What's in a Word?

I loved this chart capturing student suggestions in Temescal Creek (2nd and 3rd grade) for ways to make their writing more interesting by using words in place of "said". It grew out of a lesson in which students practiced noun-verb constructions ("Birds chirp," "dogs bark," etc.).

Thinking and Linking Pt.2

Funding for California public schools is a mess, but at least Gov. Brown has the right idea about less testing and more learning. (ABC News)

I'm not an occupational therapist, but it makes sense to me that for best learning and performance, students need to be fully aroused, and chewing gum can help. (NBC News)

I'd love to have a class set of iPads. Other folks aren't convinced yet - they think there's other, newer, or better technology. But I see that as public and private schools start breaking the trail, the ability to use these machines in service of learning has important potential. (The Olympian)

One of my favorite quotations ever is from Donald Keough, the former CEO of Coca-Cola, who once said, "What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one's ability to ask for help." But how do we deal with the fact that equity traps of race and social class impact the ease with which a student acquires this skill? (Chicago Tribune)

Obama wants to raise the drop-out age. This is good. But can we get past the superficial metrics of educational success and talk about the development of understanding, please? (New York Times)

Duh: social media and multitasking degrade social skills. (CNN)

Boy do I love Brain Pickings.

There's a little bit of propaganda and hero worship in this, but it's still inspirational:

Thinking and Linking Pt.1

Is there a connection between handwriting and success? I suppose it depends what you mean by success, and though this article barely touches on this point, it is worth considering. Handwriting is linked to attention, focus, memory, and motor control, which are all important factors in early literacy and mathematical skill development. (Florida Sun Sentinal)

Many people seem to dislike the idea that parents have a say in what gets taught in school. It's difficult to find a fully reasoned position among the fear-mongering and shield-banging on both sides of this issue. Many parents select independent schools as a form of having that say, either through the school's established curriculum, or because the school is more receptive to family involvement than other options might be (and at independent schools, the "consumer model" is already a reality, despite our desire to also create community and the important equity issues in determining who has access). Personally, I know that parents have a lot of ideas and resources to offer that can make a program and curriculum much more interesting....the problem I've encountered is how to tell people "thanks but no thanks" without them getting upset (maybe that's because of my lack of skill in communication). (New York Times)

Progressive educational thinkers like Alfie Kohn have been telling us for years about the dangers of praise - even of "effort praise" that centers around effort instead of results - because it turns children into Pavlovian dogs who work for the praise instead of their intrinsic interest. This is excellent advice, but the resulting challenge has been to find ways to communicate our respect and admiration for their thinking and learning. At TBS, our response has been to ask children to engage in high-level reflection around their work, and to build their capacity to evaluate themselves rather than seek out validation externally. Perhaps using praise focused on the neurological effects of hard work is also worth investigating. (Washington Post)

What is there to say about lesson study? That it's awesome. The opportunity to observe another teacher and then engage in collaborative conversation about the decisions and actions that she or he made is as close to the clinical model of supervision established in the medical field, and one that both has proven results, and that participants cite as transformative to their work. Let's do it! (WBEZ 91.5)

Parents sometimes wonder how we can effectively evaluate a child in middle school when we don't give grades, and how we know a child is effectively learning. I have a whole soapbox speech on the intellectual dishonesty of grades, but for a change of pace, here's an example of a school that does a part of what we do; while they do give grades, they simply don't allow students to fail. Instead of getting a "0" for a missed assignment and moving on to the next thing, that work is marked incomplete until it is finished. (Statesman Journal)

I have very mixed feelings about the length of the school day for kindergarten students. I'm not sure I believe the claims that it will lead to increased academic success - from my direct observation and experience, those little beings are often so tired from the mental and emotional energy of the morning that the quality of learning in the afternoons is not necessarily high. I do appreciate that they want to find time to provide more opportunities for play, though. (The Tennessean)

When I was an English teacher, I loved asking questions to stimulate student thinking, though I always knew my approach was not a traditional Socratic method, since I integrated many other teaching practices. So I'm not surprised that someone thinks the Socratic Method isn't right for every student in every situation; a diverse set of pedagogic techniques is the only way to be sure to reach all learners. I just wonder why people become dogmatically wedded to one particular way of doing things (like the Harvard Business School's use of case studies). (Time)

What happened in math today?

Here's what I saw when I took a stroll through the elementary math classes today.

Kindergarten - Students sat as a group thinking about, discussing and exploring the idea of attributes. Building on their experiences playing Attribute Castle (a classroom favorite), they took turns identifying attributes about the group (shoes with laces; striped shirts), and then identifying who possessed that attribute and thus fit into the category.

First grade - Students worked on consolidating their understanding of both static (not requiring regrouping) and dynamic (requiring regrouping) subtraction, using one of two tools; some worked with hundreds charts, while others used snap cubes.

Second grade - Students explored the patterns and relationships between the number of sides on a geoblock (triangle, square, rhombus, hexagon, etc) and various number of geoblocks. Understanding that one square will have four sides, and two will have a total of sides, etc, is a precursor to developing multiplicative understanding, very similar to skip counting, and this activity used visual and kinesthetic interaction to reinforce the concept.

Third grade - Students created and identified various types of addition combinations, including "make 10", "doubles", "near 10 (+/-1)", "plus 10", "plus 9", and others. This is a topic begun in kindergarten and usually terminating in third grade, as children's number sense and automaticity allow them to no longer need to count for addition purposes, since the value of single-digit numbers has become internalized.

Fifth grade - Students stood in a circle tossing a ball to each other. When a student caught the ball, she or he had to give an "exit ticket" from class in the form of a combination of various unusual fractions (1/3, 4/7, 3/8, etc) that totaled 1.00.

Unfortunately I didn't stop by the fourth grade class in time to observe!

Thinking and Linking about Leadership

I love reading about leadership -- sometimes more than practicing it! -- and there's a good neurological basis for me doing so; long-term memory is best created through regularly structured and timed repetitions of information. Each time I read about an aspect of leadership, it helps reset that idea for me as I go through my day tackling difficult topics in classroom practice, curriculum design, teacher collaboration, administrative practices and policy, parenting, and many other elements of my work that take courage, stamina, and insight to address. Moving back-and-forth between practice and theory keeps me focused on both addressing the issue at hand, and the lens with which I'm viewing that issue. With that in mind, here are a few links about leadership I've found useful in the last month; the links-as-descriptions are my summaries of what I've taken from each article and used in my own work.

Creating change requires overcoming your fears.

Failure precedes success.

Fear of being wrong is the biggest mistake of all.

Design a strategy that eliminates resistance.

It's all about the team. (I wrote about this article earlier this month)

Know when to lead and when to manage.

Leading is living a balanced life.

An inside look at a day in Blackberry Creek

I unexpectedly spent half of the day subbing in Blackberry Creek, a K/1 classroom. Here are a few things I re-learned during this time:

-Teaching K/1 requires extraordinary patience

-K and 1st grade students have a very wide range of knowledge and skill in most disciplines, even at this mid-way point of the year

-Incorporating choice into the work allows kids to have a feeling of agency, and thus motivation, which in turn makes them more open to the targeted learning experience

-Testing or opposing authority is a natural developmental characteristic of the age

-Fine motor control in writing and other small movements is often still awkward

-They both need to move and be physical, and yet tire easily

-Children this age love to ask questions, but may not yet be able to see or understand other viewpoints

-The approach to work is just beginning to coalesce; their ambition, response to critique, and knowledge base don't often align

-K/1 play to learn about the world and people around them, and learn effectively through techniques that incorporate play (games, riddles, songs, poems)

An Assembly on Empathy

This morning we held our monthly assembly in the beautifully re-appointed space of the Depot (if you haven't yet seen them, gorgeous new cabinets have been installed to store our collection of Orff instruments). The theme of the assembly was empathy, the experience of feeling with someone else's feelings (rather than sympathy, which is the experience of feeling for someone else's feelings), to tie into the social rules focus on inclusion and exclusion that Kate Klaire is working on with our classrooms this month.

I wanted to begin by giving students an experience that would help them understand that our brains make meaning of experiences in ways about which we aren't always conscious or in control. This is true not only in the academic and intellectual realm, but also in the social and emotional realm, and I hoped to illustrate that people sometimes get stuck in patterns or habits that they aren't even aware they are doing, or know why they are doing them. I also wanted to change up the approach I had used to open the previous assemblies ("if you X, clap once. if you Y, clap twice. etc"), and I wanted to have an interactive experience that could give students an experiential basis to understand the ideas I was raising, instead of just talking at them. And so, I started by replicating this activity by Bobby McFarrin:

This was followed by a series of carefully crafted teacher skits that Kate and I wrote together. Claire, Lyssa, Mike, Sima and Eve had volunteered to present these skits, and we rehearsed them before school this morning. Each skit was based on real-life interactions that occur in the classroom, at lunch, or on the playground. After each skit, Kate interviewed the participants about their feelings, which gave teachers a chance to model making their emotional thinking and feeling visible. Kate then restated the main experience or feeling, and gave students a chance to make the "me too" sign to connect what they had seen and heard with their own lived experience. My favorite comment overheard during this time, by a student: "I've done some teasing this week."

Following the skits, the Student Recess Council read off the list of agreements they had arrived at for the school. In the short term, these are going to be posted on the playground; in the medium term, the Extended Day program is going to offer a mural arts class this spring, and the product will be a full-sized mural featuring these agreements somewhere on the recess yard.

The assembly ended with Eve and Chris Perdue leading the school in a wonderful version of Here Comes the Sun, to celebrate the lengthening of days and the arrival of the new year.

The feeling in the room this morning was very powerful. Teachers and kids alike were buzzing with the good vibe and thoughtful learning. Ask your child about it!

In memory of George, I can't resist:

Jan.22nd Site/Garden Work Day

Here's a draft list of projects we're considering tackling on Sunday, Jan. 22nd. Please bring any appropriate gardening and construction tools you have that could help us in this effort.

K1 Playscape

-Cut back any plant that is extending into the walking space defined for children

-Prune grape vines, native plants bushes, lemon tree, apple tree, blackberries, dead plants, all other plants

-Build the fence at the north end of the playscape

-Reposition the boat and build a "dock" off the berm.

-Install corrugated plastic cover shade cover over outdoor classroom arbor (see awning above Laurel/Strawberry)

-Sift the sand

-Add a new coat of woodchips

-Remove the wire fencing from in front of the chicken coop, and beautify that area (remove stones, cover with woodchips).

Other spaces

-Weeding all around campus

-Prune the overgrown lavender along Blackberry

-Prune the rosemary along Temescal

-Prune the vines off the south wall along Addison

-Clean and prune the parkway strip on Addison

-Complete weaving of the bamboo fence around the rain garden

-Fence off the area under the south stairs behind/around the playhouse

-Address the space behind Mitch’s/Shira’s office

A Morning Math Stroll

This morning I took a walk through the classrooms to see what transpired during the various math periods around our elementary level.

In K/1, students were either playing "roll and record", a game in which they roll two dice and record the total of the two showing faces -- thereby providing practice with number recognition, static addition, probability, and record keeping -- or creating simple patterns ("AB" or "ABC") using snap cubes and then coloring in pattern charts to match their snap cube chains -- practicing their pattern sense, visual matching, and visual memory.

In 2nd grade, students were completing a series of problems that called on them to use skip-counting, or counting in groups (a precursor to multiplication) along with pattern prediction. They were presented with some information ("each floor of the building has X rooms on it"), and a chart containing two columns, one each for the floor # and the total number of rooms in the building up to that floor. They used grid paper and snap cubes to help themselves count by groups when necessary.

In 3rd grade, students investigated how to find the perimeter and area of shapes that don't lend themselves to easy measurement. They each traced the outline of one of their feet onto centimeter graph paper, and were then asked to find ways to calculate the perimeter and area of that shape.

In 4th grade, students practiced with multiplication math facts, completing a sheet of problems without using any kinesthetic or material tools to help them calculate. Finding just the right balance of repetition and novelty is an important part of the learning process (for more on this, check out John Medina's website on Brain Rules).

In 5th grade, students practiced their understanding of percents by writing and giving each other problems set in restaurants, where the goal was to calculate the amount of money required for a tip of a certain percentage, because creating problems is one of the strongest possible performances of mastery.

Planning K/1 Child Visit Day

Today at lunch, the K/1 team -- Claire, Kyla, Lyssa and Ben -- met with Paula, Laurie and myself to begin planning next month's K/1 Child Visit Day. We began by looking at last year's program (which itself was an enormous step forward from the previous year's event), and discussed the positive aspects of the program that we want to keep, as well as those areas we think can be refined and improved.

The basic structure of the event, which we revised last year, will stay the same: we begin with open classroom exploration, move on to a short circle, and then have an extended "work period" in which children are free to roam the room and engage with various materials, during which time each child gets guided in a short 1:1 assessment with a faculty member. The work period closes with a circle and story read-aloud, and then an outside recess before parents pick up the kids.

Perhaps the most significant shift we discussed is the content of the 1:1 assessment through which we run each student. We together looked at a long list of areas in which we might want to assess these small four-year-olds -- gross motor, fine motor, following directions, visual patterns, visual matching, visual memory, imitation, delayed gratification, cooperative play, and early academics -- and agreed that last year's assessment was too heavily focused on early academics, in areas of both early literacy (sound/symbol correspondance, letter names, etc) and number sense (1:1 correspondance, rote counting, etc), given the age and development of the prospective students.

One aspect of the event we won't be changing is that Julianne Hughes, K-5 art teacher, will have projects available for the parents in the Art Studio during this event. Giving parents something to do while they wait (especially one in the artistic realm) is a great tool for distracting them from their concerns, while also providing them an opportunity to get to meet other potential families who might join our K/1 program next year.

Thinking about the 6th Grade

Today Mitch, Norman, Marcella and I met for 45 minutes to discuss the role of the 6th grade in the school. When our stand-alone 6th grade program was founded four years ago, it was conceived of as the linchpin between our Upper Elementary and Middle School programs.  For example, it was located on the first floor, literally between the two 4/5 classrooms, and students flowed between the rooms for ongoing projects through the early years. The 6th graders were acknowledged as having their own unique needs, and they were also asked to shift between being leaders for the Upper Elementary students, and "first years" in the realm of the Middle School.

When the Wildcat classroom was moved to the second floor three years ago, to make room for the kindergarten shifting from the ECC to the University Campus, the connections with the 4/5 became more tenuous as the students physically lost contact with each other, and the 6th grade became more integrated with the Middle School. Similarly, collaboration around classroom projects slackened, and times that were once shared, such as P.E. or recess, were now conducted separately.  Furthermore, while we gladly welcomed an influx of students in our 6th grade from other elementary programs, those students had little or no prior personal connections with the students and teachers of the 4/5 classrooms. And, as you can imagine, 6th graders look up to the middle schoolers and are vocal about their preferences to be with the older students, rather than the younger ones.

The goal of our meeting was not to "solve" any particular problem, but to lay out the landscape and history of the program, and to pose the key question that will help us create a strong and consistent program: What do we want the relationship of the 6th grade to be with our Upper Elementary, and with our Middle School? This is a conversation that we will broaden to include our faculty at the 4/5 and 7/8 level, and from there, we'll explore possible opportunities for structural elements (shared classes) and cross-grade interaction (curricular projects and learning).

It's All About the Team

Though leadership theory has evolved since the 1978 publication of James MacGregor Burns' seminal text Leadership, the idea of transformational leadership -- leadership that works to allow self-actualization of both individuals and society to their highest manifestations -- remains central in for-profit, non-profit, and democratic institutions. As the Gen X generation replaces the Baby Boom generation as leaders and executives, and begins to think about how to lead the Millennial generation -- which has its own very strong ideas about life, the universe and everything -- the idea that work is an avenue for self-transformation, and not simply a way to make a living, emerges as a powerful force.

In this light, though John Baldoni's article on CBSnews.com purports to be thinking about leadership for 20 years in the future, much of what it says is immediately relevant today:

"The post-heroic leader will need to balance the role of boss, mediator and coach, allowing teams more freedom and autonomy while at the same time keeping them focused on objectives," the Hay report says. In other words, it ain't about you the leader -- it's all about the team. Note the use of the word "post-heroic." 

In school settings, it is truly "all about the team." As a leader, my goal is to support and ensure the success of every teacher (who does the same for each student under his or her tutelage), and one of the most powerful tools I have to do that (along with curriculum development support, resource support, and professional development) is to ensure that each faculty member feels that s/he is a member of a successful team. To this end, we use a variety of teams within the division itself; teaching teams within each classroom, grade-level teams across the classrooms, and a division-wide team for issues that concern all classrooms. We also use teams across all three divisions of the school (ECC, Elementary, Middle School) to discuss (and resolve) certain issues, such as curriculum alignment.

Creating good teams is difficult work that requires constant attention to subtle dynamics and interactions, and there is no shortage of literature about creating teams. It's a topic in the first meeting of the year I had with each teaching team, and one we return to throughout the year at each type of team. For example, at last month's Elementary Division meeting, the group brainstormed ways to make our meetings more effective (by level, division, and whole school). Similarly, during the break I came across this article from the Harvard Education Publishing Group on rating (and thereby having a basis for thinking about improving) a teaching team, which I'll be sharing with the teachers during our February division meeting.

Two years ago, Paula, Mitch and I went to hear Pat Bassett, head of NAIS, speak in San Francisco. At that event, Pat outlined three types of school leaders - the General, who will achieve any objective, even at a terrible human cost; the Ambassador, who will build relationships and culture, though not necessarily achieve any objectives; and the Priest, who has a vision of the future that enraptures a core of believers but alienates many others. Pat's theory was that most school leaders are naturally drawn to one of the archetypes, and at most can learn to be effective at two of the roles (which lead him to some conclusions about how to be a successful leader); however, I would propose that to be a leader who is  effective at creating strong teams, one one has to shift between these roles depending on each context and situation.