In Response to Replies About Changing the American Public Education System

Within minutes of my blog posting yesterday I began receiving messages from friends, Twitter followers, colleagues and other blog readers. Most concerning to me was a private comment from someone (not a teacher) who said my attitude toward teachers is negative since teachers are part of the system I propose we change. A few thoughts: A) I taught high school students for nearly 12 years before leaving the classroom for other education related positions B) I am married to a teacher  C) I know many teachers who agree with me that the system needs to change because it's too focused on test preparation and not focused enough on learning and finally D) I work with teachers on a regular basis and have developed strong professional relationships with many in my state and across the country. I am a huge fan of teachers, and I understand how difficult teaching can be, especially teaching in schools with little autonomy or support.

After reflecting on yesterday's post overnight, I happened upon this article earlier this morning when I was catching up on reading. In Tom VanderArk's Education Week Column, Nicholas Donahue writes about why parents should support student-centered learning. Pertinent to consider because parents (and community members) are part of the overall education system. As parents we too often find ourselves nostalgic for the past and we sometimes say "the way we did it worked for me, so it's fine for my son or daughter." But, not all of us say that all the time. Some of us have begun to recognize the larger shift that must take place in the traditional system. Even if it's a system where our children are fine (as Donahue asserts is the case for his daughters and I concur the same for my sons), we must ask:  Is fine is good enough?

Granted, this is a difficult conversation. For us as parents. For our children who have learned well how to play the game of school. As with many things in life we find challenging, the struggles are worth it. We can have children/teens who are deeply engaged and owning their learning--the successes and the failures--and it will be worth it when we do.

As My Oldest Son Starts High School, Here's What I'm Thinking

You know those tears a mom can't help but shed when her children head off to kindergarten? I had those tears again today as my oldest son set off for his first day of high school. I'm so proud of him and hopeful for his opportunities to continue pursuing his dreams and his goals.

I'm also still eager to press onward with the changes needed in our public education system, so he and my younger son, and all the other children/teens in America's public education system, can pursue their dreams and goals.

Last night, on the eve of his first day of high school, I showed him a few photographs from his first day of kindergarten, and he responded with "wow, you look younger!"  Though he and I have both grown older since 2006, I find myself asking...what has changed in public education since he started public school? Not much, really. Sure, there have been new initiatives, new standards, and new assessments, but the overall system is pretty much the same. The same as it was when I was in school and when you were in school, and when our grandparents were in school. In fact, the system has been largely the same since the 19th century. That's why I persist with asking questions, sharing my voice, and advocating for my children.

Three years ago on his first day of middle school, my son shared his queries in this What if post.

Today, I am asking what if....

The system didn't focus so much on tests?
Teachers were supported and compensated fairly?
We allowed our children/teens to learn from their mistakes ?
We encouraged more movement in our schools?
We stopped tracking students?
We changed the system?


*Note: I am not opposed to standards, and if you read this blog you will notice much of the work I've been doing in the past few years has been related to new standards. While standards have the potential to improve what students are taught, our entire system still needs to change to meet the learning experiences students must be offered in the 21st Century.

What I am Learning from Design Thinking

For the past two years, I have had the great privilege of participating in several design thinking workshops as a way to seek solutions to barriers and issues in education.  I have left each workshop feeling invigorated, motivated, and ready to continue pursuing solutions in re-designing public education.

Human-centeredness is essential.  We know this, don’t we?  But do we listen and remember why we do what we do and why we make the decisions we make?  Do we stay focused on the needs of the students?   We can do this by listening and showing empathy for given situations.  In one of the design thinking workshops where I participated, students sat with us as we practiced our listening skills.  Students told us about their own dreams for ensuring girls in their rural school possessed more positive body image.  Together, adults and teens brainstormed ideas for solving the problem the girls identified.  The teens and their principal left the workshop with concrete possibilities after the groups prototyped several of the ideas generated during the brainstorming session.

Facilitation skills make an enormous difference.  In my early years of learning to teach, I wrote my philosophy of teaching and included language such as “I am a facilitator of learning… .”  Over the course of eleven years in the classroom, I fluctuated on a continuum of facilitator__teacher.  The constant was always a focus on maintaining a student-centered classroom (thanks to my teacher preparation program).

Facilitating meetings with adults is only slightly different than facilitating learning with a group of teenagers.  It helps to utilize an inquiry approach and to remember the facilitator shouldn't be seen as the expert, but as someone who is curious about the topic/question of study.  Last week I participated in a design thinking workshop in Chicago, the facilitators possessed excellent facilitation skills as they led a group of educators from Colorado and Kentucky through six workstations where we considered potential barriers to collaboration among teachers across the two states, and then we worked to create possible solutions to

these barriers.  With this topic being so heavy and with a need to end the day with solutions, one might expect that we were exhausted at the end of the day.  On the contrary, we left the downtown Chicago studio feeling invigorated and excited about our next steps for our collaborative project.  The facilitators led the group process, helped us improve our communications, examine barriers, and achieve our outcome of creating a community of practice.

Prototypes are a vital part of the process.  Just like in brainstorming, there are no rules while creating a prototype.  Instead of asking, can I _______?  Ask, how will I______?  This is when we test out our ideas, so we can refine them and improve the process and/or product we are creating.  For our day in Chicago, educators from Colorado and Kentucky were coming together, but before we convened, our facilitators prototyped the process with teachers from the Chicago area.  Then those teachers joined us for the day, bringing new perspectives to our planning.

Collaboration is key.  Maybe this is one of my most favorite parts of design thinking because I have long sought collaborative opportunities in education.  Bringing different perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches to learning enhances the experience for all involved.  Who says educators have to stay within our isolated towers of subject area?  Who says students have to learn one subject at a time?  Design thinking encourages collaboration across disciplines, professions, and demographics, recognizing each individual and promoting listening and equality.

I suspect my foray into design thinking has only just begun because I see it as a way to discover, imagine, create, research, renew, and re-focus public education for the very people it’s intended to serve.

A Day Destined to Create Nurturers of Children and Lovers of Literature

I happen to share my birthday with two other English teacher friends--only one of whom is still in the classroom.  Jana is a former student of mine and now a young and fabulous teacher at a local high school.  The title of today’s blog post comes from Jana in her comment to me on Facebook this morning. Cherry was a colleague and has been a mentor, of sorts, to me as I made a transition, even if it's temporary, out of the classroom.

This birthday morning, I awoke to greetings from family and friends and to read a new blog post at Edweek; this post links to Learning to Muse and has caused a flurry of online dialogue this morning among my colleagues and friends.  The post has also caused me to ask—am I lying to myself to think what I do now in public education matters because I am so passionate about teaching and learning? Is it a lie to tell myself if I still loved teaching I’d stay in the classroom “for the kids?”

A friend from graduate school, now an administrator in Georgia, asked: “I struggle, too…does it get any easier?”  My reply:  “I don’t know if it gets any easier.  In a way I hope not because I don’t ever want to stop loving the classroom, even if I’m not there and especially if I ever return.  My love of teaching inspires what I do daily and the input I provide to the field of public education. Tough, for sure.”

I had a telephone conversation and subsequent online conversation this week with another amazing English teacher who has been teaching for 20 years.  He said to me: “I will simply look at this as a delay…Someday soon!”

 

Another friend, who spent 5 years in the classroom before pursuing other interests, encouraged me by stating “while you may have stepped away from the classroom for a time, you have not left education.  Your work is vital, and its effects are far reaching—across many classrooms.”

Delicate balance.  After reading the Edweek post, another friend and colleague, who spent 27 years in the classroom, commented:  “We absolutely need the best teachers to remain in classrooms teaching our precious children.  But, don’t we also want the best teachers helping negotiate and mediate all of the mandates and dictates that are being imposed on districts/schools/classrooms/teachers/students?

An anonymous educator who retired in May at the top of her game commented on my blog: “The worst thing is for teachers to leave when everyone else knows s/he's ready. What next for me? God knows. But, at least I carry with me the joys and successes no one can take away from me. Leave before everyone wants you to go. Hard to find that kind of high" in the real world. Finding something half as satisfying will be a challenge. What a wonderful journey!”

Life’s great balancing act.  Indeed life is a journey and as I sign off to spend my birthday with my husband and sons, who just made me a delicious brunch, I’m grateful for family, friends, colleagues and others who are working daily to nurture children and create lovers of literature as I continue to do per my 8 year old son who gave me a Dr. Seuss inspired birthday card. 

  

What Being a Classroom Teacher Taught Me about Being a Leader

In January 2009 I left the classroom and have been working in various leadership positions since then.  Even though I long often for the classroom, I have found if I remember these ten things I did in my classroom, I am more successful as a leader.  I only wish being a leader hadn't meant having to leave the classroom because it shouldn't have to be that way.  Teachers are leaders too!

1.  Value each individual.  No matter how busy my schedule became or how many students there were, I found it important to treat each unique individual with respect because respect goes a long way in building student/teacher working relationships. 
2. Provide choice.  Student choice in learning was by far one of my favorite tricks in my teacher goody bag.  When people feel they have a choice about what they need to do, they generally enjoy the task and learn in the process.
3. Provide frequent feedback.  Frequent, descriptive feedback has been shown to be one of the greatest factors for improving student achievement. 
4. Use passions positively.  I entered the teaching profession because I am passionate about teaching and learning.  Sometimes these passions cause me to react emotionally to imprudent decisions made in public education. 
5. Be creative with resources.  I spent my entire teaching career in Title 1 eligible schools, so we always had to be creative when looking for books, supplies, and equipment.  It’s amazing what you can get when you ask for help from the community.
6. Encourage collaboration and creativity.  These skills are supremely important for living a productive life, so I always liked to provide students opportunities to collaborate with one another and with opportunities to express their understanding of text in creative ways (e.g. through creating a painting, a poem, a song, a movie, a skit, etc.).
7. Listen more than talk. This goes back a long way for me.  As an undergraduate, I practiced Rogerian Therapy (Person Centered Therapy) for part of my graduation requirements for a B.A. in psychology.  This was all about listening to the client.  I employed similar listening skills in my classroom.
8. Provide experiences. As a believer in John Dewey’s philosophy of education, I believe students should experience positive interactions and learning opportunities which will prepare them to be confident and capable citizens in society. 
9. Don’t try to do everything because I can’t and shouldn’t.  This theory applies in the classroom and in the work place.  For a smooth running classroom where learning was happening, I needed the students to work harder than me.  This took a ton of up-front preparation, but my classroom always ran itself when I was a facilitator of learning rather than a deliverer of knowledge.
10. Set specific and measurable goals, but don’t forget the stuff that can’t be measured. While achieving success and reaching goals often meant I needed  to have numbers or measurable data for my students, I believe we must remember that being human centered doesn't always equate with measuring in numbers.  

May I Chicken Out of Testing?

Thursday afternoon I was on my way home from working with educators when my sons's 3rd grade teacher called me. You may know the momentary panic a mom feels when seeing the school number appear on the phone. I answered calmly, mentioning that I was in the mountains with a weak cell signal and then waited to hear the voice on the other end of the line. The reply "well that explains some of it" was not immediately reassuring. I was thinking oh no--hope he's okay. What I learned was troubling. My eight year old had a melt down during state testing because he ran out of time to read the long passages and answer the accompanying questions. He had placed a tremendous amount of stress on himself because he wanted to perform well after benignly being told by his teacher that the scores would not affect him;they would only affect his school and his teachers. She regretted telling him that, telling me he had likely taken the statement to heart. He is a sensitive child who cares about others and his community, and he really likes his teacher.

 My position in education has benefits and challenges. One of the challenges is that I provide content consultation to the office of assessment at the state department. This is challenging because of my conflicting feelings of angst about the amount of standardized testing forced on children in public education. Now, I must say here that I do see the benefits of SOME standardized tests, but as a nation we have gone overboard with the amount of time spent testing our children.

As a parent advocate for my child, I am in a difficult situation because my professional life demands I be sensitive to the requirements set forth by our state and school system.  At the same time, it's difficult hearing my child tell me he wants to "chicken out" and skip the test because it's just too stressful. What do I say when he asks me if it's okay for him to chicken out, knowing America's public education system will continue to demand he take these tests throughout his entire schooling and even to gain college entry?

I don't know the answers, but I will continue to seek them and will continue to join forces with other educators and parents trying to make a difference in public education. For the sake of children in our country, we must not chicken out of looking for answers to change our test driven culture!