Habits for Learning: Cultivating 21st Century Attitudes in Our Students

Before starting this reading series, I had a fairly hazy sense as to what exactly 21st century learning really meant. In my uninitiated mind, many thinkers in the field of 21st century learning seemed to refer to their goals as self-evident and justifying their ends of innovation, inasmuch as their goals are radically different than conventional learning. I had heard collaboration tossed around as a key term; in other PBL contexts, I've heard a tremendous amount about self-paced project building.

I was pleased to discover P21 - The Partnership for 21st Century Learning and its research, standards, and detailed framework for implementing 21st century learning. At its core, P21's model revolves around the "4C's": Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication. Learning that enables students to access, develop, master, and showcase each "C" is looking towards the future of education, work places, and civilization, writ large. Project Based Learning, it seems, structures its standards and outcomes to allow full expression of each C.

I've also recently encountered two works on effective habits and attitudes that ensure the success of high school age students. In thinking about the underlying values or even habits to best realize 21st century learning, then, each work offers insight into adolescent psychology and developmentally appropriate dispositions, with the direction of such insight informing best academic and non-academic behaviors. In what follows, I briefly read through two works, Sean Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens (1998, 2014) and Angela Maiers' Classroom Habitudes (2012) with the aim of summary and application of both works for 21st century learning.

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Covey's Seven Habits opens with the assumption that habits shape our being, not the other way around. His seven habits are broken into three "types" for teens' development: private, public, and renewal. The seven habits, it seems are both incremental--one builds on the next--but they're also stand-alone habits.

The private, first three habits are:

1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first

As Covey's model assumes that interpersonal success requires first the mastery of personal, often hidden challenges. Self-mastery before building communities and overcoming interpersonal challenges. 

First, being proactive means knowing that "you are the force;" keep promises to yourself and build your own sense of self-worth by magnifying your gifts. Don't fall prey to "victimitis."

Next, begin with the end in mind: write a personal mission statement; write personal goals. Check your habits related to procrastination. Beginning with an end in mind means that your habits don't reflect a life of leisurely apathy. Every day matters and builds to the end, whatever that might be. 

The final of the first three private habits demands that teens prioritize by planning ahead--and noticing how such planning is liberating in that it frees them to do things well and enjoy their lives. Putting first things last demonstrates learned behaviors related to procrastination that are extremely difficult to break.

The next three habits are in the public and social sphere:

1. Think Win-Win
2. Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood
3. Synergize

Here, Covey does good work helping teens understand how habits of competition for the sake of competition can often lead to destructive social habits. 

Think Win-Win means that having an "everyone can win" attitude removes the focus, in striving to succeed, on others. Life is not a "vicious competition," Covey writes, and habits of focusing on one's own standards and goals for success (as first articulated in the previous triad) are not mutually exclusive of others' succeeding, too. 

The next step, then, in acknowledging others' ability to succeed is giving them a voice through first listening before needing to be understood. Again, this builds on the private victories of the first triad: if you don't need others' approval, then you can succeed in your own realm and also listen to others' challenges and successes without needing to interject your own. 

Finally, now that you have made space for another, you can also work with that other, too. Synergy here means celebrating diversity; it also means working cooperatively with others without any roadblocks related to cliques or prejudice. 

The final habit, for Covey, ensures the success of the previous six: "Sharpen the Saw" or Renewal. Here, Covey argues that developing positive recreational, exercise, and life habits unrelated to the academic and social will enforce and reenforce their continued success. Essentially: avoid burn-out at all costs, as the success of the previous six depends on not burning out. 

While Covey's work is enduring and somewhat timeless in its attention to developmental stages, it is not an obvious work for developing 21st century skills in the classroom. 

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In Maiers' work, on the other hand, the emphasis falls more on teaching habits and attitudes, and in many more ways than Covey's work, Classroom Habitudes links the development of certain habits and attitudes in the service of 21st century learning. Maiers' seven habits now include passion (her updated, 7th habit of learning), as well as the following dispositions of learning:

1. Imagination 
2. Curiosity
3. Self-Awareness
4. Courage
5. Adaptability
6. Perseverance
7. Passion

Each of the habitudes is a mindset, and one that, if mastered, demonstrates genius--a quality, for Maiers, that is accessible to and can be cultivated by all. In Maiers' words, Geniuses give, take, share, and grow by:

• being diligently curious
• using their imaginations in creative and powerful ways
• facings fears in a challenging and courageous way
• persevering with tenacity to overcome hurdles large and small
• seeing inside themselves with a reflective honesty to use that awareness as an asset for growth
• living and loving passionately
• always understanding the importance of the work and their role in making it successful

Ultimately, each disposition should be cultivated through classroom learning, and classroom learning should generate opportunities, too, for each disposition's expression. I find that in my own classroom, I could be asking myself if and how I'm cultivating any/some/all of these dispositions within each unit and as part of each goal and outcome. As Maiers shows in her conclusion, not what but how we teach influences the sort of people, thinkers, and workers that our students become. Moreover, and with this she ends, a challenge to all teachers in demonstrating such dispositions as central is the undertaking of the dispositions themselves in their own lives--"embodying and living the habitudes you wish you students to acquire and know:" (128)

• Remaining curious
• Using your imagination to seek new solutions
• Persevering through the many challenges you face
• Staying self-aware--notice what you model, monitor what you say, and seek continuos improvement in your practice
• embracing change by knowing you have the capacity to adapt--go forth with courage
• believing in your power to influence
• honoring your gifts and passion

Indeed, the best way to teach something as ambitious and relevant--yet distant in conventional pedagogy--is to take it on, first, as a personal practice of one's own. 

Up next: Hacking Leadership (2016), a monogoraph by two high school principals. 

Project Based Learning: Reflections from the Summer Sandbox Conference

Introduction 

This week's post offers a different perspective on progressive education: this week, I had the privilege of attending the 4th Annual Summer Sandbox, a 2.5 day conference focused on project-based learning (PBL) and education in the 21st century hosted at Yeshivat Noam in Paramus, NJ.

As an educator well aware of the use, jargon, and general interest in PBL within the progressive educational community but without much insight into its underlying principles and methods, I've been meaning to attend this conference for a few years now.

I'm so glad I made it after all of these years, and if only for the conference's slow but steady reaffirming "pump-up" towards looking forward to the school year with fresh, positive, and innovative eyes.

Of course, I have far more pedagogical theory and practice to reflect on, but what a pleasure it was to attend, too! I'll start this post with much gratitude for the leadership of education pioneer Tikvah Wiener, her conference, the East Coast Summer Sandbox (she ran one on the West Coast, too!), and her institute, i.d.e.a.s. schools, as well as the support of SAR High School for sponsoring my attendance. Without Tikvah's leadership and organizations, innovators and leaders in day schools would feel far more isolated and lost, I think, while advocating for and implementing such theories of progressive education.

There were so many personal highlights from the conference. It was enough just being able to meet and work with like-minded educators--educators who want to reach every child in the classroom, who want learning to be reflect real-life learning and work, who want to challenge the status quo and the naysayers. But there was so much more, including

• redesigning my classroom as a "21st Century Library Classroom" and engaging in the prototyping and iterating/revision that Design Thinkers Emily Winograd and Marc Fein of PresenTense modeled for us; 
• learning from a graduate of High Tech High, a PBL driven school, about the curricular implementation of PBL at the school; 
• revising one of my units as PBL so it might help differentiate learning and reach all learners;
• actually creating a PBL unit together with other teachers on yetziat mitzrayim
• actually drafting my own PBL unit, receiving feedback from other teachers, and offering feedback to others' units

It was absolutely refreshing and absolutely challenging--I noticed how much resistance to change rose up within myself, but I was rewarded tremendously when thinking through my ideas with the support of others.

I know that I could write a tremendous amount about each session. Instead, in what follows, I attempt to mark a record of the conference for my own use and future recall by distilling the essence of PBL, noting the differences in practices and assumptions between PBL and traditional learning with projects, and offering my big take-aways from this conference.

PBL: Basic Definitions 

First, some basic definitions of PBL. I'll open with a description of PBL classroom management in a case study by John Mergendoller and John Thomas, entitled "Managing Project Based Learning: Principles from the Field":

For teachers who use Project-Based Learning, the task of classroom management is quite different from that faced by teachers employing the traditional instructional methods of lecture, discussion, and seatwork. With PBL, very little time is devoted to teacher-directed seatwork or whole-class discussions. Students spend the majority of their time working on their own or in small groups. Teachers typically do not lead instructional activities, nor do they dispense resources, or present material to be learned. Students find their own sources, conduct their own research, and secure their own feedback. Experienced PBL teachers report that they spend very little time promoting student engagement or handling student misbehavior. Teachers often spend their time participating in projects as peers rather than as classroom managers. (3)

Here, multiple principles and characteristics of a PBL classroom converge: student-driven inquiry, processing, and presentation of student learning is an absolute priority; teachers spend very little time in any sort of conventional classroom form, including lecture, discussion, or monitoring and responding to student seatwork. Students are given the tools to conduct their own learning; teachers are, essentially, the coaches of their process.

As a teacher of a standards-based classroom where complex literary texts, reading comprehension practices, and writing skills are modeled, taught, and assessed, I am immediately challenged by a vision that turns conventional classroom activities on its head. Still, I remained open to what could emerge, given a PBL classroom.

In PBL, students are offered (or even articulate) a driving question, an essential research question that focuses the student's inquiry. The independent inquiry should be held to certain standards-based rubrics. According to the PBL standards "wheel" students are given voice and choice while identifying and inquiring into "authentic," real-life problems, students sustain their inquiry independently (and with the direction of teachers), and through processes of critique, revision, and reflection, and students showcase their learning to the public in some manner. The same authors identify these elements of PBL towards the end of their case study:

Project characteristics that seem to facilitate management of Project Based Learning include the extent to which the project is “authentic” (Steinberg, 1997) and not “school-like,” and the degree to which instructional responsibility is shifted from the teacher to the student. These latter characteristics include making students aware of precisely what they are responsible for doing and producing, establishing professional standards for student products, providing examples of high quality work, introducing external resource people as mentors or partners, building in realistic consequences for failure and non-participation, holding frequent conferences and peer reviews, and assessing student learning on the basis of some realistic performance event. (37)

Summer Sandbox: Exploring the Underlying Assumptions of PBL

During my time at the Summer Sandbox, I reflected on what makes the underlying assumptions of PBL so different than conventional learning. Besides for the obvious shifts from teacher to student-focused classrooms, I also think, in other words, that there is an essential shift in values. Unlike traditional, conventional classrooms,

• PBL demands institutional comfort with student experimentation, failure, processing, and reflection. Learning looks very messy in a PBL classroom, because the process of creating a project has to be inclusive enough to allow for failure and refinement--prototyping and iteration, in the earlier "Design Thinking" stages of PBL. 
• PBL assumes that learning should address real life, real world problems--that the learning should speak to people beyond the particular scope of a skills goal or thematic inquiry into an obscure text. Instead of focusing on studying content--Shakespeare--for its own sake, a PBL unit focuses instead on the contemporary relevance of Shakespeare, or focuses instead on even greater, abstract, Shakespearean questions (e.g. "How do we understand the complex failures of great leaders?") in the context of Shakespeare and other works and media. 
• Because PBL is so interested in process-based learning, it is also OK bracketing sophisticated reasoning and analysis within the learning, to a certain degree. This emerges in the framing of driving questions. Instead of asking why something is the case, we ask how might  instead (e.g. how might we see the Exodus narrative as related to narratives of modern slavery?)
• PBL demands self-paced inquiry, but it also demands working with others through collaboration as a necessary means for realizing the project. Group work, in other words, is not in service of one's project--it is the very substance of the project, too. 
• PBL embraces differentiation as a necessary aspect of learning--every student's voice and choice is honored, and from initial framing of research topics, through the process of learning, to the creation and presentation or publication of a product. Students with IEPs, in conventional classrooms, require accommodations. PBL is itself the accommodation in allow that same student varied forms of expression.
• PBL embraces unconventional demonstrations of learning. If I were to redesign my unit on Jekyll and Hyde as a PBL unit with the driving question "How many people are you?" then students could express their mastery of the question through various means: plays, symbolic graphic novels, poetry, songs, visual art. Not every student needs to demonstrate mastery of the literary essay, in other words, in such a unit.
• In its reach towards greater real-world questions and projects, PBL expands its focus from particular texts to greater ideas or problems as demanding mastery or expression. In the Jekyll and Hyde unit, students who struggled with the complex diction and syntax of the novella could still express mastery in the unit through an original project that addresses the driving question in a meaningful manner. 

PBL Today: 21st Century Learning

Though PBL is not new--John Dewey pushed it in the early 20th century, and it was popular in the 1970's but lacked rigor, the return to PBL is supported by the rising trend of technologically infused and informed schools, as well as research and rigor driving PBL, generally speaking.

First, PBL mimics much of 21st century work, which demands independent learning--teaching as self-teaching--through the use of technology and collaboration. Much as Khan's One World Schoolhouse suggested, self-paced learning through the thoughtful use of technology in and out of the classroom teaches life-long learning and productivity. Second, PBL's recent rebirth embraces standards, rubrics, and skills-based classrooms, and has been the subject of a fair amount of research. It is, in other words, far more founded in its place in 21st century education.

I'm glad that I attended this conference. So much of what I do already just needs to be foregrounded and fitted into a PBL model, language, and execution--and it will be that much greater. Looking forward, I'd like to do the following:

1. Foreground my essential, year-long and particular unit questions for each grade level of English as PBL questions that are real-world, real-life questions (e.g. "How do we grow as writers?" "How many people are we?"). To do this, I'll incorporate interviewing between students--and between students and myself in teacher/student conferences--as a process for sharing and tweaking. 
2. Foreground the project for the year and for the unit as related to the driving question and as a process and choice of the student. As I've done in the past, I intend to continue to run my class as a portfolio-driven class. But the "portfolio" as a concept simply needs to express learning through examples of work throughout the year--and it can do so by answering the driving question ("How do I grow as a writer?") in a variety of media (e.g. Google Site, video recorded play, published book, oral history!). For each unit, I want to ensure that the driving question reigns above (ideally complements) the particular skills and goals that we continue to stress as grade-level standards.
3. Foreground each driving question as contributing to each unit or year-long project. 

Questions that still remain include the role of homework, the more challenging texts (e.g. Macbeth) that are usually taught in lecture form--scene-by-scene, passage-by-passage. There's a flexibility that the conventional English classroom can offer the PBL minded teacher without altering its form--up to a certain point.

As Tikvah stressed in her session on dispositions on PBL teachers, I think that success will be experienced in being flexible and communicative with all stakeholders, though I trust that students will enjoy this sort of learning. I know that they love writing in their journals, reflecting on their learning, and crafting their self-assessments and portfolios. Weaving these elements into the vision of the PBL classroom will only enable a more unified, integrated, and meaningful learning experience. 

Flipping Learning: Reimagining Education in the 21st Century One World Schoolhouse

Having read and reviewed two works on rethinking professional development as the development of teaching practice and not technique, I move on now to think through works in educational theory and leadership that disrupt conventions and norms.

Introduction to Salman Khan's hit Khan Academy and One World School House (2013)

To start with Salman Khan's The One World School House is, perhaps, to start with one of the most popular works in educational technology circles. Written following the success of Khan's self-placed video instruction channel on youtube, the Khan Academy, Khan is a self-taught teacher who intuits his way--and quite successfully, at that--through the history, current challenges, and possible futures and best practices of education and educational technology.

Khan's goal is an ambitious and I would admit, as a teacher, a noble one: he wants to align education as closely as possible with "the world as it actually is." (11). He writes, for example, towards the end of his book that instead of learning coding in a series of classes, students should be grappling--over the course of months--with projects and challenges that they would encounter on the job as interns at Google or Microsoft. (238) Though much of his work is based on speculation, anecdotal experience, and loosely applied research--all subject to critique, of course, and found by others to be baseless in educational research--his work is one of the central and successful case studies for thinking through shifting learning towards a flipped model, and by way of the internet and digital technologies.

Disrupting the Industrial Educational Complex

Khan is right to note that educational institutions and systems need disruption--and that technology can provide that disruption. He is right, as well, that modern education, in its most basic form, is an outcome of the Industrial Revolution--the Prussian Model that optimized schools' production of successful students through the artificial divisions of grades and subjects while controlling their indoctrination carefully, leaving behind both bored and challenged students in the process, and leaving behind any student inquiry into the subjects at hand. (76-77)

Instead of producing students with "good grades" but "without learning much of anything" (11), Khan notices how students actually learn, as opposes to how we teach them: people learn at different rates; the pace of learning is also a form of style, not a reflection of intelligence; slowness in one aspect of a field does not foreclose the absolute creativity possible within the same field, and by the same student (20). Standardized and assessed modular learning, in other words, at a uniform pace, fits and benefits very few students' advanced and enriched learning. 

The first step, for Khan, is putting the teacher aside--less focus on the need for face time in lectures, more exposure to concepts and content. (35-36). With the focus on content, a student's responsibility for mastering the content becomes, itself, the educational process. Many think, in other words, that taking responsibility operates independently as a value from the learning itself (42); Khan argues, instead, that "taking responsibility for education is education; taking responsibility for learning is learning. From the student's perspective, only by taking responsibility does true learning become possible; students of mastery learning dynamics make this clear." (43)

This, I found, to be truly helpful in thinking through an active, more modular classroom--the fact that we bracket personal responsibility as a secondary value to "actual learning" speaks to the deeply traditional model in place of passive learning and consumption at the teacher's pace. Teaching commitment should mean, in other words, teaching responsibility for the learning itself. 

Active Education as Self-Education

For Khan, as for many progressive theories of education, education is fundamentally a process of self-education. (45) What follows, through modern theories of long-term memory, is an understanding that learning is continuous and need to be built on. Again, this counters the tendency for students to "forget" their learning--it's not that teachers need to find ways to make their classroom experiences memorable. It's that they need to think about the continuum of learning as open for the duration of their students' schooling experiences. (51)

An active stance for students towards their education maintains certain instructional goals but allows students self-pacing, self-motivation, and access to prior lessons. Technology, for Khan, enables this process (58). Through the internet, students not only review but explore interdisciplinary connections and deepen inquiry into the subjects, too. 

Tracking creativity is a failure of the modern industrial-education complex--in its tracking of standards, assessments, and, finally, grades. It fails, for Khan, to be appreciated as essential to every student's success as a learner, and it fails to be seen as at all essential to some of the more scientific disciplines. (98) Of course, we don't assess student writing based on mastery of the technical skills of grammar and masterful vocabulary. What should we be measuring for greatness, then?

Homework, too, is a product of the industrial model. It only becomes necessary "because not enough learning happens during the school day" in the "broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture" model. (114) I agree entirely with Khan here: the students in our classrooms suffer at home--their quality of life suffers, their family lives suffer--because we can't think about education otherwise. 

The core of Khan's solution is, essentially, flipping classroom learning. Instead of a lockstep, uniform classroom, untracked classes (as the English classes I teach now) would benefit from self-paced student learning that is, essentially, flipped. With students hearing the broadcast aspects of the learning on their own, they could pursue the mastery of learning outcomes at their own paces, thus self-differentiating. Most importantly, they could optimize class time for the reviewing, application of, and inquiry into the learning.

Some Conclusions; Next Steps

How might all of this work in an English classroom? Well, it certainly has application for the writing classroom. The discussions of literature are driven through Socratic seminars, in my classroom, but the responses and preparation for such discussions--usually through writing--could be easily flipped through digital instruction and online fora. The composition outcomes could be varied but  kept to certain core standards of expression and understanding, perhaps along the lines of Kathleen Duddan Rowloand's recent "Replacing Form-First Pedagogy" (July 2016), which offers a particularly good critique of the assumption of one-size-fits-all composition instruction and outcomes. 

Khan's work is itself modular--part memoir, part intuition, part prophecy, part critical history. You can read any section in isolation and grasp the essence of the whole, I think, but different fields will find that particular sections speak to them. In particular, the final few chapters offer a vision for Khan's model beyond the Khan Academy--in schools, colleges, and in adult education, though the core vision of self-paced and independent learning as a core value of 21st Century education is consistent throughout. 

Up next: Joe Sanfelippo's and Tony Sinanis's Hacking Leadership (2016) for a foray into 21st Century educational leadership. Then, I'll return to theories of 21st Century education with a review of Classroom Habitudes: Teaching Habits and Attitudes for 21st Century Learning (2012).

Teaching in Communities: Developing Professionally with Colleagues; Processing Palmer's Courage to Teach (1998) Part 2/2

Could teachers gather around "teaching and learning" and explore its mysteries in the same manner that any community of learning might explore a literary text or academic subject? (141) This is the essential question of Palmer's final section to his book The Courage to Teach, and it is a crucial supplement to a work whose focus is inward--on the life, mind, and disposition of the individual teacher as the core of good teaching.

While the typically traditional privatization of teaching is risk-averse in its aversion from transparency and regular observation and critique, Palmer argues that educational institutions must learn how to create communities of teachers that foster continued conversations around pedagogy--and even open our classrooms to observations--that are not demoralizing. (144) Of course, for Palmer, the center of the discourse for this teaching community must not be reduced to technique, though technique may very well be a prominent element.

Recall from my last post that for Palmer, teaching cannot--and should not--be reduced to technique. It follows, then, that critical conversations around teaching should highlight what is most ignored--the human issues in teaching. This sort of practice validates teachers and affirms their craft as necessarily reflective and soulful--advancing their pedagogical through the deliberate practice of acknowledging fears and failures.

Here, Palmer reminds us all what he's suggested thus far as underlying the life of such a reflective teacher: that we can talk about, in such a pedagogical community

• the original inspiration to teach from our mentors and subjects; 
• the human conditions of teachers and learners; 
• our classroom paradoxes--highs and lows, gifts and limits; 
• our creation of learning spaces; 
• the ways of knowing and how they shape our teaching.

But he goes further in this final section by suggesting two more topics of conversation: focusing on critical moments in teaching and learning, and using metaphors and images to enrich the sense of self that teaches.

Critical Moments

Palmer recommends creating a timeline for critical moments, learning opportunities for students, over the duration of a course. After teachers identify particular junctures for student resistance and growth--the first challenge to a course's premise, the first graded paper--faculty begin to "talk openly about events that have perplexed and defeated them, as well as those they have managed with ease."

The crucial rule here is that teachers must "not counsel colleagues on what should happen in their classrooms;" they may only "speak about their own classroom experience." The goal here is the sharing of common experience. Young teachers, for instance, who think their struggles are unique "find relief in the revelation that older faculty still struggle with problems like their own." (146)

As the timeline is completed, it turns into a map, with certain moments along the way related to one another. The map can then be clustered into particular types of experiences--conflicts in the classroom; relating theory to practice. Clusters then become small group discussions where each member is asked to speak from his or her own experience but without critique to one another. In so doing, we are also "exploring technique--but in a nonreductionistic manner" (147), as each teacher reflects on her own identity and integrity and notices which techniques work for him or herself--and which don't.


Metaphors and Images of the Teacher's Selfhood

In faculty workshops, Palmer prompts teachers to allow their unconcious to articulate images or metaphors in response to the prompt "When I am teaching at my best, I am like a ______" (148). My own response, just as I read this, was the pilot of a small cruise ship or a subway surfer.

He recommends that we look at the shadows each metaphor suggests, as well as its strengths (sort of like "acknowledging the gifts" practice from a previous chapter). In so doing, we again do not reduce teaching to technique but instead draw on identity and integrity as the source of our deepest guidance. (150).


Ground Rules for Dialogue

What I loved about this section is Palmer's clear acknowledgment of the issues that arise when teachers are prompted to reflect on their practice. The norms of our culture include not seeming weak or vulnerable, as well as not inquiring into someone else's business; the normative "fix-it" response to someone feeling vulnerable is that we feel both guarded and competitive--and so we immediately offer advice and solutions as to how we solved that issue. (151)

Instead, ground rules for dialogue include some version of the following process:

• principle: inner truth is unknowable, and so our role as listeners is to allow each teacher to be heard; 
• method of practice: focus-->clearing committee-->mirroring
• a focused individual articulates a problem in writing: a clear statement of the problem; note son its background and similar experiences; notes on its foreground--why it is being held in view.
• committee offers undivided attention--members are forbidden to speak to the focus person in any way except to ask that person an honest, open question. 
• no advice, no overidentification, no handing off the problem to someone or something else.
• mirroring: not an opportunity to give advice, but to reflect back to the focus person moments that he or she might not have been aware of to draw them further into their own truths. 
• two reminders in closing:
• nothing is solved; real life does not work that way
• confidentiality: everyting remains within the group, and members may not address the topics discussed beyond the group.
• conclusion: teachers can be in dialogue with their inner teachers; this practice deepens each teacher's awareness of their own identity and integrity.

Leadership

These sorts of learning communities demand real leadership--not just as a form of modeling, but as a leader who "opens, rather than occupies space" for teachers to develop teaching and learning by way of their own identity and integrity. "Good talk about good teaching" must be expected and invited, not assumed or, worse, ignored in favor of focus on technique, research, or guilded specialization. 

Becoming such a leader moves both the leader and her teachers "beyond fear and into authentic selfhood, a journey towards respecting otherness and understanding how connected and resourceful we all are. As those inner qualities deepen, the leader becomes better able to open spaces in which people feel invited to create communities of mutual support." (161)

Conclusions and Next Books!

This post was well overdue--I got caught up in reading Salman Khan's One World Schoolhouse (2013) and Joe Sanfelippo's and Tony Sinanis's Hacking Leadership (2016). Both books will be reviewed and discussed in upcoming posts. 

From Palmer, I look forward to enacting the first part of his book in my classroom and the second part in my mentoring and leadership roles. I know that as an English teacher, my classroom discourse and presence, as well as the creation of a space and discourse, matter tremendously--I must acknowledge my fears; embrace and generate the paradoxes of my experience and of the learning space; and cultivate dispositions of knowing in community. 

From the second section--discussed above--I will think carefully about how I engage other professionals. I will hesitate about offering advice, but I will also seek to create spaces in my guidance roles and in conversation with colleagues where they are heard and mirrored. I love the exercises of mapping critical moments and imagining teacher and teaching metaphors as the site for productive, identity/integrity based conversations. 

Up next: Khan's One Room Schoolhouse!

Becoming a Soulful Educator: Parker Palmer Meets Rav Kook

As I wrote in my first blog post, the purpose of this blog is to read, review, and synthesize contemporary works of teaching and learning. What follows is a review that both objectively distills and subjectively responds to the work in a direct and minimalist manner. In sacrificing a need to be thorough, I hope that this post--and others to come--reach for, uncover, and popularize certain useful principles and concepts in the field.

***

In his just-published Becoming a Soulful Educator, Aryeh Ben David forges the thought of Parker Palmer and Rav Kook to realize certain principles of what he calls "soulful teaching."

I initiate this blog with a review of Ben David's work, because I think that it's best to start with the very reason, the basic choice that we all make when choosing to teach. That is, before we start interrogating the classroom, the curriculum, and the place of the student, we have to start with ourselves, the educators. Why did we choose this path? What do we hope to gain--and what do we intend to give?

Ben David's book is, at its very foundation, is a response and reminder to these questions--and a proposal and intentional structure for realizing this response in our classrooms.

Ben David's read of education resonates: soulful teachers must take a position in the classroom that is entirely essential and not at all about themselves. While associated with particular practices, soulful education is not solely about story-telling or singing songs, because those practices are not fundamentally evocative (13), in that they are performances by an individual teacher that may be more or less impressive or inspiring. A soulful teacher, for Ben David, plucks his or her own soul strings, and the students respond in kind by plucking their own soul strings, too. In so doing, the "harmonic vibrations" (13) between both sets of soul strings--much as facing guitars--are matched.

Mostly based on Rav Kook's teachings, Ben David offers sets of lists for cultivating soulful personalities and soulful teaching, with practices for both. First,  Soulful Personalities are

• aware that they have souls always communicating to themselves
• listen to the voice of their souls to create harmony in a broken world
• capable of honoring their own uniqueness without placing themselves at the center of the world.

As I see it, this sort of language is personally resonant but is difficult to translate for the practicing and not-yet soulful teacher. For Ben David, the soulful teacher shares these three elements in the classroom. She does so through

• personal honesty about the subject
• positioning herself as a work-in-progress
• sharing future goals and challenges related to the subject

Ultimately,  I take away from Ben David's somewhat abstract principle that the soulful educator doesn't just teach the "what" or material of the subject but demonstrates the "how" and "why" of the subject--how it affects her own self, and why she is so deeply engaged in its subject.

For Ben David, modeling such soulfulness of honesty and humility for one's students through teaching and classroom practices is both essential--and essentially challening. He sees four categories of challenges in this regard: "not talking in the first person, talking too generally, fear of admitting weakness, and feeling like a fraud."

While these challenges are certainly intutive for any educator, Ben David does a great service in affirming the challenges, demonstrating the need for overcoming these challenges, and suggesting that the root of these challenges lies in a certain ego voice--a voice driven by fear, in which the educational process is about the teacher's failures and not the student's successes.

This, for me, was the first great take-away of the book. While I had always intuited the need to feel comfortable and even vulnerable and honest in the classroom, Ben David underscores why this need is so central to educating the souls of the students--if the teacher can't be honest, vulnerable, and a student of the wisdom of the discipline, then how can students learn how to do so?

The remaining two chapters to Part 1 of the book are concerned with two pre-requisites, if not fundaments, for soulful education: intentionally creating a safe soulful space for students to be vulnerable and honest, and loving each and every student. Again, this is wisdom that most teachers feel, but Ben David makes a compelling case for centering this wisdom at the core of our pedagogy. This second point hit home, personally, when Ben David opened the chapter unequivocally: "The most important quality of a teacher is to love his or her students--all of them." (34)

Soulful education requires that we love our students through the following paradigm shifts:

1. Relating to students as souls--and loving their souls.
2. Loving our students unconditionally--despite bad behavior. 
3. Loving all of our students.
4. Especially loving the student on the margins (e.g. the quiet student). 

Loving can be cultivated by simply listening to one's students--and by acknowledging that the patience and wisdom such listening engenders is itself a soulful education. In schools where quiet students are marginalized, Ben David suggests that listening can happen in small groups, through alternative media, and outside of the classroom.

The second half of the book is dedicated to setting up a lesson plan, unit, and ultimately a year-long experience that is soulful in design. While Ben David talks about the 6 steps to soulful education on the micro- level, I think that these steps are true on the macro, year-long level as well. They are

1. Transitioning into class
2. Introducing the learning
3. Mindful engagement
4. Heartful engagement
5. Summarizing the learning
6. Transitioning out of the class. 

Now, I'll proceed through each step with a summary--

1. Transitions, Ben David suggests, maximize focus by minimizing the now-natural multi-tasking. The soul, in his words, can't multi-task. I've always thought about warm-ups or "write-nows" in the English classroom, but I've only intuited the transition for teachers--setting up a ritual of sorts to enter the space of the classroom. He suggests a mantra (his own is "Please, God, give me the will and wisdom to best serve my students.").

2. Introducing the learning is about answering the question: "where are you in this subject?" Here, the teacher plucks her own soul string, modeling her own personal engagement.

3. Mindful engagement is about relating wisdom to one's own experience and making that learning central. I'm not exactly sure how mindful engagement is different than heartful engagement (the following step), but I do take away that mindful engagement is about learning slowly, deliberately.

4. Heartful engagement is about processing the learning. He breaks this down into 4 steps of inquiry:

• Where are you regarding the subject studied?
• How do you think these ideas can affect your life?
• What do you think are the obstacles for you to reach this future reality? 
• Based on what you learned, what's one small practical piece of advice that you could give yourself?

In heartful engagement, a spiritual chavruta that listens without judgment and asks open, reflective questions without focusing on themselves can be implemented, too. This gets to modeling the tzimtzum of teaching, as he puts it (77).

5. Summarizing the learning is all about articulating what happened and what was learned today--before the class's end.

6. Transitioning out is about setting up rituals or routines that will allow the seed of learning to flourish beyond the classroom. This is less about something that happens in the classroom and more about acknowledging that "the goal of the class is what happens after the class is over." (81)

***

Conclusions 

I found Ben David's book to be a quick and easy read. Much of what he writes is intuitive, but his argument and method is refreshing and certainly not at the center of conversations around education. Indeed, while school communities expect that developing the soul of a student is at the core of our work, pedagogical conversations assume that this happens through good pedagogy. Creating a language, a set of principles, and even a certain discourse and trajectory is Ben David's useful contribution. 

Personally, I take the following teachings to heart, and as a call to renew certain basic intuitions or felt assumptions that I've known or developed as teacher: 

• to love my students-as-souls, and to do so unconditionally; 
• to personalize soulful learning by first and foremost being a vulnerable teacher;
• and to set up certain rituals before, during, and after class that foreground the soulful nature of my classroom. 

A New Blog / Seeking Summer Reading Recommendations for Teachers!

A Teacher Leader Blog: Reading, Writing, Sharing

1. Hello world.

As a teaching professional entering my 10th year in the high school classroom, this blog is a personal challenge: to continue to research, write about, reflect upon, and share best practices for both teacher leadership and 21st century education.

This blog will serve primarily as a record of my own professional study and development.

My intentions: through writing, to discover greater and great conversations around education, teacher leadership, and best practices for 21st century study; through blogging and sharing, to extend those conversations into the greater network of teacher researchers and writers.

2. What's your recommended "must read" for teachers this summer?

As a first step, I have scanned lists of books, borrowed and bought some, too, and I've looked for relevant blogs to link to.

Below is some of what I've found. But please, do respond by adding to my search.

If you have a blog, twitter handle (mine is @hillelbro), list of books, or a recommendation, please feel free to share in the comments below or via social media.

3. Starting research and review: exploring the place of the teacher in the classroom! 

As I think that I should start with understanding the place and disposition of the teacher in education, I'm starting with some recent works on he life, mind, soul, and role of the teacher and teaching profession.

My first book review, I'm excited to share, will be of Aryeh Ben David's just published Becoming a Soulful Educator (2016).

As I know that Ben David is a student of Parker Palmer, I think that I'll follow this review with a second post on Palmer's The Courage to Teach (1998).

4. Guest bloggers: calling all teachers

If you're a teacher, teacher leader, or aspiring teacher and have read a great book that you'd like to write about on this blog, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.

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Listicles

Edtech reading lists; 
Teacher summer reading lists;
My amazon.com reading list;