Book Review: What School Could Be (2018)

What are the rules of school, and where do they come from?

In his 2018 travelogue through innovative American education, Ted Dintersmith (producer of the critical documentary on American education Most Likely to Succeed) allows this question to loom large--and by way of contrast, in the background. As he takes the pulse of our nation by visiting 50 states and documenting over 100 schools, he notes the tensions between the drive toward innovation and the 1893 factory model of economic efficiency that still permeates our systems of education.

Overall, the schools that Dintersmith are interesting--they've taken some sort of stance on making learning meaningful by allowing students to drive their learning through real-life questions, community-embedded initiatives, and/or authentic assessments and tasks. In his introduction, he suggests a distillation of sorts in which students thrive--schools in which they learn and develop

• Purpose - Students attack challenges they know to be important, that make their world better.
• Essentials - Students acquire the skill sets and mind-sets needed in an increasingly innovative world.
• Agency - Students own their learning, becoming self-directed, intrinsically motivated adults.
• Knowledge - What students learn is deep and retained, enabling them to create, to make, to teach others. (xvi, 38-39)

(Later, on pages 40-41, Dintersmith offers a vision statement of sorts regarding how school could be different, K-16, with these principles at play.)

These PEAK principles aren't a given in most high schools, Dintersmith notes, as college readiness becomes a competition or ranking of students based on their potential--but in so doing, losing the focus of developing students' potential. 

For Dintersmith (and I happen to agree with him here), college admissions is the elephant in the room (17), as we are preparing students for their college applications more than we are for college (57). Colleges need us to rank order kids, even as we know that we are living in a "uniquely exciting time...we understand how to engage kids...and let them create portfolios of joy" (18). 

And even if we are preparing them for college, Dintersmith levels a greater critique at the greater system: we are preparing our students for bad college pedagogy (large lecture halls, passive leaning) through bad high school pedagogy (67). Ultimately, he's right when he says that nothing would transform K-12 schools faster than a college admissions process that values creative, authentic student work (69). 

Over and again, Dintersmith observes how kids know how to be engaged and focused learners; ironically, as they move towards and through high school, he observes how we recognize and award short-term memory and compliance far more than innovation and project or portfolio keeping. Students who score 4s and 5s on APs, for example, never want to take a course related to the subject again. And students who are "liberated" in a Genius Hour start by googling "what should I be interested in?", as they don't know where to begin in locating their passions. (29) Unfortunately, when we are blindly or uninentionally trying to improve schools, we are really hoping that they not just do things better but really "do obsolete things better" (148).

Overall, Dintersmith is hopeful about the future of education in America--and he feels strongly that we are at a turning and breaking point, too, in shedding the skin of our inherited factory model. Some highlights for me, from his cross-country trip:

• Gone Boarding, a school-wide program that teaches design and building of snowboards through interdisciplinary study (33)
• An Albuquerque school partnering with a regional soccer team as its social media office (57)
• Cleveland schools moving towards mastery-based transcripts (mastery.org) (69)
• Evergreen State College builds inter-disciplinary courses of study that support greater authentic areas of inquiry (76)
• US Naval Academy fosters leadership by having all freshmen write an essay title "Who do I want to be as a senior?" (84)
• When visiting New Orleans, Dintersmith detects "competing agenda", something that he notices throughout his book--that schools are pushing for better test scores as improvement outcomes, but noticing also that there is something fundamentally wrong with our educational priorities. (154)
• Eminence independent schools in Kentucky moved away from test prep and embraced innovation. Test scores dropped, but the district trusted students with their own learning and the ability to identify and solve problems in their own communities. (182)
• Hawaii schools are focusing on next-generation self-assessments (as opposed to assessments) and direct quality (authentic, creative, product) assessments, as opposed to indirect (recall, short-term) assessments. (210)

There are some darker or more problematic tensions at play, too, that Dintersmith notes on his tour: schools that pursue Calculus or even complex math as an end of excellence in itself; schools that award teachers based on their own SAT/ACT scores; schools that hire TFA teachers because they know how to do "conventional school" well.

"Education should prepare children for life. But we have it backward. We prepare children's life for education." (47) If we can walk away from the 8 words "We have to be able to measure it" as an artificial and inauthentic grounds for education (96), then we can start teaching towards a different future. 

So what can or should we do? I agree with John Dewey when he said that "Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the thing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results." (171). Let's not educate people out of their creativity, as the great Ken Robinson has argued (200). Our innovative teachers, not some political experts, are the ones who know that our students can learn anything in a matter of days. As Dintersmith concludes, it's time to let that observation in. (216)

Book Review: Radical Candor (2017) - Part 1

Kim Scott's Radical Candor: Be a Kick-A** Boss Without Losing Your Humanity (2017) is not stuck on semantics. It's fine to be a boss (as opposed to a manager, or leader, or builder, or whatever is in vogue and proper), because being a boss, for Scott (of Apple, Google, Dropbox, Juice; trained by Sheryl Sandberg), means recognizing and working with the understanding that "emotional labor is not just part of the job; it's the key being a good boss." (5)

Some crucial definitions and key points from Scott's first of two parts of the book, which is more focused on the theory of radical candor than its practice:

• "Bosses," by definition, guide a team to achieve results
• The central difficulty of management--and key to management--is establishing a trusting relationship with each person who reports directly to you.
• "Radical Candor" is what happens when you put "Care Personally" and "Challenge Directly" together.
• As opposed to being "just professional," "bring your whole self to work." (12)
• To build trust: offer radically candid praise AND criticism
• To develop a culture of radical candor, explain it, and then ask people to be radically candid with you: "Start by getting feedback...don't dish it out before you show you can take it." (33-34); "Ask for criticsm before giving it, and offer more praise than criticism." (38)
• Understand the "perilous border between Obnoxious Aggression and Radical Candor" by not personalizing the criticism--make it about the work, not the person. (37)

Her first part of the book also deals with building teams, that key word in the work that bosses guide. She points to countless examples, and especially Google, which "went to great lengths to make sure bosses couldn't squash their employees' ideas and ambitions." (45) This is related to growth management, a focus in chapter 3, as employees also "conduct their careers in the way they desire, not the way you think they should want to." (47) I appreciated, as well, how she takes to task passion and purpose-based theories of leadership. Central to her argument, about respecting employees' trajectories and choices to be "rockstars" (steady growth) or "superstars" (accelerated growth), is that as a boss, "your job is not to provide purpose but instead to get to know each of your direct reports well enough to understand how each one derives meaning from their work." (51) Finally, in thinking about building, hiring, and firing team members, Scott believes that "everyone can be exceptional somewhere and that it was my job to help them find that role." (65) This resonated, too, as I imagine much of my job supporting teachers towards finding that balance, role, or proper place in or beyond a school. 

In the final chapter of the first part--a chapter on collaboration--she cites Intel's Andy Grove who said the following about Steve Jobs: "I didn't say Steve is always right. I said he always gets it right. Like anyone, he is wrong sometimes, but he insists, and not gently either, that people tell him when he's wrong, so he always get it right in the end." (79) This, and the "Get Stuff Done" (GSD) cycle, resonated deeply, as a means to nurture ideas and engage collaboratively in clarifying, debating, and ultimately executing as a team. 

As an educator and team builder, I like much of what Scott posits, and even if all of her theory is aimed at the start-up Silicon Valley Google-ish culture. In schools, leaders can build trust with teachers through both caring and challenging, and we especially build that trust when it's reciprocal and shared both horizontally and vertically. I also see that it takes a deep trust in and commitment to its method--that is, one must be vulnerable, patient, and even self-effacing to support a business, start-up, or school's growth. Finally, it makes clear that radical candor is not only about feedback cycles--it is about cultivating ideas and teams to support the success of outcomes. I can only imagine implementing such a cycle in designing learning experiences and curriculum! 

Book Review: Teaching with Love and Logic: Taking Control of the Classroom (2nd Ed., 2016)

What I loved about this book is that it offers an educational psychology that positions the teacher as a consultant regarding classroom management (really, student behavior management).

While I hadn't read it before this summer, it's been a classic in the field for some time--and I recommend that you should read it too, if you haven't yet, and if only to be in conversation with it.

In essence, the core principles of the love and logic classroom--and school--are:

• mutual dignity and respect
• sincere empathy
• shared thinking
• shared control within limits
• healthy relationships

Instead of drill-seargent-ish immediate consequences, students are encouraged to see their challenges, see the limits in which teachers can address them, and share in the process of determining reasonable consequences. And instead of acting as helicopters, teachers are encouraged to defer consequences and discussions, to share control of student management with the student, and, most importantly, to build relationships as the foundation of this shared model.

If anything here is the paradigm shift in classroom management, it's that relationships aren't for certain teaching styles or teacher personalities, or that they are a nice thing to build in to your classroom--instead, they are within reach and, actually, essential for every teacher to cultivate proactively, and especially with the most challenging students.

The book offers particular methods and strategies, not just theories, for building such relationships, and especially when a teacher finds it challenging to do so. Through noticing six unique and positive things about each student and sharing those progressively with the student (the "one-sentence intervention"), or through offering sincere (not sarcastic) empathy along with limits and consequences (consequences+empathy=learning), do students invest that much more--and even if it's just for their teachers (another verbal strategy). 

So much of what I intuited to be true about good classroom management--and good strategies for working with challenging students--was validated by this book. For example, in a chapter on mutual respect and building relationships, It was affirming to read that asking students to leave a classroom could be the most humiliating thing in the world and should be avoided. Students want to avoid deflating their self-concepts at all costs (by presenting as not knowing something) and will go out of their way to preserve their self-concepts, and even if it means sabotaging their academic success (I won't try hard, pay attention, etc....because I can't risk failure). Instead, the authors argue, students should be told to leave only when it is absolutely necessary to do so--as a "short-term recovery"--to preserve the learning environment for other students, and such a request should be done within the scope of a positive relationship (walking over to the student, asking quietly, using a secret signal, framing it as a break).

I was also reassured in learning that sharing control with students means offering a very limited set of choices (e.g. 2), or allowing students to solve a problem or formulate a consequence through empathy before offering recommendations.

Ultimately, the core principles listed above are enacted in a classroom through clear, explicit expectations.

Here's a sample of a teacher's "How I Run My Love & Logic Classroom" expectations:

• I will treat you with respect so that you will know how to treat me
• Feel free to do anything that doesn't cause a problem for anyone else 
• If you cause a problem, I will ask you to solve it
• If you can't solve the problem, or choose not to, I will do something 
• What I do will depend on the special person and the special situation
• If you feel something is unfair, whisper to me, "I'm not sure that's fair," and we will talk. 

Finally, of related note in this work is the use of a "love and logic" approach by parents when broaching a teacher, and conversely, a teacher or administrator using the approach when seeing a parent's offensive by seeing their pain (and even grieving for their shattered dreams). 

Ultimately, this book is about compassion. As it turns out, the research shows that leading with empathy, in all aspects of a school, will go a long way towards students' actual academic success. Slow down the thinking--and allow the healing of whatever hurt to occur so that learning can happen. 

Book Review (fiction): The Ladies Auxiliary by Tova Mirvis (1999)

"Batsheva appeared in our lives on a Friday afternoon as we were getting ready for Shabbos. It was inappropriate that she moved in when she did." Thus begins Tova Mirvis's delightful The Ladies Auxiliary (1999), a novel depicting a neatly controlled and small-town Orthodox Jewish community disrupted by an outsider's arrival and residence.

In a nutshell: this novel is an exaggerated and at times simplistic story, which is also part of its appeal. It is probably best understood in the tradition of modern Jewish folk-tales, worthy of both Chelm and Chaim Potok, both comic and tragic in a unique and particularistic way.

What is most remarkable (and funny, and tragic) about this work is that it is told in the first person plural. The narrator's voice is a collective "we" or "us" of the Sisterhood of the Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis who fears, celebrates, and ultimately tempers its own history and worldview regarding an artsy and disruptive newcomer. It is a modern shtetl voiced and collectively conscious.

This narrative perspective is perhaps the novel's greatest achievement--the characters themselves are types, but their collective tragedy, even if privileged and inconsequential, is heartfelt--which makes reading this work a fulfilling task. I found myself laughing at the narrators' righteous indignation, and I found myself wondering about their collective limits and compromises, too, as the story unfolds.

With its bird's-eye surveillance and single-mindedness, the novel is clearly an exaggeration of the perception a high school girl might feel growing up in the community, or a newcomer might feel arriving to town. Similarly, the near absence of central male figures (and the near powerlessness of the central rabbi of the town) seems unrealistic or exaggerated in such a community.

The novel is clearly authored by an insider (Mirvis grew up in the community), as she details types and tensions, and without resorting to stereotypes or cliches. Mirvis gets so much right, too (first courses at a shabbos dinner! Jewish holiday art projects! the tensions around innovating womens' ritual and traditional learning!), that it's hard not to see a very familiar Orthodox Jewish life-as-lived reflected here.

Finally, as a teacher and principal, I loved that The Ladies Auxiliary by Tova Mirvis (1999) took place over the course of an academic year--from the end of summer until Shavuot. So much drama unfolds and builds through the life of not only a cycle of Jewish holidays, but of a year of school, and especially when tensions of individual expression and conformity emerge in this central institution of private school in an insular community.

My recommendation: read this book, if you haven't yet. It is not as irreverent as you might think, it is most definitely relevant for any community centered around central religious institutions (synagogues, churches, private schools), and it rewards its reader with a narrative complexity that often eludes its delightful, naive plural narrator.

Book Review: Meeting Wise: Making the Most of Collaborative Time for Educators (2014)

Just read Liz City's Meeting Wise: Making the Most of Collaborative Time for Educators (2014) after hearing her present her work on meeting theory and practice in schools at the Harvard Principals' Center "Art of Leadership" institute. My very brief take away: This is and will be perhaps the most useful and easily implementable text I've had in a long time.

Basically, City's argument about effective, growth-driven collaborative meetings is that they need to happen in schools that are learning communities. In the schools of yore, teachers and even leadership didn't mind not reaching all learners and their challenges, as they didn't mind refusing professional learning--they taught how they always taught, and without much change, as students needed to learn on their terms (or not learn at all).

Her argument, underlying her work, is that schools that embrace emerging and evolving challenges and changes in education and in students require a robust and intentional meeting culture. If adults are collaborating well towards learning objectives and outcomes, then all students are being served.

What is most useful about City's work are her actionable items (templates, protocols, checklists): her checklists for effective meetings (does it have an objective linked to student learning? does it have meaningful activities?); her protocols for various types of meetings; her recommendations for max. time for each meeting moment; her recommendations for engaging activities; her acknowledgement of challenges to and the learning curve of a facilitator; and her agenda template, which, if done right, fulfills the entire checklist.

In reflecting on her work, I understand now more than ever that meetings are opportunities--valuable, rare opportunities--for meaningful adult learning and collaboration, and they need to be structured as such. In that sense, they're a sort of classroom that engages and empowers its learners. If done right, meetings can be meaningful and even fun--and ideally, they model the sort of learning that we would expect in our classrooms, too.

Looking forward, I would like to spend as much time planning a meeting as I do holding it. I would like to include a clear objective and agenda communicated in advance (I've been doing the latter but not the former) by adapting City's form (template as google doc is available here!). And I would like to elicit "plus/delta" feedback at the end of each meeting to build in reflection and growth in to the meeting culture itself.

The Overstory (2018): Book Review

Quick Take: 
If only I had discovered Richard Powers earlier on. His most recent novel (and the first that I've read), The Overstory (April 2018), is one of those epic, poetic works that attempts to mingle or even re-set human narrative storytelling to the pace of the natural history of trees. I rarely say this about a work of literature (and I've read plenty)--but it is truly beautiful, and no doubt a masterwork.

Basically, in all of its human drama, this novel poses two narrative and historical-natural questions: what if we could narrate--and live--at the pace of trees? And how might human history affect and be affected by the natural lives of trees? The conceit is an ambitious one, and one possibly trite and tried, but Powers produces an original and deeply poetic work.

A moving read, I recommend this book for those seeking a captivating novel of history and loss--a truly melancholic read. I couldn't put it down (which is rare for me these days), and I found very little to be critical of. Powers is a master of the craft--he is a past winner of the National Book Award, and The Overstory is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. He is certainly up there with the contemporary American greats of what they now call literary fiction.

***

More:
While the novel initially spans 150 years or so, it is really about the convergence of multiple characters' histories in the present, but at the pacing and in the mode of tree growth. Like trees, these characters conspire, revolt, and suffer together; they discover, celebrate, and live alongside the hidden lives and indifferent histories of trees through activism, scientific research, artistic representation, and virtual digital media.

The novel is told through tracking different strands of the greater human family tree, with a certain arbitrariness underlying its narrative motion. It is capricious in its joys and losses--whole species of chestnut trees are lost in the blink of an eye; whole branches of families suffer loss. As I read, I came to expect surprise as the narrative device, which is good, because I loathe a neat narrative arc, resolution, or transcendence, even as I expected the desire for life and living from both trees and humans. Throughout the novel, lives emerge and converge organically, like the trees around them, and they are swept away arbitrarily, too, into new histories or dead ends of their family trees.

As a modernist, Powers resists reconciliation, but he does imagine a natural convergence of human and tree that is poetic and tragic. Redwoods and chestnuts suffer natural disease or human extermination, and the humans around them suffer and celebrate in both organized and arbitrary ways.

While the design and metaphysical balance of the novel worked, what made it most palatable, and even beautiful, was its absolute elegance on the level of storytelling and diction: The writing easily passes as a series of epic, prose poems. It is not for naught that Powers references Thoreau and Whitman. He is clearly a modernist inheritor of their transcendent traditions.

From a Portfolio Classroom to a Portfolio School

What if a high school could track its learners' growth over the course of four years? 

What if high school students could track their own learning over the course of four years?

These were the two essential questions that set me on my journey--first as a classroom teacher, and now as a principal--towards a portfolio-driven school. 

I have written and shared publicly about my own portfolio classroom, which was first paper-driven, eight years ago, and now entirely digital, with the advent of various learning management systems (most recently, Haiku/Powerschool). 

I'm writing now as a principal working towards a portfolio-driven school, first wondering about and now rolling towards school-wide implementation.

In what follows, I share my thoughts on the what, the why, and the how of school-wide portfolio keeping. Along the way, I'll share the benefits  of teaching the process of thinking and learning, of metacognition; I'll also share why I think any school in the 21st Century could and should keep such portfolios, and with minimal teacher and student effort. 

First, What is a Portfolio? What is a Portfolio-Driven School?

• As others have outlined, a student portfolio is, at its very base an archive of student work, with the potential to be both a workspace, and ultimately, a showcase of student learning.

• A portfolio-driven school first acknowledges that student learning is essentially a shared, multi-year, and collaborative process. Our teaching does not happen in isolation--it is built on and builds towards past and future curricula. Likewise, our students don't appear and disappear in a vacuum; each student carries along with him or her a long history of ongoing challenges and successes, goals and frustrations. 

• A school-wide portfolio model, therefore, is a record of each student's history, and a site of student reflection, self-assessment, and goal-setting in relation to various media artifacts, each of which is anchored in but transcends a particular class, year, or academic subject.

Second, Why Should We Build Portfolio Schools? 

• As Matt Renwick has shown in his excellent and very recent book, Digital Portfolios in the Classroom (ASCD, 2017), there are at least 10 reasons that "make the case" for digital student portfolios, as such portfolios allow students, teachers, and school communities to:
1. Celebrate all students as learners
2. Improve home-school communication
3. Facilitate better feedback
4. Highlight the process of learning
5. Demonstrate progress over time
6. Guide students to become self-directed learners
7. Maximize formative assessment
8. Integrate speaking and listening
9. Advocate for every student
10. Work smarter as a teacher

• Portfolio keeping is driven by cycles of reflection, self-assessment, and goal-setting, all of which are firmly metacognitive skills. Metacognition, or teaching learners to "drive their brains" and master their own habits of learning, is trending now in educational circles, and for good reason: The research in education justifies it, and Common Core teaching and learning standards have shifted towards teaching thinking practices within each discipline. As an illustration, Wilson and Conyers, in their 2016 book Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains, cite a meta-analysis of 91 studies that determined metacognition as "the number one shared characteristic of high academic achievers."

Third, How Might We Build Portfolio Schools?

• In its most basic form, school-wide portfolio keeping, in the 21st Century is simple. When all work is already digital or easily captured in digital form, portfolio keeping demands very little of teachers and students, and it offers an impressive return on even the slightest investment.

• To revisit the How of digital student portfolios in terms of the What, then:

• If a portfolio is an archive, or storehouse of student work, then it can take the simplest form: a google drive folder. Anything can remain in such a folder, and such a folder can travel with a student for the four years of high school.

• If a portfolio becomes an opportunity for reflection, self-assessment, and goal setting, then a number of apps and activities might interface with the student work, including:
• annotation, attaching cover letters (possible in Google Apps for Edu)
• student and teacher commenting (possible in the SeeSaw app and Haiku's ePortfolio feature)
• publishing and showcasing (possible in a number of digital apps and physical media)

• Finally, when determining the How, teachers will want to think about the role of the portfolio for their classes:
• Do they want the artifacts to be selected by student or teacher?
• Do they want the portfolio to reflect process (challenges, early drafts, even failures) or performance (trophy pieces, final drafts)?

Next Steps

• Faculty Training and Expectations

• At our faculty meeting and training in the theory and practice of digital student portfolios, we stressed the metacognitive theory and easy entry for rolling this out for our students. We also emphasized that this is, at its core, a student-driven initiative, and so the bulk of portfolio keeping will rely on student submissions and student portfolio keeping.
• We clarified expectations of teachers for the next semester. As a baseline across all classes, we asked that each teacher design three activities for their classes: goal setting; submission of a process artifact (with student comments or annotations); submission of a performance artifact (with student comments or annotations).
• We explored the what, the why, and the how of digital portfolios for our own school with teacher metacognition activities, exploratory gallery walks, table-talk conferences, teacher reflections, and department meetings for lesson design. 
• We trained faculty in use of the SeeSaw app as the platform for hosting each student's portfolio. In our training, each teacher became a "student" in a faculty "class" and experienced three "assignments," including a submission of an image to the "journal," a response to some questions, and the completion of an exit ticket. 

• Remaining Steps and Questions

• We arrived at SeeSaw through a process of elimination, as it seemed to be the simplest, most dynamic, and most accessible option. We haven't decided yet, however, if it is the absolute best option and fit for our school. It simply seemed that the learning curve, upkeep, and oversight of student portfolios, via SeeSaw, were optimal for our needs.
• In fact, our Director of Educational Technology, R. Aaron Fleksher, had determined Haiku's ePortfolio feature to be too difficult to access by the classroom teacher in a meaningful way, and we had determined that individual Google Folders were both not dynamic enough and too difficult to manage with sharing across the school and over the years.
• In our exit tickets from the day, faculty asked for more guidance with setting up their classrooms on SeeSaw. One day of training was sufficient for the theory of metacognition and portfolios, and the practice of SeeSaw as a student, but it wasn't sufficient for generating lessons and materials for rolling out a portfolio classroom on SeeSaw.
• Particular departments and teachers have requested further training and follow-up for both implementation and modeling, and especially those departments in which writing is secondary to performance (e.g. the Math department would like to learn more about the use of Math portfolios--an expected challenge, given the typical association of the Humanities with portfolios).