Friday Morning Fun

I love Friday mornings at The Berkeley School. Each K-5 grade level has a unique tradition that engages students in their intellectual learning linked to important social learning as well. In the K/1 classrooms,  parents and family members are invited in for Free Friday, a chance to explore materials, collaborate on reading, writing, and math activities, play games and puzzles, and put the child in the role of expert and guide to demonstrate (and thereby consolidate) his/her learning.  

In the 2/3 classrooms, parents and family members join students during a Reader's Workshop period. Children without family members present often spontaneously gather together in groups and simultaneously read and share a variety of (often non-fiction) texts.

Friday mornings at the 4/5 level usually begin with a "Cerritoberry" period, in which all students and teachers from both classrooms come together to do an activity (or play a game) that promotes communication and collaboration. For today's activity, students were broken up into groups of 5 or 6 and given the following survival situation (drawn from secondary Scouting curriculum, which uses it for the purposes of teaching content, whereas for TBS it was used for teaching critical thinking, communication, and collaboration):

You and your companions have just survived the crash of a small plane.  Both the pilot and co-pilot were killed in the crash.  It is mid-January , and you are in Northern Canada.  The daily temperature is 25 below zero, and the night time temperature is 40 below zero.  There is snow on the ground, and the countryside is wooded with several creeks criss-crossing the area. The nearest town is 20 miles away. You are all dressed in city clothes appropriate for a business meeting. Given a group of items you’ve recovered from the wreck (a small ax, a can of Crisco, newspapers, a lighter, etc), create a list of the items in order of importance for your survival, followed by the uses of each item and the reason why you have it in the order you’ve chosen.

Disrupting tuition

Clayton Christensen, author of the highly influential book Distrupting Class, has an excellent new video about disruptive innovation posted last week at HBR. It's got me wondering if the way tuition works at independent schools presents an opportunity for disruptive innovation, and what that might look like. The only two options I'm aware of currently employed are partnering with outside funding sources such as corporations or funds, which comes with significant limitations and directives from those financial sources, or employing a sliding scale for tuition, which very few schools do sustainably, since tuition assistance essentially functions to create a sliding scale that is more predictable and manageable. Let me crowd-source this: anyone got ideas?

NAIS Annual Conference, Day Three

The final day of this year’s NAIS conference began right at 8:00 am with the first of the day’s three workshops. Since the theme of the conference is innovation, I choose “Innovative Schools, Innovative Students” by Jonathon Martin, Head at St Gregory’s (AZ). I’ve enjoyed reading Jon’s blog and his posts to the Independent School listserve, and was excited to hear what he had to say about innovation. His presentation was essentially an overview of the concepts presented in some select recently published books on innovation, including Drive, Where Good Ideas Come From, and The Innovator’s DNA, which was useful from the standpoint of a data-dump on the concepts, but not in thinking about how these ideas are specifically applicable within schools. Unfortunately, as he ran short on time he accelerated the pace and volume of his speaking – choosing content coverage over depth.

For my next workshop I attended “Innovator’s Challenge Promotes Cross-Curricular Collaboration and Innovation”, presented by Penny Summers and Burn Jones of The Canterbury School (NC). They told the story of how they attempted to foster curriculum improvement through a specific project that arose from their leadership team’s shared reading of Curriculum 21 by Heidi Hayes Jacob (a book that has been on my reading list for some time). Listening to the narrative of the project was interesting, and I especially appreciated the constraints that they built into the project; that teachers work cross-disciplinarily with another teacher, that they connect with an outside organization, and that the project be considered within the context of the real work of the professionals in the field (biologists, writers, etc).

I had have a wonderful lunch conversation with Mary, Anne, and Mo Lan from The Trinity School in Menlo Park. I had been on their campus for a CAIS accreditation training in October, and Anne lives in Oakland and worked at both Bentley and Beacon previously, and we built on those connections to discuss a range of issues, from accreditation to enrollment to strategic thinking.

For the final workshop of the conference, I picked “Moving The Mountain: Changing Faculty Culture from Within” by Alice Moore at Marin Country Day School (CA) and David Colon at Collegiate School (VA). This workshop took a widely divergent pedagogic approach from the others, in that the presenters posed a series of questions to the audience, giving us time to talk in small groups and then report back our answers, before sharing some other considerations and moving on to the next question. I appreciated the attempt to provide a structure that would allow for active thinking and engagement, in contrast to most of the other workshops of the conference, though my hope for an increased understanding of, or even a few pragmatic nuggets about shifting faculty culture was not satisfied.

The conference’s closing general session featured Amy Chua, Yale Law School professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. After all the bad publicity her book had received, I was fully expecting to hear views that are widely divergent from my own, and thus was utterly shocked to hear how incredibly funny, self-deprecating, and thoughtful Amy actually was. Her perspective is far more complex than the media have depicted, and I found myself agreeing with many of the things she discussed, including the need to have high expectations for children, the importance of having them develop resiliency, the fact that genuine self-esteem comes from succeeding as a result of trying hard to do something challenging, the importance of balancing choice and freedom, and that happiness and success do not need to be mutually exclusive. Ultimately, her point is that Western parents have much to learn from Chinese parents, and vice-versa; that Chinese parents need to learn to nurture the whole child and cultivate the social and emotional lives of their children as well as the academic. In many ways, she was advocating for the exact sort of progressive education that we provide at TBS!

NAIS Annual Conference, Day Two

The theme of this year’s conference is innovation. The opening general session this morning began with an address by NAIS president Pat Bassett that made me feel extremely good about the work that we are doing at TBS. He began by proposing that the work of independent schools is to teach students to be “critical, creative and inventive thinkers”, which ties directly to our school-wide learning outcomes. He then went on to proclaim ten promising innovations in education:

1. adopting backward design and mapping of curriculum around skills, rather than subjects

2. documenting student outcomes via formative assessments and “demonstrations of learning” and digital portfolios

3. connecting appreciative inquiry, the strengths approach, and growth mindset – all subsets of the positivist psychology movement

4. globalizing independent schools

5. stage II greening of schools

6. “STEM and beyond” signature programming – the great differentiator of your program

7. professionalizing the profession – 6 or 7 day schedules to get all teachers with an affinity free on a certain day; different teams (brain based learning, flipped classroom, differentiated instruction)

8. public purpose of private education initiatives

9. online learning consortia for independent school-branded courses

10. teaching and using design thinking

I’ve italicized the five innovations on the list that we are currently utilizing, which I think is a great starting point for TBS given the enormous change pressures that we have experienced in the last five years. I also believe that we’ll be in position to begin pursuing items #6 and #8 above in the next year, in explicit initiatives and programs.

Unfortunately, I was entirely underwhelmed the presentation of the keynote speaker, Bill Gates. His talk was centered on four aspects of technology that he believes can revolution education: reimaging textbooks as interactive, scaling our best teachers via online videos, connecting thru social networks, and personalizing learning. While there are tremendous possibilities in these mechanisms, Bill’s storytelling was flat and lacked humor, his visuals were overly simplified, and he essentially dodged the tough questions during the Q+A. Here’s an example:

Q: What skills do you think will be needed in the future?

A: The basic ability to use the latest software.

After the opening session came the first one-hour workshop period of the day. I selected a workshop titled Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, presented by Helen Landry and Laurie Reider-Lewis. I struggled with buyer’s remorse for the first twenty minutes; though this workshop connected directly to one of my personal PD goals for the year, I was also interested in a workshop on changing school culture, and the initial introduction by the speakers didn’t instill confidence that the conversation would yield substantive growth in my understanding of the concept of mindfulness. It was only when we did the first exercise – a “body scan” – that I was able to slip into a more mindful mode, and thus become content with the structure of the workshop and open myself up to the learning possibilities it could present – for which I was promptly rewarded with several nuggets about using mindfulness with students. Being in this mindful state carried over for the remainder of the day, and had a positive impact on my engagement with the other workshops of the day.

After lunch and conversation with Mohammad, and browsing the exhibit hall, I headed to a workshop on implementing design thinking with students, given by Kim Saxe at Nueva School (CA). In 2007, Nueva partnered with the Design School at Stanford to launch a design lab, giving over 3500 square feet to a design studio. Learning how Nueva implements and teaches design thinking to students, and used it in the development of their own program, was inspirational and exciting. Design thinking is the process that Laurie Schoeffler and I are using to improve our K-5 literacy program this year, and this workshop gave me several good ideas about how to integrate the approach with our ongoing curriculum review as well.

For the final workshop of the day, Mohammad and I went to hear John Medina, author of the book Brain Rules (about whom, and which, I’ve blogged before). I’d read the book earlier this year, so I was a little disappointed by his presentation, as it was a case of “read the book, or go to class, but not both”. He focused on two of the twelve brain rules in his book – exploration and stress – and you can get the basic ideas of these concepts by watching the videos below.

The day closed with a series of social and professional connections featuring a revolving cast. First I met with Nancy Foy, a member of my Fellowship cohort, for a conversation about her upcoming transition to a Head of School position in Richmond, VA. After this I attended a gathering of progressive educators hosted by Peter Berner-Hays, head of The Little School in nearby Bellevue, to discuss marketing and presenting the idea of progressive education in modern culture. Next, I gathered three Bay Area educators – Steve Bileca from Brandeis Hillel, Jon Kohler from Redwood Day School (another Fellowship cohort member), and Damon Allswang from Beacon Day School – for a Mediterranean dinner at Lola’s Restaurant. Finally, I met up with three members of my Aspiring Heads cohort – Andrea Kelly from Packard (NY), Rehki Puri from the School at Columbia University (NY), and Michele Williams from Stevenson (CA) – for drinks and reflective sharing about our learning from the day.