Welcome to the blog of Zaq Roberts, Associate Head of School at The Berkeley School in Berkeley, CA. I blog about a wide variety of topics, from classroom moments I witness, to administrative events and conversations, to the educational blogs, videos, and books I am reading and watching, and how they are influencing my thinking. I hope this eclectic approach will give you insight into the many ways that I am engaging in advancing the school and strengthening our program, and I welcome your thoughts and comments!
This blog takes its name from a quotation by Archimedes that reads "Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world." The TBS mission speaks directly to the need to engage a changing world, while many of the experiences in our program focus on the development of students' agency and authority. TBS is the lever by which we all - administration, faculty, students, and parents - can together move the world to be more humane, compassionate, and responsive. To borrow an important Montessori phrase, it is our way to remake the world.
This week we held two elementary division meetings; one to begin thinking about some common themes of our work together this year, and the other to train faculty on a specific curriculum initiative.
On Tuesday we met from 9-11, beginning (after reviewing our ground rules) with an activity I based on one in Daniel Goleman's terrific book Working with Emotional Intelligence. The teachers were divided into two teams, and each given a ball to try to throw into a bucket, with increasing amounts of points being scored based on how far away a person was when s/he threw it in. After three rounds of playing this game, we had an excellent discussion about the idea of calculated and managed risk, with a wide range of perspectives voiced (from the new teacher who stood close to ensure getting one point each time, to a returning teacher who didn't feel there was much risk if he missed from far away, to the teacher who choose how much to risk based on the scores at the moment, and on and on). From here I directed the conversation towards thinking about how we manage risk in our teaching practices, and then on to the question of how students might feel risk (and thus respond) in a classroom setting. What surfaced was an understanding that we can't project our assumptions about the nature of a task or setting onto the children; we have to stay open, observant, and investigative of the signs they give us about how they are feeling.
From here, I turned the conversation to the topic of Gifts and Challenges, a long-running concept at TBS (which was brought to us by Judy Donovan at Sunrise Montessori in Sonoma), because of the 24 faculty in the division, only 4 were here the last time we did this training ten years ago. Gifts and Challenges is rooted in the sometime conflicting ideas of a) honoring and valuing each individual for his/her authentic self, and b) the developmental norm for children to compare themselves to their peers. In G+C, teachers and students investigate what comes easily to them, and what comes hard, in a range of domains, from academic to social to behavioral. By reflecting on their own strengths and weaknesses, children begin to develop meta-cognition about their own learning, and find ways to both use and practice their strengths, and also work on their challenges to turn them into talents. This process also helps build community in the classroom. I showed a film about Gifts and Challenges made at TBS about 7 years ago, and then Shannon Collins walked the faculty through the series of lessons she implemented in the curriculum, including how it sits within the concept of "Me and We". This led to a generative discussion about what each classroom can do, or already does, to get at the concept of Gifts and Challenges, and the commitment to initiate a curriculum and conversation in all classroom during the first six weeks of school.
The meeting then moved through a series of discussions about the roles of various people in the division, including the arrangement of Stephen, Renee and Kate in the learning support office; Sima as the Math Curriculum Support and Community Engagement Coordinator; Kate as the Social/Emotional Learning Coordinator; and Kyla as Extended Day Director.
On Wednesday, the division re-convened for a one hour training on the Zones of Regulation curriculum, led by Kate Klaire. Kate began by introducing the conceptual framework for our social/emotional work that she and I developed this summer; then she explained the approach of the Zones of Regulation curriculum (implemented with tremendous success in the K/1 classrooms last year), which color-codes emotions as blue (sad, slow, tired, etc), green (happy, glad, present, etc), yellow (excited, confused, nervous, etc), and red (angry, out of control, desperate, etc), thereby using the visual-spatial modality to get the tricky realm of intra-personal intelligence. Kate then led the faculty in the first of two lessons that they could use (or adapt) to introduce the Zones concept in their classrooms.
Yesterday the TBS admin team held an off-site retreat at evolve! studio in Berkeley, a small space located above the Freshly Cut Florist on 1301 #d California St (across from Monterey Market) that is so hip and locally-driven that it doesn't have a website (it does, however, host regular Soul Collage meetings, a book I gave my wife on her 38 birthday).
The first activity of the day was a presentation and discussion led by Mitch about the differing values, traits, and gifts and challenges of different generations. While our student's grandparents are largely Traditionalists (1922-43), our parents are mostly Boomers (1943-60) or Gen Xers (1961-1980), with a scattering of Millenials (1981-2000) thrown in on the younger end. Each generation has been shaped by very different forces in very different contexts, and understanding how each generation sees, and is seen by, the other generations, is important as we think about both promoting community within our parent body, and clearly communicating about our educational program in our marketing efforts. And, because we are who we are, we also enjoyed applying critical race theory, post-feminist, and other forms of critiques to the concepts we discussed.
The second discussion was a review of the marketing and re-branding efforts undertaken by the advancement office over the last several months. In addition to our incredible new website rolling out next week, we're revising a number of aspects of our communication, from the timing and template of the weekly NewsNotes newsletter to the signature block in our emails. On September 6th we'll be hosting an evening event from 7-8:30 pm with a "brand reveal", a summary of information from last spring's parent survey, and a financial status update.
After lunch (at Lilly's Restaurant down on Hopkins St), we returned for a walk through the Leadership Compass, a tool for self-reflection and leadership development loosely based on the Native American concept of the "Four-Fold Way". We began by gathering into groups based on which working styles we "default" to, whether when stressed or simply as our usual starting point -- the in-charge activist, the visionary, the nurturer, or the analyst. After reviewing some descriptions and materials about these archetypes, we worked in groups to identify and share a) what others should know about us when working with us, b) the gifts and challenges of being in this archetype, and c) our theme song.
The day concluded with a preview of the schedule for Work Week, including finalizing details for the New Faculty Orientation, the schedule of all-faculty and division meetings and the topics that we wanted to discuss at them, and reviewing assignments and roles for next Friday's New Parent Orientation.
Huzzah! Today I learned that my proposal to present at the 2013 NAIS Annual Conference in Philadelphia has been accepted. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to engage in dialogue with other educators and administrators about this topic, and also to sharpen my own thinking as I continue this important work this year at TBS. Below is the abstract for the one-hour workshop that will appear in the virtual handbook NAIS puts out (I put up the full proposal in an earlier post).
Changing School Culture At the Division Level School culture needs to be cultivated and developed through intention and effort to support and align with a school’s mission. Learn about the theories behind how cultures form and mature, delve into a case study of one school’s work in this area, and leave with pragmatic tools and ideas for nurturing the culture of your school at a division-wide level.
Fun energy abounds at TBS as admin and faculty begin to prepare for the new school year, now that Steve+Kate's summer camp is over!
Yu-Ren assembled new storage in several admin offices, including Mohammad's office.
Steve+Kate's put the finishing touches on their campus clean-up.
The Sun Room (and many other rooms) have been repainted in a delicious, warm buttery yellow.
New (and former) Middle School Division Head Gretchen Griswold took a lunch break from setting up the new 6th grade classroom (which has switched places with what was formerly the "main room" in the middle school).
Every detail is attended too, down to sharpening and arranging the colored pencils.
Supplies wait to be sorted and set up in the Middle School Science Room.
New Laurel Creek teacher Cate Dayan familiarized herself with the class library.
Jeff Grether (4/5) and Shannon Collins (K/1) share a laugh.
All of the exterior wood surfaces have been refinished and re-stained.
I love playing games. Rhythm and drama games, games of chance and luck, team and individual sports, board games and card games, strategy games and logic problems, even jigsaw puzzles: I haven't met a game I didn't enjoy. One of my earliest memories -- and a favorite family story about my childhood -- is beating my father and brother in two consecutive games of Uno at the tender age of three while on a houseboat in Florida (both times I ended with two wilds in my hand).
Games are one of several powerful forms of play (along with imaginative play, rough-and-tumble play, object play, etc), and as Dr. Stuart Brown taught us, play is an essential life skill that has a direct impact on brain development, physiological and emotional health, social skills, professional success, and learning and memory. Which is why I enjoyed reading a recent CNN article about the Quest to Learn school in New York, which uses games as the primary instructional technique in the classroom.
At TBS, we also believe in the effectiveness of play as a basis for educative experience, and though it isn't the central pedagogical tool used in our classroom, it is deeply integrated into our practices. I wrote about the use of games in a K/1 Reading Workshop class this spring in Mission Moments #5, while the Investigations in Numbers, Data and Space math curriculum contains an extraordinarily rich variety of games including student favorites Roll and Record, Close to 100, Factor Bingo, and many more. Games are also a part of the Montessori approach, including the Stamp Game, which is used for teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and the Imaginary Island Project, which teaches a variety of concepts about physical and cultural geography.
Going beyond playing games for the educative experience of knowledge construction and skill building that can result, I also see great value in teaching children to think critically about how games work, as it teaches them to identify context, frames, and principles. As a middle school teacher, I offered a course in game theory and design, in which we analyze the construction, rules, and guiding principles of games beginning with Tic Tac Toe and Rock Paper Scissors, moving on to Connect Four, checkers, and chess, and finishing with board games such as Monopoly and Risk. For a final project, students designed and built prototypes of their own games (which we then played in order to assess the design and underlying principles).
Connecting game-playing to the TBS mission to engage a changing world, check out Jane McGonigal's TED talk about games, and the possibility that games can actually be agents of social and societal change. She points to a real-life example of gamers finding a solution for how to fold certain proteins in certain ways that scientists had been unable solve as the potential for games to lead to a better world.
Problem solving is a type of game, so here's a problem that I'm also forwarding to our 4th-8th grade math teachers. It's the classic "Monty Hall" problem, and it's great for teaching concepts in probability, and for the ability to replicate and simulate variations to test answers within the classroom:
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1 [but the door is not opened], and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
You can check your solution here (warning, it's a link to Wikipedia).
From here, I turned the conversation to the topic of Gifts and Challenges, a long-running concept at TBS (which was brought to us by Judy Donovan at Sunrise Montessori in Sonoma), because of the 24 faculty in the division, only 4 were here the last time we did this training ten years ago. Gifts and Challenges is rooted in the sometime conflicting ideas of a) honoring and valuing each individual for his/her authentic self, and b) the developmental norm for children to compare themselves to their peers. In G+C, teachers and students investigate what comes easily to them, and what comes hard, in a range of domains, from academic to social to behavioral. By reflecting on their own strengths and weaknesses, children begin to develop meta-cognition about their own learning, and find ways to both use and practice their strengths, and also work on their challenges to turn them into talents. This process also helps build community in the classroom. I showed a film about Gifts and Challenges made at TBS about 7 years ago, and then Shannon Collins walked the faculty through the series of lessons she implemented in the curriculum, including how it sits within the concept of "Me and We". This led to a generative discussion about what each classroom can do, or already does, to get at the concept of Gifts and Challenges, and the commitment to initiate a curriculum and conversation in all classroom during the first six weeks of school.
