ladies would know each child by name. They knew what the child liked and what the child didn't. "Tommy, I know you don't like the carrots, but I have to put them on the side. Federal meal requirements." They found fun and humor with the kids. At times the kids were obnoxious or arrogant. However, most of the time they smiled. Walking forward a little brighter than they entered.
These three ladies were on the front lines. They'd all had jobs that made higher wages before this. This was a second, third, or fourth career. This was the career they weren't going to leave because it was here, serving Sloppy Joes and French Toast that they saw their legacy. Helping kids start their day on the right foot. Making them smile and helping them know someone saw them and cared.
I walked into a kindergarten room a couple of months ago and the teacher came over. She approached me about a student who had eight letters down. It was May and he had eight down. She was vigilant as she focused on what were we going to do to support the child. I looked over and asked her how many when he had entered the class. "Zero. But it's only eight now." This clearly is a child we need to support and are going to support. Lost in the battle for the future was the journey so far. The child had started at nothing and had begun the journey. How rare is it that a child truly starts at nothing? Or more worriesome how frequent is it a child truly starts with nothing? We need to celebrate the gains while being optimistic about the journey ahead. She had chipped away and begun to make the connection between abstract script and sounds. Sometimes the big hits we make are the little ones. Our work is not done, but it had begun well. It was our job to ensure the baton passed safely and the next teacher continued to accelerate the learning curve for this child.
I sat with a friend the other day. He, like many of my friends, lives in the corporate world. Dependent on bottom lines, gross margins, and corporate bonuses. He looked at his beverage and across the table and said, "you know all I really want to do is make a difference. I want to know my work has meaning and creates something valuable." I've seen him up late, running around, trying to make the next conference call. In the whole rigamarole of life, all he wants to do is create value.
Education is a changing place. During the past few years "value added" has meant a statistical measurement aggregating how children changed and performed on "valid and reliable" achievement tests. It is meant to give an indicator of how a child has grown during school and create accountability for the school and the staff to parents and the community. However, like pitcher win-loss records, the "value added" statistics are dependent on many more things than the pitcher or teacher can control. Jose Quintana is a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox this year. His record is 4 wins and 9 losses. Not very good. During his nine losses, the White Sox have scored the following runs: 1-0-1-1-1-0-0-1-1. While Quintana has not been perfect, his team has left him 3 times with no chance to win and 6 times required him to be perfect in order to win. Too often, our schools and classroom teachers are left in situations when they need to be perfect or close to perfect under the No Child Left Behind Act in order to meet achievement and growth targets.
It's time to rethink "value added." Test scores, like wins or RBIs, are some indicators but they are dependent indicators. Details that rely on a confluence of events and activities. As we look at learning and education, we need to dig deeper and cultivate metrics that provide insight towards the whole picture. Each day, there are people making a difference. What is measurable, is not always valuable and what is valuable is not always measurable. Lets add value.
It must be something about the Fourth of July. There's fireworks, music, festivals, and somehow some authors reach back to the mythical land of yore to complain about life nowadays. Perhaps the sound bangs and light show woke someone up. Perhaps it was a long simmering pot ready to boil over inside of them. However, when one reads their perspectives, one can't help but feel like someone is simply complaining about society. On July 6th, the New York Times started it with Jane Brody's personal health piece, Screen Addiction is Taking A Toll on Children. Sportscaster and former Sun-Times columnist Terry Boers followed it up with Finally, the Grateful Dead are Gone. Now, Boers makes a living making fun of people for silly decisions. I don't follow Brody enough to know her perspective, but both pieces come across as if the authors were members of the focus group described in The American President's final speech:
As Boers' pillages those who attend the Grateful Dead concert, he cherry picks examples of disconnected hallucinogenic fans to make vast generalizations. People like Allen, who wanted to "touch the hand of Jerry Garcia" and Jeff, who was trying to "cleanse his soul." Now I'll admit, I am not the music aficionado in the family. I am as likely to be listening to A-ha as Taylor Swift and not know the difference. I leave it to my bride and 8-year-old son to guide the music. However, I did look at the packed concert pictures from the weekend's Grateful Dead concerts. Attending I saw pictures doctors, lawyers, engineers, plumbers, and rabbis. Adults, sometimes with their kids, posing with their red solo cups having a good time. For some of the pictures, I felt like I could overlay a picture of the same individuals 20 years earlier attending the same concert. And the same curmudgeon's would be out saying these kids today are going to amount to nothing. They have no fiber and no values. Today those kids are building our world and leading our souls. Terry Boers may not like the stink of the Grateful Dead concert, but it's no more a problem than Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Rush, or Taylor Swift.
Jane Brody comes across the exact same way hitting on the morally objectionable devices that are plaguing America's youth. At least Boers' had direct quotes from the Chicago Tribune. Brody cites an unnamed study by "Chinese doctors" who are diagnosing children with this disorder and sending children off for treatment. She brings out the American Academy of Pediatrics position statement on technology, which truly is analyzing any form of digital media consumption. And then she cites studies about number of texts authored by kids per day and how kids lose sleep because they are texting all night. I almost cried as I could hear her shouting "those darn kids today are in serious trouble because of these devices." John Herrman in his piece "Why Grandma's Sad" on the Awl does a much better job than I could in an analyzing Brody's position. If you want to read a great counter to it, his piece is fantastic. The reality is, Brody is right in the fact that the mobile internet is changing the fabric of our world. However, it's not just kids and it's not just for the worst. There are issues and we will have to deal with them.
Screen addiction is the wrong word. Just because one drinks alcohol one is not necessarily an alcoholic. One can have an occasional drink and certainly not be the local drunkard. Moreover, many of us know people who can't live without their morning coffee or soft drink. I am pretty sure one of my fifth grade teachers always had a stash of Diet Coke somewhere when I was a principal. Screens are a medium through which we access a world of information and a world of others we wish to connect with. They connect us to our personally selected interests. Whether that is a local seven-year-old playing Minecraft alone or with friends, a pre-teen Instagraming duck-faced selfies to a group of friends, 40-somethings hash tagging pictures of themselves on Facebook as they are running around the Grateful Dead concert, or seventy year-olds posting inspirational quotes and political action articles on Facebook. Screens are a portal. They themselves are not the addiction, we, both children and adults crave the high interest and high engagement. We crave the communication, the connection, the stimulus. We crave the idea that we are unique but also part of something more. We crave to hear and to be heard. Screens aren't addicting, the substance behind them is powerful.
Brody complains about kids texting all night. Kids not talking to the people in the present. This is not new. I remember sitting with my grandmother. I remember her complaining about everything. And she did, just ask my Aunt and my parents. I couldn't wait to get out of there. I also remember my son hanging with a 90-something Grandma Bernice. She didn't complain about anything all she did was hang with him and talk to him about what he was doing. She laughed with him and sometimes at us. You know what, Cameron loved hanging with Grandma Bernice. At 96, Grandma Bernice was an active iPad user. Grandma Marjie, Grandad Don, Grandma Nancy, and Grandpa Barry are as likely to be on their devices as 12 year-old Cameron and 8 year-old Logan. If you are worried about the device time, be a parent. If you need some suggestions, here are 4 easy steps. Just remember, those darn screens aren't the problem. It's a problem only if we choose to not be the parent and let it become a problem.
In schools, we talk about needing to prepare children for a changing world. We have conversations about the number of careers an individual will have in their lifetime. We discuss the ever changing workforce and preparing students for jobs that don't exist. We engineer imaginary objects and dialogue about what technologies the future will bring. And then their is social studies. We discuss our past and our present but rarely our future.
I remember Social Studies pretty well, which seems odd because going through elementary school, junior high, and high school I remember that we'd constantly talk about how boring it was. Social Studies in the early years was all about our community. The neighborhood, policeman, fireman, the mayor, the library. We learned to read a map before Google and Apple put us on the map. Then we studied cities, regions, US History (never getting to Vietnam) and World History. We learned the Constitution and why it was written. In the end, it was about a bunch of mostly dead people that set up rules so we could live in one place. Social Studies was the past and the present. It wasn't our future. Maybe that's why my generation, Generation X, had so many movie about feeling disconnected from society (Breakfast Club, Reality Bites, etc.) Our learning about society was about a world we had no control of yet in everything else we were learning skills to observe and build in our world. It was a great disconnect.
Apparently, whether we learned it in school or not, we found our voice. As I read my Facebook feed this weekend, the normally white background with blue trimming has turned the rainbow colors of a cereal bowl with a half-eaten collection of Lucky Charms. There are two themes that go through my timeline, individuals on "both sides of the aisle" sharing #lovewins and my staunchest Republican friends complaining about leaders who advocate about getting rid of the courts. I have lived and worked in "liberal" and "conservative" communities. The thing is, both titles are fueled by ideas of the past not visions of possible futures. Versions of Reagan and Bush's healthcare plan has become the "Obamacare" or "Affordable Care Act" of the present. The Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act was named after Reagan's White House press secretary, James Brady. Ideas that political parties want to capitalize on as being "liberal" or "conservative" are truly encapsulations of our past not visions of our future.
While we didn't learn social action as part of Social Studies, it was being taught somewhere because it is evident in my timeline. Perhaps we learned it from Sesame Street and Raffi. Social Studies is more than our past and our present. It needs to also be about our future. We need to understand the frameworks of our society and discuss what it could mean. Encourage children to question structures that deny individuals liberties and rights. We need to prepare them and ourselves for an active future which may not be the same as our present. If we are preparing students for an ever-changing society, one in which job markets and careers constantly evolve, perhaps we also need to prepare them for a society in which prejudices and generalizations of generations past are not those of our future. Perhaps we can encourage them to envision a world not trapped in the judgements of their parents and grandparents generations. Raising children for the future means preparing them to be more than workers. It is our job to help them become leaders and difference makers. In the words of Google, "Don't be Evil" and of Apple "To Leave the World a Better Place Than We Found It."
This week my youngest child discovered Phineas and Ferb, which means every afternoon for the past few days I have had to hear that there are "104 days of summer vacation." They must have a really great summer vacation that begins on May 26th and ends on September 7th. That's a long time. While summer breaks aren't that long, my children will be off from June 13th to August 25th or 74 days without a class. It's still a long time. A time in which they can still learn, change, and grow or the can drift, lose, and fall back.
Summer is filled with choices. For some families, the choice is to take a break from everything. They say they want their children to be children, run, play, socialize. For some it's classes, they want their child to learn new things they are interested in such as photography, coding, tennis, and cooking. For us, it's camps with swimming, community, skills, classes, and some religious living. The trick is while summer vacation can and should be all of these things and more.
Summer shouldn't be the intensity of 35 hour student work weeks with 90 - 120 minutes of nightly practice. However, it can't be learning free either. Reading and mathematics are skills that if you don't practice them they do go away. Just like my high school French classes. If I don't speak and read a little French now and then, I don't have the vocabulary or sentence structure to use them. The same applies in math. We need to practice some math skills each week or we will forget our trigonometric ratios and how to combine fractions. Skills learned during the year need a little love, care, and maintenance during the summer in order to be ready for next school year.
Summer can be a great time for reading. It's our chance to work with our children to find their "home run book." Selecting novels, comic books, or magazines that may interest them or make them laugh. You know, the ones we find them reading with a flashlight under the blanket. For my eldest, it means MAD magazines, Justice League comic books with "The Flash", and some Terry Prachett novels. For my youngest, well that's our job this summer. We haven't found his home run book yet. The one he wants to read all night and can't put down. Maybe will start with a Phineas and Ferb novelization. After all, they are always building things and he likes to build. There may not be 104 days in our summer vacation, but we can make the most of the days we have.
I couldn't have been more than five or six at the time. It was raining outside and we were at my mom's office in Lisle one evening. Mom was seeing patients, dad was serving as the night receptionist, and I can't even remember what Roy and I were doing. I'm sure that we must have been trying to help out in some way and reflecting on it, I'm sure it was probably more work for others than actual help. It was the family business, the seventies version of a "start-up." Dad was the greeter. Mom, the primary "bread-winner," was a physician in a time when there really weren't women physicians. And two little boys were welcoming anyone who would say hi.
Twenty years later, I remember walking into a diner two miles from my first assistant principal's job. It was between school and a night activity. In a booth sat two boys from school, a second grader and a fourth grader, doing their homework. The older one looked up, scurried to the counter and grabbed a menu. He invited me to take a seat at a nearby table and coyly said check out the menu, I designed it. As I sat, his mom appeared from out back, thanked the young man and invited him back to complete his homework. I learned later, every night the boys "helped out" at their diner. It was their "start-up." A tough business, fifteen years later I wonder if it's still their's and still there.
Powerful lessons are learned when we share our work. As we have children take part in our work and we take part in their's, bonds are formed. Understanding and context developed. Real life application helps our children understand why the skills they are learning are necessary and important. They also learn not to go it alone, but to work together with us to help achieve. My wife shares stories of helping her mom out at school. Going as a teenager to organize supplies, help students find things, and listen to them read. For us, our children help us with our work in innumerable ways. They have made sample videos such as our first 1:1 video to the Board of Education about what a child could do with an iPad came from my eldest, 9 years-old at the time as he screen shot how he used it to write and organize his work. When we had 2000 iPads to organize for school in a month, there were my children and their friends. They unboxed iPads and created set up shortcuts that we had never imagined.
When worlds collide, positive connections can be made. The realization within the family that both our work and their's are important. As such, there are many nights when I wander home from a meeting to be greeted by a young man who needs (wants) help completing an assignment. One who wants a section re-read to him or an essay reviewed. It's their work and my time to help them out at the shop. Through these opportunities we discover that our worlds are not separate, but intertwined experiences, home-school-work coming together to make a powerful tapestry of life. One in which we can choose to share and through sharing we become more connected.
I remember taking a graduate school class at Eastern Michigan University with olympic medalist Eric Namesnik. Nice guy. Added a few thoughts here and there in my Educational Leadership class. He didn't walk around and introduce himself as "Olympic Medalist" or "Olympian." I think the only reason we new his last name was that first day going around the circle he said, "Hi my name's Eric Namesnik and I work over at the University of Michigan." For most people he was just this guy in the class, a relatively quiet gentleman at that. For me, I knew who he was as he finished uttering the syllable "snik." That was two-time 400 Individual Medley silver medalist, Erik Namesnik. He was barely a breath behind Tom Dolan in '96. He was an impressive swimmer. Didn't make him a great educational leader, didn't make him a wonderful pianist, didn't make him an astro-physicist. I simply recognized him internally for the honor that was his, one amazing swimmer.
O'Neill Middle School held it's graduation ceremony for the first time since anyone can remember in the Downers Grove High School gymnasium. As a graduate of O'Neill and South, it was an interesting experience. I walked into the gymnasium for the first time Kitty Dukakis had done a speech on the campaign trail recommending that we students avoid the perils of drugs. A while later she was hospitalized for drinking rubbing alcohol. The gymnasium was a place I generally avoided as a student. I was a swimmer, so I did PE down by the pool after freshman year, either as a lifeguard/swim teacher or through swim competition. With 3000+ students, the gym was this loud place to be avoided during pep rallies. So naturally, I wandered to a place I was more comfortable, going down towards the pool.
Outside the Downers Grove South High School pool is a blue board with white letters. It's a top performances board. Listed there are the best performances of South students in Swimming and Diving. I wandered to see the board. At the top of the 100 and 500 still sat Steve Fetyko, I remember the 44 he swam at State in February of 1991. I remember him coming home and quietly sharing the 4:44 he had gotten at State in February of 1989. At the top they still remained. Doc Antonoff's 507.38 in diving in 1973 had just recently fallen to second place on the board. The board was filled with other names I remembered: Aaron Johnson's 1:02 and Keith Johnson's 1:05 in the 100 Breast, Nick's 52 in the Fly, other names I swam with: Mike Orseno, Eric Mateja, Dan Brady, Mark Hacker, and others. The board was a roll of honors, those that had achieved something remarkable. And 24 years after I had left, the honors were still rememberable to me. They were specific times, specific incidents, specific moments where something special had happened. To an outside person, one could look at the times and say honestly how special or not special it was. They were comparable points of data and in my mind moments of personal energy that culminated from months of hard work.
I walked back in the gym and looked up against the wall. There was a large blue cut out of the State of Illinois. Listed on it maybe 15 names. State Champions that had gone to Downers Grove South. Listed their were some of my classmates. I remember Mindy bouncing for hours on the the diving board warming up. I remember my neighbor Tina running each day as soon as the weather broke. I remember meeting Stephanie in the halls one day between classes. State Champions in diving, track, and gymnastics respectively. Names honored on the wall for specific achievements.
See, as we move to vertical learning, where students are challenged to push the boundaries of what they can learn and do hard things. The old system of honor roll may no longer make sense, if it ever did. See when high achieving students get material at their level, they may no longer get perfect scores. They could be learning trigonometry as an 8th grader and Calculus 3 as a Sophomore or Junior. If we give them the opportunity to learn at their instructional level, it may take them time to learn and achieve. So what do we do about Honor Roll? Do we honor the aggregate achievement of performance as we do now, regardless of the class taken? Do we make some mythical scale for adjusting the worth of Enriched Classes, Honors Classes, AP classes to calculate "GPA?" Does being an Honor Roll student at Downers Grove South, Deerfield High School, Lee M. Thurston High School, and Richland Center High School mean the same thing? Does it mean any more or any less depending on my high school? Does it mean equalized performance or are these honor rolls inherently unequal? Does it actually mean anything? I'm not even sure that a first semester A in Mrs. Lindahl's Chemistry class that I took is the same as an A in a first semester Chemistry class that I taught.
We do need to honor students for their achievements. We need to bring meaning to the accomplishments and recognize outstanding insight and performance. In talking through this with one of our bright Middle School principals, the idea came out of a role of honors. Recognizing students for outstanding performance, not in aggregate as a GPA does but in specific. Just as we do now, publishing a list of students who achieve at high levels, not in terms of general grades, but in terms of itemized specific performances. A student's name and the performance/standard that is being recognized, for example:
Jamie Doe - Life Sciences- Cell Structures, Musical Composition
Jo Winner - Engineering - Simple Machines
Tommy Marvelous - Musical Performance - Vocal, Spanish Preterite Tense
...
A simple list. Easy to reconcile based on accomplished standards and teacher identification. Student's performances identifiable by specific achievements on rubrics developed by student's and staff. Meaningful in terms of why a student is being recognized. A roll of honors that recognizes that we don't need to be great in everything to be outstanding in any one important thing.
I look at the board at South and there are achievements that have never gone away. Special moments outside the classroom. We can generate this within the classroom by simply creating the same power, honoring not a summation of the work, but rather specificity within the work. There could be boards outside the Math Department, Science Department, Music Department that honor similar specific achievements. What could generate more powerful learning, the honor roll or a roll of honors?
