Helping 9th-Grade Students Get It Right: Norwood First Year Academy

We’re enthusiastic about a new project we’re supporting at nearby Norwood High School. The school has completed smart and thorough preliminary planning across academic, student support, and operational domains for a First Year Academy which will open in the 25-26 academic year.

Members of the Academy’s Planning Committee, almost two years old, joined prospective teachers in digging into what the school experience could be like for all concerned in an intense two-day August retreat. The agenda was ambitious: exploring values and beliefs, assessing the efficacy of systems and policies already in place, identifying the need for new thinking, understanding the rules of the road when making durable consensus decisions and managing high-stakes meetings. Exchanging  work groups on different tasks, using different strategies to meet the desired outcomes, and working with student and teacher life in the mind’s eye made for a productive outing.  

As we’ve known, “middle school” students can come in all shapes and sizes and, across a typical 11–14-year age span, display great differences among factors such as social adeptness, family background and norms, body strength and coordination, motivation and outlook, academic acumen, reading level and vocabularies, executive function, and a host of others. Recognition of those potential differences was clearly on the page for the Norwood team, who seem game to welcome all of their learners and caregivers, going out of their way to be inclusive in their planning, the development of their vision and the daily experience that will make it tangible.

Norwood Faculty at Work at their Summer Retreat

Principal Galligan

Zooming out to the big picture, focusing more directly on entering ninth grade students is now happening frequently. A number of large and mid-size city school systems have made it a priority to examine their capacity to support learning and development at that transition point from middle school to high school, but it’s also happening in rural and suburban schools. The impact of COVID on many students who were in mid-elementary school at the time is being felt in schools across the nation. During the pandemic, many students got less than full attention in developing literacy skills in the lower grades, making the critical flip from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”. Many others felt the lack of opportunity to be part of a community, honing social skills as part of their learning. In addition, the acute mental health challenges that spiked then have not receded, and schools, not adequately resourced or structured for that burden, can groan under the load.

Given that so much in education policy seems cyclical, it’s helpful to recall that  “Ninth Grade Academies” were popular in the mid and late 1990s, as the energy and investments of those times included taking a deeper look at that pivotal year of entry into high school. During those exciting years new learning in adolescent development, including a pivot from deficit-based theories to “positive youth development”, and burgeoning new and engaging teaching strategies such as Inquiry Learning were springing up from networks like the Coalition of Essential Schools, the Accelerated Schools, the Turning Points Middle School Network, and a host of progressive university Schools of Education.

The introspection of the 1990s also revealed the crucial nature of transitions in schools, especially those serving low socio-economic populations. One popular saying became “transitions are the villain” , meaning likely places for students to go off-track. Moving teacher to teacher, class to class, grade to grade, school to school, brought with it potential negative impact on the strength of relationships, outlook and motivation, and resultantly, achievement. Entering high school, which was viewed by many as the biggest and most important of all transitions, spawned a proliferation of attempts to improve the hand-off from “middle school” to the classical “upper school", where all the rules and ways of daily life are new and different.

Unfortunately, in 1999 the No Child Left Behind legislation bound schools together in following a top-down agenda, froze innovation and new approaches, and cemented the century-old architecture of high schools. Not much of that era’s new learning was carried forward as schools moved towards standardization and test-based “accountability”.

Norwood High School, refreshingly, has made a significant commitment to making sure entering students do see what’s ahead of them, get critical support, and can take advantage of its many resources. Working in the library of their spacious new high school, Principal Hugh Galligan invited retreat participants to practice activities calling for shared leadership and consensus building, choosing from a menu of options that included positive character development, conflict resolution, critical media literacy, digital etiquette, and executive function, among others.

The ”builders” of Norwood High School’s new First Year Academy

Since we met, I’ve been impressed by the thoughtfulness and transparency of the Norwood effort, led by Galligan’s energy and high touch skills. It wasn’t surprising to me to learn that he was the 2022-23 Massachusetts High School Principal of the Year. Galligan routinely shows his own leadership tool kit: honoring the hard work that has occurred while keeping people open to new possibilities, digging in hard to the thinking but having fun and laughs in the midst, owning important chunks of the work himself while inviting others to take on significant tasks moving forward.

In creating the First Year Academy new ideas, survey data, and planning documents have been meticulously captured, shared and vetted with stakeholders on a consistent basis. High School representatives have been in dialogue with community members, middle school staff, their fellow faculty, and current students in assessing which elements would make for the most positive social and academic experience. Planning Committee members have visited other schools with similar academies, brought back anecdotal data to share with others, and are keeping an open mind as they co-design the Norwood prototype.

The Summer Retreat included a diverse group: newer faculty along with veteran teaching staff, representatives of differing curriculum departments, guidance and social work staff, and members of the school’s administration.  In addition to assisting with presentations and facilitation, Associate Principal Cindy Derrane thoughtfully provided table tools and puzzle pieces for the group to assemble in a final “show your learning and progress” activity.

Committee member and Assistant Principal JuanManuel Gonzales, who’s served in other schools prior to arriving at Norwood, recalled that one important driver for the Academy was to front-load supports for students, rather than waiting until later years when they better understood such issues as grades, credits, and academic performance and how to access help when needed. When asked what he thinks will be factors in success he had two things to say, “As a school veteran I know that for something as big as this you need a good plan, and I think we have one. And we’ll need teachers working closely together, taking responsibility, being willing to grow and learn, solve problems, and being flexible, and by all signs, we’re ready for that as well”.

The Retreat  ended with a viewing and assessment of those afore-mentioned puzzle pieces to display consensus on key tasks while pointing forward to next steps. Photos of participants in their “building and construction” outfits and an ice cream truck with sundaes for all made for a great departure celebration. We recalled that in our planning, describing what he hoped for over the two days, Galligan stated, “we want to take this opportunity to get as close and tight as we can, since we know once we’re in regular school mode, things can loosen up”.  Looking back, we’d say, “mission accomplished”.

The ”builders” of Norwood High School’s new First Year Academy

We at ERC look forward to facilitating the teams going forward, sharing tools and perspectives and learning from Norwood’s efforts as well. To learn more, feel free to contact us or the administration of Norwood High School.

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To explore our ERC coaching, professional development and strategic planning resources, contact larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org

Recalling Vygotsky

Greetings and welcome to Volume 4 of our EdHistory 101 Project, our periodic revisiting of key historical events, personalities  and perspectives that continue to shape our ideas of school. Knowing our nation’s educational history—the forces, beliefs, and language of other times—presents opportunities for us to reconsider the roles we need school to play for the social and intellectual well-being of our young people. It’s a way for us to assess the prevailing values, to re-frame our work and, with persistence, to re-imagine the systems, culture, and practices that cement the grammar of schooling.

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The past two decades of education policy have privileged “standards” and “norms” at the expense of teacher passion and student curiosity and engagement. These days, we seem less able to root our work as we once did in the thinking of giants in the field of learning psychology and educational philosophy. Its been some time since I taught education courses or supervised new and practicing teachers, but from recent conversations with younger educators, names like Dewey, James, Piaget, Comer, and Sizer are seldom recognized. Some of Benjamin Bloom’s work survives since his cognitive framework lends itself to the prevailing fixation on organization and measurement, and his belief in the potential of “mastery learning” which provides an appealing rationale but, under various names, has never proven itself effective. Few, however, remember and recount Bloom’s other key assertions regarding a psycho-motor (action) domain or an affective  (emotion-based) domain, even in this time of “SEL” measurements and curriculum.

In this edition of our EdHistory 101 Project we remind ourselves of the work of  Lev Vygotsky, whose early 20th century work provided an enduring and sociocultural theory of child development we would be well-served to re-visit and resume in practice. As the education sector struggles to find its footing after the demise of standards, norms and measurement, there are reminders from Vygotsky of how young people grow and learn.

“Learning is more than the acquisition

of the ability to think; it is the acquisition

of many specialized abilities for thinking

 about a variety of things.”

-Lev Vygotsky 

Vygotsky’s short career,  he died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37, focused on child development, developmental psychology, and educational philosophy. Cultural mediation. Inner speech. The more knowledgeable other. The zone of proximal development. These are key concepts and familiar terms he developed and explained. He is also remembered for his studies and recognition of the key role of play in learning and development and for his insistence that “all learning is social”, an oft-quoted but seldom fully-explored nod to Vygotsky’s legacy. Early in his career, Vygotsky delivered what was at the time a revolutionary theory: innate abilities affect the development and self-realization of children, but do not necessarily rigidly fix or shape them. Vygotsky believed that young people learn a great deal through physical interaction and asserted that learning is first and foremost a social process in which society and parents play a key role.

Two Breakthroughs in his field

The Zone of Proximal Development As his studies in 1920’s Moscow deepened, Vygotsky authored a concept he called the “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD), perhaps most easily defined as the space between what a learner can do without assistance and what a learner can do with adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. He wrote, “What lies in the zone of proximal development at one stage is realized and moves to the level of actual development at a second. In other words, what the child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow.”

As stated above, given his recognition of social forces in learning, Vygotsky identified that a key component in the successful attainment of skills and concepts was working  in collaboration with parents, peers, teachers, etc., as he termed them, the “more knowledgeable others”. The notion of “ZPD” provided psychologists from across the globe with a new approach to assessing and measuring fundamental developmental processes.

Inner Speech As part of his framework for intellectual growth Vygotsky also coined the term “inner speech” to explain the process by which the private speech of young children, talking to themselves out loud during play, starts accompanying their activity in a variety of cognitive tasks. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains inner speech as “the little voice in the head”, or “thinking in words”. Its importance, they suggest, is that it is a phenomenon where several topics intersect: language, consciousness, thought, imagery, communication, imagination, and self-knowledge; all appear to connect in some way or other to the little voice in the head.

Studies of inner speech have continued, expanded, and intensified over the century since Vygotsky coined the term, becoming both interdisciplinary and discipline-specific. There is general recognition that inner speech is a regular daily experience with significant links to self-awareness, short-term memory, cognition and development, yet researchers from many fields have cited the many challenges in furthering its study. Recently, advances in neuro-imaging and related brain study advances have rekindled interest, as have the recognition of possible links to autism, schizophrenia,

As explained in the neuroscience journal Grey Matters, “inner speech holds a pivotal role in multiple mental processes. There is evidence of its involvement in the development of social behavior, cognitive tasks, self-awareness, and even confidence in oneself. Although researchers have made connections between many of these findings, the methodology for studying inner speech is rudimentary and in need of improvement.”

Vygotsky Family Archives

Two Giants Agree, Mostly

While Vygotsky never chanced to meet Jean Piaget, another giant of learning science, he was familiar with his works, agreeing on many of his perspectives. Piaget believed there were universal stages of development that all children naturally pass through. Vygotsky posed that learning happens through social interactions and is therefore greatly dependent on experiences which can differ greatly. In the early 1930’s Vygotsky came to a different theoretical position from Piaget on the topic of “inner speech”. Piaget had speculated that “egocentric speech” follows from inner speech and "dissolved away" as children matured. Vygotsky’s studies demonstrated  that egocentric speech became inner speech, and then into what we call "thoughts". After reading Vygotsky's work after his death, Piaget openly praised him for his discovery of the social origin of children's thoughts, reasoning, and moral judgements.

How Remembering Vygotsky Might Help Us

Make activities accessible yet stimulating From a Vygotskian perspective, ability or the lack thereof, is not genetic. A young person will learn most effectively if the concept or skill is within their ZPD. Activities that are too challenging will likely open the child to failure and affect their confidence as a learner. Similarly, as noted by Philip Adey, “the under-stimulated child does not develop their intelligence as they should”. Recent research has shown continued and growing student frustration with boring classroom activities. One can only conclude that a failure to engage young people’s powerful curiosity  is a primary reason behind our ongoing flat achievement.

Formative assessment should be much more than a quiz on Friday A student’s learning goals and instructional activities must be personalized to his/her needs and abilities to the greatest extent possible.  Formative assessments, as well as instructional variation, should be dynamic and part of school-wide conversations. Success should be measured in terms of progress from prior levels, in line with his/her dynamic and changing zones of proximal development.

Scaffolding and modeling should be integral Scaffolding and modeling are at the core of the ZPD model. Fortunately, modelling and scaffolding are more commonplace in today’s classrooms in education. A core tenet of Vygotsky’s work is to ensure that scaffolding is geared toward the ZPD of the relevant learner, as opposed to the “one-size-fits-all” approach that many teachers adopt to enable them to hurtle through material for the sake of upcoming tests. Scaffolding, for example, should involve leading questioning and prompting the child to succeed in undertaking the challenging task themselves, rather than offering a sentence starter/word bank/fill-in-the-blank approach to complete the task.

Our over-reliance on standards, norms, and measurements has not been good for student engagement and teacher autonomy over the past two decades and we’re paying a price. Remembering the tenets of learning, growing, and teaching, and what Vygotsky discovered  can be help us remember what matters in classrooms and relationships.

Thanks to Wendy Paterson, Russia Beyond, Frontiers, Grey Matters, & Teaching Times

We’re hoping you’ll join an EdHistory 101 Project reading group or form your own. We invite you to copy the link text to read and discuss it with colleagues, to make time to refresh our role as the intellectual hubs of our communities. Watch out, minds at work! 

Current Demands on School Principals Show a Dramatic Need for More Support

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Ask yourself, how many more important investments can a school board, superintendent or community make than the good health of its school principals and their leadership teams? If you know life inside of schools, it’s hard to disagree that the demands and stressors on school leaders today are unprecedented in the history of American education.

Yet, it’s amazing how very few leaders get the invaluable support they need. And for some who do get coaching support, it’s usually very short-term, and it's mostly focused on maintaining the status quo, keeping the trains running as they always have. It makes me wonder why this issue seems so invisible to so many.

Things Have Changed

But these days, if one were to check out the headlines from community newspapers around the country, we’d get a sample of new, additional issues on a principal’s plate:  red v blue politics, parent controversies, woke or not-woke, LGBTQ+ issues, what’s in the library, sports eligibility, bathroom and cell phone policies. These issues were not in your grandfather’s newspaper nor seldom part of a principal’s life. These often-political confrontations wash over a school, are seldom easy to reconcile and are almost never part of a principal’s training. Issues like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, cyber bullying, presidential politics, or, sadly, the death of a student, all require immediate responses. In many cases there are perceived winners and losers in these situations, and all parties live in the same communities and attend the same schools.

The Mental Health Challenge

As has been often mentioned in our ERC newsletters and alerts, these are incredibly challenging times for student’s mental health, placing a huge burden on schools not built or prepared for that work, but who must deal with it anyway. And such challenges extend across the spectrum to wealthier communities and to differing age groups. The Association of Children’s Hospitals has declared a mental health emergency! How many school boards know about that? How many are discussing it?

Principals must decide how best to keep up preventative systems and practices to avoid being mired in endless interventions which are time-consuming, require copious documentation, and disrupt the school’s smooth operation and focus on learning. Leaders also need to develop new partnerships within and beyond the school to help deal with the demand for services and to support students and families in the crucial “after-school” hours. Managing extensive partnerships is terra incognita for new and even seasoned principals. How do they fit that into an already demanding day? How do they decide what gives? --being in classrooms? sitting with students in the lunchroom? greeting buses and cruising hallways? supporting new initiatives or meeting with parents? 

A Safe Haven to Be Thoughtful

We know that the principal’s office is a beehive. Most everything goes through there in a good school with an active leader. A leader’s schedule is almost always booked to the hilt, emails routinely top 80-100 a day and there are always drop-in’s to speak with “the boss”. By contract and tradition, principals must also devote countless hours to writing up teacher evaluations, often with precious little  time to observe classrooms, provide feedback and have conversations about instruction or classroom environment. Everyone, especially parents and school boards, want issues solved yesterday  and email and texting have made the expectation: “now”!

The problem-solving, root-cause analysis, scenario building, negotiations, and employing a sharp instructional eye are a high touch workload for leaders. They’re also incredibly time-consuming on top of a laundry list of administrative tasks. What we’ve seen increasingly is providing the necessary, consistent support is beyond the reach of a superintendent who might like to help by being somewhat available or employing an elder principal in the district assigned to “mentor”, which mostly means show them how the system currently works. People forget how hard it is to reveal your inner thinking to your boss(es). Asking for second opinions, confessing temporary uncertainty, seeking out a possible blind spot --am I missing something here?--are not the kinds of behaviors leaders want out in front of their boss or her/his minions, even though they’re the necessary hallmarks of reflection and deliberation that make for good leadership.

Many readers will know Difficult Conversations authors Doug Stone and Sheila Heen. In their follow-up book Thanks for the Feedback there’s a powerful chapter on the need for intimate help called “See Your Blind Spots”. One assertion stands out: “Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback”. (Penguin Group, NY, NY; chapter 4)

But We Already Have a Prepared Leader

School board members are likely thinking, either we have a principal already in place or we just spent a good deal of time finding the best one out there to join our district. We listened and probed and hired someone who’s ready to do the job. Why do we need to dedicate more time and resources to supporting them?

I have to believe it’s time for boards to step in, to weigh the costs and benefits and invest in the good health of their principals as private sector companies, sports teams, surgical hospitals and hedge funds routinely do. It’s possible that some board members have a rather outdated understanding of the role of today’s principal. So much has changed about the inner workings of schools, not to mention the larger sphere in which a leader operates. In most of today’s schools, principals must 

deploy, support and manage a fleet of other administrators and specialists –assistant principals, special educators, registrars, literacy and numeracy coaches, IT specialists, student life deans, and behavioral personnel.

One of the comments we hear from our ERC coaches is that the principals they work with often say, “thanks for making me stop spinning around and pay attention to important stuff. The incoming is relentless, and I can get lost in the fog”. (One of our tools is the Eisenhower Matrix, which helps busy leaders think through the hurricane of incoming issues and tasks.)

Doesn’t A Coach Have to Know OUR District?

Of course, some familiarity with a particular school or district can be helpful to a coach but it’s not essential. What is essential for a coach to know are the many critical elements of school leadership. Every principal must know how to evaluate and manage staff, build a school schedule, find and hire staff, manage a range of meetings, communicate clearly to multiple stakeholders, develop and manage a budget, work with multiple stakeholders to develop and maintain vision for their school, collect and analyze various school data, help to develop standards and handbooks for staff and students, manage conflict, design professional development for school staff, monitor compliance with local, state and federal mandates and develop a safe and welcoming learning environment. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it illustrates that much of the work of school principals is common across most schools and at all levels of preschool to grade twelve. A coach who knows how to share, assess effectiveness, and improve these dozen or so responsibilities with a principal will be helpful and effective regardless of a school or districts’ demographics or unique characteristics.

Is Good Enough Good Enough?

In my experience, the best principals need support and want to improve. They see themselves as adult learners. They want to grow. They like real back-and-forth. They know there are few black-and-white decisions in the principalship, and they want regular opportunities for what we call critical friendship – someone rooting for me but who isn’t afraid to ask me hard questions. Wouldn’t a board or superintendent want a principal they might rate as a 6 or 7 on a 10-scale to be pushing for 8 or 9 status? And doesn’t that improvement translate to better learning, a satisfied professional community and more support for schools?

I’ve been a principal several times over and I’ve been coaching principals for 15 years now. There is no doubt in my mind that the help a coach provides to a principal even just a few hours a week can help them succeed. In most cases working harder, longer or faster is not the solution, even if it were possible. Working smarter is one possible alternative, one that is more likely to be achieved if a principal has a dedicated coach who knows deeply the work school leadership. When I first meet a principal, I tell them that I’ll be far more successful at helping them prevent problems than solving them after they’re in full-blown crisis mode. I want every principal I work with to think of me as their “thought partner”.

Time spent working with a coach to explore problems of practice, analyze issues and brainstorm solutions can actually save time and damage control and allow a leader to focus on the positive and more constructive elements of building a strong and healthy school community.

It’s time for a new era of support for school leaders, time for school boards, families and district leaders to understand the new realities and the new demands for both coaches and leaders.

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Wayne R. Ogden has worked as a teacher, high school principal, assistant superintendent and superintendent. He coaches new and veteran leaders across New England. He is one of the co-authors of The Skillful Leader: Confronting Mediocre Teaching. Wayne is a METCO Board member, was a long-standing member of the Advisory Board for the Principal’s Center at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, and was a Founding Director of the Vermont Principals Center.

Education Resources Consortium

www.educationresourcesconsortium.org 

Critical readings for school professionals and their communities

Greetings,

As the leaves fall here in New England, we offer you three important school stories:

• An unprecedented challenge to young people’s mental health clearly identified and confronted.

• An articulate and forensic look at why we can’t seem to make our schools different and better, and a guide to redesign, from our own ERC co-founder.

• An eloquent and reasoned look at school accountability and why its off the mark and unhelpful.

 Enjoy this urgent commentary on key issues.

                                                                                 Wayne Ogden, ERC Co-Founder

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Professor Jean Twenge takes on a frequent conclusion that we don't have enough evidence about social media use associated with harm to young people’s mental health, and says, “Yes, we do know social media isn't safe for kids.”

technoskeptic.substack.com/cp/137579842?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email 

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Addressing The Neglected Elements of School Redesign tracks why things stalled in improving schools back in the late 1990’s, why we’re so stuck engaging students and raising achievement and,  most importantly, identifies the seven areas that we need to tackle.

medium.com/@larry.myatt1/addressing-the-neglected-elements-of-school-redesign-5ac95a58728b

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Peter Greene’s testimony before the Pennsylvania State House Appropriations and Education Committee offers a much-needed, common sense take on school accountability.

curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2023/10/my-testimony-for-pa-house-education-tour.html

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These are three serious reads that one hopes will spawn serious conversation in schools and their communities. School leaders, make time to share, analyze and discuss these issues. Things are stuck in the K-12 sector and here are three ways we can dig out from under the weight of inertia.

Good luck in your conversations!

ERC Summer Newsletter August 2023

Welcome to our Summer Newsletter – as is our custom, we’re sharing what we see on the school front lines --in classrooms, the principal’s office and in district administrative suites. This August there are two things we think deserve attention.

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More screen-based instruction as the remedy for "learning loss"? We don’t think so….

Brain POP

Responding to last year’s troubling NAEP scores, i.e., the “nation’s report card”, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said, “Let’s be very clear: the data prior to the pandemic did not reflect an education system that was on the right track.  The pandemic simply made that worse.  It took poor performance – and dropped it down even further.” Cardona was referring to the fact that after a decade of flat achievement, test scores have fallen even more and a crusade has begun to help school children recover from COVID “learning loss” (referring to a loss of knowledge and/or skills, or a “reversal in academic progress”, most commonly due to an extended interruption in a student’s education –summer vacation, illness, absences, etc.)

In response, tens of billions in federal aid began its flow to our schools to combat learning loss. The largest chunk of the federal largess, $122 billion that was included in the American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, requires that schools put at least 20% toward battling that “learning loss”. Schools need to spend most of their recovery funds by 2024, and summer is the main buying season, so new tools can be delivered in time for school to start. We ask, who’s set to benefit from that?  

An armada of companies are now pressing the case that schools should spend the money on their products. In particular, as reported by Pro Publica, the ed tech industry is not only poised to benefit from the surge in federal funding but also enjoyed a huge wave of private funding as the federal tap opened: The annual total of venture capital investments in ed tech companies rose from $5.4 billion to $16.8 billion between 2019 and 2021.  Firms that track such investments also predict that global edtech venture capital will nearly triple over the next decade. (chart below)

We certainly agree with an obligation to respond to genuine learning loss, but  we’re hoping that educators keep their eyes on the gigantic irony herein: a host of studies showed the negative impact of increased school-based screen time during COVID and that the extent of learning loss was closely correlated to the amount of time that students had spent doing remote learning, rather than receiving direct instruction. And now companies are offering us more screen-based instruction as the remedy. 

Although we’re in support of limited and very careful investment in on-line learning, what we recommend more strongly is to focus on and buck up district “impact solutions”, among others intensive tutoring, focused skill review, counseling support, and extended-day and extended year programming. Building-based teams and community partners should engage in granular, wrap-around planning and care coordination which address a full range of key aspects, most critically literacy and “reading recovery”,  emotional and physical wellness, varied instructional strategies in content areas, establishing homework centers, and providing one-on-one check-in’s and mentoring and coaching  beyond school hours. 

These are practices which have always made a difference in addressing gaps in student learning, and importantly, bring an essential, high-touch element which simply cannot be replaced. Spend the “learning loss” funds close to home in ways that address the core issues.

(For support in planning and implementing “impact solutions”, contact us here at ERC) 

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Take On the 800-pound Gorilla of Teacher Evaluation – But don’t rush out for a new system! 

Almost everywhere we go these days we find school administrators groaning under the weight of cumbersome evaluation procedures. Its difficult to find many who feel that that work is making a significant difference in their school, that their investment pays big dividends in supporting teachers and improving instruction. And now its back in the news.

Istock- Getty images

Some history. Teacher evaluation reform during the late 2010s was one of the fastest and most widespread education policy changes in recent history. Thanks mostly to Race to the Top and ESEA “waivers,” over a period of about 10 years, the vast majority of the nation’s school districts installed new teacher evaluation systems. We were a part of that ground level work in a dozen school districts. Conceived in what must be acknowledged as a climate of teacher mistrust, the mandate required a vast expenditure of time to learn and adopt new and more stringent procedures. Evaluation methodologies began to include expanded rating categories and incorporating multiple measures, some based on student outcomes – i.e., testing results. 

Schools have now been at that work for a decade, and regrettably, two visible outcomes we encounter are a burdening of school administrators that distracts them from other critical work, and a general disbelief among educators that the whole process really makes a difference. It’s one of the 800-pound gorillas that we’ve come to live with in education. In most schools it’s not something that teachers complain about. The unspoken trade-off seems to be, “I don’t really get much support for my actual teaching, but evaluation is not something I have to pay a lot of attention to or worry about”. Not what we’d like to hear or believe but an accurate assessment of how things stand in too many schools.

But a major new report issued in April 2023 on the impact of teacher evaluation reform has garnered attention. The research on student outcomes with data from 44 states comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University  and offers a strong analysis of multiple locations that finds no aggregate effect of the new systems and that national evaluation reform has not been successful in improving measurable student outcomes. [Bleiberg, Brunner, Harbatkin, Kraft & Springer.]

That report dovetails with what we’re seeing on the ground-- that the implementation, the actual day-to-day practices, seldom provides the payoffs we’d want: familiarity with over-all teacher practices, meaningful support and incentives, rating systems that work, and improved teaching. In a nutshell, evaluation frameworks and procedures are too top-heavy and time consuming, and don’t allow for timely dialogue, instructional intimacy, or support a growth mindset. 

But whether provoked by the report or attempting to get more results from the process, many districts are suddenly looking to move to yet another new evaluation framework. We’ve even heard of two districts close to each other where one is giving up on a system while the nearby district wants to adopt it.

Poets&Quants

Stop! Pay attention to the report! There is NO evidence that one particular or different approach to evaluations would have changed the results. We did not somehow “miss” the right approach or framework. It’s in the implementation and conditions. But many districts are on a hunt for yet another teacher evaluation system despite the fact that they’re expensive, they take lots of time to understand and implement, as well as to negotiate with teacher associations. And the usual suspects who  monetized teacher evaluation a decade ago are making a comeback, with new logos and Zoom modules,  and school districts are looking to buy. 

We have a better idea and its taking root. Our approach has become to bring school leaders and teachers together. The task is to collaboratively choose two, perhaps three, areas to focus on, areas that are likely to support growth and achievement, and using frequent mini-observations and conversations, develop mutual expertise in those areas. Formative assessment, lesson planning, managing classroom environment, student engagement, the use of multiple strategies -these and others all hold the potential to make teachers more successful in engaging and growing young people in their intellectual work. 

This doesn’t mean that other elements of an evaluation framework don’t matter. They have their place. But regular feedback and conversation among administrators and teachers on a few key agreed-upon areas can foster improvement, build a culture of growth and trust, and give teacher support and evaluation the boost it needs. It’s a simple approach that makes better use of time, energy and wisdom in all regards. Its careful work, to be sure, and requires good decision making, smart public engagement, and a strategic road map. 

We’re doing more and more in this arena and would love to share our methods and coaching support if your school would like to get to the heart of the work. Let us know if you’d like more information. 

Larry Myatt Wayne Ogden

Assessment and Grading: Taking the Right Road

Over the past 4-5 months I’ve been helping one of our longest-standing ERC client schools, The White Mountain Regional High School in New Hampshire, with some deep work on assessment. Under new administrative leadership and with several new faculty members it was time for a “refresh”, an opportunity to revisit core values about teaching and learning and to develop the flexible yet durable set of agreements around teacher practices that every good school needs.

Middleweb

Assessment and grading are such a huge, combined thing in schools, yet they are seldom explored in intentional ways. Not only does that neglect make for a weak instructional fabric, but it can also get us in trouble. In addition to the many small “grading” skirmishes that occur regularly in every school among students, parents, and teachers, every so often there are bigger, more splashy beefs. I was reminded of a recent case in Maryland and another one in Texas.

Courtesy, The Conversation

Not every situation gets as heated and public as these, but our ERC experiences in schools suggests that grading and assessment, which are surprisingly infrequent topics of discussion, can become quietly but dramatically discordant. Wildly different and unexplored approaches conspire against making a school’s approach consistent and understandable to parents, and perhaps more importantly, to the students themselves as they stress over how to navigate which behaviors and standards work with which teachers but not with others. They’re often told, that’s just how school is, right?

Over the years, as we’ve forgotten the roots of our normative workings, we’ve made it comfortable and routine to assign a single number or letter to a stunningly complex body of work emerging from a  developing mind, with each teacher largely guided by their own beliefs and standards. That’s where instructional leadership should come in. Schools should routinely make time for discussions of how they want to deal with the paradoxical undertaking that teachers must live with – managing the equilibrium between two different purposes of schooling: honoring each child’s growth, their different ways of seeing the world, their grasp of skills and content at that moment in time of their development and, simultaneously, complying with the demand to sort and report  the “grade” or rank of their students.

Teachers spend huge amounts of time on grading. In some cases, they spend a good deal more time on grading than on planning engaging lessons and on looking at formative assessment results.  The latter often in particular gets short shrift, with easy to score “quizzes” serving as the primary indicator of a student’s understanding of key concepts and skills. Most teachers will say it’s just too time consuming to dig in on formative assessment --how each student is doing with their learning-- and so, over the years, quiz grades have become the coin of the realm. Visiting a state still struggling to gain some benefit from competency-based learning, I was struck by how quickly I heard teachers lurch from any discussion of the quality or characteristics of a student’s work to inserting a “grade”, and how easily they conflate grading with assessment.

As a remedy for these potential ills, and to help new White Mountain Co-Principal Patsy Ainsworth get her teaching staff grounded in the key issues and beliefs, we co-developed a series of professional conversations about assessment and grading. As Ainsworth, who takes the instructional lead, shared with staff in one of their meetings, the need for a revised Program of Studies for the high school made it more important than ever that the faculty have some strong agreement and beliefs about how to approach the complicated issues teachers inherit when they enter the field.

 Central to those professional development conversations has been what we’ve taken to calling our ERC “Assessment Board Game”.  Digging into the purposes behind formative and summative assessment can take us back to how we look at motivation, compliance, rewards, and reporting to multiple audiences. These can be incredibly complicated  topics as each of us recalls and examines our own experiences, attributes certain results to certain behaviors, some rooted in the psychology of learning but many not so much. Hence the value of the Board Game  --giving these topics their due fresh air.  

Teacher Leader Jeannine LaBounty, who has shouldered much of the professional development work with Ainsworth, shared that this work has been important and overdue at the Regional, “It not only allows teachers to examine their work but to come together and build consensus about grading practices, how we define and develop formative and summative assignments, and importantly how we inform and report to parents and the ‘permanent record’. This assessment work will really pay off because the conversation is around common topics and will have a direct impact on instructional practices at WMRHS.”  

Initially, the differences in opinion, definitions and assertions were striking. But by making time for recurring discussions, conducted in multiple, varying groups, and being sure to have each teacher share thoughts documented at each session, the more prevalent and enduring values began to emerge. A strong and clear statement of values and beliefs about assessment and grading, from the professional community, will undergird the Program of Studies. My guess is that people will take extra care as they wield that grading pen (or mouse) and enjoy greater confidence in answering a question from a student or parent.

The work I’ve seen firsthand at White Mountains has been incredibly rich and thoughtful. And it has reminded me of the perils –small and large—in not having these discussions. Fairness meters are part of a student’s tool kit, and they can help remind us of how students think about what honesty, integrity and accountability look like in the adult world, a civics education in its own right. School folks  deserve the chance to enjoy being part of a real collaborative community, one that takes learning seriously.

If you’d like to know more about how you can elevate your work in this arena, or how to use the Board Game, please contact us.  

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder, ERC

Support for First Year School Leaders: It Makes a Difference!

The research is abundant. The literature is clear. Coaching for leaders is common in all types of businesses and organizations, and it’s a difference maker. Actors, CEOs, athletes, musicians and physicians are just a few of the professions where having some kind of coaching support is the rule not the exception. This is not a new concept. Coaching has been recognized for decades as a key ingredient to a professional person’s growth and success. So, I’ve been puzzled for a while about why more school districts don’t provide a more robust support system, including an external coach, for new leaders that get hired into the district, people in critical roles. I wanted to start someplace that saw that need and acted on it.

The Natick (MA) Public Schools started providing external mentor/coaches for newly hired principals over a decade ago. Anna Nolin oversaw that work as either assistant superintendent or superintendent for most of those years. Natick is one of a few school districts in New England that provides a broad and consistent level of support for its newer leaders.

I discovered shortly after meeting her that Superintendent Nolin places a high value on supporting building leadership, especially in the crucial first year. Anna learned early in her career as both a teacher and a middle school principal the connections among student learning, excellence in teaching and having consistently strong building leadership. Even though we develop a systematic plan for principal support and training, I can be rocked by certain forces that may mean I can’t be as responsive as a principal might need”. She adds, “a strong coach can follow the principal’s growth as a learner and go deeper into their particular needs than I can as the supervising superintendent. Between the coach and the support of our Principal Professional Learning Community, I think our principals get a top-notch and comprehensive experience. And that’s what new administrators deserve!”

Michael Lewis, author of fifteen or so books, including Money Ball, The Blind Side, Liar’s Poker, and The Premonition), recently created the podcast, “Against the Rules”. He devoted the entire second season to the subject of coaching. Near the conclusion of the first episode of Season Two he summarizes the comments of one of his guests saying, “Funny thing is, the best coaches don’t leave you needing them!” To which I say, isn’t that the point of good coaching? Lewis’ persistent focus on the value of coaching rekindled my curiosity about what people take away from it, how it not only helps but endures, and why some people believe in and invest in it and others don’t heed the lessons.

So, over the past few months I set about checking in with six of Natick’s school leaders about their experiences being coached during their first year as principals. One of those six individuals had been a principal in another district before coming to Natick, the other five were first year, first time principals. These principals have now been in Natick anywhere from one to ten years.

For starters, to a person, these principals agreed that having a coach who was familiar with the district was a good thing. While an external coach brings a significant skillset with them when they enter a new school district the coaching advantage seems to increase as the coach becomes more knowledgeable about the district, local expectations and its professional culture. While the superintendent and her staff ware there to support growth and understanding around matters of policy and procedures, their coach was also able to support the new leaders in their assimilation of the district’s “mindset!.” This mindset was really the culture of leadership in the district. How principals supported each other and the teachers and students they served. It also was about how principals worked together to find solutions to all types of problems rather than struggling alone in the isolation of their individual schools.

There was also unanimity among the principals about the notion that having a confidential coach who could be trusted with their most daunting challenges and biggest fears was the essential ingredient in growing a relationship. The principals most frequently cited things like, “having an objective sounding board on difficult parent and staff issues” was key to their successes during their first year. As one principal shared, “My coach shared her viewpoints, but also asked me pointed questions to help me sort through possible solutions and thinking through the implications of differing scenarios. That weighing and sorting, in a safe space, helped me grow more confident in my own decisiveness.”  Another principal referred to that process as the “gradual release of responsibility” that was similar to the teacher/student relationship over the course of a school year. 

Anna Nolin
Natick MA Superintendent of Schools

As a veteran coach, I get asked routinely about the potential for confusion or conflict when a principal has both a boss (the superintendent) and a confidential coach. So I wanted to ask the principals I checked in with, had they experienced any situations where this resulted in some kind of conflict for them? The replies were clear and  unanimous. Nothing negative or vexing ever arose from that context. One principal reflected that sometimes there were different opinions coming from the coach and the superintendent but he, “found these differences interesting and thought-provoking” and helpful in coming up with good solutions to problems.” Another explained that she, “used her time with her coach to think out loud, formulate thoughts and responses to specific situations and then be better able to explain her action plan to the superintendent and others.”

I was also curious about the academic training they received in becoming a principal versus their learning within a coaching relationship. Again, the responses were consistent. One commented, “Graduate school learning and licensure programs were strong in the theoretical aspects of leading a school but having a coach in my corner who I could call whenever the going got tough was hands-down the most valuable tool in my tool box!” Another compared the difference to that of a college student preparing to be a teacher. “Some of the things I learned in college were helpful, but my learning in the trenches of student teaching was by far more important to my development.”

Each principal could identify significant new learning during their year in a coaching relationship. Although these learnings varied by individual and situations, each principal felt that she/he had grown in some consistent and important domains: instructional leadership, confidence, being clear and consistent, listening skills, having difficult conversations, asking good questions and being the advocate for children in their building.

These overwhelmingly positive conversations with principals led me back to the question of why Natick commits to such a robust plan for supporting new leaders that not only involves coaching but also ongoing membership in a principals’ PLC group? When I asked Supt. Nolin how coaching for principals compliments Natick’s district priorities she responded, “A core value of mine is that every educator deserves to be coached if they are open to it. Coaches provide a safe learning environment that is not impacted by the evaluator/supervisor to principal relationship. She explained further that her school committee, “knows that we have a mentoring ethic within the district and that we invest highly in teamwork.” Furthermore, “I also provide internal mentors to all new principals regardless of certification (licensing) status. The outcomes are consistently powerful and lead to principal retention.”

I know that school districts take a variety of approaches to onboarding new principals: in district colleague mentoring, principal PLC groups, regional role alike groups, leadership seminars and personal external coaches. But Natick’s comprehensive plan for supporting new school leaders stands out in the way it includes most of these activities for each and every principal and the district’s success at growing, recruiting and retaining principals  --the end result of Anna Nolin’s thoughtful leadership.

A special thanks to the following Natick Public School Leaders: Anna Nolin, Karen Ghilani, Mary Beth Kinkead, Aiden McCann, Jodie Cohen & Jordan Hoffman (now a principal in Wellesley, MA). You each have helped me become a better coach and I would not have been able to write this article without your help.

Nature-based Programming in New Mexico? A “natural”. A Biophilia Symposium Brings School Partners Together to Dream

People across New Mexico know and appreciate their outdoors, and they covet their time in the natural world. There’s a deep and historical understanding. That sentiment helped to drive the planning and activities at a late September Symposium on Biophilic Programming. The event was hosted by the dynamic Albuquerque Sign Language Academy (ASLA) a front-runner in the NM education sector across the domains of programming, wellness, and policy.

ASLA is successfully pursuing a growing number of partners and collaborators who offer different opportunities to connect students and families to a literal world of outdoor activities. A number of dignitaries representing Bernalillo County, New Mexico Highlands University, the University of California Los Angeles, Harvard University, and various outdoor education groups in New Mexico were in attendance. A key goal for the symposium was to connect those people and organizations in dreaming about new ways to expand and make the most of what the world is coming to understand about “biophilic” programming.

Longstanding  ASLA Executive Director -and parent to two students- Rafe Martinez welcomed the two dozen participants with an acknowledgement similar to the above -- that is, that people in New Mexico bear intimate relationships with the land, sky, and other species and that “modern New Mexico” retains a culture of appreciation of and deep emersion in the natural environment. He went on to cite the state’s growing commitment to stewarding the natural resources and to making them increasingly a part of all student’s school day, another prime motivation for the Symposium. In attendance along with partners and invited guests were the ASLA Leadership Team and select staff members.

At that point, Martinez handed the program over to two longtime friends of the school who designed and facilitated the event:  Kristina Lamour Sansone, founder of Design Instinct Learning and ERC Co-Founder, Dr. Larry Myatt.  Myatt began with a reference to E.O. Wilson, who in the 1980’s proposed the possibility that the deep affiliations humans have with other life forms and nature as a whole are rooted in our human biology. Wilson’s work helped to cement its standing among behavioral and natural scientists and thinkers, and provided many of the possibilities for today’s intensifying “re-launch” of biophilia.

Myatt then offered an explanation for this recent surge in interest in the education sector: an urgent and intensifying quest for more therapeutic programming to cope with the mental health crisis schools are facing Link to ERC mental health blog; a hopeful, initial effort to reverse a decade of growing student disinterest in classroom learning and its causal effects on chronic flat achievement; and third, accelerating research, on an international level, of a wide range of intellectual and social-emotional benefits from biophilic programming. 

Myatt then introduced Lamour Sansone whose work linking design principles with teaching and learning strategies has a long track record of success in engaging students and their teachers. Lamour Sansone welcomed the audience to a reflective journey, a succession of eye-catching, salient images symbolically recounting our human journey from the oceans to our present Anthropocene dominance. 

She prompted the audience to let themselves “go deep” into memories and experience, sensory recollections and preferences, and own mental imagery, a 15-minute “deep dive” into our conscious -and sub-conscious- ties to the natural world.

Following the “image journey” participants gathered in virtual groups of 4/5 to first share their reflections on the slides, and then to pose ideas for collaboration and initiatives built on the collective resources and possibilities “in the room”. People in those groups had little trouble and clear enjoyment in recalling a host of experiences, learning, and discovery from and in natural settings, paving the way for energetic conversations about what might be possible

Bringing the audience back together, Myatt facilitated the sharing of comments and ideas from the different groups, a summary of which will be shared by ASLA soon, and closed out with a brief set of slides featuring a host of rigorous learning activities that addressed the question, “is this stuff academic??”  In addition to those examples, Dr. Rebecca Gotlieb from the University of California Los Angeles Department of Neuroscience helped lay to rest the arcane idea that “academic” or intelllectual learning is different and apart of feeling, emotions and developmental growth, saying “from a neuro perceptive, the social, emotional, and cognitive are intimately entwined”.

As the event neared completion, ED Martinez introduced Dan Caruso, an architect with RMKM, based in Albuquerque, who shared his firm’s three-dimensional drawings of ASLA’s pending new facility. Groundbreaking is scheduled for January for a structure that will embrace tenets of Biophilic Design and intimacy with natural elements.

As mentioned, in addition to Dr. Gotlieb, other attendees from beyond New Mexico were Rachel Kolb, scholar, writer, and disability advocate and  Junior Fellow at Harvard University and Dr. Katrina Kennett, an ERC Consulting Practitioner and faculty member at University of Montana Western with education students and in educational technology. In closing, Martinez thanked participants, with a promise that this gathering was only a first step in exploring biophilic programming for the ASLA community and the many possible collaborations among this group and others.

Note: If you’re interested in exploring authentic biophilic programming possibilities and connections, feel free to contact Katrina@educationresourcesconsortium.org and or Kristina Lamour Sansone at Kristina@designeducator.com

Bringing Their Best

This past year was not an easy one for school people. “Recovery” from COVID was slow and complicated, getting back into a groove with frequent disruptions and plenty of uncertainties. Returning students brought complicated social and academic challenges as schools everywhere struggled to adapt to the social-emotional load. Just putting one foot in front of the other, as they say, was all too typical in many schools and districts. Often times, important pre-COVID plans that had been postponed were more or less abandoned. School leaders struggled to help teachers emerge from an in/out of school imbalance, an unsettling remote world, to get back to the relationships and engaging teaching that young people rightfully demand.

A key factor I’ve heard over and over that contributes to the malaise is that we’re repeating ourselves -in our instructional practices, in our planning, in our professional development. People see the future as resembling the recent past and its hard to find leaders stepping up, looking, daring to try something new.  In many places, it’s been hard to take in the levels of demoralization, even with people I have known to be hopeful and future-oriented. Often, it’s been downright discouraging.

I needed some uplift and decided it was time to follow my own advice for leaders I work with --let’s look for the bright spots, the big ideas, and the inspiring people among us.

Sure enough, it turned out to be easy to find four people who bring their best every day –Dan Hubacz, Tony Spagnuolo, Gabe Cordova, and Kimberly Brownell. Here are their stories in brief. They’re worth a read and I hope they can inspire you and help you to find the “stars” in your own school orbit.

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DAN HUBACZ: CONNECTING TO THE WORLD

When I met Dan Hubacz, he was a rough-and-ready science teacher. A climber and outdoorsman, a student of rocks, glaciers, water and the forces that shape their interactions and results. Dan was a new addition to a STEAM team I was coaching in a high school in up-country New Hampshire. I remember from the start that he puzzled in a good way over big-questions and issues, mysteries we learned to call them, but he could also “go granular”,  designing detailed yet flexible plans for activities that engage students and connect them to the world beyond the classroom.

Dan was also naturally interested in forming relationships with students as people, an asset that makes a big difference in so many ways. Dan is an avid reader, a student of a broad variety of topics, and to me, the quintessential “adult learner”, as the phrase goes. As we know, being open to and enjoying learning across the professional (and one might add, human) life span is a sure indicator of success and high performance.

Dan Hubacz with ERC coach, Dr. Katrina Kennett

The next thing I know, he was starting to help three students build a robot from a discarded wheel-chair after school (and often at lunch), building a core of inspired learners who dove in to the concepts of robotics and its hands-on work, not all of whom were quite as eager in traditional, sit-and-listen classrooms. Soon he was leading an informal club, meaning there was no real budget or school recognition going into the effort. With a STEAM colleague, they gave volunteer after-school time and began to connect their small but growing team to regional websites and activities. As it gained momentum, school administration gave the robotics team some formal recognition and funding to allow them to be a part of FIRST Robotics competitions and activities.

Meanwhile, Dan was also exploring programming and related learning opportunities in science and industry. He taught himself how to code and did some certificate work, and not too long after, as if by some magic of the technology learning gods and goddesses, a CTE position opened up at the school. Dan was clearly the man for the job. He hustled to make sure of acquiring the technical requirements for the job and immersed himself in the CTE world and what it had to offer him and his students. Bringing all his knowledge of science and math into his new domain, he jumped into a new world of programming with both feet.

That summer when he relocated to a new room in the CTE wing, he found the space dusty and largely barren of working programming equipment, but with some tables and boxes of unused devices. On his own time and with the help of a few friends and colleagues his space, although hardly complete, was largely up and running for the opening of school. Dan wasted no time in connecting concepts and skills in programming with opportunities for his students to put them into action. He worked with a local STEM outreach provider, White Mountains Science, Inc. to connect with Arduino and use his classroom as a test bed for IoT hardware and software in an education setting. 

Dan and his students designed, prototyped, and implemented a “Smart Greenhouse” at the school with the goal of using technology to improve their school community.  This project was unique in the experience of Arduino and pushed their expectations of educational uses for the IoT boards from lab projects into permanent installments mimicking professional applications. As a result of the general excitement around this project he, his school and students demonstrated and interacted with a world-wide network. Presenting to a virtual international conference of educators hosted by Pitsco Education and local partners and schools.  His students were also able to provide feedback to Arduino talking directly with their engineers and software designers, from across Europe.  One of the most exciting moments was when Dan’s students invited the Arduino folks in Italy to adjust lighting and climate in the school’s greenhouse, located down the wing from his own room, through the IoT dashboard. Check it out: https://www.arduino.cc/cloud/building-automated-greenhouse.

His students also presented their work in a bevy of local events, learning how to organize and display their work at a high level and demonstrating to community partners what could be accomplished for their dollars, both in terms of human capital and workforce readiness. Dan invited collaborators from the education and business fields to tune and view his student’s work, a Tufts University graduate student planning to implement a similar project, among others. This school year’s finale was his students' involvement, on their own and his summer leisure time, in creating the Farmbot Exhibit at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.

Dan is the kind of person you’d want to take your students’ learning, your colleagues’ enthusiasm, and your school community to the next level – a level of excellence. Here’s to someone who kept moving and learning through the pandemic and who shows what is possible.

Note: Dan will be at St. Johnsbury Academy (VT) starting this fall. Email me here for a connection: larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org

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TONY SPAGNUOLO: ALWAYS ON THE MOVE

Tony Spagnuolo is in his fifth or sixth, some say seventh career. And some middle school students in Central Falls, RI have become the big winners. After stellar careers and recognition in a range of fields, including a major position in the New England dairy industry, he made the move to public education, wanting to serve young people and to capitalize on a wealth of knowledge and experience in science and nature studies.

In order to join the teaching ranks, Tony did the “going back to school” thing to gain the licensure he needed, absorbing key concepts and frameworks for becoming a solid teacher. He threw himself into it,  relishing a chance to be a student again and found as much pleasure in art and design (things he has always kept up in his spare time) as he did in courses about teaching methods and materials. Once he had the degree and the licensure he began a series of settings that ultimately led him to Central Falls.

Tony Spagnuolo

Part of a military family, Tony lived in many places growing up, something that may have contributed to his ability to fit in while still being true to himself. His youth was spent all around New England, mostly in Vermont, some in Maine, where being outside in nature and on the playing fields contributed to his love of animals, skiing and snowboarding, all sports, and just being out in the fresh air. Criss-crossing New England in his 20’s, he worked in the glass industry, outdoor education, youth services, retail, and more, before signing on to help one of the large regional dairies to modernize and grow. He spent a long, upwardly-bound career learning and modifying key aspects of that industry, all the while finding time to coach youth soccer at many age and competition levels.

To know Tony is to be amazed at his energy. He’s always on the move. A multi-sport athlete, Spagnuolo become a fixture in youth soccer in RI and beyond for years. Still, these days, summer always finds him instructing at soccer camps, just as afternoons and evenings during the school year have him coaching clubs and doing clinics, finishing just in time to sit and make sure his lessons are ready for the next day. He takes evening time to find a short video to make topics come alive, or group task to put kids together for something hands-on.

He pays particular attention to the many new learners of English and Central Falls has many of them. He took some courses to learn Spanish, pays regular visits to Spanish-English glossaries and prints them for his new learners of English. Often times he reviews assignments for the next day first in English, then in Spanish, inviting students to correct or add to his version.

Another of the things I’ve learned that makes Tony special in school is his strong belief that positive behaviors and students supporting each other are as important as school lessons, probably more so. He’s a walking “character education” class. Leading by example, he takes a personal interest in young people and their outside-of-school lives and background, even with the large classes that are routine in the district. He is quick to connect kids with each other for social as well as academic support and it’s no surprise that during lunch and after school his room is crowded with kids.

Tony routinely forgoes a quieter lunch in the teacher’s room or on the patio to make his room a gathering place for students. The room buzzes, almost as full as his classes. They may be there to work on the model racing cars they build with him to learn physics concepts, to take care of the fish, rabbits, gerbils, turtles, hamsters, and other wildlife that he has rescued or grown at his home, or just to be around him, to enjoy his positive energy and the interest he shows in each and every student. With “Mr. Spags”, you earn that attention by being a good citizen and supporting other students. His love of animals comes through and spreads among the young people, whose new urban environment may differ from where they grew up in another country.

These are not easy times to be a teacher, and Tony likely faces more challenges than most by virtue of his setting. But, he is rock solid, a great colleague, and the kind of teacher that you’d want for your own youngsters. Thanks to good fortune, our field gained a role model and a great contributor.  

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GABE CORDOVA: A GROWTH MINDSET

I’ve been working on and off with the Albuquerque Sign Language Academy for almost ten years. I met Executive Director Rafe Martinez when he was Dean of Student Support at a small re-engagement high school in the Duke City. I followed him to a new job and have been a fan and friend ever since.

That new job was at the Sign Language Academy, ASLA is its often known, a tuition-free public charter school with a history of breaking away from unsatisfying status quo situations and clearing new ground. The school was created by progressive educators and parents and caregivers of deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing children who wanted an option that would allow families to remain together and thrive.

Gabe Cordova

As a certified ASL-English dual language school, they provide direct instruction in American Sign Language to all students, resting on a strong belief that American Sign Language has a deep power to unify people and improve quality of life. In a unique move that builds on their beliefs, the school has chosen to offer a rich, side-by-side experience for students with hearing challenges as well as for others who could choose a traditional classroom, with a one-to-one ratio of deaf to hearing students Ninety-five percent of ASLA students have a link to the deaf community, either by being deaf or hard of hearing themselves or by having a deaf sibling, parent, cousin, or other family members.

The Albuquerque Sign Language Academy is a special and demanding setting. I don’t know of a more hard-working school anywhere. One of the people whose job it is to promote a healthy culture and solid social-emotional care is Gabe Cordova, Coordinator of Student Support, now in his third year. Having come out of a state university with a B.S. in psychology and a Master’s in clinical social work, Gabe first signed on with the Department of Children, Youth, and Families. As fortune might dictate, in that graduate work he also dug into American Sign Language, leading to an internship at ASLA, a part of cementing his social work degree. Being a local guy interested in helping others, he gravitated toward the ASLA vision that includes mental health and other support services as fundamental parts of the design.

He also was drawn in particular to the notion of taking a hard look at antiquated practices in “traditional school” and the prevailing traditions for deaf and hard-of-hearing.  ASLA struck him as different in the school’s  encouragement of all staff to bring new expertise and try different approaches, recognizing something special, that ASLA goes out of its way to foster a growth mindset in the staff, as well as the students. Gabe is quick to express his commitment to the school’s mission and he’s not shy about his gratitude for being called on to serve the ASLA community, starting with the students and extending to the faculty and caregivers.

Cordova’s Student Support Team helps with interventions for individual students, provides classroom support, and consults with academic staff about a range of behavioral and motivational issues as they arise. Another big part of his work at ASLA is to help employ an array of data that includes robust qualitative subsets other schools might miss. This includes both the PEAR Institute HSA and a self-developed functional assessment, called the FQSS, to help shed additional light on the social emotional status of students, their outlook on the world, their school, and their learning. Integrating academics with mental and behavioral health provides unique insights. As a new leader, Gabe promotes the idea of giving students a voice in advocating for their own needs, personal or academic.

Not surprisingly, he’s also a fan of the side-by-side method of programming, having hearing and Deaf/HH students learning together, arguing that the best way to teach multiculturalism is to immerse students in the vast array of experiences that will be their lifestyle. His approach, and the school’s, is that D/HH students will need to learn to navigate a world that will not always accommodate them as it should, and that hearing students will benefit from learning how to accommodate the needs of others. By truly embracing a growth mindset, something many schools proclaim but too seldom live out, these young people can make their world a better place.

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KIM BROWNELL: A NATURAL FIT

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of being invited by then-Superintendent Ken Facin, a superb public educator, to help him make his district’s schools as safe and supportive as possible for students of all ages to develop as thoughtful, alert, and kind young people. Part of my involvement there was to work with a team of teachers and counselors to assess how some possible new programming could help adults get to know students more deeply, serving as a preventative layer and supporting them through challenges and growth.

I recalled specifically how one of the teachers often seemed to put it all together, connecting ideas, drawing conclusions, broaching hard topics when necessary, and suggesting action steps.  She understood that social/emotional and intellectual growth were not distinct from each other, that building relationships with students should not be optional but rather essential, and that a school that was willing to reflect, change, and grow was a healthy school, good for all involved. So, I was not altogether surprised when that teacher, Kimberly Brownell, reached out to me a year later asking for advice on how to grow into a leadership position. We spent almost a year, her doing by far the brunt of the work, researching and connecting with a variety of school leadership programs in the northeast and helping to select the right one.

As I advocated for her as a graduate student, I was taken with her drive to contribute, to make schools a better place, and her openness to new ideas and possibilities. I learned that she, in a rather brief time span, had served in a variety of school settings, traditional and alternative, and carried forward lessons learned about kids, teaching, working with colleagues, and engaging families. Before too long, she was completing her internship for her licensure and our conversation moved on to teaching practices, youth development, and leadership essentials. Kim always seemed to find the core of the arguments, and what I particularly appreciate, is her willingness to challenge the status quo, exploring why we often continue to do things in schools that we don’t really look at, even if they don’t work that well.

As she completed her internship, conducting internal and external research and presenting to the district board, it was clear to me that she was ready to find and step into a school administrative position. She began a quiet search. Little did either of us know that in a nearby district a new superintendent was looking for a new 6-12 school principal.  It seemed a big step, but I viewed her as more ready than many, and more of a natural fit character-wise, to join the principalship right away. We spent some time anticipating questions she might be asked, her take-away’s from her varying experiences and her coursework, and her vision for a good school.  She spent time daily preparing, researching and visiting the community and its schools, and genuinely probing for how she could help the school grow while building on its existing assets and culture.

Kim Brownell

Well, she got the job, obviously convincing a new and intent audience that she had the heart and mind for the work. I’ve had the pleasure of coaching her this past school year, a year full of listening and watching, but also a year of doing new things, of thinking differently when needed, and in following through with new activities and new conversations. Kim has a way of getting people to think hard, but not with a sense of worry. Her default position is one of supporting and reassuring, but also being clear that getting better is part of her leadership roadmap

One of the first investments that paid off was building out and refreshing a Student Support Team. What could be more valuable in a pandemic than taking good care of people, and supporting the caregivers charged with that work? Meeting regularly, assessing systems and practices, and leading activities with colleagues, that team takes pride in being a vital part of school culture and capacity. Wellness is an achievement strategy, so goes the ERC mantra, and her team is striving to make that a reality.

Another milestone for Kim and her school was a first-of-its-kind activity: an assembly where rather than sitting and listening to the rules and consequences, students at each grade level were invited to discuss and comment on those rules, climate, and things they might want to keep or change. Kim was concerned that it be a truly authentic activity, with students speaking their mind, yet she understood that it was new for them, and for the school’s adults, and it needed to be safe and well-organized. Students representing themselves poorly could discourage future chances while having a “canned” activity would send the message to students that adults always know best.  Kim and I spent almost a month, first imagining the event at its best --its most exciting and engaging-- then taking time to think about what could go wrong, and finally coming back to create a plan that elevated the activity into something special. That way of thinking and planning I owe to my work with two giants of school life and leadership, Vito Perrone and Roland Barth. Don’t let the worries rule the day. Always come back to the initial vision of excitement and uplift, and let that be the target.

A good deal of communication about the event and trouble-shooting for a full day of “student voice” filled the next weeks for us. I found myself wondering on the day of the event how something so unfamiliar would go, one orchestrated by a first-time principal, one new to the school as well. It turns out that, with help from the Student Support Team and Teacher Leaders, the event, actually seven different events grade by grade, was a big hit. Students, initially surprised at such an opportunity, were thoughtful and engaged listeners and fully represented how they viewed key issues that shape school life. They asked for more such activities, and Kim’s debrief with teachers also included positive reviews and requests for more. Teachers who were in the habit of paying attention to student voice said that the event affirmed that way of engaging. Others offered support for more listening to students on problem-solving and quality of life. Not long after, some of the school handbook’s arcane rules were modified and endorsed, with Kim being careful to keep communications with all stakeholders regular and descriptive. As a rule, she makes sure that she is letting everyone know what’s going on, as well as committing to careful planning and follow-through, secrets to success in administration.

Despite a grueling schedule, Kim stays remarkably positive and energetic, much of which I attribute to not just completing administrative tasks and keeping the trains running, but really looking and listening, and making time for not shying away from hard questions, new ideas and exploration. She was, it seems, built for this job.

A first-year principal can be great, its clear. No one starts out as a veteran principal. School leadership is not one-size-fits-all. Schools at different times need a healer, a listener, a manager, a scientist, a cheerleader, a model teacher, maybe a brother or sister, mom or pop. All schools are different, year to year, sometimes month to month. A good fit is essential --something we don’t pay enough attention to in our leadership searches. When it happens, watching it unfurl, as it seems is underway for Kim, for her students, families, and professionals, is a beautiful thing.    

NOTE: I’m happy to connect you to Kim – just email me at larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org.

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Coaching for school and district leaders and teams is a specialty. It makes a big difference. Come on down!!

The school mental health crisis: gaining a foothold

I opened my newspaper this morning, yet again, to school news that isn’t news to me.

The Boston Globe today reported, “School leaders nationwide have again reported a general uptick in discipline and behavior issues, including fighting and bullying, since students returned to full-time, in-person school following two years of disruption. The troubling trend has been linked to the mental health toll of the pandemic and to social development delays due to student’s extensive recent isolation.”

For some, it seems to have happened rather suddenly, perhaps a by-product of COVID. But if you are a veteran educator you know that the change began to happen almost a generation ago. Schools have now become a --perhaps the-- locus of community mental health issues. This past year, counselors in schools where we work reported sexual aggression and related assaults up by 28%, self-harm by almost 20%, chronic absenteeism up by over 20%, bullying and cyber-stalking up 30%, self-referrals for counseling up by 25%, and most sadly, a stark rise in attempted and successful, suicides.

How do we get our heads around this? Here are three immediate take-away’s:

The first is recognizing that we’re in a seriously dangerous moment for schools and young people. When school-age mental health issues are substantial enough for the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare a national emergency, where does that leave our schools? Where are school and community leaders even talking about it? It needs to move to the top of every meeting agendas. Its far worse than most people think.

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Second, we need to move beyond band-aids to begin an immediate and dramatic youth development and mental health retrofit for schools, and it’s a generational undertaking.

In-school responses to the issues mentioned above have been slow and inadequate. Emphasizing such things as “SEL” or Restorative Justice barely scratch the surface of what the situation demands. What “SEL” actually is remains different and mushy in every district, ranging from 45 minutes a week to “talk about feelings”, to a curriculum full of slides on compassion or bullying, to on-paper assessments of student mental health by teachers using an “outside provider’s” off-the shelf rubric. (I had to intervene in plans for such an activity in a school we work with!) A school culture shaped by Restorative Justice practices is a supremely worthy goal but its effectiveness is too often stunted by poor training and near-total lack of significant adult participation, showing that it cannot be parachuted successfully into school. We need deeper and better solutions for our new age: prevention, early warning, targeted responses, in and out-of-school partnerships are some elements of school readiness.

Third, schools and districts seem unable to organize around these issues --we need to mobilize and prepare school leaders for this new conversation. Years ago these phenomena seemed more apparent in low-income settings, where social determinants have long challenged families. Now, behavioral issues buffet virtually every school with striking intensity. Class and geography are no longer sufficient insulation to cyber bullying, orchestrated and videoed fights, and anxiety from the threat of weapons and active shooter drills. School principals rely on resources granted from above and are often unfamiliar in integrating such precious investments in ways that make a difference. Leaders have told us they worry that they will be seen as complaining if they raise such issues. That has got to change.  Its our most critical work and we need an all-hands-on-deck approach, convened by school leaders but involving the broadest possible audience.

There are no easy answers, no packaged solutions, none of the how-to guides we’ve become used to receiving about the other complicated issues that happen in school. By definition, this will be a DIY undertaking --a school-by-school, district-by-district, community-by-community effort, a generational change in how we think about supporting our young people. Its time to make this a priority and dig in to the challenge.

Larry Myatt, Co-Founder

ERC invites school and community leaders to connect with us and, in turn, with each other. We have a variety of free resources and experience in organizing these critical conversations. We also offer coaching support for public engagement, tools for assessing school capacity with essential qualitative methods, and professional development to make restorative practices and other approaches to behavior and climate far more effective.

Email us at wayne@educationresourcesconsortium.org or larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org.

Moving Math Forward: A Landmark Change Driven by Front-Line Teachers

I’ve been looking to do this story for a long time. I didn’t know where it would take place, if ever, or who the actors might be, and as I said, it’s been a long time coming. It just so happens that the good folks of White Mountains Regional High School in New Hampshire have helped me -and all of us- out. I’ll explain the key ingredients as I recount the story, but the short version is, finally, a public high school is taking on many of the issues that have wrecked the study of math for too many kids for too long. This rural school, located just above Franconia Notch in what’s known as NH’s North Country, is paving the way for others to follow suit, a story of potential national significance.

The context is perhaps best explained by stating simply that math is, well, ….. math. When that subject comes up, we know what we are likely to hear. “I’m not someone who did very well in math” or “I’m just not a math person.” Others confess, “I’ve always had math anxiety” or, “I had to take History of Math to get through college.”

We’ve made it ok for people to feel this way long ago, “Well, you really don’t need a lot of math in most jobs” or “you know, most math is really not related to the real world.” Do we notice that in almost every suburban mall we can find “math-nasiums”, those ubiquitous tutoring centers specializing in all levels of math? Are that really that many kids just not able to do math? Or is it something bigger? Check out some of  these topics:

• More kids fleeing math, right from the start: from Psychology Today, link here

• High-paying jobs for people who hate math, link here

• Math teachers aren’t the problem, link here

A major part of the math conundrum is Algebra I: the single most failed course in American high schools. It’s also the single biggest academic reason behind the huge dropout rate at community colleges. And it’s totally unnecessary. Algebra may be viewed as foundational to “formal” mathematics, but it’s not at all necessary for many important and useful forms of mathematical literacy. Statistics, probability and data analysis, for example, hallmarks of “functional thinking,” often come easily to many who cannot fathom abstract algebraic thinking, yet they remain beyond the reach of students who do not rise in our “traditional” math sequence. What’s ironic and rather maddening is that these are the very skills that business leaders have been asking for going on four decades, to the deaf ears of the education sector.

It’s not only that Algebra has been the bane of so many student’s school experience over time, but  we’ve overlooked the larger price we pay for squandering interest in math: limiting access to science, cramping our own STEM workforce pipeline, and relying on other countries to fill that gap. STEM  investments in K-12 public education remain consistent and substantial, but continue to show mediocre results because schools like to do more of what they’ve always done. If you’ve been following this topic, you’ll know that every year or two there is some logical outrage from a variety of sectors -such-as this 2011 piece in the NY Times-  but nothing has ever changed. The math elite just circle the wagons and wait for it all to subside.

Over this past year as COVID continued to impact schools, and federal money was becoming available, I was struck by the number of districts quickly, rather mindlessly, earmarking funds for yet another off-the-shelf math curriculum, combined with that old stand-by, “math coaching”. These were such wide-spread, knee-jerk responses to flat standardized test scores it amazed me that people weren’t raising their heads up, looking around and noticing, “hey, they’re flat everywhere! And they’ve been flat for years! It’s not just us here.”

Happily, that kind of noticing is just what happened at White Mountains. Veteran math educators, several of them new to the school began to question the wisdom of doing more of the same, living with the notion of too many kids foreclosing on math. What’s cool and really significant, is that neither did they want to overlook the many others who could soar higher in that subject but are limited by an approach that is traditional, but was never really good practice. That is front-line teacher leadership!

I’ve fortunately been privy to this work because ERC has been with the Regional for five years now. We’ve provided leadership and organizational coaching, brought in our Inquiry Tool Kit, and have been collaborating with both school and district leaders, looking at practices and outcomes.

“Doing more for more kids” has been the school’s de facto mission statement since I arrived there to help build an inquiry-based STE(A)M program that could go deeper than watery “PBL.” The ideas behind inquiry work spread, leading to more collaboration, new curricula, and a rising tide of teacher leadership. A generous grant from the Barr Foundation, the school’s second in four years, is a major indicator of the school’s commitment to innovation, the first step of which is a willingness to question the present realities and results of traditional practices. That’s precisely what happened with the math conversation.

This NH-bred change narrative began with a pre-COVID set of discussions about possible ways to spark more interest in math and science among students entering at ninth grade. One of the school’s dedicated collaborative planning rooms became a regular site for the intersection of veteran staff and new-to-WMRHS teachers. I was fortunate to be present for some of those discussions. That conversation, and the potent mix of perspectives and experiences, identified many aspects of the traditional curriculum that were not engaging for many students. The team of math and science teachers concluded that a framework of application, relevance, and interaction would serve students better in both the short and long terms. The teams advanced a proposal to design an inquiry-based, integrated Math/Science (MS) curriculum which was accepted by school and district administration and which is now in full swing at the school. A central idea of that MS strand is viewing math not as an isolated set of concepts foreign to other subjects, but math as a helpful and interesting tool of science.  

A key arrival at The Regional was veteran math educator Shane MacElhiney, one of a core group that has played a leading role in this story. Having been one of the central conversants in the high school’s move to an integrated Math/Science sequence, MacElhiney began to include more reflection on math results in team meetings he was asked to facilitate. Among others, the team included versatile Erica Hicks, and Jeannine LaBounty, an experienced math educator who also serves as a dynamic Teacher Leader, supporting faculty in developing inquiry strategies and reflecting on practice.

Shane MacElhiney

Slowly but surely the team’s collaborative conversations focused on performance data, including paying attention to their own experiences in teaching certain skills and concepts as well as what students had to say about the learning and the material. The team began to track concepts and activities that engaged students at a deeper level and which had greater relevance in career development of all kinds, outlining a list of changes that seemed to make good sense going forward. Several teachers also participated in the NH Spreadsheet Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by ERC and What If Math which helped teachers  think more broadly about functional thinking and cross-disciplinary activities to engage students. Concurrently, viewing math as a helpful tool of science logically pointed the teachers towards statistics and spreadsheets, concepts and tools used by most adults in a majority of work and domestic circumstances.

    Art Bardige

Another of the conversants was Art Bardige, a founder of What If Math in Cambridge, MA, who visited the school in 2019 and struck up friendships. Bardige, who might be called in many schools an “outside expert”, has at various times been an entrepreneur, designer, teacher, filmmaker, curriculum coordinator, university trustee, and for the past 40 years, a digital learning developer. He shared his philosophy with the math staff, the school administration, and with me:

“Much of the traditional math that we teach is obsolete. There is no serious reason for our kids to learn it. On the other hand, the math used in business, science and industry in the 21st century, is largely spreadsheet math, with functions as the primary math element and thus functional thinking—model building—as the essential method of problem solving. Recapturing the time spent today in classrooms on paper algorithm practice, we can open the way to focus on the future, preparing students to be problem solvers and to use functional thinking as an essential quantitative part of that process.”

The school’s math stuff was on to the same idea, including Susan Zielinski who arrived in 2020, attracted by the school’s dynamism and collaborative fuel. Zielinski is another mid-career math teacher with a variety of experiences and lots of intellectual energy. With these members, conversation about where and why math goes off track became more regular and focused. To my eye, these are folks who deeply understand curriculum and student learning, and are neither wedded to old ideas nor intimidated by tough questions about the math itself. They’re also people who understood the variables:  the intricacies and politics of college admissions, standardized test scores, parents’ hopes for their children, and the reluctance of policy makers to change things that are familiar and recognizable.

Susan Zielinski who joined

the Math faculty in 2020

Needless to say this story couldn’t have taken place without the involvement and attention of school principal Jacob Hess, who listened carefully, probed the data and the new approaches, and enlisted the support of Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Dr. Steve Nilhas. One of the dilemmas the team, and Hess, encountered was what to do about the old “geometry sandwich”, referring to the ossified

curriculum gauntlet math students must enter and endure, Algebra IGeometryAlgebra II. Such a smart yet potentially risky move against unexplored tradition needed vetting, which MacElhiney and LaBounty took on, engaging school leadership.

Thinking as a principal, Hess concluded, “ I wanted to move away from the ‘geometry sandwich’ for three main reasons. First, it’s boring and stale, and has been that way since I was a student. Second, when you look at the big picture, it has only seemed to serve the purpose of sorting ‘smart kids’ from ‘the other kids’,  a sorting that starts long before high school and which I’m not sure is helpful. The data are fully convincing that that approach does not serve a majority of our students well. Finally, and probably the biggest factor for me, is that the issues coming out of our discussions, and the ideas for a new, integrated Math 1-2-3, seem to check all of the boxes for ways to improve math education for all students. The right skills, the right topics, the right pedagogy to have our students ready for whatever they choose next.” Added Nilhas, “having a class that devotes so much time to such a narrow part of the math experience in particular, but also the overall learning experience, takes away from the kind of learning that is better for a far greater range of students, including our math high-performers.”

  Principal Jacob Hess

Following a host of internal critical reviews and reflection, plans proceeded to bring the idea to the school board’s curriculum review sub-committee. In that meeting, with the aid of a well-conceived PowerPoint and presentation strategy,  the team put forward that the primary goal of the new Math 1-2-3 was to elevate the applicable skills and content (raw data analysis, statistics, spreadsheets, basic functions, everyday proportional thinking, extending out to data-based journalism and media studies) while keeping only the minimum amount of the traditional yet largely inapplicable content. That content persists, said MacElhiney and Nilhas in the deliberations, because it’s a vestige of the SAT’s. What the team understood correctly is that the SATs have been one of our classic sorting instruments, one which persists in testing for a number of likely-to-never-be-seen items, yet whose influence is increasingly on the wane across the nation, as college admissions are roiled by decreasing enrollment.

Spreadsheets will be an important area of focus in the new approach as has been pointed out. In their discussions with Nilhas and the curriculum committee, the team pointed out their agreement with What If Math that spreadsheets change the name of the game. They are the tools students will use in the workplace so they should begin practice and familiarity in school. And spreadsheets are not just computational tools, but are powerful visualization and data science tools, employing functions and functional thinking to build and work with models essential to all STEM projects.

In the dialogue, the school/district team added, “we believe students will be more engaged, be more likely to stick with math, see science as a more inviting domain, and be far more ready for business, domestic and higher education setting with their spreadsheet skills. In reviewing their position with the PowerPoint, MacElhiney posed, “we’ll be able to look students in the eye and say what they are learning is relevant and applicable. And that they don’t have to see school as something they’re not good at because math and science are kind of closed off to them, and those represent a large chunk of what high school is. Plus, we fully expect, and data will support us, that high-achievers in math, and science, will fly even higher.”

The team’s presentation met with success and moved on toward inclusion in the district’s Program of Studies. It was a quiet yet energizing victory for the math team, the school, and especially, for the students.  LaBounty comments, “Moving forward, we’ll continue to encourage students who are looking to progress to the traditional end-of-high school math class --Calculus.” In the school’s recent history, she shared, Calculus classes have had increasingly low enrollment. She went on, “The new pathway will offer more student choice, and rigorous skills and content will be at the heart of it. That’s likely to increase the number of students who feel confident enough to dig into Calculus.”  There’s a rare, math win-win.

Teacher Leader Jeannine LaBounty with a student

I like the folks at White Mountains for a lot of reasons, but in this case one really stands out. They could have been like many schools, content to allow cadres of incoming students pass through four years of low-engagement and low expectations in math. Instead they’ve built new and engaging learning activities, integrated Math/Science, created a dynamic Humanities sequence, and now paved the way for the new Math 1-2-3 sequence. They knew it would take a lot of work, including the politics of public engagement, sharing their insider knowledge in understandable ways, and addressing the complications of changing something truly significant in a school, something that almost never happens.

The Spartan community of White Mountains worked hard to make important changes in math and have embarked on an exciting journey, one that will undoubtedly pay off for the students in both the short and long runs. Let’s hope other schools take notice and embark on something better for young people, the learning mission, and the study of math.

Larry Myatt,

Co-Founder, ERC

A New Grand Challenge Enriches Our Explorations

In 2018, the ERC team was pleased to be at the forefront of rethinking how we could organize student learning in our schools, i.e., the “curriculum”, moving away from a second-hand, 150-year old organizational approach to a more compelling way to engage young people. We explained one way that overdue change might be accomplished in this Grand Challenges newsletter. (Check out the comments people added at the bottom of that post, by the way.)

Since then our ERC Grand Challenges Network has provided teachers and students in a wide swath of schools with opportunities to explore urgent topics while offering meaningful choices to engage in deep learning. If you’re not familiar with these ideas, it’s worth repeating where the Challenges came from and why, and to note that now there has been a new and significant development.

The journey began when I had a breakthrough moment -the good fortune to read a brief yet especially thoughtful article, “Synergies”, by G. Wayne Clough, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. As Clough said at the time, “Our age has seen an explosion of experts in hundreds of disciplines, all creating huge amounts of specialized knowledge, which ricochets instantaneously around the world over the Internet.” How can we make sense of it all?

His insights into the urgency of organizing human thinking in a collective effort moved and excited me just as they had inspired his colleagues and collaborators at the Smithsonian. His notion was to have Smithsonian teams seek out like-minded global partners at universities, nonprofit organizations and government agencies willing to tackle high-risk/high-return problems  and address them collaboratively within a framework that could make a difference.

G. Wayne Clough

Finally, here was a way of making sense of our intellectual efforts, our potential as social and thinking creatures, and doing so in a way to make for a better planet and a better “civilization”.  The Grand Challenges presented themselves immediately to me as a framework for re-igniting the passion and curiosity kids bring to the early grades but which are mainly lost as they learn to conform and to please, solving tired, predetermined puzzles. Here is a framework that can help us dig out from under the glut of competencies, one-size-fits-all “do-now’s” and “exit tickets”, etc. that no one wants to come to grips with, but which continues to turn students off to classroom learning.

As initially conceived, the Challenges framework was four-fold:

·      Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe

·      Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet

·      Valuing World Cultures

·      Understanding the American Experience

Now, the Smithsonian has added a fifth Challenge to its framework for study and examination: “magnifying the  transformative power of the arts and design”. In their description, they ask us to explore “how the arts and design improve the lives of individuals and communities, how they have served as means for people and communities to express and share values and ideas, and how the creative process can help all people experience our shared humanity.”

Our many friends in the worlds of design and the arts are pleased and excited at this truly significant, perhaps overdue, recognition of those fields as central and vital, occupying a critical place in human learning and understanding. Interestingly, if one looks back at the long list of previous ERC Grand Challenge Network topics, it’s clear that many of them have honored and explored those very issues.  

Here are a few links to people doing interesting things in those worlds of design and

the arts:

• Kristina Lamour Sansone: designeducator.com/sources

• Oscar Palacio: oscarpalacio.net

• Terrapin Bright Green: terrapinbrightgreen.com/reports/14-patterns

• 516 ARTS:  516arts.org

We look forward to including this new Challenge in our network activities and conversations. The collective energy associated with this new development increases our hope that people can begin to slowly put aside our tired approach to “curriculum” and replace it with explorations and activities that use the Grand Challenges as a framework for learning, activities that erase some of the unhelpful boundaries and structures that inhibit passionate learning. Whether you use the Challenges in an existing unit of study, as a larger scaffold, as an alternating curriculum, or as your basic framework, you’ll be helping us move the dial.

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder,

Education Resources Consortium

Take a look at the full five Grand Challenges here: si.edu/about/mission

For more information or to be a part of the ERC Grand Challenges Network, email us at larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org.

Innovation in Action: Experts Explore a Working Model of a New and Different School

By Katrina Kennett

I’m told that former Boston school superintendent Michael Contompasis supplied the push for a fabulous event I had the honor of facilitating in late October. Contompasis, also a long-time Headmaster of the esteemed Boston Latin School, is quoted as saying, “Repeatedly stating the obvious, that schools are not working for too many of our students, has just not been sufficient. We need to present new mental models of the future of school.“  

Oscar Santos, Executive Director of CCE-Boston, took him at his word and joined in putting together an expansive group of thinkers for a deep look at what has been described as one the few innovative school prototypes to appear, the Vanguard Academy Design for Learning.TM  Participants were invited to join in critiquing the design elements of Vanguard, reading along with the story of a day in the life of “Zach”, a student at the school. Following a welcome from Santos, I explained the afternoon’s activities to the more than two dozen invited guests, including front line educators, district administrators, higher education deans, neuroscience researchers, writers, policy makers, and funders.

The core ideas for Vanguard have come from ERC Co-Founder Larry Myatt, who has been at serious school redesign since his involvement with Theodore Sizer’s Essential Schools movement. Along with ERC colleagues, me included, and with a host of researchers, teachers, engineers and private industry and STEM collaborators, Larry has ably “reversed engineered” to address persistent flaws in traditional school design that continue undermine learning and development. Link here.

Zach’s “day in the life” takes him, and us, through a typical school day. Typical for him, perhaps, but dramatically different than what American high school students have experienced for more than a century. A refreshing new curriculum approach draws Zach and his fellow students into urgent local and global issues, connecting with far-flung experts as well as local partners, and spawning deep, sustained  projects that emerge from their passions and curiosity. School days offer unique, flexible structures that support learning in differing student configurations with support from teachers who represent innovative, integrated knowledge and skill bases. Relationships, rituals and resources in the school make it a safe place, less prone to bullying and isolation, and free of a reliance on age-alike cohorts, as Zach says, “I like that here you almost always work with different age students, not just the kids you were with every year since kindergarten.”

Modules, lasting a week or two, provide chances for students to catch up and regain confidence in a particular skill or subject matter, while Accelerated Learning Labs connect students who are particularly enthused about an issue or subject matter, where they can “go deep” as Zach says, and keep a project going for months and even year to year. Outdated “Algebra I” has given way to spreadsheets, programming and functional thinking, and math now has a new and far more positive reputation. Technology, arts and design are continuously integrated into the schedule, rather than being siloed, and provide students opportunities in each area generally not available in a comprehensive high school “master schedule”.

As the event unfolded, after reading each section aloud, small breakout groups pursued three key questions – what’s different (from traditional schools)? What do we like about it? Is it better than what we have? Those small-group conversations were energetic and far-reaching, produced no shortage of differences from traditional “school”, and a series of resounding “yes” answers to “is it better than what we have?” Participants enjoyed diverse points of reference from group members from different professional domains and parts of the country.

After the third and final reading and analysis activity, each breakout group was asked to identify two changes they would want to make in schools as soon as possible that derive from the Vanguard prototype. Link here.

Here’s what their responses look like:

Link above: http://www.educationresourcesconsortium.org/grand-challenges-network

Mary Helen Immordino Yang, Director of the Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE) at the University of Southern California attended, joined by a colleague, Rebecca Gotlieb, educational neuroscience researcher at the University of California Los Angeles. Professor Immordino Yang provided a penultimate piece to the day with commentary linking key aspects of Vanguard with the growing body of research intended to guide changes in the student and teacher experience. (Of note, after the event, a conversation emerged among several of the participants, newly  dismayed at the number of things we do in school that in truth may be stressful and damaging, rather than helpful.)

Santos draw the event to a close by asking audience members for final thoughts, pledging more innovation events and conversations to come. Meanwhile, Contompasis concluded his experience as a part of the critique group, reiterating his assertion – “This was a major event, so many new possibilities. Proof that more than ever we need to present new mental models of the future of school, of schools that work. Vanguard does just that.”

After the event, Myatt was pleased, but noted he was not greatly surprised with the reactions and the depths of the critique. “These Vanguard elements appear in Zach’s story because they offer starkly preferable approaches to things we know work poorly in schools. Vanguard was a design exercise. And this prototype -not a “model”, he adds- can be and should be, adapted for different communities -their values, resources, and traditions- things that both matter and differ greatly. This is a “reciprocity” approach, intended to reframe the role of schools as places that enrich their communities, starting with being better places to learn for its young people.”

He cites the benefits of a long collaboration with Design Instinct Learning and the use of the ERC Design Studio tool with providing new insights and starting places, including “the ability to build upon, not  ‘end run’ around, what we’ve learned from Prof. Immordino and others from the neuroscience community over the past decade.”

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For more information on the event and/or on The Vanguard Academy Design For Learning TM,  email me at Katrina@educationresourcesconsortium.com.

Dr. Katrina Kennett is a Professor of Education at University of Montana Western and serves as a Consulting Practitioner. See her bio here.

EdHistory Project-Vol 3-Getting Teacher Evaluation Right

Greetings and welcome to Volume III of our EdHistory 101 Project, our periodic revisiting of key historical events, personalities  and perspectives that continue to shape our ideas of school. Knowing our nation’s educational history—the forces, beliefs, and language of other times—presents opportunities for us to reconsider the roles we need school to play for the social and intellectual well-being of our young people. It’s a way for us to assess the prevailing values, to re-frame our work and, with persistence, to re-imagine the systems, culture, the practices that cement the grammar of schooling.

In this edition Wayne Ogden looks back at the teacher evaluation mania of a decade ago, wonders what’s changed, and offers some wisdom we’ve been slow to take advantage of.

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I’ve  been moved to republish the core of an article I wrote some time ago for two main reasons.  The first is because there is a now a large, new generation of school administrators and teachers for whom teacher evaluation is a highly challenging craft endeavor. Second, because as a profession and as policy makers, we have yet to deal  with the long-standing dilemmas within this broad set of issues. In a recent survey, network principals in one New England state told us that, on a 1-to-10 scale, the effort, time and mental energy required to comply with teacher evaluation requirements was between 7-8 and its rewards in terms of actually improving practice and building culture were a 4 at best. 

So, for that newer generation of folks observing teaching and doing their best to support good practices, and for the policy people who think about these issues, here is an EdHistory Project update of my earlier piece.  I hope it’s helpful.  I’ve included my ten recommendations to help get it right. Read on.

 —Wayne

Where did the furor over teacher evaluation go? In 2012 it became the behemoth that overtook American schools. Now? It’s hardly on the radar screen. What happened?

To understand the trajectory, it’s important to recall that way back in 2001 Congress passed the “No Child Left Behind Act” with great fanfare and out of some desperation. Politicians and policy makers believed that something radical had to be done to improve our schools and rescue our economy from the ravages of a poorly educated workforce. When President Bush signed that act into law in early 2002 it was the most sweeping educational reform initiative since the days of President Lyndon Johnson. That law had bi-partisan support, promising radical changes in student performance and school accountability.

But a decade later at the mid-point of the first Obama administration, when students’ performance on standardized tests showed no substantial gain, our public schools again appeared resistant to improvement. Policy makers searched for the causes and teacher quality, understandably, came quickly to light. Studies from the New Teacher Project, among others, surfaced that school districts were habitually rating more than 90 percent of their teachers as “satisfactory”. Most districts also routinely failed to factor in performance in any way when making decisions about promotion, professional learning, pay scales, or termination.

In think tanks, and hence in Washington, the party line became, “it must be the teacher’s fault”, and its cousin, “why aren’t principals evaluating out those bad teachers?” The single-minded emphasis on testing as an achievement strategy begun with NCLB was supplemented by a new fixation on teacher evaluation and administrative management. Those of us in the business at that time –teachers, building and district administrators, and trainers- remember the flurry well.

The Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passed by Congress included roughly $115 billion in education spending, of which $4.35 billion was allotted for competitive state grants through a program called Race to the Top. This program encouraged states and districts to revamp their teacher and principal evaluation policies and to begin to use evaluation results in making personnel decisions. States and participating districts were to begin evaluating teachers and principals using multiple measures, including an emphasis on “student growth”. That term was, and remains, defined to mean a change in student achievement as measured on statewide assessments and other measures that were “comparable across schools and classrooms.” Under Education Secretary Arnie Duncan, those requirements and definitions were codified in subsequent grant competitions, beginning in 2011.

State legislators and education policymakers across the nation quickly proposed dramatic changes in areas that had long been viewed as immaterial. An article from Education Next cited that the number of states requiring objective measures of student achievement to be included in teacher evaluations nearly tripled from 2009 to 2015, and the number of states requiring districts to consider teacher evaluations in tenure decisions grew from 0 to 23 over that same period.

Strictly tying teacher evaluation, student performance, and merit pay provided an appealing formula for success. Many of our nation’s most prominent national and regional  funders and businesspeople jumped on the bandwagon of a compelling mental model. Substantial private money followed public funds in support of these notions. Huge amounts were spent on the development of “new and improved evaluation programs” and hundreds of millions more on professional development to train educators on how these new teacher accountability systems were going to work.

Virtually all other professional development activities ground to a halt for two years, perhaps more in some areas, as training of administrators and teachers to implement new evaluation instruments and management techniques swamped all other needs and plans. It became the singular focus of states, districts, schools and the associated educational professionals for three years. Finally our public schools were going to produce higher performing students.

So, what did all of this spending and fixation on accountability accomplish? As the studies and evidence has rolled in, to this day, not a great deal. But it’s important to begin by taking a broader look.  

School districts have struggled with teacher evaluation for years, showing limited progress in developing systems that actually result in instructional improvement and increased student learning. In a historical pattern, state departments of education regularly developed new models of teacher evaluation only to replace or embellish them every few years. In some states, teacher unions collaborated with their departments of education on new evaluation models only to retreat from them within a few years as they actually went into full-scale implementation. 

The way evaluations have played out in far too many schools and districts is that an evaluator, whose real expertise has become the area of administrative management, data gathering and reporting, budget development, family engagement or student affairs, announces a date at which time she/he will come to observe a teacher at work with the class, usually for a good chunk of a class, sometimes a whole “period”. Depending on the contractual/labor agreements, the teacher may or may not have submitted a plan of what would occur in the class. This “formal observation” is usually supplemented by a few more “informal”, i.e. un-announced visits, that are shorter in duration, and which may or may not provide the opportunity for more data gathering on the teacher’s performance.

What it can too often feel like at the school level is inauthentic and inadequate, at best, and bad opera at its worst --a pretend panorama of the teacher’s daily routines and practices, mired in forms, dates for discussions about the findings, replies, claims, and counter-claims, within which the essence of teacher performance and support thereof, diminishes substantially as the days go by. From the teacher standpoint, the process too often provides little insight into the real dilemmas of teaching, and little by way of getting at the nuanced formulas for sustaining energetic teaching and learning in demanding settings, made even more stressful by the layers of testing and test prep.

Part of the teacher quality conversation was computer billionaire and amateur education wonk Bill Gates, who was driven to try his hand at influencing the teacher evaluation game. If at the time you had visited the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, the Gates Foundation’s newly established thought center for work in this arena, you would have found that teacher quality was defined in terms of the ability of a teacher to “produce gains in student achievement”. The project, wishing to be viewed as expansive in their thinking about the metrics involved,  posed different ways to measure this ability. Along with direct measurement -the scores- there were alluded to a host of other indicators - observations, surveys, the occasional portfolio. But the core idea of teacher “effectiveness” remained defined as student achievement, and student achievement was and remains some sort of test performance.

Three years after an expenditure of more than 180 million (in 2012 dollars) in Gates Foundation and other funds, and an estimated 50 million dollar per year to implement and maintain the initiative, The Washington Post headlined, “Another Gates-funded education reform project, starting with mountains of cash and sky-high promises, is crashing to Earth”. A project in Hillsborough, Florida Public Schools was one of many throughout our country that focused on teacher evaluation as the path to improved student performance and better schools. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/03/bill-gates-spent-a-fortune-to-build-it-now-a-florida-school-system-is-getting-rid-of-it/ )

I don’t want to demean philanthropy in education. Hardly. We need all the help we can get. If its spent in the right places and the right ways. I want to highlight that when a government agency, a funder, or other well-intentioned people make what seem to be knee-jerk, simplistic reactions to highly complicated problems such as addressing the factors that will improve student learning, those initiatives are likely to fail. I’m reminded of a great quote from educator Dean Shareski: “I’m not anti-education policy. I’m anti-simple.” These are incredibly complicated issues with many flavors of history, economics, culture, and politics. As the old but elusive saying goes, complicated problems demand complicated solutions.

At least two of our nation’s largest school systems (Los Angeles and New York) and the media that served those metropolitan areas thought that publishing a ranking of teachers by their composite evaluation scores, politely called teacher data reports in NY, might do the trick (in the form of public humiliation). As scholar and researcher Linda Darling-Hammond noted at the time in a Phi Delta Kappan article, (link here) “a teacher’s effectiveness is determined by numerous school and non-school factors that a ‘value-added’ analysis typically doesn’t or can’t take into account. These might include variables such as the impact of peer culture, students’ prior teachers and schools, summer learning loss, access to tutors, and even the nature of the tests used to measure achievement.”

Those initiatives that were spawned under Race to the Top focused on the development of complex educator evaluation systems, relying on explicitly-written teacher performance rubrics. These rubrics employ intricately-crafted instructional elements describing all possible teaching behaviors arrayed on a rating grid, similar to the old-fashioned teacher checklist evaluations, now on steroids. Whereas older checklists simply referred to broad categories of instructional competence (e.g. classroom management, questioning techniques, use of higher order thinking skills, etc.) the new rubrics were intended to be both comprehensive and explicit in determining the “evidence” that would suggest a particular type of instructional strategy is “exemplary”, “proficient”, “needs improvement” or “unsatisfactory”. Such rubrics are available on the websites of almost every state’s public education department.

That type of educator evaluation system alleges that it draws upon the “science of teaching” to help inform and modernize efforts around instructional improvement. However, of significant note, one often-used rubric model was originally designed (see Charlotte Danielson) to foster the professional development of teachers and instructional improvement in a collegial environment, not to “judge” or “rate” a teacher as “competent” or “incompetent” for the purposes of hiring, firing, retention or promotion. And as my ERC colleague, Larry Myatt often says, the effectiveness of what teachers do in the classroom can more easily be understood and examined if we watch the students, not the minutiae of teacher behavior. The idea of teachers as the sole and dominant actors in any classroom setting is part of a century-old model –a paradigm hyper-focused on the culture of teaching. What we still need now, as then, is to understand the creation of a culture of learning and how the teacher’s role must change in a departure from the industrial values of content delivery.

 So, back to my initial question --why is getting teacher evaluation right still so difficult and elusive? Why have so many initiatives, tools, and procedures  failed to achieve their desired result? I believe that it’s because we begin the conversations with the wrong question. If we start with questions about judging teachers and their teaching, we’re already on an impossible path. We need to re-frame, and to ask ourselves, what it is that will lead us on the path to the best teacher growth and improvement? And how does that contribute to the best kinds of student learning? What conditions and practices will result in the instructional excellence that we all desire for our kids?

Here’s that same list of ten things I thought we should give a sustained try, and I still think they deserve a shot, in no particular order:

1: School districts must support and engage administrators to differentiate instructional leadership from operational functions. Principals who spend their time on bus schedules, budgets and bullies will never have adequate time to devote to developing and supporting master teachers around issues of instructional excellence. Districts can and should hire sufficient staff that doesn’t need advanced degrees, licensure, and big salaries to perform routine, non-academic tasks.

2: Beginning teachers should be apprenticed for a full school year to a master teacher in a co-teaching scenario (not as un understudy) for at least half of each school day. This “fellowship” would also include collaborating with other teachers in the school and district, looking at student and teacher work, discussing how best to address typical challenges and dilemmas of teaching. The other half of the day could be in full teaching service.

3: Fairly compensate master teachers at a higher level somewhat than their colleagues, but do not select them on the basis of seniority, rather as a result of thoughtful process involving administrative, peer and student feedback.

4: Master teachers should be become part of the school’s leadership team, involved in problem-solving, culture building and setting the institution’s course.

5: Schools must also judiciously hire corollary staff to free teachers from operational and “custodial” duties that distract them from their essential function as architects of learning, their students and their own.

6: Summers should include at least two weeks of pertinent, differentiated professional growth activities for teachers and districts. These high-quality collaborative growth activities must help to put to rest the one-size-fits-all teacher “PD” that changes focus and content each year based on the flimsy trends we’ve named above, often emanating from what the “district” thinks all teachers need.

7: A team of school leaders and administrators should be regularly observing teachers in all phases of their work (classrooms, student conferences, team meetings, etc.). No system of professional growth can work when someone is observed and a conversation convened only a few times per year. Administrators should engage with teachers in content areas to determine the kinds of routines, support, critique and provocation that are needed this year in this school. 

8: Require and assist teachers in soliciting and using student and parent feedback on a regular basis, as part of a broader conversation about how learning is taking place. The practice of gathering and using such significant qualitative data remains almost wholly absent in most districts.

9: Take a page from the world of art, design and architecture and develop faculty cultures where critique and feedback are positive, frequent and earnestly solicited, not seen as negative and unwelcome. Video recording and analysis of teaching and learning provides the perfect medium to discuss the subtleties of the craft, the instructional leader’s real work.

10: Provide every first and second-year school leader with an external coach. See my coaching new leaders (link here)

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Supporting teachers, including evaluating and discussing their work, are essential and powerful elements in a great schoolhouse. But it’s going to take an investment in helping schools become alive and responsive again, and policy-makers need to get out of the way if they can’t do better than the past twenty years. Rather than busying principals in getting rid of bad teachers, re-framing the issue as the need to support learning and those responsible for learning is critical, as is involving all parties in a conversation about the structural and organizational changes we need to make in our schools on behalf of children and families.

Wayne Ogden is co-founder of ERC, a former teacher, high school principal, and superintendent. He specializes in coaching school leaders and was a co-author of The Skillful Leader, a handbook for administrators in supporting improved teaching.

We’re hoping you’ll join our EdHistory 101 Project reading group. Or to form your own. We invite you to copy the link text to read and discuss it with colleagues, to make time to refresh our role as the intellectual hubs of our communities. Watch out, minds at work! 

Prior EdHistory Project 101 Volumes:

http://www.educationresourcesconsortium.org/news/2017/2/18/ellwood-cubberley-1868-1941

http://www.educationresourcesconsortium.org/news/2018/12/8/volume-2-erc-edhistory-101-project

Can We Fight Racism with S.T.E.A.M.?

ERC is proud to be a founding partner in The Reciprocity Project, a new community development and education movement, from the ground up.

This month we’re proud to feature a compelling interview by a pioneer and warrior in the fight to make career opportunities available to all students. Michael Dawson’s decade long campaign to redistribute the spectacular resources of Cambridge’s Kendall Square and to help grow young scientists, designers, thinkers, and activists, and has become legend.

Please join him in exploring:
Can We Fight Systemic Racism with S.T.E.A.M.?
with Michael Dawson | Founder, Executive Director of Innovators for Purpose

The Reciprocity Partners

Rethinking the Purpose of School: The Reciprocity Project

ERC Joins The Reciprocity Movement

We’re very proud to announce that ERC has joined the Reciprocity Project as a core partner.

What a great and deserving vision – that the primary role of public schools should be to make their communities healthier and more prosperous! Check it out.

For the full Reciprocity website, go here.

Wayne Ogden

Since I’ve been in the business of school -work that I’ve always loved- we’ve been trying to patch leaks in the system. We don't seem to make progress toward greater equity in public education partly because schools and their leaders have stuck trying to make incremental changes when attacking huge problems, and because the design of our schools is intended to advance only a certain portion of the students. Ringing in my head are words from Ted Sizer, "The reason nothing seems to change in schools is because in order for something to change, pretty much everything must change”. Well, I’ve been ready for pretty much everything to change. I’m hopeful for the Reciprocity Project because it has a great chance to accomplish that by changing the role of school ---beginning with what communities value, and organizing our schools to reflect that.

Larry Myatt

The Sal Khan quote above helps to explain why we’ve been stuck with an institution that repeatedly lets down so many of our students and families. So many schools are infused with racism, and designed to sort young people into social castes and corresponding opportunities, despite the heart and labor of those who work within its systems. We have to do what we can –finally- to disrupt a system that operates this way. Senge /Unpacking the Industrial Age School

The “reforms” of the past 25 years have done little or nothing to make it better, it’s just hard for decision-makers to admit it. Sal Khan is correct.

 The Reciprocity Project can become an anchor for people who see and experience the realities of inequitable schooling, a place where very different conversations happen, and where the focus is on addressing the needs of the community as stated BY the community. That’s what the Reciprocity Project is about.

Ready to reimagine your community’s school?

ERC February 2021 — “Principal Talk”

“If we were still principals, here’s what we’d be talking about….”

Wayne Ogden and Larry Myatt

Times are hard, and really stressful for school principals. We think about it a lot.

We each spent two decades in building leadership, during a time not long ago which we agree was more rewarding and do-able for school principals. That experience was core for both of us, we still talk and think like principals, and we both coach leaders and work with teachers in lots of places and on all kinds of adventures.

It’s clear that the job has changed. Way too much reporting, less room for creativity and more demand for “fidelity” and “accountability”, less psychic space for important influencing and a near total emphasis on implementation of others’ plans. No wonder principal applicant pools are down by as much as 40% and so many interims are at the helm.

Now, with COVID weighing on us, we hear lots of leaders at all levels pining for the way it was. They’re stressed and overburdened with demands for safety and hygiene. Parents have pretty much panned the remote instruction they see their kids getting. Meeting time is sparse, budgets are down for non-COVID stuff. Social determinants are wreaking havoc on so many families. Totally understandable to want to get back to the (now seen as) more relaxed traditional rhythms and activities of school.

Yep – it would be easy to say, “Yeah, I’m with you. Just bring on 2015.”

But that’s not our job. At least not if we want the best for our community.

Instead, we have to do our best to “hold” two ideas: people’s understandable craving for the familiar, the predictable --its human nature—we have to recognize and honor that. But a thoughtful leader right now is also trying to figure out how to remind people that we’re educating for “up around the bend”, where we can’t see the road that well. Kids after all are headed for that world, that new terrain, not for 2015. We didn’t see COVID coming, for example. We’ve had technology in our schools for 40 years but how did that work out? Its clear that “remote” is not going away, that we’re going to see the need for several different kinds of distance engagement.  We’re seeing, too, the diminishing role of the SAT and other tests amid dramatically shifting college admissions standards, along with the dramatic waning of standards and testing as a viable, helpful improvement strategy. Add to those a flurry of new trends and new demands in so many aspects of the “workplace”, regardless of the color of your collar.

We have to talk about these things -out loud and to several different groups.. We need parent’s agreement and support to educate their young people, mindful of yesterday, but towards a future around the bend. We need our teachers to see how their world is likely to be altered despite their own craving for the familiar. Boards, too --they’re well-intentioned but removed from the changing landscape of schooling. We can’t wait for departments of education and other bureaucracies to guide us, that’s for certain. They don’t see that as their job. When the pandemic ends, it’s not going to be 2015, and you’re probably thinking and talking about that if your head is above the sand.

Of course, part of getting the conversation ramped up is listening -really listening--to our communities. And not just to the usual folks, pushing for more AP, better test scores to support real estate values, or just the right teacher for each of their children. But to the quiet caregivers and families who are not usually on our calendars. To some of the young people who we don’t know well since they are not National Honor Society or star athletes. To the community activists who can seem to be a pain, but in whose words there are pearls of truth and things we wish we could address. To the quiet educators who linger after school or spend their lunch tutoring kids who need more. A lot of people are in pain right now. Our old-fashioned model of school has failed us in so many way. Its these people who can help us to identify the leaks in our boat and then its up to patch them.  

This is a time for leadership that extends beyond its positional authority. So, if we were still principals, here are three things we’d be talking about:

1- Your child’s school – pretty much every school—is now the locus of mental health- and it’s not built for it. Young people bring their emotional lives to school. Many traditional places in our communities where the ingredients of good mental health may have been noticed, maintained, or nurtured largely no longer do that work. Families, too, and the ways they operate are much different now from even two generations ago and COVID has further rocked the family equation. Psychologist Robert Evans’ early 2000’s warning about the dramatic need for a reframing of the home-school partnership has gone largely unheeded. Affluence is no guarantee of immunity from the stresses of modern adolescent development as can be seen from data on anxiety and depression, along with increased levels and variants of PTSD that young people carry to school in challenging economic settings.

Here’s a further twist: there’s growing agreement among the many schools we work with that about one out of about every six students not only would prefer not to be in school, but are doing better academically than when they’re in physical school. What does that tell us? Maybe they’re anxious, or they find it hard to learn in a noisy group of 25 or 30, or are bullied, or whatever. But what we are we learning from them that we can use when schools are fully open again?

An oft-cited Winter 2020 Yale Child Study Center study- pre-COVID- tells us that 75% of students describe high school as stressful, boring, or both, and not a place they want to be. Holy cow!  How can we possibly bear the social/emotional burden we’ve had to assume with the paltry resources and structures we’ve inherited from a model built generations ago?

Attentive leaders and their schools have begun a retrofit that will take time, money, heavy culture changing and new tools. We need to be talking about that with every audience we can. And, in house, we have to stop saying simply “SEL” or pronouncing it like “sell”, treating it like the flavor or the week or a vitamin that will address the issue. That trivializes the complicated work ahead. Call it wellness, good health, belongingness, social-emotional or youth development, resilience, not just “SEL”. We have to think bigger and get in gear to address the fact that, like it or not, schools are centers of mental health. Check out our Nine Elements of Social/Emotional Support poster. We help leaders and their teams work with it as a rubric to see how well their school is doing with that retrofit. If it hasn’t started at your school yet, its past time.  

2-How are we going to cope with the tidal wave of failure rates we’re seeing in so many places? We’ve spoken to some principals who have current “failure rates” of close to 50%. That’s not just course failure, that’s grade-to-grade passage failure, and graduation eligibility failure. A significant part of that failure is directly attributable to poor attendance. Principals relate how difficult it is to get students to attend classes when they are learning partially or fully remote mode. Add to that the number of students who are not engaged in the remote instructional motif, turned off by the unsophisticated, boring lessons they’re encountering as regular fare. Some families in high needs areas do not have adequate access to technology and internet access, or have to share limited technology with several children, while other parents simply don’t have the luxury of staying home or hiring someone to monitor their children’s learning during the day.

Some bureaucracies, think tanks and higher education centers will no doubt spend time and money developing algorithms to estimate “learning loss” and develop top-down strategies to re-order their curriculum standards, pacing guides and tests. Not helpful in the long run, we’d guess. But we do need to take action and we offer two steps in response to the “learning loss epidemic”. The first is to pay attention to one place most folks agree will be particularly damaging -the break-down of reading development among children in elementary school. That should become a huge priority everywhere it is recognized as a COVID-related phenomenon. All teachers should get bootstrap training in key reading strategies, guided by reliable but down-and-dirty assessments to pin-point where help is needed.

The other notion we espouse is for principals watching failure and disengagement rates soar to call out an “all-hands-on-deck” community strategy --mobilizing community centers, groups and clubs, local businesses, parents and retirees, anyone who can spare an hour a day or 2-3 hours a week. School “guidance” offices should suspend much of their reporting and recording activities and become command and tracking centers where students are sensitively matched to those who can help them with tutoring, reading, study skills, virtual internships, etc. Tight on engagement and personalized support, looser on traditional formats of “instruction”. Rather than worry about “grades” we should keep our eye on the real issues --keeping students supported and engaged in this crisis.

We’re aware of a growing number of efforts in several cities bringing together families, youth workers and activists organizing around what Pedro Noguera has called “the normalization of failure”. We’ve got a defunct model of school designed to sort kids, and now with help from COVID its doing that unfortunate job better than ever. Families and communities should be mobilizing against the status quo and we should be helping them.

3-School leaders, put your own oxygen mask on first –ask for good, regular coaching.

If there were ever a time when we needed to step up and support leaders, this is it. We are watching so many leaders go uncoached, and they and their schools are paying a price. High-quality coaching is not therapy, nor does having a coach imply that a principal has flaws or shortcomings. Good coaching provides customized opportunities for principals to think deeply about the many important decisions they must make, and having a skilled coach provides a chance for leaders to process ideas as they develop, and to get feedback from an expert confidant before an idea, initiative or piece of writing goes public. Time for the coaching relationship to prosper comes from time not wasted on mistakes and false starts. COVID has been a tsunami for so many schools, and a principal, a leader, struggling to stay above water -on her/his own- is a recipe for mediocrity at best.

The idea of superintendents coaching principals is one that we’ve seen meet with very limited success, one which more often flounders or evaporates as time passes. Most Superintendents simply do not have adequate time for effective coaching of school leaders, a particularly granular task, and even if time can be found, there exists an inherent conflict in the roles of confidential coach and a boss who evaluates her or his leaders. Given the extraordinarily challenging political, instructional and human relations issues they face, especially now with COVID and its myriad issues, principals need a dedicated, confidential coach from outside the organization who can be trusted to address a leader’s uncertainties, concerns and challenges in such an intense and complicated environment.

While some will resist spending to support their principals, more sophisticated decision-makers know that from Fortune 500 companies to politics, from professional sports to the fine and performing arts, highly successful leaders use coaches to help them excel at what they do. Seasoned school superintendents and smart boards make these strategic investments because they understand that organizations with strong leaders perform better with high-quality, dedicated coaching. Instead of arguing that “our school district just can’t afford” to hire external coaches for our leaders, we’d want them to take a longer view — in New England, for example, a typical three-year contract for a school leader with salary and benefits ranges from $400,000 to more than $700,000. A typical one-year contract for an external coach is roughly $12,000, a modest sum to ensure the success of a new principal, in particular given the potential for disruption and uncertainty with a leader’s departure, the time and cost of a new search process, and the impact on to student achievement and school culture. Our principals are under the gun. And, as we’ve said, it’s more than “getting back to normal”. We need not only to deal with the current challenges but to come out different and healthier. Again, If there were ever a time when we needed to step up and support leaders, this is it.

So, with these three issues in mind, as well as deep respect for the work you do, we invite school leaders to step up, and to start talking!

Wishing you the best in your work,

Wayne and Larry 

ERC Holiday Interview: Roberto Gonzalez, Founder and Executive Director, STEAM Box-Rhode Island

steamboxri.com

ERC: Hola, Roberto. You’re a super busy guy. Thanks for making time for us. Can we begin by having you tell me a little about the need, the ideas, the why behind STEAM Box Rhode Island?

Roberto: Of course. I think first, it's covering a deficit. Our youth, our particular youth, are from the urban core of Rhode Island. Particularly for girls in the sciences, there has been a huge gap. So for example, 57% of college graduates last year are girls. And I think 23 or 24% of incoming science jobs and technology jobs, were going to women. There's a huge discrepancy there.

 There's more women coming out of college and ready to join the workforce, but there's fewer women getting the jobs in science and technology. And that's exponential when you add to it the BIPOC students, the students of color. So I wanted to address those particular needs, and I wanted to do it through the skillsets and the things that I know. I am good at recruiting students, and I'm good at retaining students. And the reason is because I let them have voice and locus of control over their work.

So if I'm combining those two things, and we're putting a science lens on it, creating people who are ready to go and take those science jobs back tomorrow.

ERC: Why do you think that you get such good results with young people? Not to put words in your mouth, but are you representing something in your work that's different from what the school system is representing?

Roberto:: Yeah. Yeah. What I found is, the closer I work with the schools, the more I have to adhere to those antiquated systems. So the more distance that I can put between me and the schools, unfortunately, that's where I have to meet the students. That's where the students are. That's where they congregate. That's where they have to go. But the more distance that I can put between me and the schools, philosophically, me and public schools, philosophically, is the more opportunity for growth, and there's more opportunity to listen to students' needs and listen to students, look at students' pathways towards their careers and see their trajectory and where they're going to end up, and what they need to do to get there. So distancing myself from the school philosophies allows opportunities for growth in ways that schools don't.

Metcalf Award Winners

ERC-What are the needs you see for young people at present, especially with COVID?

Roberto- The mental state right now of my students is worse than I’ve ever seen it. It became apparent to me, as soon as this started, that we had to shift our STEAM work, and we did. I would say 75% of our capacity has moved from STEAM topics and skills to supporting emotional well-being. We're doing movie nights, we're doing game nights, we're hooking up with students online, we're having them meet their mentors on line, as well as celebrities and some of their favorite music artists. We’re trying to support them and connect them to the appropriate resources at the same time, because right now, some people are isolated. Other people may have the opposite problem, where they're not isolated, but they're in a stressful home situation, more or less trapped. So, as far as mental wellness goes, I would say, its bad right now.

Another important and related issue is the nature of school itself. Last week on our STEAM Box podcast we had two amazing guests, who are wellness specialists. They were amazing guests about the need for social emotional support for young people in school. And what some of the stressors and pressures are. Our students talked about the need for connections, for taking care of each other, But interestingly, our students –unanimously-- agreed while talking with them on the podcast that they believe that schoolwork and testing harms them, actually interferes with their emotional and mental wellbeing.

Now that's a big deal. When can you get all of the students to agree on anything? I've got a student for example who’s very conservative in his political beliefs. But in this case, he’s 100% in agreement that the feel fo school is negative. It's weird to me, because in every group, you're going to find somebody who disagrees with something, but every student unanimously agreed that the amount of testing that they have in schools in general harms them mentally and emotionally. I want to point out that especially now, we've got to consider the ramifications of the emotional impact that “school” is having on these students, in the long term.

STEAM Box students in Japan

ERC: How has your thinking about the STEAM Box mission been evolving?

Roberto: Yes. Yes. I’ve been thinking so much about where do we really want to go? When I started STEAM Box, to your question, I  felt like a lot of burden was on me. To do so much of the preparing, the guiding ideas, asking the questions, making it just right for students. I felt like that ‘the buck stops here” thing. And I felt like all of that responsibility was on me to focus on and clarify the mission. And I've learned over the years that that's not true. And I’ve been candid that if we really want to change and evolve schools, the students need equal power – equal to the school district, and the state, and teacher's union. I'm telling you that the same thing has to be true for STEAM Box. STEAM Box needs to have its mission developed by its students, and its direction established by its students.

And to be fair to myself, it’s getting there. We have been doing that. And I know you've seen instances that the students really run the show and drive the bus at STEAM Box. I’m excited for the students to retool the entire mission, and the way we do business. And I think that I can start to take some of that burden off of myself because the students are really doing such a good job with that.

ERC: You’ve received a number of awards, and some great media attention. Does STEAM Box have adequate resources to continue with your mission?

Roberto: We’ll certainly continue with our mission, no doubt. But its always super hard to obtain the level of on-going support we’d like, let alone to expand our services. Its always a challenge to have to choose among a number of vital things, so especially now with COVID we’re looking for new friends, new allies, and new supporters.

ERC: Here’s wishing for you to be able to continue the amazing work you do in Rhode Island, and thanks for your time, Roberto.

Innovators for Purpose: Building Inclusive Pathways into Design & STEM Careers.

Michael Dawson Interview 12/5/2020

ERC: Michael Dawson, founder, Executive Director, head scientist and youth developer of Innovators for Purpose is our guest. Welcome, Michael. Remind us about the why, the reason behind iFp? What did you see as the need?

Michael: We founded Innovators for Purpose in 2014 to spark young people’s interest, especially youth that are underrepresented in design and STEM fields, in developing the skills and mindsets to change the trajectory of their lives. And that's my life story.

 I grew up in Florida about 20 miles South of Kennedy space center. I watched many Apollo and Space Shuttle launches right from my doorsteps. We would watch the countdown on TV and then walk outside and watch the spaceship go up. The ground would literally shake beneath our feet. Not once during my formative years, did anyone within my sphere of influence say, “Hey, let's take a ride up 15 miles to Kennedy Space Center and see one of the launches up close.” Who knows what that would have sparked in a somewhat curious kid's mind?

School was always important to me. I was a good student.  It was just ingrained into me. My mother really pushed education. I was always good in math and science, but I never really knew what I could potentially do with it. In the 11th grade, a guidance counselor --who wasn't even my guidance counselor-- tapped me on my shoulder and said, “Hey, I would like for you to go check out this afterschool program. I think you'll find it interesting.” So, I did, and that's when I was introduced to engineering. From there I went on to earn a bachelor's and a master's degree in engineering, which led me up here to Massachusetts. Just like our mission, I got excited about developing skills and mindsets – and it changed my life.

To a larger degree, Innovators for Purpose is doing that very same thing. We are that guidance counselor out there, so to speak. We're tapping on young people's shoulders and saying, “Hey! there's amazing opportunities out there if you apply yourselves.” And from there, we begin to expose them to all of the unbelievable companies around Massachusetts, especially in Cambridge, such as Google, Microsoft, Biogen, and the big universities like MIT, Harvard, etc.

ERC: Let's talk about Cambridge for a second --for someone who didn't know it, how would you describe Kendall Square?

Michael: Well, it’s called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” You walk down the street, there is Google, Microsoft, Novartis, Biogen, Akamai, Draper Labs – and there’s the Cambridge Innovation Center that has a wealth of startups. It's just this amazing space. There’s innovation everywhere. It's an incredible place to be.

ERC: Tell us about the student who chooses Innovators for Purpose.

Michael: When we started Innovators for Purpose, we strategically designed it to be at the intersection of art / design and STEM. We felt that there were many STEM programs. However, they are really enrichment programs. They are enriching students who already have an interest in STEM.

We wanted to pull in students who didn't already have an interest in STEM. We also wanted to bring in students on the arts side as well. We have a great mixture of students. Some of our students are more on the artistic end, some are more on the on the tech side. When we bring them together to work on our amazing projects, the ones that are artistic become a little more technical and the ones on the tech side become a little more artistic. I think we also draw in some students who aren’t necessarily artsy or STEMy but are looking for something too.

We have an incredible robotics program, but some students are intimidated by hard-core concepts. We attempt to position our programming in a fun and meaningful way. Our Real Projects with Real Impact usually pique their interest. What’s important is to get our message out there. So that students know what we're doing, what’s possible, then can make an informed decision to join us.

 ERC: The Looking Glass you guys did is a big deal, right in Kendall Square. Tell us about that.

Michael: Yes, it sure is. Our students conceived and designed it. It's a permanent installation in Kendall Square. The Cambridge Redevelopment Authority were looking for creative interventions in the built environment. It could have been anywhere in Cambridge. So, we had the specific task of creating a sculpture in Galaxy Park. We studied Galaxy Park which looks toward Boston in one direction and down Main Street towards Central Square in the other. We studied two parks and came up with multiple ideas.  We decided to go forward with this one.

This sculpture is called the Looking Glass.  It allows people to look backward and forward in time. If you look in one direction, it frames Longfellow Bridge which was built in 1793.  At the time, only 3 families lived East of Harvard Square. So, you can kind of think about what times were like before the bridge was built. When you look in other direction, down Main Street, you can envision the future. That's where all of the exciting science, tech and startup companies are. The Looking Glass has become an iconic symbol in Cambridge. And a symbol of what youth can do if given an opportunity. I see pictures of it everywhere. We're really proud of that.

ERC: Michael, what’s important to the iFp organization in 2020? How is iFp doing in terms of gaining support and visibility, especially in these hard times where your help is crucial?

Michael: Our goal is to help young people develop skills and mindsets that will get them from where they are to where they want to be. Whether that's as a scientist, an engineer, a designer, or even a lawyer. Whatever they want to do, as long as it is productive and helping change lives. We are giving them the space to do that. Not only are we focused on helping our young people develop their skills and mindsets, but we're also trying to bring awareness to the business community that these amazing young people are right in their midst. But that’s not easy. So we're working hard to do that as well.

Maybe that will be our holiday gift.  That our mission will continue to grow, prosper and we'll get the support behind us that’s needed. This has been a labor of love. We started this 7 years ago without any institutional support behind us. It was basically the Dawson’s checkbook that supported this project for a long time. We’ve have started getting support behind us, but we still need much more to do the work. We need businesses and foundations to look at what we're doing.  The difference that we are making speaks for itself.

There are quite a few corporate and institutional STEM programs, but as I said the problem is still there. Those programs are missing many young people. The same youth tend to continue getting the support, and that’s okay, but obviously there's a gap that's not being filled.  There are organizations out there, like us trying to do this work, but are not getting the support needed. We are beginning to gain some corporate sponsors and foundation support, but there's still so much more that can be done.

ERC: Michael, sometimes a hint of irony creeps into your voice. When you talk about all that

talent that you have, the young people who imagined and built that. You've told us about all that they did, the thinking and conceptualizing, what kinds of metal would be chosen, the metallurgy, the precision crafting and cutting, all of that. I've heard you speak about, of all the riches of Kendall square and the fact that almost all of the people who work there are not from the community. Can you talk about

that disconnect, that feeling that drove you to want to dig in, in that place, of all places?

Michael: Let's say Kendall Square is here (points). And right across the street is the most economically challenged neighborhood in Cambridge. I mean, literally, you just walk across the street and you're there. That disparity is troubling. People who come in to work or sight-see, may have walked through the neighborhood and not know the struggles that people in that community -- and in surrounding communities-- are going through. So there's a definite disconnect there.

ERC: These are fraught times, with some very overdue conversations about policing, Black Lives Matter, health care and housing. You’ve mentioned that your students with your help, have seized on a theme called This Should Not Be, can you tell us a little about that?

Michael: We're working on a project now for MIT that's going to be installed sometime next year. The project highlights diverse innovators who have helped Kendall become what it is. When George Floyd happened, we took our work to another level. The George Floyd incident happened on Memorial Day, May 25th.  That was a Monday. Our program meets on Mondays and Thursdays. There was talk about George Floyd, but it exploded that weekend. There were protests everywhere. It was all over the news.

innovatorsforpurpose.org/this-should-not-be

All over social media.  Everyone was being bombarded with the news on George Floyd. That Monday, we met with our students.  Before jumping into our work, we said let’s talk. We started talking about George Floyd - what they were seeing on TV and social media. They had never experienced anything like this. These are 14, 15, 16, and 17-year-old young people.  Some of them were shaking.  They were afraid.  Am I going to be next? They were just that afraid. So, at the end of that conversation, we said, okay, we have two choices. We can either there remain afraid.  Just go about our daily lives being afraid or we can try to do something that will make a difference. Everyone said, let's do something! Then the task became, what do we do?

That was the genesis of theThis Should Not Be project.  By the way, the title came from a blog by former president Barack Obama right after the George Floyd incident. So, immediately after the meeting with our students - we began talking with the Cambridge Public Library.  They are true partners. We've been working together since 2017. In January, we became the flagship partner in its new STEAM Academy. They've been very good to us.

Our studio is based in the Cambridge Public Library. We went to our primary contacts and said, “The students want to do something around systemic racism. We've had some ideas around augmented reality. We think we want to do something on systemic racism with augmented reality and we want to do it on the library’s lawn.” They said “That sounds great. Let us worry about the details.  Just go for it.” And the rest is history. Our spring session was wrapping up in a couple of weeks. We started gathering ideas going, then in the summer we just hit it - six hours a day, four days a week for five weeks. The result is an incredible groundbreaking augmented reality installation that’s on the Cambridge Public Libraries lawn right now.

During the Summer, we did a deep dive into systemic racism. The student read articles, watched videos, and had discussions with each other. At night they were writing about what they were learning. The next day, they were extracting highlights from each other's papers and synthesize the info. Those papers and synthesized insights became the basis for the script underlying the installation. It's by far the most important work we've done as an organization.

ERC: If I were sitting around with some of the moms and dads, and I asked them, that man, Michael Dawson, that Innovators for Purpose group, what does he do for young people that they don't get in school. How do you think they would answer me?

Michael: We would hope that they are very thankful and grateful for what we are doing for their children.  We're exposing them to opportunities that they never imagined.  We have some that are going into college next year. So, even outside of our regular hours we're working with them to get their college applications together.  Helping them work on their portfolios. Lining up people to review their essays and portfolios. So, I think they would be appreciative of what we're doing.  Our focus is on being a trusted guide helping them reach their dreams.  I think they'll give us a good report.

 ERC: I have no doubt that they would. Thank you, Michael, Donna, the iFp Board, partners, students and families!!

“Asking ‘What If’”: The New Hampshire Spreadsheet Initiative

Spreadsheets are everywhere. We see them in almost every business and bureaucratic context – real estate, insurance, design and engineering, biotech, office management in state and local agencies, on and on, as well as at home, of course --for people’s records keeping and communications. Quite a while ago, Excel and similar products, became the ubiquitous tool undergirding the contemporary workplace. 

Surprisingly, the place where they may be least visible and least utilitarian remains our schools. It’s a bit of a head scratcher. But their absence is another stark reminder that we have not done enough to be truly permeable to the “real world” in shaping the experience of high school and the preparation we offer our young people. Outdated approaches to curriculum keep in place an antiquated math experience we should have addressed decades ago, when the digital age began.

In New Hampshire, however, there’s good news. Three high schools are digging into a new conversation about refreshing, I’d say modernizing, how they want their students to use and appreciate mathematics.... and more!  When What If Math reached out to ERC in search of potential venues to go deeper, a few places came quickly to mind. Three Granite State schools -Pembroke Academy, White Mountains Regional High School, and, of late, Souhegan High School- have joined ERC’s intensifying innovation efforts, looking at inquiry learning, new curriculum concepts, technologies, and even a new secondary prototype Reimagining-school.

That proposed collaboration is quickly becoming a reality -The NH Spreadsheet initiative-- with the stated goal of making every NH student “spreadsheet capable” and fully prepared for digital age jobs and citizenry, with a focus on collaborative problem solving and transdisciplinary learning. Wow! Suitably ambitious and necessary!

With support and participation from teachers and leaders at each school, the stage has been set for a Winter 2021 on-going seminar involving faculty from each of the schools. What If Math is facilitating the seminar at no charge for each school, along with individual and small team coaching for participants who want to probe different possibilities. ERC has been facilitating the work thus far, beginning with a video symposium, “Introduction to Spreadsheets & What If Concepts” in early October, along with next-steps discussions with school leaders. It’s exciting, we think, not only for New Hampshire and for the field, but especially for those many students who pass through high school doing their best to stay away from math, or who see it as something to be endured. And, for those who excel in the current paradigm and who love math, we can open new doors and possibilities.

As I alluded to in a prior newsletter, (what-if) the What If Math founders, Art Bardige and Peter Mili, are big picture thinkers, and energetic scholars with vast amounts of experience in schools professional development, math, science, and educational technology. They’ve looked far and wide about the kinds of math and mathematic thinking required across the employment spectrum. They’re not offering a packaged, off-the-shelf math curriculum, something we’ve seen way too much of with little to show. They prefer to engage and support educators to self-examine classroom practices, as well as concepts that at one time might have seemed important but which no longer hold up beyond “school”.

What’s been surprising to Bardige and Mili is the degree to which the school folks have quickly viewed the conversation as extending beyond “just math”. Although it’s called, “What If Math” the approach and vision are transdisciplinary and holistic. They see entering the overdue conversation on re-thinking our approaches to math only as an essential first step. Where they’re headed long-term is spreadsheets in and across all domains, and as a glue in a variety of new learning configurations.

In that first video Symposium, Souhegan faculty member Jennifer Bonsu-Anane shared a memorable point of view. “My 31-year old son told me that his ability to use spreadsheets opened up doors to good-paying careers.  Since graduating from college, he has worked in corporate type jobs, first at Dick's Sporting Goods, then Lowe's, and now Honeywell.  His college degree was in Economics, but surprisingly, he didn't use spreadsheets a lot. He realized he’d need to learn to use them during an internship he had in a hospital finance department, and again at his on-campus job at University of South Carolina.  He also started refereeing intramural sports, and kept at it throughout college.  By the time he was a senior, he was scheduling intramural games and all the courts and referees - using spreadsheets, of course!”

Hearing that stellar, real-world endorsement made us curious to ask others in the schools about their perspectives. Shane MacElhiney. Math teacher and Building Leadership Team member at White Mountains is another who hasn’t needed much convincing about the role of spreadsheets, "The fact is, the world does math in spreadsheets. As part of our focus on helping students to learn key skills they’ll need to be successful in THEIR futures, spreadsheets are becoming a central platform at WMRHS. It's an essential part of the Inquiry Tool Kit, helping students with collecting, organizing, displaying, calculating with, and analyzing data."

“At WMRHS we’ve recognized that ‘silo-ing’ math and science limits a student’s opportunities to learn math in context and to apply math in authentic situations, two things that could engage them and make them more confident learners. We also embrace the vision of Ted Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools curriculum integration, and we’re advancing a multi-year integrated math/science curriculum."

Jacob Hess, Shane’s principal at White Mountains adds, “Combining separate math and science courses into our current Math/Science sequence actually came about as a way for students who struggled with math abstractions to make connections, and for them to see ideas and processes in practice in a different content area (science). It also fits right into our philosophy of having teaching colleagues, whether in our content area or not, be looking at each other’s lessons, units, and ideas in order to improve the quality of our work.”

Chris Motika, Director of Curriculum and Instruction for the district that includes Pembroke Academy has been looking for new ideas and conversations to share from his domain. “I think it's important to keep in mind that spreadsheets, and What If Math, are not just about math and numbers, they are about making data meaningful in authentic contexts, about finding new and unique ways of seeing, manipulating, and working with datasets.  Thinking about What if spreadsheets in this way can and should make us wonder... could we utilize other data sets to help students delve into other kinds of problems?  We’re seeing nothing but possibilities in this endeavor and have started to bring the foundations of What if Math to our Science department.  Science shares a natural connection to math, and is full of phenomena-based learning; taking data and observation to make sense of something.  We are so excited to have two departments working to help students explore mathematical concepts through spreadsheets and data.”

“There’s some interesting commentary on why it’s important to have deep collaborations with outside thinkers. When we were discussing how a teacher had found a classroom program that would likely be easier to manipulate, Art Bardige interjected some real-world common sense. "Our goal wasn't to create a product like that. Those products aren’t part of what people do in the workplace, outside of school. One of our goals has been to promote conversation and deeper thinking, grappling with ideas as students manipulate the numbers."  His comment pulled me back to our purpose as educators - to create the conditions so that learning can happen. There may be other programs or tools that may seem easier to manipulate, more appealing, but they simply show what happens in a graph. What if Math investigations come with prompts that encourage deep inquiry so that students can address their own ‘why’s’, can mimic the big questions that drive people and organizations, and be prepared for real life, not an abridged, ‘in-school’ reality.”

Art Bardige has more to say: “Our students ask, “Why do I have to learn this?” and too often today, we do not have an answer. Because indeed, so much of the math we ask them to learn is obsolete and has been for years. They will never use it and they won’t need it. We have to ask, “What math will students need to learn to thrive in the digital age?” We believe we should be preparing them to calculate on spreadsheets not on paper, to solve problems, build models, and manipulate data using functions and functional thinking, not just manipulate symbols, to work collaboratively in teams and communicate with graphs and other visual representations and not be lost in abstractions.”

In imagining the Network at its best, Peter Mili adds, “Creating and modifying lessons during the school year is always challenging, especially when integrating something innovative and novel for the students.  My experiences in making changes to my practice were always more successful when I was collaborating with colleagues, where support, questioning, feedback, and coaching helped me persist when needed. This persistence helped make innovations become an integrated part of my practice, benefitting my students.  My hope is that providing this ongoing support will increase the probability of a successful implementation of new pedagogies.

Pembroke Academy Dean of Instruction Amy Parkinson shared, “We have a brand new Innovation Academy here and we spend a lot of time talking about application and transferable skills. A benefit of an approach like What If Math is that it creates an instructional structure that both allows our students to question and explore AND gives them a strong foundation in the use of spreadsheets. The use of spreadsheets is increasingly transferable across “adult life” and when paired with inquiry practices like those we’re pursuing with ERC, students quickly see that there is a real world application to the work they’re doing in high school. No more ‘when will I use this in the real world?’ questions.”

Souhegan Principal Mike Berry also offers a timely perspective.  Me as a leader, and we --all of us-- as a faculty, especially now with COVID but not only due to that, have to be willing to blend the old and the familiar with the need to prepare young people for a new world, one we can’t fully imagine. Spreadsheets are something that hit that mark. We remember the old math, but it's not in much use any more outside of schools. This is the new way. And ERC and What If Math are two “out front”, big-thinking organizations. The willingness to be open to the world is something we’re proud of at this school, and we have the talent to do it well.”

Bardige makes a really important point about another reason spreadsheets can be so valuable in school math. “We are especially excited about including students who may have struggled with math to jump into using spreadsheets. Pursuing math on spreadsheets is concrete, it’s real, and can be applied to interesting problems outside of the classroom and school. It’s also highly collaborative so that students help each other to practice good problem solving methodology. And it's exciting to get the immediate feedback, the sense that you’ve made something work. Spreadsheet math gives every student a fresh start.”

“We love our partnership with ERC”, says Mili. “And we’re really excited about engaging with forward thinking schools in New Hampshire as the beginning of another great relationship, one that can truly integrate math into inquiry learning, into STEM and STEAM, into other natural reaches within the learning universe.  Especially now, it will help prepare teachers and schools to function as effectively online as they do face-to-face.”

Bardige concludes, “We’re currently extending the collaboration between ERC and What If to develop a next generation of online cross-disciplinary content that focuses on problem solving and inquiry. We call these new creative/collaborative learning opportunities, Explorations. They combine the vibrancy, richness, and interactivity of ERC Grand Challenges Web-links with the problem solving capability of What If Math spreadsheets and other shared learning tools to promote real-world, complex and absorbing problem solving. We look forward to bringing these exciting new learning opportunities and their integrated STEAM vision to the New Hampshire Spreadsheet Initiative to help schools prepare students for their future and not our past.”