Amy Biehl charter says grade makes no sense

Amy Biehl HS,  a familiar and cherished partner, offera a compelling argument for abandoning school report cards. Go here for more info. 

Summer in New Mexico’s Progressive Small School

Santa Fe plaza

I spent a good deal of time this summer in two of our “new” states –New Hampshire and New Mexico. (More on NH in an upcoming post)

I’ve had the good fortune to work in schools over recent years in The Land of Enchantment. New Mexico faces some stiff economic challenges and a department of education that has not been friendly to new ideas and diverse approaches, but I continue to find schools and networks that studiously embrace all learners, reach out into the community and strive to learn from each other.

One of my first summer stops was Amy Biehl HS in Albuquerque, a school I had collaborated with in its early years. The school is located in the city’s old Federal Court House in a gorgeously restored setting. Humanities teacher Frank McCullough is now the school’s leader, and along with Dean of Students, Mark O’Gawa, I had a chance to work with their very skilled Student Support Team. Over a decade ago, the Amy Biehl SST offered an early model of how to bring social-emotional support out from behind the counseling curtain and share ideas and practices school-wide. We spent a full day taking stock of the team’s role in a very mature school, sorting through challenges and assets, and identifying milestones through some appreciative inquiry.

Amy Biehl HS Indaba Hall

Next, my travels took me to Santa Fe to facilitate a leadership retreat for the Albuquerque Sign Language Academy (ASLA), an innovative, dual-language school open tuition-free to the community and region. ASLA is a great story, “the little school that could”. Sensing a lack of non-residential educational options for deaf and hard-of-hearing young people and their families, the school was created by parents, educators and collaborators less than a decade ago. The school now offers grades K-10, and approximately 60% of students qualify for special education services and 85% of students have a link to the deaf community. Under Rafe Martinez, ASLA’s Director, two partnerships have increased the school’s capacity and raised its profile --one with the University of New Mexico which welcomes new and practicing educators to learn and study at the school, and a second with the PEAR Institute which will guide wellness programming.  

 ASLA Executive Director Rafe Martinez and legislative collaborator Rick Martinez

The school’s own increase in student enrollment (a waiting list has grown), inquiries from other schools in the region, and their own ambition to provide state-of-the-art services to the community, signaled the need for the executive administrative team to look ahead to new leadership strategies and key upcoming milestones. I joined local consultant Everette Hill of the Social Innovation Strategies Group in guiding the team through a set of activities that will provide a road map for the upcoming year as they grow programs and partnerships and lead the faculty in concert. Facilities options, board development, developing a revised professional development calendar, and identifying key benchmarks and support required to get there all surfaced in the intense three-day retreat.

Early August brought me back to Albuquerque for on-going collaboration with the New Mexico Center for School Leadership. It’s “Leadership High Schools” network includes a focus on re-engaging older students who had left school but now wish to return and need an environment specifically designed for them. Based in part on the design of the New York City Young Adult Borough Centers, the Network’s Re-Engagement Schools provide an afternoon-early evening schedule, social workers and counselors, connections to growth industries and employers and hands-on learning in the areas they require to meet state graduation standards. Key to the mission is shaping the community’s understanding that different types of students require a diverse and substantial portfolio of educational options, and then designing forward.

 Albuquerque Sign Language Academy leadership team members, Leticia Archuleta (left) and Jennifer Blythe (right)

School leaders and wellness pillar administrators from the network schools came together to assess the efficacy of current efforts and to begin a more intensive study of the needs of older students, implications for design and gathering promising practices. The Center’s doctoral Intern, Rachel White, presented the findings of her research in the current state of the network’s evening Re-Engagement programs. A new partnership with local youth development agency NMCAN will assist the Center and the schools in leveraging resources in support of re-engagement programming.

Rachel White presenting Re-Engagement Research                         

That same week the Leadership HS Network administrators and boards joined forces for a retreat to focus on policy development, good internal board practices, and support for school leaders. Held at the new Siembra Leadership High School, nearly thirty people from three schools gained some big picture take-away’s and promising practices before going into school-based teams to assess current efforts and upcoming opportunities for focus and growth.

 Leadership High School Network boards retreat

My final NM summer outing was a day-long retreat with, and for, new amigos at the Media Arts Collaborative secondary school. The school seeks to prepare students for an education in the media arts at the university and community college level, as well helping students and families to understand the global role of media arts and how people’s lives are shaped by them. I was fortunate to meet Glenna Voight, the retiring Media Arts principal, at a CES conference last fall, and now count new leader Jonathan Dooley as a friend and colleague. I’ve also quickly grown fond of the school’s diverse, open-minded and accomplished staff.

 Media Arts Collaborative secondary school.

Working with Media Arts’ middle and high school staff, the day was a mixed bag . We began by exploring concepts from learning science (most at odds with today’s linear learning, standards and testing regimen), exploring the not-so-hidden effects of industrial age schooling, and reviewing current national achievement data for context. We transitioned to hands-on project design through visual provocations of the kind I do in STEM schools, some re-imagining of teacher roles in that kind of inquiry-based learning motif, and finally, sharing personal milestones for the upcoming school year. An intense and rewarding day.

New Mexico has a number of small progressive schools proudly peeking out from under a layer of bureaucracy that has not resulted in achievement gains or social-emotional improvement over the past eight years. They’re holding their own conversations and moving forward smartly. They’re worth a visit, your interest and your support. Adelante, New Mexico. 

Albuquerque Convention Center Plaza

A School District That Sees the Whole Picture

Ken Facin poses a question in the Skype session

I’ve been working with Superintendent Ken Facin and his Hoosick Falls NY team for several years now. We featured Ken in one of our ERC e-newsletters a few years ago as one of a small band of heroes seriously committed to wellness and social emotional development in schools, despite more than a decade of underfunding and relative de-emphasis in most school districts.

I first met Ken and his team in our home base of Cambridge when they were in town to attend a Harvard School of Education conference on instructional improvement. I walked into their hotel conference room to find test score charts and graphs taped up on 3 walls from floor to above my head. Despite the intense two days their team had experienced at the conference, focused on the minutiae of standards, progress monitoring, feedback on pacing outcomes, etc., we had an instant energy re-set when we began to talk about young people and how best to support their readiness to learn. Ken was quick to embrace the idea of social-emotional support as a prime achievement strategy and since then has been off and running. His district has steadily advanced in state and regional rankings, but more importantly there is a tangible sense of kindness and concern in the schools. He has put his mind to influencing both inside and beyond the schools to create a community that sees readiness to learn as the lever for almost everything else.

Hoosick Falls is a small rural district northeast of Albany, rich in tradition, but also experiencing many of the mental health and family challenges that come with low-income demographics. Add to that the academic pressures and myriad top-down mandates and policies that come with New York state’s heavy testing and teacher rating schema (one that seems to have shown little benefit, I must add) and one wonders at how Facin has so successfully nurtured the growth of a top-flight wellness team that has developed a high level of expertise and works seamlessly with school administrators. Over the past three years a focus on mindfulness has paved the way for a daily meditation session for everyone in the school and just ahead, planning with teachers for a restorative morning meeting for all students and staff in the middle and high school. It was this planning that brought me out to Hoosick Falls for a recent day-long session.

I was the presenter for the first of the day’s four phases, organized by Facin along with Dean of Students Mario Torres.  I focused my time on the foundations of building a culture of authentic relationships. I shared with the K-12 team of administrators, counselors and mental health professionals my contention that this kind of work, by its very nature, changes the “atomic structure” of schools, the fundamental relationships and “psychological contracts” between and among students and adults. I reminded the team that every day, each and every student is making a number of calculations about how much their teachers know and care for them, assessing how interested each adult is in their learning and well-being. When you strip away the academics, and along with them the power of the gradebook, the veneer of control, the compliance and teacher-pleasing orientation, it can be an unsettling, even raw experience for many teachers. Kids know right away when things are for real, as we know, and teachers are often already under the gun to cover far too much content and address test items.

Larry Myatt leading his session

I do a good deal of work helping schools tackle “classroom management” challenges and trying to salvage moribund or downright failing advisories. I learned as a school leader that when we attempt to introduce such ideas as advisory, mindfulness, or restorative practices, the success of those initiatives rests squarely on authentic relationships between adults and young people. Schools must provide the structures, opportunities for practice, language and modeling for students in order to learn that all good discipline is self-discipline. This is the “atomic level” work I talk about. Simply using a manual to learn a few group routines or convening kids in a circle does not go deep enough into exploring what adults and young people have a right to expect from each other. Adults must revisit, in supportive, collaborative settings, their personal commitments to the work and the impressions they convey each day, be they intentional or not. I left them with some big ideas to ponder, a number of readings, tools and activities to begin work with the teaching staff, who will also be invited into the planning of what the next steps will be.

I was followed by a presentation from Caitlin McCormack from the PEAR Institute, the Harvard School of Medicine and McLean Hospital initiative that supports schools and community organizations in understanding human developmental needs and employing a common language to communicate the strengths and challenges of children and youth.  I was pleased to be the matchmaker between the Hoosick Falls schools and PEAR, and over the past two years the collaboration has grown and provided a centerpiece for the work of the school’s leadership and wellness staffs. Caitlin is a Lead Facilitator for PEAR training and professional development programs and provides super helpful interpretation sessions for PEAR’s landmark Holistic Student Assessment. She shared group development theories and strategies with the Hoosick Falls team, walking them through one of the PEAR group approaches linked to HSA results in a fun, informative and inter-active session.

HFCSD Staff at Higher Ground Farm

The last element of the morning was a Skype conference for the participants with Dr. Gil Noam, founder and director of The PEAR Institute and former editor-in-chief of the journal New Directions in Youth Development: Theory, Practice and Research. Dr. Noam has become well-known to the school’s team, hosting them in Boston and communicating regularly as their partnership grows. For nearly an hour, Dr. Noam fielded questions about theory and implementation and shared thoughts about the on-going roll-out of social-emotional programming in the schools.

True to form, Facin had yet another novel activity for the afternoon, a recent added expansion of the restorative programming which has helped the school to raise achievement levels, make the schools safer and more supportive environments for students and staff, and raise its profile in the region as a district on the move.  The team adjourned at midday to travel to the Higher Ground Farm where equine specialist Janet Botaish led the group through a version of the Hoosick Equine Connections Program. Janet’s program is affiliated with the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association (EAGALA) a leading international nonprofit association for professionals incorporating horses to address mental health and personal development needs.

Through their new partnership, the Hoosick Falls schools are developing a program that brings young people to the farm for activities designed to provide a peaceful, purposeful and therapeutic setting in which clients can experience change and growth, often more effectively and quickly than in traditional clinical and psycho-educational approaches. As Janet shared with us, the notion of working with horses is engaging, real time and hands-on. The experience is immediate and fully felt and I can testify that I was thinking of the activities and encounters with my new equine pals for several days.

Next up in Hoosick Falls is a 3-day Summer Retreat this coming July to advance the ideas of authentic relationship, a daily restorative ritual, and continued merging of the skill sets and perspectives of the wellness staff and the academic community. I’m looking forward to working with teachers and staff as we continue to restore to schools the idea that attending the whole child matters at each step along the upward path through the grades. And I’m looking forward to seeing what the next big ideas are from Ken!   

Dr. Larry Myatt, Co-Founder

Finding a Foothold for STEAM Inquiry

Larry Myatt, ERC Co-Founder

The first time I heard mention of McLaughlin Middle School STEAM, I was part of a series of keynote remarks at a STEAM-Ahead event organized by Bob Baines, founder and Executive Director of STEAM-Ahead NH. It was held at Dyn, Corp. in Manchester, an early and passionate support of STEAM-Ahead. Here we were, assembled on the very cool work-floor meeting space of a major high-technology firm –community leaders, educators, policy makers and business and corporate representatives—easily a crowd of over a hundred. 

As part of the event, two McLaughlin students were asked to speak briefly about their learning on the school’s brand new STEAM team. Not only were these two 13-year olds poised and confident, they were able to speak in detailed, mature ways about their intellectual growth in a way I seldom hear (sadly) from middle-schoolers.

After the audience rewarded them warmly I went over and listened in as the students reconnected with their waiting teachers. I was impressed right away with the relationships among the small group and the very STEM-like debrief of form and content they conducted right away, informal but structured. “Something is going on over there”, I noted.

At that same event, the next group of students, from a STEAM team at Manchester’s West High School, not only talked about their project activities, they tasked the audience to engage on the spot in some table-based hands-on design challenges. Another home run with the crowd.

The kids I met there that day were not all the typical “best-and-the-brightest”, pre-screened into the programs, but, I was told, a very mixed ability groups of kids. Yet each one I met was capable of a level of “meta” thinking that told me these are capable, growing young people. I would have loved to have had my own kids in this kind of school setting.

Much to my delight, I got an email not too much later from Bob Baines, asking if I could accompany him to meet McLaughlin teachers and Principal Bill Krantz on my next visit to STEAM at West. The meeting was great. We exchanged perspectives and ideas on where we thought things stood and how they could develop. I could tell right away these teachers were game, had an appetite to grow and learn, and inquiry teaching and projects had rejuvenated and inspired them.

Baines brought key ingredients, a vision of connected programming in the city and incentive funding from the NH Department of Education grant and the local Bean Foundation, for release time and the needed high-touch coaching and professional development as the school planned for growing the STEAM program. The meeting resulted in a commitment for me to begin work there this past winter.

I’ve just finished a recent couple days there on an arc of deep conversation that the teachers engaged in quickly and intensely. As usual, we talk about the constraints of traditional school structure and flaws in the design, and how they mitigate against deep learning. We move on to productive practices, sharing what they notice about their students’ learning, what things feed them as teachers to endure the relentless pace, and milestone achievements they hope they can pursue. Wherever I travel, sharing ideas is most often cited as one of the highlights for teachers when we do our debriefs. So many teachers are hungry for a chance at serious, meaningful conversation that they don’t get often enough.

McLaughlin founding STEAM-er’s Callahan Goulet and Christina Stavenger brought a thoughtful and research-based DIY approach to early STEAM. They traveled and visited people doing similar work in and beyond STEAM-Ahead NH. They began to use their energy, collaboration and commitment to work differently with kids.

They opened up their classroom dividing walls; students sit in small teams facing each other, Chromebooks at the ready, orderly yet buzzing on the days I visit. Things are often hands-on here, connected to important issues in the world, and pursued in a team fashion that closely mimics the “21st century workplace environment we espouse but seldom replicate in most schools.

In our sessions we’ve worked to grow cognitive dissonance (and put it to best use), conducted charrettes to plan projects, mapped out big ideas and questions from their standards,  created and unpacked Learning Murals via our Visual Provocation Protocol. We created an early draft of a year-long array of projects and activities, smartly blended with direct instruction, drill and practice, lecture burst, etc., hallmarks of more traditional teaching. It’s a nice mix of pedagogy that invites different learning styles. Much of what they do is really good for learning, but to many it’s different and unfamiliar. It’s different for some students, and to teacher peers, and for some parents who want to see “teaching” that they recognize and consider good instruction from their school days. The STEAM teachers understand the reasons behind this range of opinions as accept it as part of trying to do business differently. Their job is to help more kids grow and be successful without putting traditional learners at risk, something far better done through inquiry teaching than by other means I find, and research suggests.

Our adult work is scholarly. I push. We talk a lot about the need to erase lines –the lines between subject matter and big ideas, the schedule and the pacing that move things along in a way that makes it hard for many kids to thrive as thinkers, as growing adolescents finding out what they may capable of. The STEAM teachers respond with thoughtful ideas and questions. To me, it’s what “PLC’s” (I dislike acronyms) could really be like. It’s the kind of intellectual work I recognize from being a teaching principal at Fenway High School, and the kind of intellectual work that experience, research and neuroscientists tell us is good for our brains and is the way more schools are going to do business.

I add here that I don’t like the acronym “PBL” either. Too easy to see it as an idea grafted loosely on to conventional teaching, as “dessert”. Instead, I like wrapping all these ideas up as inquiry learning, part of the overdue yet irresistible shift from the culture of teaching to a culture of learning. I see inquiry learning as an effort to get beyond the persistent mental model that one gains knowledge by “the presentation of established facts” -a mental model that portrays a false but appealingly smooth path to knowledge.  Whether it’s posing big questions, building and making, pursuing problems or wrestling down real-life scenarios, I see these as kindred brands of inquiry learning. These are the ways in which learning opportunities surface in the “real world”, quite different from those that are briefly granted on the academic conveyor belt, a set of sorting processes within a setting that remain intentionally apart from people and daily life.

But programs like STEAM need different conditions, more like the “real-world”. The track record of support for these efforts is poor in many districts and schools. Work of this kind can happen more routinely in affluent, independent settings, but in public schools it often bumps up against the predictable obstacles –history, culture, systems clash. (*For a great primer on these issues, see Charles Percy’s acute “So Much Reform”). Programming like STEAM is routinely unable to grow and thrive inside the traditional architecture of our secondary schools, sooner or later being sucked back into the traditional schedule, contract, instructional motif, culture and belief system. Add to that budget cuts, larger class sizes, and a teach-to-the-test mind-set and calendar that constrain deeper learning, and it’s not easy going for a seedling to emerge and plant itself firmly, be it Manchester or elsewhere.

I’m rooting for everyone at the McLaughlin. I see the STEAM program as good stuff for kids and teachers, connected to practices and perspectives that we sorely need given the poor results of our last 15 years of policies and mandates. If standards and testing was the right recipe, the private schools would have joined in long ago, right? The STEAM brand of teaching, just like that at their sister school, West High, can be a good fit for the high-achiever, but not only him/her, but also for the newly-emerging thinker who wants to take school more seriously than it takes him/her, for the student who likes to build and tinker rather than listen, and for the curious kids who like to ask what it all means. That’s why colleges and employers are after students who have some STEAM experience in their education. And it’s good for the teachers I see and work with--they get to plan, to grow, to take each other seriously as people and professionals. Here’s hoping the McLaughlin program can grow and prosper.

If you have more questions about what inquiry learning can look like , projects and achievement, etc. you can go to these Web links:

Positive brain development from hands-on learning:
http://news.stanford.edu/2015/07/06/symmetry-math-schwartz-070615/

Inquiry and projects in the private school world: https://www.hudsonlabschool.com/blog/2017/4/1/studies-demonstrating-the-benefits-of-project-based-learning

Inquiry learning with high-challenge schools and students: http://www.educationresourcesconsortium.org/news/2015/11/15/change-at-the-roots-level-anatomy-of-an-urban-school-renewal?rq=urban%20

Math in the middle years:
https://www.bie.org/object/document/pbl_in_middle_grades_mathematics

STEAM Ahead NH:  http://www.steamaheadnh.com/

Volume 1, ERC EdHistory 101 Project

Ellwood Cubberley (1868-1941)

Applying industrial management theory to school leadership was the signature idea of Ellwood Cubberley, giving rise to what we experience as modern school administration.

Cubberley was born in Andrews, Indiana, and was educated at the University of Indiana and Columbia University. After brief stints as a classroom teacher, college instructor and president of Vincennes University, Cubberley became superintendent of schools in San Diego-a position that influenced his long career as professor and dean of the School of Education at Stanford University.

At the outset of Cubberley's career, school administration had little or no theoretical or scientific basis. There were no formal textbooks from which to teach educational administration. Administrators were expected to learn solely from experience. Indeed, educational administration posts were routinely political plums, requiring little, if any, formal training in education.

Relying on new industrial management science theories, Cubberley designed an “administrative” system for schools, led by a professional class of superintendents and principals. His hierarchical model professionalized school leadership at that time and became the standard.As head of the Department of Education at Stanford, Cubberley trained cohorts of administrators in the “science of school management”.                       

To some, Cubberly is a controversial figure in the history of education. He has been criticized for his emphasis on efficiency and bureaucracy to solve complex educational problems. For example, Cubberley wrote: “We should give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal and that our society is devoid of classes. The employee tends to remain an employee; the wage earner tends to remain a wage earner.”

In the 1934 edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley’s Public Education in the United States he is explicit - a statement occurs in a section of Public Education called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which he explains that the coming of the factory system, which has deprived children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave, has made extended childhood necessary. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor, an army of workers has arisen who have little or no knowledge.Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers.”

According to Cubberley, with "much ridicule from the public press" the old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and "a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad." That reference to a new psychology refers to collectively-developing practices of European schooling particularly common to England, Germany, and France, three other major world coal-powers investing heavily in military and industrial science.

His influence extended far beyond the nature of training and certification of administrators. His writing was powerful and influential concerning what constituted the best situations and arrangements for learning from childhood into adulthood. Communities across the nation strived for decades, as a matter of public pride, to adopt the practices and systems that he espoused. 

For better or for worse, Cubberley’s influence on American schools has been deep and lasting. He is the father of professionalized school administration, and his beliefs regarding the acquired knowledge of the times and the ways to apply it to America’s citizenry influenced learners, parents, teachers and administrators through the Second World War and beyond.

Thanks to PBS School & the Odysseus Group

In NH’s White Mountains: STEM, Inquiry, and Technology—an Integrated Platform for School Change

Katrina Kennett, ERC Consulting Practitioner

Mike Berry is a man with a plan.

Although he has some constraints ---he’s pretty far from a lot of places, he’s limited in his pay scale, and other schools like to “borrow” his staff— he has shared a vision that is catching on. “More success for more kids” is his simple driver.

With support from his district administration, and with smart convening of local business and community members to explain and gain support for his ideas, Berry is bringing his North Country school to prominence and setting up to transform its design from the 19th to the 21st century.

White Mountains Regional High School is an exciting place to work. You can come here to grow as an educator. For me, it’s a return to my roots – I grew up in Concord NH --and it’s great to see this kind of work flourishing in the Granite State. We’ve had a decade-long run of master planning, testing and conventional thinking. Some people are betting on performance assessment, blended technology approaches, competency-based grading, or yet another (!) revival of mastery learning. None of these change the fundamental arrangements of school, arrangements that no longer serve us. As someone who plies her trade helping schools to plan super-thoughtfully and involve students in deep ways, it’s exciting to find this kind of work.

STEM as one launching pad

Among other things, Berry caught on to the promise of STEAM Ahead-NH and has invested in a new vertical STEM initiative coordinated by Mellissa Jellison. Next year, they will add a new grade cohort and, with the addition of an arts/design component, become STEAM.  Central to Jellison and her colleagues’ work is inquiry teaching and putting the “thrill” back into students’ daily experiences.  Mike is totally on board with that shift as a lever to achieve his mission of more success for more kids, and is using ERC tools to move it forward, flattening out leadership, and inviting others who are excited to help grow and contribute.

I made my way back to NH from Illinois when Mike Berry was looking for STEM professional development and connected with my colleague and ERC Co-Founder Larry Myatt.  Berry says that potential vendors for STEM p.d. came out of the woodwork, but in a conference call he and his people recognized Larry’s breadth of experience and proof points, and his “DIY” approach to renewing schools resonated with them. By DIY, we mean that we believe that schools don’t need the pre-packaged, highly prescriptive “how-to” manuals to be great, but that school people can believe in themselves, marshal their resources, and grow their own capacity to improve and flourish.

Mike Berry at Fall Forum

Upon arriving, Larry connected right away with staff, brought in some new “big ideas” and framing that resonated with Berry’s own philosophy.  Larry also helps to coach the administrative team on moving the changes forward.  Says Berry, “The mantra that we’ve taken from ERC is the need for shift from a culture of teaching to a culture of learning, and all that goes with that. We believe we can build it right here, and do what’s been almost impossible for high schools to do up to now – take a traditional model and transform it for students who’ll take over a world we adults can’t even understand.”

Teachers as Learners

My work with Berry has been in supporting his staff as they learn about technology and integrate it to support inquiry practices in their classrooms. In interactive, large-group workshops (in-person and remotely), I invite teachers to have fun being learners with new tools and platforms, even when it’s frustrating or confusing, as new technology can be. This means they do all the things we want students doing – working hands -on, discovering, struggling, and reflecting, then applying their experience and knowledge to their own ongoing work.

In my conversations with teachers as they learn with new tools, I keep bringing them back to three critical questions: What do you want your students to walk away knowing? What kinds of questions would you like your students to be asking?  What’s the “so what,’ and why is it important? 

Mellison Jellison and STEAM 9 students

Not a ‘one-and-done’ version of learning with technology, our sessions provide devoted time to look at a variety of tools for curating and archiving student work. And, I use research-based instructional strategies that bring together teachers’ learning over time. One of my favorite strategies is the use of EdCafes, (See link) which almost always raise the levels of energy and creativity in a collegial setting that transfers directly to work with students.

However, direct support of teachers isn’t enough to sustain meaningful school-wide change. My sessions need to be part of a larger, overall story of change within a culture of learning – instructional, cultural, intellectual (for both students and teachers), and developmental.
 

It’s big and it’s challenging, but that’s what it takes and that’s why I love this work. To help the instructional leaders work both on-the-ground and at the 10,000 foot level, I coach them to keep their sights on those three core questions as they work with faculty. This coaching involves assessing ongoing school PD rhythms and routines, helping folks to keep an eye on outcomes, and continuing to create authentic situations for teachers to present their ongoing practice. I see it as solid and intentional instructional design. White Mountains’ administrators and coaches have joined me in “thinking like a teacher” as they support the intellectual and creative growth of their staff. 

Down the Road

There are other moving parts to the White Mountains DIY plan. Ron Danault, a veteran computer instructor is thriving in an on-going MIT-designed coding seminar that helps him to teach programming by becoming a coder himself. That work is part of “TeachCode Academy”, a partnership among the Governor’s STEM task force, STEAM-Ahead NH,  the Manchester School District, UNH-Manchester, and Dyn Corporation. To me, Ron is a great example of a sharp teacher taking on new challenges.  Berry has also invited CTE people from culinary arts, horticulture, and pre-veterinary studies, among others, to join STEAM professional development activities delving into inquiry-teaching and being a part of project design and tuning. Myatt recently worked with the entire high school staff for a big picture exploration of instructional design of their own making and flavor, using an inquiry approach to build teacher and student curiosity and capacity.

In early December, Berry presented a portion of his plan at a national Coalition of Essential Schools conference in Providence, RI.  Joining him there for an intense three days of workshops, networking and progressive education history were Jellison, Ryan Patterson, science teacher with the STEAM team, and Jeanine LaBounty, who now supports teachers at the school in addition to her teaching. I was there to see Mike’s pitch and it reminded me why I’m excited about my work with WMRHS. They believe in themselves! They are invested in developing their own capacity to decide what and how to teach, how to turn more over to the students, and in each other. It’s a great story at a time when other schools think they have to buy blended learning platforms and color-coded diagnostics to make their schools better.

Larry addresses White Mountain staff

In the near future, Berry envisions more External Learning Opportunities (ELO’s) to connect students with their passions and with resources beyond the confines of the school. He sees opportunities for more plentiful and robust internships, coordinated by teacher Patsy Ainsworth.  Part of the big idea is to be intentional about bringing community members into the high school to work directly with students. He is also interested in networking with other ERC schools that are committed to projects and inquiry, becoming a regional “center of activity” – a place where people recognize that they can learn from the thoughtful things that are happening. Under consideration is hosting a summertime school development and re-design institute with instructional, technology, and leadership strands. I’m counting on being a part of that!

I’m rooting for these proud and independent educators and am pleased and proud of their commitment to Mike Berry’s words, making school a place of more success for more kids.

STEAM 9 classroom with Ryan Patterson coaching a forensics examination

For more on this story – contact katrina@educationresourcesconsortium.org

Greetings and Happy New Year from ERC

All signs point to 2017 being an interesting year.

We’ve been asking our colleagues and friends in different parts of the nation about the mood in their communities and schools. Some of the concerns we heard weren’t surprising: anxiety over what we can expect from the incoming administration, and from the Congress; more debate on charter schools; how to meet the demand for services to struggling children and families. We also heard about trying to find more helpful, and more worthy, accountability approaches than school report cards (that’s been a refrain for a while now); how to honor the demand for personalization in standardized school environments; how to keep the excitement of learning in a time of standards and testing, etc.

In the face of these many issues some school people, good soldiers they are, will gear up for yet another proscribed run at success, likely guided by a master plan that emanated from a state department of education, a well-intentioned philanthropy with its own pet framework and money to lend , or a think tank associated with someone’s agenda.  Or some hybrid of all three. However, as we urged last fall, (see link) other folks are beginning to coalesce around a “DIY” mentality, feeling that this is a good time to break from the cycle of the last 15 years,  to think more transformationally, to believe in their own capacity and skills.

In keeping with our belief that there is no time like now for school folks to take matters into our own hands in 2017, we will be featuring stories of schools on the move, and adding some cogent topics as a part of EdHistory 101 Project – a new effort to revisit some key historical events and perspectives that continue to shape schooling in this country. We believe that knowing our history – the issues, beliefs,  and language of other times-  presents opportunities for us to reframe and reimagine.  

To accompany our EdHistory 101 Project we continue to offer coaching, expertise, strategies, speakers and facilitators and TREK (see link) resources for schools wanting to look at serious redesign.

If you’re curious and want to connect with us and others who want to have a different kind of conversation about the future of schools in your community, please contact us.

We wish you an energetic and rewarding New Year in your work with schools, communities, partners, parents and students.

See Wayne's New Year's resolution link here.

Larry Myatt and Wayne Ogden    

Co-Founders

My New Year’s Wishes for School Principals and the Kids They Serve

I know what you’re thinking, New Year’s resolutions are ridiculous and unattainable! But, that can’t keep me for wishing for things that would make the lives of students, teachers and principals better.

So, here they are—MY seven wishes for 2017—for every overworked and under-resourced school principal on the planet.

Supply every school principal with a budget he/she deems worthy of the kids they serve.

Grant each and every school an instructional coach for every eight classroom teachers. These coaches are to focus exclusively on working with teachers to improve learning and teaching.

Provide each school with sufficient professional staff to promote the social, physical and emotional health of every student since we know that “intact”, healthy and resilient kids learn better.

Lengthen the school day to ensure that there is time for students to study the fine and applied arts , as well as participate in “extra curricular” activities.

Provide a full year moratorium from unfunded (or lightly-funded) state and federal mandates related to education.

Provide an additional one year moratorium on the high-stakes testing of kids and let’s see if anyone suffers.

Provide every student with a facility that’s as nice as a room in one of our President Elect’s 6 star hotels.

What would you add if this was your New Year’s Resolution and you were dreaming big for our children?

Wayne Ogden

New Mexico’s Leadership High School Network Celebrates Grant Opportunities

ERC became a central part of an exciting school initiative, when Co-Founder Larry Myatt was invited to co-plan and facilitate the September 2016 retreat of the Leadership High School Network in Albuquerque, NewMexico. Hosted at the Tamaya Resort and Conference Center north of the city, staff members, administrators and board members from the four network schools –ACE Leadership (architecture, construction and engineering), Health Leadership (allied community health care), Technology Leadership, and Siembra (entrepreneurism)- had a chance for a deep look at the promise and practices of their network .  

Larry Myatt facilitates a core practices activity

Tamaya Resort

The LHS Network was a recent recipient of a major grant from the ECMC Foundation to advance the work of its schools in tight coordination with its corporate and community partners. See link. Myatt, with more than a decade of experience working in Albuquerque, was a part of the original design team for the network schools and has assisted Tony Monfiletto, Executive Director of the NM Center for School Leadership, and Justin Trager, Director of Networks for the Center, with thought partnership in innovation, redesign, and systems building. He was featured last year in a TED talk addressing the city’s readiness to move in dynamic ways with its schools. See link. “What’s exciting for me about working with the Center in Albuquerque”, said Myatt, “is the willingness to adopt new structures and think differently about time and learning. There is no reliance on the industrial age notions of school.  And, of course a model that is super responsive to students and families and treats partners as just that, co-decision-makers with a valued perspective. A grant of this size and nature reflects the potential of this network and the NM Center to break important new ground, especially for students and families who have not yet been well-served in traditional settings.”

LHS Network school executive directors Kara Cortazzo, Blanca Lopez and Tori Shauger

Part of the retreat was a review by Dr. Myatt of the history and research of the Youth Transition Funders Group across a number of urban centers, including their focus on supporting vulnerable youth at risk of dropping out of school and re-engaging many that have left.  The LHS Network has made a singular commitment to serving those students in its schools.  For information on developing a multiple pathways approach to support a wider range of students, go here.

Everette Hill leads a session at Tamaya

Also planning and facilitating the Network event was Everette Hill, Managing Director of Albuquerque’s Social Innovation Strategies Group, another long-time friend of the network and former executive director for the NM Forum for Youth in Community. The retreat offered participants a chance to re-examine and recommit to school and network principles and to identify key practices and distinguishers. Over the course of the two days, affinity groups gave board members from the four schools a chance to connect with other governance and strategy partners, as well as connecting in cross-role groups with executive directors, pillar leaders in student support, community engagement and project learning to broaden the understanding of how each school as well as the network could gain from best practices, public engagement and action research.

For more information on the NM Center for School Leadership or the Leadership Network High Schools, go here.

Back to School 2016 – “it’s a DIY moment”

People in my professional world are heading back to school these days. I know, because I’ve been getting calls to plan projects and activities, conduct trainings, coach leaders and even give the occasional rousing speech.

Here’s what I say when I’m asked, and even when I’m not: 2016 is the year to grab the educational reins back. Right now. Starting this month. This is your classroom, your school, your school district. It’s your DIY moment.

Why am I so convinced?

We’ve already lost a generation to NCLB and other such b.s.

Paraphrasing the Beatles, it was 20 years ago today, or thereabouts, that we educators gave ourselves up to top-down standards and the allure of master planning. Consider this: this year’s high school seniors have lived their entire scholastic lives under No Child Left Behind. 

And so have educators. We weren’t capable of choosing methods and materials, we were told; the details needed to come from a higher perch, far “above” the school and classroom. With luck, the bureaucrats thought they could teacher-proof methods and materials. Jal Mehta’s The Allure of Order, the title of which pretty much says it all, is essential reading.  It will help you understand the folly of this policy as well as the essentials of our educational history.

How have we done after 20 years under the thumb? Results of recent NAEP scores, the nation’s “report card”, are some of the least hopeful since the early 1990s, particularly given the massive expenditures and smothering effects on schools, especially those who serve largely poor students. 2015 high school reading scores are lower than 1992, as one example. The Washington, D.C.-based Education Trust, supported by the major foundations one would guess, and which bills itself as a “fierce advocate for high achievement”, called the NAEP results “sobering”, and “another wake-up call”. Does that language sound familiar? The fact that this comment comes from a group staffed and led by a board of academics that have been “promoting and supporting federal and state policies” for the past generation brings with it no small irony. For added interest, check out Marion Brady’s essay.

Some want to believe that our schools just haven’t squeezed hard enough, or that we just haven’t put all the plan’s ingredients in order. I reply, “Hardly.” Strategies and policies cannot and do not “correct” for real, live people and the idiosyncrasies of individual learning.

Further, I say, time and energy spent pursuing fantasy targets such as SLOs or parsing DIBELs is largely wasted. Such notions are contrived and artificial, and although organizing them may make us feel productive, they are routinely trumped by values and culture, and have shown little enduring impact in meeting the social and intellectual needs of young people.

When we bother to ask, kids are responding in almost every survey, that the longer they are in school, the less interesting and meaningful it becomes. Even those who do well academically – gaining status, honors and scholarships -- say school is boring and largely irrelevant to their lives.

Many teachers and principals with whom I work are hesitant and uncertain. The top-down standards and testing slog has left many with a spent feeling.  It’s hard to muster enthusiasm to do more of the same. Those are breeding grounds that threaten to de-energize us or, worse, to incubate cynicism.

There’s one remaining element of why we need to own our schools again, starting today. The students in our classroom have changed. How? Social scientists and observers conclude that notions of “family” have changed. Marital and parenting bonds are looser, incomes are down, and adults are working more for the same or less money. Family time has become a scarcer commodity. Kids absorb the results and they bring them to school.

And twenty-five years ago, kids more likely sat around the TV in the living room, where Mom or Dad controlled the programming. The present generation may be spending 20 to 30 hours or more a week (especially if you include smartphones) on recreational screen time. The brand of direct parenting of yesteryear has largely been replaced by a new, more diffuse environment where kids are in their rooms, wrestling with Facebook. They’re outdoors less, and far less involved in neighborhood, multi-age group play. The brain’s quest for novelty and stimuli contribute to making school, with its list of standards, and its five-paragraph essays on topics unrelated to their lives and interests, a disconnecting yawner.  We can hardly compete for real interest and enthusiasm. As B.B. King said, “the thrill is gone”.

It’s up to us….

So, I’m telling school people that in 2016, the only promising way forward is muster the will to do it ourselves. To renew our profession and our communities by building skills and capacity, improving culture and systems, in the way we know that work needs doing. That’s our advantage – we know the work at the granular level.

On the upbeat side, we educators understand that, despite the external forces, young people still come to school every day wanting to do well, to use their minds, to connect. They ask themselves, “Does this teacher know me?”, “Is she interested in my future?” They’re making an overarching daily calculation, “Can I work with and learn from these adults?”  School folks have to account for, and own, that calculus.

What does ownership look like? First things first. The adults “in the room” must determine the fabric of the school, in reference to their own bonds with the institution and with each other. We’re asking our own questions about our situation: “How committed are we to each other’s success and to this fragile institution?”  “Do we have the time, freedom and support to work deeply with each other with the right menu?” and, perhaps most important, at the individual level, “How much am I willing to invest?”  If school administrators and teacher leaders commit to creating a culture where the answers to these questions are the right ones, the odds are largely in our favor.

There is no way around these issues. No policy advice survives this rarified air. These are the real questions that move people, and schools, forward. That’s why this fall I’m telling educators that the only promising way forward is to do it ourselves. To renew our profession and our communities by finding the will, by building skills and capacity, refreshing culture and systems, in the ways we know it needs to be done.

In the 1980’s, Judith Warren-Little gave us the elements of a simple and elegant recipe for making a school great: teachers planning lessons together; teachers talking about their students’ learning; teachers watching each other teach and making improvements; and teachers rooting for each other and their students. There they are – the conditions we need to restore our faith in each other, in the young people and their families-- the conditions to do it ourselves.

If you'd like to take action in your school, consider TREK" go to this link.

Dr. Larry Myatt
Education Resources Consortium

A Conversation Among Friends

In late June I had the good fortune to be among the attendees at a memorial event for Ted Sizer, organized and attended by many of the people he taught and worked with and otherwise touched during his decade at Brown University. Held at the campus, “A CONVERSATION AMONG FRIENDS” welcomed more than one-hundred people to the campus center.

Theodore Sizer

Special guests were the new Brown MAT’s, who had the chance to explore Ted’s work with three older generations of “Ted heads”. As part of the event, they received copies of Ted’s magnum opus, Horace’s Compromise, which I was asked to recall for the Coalition of Essential Schools “Year of Demonstration”. 

Speaker Jed Lippard, touched a nerve with many when he recalled a recent meeting of young educators, almost none of whom had read Sizer’s works. For that reason alone, it was great to have the face to face time with the MAT’s, along with back-up from seasoned Essential schoolers, many of us who considered Ted to be the Dewey of our time. The eagerness and intellect of those current graduate students was super refreshing to me. They identified with the book and they brought broad and astute perspectives on issues from Compromise - teachers’ beliefs and choices, collaborative practice, believing in young people and helping them to use their minds well. An additional theme was their recognition of the plight of educators on the front lines being asked to implement unhelpful policies and practices. It reminded me of Ted’s exhortation to policy makers – “provide the resources needed and get out of the way”, advice that remains unheeded. That these young professionals, all of them striving to know and learn more, could already see the need for those closest to the classroom to lead the changes needed was a near-perfect affirmation of Ted’s Common Principles. And right here on the campus where Ted made so much happen.  

Another striking reminder to me was the reach and gravitas of the many CES veterans who attended, friendly faces who had led a range of exciting, progressive efforts to the places they had chosen to dig in -school and district leaders, college professors and teacher developers, writers,  school coaches, teachers from across the K-12 spectrum. The degree to which Ted‘s ideas and convening magic had propelled so many of our careers is astounding, as were the many shared memories of what made Ted special –his gentle, courtly ways that belied his passion, his stunning grasp of the ecology of the schoolhouse (equaled only to me by Seymour Sarason), his clarity of thought and expression, the special attention he always gave to the youngest in the room, be they the children of staff, high-schoolers or new teachers.

 In closing, there was much talk of a fabulous Fall Forum in Providence this coming December.  There was also talk that fund-raising and the cooperation of the Brown Development Office will make “A CONVERSATION AMONG FRIENDS” an annual spring event and that wider notice and participation will follow. Bigger and better sounds great to me, although the size and enthusiasm of those in attendance this year was already a remarkable and uplifting way to enter the summer.  See you there next June! And thanks again, Ted.

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder

Education Resources Consortium

Gathering STEAM in New Hampshire

“Steam” was in the air in New Hampshire in early May as STEAM-Ahead NH held a spring summit for schools and collaborators to propel its state-wide STEM initiative. Held at the state-of-the-art Dyn facility in Manchester, the event welcomed over 100 educators and collaborator to explore the potential of STEAM programming to motivate students and help prepare them for careers in growing fields. And, as presenters suggested, as a way to help schools make changes in instructional programming, structure and culture.

Dyn is a cloud-based IPM provider that has been pivotal in revitalizing the Queen City. Its Co-founder, Jeremy Hitchcock, along with Silver Tech CEO Nick Soggu, has championed STEAM since its inception, and both work closely with Granite United Way to help provide a base of operations for STEAM-Ahead NH Executive Director Bob Baines.

Baines, who doggedly pursued industry partnerships and resources for STEAM-Ahead, opened the day with short videos and energetic remarks about the changing workplace and opportunities for young people. He gently challenged school people and partners alike to push past some traditional educational practices to help the STEAM work take root, and received a rousing endorsement and pledge of support from Commissioner of Education, Dr. Virginia Barry. Next, STEAM students from Manchester High School West and McLaughlin Middle School wowed the crowd with insightful remarks about their positive experience in STEAM classes, and then students and teachers from the West HS team seized the day with three hands-on STEAM projects that challenged the attendees to get their hands dirty, building and problem-solving in the fashion that distinguishes learning-by-doing.

The event wound down with a reflection from West HS Principal Christopher Motika and a professional development overview from Dr. Larry Myatt from ERC. Motika, widely respected for his turn-around efforts at the school, reprised the genesis of the STEAM effort at West, lessons learned in the past two years, and insights into the leadership decisions and dilemmas that came with trying to make changes to the traditional system. Myatt, who works with inquiry-based and project learning schools around the country, capped the event asserting that STEAM efforts cannot thrive without changes to beliefs about learning and major alterations to structures and practices. He shared his experience that project learning is often deeply constrained by the nature and design of conventional school and that STEAM, with its multi-sector partnerships and prominence, offers a unique opportunity to re-imagine a culture of learning, and to build educational communities that offer better possibilities for students and working educators alike.

Anyone have $50 million for a high school?

Friends-

Two weeks ago, an ERC TREK team and a few of our best friends submitted a lengthy vision to XQ: The Super School Project.

XQ’s goal, according to Laurene Powell Jobs, is to reinvent high schools in a way similar to how her late husband, Steve, reinvented how we listen to music. She’s willing to bankroll five brand new high schools up to $50 million (total) to make it happen.

What’s not to like? A funder familiar with audacious change. A nationwide search for new ideas. A significant pot of gold to give five of those ideas good footing. And a cooperative effort where applicants can talk to one another, even join multiple teams. All for the sake of, finally, possibly, bringing public education out of the 19th century.

A chance for us to explain our dreams
Though we’ve made it to the second round – out of five, we think – I don’t think any of the TREK crew is planning our lives around winning. But, we’ve enjoyed – if that’s the right word for a few hundred hours of discussion and writing – sitting down and sharing what each of us has learned about students, schools, communities, teachers, learning styles, families, and a few other subjects I must be leaving out.

Then, add to that our discussions about education philosophies that have come and gone, those that have stayed, those that should have gone but haven’t, and those that never arrived. One of the joys of our exploration is that our team ranges from the well-seasoned (meaning a bit older) to having a fresher outlook (meaning younger). The team includes public educators, nonprofit experts, university design chairs, community activists, and a couple of cynics, which every group should have. Frankly, if every school put together groups like that, and invited discussions like ours, much of our work would be done. (By the way, if I had had a chance to get Ms. Jobs’ ear, I would have suggested she start with middle schools first. But she didn’t ask my advice.)

What we agreed upon for “our” high school wasn’t particularly radical, given the lives our team members have led (but I suspect Bernie Sanders would say the same). We had questions about the XQ project’s underpinnings, but when all was said and done, we couldn’t say no to something that called out the need for action in a loud voice. ERC’s TREK program is better for us having met and labored together. (Perhaps Ms. Jobs can spare just a million or two to support TREK; we’re not greedy.)

A few highlights from our application
We’ll show you more of the application components over the coming year -guaranteed if you’ve signed on for TREK to work with us in redesigning your school(s)- but we do want to summarize five underlying fundamentals on which we agreed an ERC TREK high school would rest.

• Education must prepare young people to face a world that will change rapidly throughout their entire lifetimes, requiring them to be flexible and able to solve complex problems.
• Learning and youth development are inseparable if not indistinguishable. One cannot look at a young person as “merely” a student who arrives at school in the morning and leaves at the end of the day. A TREK school recognizes its responsibility to work deeply with youth to enable them to act in conscious, thoughtful, and responsible ways. 
• The educational environment must be authentic on every level. Content and assignments must relate to students’ lives. Relationships with the educators must be honest, open, and fair. Activities must include an almost seamless relationship with the community and the institutions, businesses, and organizations that comprise it. 
• We must incubate and elevate the “active inquiry” that is happening with us or without us. Guided, that “active inquiry” helps youth ask and answer meaningful questions: about themselves, their communities, and their worlds. Their answers can lead to authentic assessment: real-world products, presentations, and events.
• A TREK learning environment will never again be about rows of students in chairs day after day listening to a teacher lecturing to them, penning all students of the same age together for years, studying the same subject in the same way for pre-allotted chunks of time. Dispatching the old “culture of teaching” in favor of a culture of learning is vital in an ERC TREK school.

Re-imagining high school scares the hell out of some people – we find it energizing and totally possible.

We’ll keep you posted on how the TREK team is doing. If you’d like us to visit your school, though, just give us a shout.

For ERC, and our ERC TREK team,
Larry Myatt

Social-Emotional Support in Our Schools: Three Individuals Making a Difference

By Dr. Larry Myatt, Co-Founder, ERC

It’s the biggest no-brainer in K-12 public education –match the high demand for academics with equally high levels of social-emotional support. It has proven itself true repeatedly as a core strategy to raise student achievement, but more importantly, as a way to create the kinds of environments in which young people and adults can grow and thrive.

As Robert Evans pointed out in his thoughtful book Family Matters, for a generation we’ve been, and will continue to be, in the throes of social and economic upheaval that call for us to dramatically re-think relationships between home and school, as well as the services and outlook schools must offer. Levels of anxiety and depression astound us in affluent school communities, as does the impact of trauma and neglect that plague poorer environments, undermining safety and well-being, and, understandably, students’ readiness to learn.  Sadly, budgets for this critical aspect of schooling have withered over the past decade in almost every district I work in, especially the urban and rural. What money there is flows more readily to academic programming and technocratic fixes for our schools.  Ironically, it’s happening just at the time when our knowledge of brain development and the availability of tools and practices to do powerful resiliency work have crescendoed, yet remain largely remain untapped or inaccessible in our schools.

My own understanding of these issues intensified as I followed Richard Rothstein’s seminal reporting on the impact on children of factors such as eyesight, dental care, diet, and home influences related to child-rearing and mental health in schools in New York City. As a sitting principal, I saw how our own school’s early investments in social-emotional support, gender and racial equity, and personal and family wellness paid off. Ultimately, we learned we had also sparked a growth in the percentage of graduates seeking out careers in the helping professions. Now, as an ERC leadership coach and re-design consultant to schools, networks and boards, I believe more strongly than ever that schools have a clear and compelling obligation to do better to provide for all students the benefits that come with the right ZIP code.

In this issue, it’s my pleasure to cite three individuals, consummate humanists, who energize me, sustain my faith in the power of social-emotional care, and can be guides for school communities who are considering where and how to invest their time and resources: Superintendent Ken Facin from Hoosick Falls, a rural district north of Albany, NY whose commitment to what he calls “mindfulness” has begun to transform his schools; Ray Smith, often known as Brother Ray, who calls himself a “people builder” at Providence’s Alvarez High School; and Dr. Gil Noam, whose PEAR program’s resiliency-building research and “Clover” model are providing schools with state-of-the-art tools that provide a portrait of young people’s strengths and challenges and guide programming to meet them. Each, in their own sphere of influence is contributing in novel ways to shaping perspectives and practices in resiliency and positive youth development.

Facin, in his 8th year as leader in Hoosick Falls, brings vision and a high level of personal visibility to his schools. He candidly acknowledges being a bright, yet very challenging student back in his own high school years, and uses those recollections to emphasize the importance of relationships and the need to understand what lies beneath students’ behaviors and attitudes. He brings many of the lessons from his personal life into his public school leadership philosophy. Facin comments, “The more research I did, the more it became apparent that our young people’s needs were not being met across the social-emotional spectrum. And beyond that, the proliferation of social media without clear boundaries about use is causing an adolescent crisis that schools have been slow to understand and confront”.  

In his communications and interactions, he has been relentlessly positive about the need for students to see teachers as people, and for all members of his school community to make time for and develop an attitude of “mindfulness”. With trust and resources from Facin, the social/emotional team – counselors, social workers and psychologists, administrators, resource officer, and interested teacher volunteers- have been provided with time to meet, and support from ERC, to develop a long-term plan to raise the level of mindfulness in the schools. That includes building adult and student skills, and establishing rituals and routines that make hallways and bus rides, as well as classrooms and assemblies, safe and welcoming.

Hoosick Falls students are performing academically and attending high education at increasingly higher levels, and through Facin’s efforts, a mentoring program to help students succeed and stay at college and to prepare for the workplace and citizenship is expanding rapidly, yet thoughtfully. Facin shares his enthusiasm and ideas with other regional leaders and has convened a conversation about more seamless partnerships to undergird schools’ resiliency efforts for families and children.  For what to some may seem a small community, Hoosick Falls is more and more “on the map” for its smart investments in students’ readiness to learn, both during and after their years in the schools.

Helping students be ready to learn also comes naturally to Ray Smith, a Chicago native who moved to Providence 17 years ago. “Brother Ray” has been a presence on the streets and with the families of the city, especially those who may struggle to avoid the perils of tough neighborhoods. Energetic, quick-witted, thoughtful, and relentlessly positive and welcoming with all he meets, Smith has brought the wisdom and positivity of his own experiences and those of his community organization, the Young Leaders Fellowship, into his work at Alvarez High School. Young Leaders seeks to restore and revive the passions and dreams of young people, a mission that Smith embodies in his approach to daily life and work.

Only two years ago, Alvarez was a likely candidate for closure or take-over, but as part of her own wellness plan, new principal Zawadi Hawkins-Gladstone, who knew of Smith’s work, made it a priority to get him into the building on a permanent basis. Paperwork snafus delayed his arrival last year, but once he arrived on scene, his welcoming touch, ability to connect with all students, and skills in defusing potential conflicts made a huge and immediate impact, according to faculty, students, and Hawkins-Gladstone.

As often as possible, Brother Ray begins his day by greeting every possible student at the school’s front door with a joke, a positive reminder, a wise saying (often about the value and good use of time), making their first interaction at the school a pleasant and welcoming moment to set the tone for the day.Smith also serves on the school’s Wellness Team, frequently volunteering to serve as touchstone and mentor to students experiencing family challenges or struggling in school as well as adding his inside information on families, neighborhood history and relationships that help to paint a broader picture of students for others on the Team. Well-known across Providence, he has been a key part of the 300 Men initiative, which has invited and challenged men across the city to get involved, volunteer and lend a hand to support young people in a variety of ways, keeping the peace, and “building people” as he likes to put it.

Smith’s ways of working includes citing timeless metaphors and important life lessons that help students to see the big picture, make better decisions, and distinguish between short-term gratification and more productive, helpful plans for the future. “To watch him work is to be reminded of the power of the human touch”, says Rick Schwartz, head of the communications and non-profit advising firm, StraightTalk, and a member of the Friends of Alvarez advisory group, “There’s so much genius evident in his work”.

Dr. Gil Noam founded PEAR (the Program in Education, Afterschool, and Resiliency) in 1999 as a collaboration among Harvard Medical School, McLean Hospital and the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a number of strong community partners. In the years since, the program has flourished, and has a growing staff and list of initiatives.

During his earlier work in youth mental health, says Noam, he began to recognize that the school experience has a huge impact on how young people view themselves, and that education itself is an important marker of mental health. He shared, “I see the fostering of social-emotional skills as a natural meeting point between clinical and developmental psychology and education. And in schools I saw unnecessary suffering despite the availability of more and more tools to address student needs. Knowing that the emergence of mental illness can overshadow a whole life, I decided I needed to go beyond individual patient work to focus on larger systems”.

Dr. Noam sees a very important need for what he calls “translational centers”, like PEAR, in education– a place that facilitates easy movement between practice, policy and research – and where the research field conducts continuous scanning for best practices and innovations in the field to share with practitioners. We’re able to show results more rapidly because we don’t have to wait years to get much-needed resources into school communities. We can also more readily address the need for useable tools and trainings that update the knowledge of those in the field. PEAR strives to go beyond the typical short-lived or short-term professional development to create deeper communities of practice and to create tools like the Holistic Student Assessment (HSA) that can be used widely.

Noam is quick to express the personal and professional benefits of PEAR’s work. “At the end of our PhotoJustice program, students are asked to write about their photos of their school and environment –the stories ranged from a school bathroom that had been vandalized to photos of a memorial for a youth murdered in the school’s neighborhood. At the final ceremony, you could see that this program took youngsters who were angry at the world and gave them a way to channel their voice collectively and creatively. They learned that their voice has power and it’s up to them to choose to use that voice in a way that benefits their community, instead of disrupting it. That’s the kind of story that can happen when we provide the right opportunities.”

One of my votes for “Most Likely to Succeed” in 2016

Larry Myatt, ERC Co-Founder

ERC Co-Founder Dr. Larry Myatt opens the Panel Discussion at “Most Likely to Succeed” screening

No place makes ERC prouder of our contribution to better schools for kids than the Duke City – Albuquerque, NM. The excitement there continued to mount at year’s end with three key developments for the New Mexico Center for School Leadership, its Leadership Schools network and boards, and collaborating agencies and institutions. As mentioned in a TEDX-Albuq talk.

I was invited to present in that city earlier in the year, The NM Center and it’s cousins, the McCune Foundation schools cluster, have running room and energy and are making use of both.

I’ve been working over a decade in the city, watching the birth and development of a robust progressive education conversation that respects but resists the state’s policy moves towards standardization and constraining metrics. My colleague Katrina Kennett often joins me in work there as a resource for instructional planning and technology integration, and our post-visit debriefs always include some marveling at the room to innovate and local passion that we find refreshing.

In late November I was invited to moderate a panel following the Center’s screening of “Most Likely to Succeed”, a re-imagining school documentary, presented to a full house at the beautiful National Hispanic Cultural Center. The film, which won awards at Sundance and Tribeca, pushes hard on our failure to re-imagine new ideas of school, and was extremely well received, provoking a lively discussion among industry representatives, distinguished educators, and past and present students from the Leadership Schools Network.

The post-movie panel kicks into gear about what should be happening in local schools

As Center Founder Tony Monfiletto pointed out as he kicked off the event, the film provides some emerging details of what a high-quality 21st Century education will look like, and that similar dynamism is available locally in the city since Network Schools are on to the same scheme, but with even greater community involvement in design and programming.  Panelists took questions about the readiness of the teacher corps, demands from the community and work force trends, and the depth of the learning experiences of the students, making for a full evening and a lot of buzz.

NM Center Founder and Executive Director, Tony Monfiletto in front of their new home at Fat Pipe in downtown Albuquerque.

As the Center shifts into a higher gear it has also recently found a new home --at Fat Pipe, a unique community co-working space that brings start-ups, existing businesses and entrepreneurs together in the heart of Downtown Albuquerque. The Center has also added a Director of Networking, veteran progressive educator Justin Trager, and is building capacity with collaborations in the area of research, organizational and educator development, higher education partnering, and school networking. With support from the McCune Foundation, it is also convening the regional New Metrics initiative, which works to identify new and more powerful metrics for school evaluation that support and incentivize schools to provide students with the educational experiences and skills they need to become successful adults.

In a final bit of good news, the Albuquerque Public School Board approved its first charter high school in seven years last week --Siembra, the newest member of the Leadership HS Network. The new high school, planned for the South Valley, was chartered to address some of our city’s pressing economic and educational needs. Siembra Leadership High School, according to the press release, “adopts an innovative new model for education, focused on providing students with relevant and engaging project-based learning that responds to the needs of our city’s fast-growing entrepreneurial economy. Curricula at the Leadership High Schools are developed in partnership with Albuquerque’s leading businesses and organizations and this new high school will draw on the knowledge and needs of Albuquerque’s entrepreneurship sector to inform curriculum and ensure students receive an education that prepares them for the future.”

The Albuquerque Journal reported that Siembra Leadership High School will open in August 2016. Funding is provided by the State of New Mexico with startup support from private sources, including a four-acre plot of land off Rio Bravo and Coors, donated by NAI Maestas & Ward Commercial Real Estate as the permanent home for the school. ERC plans to support the Siembra Leadership as it identifies and brings in the talent to staff a state-of-the-art small high school with deep roots in the community, as well as supporting its new Board.

Why Is Getting Teacher Evaluation Right So Elusive?

By Wayne Ogden

Where did the furor over teacher evaluation go? Just five years ago it was the behemoth that overtook American schools. The only conversation in town. Now? It’s hardly on the radar screen. What happened?

In 2001 Congress passed the “No Child Left Behind Act” with great fanfare and desperation. Politicians and policy makers believed that something radical had to be done to improve our schools and save our economy from the ravages of a poorly educated workforce. When President Bush signed this act into law in early 2002 it became the most sweeping educational reform initiative since the days of President Lyndon Johnson. The law had bi-partisan support and promised radical changes in student performance and school accountability. But, by 2010 when student’s cognitive abilities, as measured by performance on paper and pencil standardized tests, proved to be resistant to improvement a “blame game” began in Washington and elsewhere.

At that juncture, the popular rationale regarding flat student performance became, “it must be the teacher’s fault”, and its cousin, “why aren’t those principals evaluating out those bad teachers?” Our national fixation on testing was supplemented by a new fixation on teacher evaluation and administrative management. Those of us in the business –teachers, building and district administrators, and trainers- remember the flurry well.

The Federal government dangled multi-million dollar carrots in front of states and school districts to encourage an overhaul of their teacher evaluation systems. The common wisdom was that if we could tie teacher evaluation, student performance, and merit pay together we would finally have the formula for success. Many of our nation’s most prominent funders and businesspeople jumped on the bandwagon. Private money followed public funds in support of this notion. 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 as training of administrators and teachers to use new evaluation instruments and management techniques swamped all other needs and plans. It was the singular focus of states, districts, schools and educational professionals for three years. Surely, this was going to do the trick! Finally our public schools were going to produce higher performing students.

So, what has all of this spending and fixation on accountability accomplished? As the studies and evidence roll in, not a great deal.

Let’s take a broader look. School districts have struggled with teacher evaluation for years, making limited progress in developing systems that actually result in instructional improvement and increased student learning. State Departments of Education have regularly developed new models of teacher evaluation only to replace them every few years, but not, as I see, it, for rational and helpful reasons. In some states, teacher unions have collaborated with their Departments of Education on new evaluation models, again, only to retreat from them within a few years. 

The way evaluations play out in far too many schools and districts is that an evaluator, whose real expertise has become the area of administrative management, data management and reporting, or student affairs, announces a date at which time she/he will come to observe a teacher at work with the class, usually for all or a good chunk of a class period. Depending on the labor agreements, the teacher may or may not have submitted a plan of what will 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 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 provides little insight into the real dilemmas of teaching, and little by way of getting at the nuanced formulas for sustaining growth and energetic teaching and learning in demanding settings, made even more stressful by the layers of testing and test prep.

To address these issues, the federal government used legislation, its bully pulpit and boatloads of cash to encourage “teacher accountability”. Most recently, the computer billionaire and amateur education policy wonk, Bill Gates seems to have become the most recent to fail at the teacher evaluation game. After an expenditure of more than 180 million dollars in Gates Foundation and other funds, and an estimated 50 million dollar per year cost to implement and maintain the initiative, The Washington Post recently headlined, “Another Gates-funded education reform project, starting with mountains of cash and sky-high promises, is crashing to Earth”. That 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. We need all the help we can get (if its spent in the right places and the right ways). I just want to highlight that when a government or groups of well-intentioned individuals make knee-jerk, simplistic reactions to highly- complicated problems like the factors that will improve student learning, those initiatives are likely to fail.

It wasn’t that long ago that the big idea about how best to bring about better student achievement was to get away from compensation systems that reward teachers for years of service and academic credentials earned, and instead implement merit pay evaluation systems that would reward educators based on the performance of their students. Unfortunately, scholars have found little or no evidence to suggest that merit pay has worked anywhere to improve student or teacher performance. No one talks about that idea much anymore. We’ve also learned that our national testing and school choice initiatives don’t sustain school improvement either.

We’ve even tried to use public humiliation as a way to improve teacher performance. 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.  As scholar and researcher Linda Darling-Hammond noted in a Phi Delta Kappan article, http://edsource.org/2012/pioneered-in-california-publishing-teacher-effectiveness-rankings-draws-more-criticism/6732 )  “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.”

So, back to teacher evaluation. Those initiatives that were spawned a few years ago have 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. Where those old 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 are intended to be both comprehensive and explicit in determining the “evidence” that will suggest a particular type of instructional strategy is “exemplary”, “proficient” or “needs improvement” or “unsatisfactory” (See, http://www.doe.mass.edu/edeval/model/ for a sample of a model of the rubric used for teacher evaluation in Massachusetts).

This 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, the rubric model itself 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-sole-and-dominant-actors is part of a century-old model –focused on a culture of teaching. What we need now is to understand the creation of a culture of learning and how the teacher’s role must change.

So, back to my initial question --why is getting teacher evaluation right so difficult and elusive? Why have so many different initiatives 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 a short list of things I think we should give a sustained try:

-Beginning teachers should be apprenticed for a complete school year to a master teacher in a co-teaching scenario (not as an understudy) for at least half of each school day. This would include collaborating with other teachers in the school and district.

-Compensate all master teachers at a higher level than their colleagues, but do not select them on the basis of seniority, but as a result of thoughtful process involving administrative, peer and student feedback.

-Master teachers should be part of the school’s leadership team.

-Schools must judiciously hire corollary staff to free teachers from operational duties that distract them from their essential function.

-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.

-Summers should include at least 2-4 weeks of pertinent, differentiated professional growth activities for teachers and districts should 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 -or that emanates from what the district currently thinks all teachers need.

-School leaders should be observing teachers at least one hour per week per teacher in all phases of their work (classrooms, student conferences, team meetings, etc.). No system of professional growth can work when someone is observed only a few times per year

-Administrators should engage with teachers and content areas to determine the kinds of routines, support, critique and provocation that are needed this year in this school. 

-Require teachers to solicit and use student and parent feedback on a regular basis, as part of a broader conversation about how learning is taking place.

-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. This is the instructional leader’s real work,

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

http://www.educationresourcesconsortium.org/news/2014/12/9/new-leader-support?rq=new%20leader%20support )

Strong support for and evaluation of teaching is possible. But it’s going to take an investment in helping schools become alive and responsive again. Policy-makers need to get out of the way if they can’t do better than what they’ve shown us for the past 10 years. And framing the issue as the need to support for learning and those responsible for learning is critical, as is involving all parties in a conversation about the changes we need to make in our schools on behalf of children and families.

Wayne Ogden is co-founder of ERC, and a former teacher, principal and superintendent. He specializes in coaching school leaders and was a contributing author to The Skillful Leader, a handbook for administrators in supporting improved teaching. To see his piece titled, "The Six Myths of Coaching New School Leaders" go here.

Change At the Roots Level: Anatomy of An Urban School Renewal

Larry Myatt, Co-Founder

In my school redesign and renewal coaching, I often talk about the needs of kids in terms of ZIP code. It’s a stark way to put things, but it’s also a simple, foundational orientation to working with students from poor families. By accident, kids born with the right ZIP code get a lot of good stuff. Not that they are without their own problems – a different set of problems- but they mostly get the role-modeling and cultural imprinting they need to more smoothly enter the worlds of college, employment and social standing. I explain to the adults that one of the best ways to invest our time in improving our schools is to mimic, even improve upon, those collateral but critically important activities that happen in certain ZIP codes, that help one to understand and make his/her way in the world. 

Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School in Providence, RI has many institutional challenges. You could probably guess what they are. Like many inner-city schools with inadequate resources, they do their best to serve a predominantly Latino, low-income community, and increasing numbers of non-English speaking immigrants and refugees. The school is in the third year of an attempt to re-build its capacity, restore programming and raise achievement levels, yet again in the face of shrinking budgets.

As usual, there are big struggles and blissful moments. This edition offers two examples that reveal the nature of roots work, the crucible of creating an intellectual, socially responsible culture under tough circumstances. 

Thoreau in the City

Team Carpe Diem is Alvarez’ frontal assault on the self- repeating drop-out phenomena, when over-age and off-track students linger in the school but fail to advance. It’s a state that I’ve termed “fragile stability” – young adults OK enough to come to school 3-4 days a week, but too often unable to engage, usually with big reading gaps, and frequently volatile or withdrawn. At Alvarez, students who are over-age and far under-credited can now opt for TCD, as its known – a small but hopeful program that does its best to build team, support social-emotional needs and offer the kinds of engaging, scaffolded academics that will draw students back into an academic life.

The day before their trip to one of Rhode Island’s most scenic and tranquil nature reserves, students in a Team Carpe Diem Town Meeting read about Thoreau’s life, then viewed a provocative YouTube video about man and nature, paving the way for intense small group discussions about big questions:  have humans moved too far from nature? Is Mother Nature really in control anymore? What price do we pay for being out of touch with the planet? Transcendental questions on Adelaide Ave. in Providence.  E.D. Hirsch would be proud.

The next morning they boarded a bus and on disembarking deep in the woods they each received a photocopied paragraph from Walden. With each student seeking out their own solitary spot in the forest, they sat with eyes closed for five minutes, looked at the sky for five more, then in a final pause, looked closely at the ground around them. For a half hour they sat silently, journaled and made their own sense of what Thoreau posed about the relationship between each of us and Mother Nature. Back at school, these would become essays and discussion topics. The insights were many and powerful, the kind of insights any of us would find memorable, self-revelatory.  Solitude, in a natural setting. ZIP code work.

A Big Second Wind

In early November, the Alvarez ninth grade team had their chance to jump into activities that, again, may or may not materialize depending on one’s ZIP code. Teacher, trainer, martial artist, philosopher Jeffrey Cohen brought his “Second Wind” master class for the whole student team and their staff. Cohen moved easily between leading body stretches and breathing exercises, personal planning and executive function tips, and the science of oxygenation and aerobics. Using only their chairs or simply standing tall, students got a full workout, the kind that can happen easily in any classroom.

Jeffrey Cohen brings Second Wind to Alvarez HS Freshmen

Cohen brought a special eye to adolescent needs, sharing with them strategies for ID’ing and coping with stress, focusing on and visualizing success at the beginning of a class or test, stretching out big muscles in your chair to renew brain energy. Student volunteers who saw their chance to know and do more jumped into the fray to model different stations of more robust exercise-- lifting, deep squatting, running in place. Of note, said staff members, the enthusiastic volunteers were students who are often restless and fidgety in the 70-minute Alvarez classes.

There are dozens of studies that conclude clearly that increased amounts of physical activity increase learning, help curb behavioral issues, and foster healthy habits. Schools that embrace and add a regular menu of movement see less truancy and even more parental involvement. And it’s a simple fix. Veteran Alvarez science educator Jack Fair was one of many to observe the focus, attentiveness, and relaxation that overcame the group as the 90 minutes proceeded. Fair was hoping routines from Second Wind would soon work their way into daily routines at the school.

I was happy to play a hand in the team meetings and planning sessions that made these events possible.  This is the way I’ve learned that change happens. Against many odds and local history, the school administration and teacher leaders are buying into a hearts-and-minds approach to turn the school around. We’re doing it the old fashioned way, re-booting Judith Warren-Little: creating lessons together, sharing our teaching and learning, investing in each other and our kids. And we’re thinking for ourselves, looking for thrilling learning and exploring the marrow questions: How do you help kids really use their minds? What kind of intellectual work would we want for our own kids? Is the work good enough?

Policy-makers, district leaders, think-tank pundits and funders, this is what the work looks like. One school at a time, as frustrating as that is for some. You can tell a lot from this story about what’s needed and where to invest. This is how you rebuild a school and the hopes of its adults, how you rebuild students’ hunger to learn that’s mostly been drained from them, and how you rebuild a community. 

TREK returns. A new, better chance for our schools.

Hoping for more from our schools?

For your children?

For your community?

Are you searching for a better vision of education?

You’ve been waiting for TREK.

Our nation has been unwilling or unable to facilitate the entrance of new models
to replace the old public schools. 

—Clayton Christensen in Disrupting Schools, 2011

In the early days of the Coalition of Essential Schools, TREK spawned many of the great small schools that endure today. TREK also became shorthand for a thoughtful community journey to perform what Theodore Sizer called the most important educational task of our times:  to evolve the institutions and practices that assist  learning.

ERC is pledging to make the potential, excitement and power of education renewal available again, to families, communities and schools who believe that change is overdue --through TREK.

Why Now?

At ERC we think the timing is right. The limitations of the core architecture of schools, minted in the 1890’s, make our communities increasingly vulnerable. Look at the plan’s basic elements: all kids of the same age, all together, all day long, from kindergarten to twelfth grade; all students studying the same facts, at the same time, with the same methods. Students plucked from a contextual and larger world environment and confined to classrooms in 50-minute doses. None of the above ideas based on any learning science or good parental instincts.

Increasing numbers of smart, committed, hardworking people – like you – are frustrated by the continual retreat to unproductive ideas. In the face of bigger needs, our efforts are not improving a faulty system.

How far behind we’ve left Sizer’s challenge! Policy makers don’t tread there. They see little need to question the “arrangements”. What’s passing for innovation these days? Add an hour to the day, adopt literacy software or get more computers?

As soon as you start thinking of kids as data points, you’re in trouble.
—Sir Ken Robinson

Even good-hearted attempts to tackle the status quo end up with little to show. I was invited to be a project advisor to an I3 grant initiative a few years ago. Despite adequate money, convening and networking, the effort achieved very little and ultimately hung up on the same rocks as dozens of other such attempts I’ve seen.  Just think of such projects as the $500 million Annenberg Challenge or the more recent $100 million gift to Newark schools.  Now, Ms. Jobs want to lend her checkbook to a new effort. (Check out Jal Mehta’s Allure of Order, if you haven’t yet. He gives us some critical perspective. ) Even the latest big ideas like Common Core, PARCC, or blended learning don’t get at the outdated structures, culture and conditions which do not correlate with what we know about learning.

So, back to TREK. What we are hearing in diverse settings nationwide is that people are missing and wanting a chance to imagine more than the present arrangements offer.

If you’re still reading, you know what I’m talking about.

TREK addresses three inescapable criteria for school redesign and renewal.

People with the education “reins” underestimate the complex interplay among the three core aspects of school:

1. Social/inter-personal— how do we treat each other?
2. Cultural— what matters here that we pass on as valuable, without examination?
3. Intellectual— do we learn to use our minds well? (Although this third aspect is often referred to as “academic” mission, its often more about who does well and who doesn’t, not to be confused with using one’s mind well.)

Each of these core aspects has associated with it deeply felt values, personal experiences, and generations of institutional practices – the 1998 state basketball champs, the drama club, National Honor Society, concerts, teacher open house  – all of which rally aunts, uncles and neighbors to the school and bind the cultural fabric tighter.  Other memories and feelings, the more social and intellectual reside in the shadow of the cultural. We tend to forget the divisions among those who felt smart and those who didn’t.  Somewhere in that shadow, too, are bus rides or car pools, the cafeteria, passing time; even if we experienced them anonymously, joyfully, or painfully, it was life, experienced at a vulnerable time. We carry forward trace images, some lasting and recognizable, most far less so, but all part of our “education”.  We know we can give our kids far better. Can we muster the will?

No room – or excuse – for nostalgia

People often resist change because they’re anxious about losing something.  Saying goodbye to a vague yet familiar notion of what school means is powerful stuff. Add to that, it’s uniquely human to want to pass down a replica of what we’ve experienced --to our kids, to the next generations.  Our instincts crave a common bond of experience, of ideas, of values. This is why we must work in particular ways, with the “whole village”, to envision something kinder at the least, a journey more humane, engaging, rewarding, and memorable.

Loss need not be part of renewal. We don’t need to throw away what works  for kids, we CAN keep a lot of what we treasure! That becomes uplifting and fuels the work of TREK. But success takes a team, a team with enough time, open-mindedness and self-discipline to tackle the toughest job in education: re-imagining it.

The first steps of the journey also require outside help --high-touch and high-skills. The vision and change leadership required to manage the feelings and ideas attached to the social, cultural and intellectual worlds of our schools is exacting. ERC has created and employs a “re-design spiral” that tracks and informs the arc of the change process required. Design, planning, and facilitation must be at once forensic and humanistic. 

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TREK is not for the faint of heart, nor for those who want the kind of quick and easy fix we’re conditioned to accept as real change. TREK is not for those who believe deeply in the current model simply because it has benefitted them, or for those who think that the teachers and kids are what need improving.

If you want in, we’ll come to you. We’ll bring you the most skilled facilitators, technology, and leadership coaches, the highest quality public engagement support, the most creative change process designers, and the most experienced scenario and school redesign experts. The hard parts - building the will, assembling a team and doing the work of creating your vision to pursue – that’s up to you!

For more information or to begin a TREK yourself, email today: larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org today!   

Please note: CES schools— if you feel it’s time to re-invent yourselves, you’re especially welcomed! Please email us about our plans for supporting TREK in CES schools.

Thanks for reading.

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder, ERC

Response to Globe Magazine Education Segment

I appreciated the Globe magazine’s ten ideas for transforming K-12 education, (Oct. 1) but found nothing transformational, and that the ideas fail to address our fundamental problem- the core architecture of our schools, vintage 1890. All kids of the same age, all together, all day long, from kindergarten through 12th grade. All students taught the same material, in the same way, for the same allotted chunks of time. All learning done inside the building, divorced from community. All kids ranked from top to bottom, with “success” limited to a predictable percentage.  No learning science has ever supported these ideas! No wonder one of your recommendations is to reduce student stress. As Clayton Christensen said in his 2012 book, Disrupting Class, “our nation has been unable or unwilling to facilitate the entrance of new models to replace a failing public system”.

Not since Theodore Sizer has anyone been forceful and persistent in saying it’s not the people within the institution – the kids and teachers- that are the problem, it’s the school model itself. Policy makers and state departments of education have abetted the failure by continuing to lock in the current system and practices.  Philanthropies don’t press for smarter efforts or true innovation. Our MA business community, despite its brains and influence, only asks for more charter schools. Everyone seems happy with the present “arrangements”. Until we do more than tinker around the edges, we can expect the same results.

Dr. Larry M. Myatt

Founder, Fenway High School

Boston, MA

President, Co-Founder

Education Resources Consortium

Teacher Learning Murals: Making Planning Visible

These days, in addition to coaching administrators and helping with school redesign, I also do a lot of direct work with teachers, supporting them in designing inquiry learning experiences for teams, individual classrooms and beyond. Portfolio tasks and PBL are a part of the bigger picture of inquiry learning but I like to take it a bit further, helping schools move purposefully from a “culture of teaching” to a more authentic and engaging “culture of learning”, within which students fuel their own intellectual activities. To do well at this, I spend a lot of time exploring how to help adults engage in meaningful learning, similar to the kinds of challenges they will present to students. We’ve known for years that the highest performing organizations have the highest degree of adult learning.  

For some time now I’ve been influenced strongly by the power of visual learning and visual literacy. Among those influences are Thomas West, a big thinker and writer on visualization, graphic design educator Kristina Lamour Sansone of Lesley University, my ERC colleague Katrina Kennett, a superb lesson/project designer and teacher developer, and a host of cognitive and neuro-scientists who are proving with brain-imaging technologies that seeing usually beats listening and text for learning. Although I thought I understood the field pretty well, and had the pleasure of writing an article on visual literacy for Phi Delta Kappan, (Connecting the Dots”, November 2008), I’m always finding new examples of the power of making things visible.

Manchester West HS STEAM-Ahead staff members prepare Learning Murals for presentation to their colleagues

Something I’ve been working on of late is a process to help schools make the huge leap from teachers working in private practice to being part of small teams, where it’s critical to make their planning and teaching visible. It’s something I call a Learning Mural. Learning Murals are in no way an invention for which I can claim credit. Similar processes and products have been around for years under different names- curriculum diagrams, mind maps, brainstorm webs, and more. What feels novel is the way we’re using them, and two aspects seem to be particularly helpful about the process. One is the power of colleagues being able to actively participate in a fellow teacher’s thought process, and, two, that the plans they generate are a departure from the kind of canned or scripted lessons that have overtaken our field over the past years. Teachers have been remarkably enthusiastic, standing up in front of their teams, sharing their excitement, asking big questions, making connections, and imagining possibilities. Two schools that have begun to embrace Learning Murals this summer –the STEAM-Ahead Academy at Manchester NH’s West High School and Providence RI’s Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School have already begun to make serious strides.

When asked for feedback, what teachers key in on is that Learning Murals are dynamic –“living documents”, as we call them- and exceedingly multi-purpose. They include three key aspects of good planning-- brainstorming, organizing and incubating, all in a lively, focused setting. The last of the three –incubating- results from the fact that other teachers and students have an ongoing opportunity to add to and alter it, posing resources, activities and possibilities that will help enrich student and teacher learning in ways that traditional solo, written lesson planning seldom approach.

Alvarez High School Teachers brainstorm components of a Learning Mural in August PD with ERC

Alvarez HS Principal Zawadi Hawkins-Gladstone is ecstatic about the potential for the murals to provide documentation of evolving teacher work and concrete starting places between meeting times, with phone cameras and software applications making it easy to capture and share the murals as they morph. She has endorsed the creation of Learning Murals as a key planning tool across all grade levels this academic year. Already the school’s teacher planning rooms sport a host of murals from different content areas. 

                                        Something I’ve added to the Learning Mural with great success is a simple, flexible protocol that helps the presenter further maximize her/his unveiling of a plan for a unit, lesson or activity. The facilitated protocol provides 5-8 minutes for the teacher to share the mural (see photos), another 5-8 minutes during which colleagues can act as students (what would excite me, if I were studying this topic or trying to learn this skill?) or as teaching colleagues (how could I connect to/piggyback on this? What am I doing that’s related or complementary?), reacting to what’s been presented, and a final 3-5 minutes on suggestions to make the Mural more compelling, powerful or understandable. The protocol can be facilitated by another faculty member and, in some cases, a helper uses a marker to add thoughts and ideas, draw connecting arrows or points of emphasis so that the presenter can focus on listening and using her/his visual powers to track changes on the mural.

A Civics/Social Studies Learning Mural at Alvarez HS

At Alvarez HS, teachers are already planning for students to attempt their own Learning Murals to organize a project they choose, as well as for second and third opportunities during Team Planning for teachers to incubate their learning design ideas as the work grows and changes with real live students. At Manchester West, STEAM staff members have agreed to adopt Learning Murals as a “road map”, a way to explain to students where their course work will take them, hoping to engender student ideas up front, and to post them so that students can track the flow of activities.

Again, nothing here is brand new, but the timing seems right. Learning Murals are an effective way to offer schools and teacher teams a safe yet provocative way to pursue higher quality planning, enrich a team’s collective and collaborative understanding of its intellectual endeavors, capture the fruits of that work, and above all, invite students to experience deeper engagement and learning through the power of visual learning. 

For more on Learning Murals contact: Larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org