Reflections on Growth Mindset

The memories are decades old but it feels like yesterday. The tight elastic strap pulling against the base of my skull. The plastic cups of the goggles pinching against my forehead. My hands rotating back and forth as loosened up behind the blocks. There was always the humid drench that came with the pool, that feeling when you are wearing only a swimsuit, it's dark outside, and yet you are still a little sweaty. All of this simply before the race. Each race I entered, I knew I wasn't going to be the best that day. Growing up those honors belonged to Fetyko, Fetzer, Khoo, Hacker, Moss, or the Johnson brothers. I would be seeing them go flying by at some point. As I went away, the names changed to Walker, Blowers, Miller, Robbins, Kemeny and others, but the result didn't. It wasn't about that anyways. It really was never about that. Hundreds of times, I stood there behind the blocks, rotating my hands back and forth focusing intensely on how was I going to be better today. A buzz or gunshot later and I would be off, the water sliding around me as I hit the pool. A minute something later I would be done with the race and hyper-analyzing what went well and what went poorly as my chest pounded and my breathing fluttered. A ritual that occurred decades ago, week after week, for years in reality and for decades in my memories.

When I took my new job this year, a wise person told me don't make changes. Wait and see what is going on. Resist the urge to change it. I went into the role and kept that mantra going through my head, whether it was on the transition days before I started the job or during those first early months. Resist the urge to change things. No one wants their cheese moved by the hyperactive kid running up and down the hallway. Well, the no changes thing didn't last until lunch the first day. Due to a mixup with a training, I had ordered the staff pizza and we were eating it in the commons. The staff was dancing and I wasn't sure why. It took a couple of explanations because I was slow on the uptake, but apparently eating in the commons was taboo. I wasn't three hours into the job and changes were already occurring. A couple of months more and a couple hundred more inadvertent changes and we were rolling.

This year we have changed a lot. We started the year with very little social media presence, now as I go across twitter and instagram many of our staff members are sharing great experiences with their students. I walk up and down the halls and technology is a canvas through which differentiated learning is occurring. Each day I see amazing new things from our staff and our students. Change is everywhere. However, I think it's more than change. As a society we have tried this evolution of practice many ways. Systematic change through organizational theory. Individual change through who moved my cheese. Shift theory encouraging organizations to make adjustments. The most recent vintage is growth mindset. The difference between growth mindset and it's predecessors is that the locus of control is a combination of internal and external as opposed to solely external.

Our work on sharing our story through social media has come as challenge by choice. I introduced it as something I was going to do. We shared how it was done and more specifically how to see what I was producing. A few staff leaders jumped on and the stories became far more interesting. Each member not joining because they were obligated but rather because they chose. Over time others join and the fabric changed even more for the better. A year out it feels as if we have done this our whole careers. The stories are good and people have grown from sharing their stories and seeing the stories of others.

Our work on technology and instructional practice has come through committees. Some of which I attend and some of which I have not. Each committee has started us on a journey. Created opportunities and choices for staff to explore rather than recipes for staff members to follow. Opposed to the short time frames of SMART goals, we have created overly long time periods for people to explore. We talk of baby steps instead of giant leaps. Recognizing how you are improving on your growth journey rather than comparing yourself to your teammates or other teachers. All of us need to be on the journey, but not at the same point and not working at the same rate. Some will take baby steps and some will take giant leaps.

The results are amazing. I am learning to get comfortable with the idea that we have changed a lot. We simply have. However, these changes come as much from inside each of our team members as any district or building initiative. Growth mindset was here before I arrived, studied and explored by teachers within the school. It will be here for a long time. We may not be the best. However each of us are getting better every day and that is a cool thing to see, celebrate and be a part of. It's been a really long time since I last touched the pad at the end of the race, but that feeling of working with amazing teammates to improve each day, that is alive and well.

Snow Day

The excitement was building throughout the week. On Monday we had our first glimpse, an after work commute with a couple of inches. Just enough to slow traffic to a crawl. Groundhog Day had passed and the Midwest wanted to make the point, there's a reason that little furry creature predicted six more weeks of winter. Frayed commuters skated their ways home. By Wednesday, the energy was palpable. Newscasters showered us of warnings. Here it comes. Be prepared, 8 to 14 inches to be spread over a couple of days. Believe it or not, in an extreme moment of emergency awareness, we as a community were paying attention. By Thursday, seven year-old girls were asking their superintendent, "Do you think we'll have school tomorrow?" They were ready. We were all ready.

On Friday morning at 5:30am I looked outside. None of the streets were plowed. The front yard covered in a white Down blanket. Tiny flurries blowing from side to side. A mere 7 inches, enough to snow blow. Not nearly as bad as we thought. As a rookie superintendent, the thought crosses my mind, should we have called it? We could have made it in this. 6:30am rolls around, and still no car tracks in the subdivision. The occasional barking is heard as neighbor dogs prance in the snow. By about 8am the boys wander down the stairs. Exhilarated to go snow blow and play outside. By mid-afternoon, Facebook and Instagram fill with pictures and videos. Families making snow forts. Children creating snow angels. Sledding pictures and shoveling pictures. Families curling up with cocoa.

Perhaps a snow day is what we all needed. An unscheduled moment where we couldn't run errands or race to the next activity. A chance to just breathe together and enjoy each other's company. A chance to play and let go of our daily routine. This snow day, while not the blizzard predicted, was a moment for families to just relax and enjoy each other. A day well worth it in my world.

Into the Dungeon: A Formula for Success

Often it's hard to let go of the way we grew up. There is a comfort to the rhythm of the experience. School was school. Home was home. All of us like patterns and predictability. Sure we want an occasional pleasant surprise, however even in those surreal moments, we are more at home within the continuity of our comfortable predictable experience. As teachers, just like any other individual we like to set up our schedule, our units, and our experiences in a predictable comfortable way.

Often if we ask a teacher what they do, they describe themselves as a science teacher, third grade teacher, or my favorite sophomore English teacher. They talk about the age of the students or content area of focus. It's an intriguing concept. The commonality of the students or the content becomes the focus rather than the mentorship and guidance. Interestingly in reflection of the long-term age, how much of the take away the is the content. Does anyone that isn't teaching it remember the skills they developed in sophomore English? Does anyone that isn't teaching it remember the definition of electronegativity? The differences between ionic and covalent bonding?

The reality is that search engines are far faster and far better at both gathering knowledge and applying algorithmic formulas than humans will ever be. Things we valued growing up, informational knowledge, math facts, and the ability to calculate using formulas, are all easily replaced by the silicon contraptions in our pockets and before our eyes.

So where is the value? The Partnership for 21st Century Learning places it in the 4 C's, communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. All skills intrinsically human dependent. Items that require us to break the individualistic focus and mold of learning in our schools and exhort us to challenge the comfortable learning patterns of the way we were raised. Our schooling focused on gathering knowledge and applying formulas. Our work lives need this at a much rarer rate. Our personal lives need it even less. However, the 4 C's, that we could use in both personal and professional lives.

If we can't teach simply age-level content and formula application, what do we teach? The challenge is not the age-level content and formula application. Rather, the challenge is how we get there. In an information distribution model that schools often are, we model a process, share specific information, and gradually release. The learning is a result of pattern recognition and then independent repetition. Lost in this process are the 4 C's. Student communication in this model is predominantly listening, collaboration is limited both in time and product, and both creativity and critical thinking are predominantly absent. If we think back to the 70's and 80's, in the era of Dungeons and Dragons, children had to use all 4 C's. There was a gradual development of challenges in which characters had to problem solve often through ridiculous situations. Players had to communicate with each other, develop collaborative plans or face failure. School is not the dungeon and teachers are not the dungeon master. However, it's pretty close. We remember the Oregon Trail simulations. Why can't the majority of Social Studies be students problem solving through life situations as a hunter or gather in early civilizations or strategizing in the cabinet meetings with FDR to move our country out of the depression and through global warfare? In math, why is it we learn the algorithm first as opposed to being presented with a situational challenge and discovering which math concepts and strategies may work for the situation. The Next Generation Science Standards explicitly want students not to learn kinetics directly, but observe situations in which different rates of reaction are occurring and discover the relationships between the reactants and the reaction.

The reality is the formulas for instruction and learning we grew up with do not necessarily result in the development of desired skills for our current and future work force. In order to be successful, we will need to release the models which we learned from and find other models from our life experiences to move us forward. The formula for success may not be Madeline Hunter anymore or gradual release. We may discover it in the unlikely dungeons of nerds gone by.

The Goldberg's Contest

Don't Change, Iterate!

   We all have challenges. For my youngest Son, it's that he eats about five things for dinner and for my oldest son, it's that he has several hours of homework each night. It seems easy enough to say do your homework or eat this. It seems like it would be as simple as Yoda says, "Do or do not, there is no try." For those who have parented before, you recognize, that those things which seem easy rarely are. Change is difficult. Abrupt change is even more so.
   As leaders of a household, classroom, building, or school district we are always looking for ways to improve. Whether it's a way to save a few dollars, such as cutting the cord on cable or no longer paying for a certain work book, adding a new practice to our routine like walking a puppy or guided math, we always looking for our next step towards improvement. The challenge is even with a desire from leadership, change doesn't simply happen. Furthermore, even if I wish it were so, effective change can rarely be mandated.
   There is hope, if you think you have problems with change, that's just peanuts compared to Apple. Each year they sell around 200,000,000 iPhones. Each year, they update their operating system and have around 500,000,000 people using new software tools that they didn't ask for. And each year, the press come out and say that this update isn't that much. Approximately 90% of Apple users choose to update their software each year. Android isn't even close. Part of this is control of the cellular service and device. However, part of this is also helping people feel comfortable in the idea that the change process is helpful and worthwhile.
   Supporting growth and change is hard. Effective change only come from internal motivation. Individuals need to believe they have something to gain from changing and they need to believe that the change is both achievable and manageable. Rene Ritchie from iMore maintains a comprehensive change list of how iOS, the iPhone operating system, has evolved. In it, one can see that Apple has taken an iterative process. Each year adding only a couple of new features. Even though other phone makers may have a process quicker such as cut and paste or facial recognition, Apple baby steps the journey in order to bring their products, software, and users along with each iteration. For example, the first iPhone didn't have an app store. Cut and paste came in version 3. Drag and drop copying came in version 11. FaceTime over WiFi came in version 4. FaceTime over cellular came in version 6. FaceTime audio came in version 7. Small enhancements year over year lead to longterm changes for the user and the product. iOS 11 is dramatically different than iOS 7, iOS 3, and the original iPhone. However, the small annual jumps do not feel drastic to the reviewer or the user.
   This iterative approach to change highlights a way for successful development both at home and in the workplace. My youngest son isn't going to magically start eating every food. However, we have gotten him to try 3 new meals over the past 4 months, of which, he will consistently eat one. My eldest didn't go from zero to multiple hours of homework each night. It started by adding one subject than the next over the past couple of years so now, while tired, he does feel that he can get it done. The same thing in schools. We are exploring two change initiatives. One with technology and one with pedagogy. In doing so, we are not taking away teachers' old tools, but adding new ones in an exploratory phase. Slowly, over time we hope to have the new ones accentuate positive practices and eliminate less effective practices as our instructional leaders see the impact of their work. We may want to totally transform our workplace and home life. We may dream about the moonshot. However, in reality, the more we iterate, the more substantial growth we may accomplish over time.

Original iPhone Commercials

What's Our Product?

I remember in the 90's the common refrain, schools should be run more like a business. There are clear efficiencies that you need in a business in order to survive. No business could be managed like public education, there is too much waste, the work year is too short, and schools don't use data. As a result, the government and the private sector pushed business-like features onto schools. The amazing impact from public educators was go ahead, measure me, and try to do what we do. However, there was only one question that came forth, what exactly is our product?

Over the past two decades, public school students have been assessed in more ways than students in any other country in the world. Annually children in 3rd through 8th take tests for the State/Federal government in Reading and Math. They take assessments in Science for two of those grades. Additionally children take standardized assessments multiple times a year for their schools in Reading and Math, plus local common assessments, plus classroom assessments. Students, teachers, and administrators are asked to create SMART goals. So they can progress monitor their steps and develop actions to improve. are measured in every which way. We know more data points than we have ever known before.

Furthermore, States and localities at private business like runs at operating schools like a business. If you'd like the comedic analysis of charter schools, one could try John Oliver's take as he cherry picks the worst of the worst. Or one could look at reports from more traditional media like the New York Times and the Detroit Free Press. The reality is as schools operate pretty efficiently. The cost of schools is related almost exclusively to the cost and benefits of employee salaries. One can increase the length of the school year by increasing labor costs. Michigan tried this, forcing schools to add additional days, but found they couldn't fund it. One can drive down the employee cost by reducing benefits and salaries. Many States and localities have done this. The result is the number of highly qualified college graduates entering the field has reduced significantly. The field is simply seen as less desirable, resulting in states and local offices of education gathering data regarding employee shortages. 

However, the biggest challenge to trying to run a school as a business is defining what our product is. As a parent, I want my children to communicate well to peers, teachers, and employers. I want them to be able to read things for pleasure and to be able to solve problems. I want my children to understand the world. Furthermore, to steal a quote from one of my parents as she drops her children off to school each day, she says "choose kindness." I want my children to be kind to others. In reality, schools have very complex jobs. Teachers are working to mentor students with the DNA of communities. Developing creative communicators who can problem solve a wide variety of situations and invest children in challenges of the future. We need good people to develop good people. We need challenge creators to cultivate students into being leaders and difference makers. Our product, as much as some may wish, can not be simply measured by the nine-month growth in reading and math scores. Our students, and their classroom leaders, are so much more than that.

Measuring the Right and Wrong Things

10,000 Choices

Around the country teachers and students are returning to school. There's a freshness to August. A sense of excitement. Nervous anticipation resonates throughout our schools and communities as we contemplate the potential of a new school year. Inside each schoolhouse is a principal, who's very words, actions, and ideas set a tone for the learning community. Inside each classroom is an instructional leader who is beginning to make 10,000 choices as the children prepare to return.

As I think back to my opportunity to set up my classroom, I wonder how much I did because it was the thing to do and how much I did because it would have an intentional impact on student growth and development. I remember the cute posters and the bulletin board my bride helped me hang. I remember arranging the desks in a way to promote discussion, or at least discussion with me and kind of, sort of with other kids in the class. I truly wonder how many of my choices were because this is what I saw from classrooms where I grew up and thought a classroom needed to be.

It's been fun to watch our teachers begin to return this month. The pre-school teacher arrived and her assistant arrived first, having so many hands on things she needed to organize and arrange. They were followed by the kindergarten team, then the first grade team, and so on and so forth. As they children get older, it seems our classrooms have less and less stuff. I figure the high school philosophy teacher probably shows up three minutes before the first institute day begins.

As our teachers, coaches, counselors, and speech pathologists cultivate our learning spaces, I wonder how much of this is because we have done it in the past or we have seen it done and how much of it is because we want a certain type of learning to occur. In cultivating the Feng Shui of our learning spaces are the designs based on the idea that I need a listening center and a computer nook or crafted by thoughts of I want a place where children will build with objects and another space where they will imagine and role play.

The clearest examples in my mind of making these 10,000 choices based on learning experiences was when we added the Optional Kindergarten Enrichment and Enhancement Program in Downers Grove. This added a second half to our kindergarten learning. The teachers were thoughtful about the types of experiences they were adding. More Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) and more social-emotional learning meant that in the same rooms, areas which focused simply on reading and writing were converted into more open spaces to allow these interactions. Some book nooks and listening centers left and were instead placed in tubs, so that they could be alternated with tubs of legos, solo cups, and straws. All of a sudden, play kitchens and costumes returned, allowing children a some time for imaginary role play and interaction. Sure the kitchens were covered with maker space tubs in the morning, there was only so much space in the classroom, but the materials present and design choices of the room were based on thoughtful decisions made by the instructional leader, influenced by the goals of the entire kindergarten team.

The best part, just like the students, this school year is just beginning. Our initial setup is simply that an initial setup. We start by making 10,000 choices to design our learning spaces. We will have an opportunity to see how each decision plays out and how learning is impacted. Throughout the year we will be able to make 1,000,000 decisions more. As long as we are willing to adapt and adjust our learning spaces to meet the learning objectives and the needs of our students, the successful both we and our students will feel. Enjoy the journey, it is through these choices we feel empowered and empower our students also.

The Reset Button

I was looking through Facebook the other day and saw one of my former teachers and her family tubing on some lake. The children, a rising second grader and first grader in my former district, were grinning ear to ear as the were sliding through the water. A smile crossed my face. A decade ago, maybe more, I remember a friend complaining that teachers get the whole summer off. I don't hear that complaint as much any more.

I looked at the picture and those pictures of several of her colleagues and I'm glad to see them spending time with their families, taking time with their children now. As I've grown and our profession has evolved, I have begun to realize how fleeting these moments are for these individuals. Whether we like it or not, schools have changed over the past 17 years since the passage of No Child Left Behind. Teachers aren't cruise directors given children tasks and simply waiting for them to complete them. Teachers are literally making hundreds of decisions an hour for their students, modifying and adjusting tasks and learning experiences based on classroom formative feedback. The hours for both students and adults are not 8:30 to 3, but rather often 7:30 to 10 or 11. These children I was looking at in the picture I knew had been working hard all year long. I am sure there were evenings by the end of a school day in which they simply melted down for their parents based on the exhaustion of their work. There were days after long committees, data analysis, center prep, and assessment feedback the teacher-moms were ready to melt down from the exhaustion of their day and week.

I've been using computers since the 80's. I remember the amazing things they could do. The sheer numbers of operations and tasks they could complete. I also remember at times even the computer would become overwhelmed with the tasks at hand and on those machines, we all did the same thing, "Control-Alt-Delete" and the system would reset. Even todays machines, as advanced as they are, need to be rebooted from time to time. Their energies restarted and memories cleared.

My brother just arrived from Scotland on "holiday." He spoke of the required vacation he had during the year. It seemed so odd, that I looked it up. In the United Kingdom, employees were required 20 paid vacation days by law. In fact many countries require time for their employees to reset.  I would presume that this results in more productive work when the employee returns, just as the computer becomes more productive after it is rebooted.

I think back to this past school year for my children, my bride, and myself. I think we as a family recognize that we all need some reboot time. We realize that this past school year was a challenge and the upcoming one will be even harder. Whether it's advanced courses, new responsibilities, or new schools, there are challenges before us. So, I think I may follow my former teachers' model, take a few moments to reset and reboot, knowing that we will be digging in for far more than 8 hour days as school begins. I hope you do also with your kids.

Working Hard Until You Crash