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Sorry for not posting. I’ve been so busy. Can’t manage much more than plurk-sized thoughts - might be a problem! While we hear so much about all the whiz bang hi-tech stuff at Christmas, (gee, I was kinda thinking of a Kindle myself), there is nothing so wonderful as receiving those little atoms of ideas - “books, the original laptop” - (full disclosure - I have a t-shirt that makes this assertion)…

Books are always something I like to give and receive, so here are a few possibilities this season.

Don’t miss this little gem of a book. A Guide to the Birds of East Africa is Nicholas Drayson’s tale of Mr. Malik, a widower living in Nairobi, mostly retired, but still much engaged in the business of living.

The book has much to do about people and a little less about birding. Birders and others will enjoy imagining themselves birding in Nairobi and other Kenyan settings, but our souls will delight is this examination of virtue and love, of our struggles to make our way through a world that is typically familiar and foreign simultaneously.

It is great to see paperback availability of Hazel Rowley’s, Richard Wright: The Life and Times. It is a masterful biographical work. Ms. Rowley is exceptionally adroit at crafting beautiful work in this form. I am hoping to see a copy of her bio of Jean-Paul and Simone, Tete-a-Tete under my tree.

Wright is an important American novelist, but as I studied the man and his work, I found myself newly intrigued by his later work, his travel writing. If you are not familiar with Wright’s efforts in this genre, begin with Pagan Spain. This late 1950’s piece combines RW’s terrific power of storytelling with his much developed outsider’s view of post empire, post civil war Spain: a complex and hugely contradictory culture. Though circumstantially different, Wright’s Spain offers vignettes not so unlike the then contemporary American culture. Out-of-print for decades, a renewed scholarly interest in Wright has resulted in many of these “minor” works back in print.

While I’ve yet to read, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest, by Brown and Jacobs, I have chosen to add it it to the reading list of The Political, Social and Economic Aspects of Business. Though I departed daily work in the corporate sphere some years back, it was a serendipitous day a few years back when the dean of the business school asked if I’d like to teach a liberal arts perspective on business to his graduate students. In many ways, it has become a favorite experience: we get to explore the myths necessary to maintain social momentum as we weigh our responsibilities to ourselves and others as we gain greater potential influence.

It was through Pinsky and Dietz’s most laudable An Invitation to Poetry that I discovered Szymborska. Find a book of her work and read about poetry as the asking of questions leading to some construction of meaning or perhaps, to a new level, full of new questions to ponder.

As I plurked the other day, Jim Harrison has a new novel out, The English Major. His autobiography is interesting, though you can get a quick peek at this author in this 2007 NY Times article/interview. On one level, I am thankful for Harrison because I always feel healthy and fit compared to his robust and some would argue reckless verve for life.

Teachers hopefully have a well-worn, dog-eared, heavily annotated copy of Eric Jensen’s 1995 Super Teaching. I was delighted to see a new edition appear - the 4th edition ISBN 978-1-4129-6332-9 just in time for the gifting season. Shred your old copy and pile it on the compost heap. The new volume is slimmer, and reflects new understandings of brain-based learning.

Poet Donald Hall, has published an autobiography, Unpacking the Boxes. I want to read this one over the holiday school recess.

While I love the convenience of online booksellers, I’ll make sure to go to my independent booksellers at The Toadstool this season. Be well, readers.

Back to school has been intense. After a splendid visit to British Columbia and Alaska, I found myself home with less than 24 hours before the first day of school. Then in October, I buried my sister after a long bout with cancer.

Still, the school year is whirling through space!  How is it possible that so much time has already passed and the 1st quarter of the school year is at end!

In all the time I have not written, I have been thinking deeply about planning and musing about ways to elevate it to a more important pedestal. Part of this is no doubt driven by the fact that I have been appointed the ‘data manager’ at my school. This newly-minted moniker refers to my volunteer role as a member of the school’s “Literacy Team”. Our district has identified increasing literacy across all grades and all curriculum as the key goal of a 5 year improvement project.

A quarter year into our 2nd year, I despair that without learning how to collaborate, and without a dramatic increase in planning time, real transformation in public education remains little more than political baloney and garish window-dressing. Certainly, isolated miracles occur when heroic teachers prevail in spite of these well-intentioned group efforts. But many dedicated and hard-working teachers rebel and recoil to change because of the absence of a shared vision.

The Super’s late August kickoff wasted no time: Year 2 is all about DATA. I won’t recount all the many expletives heard in a variety of settings: suffice it to say that many teachers are dubious about data because we seem to have narrowed our sights to the data we get from standardized testing and are weary of the educational vendors slinging “standards-based” products as the silver bullet, out-of-the box solution.

Myself, I have always embraced the belief that if you can’t measure it you cannot act to improve it! But maybe we are letting the standardized test imbroglio fog over the more core issue. As an educator, I am disheartened and ashamed to see a 2nd grader losing it as she stares at the computer screen for her first standardized test. We can and should do better.

Planning and workload take on a whole new dimension when we embrace the notion that one-size-never-fits-all and that each child in each class has specific needs that must be met if we are indeed serious about transforming education.

We need to utilize data because differentiation only works when we assess and develop learning opportunities based upon the assessment results. While many teachers think they differentiate, they are usually just throwing/trying all the options they have in their ‘bag of tricks’. It usually looks like ‘whole class’ instruction, doesn’t it?

The oft-uttered platitude that “data drives instructional practice”, is just a phrase, but re-engineering the schoolhouse is a daunting challenge for even the most sophisticated ‘learning organization’ - and most educational institutions: elementary, secondary and tertiary would be hard pressed to award themselves the ‘learning organization’ badge while looking in their collective mirror.

Teachers need to learn how to read and use data, ‘nuf said. But beyond that teachers need to develop new ways of really running a differentiated classroom, providing lots of learners different content in different packages. All classrooms should look like resource rooms now, and that’s that.

This shakes the very architecture of our schools. Kids can’t/shouldn’t stay in 1 room with 1 teacher. We need movement and fluidity of both staff and students. And we need continuous, reliable and accurate assessment so we can make these movements beneficial to all the learners, rather than the headline getting standardized tests that churn more data than anyone has time or talent to utilize.

Lets move to class sizes of 40 - 50 students in large open spaces with two teachers and additional adult participants. Let every group -  if not every child - have a networked device. Let’s not think of the large class size but rather of several smaller groups pursuing different pathways to common objectives.

Let’s abandon teaching by subject matter and embrace a thematic approach that allows all skills to be mastered while deepening our understanding of the core content! Let’s severely limit the didactic portion of the school day and facilitate the formulation of good inquiry and research.

Educational leaders with antiquated autocratic leadership skills are doomed to fail, just as so many corporations failed when they embraced Hammer and Champy’s re-engineering without understanding that transformation requires the humans involved to be connected and ready to step into the darkness.

The schoolhouse cannot look like the schoolhouse we attended when we were children. If it retains the characteristics and practices of the industrial age, it will surely rust and cease to exist.

Fortunately, the children still make the schoolhouse the work destination of choice for many people who are ready for transformation. We all need to look beyond the usual suspects for ideas about the schoolhouse of the nowfuture. We can learn a great deal examining organizational behavior and design literature; from new thinking about leadership and or the myth of it, and the power of networks and the power of the people.

In your eyes, if the classroom of 1010 or 1012 or 2015 resembles the classroom of 2008, you need new eyes.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
- Marcel Proust

Vacation. I’m off. Think about big things. I won’t be around till the end of the month. Be well, be curious!

Kevin Kelly’s TED video on the next 5000 days of the web has sent me synthesizing. I’ve been reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. On de Botton’s website I found this succinct summary of this tome:

This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we’re judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety.

de Botton points out:

the modern high-status ideal duly ceases to appear ‘natural’ or God-given. It stands revealed instead as a development stemming from changes in industrial production and political organization-changes that began in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and subsequently spread acrosee the rest of Europe and N. America. The enthusiasm for materialism, entrepreneurship and meritocracy that saturates the newspapers and television schedules of our own day reflects nothing more complex than the interests of those in charge of the system by which the majority earn their living. “The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.” (209-213)

I’m interested in thinking about this in terms of the One Machine. See Kevin Kelly’s take below to learn about the One Machine. Kelly envisions a leap in technology that will be as distinctive as was the development of alphabets and writing. But at the same time, we see that this new world of digital community requires us to become transparent rather than private.

Many will be troubled with this new possibility because of our status anxiety. We see and celebrate the failures of others in our media quite routinely, so status seekers strive to conceal the deficiencies they perceive in relation to the larger culture.

But perhaps the more imperative question we need to discuss concerns the aforementioned statement: “The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.” Does a new transparent age allow us to actually become who we want, or does it auger a dark totalitarian age. I don’t believe we know the answer and that depending on choices made either outcome is possible.

The very rich have been successfully diminishing the ability of governments to provide checks and balances against the oppression of the citizenry. The individuated American is conditioned to think that they will be the next millionaire, and do not act in concert with the other members of their community.

But is there possibility of a more equitable planet enabled by the rise of these new technologies? Howard Rheingold and Clay Shirky show that the myth of leadership may be ready to give way to a broader mutuality that shares, connects and collaborates towards a new  economy. And gradually acknowledgment moves across the planet that we have a limited future in carbon-based energy. Might this also create opportunities for us to join together? Maybe Al Gore realizes that real power in the nowfuture is the connected community and not the lobbyists inside the Washington beltway? Maybe we all care less about the choreography of the modern political campaigns and are becoming more interested in finding those durable communities that Bill McKibben envisions?

In 1991, I was co-managing a project at work with a far more senior colleague from IT. I was the Business lead. I wanted to reduce our transaction costs and fixed expenses by having our customers enter demographic data directly into our computer systems. For weeks IT told me that we could never do it: not secure, too dangerous, we’ve never done anything like that, etc. You get the picture. We made the change and improved our data quality, reduced our expenses and improved our customer satisfaction.

In 1996 my independent learning project for my M.Ed. was a website of resources for K-12 teachers. The college didn’t have the ability for me to publish it. I published it on my personal website. Of course, I still had to print it out and include it as an appendix to my thesis. We cling onto dead practices long after they’ve become obsolete. I think about my penmanship teacher, Sister Mary Grace, lots of time when I sign on those digital devices. Perfect Palmer? No way. Do we really need the mark? Nope

I find myself thinking about those of us not standing on the edge seeing what is possible. The issue we face in this nowfuture is that our educational practice is fast becoming as useful as an analog TV. Consider the R U Reading debate discussed in this recent New York Times article. I think we are missing the point when we argue along the digital/analog divide. The most salient point expressed in this article - the one we need to address as educators and parents is the need to help all of us develop the competencies needed to be literate in this nowfuture. What is credible and accurate? How do we put it together in a meaningful way?

We live in a time that urgently needs us all to become more creative. As Torrance and Safter opined in their book, Making the Creative Leap Beyond…

When we confront the problems of increasing heterogeneity and global interdependence, exhausted natural resources, increased rates of change, and the like, the need for “flashes of insight” and creativity is obvious.

When most of us examine our own upbringing and “education”, few will self-identify as being creative. Being creative is risky behavior and most of us have been socialized to be risk averse. Yet we are resident in nowfuture that Torrance and Safter identified. The challenges we face today cannot be solved by 20th century thinking.

Teachers then, need to work on becoming more creative persons while simultaneously facilitating learning environments that allow our children to reach their full, creative potential. Too often, the only opportunities for creative learning exist only in ‘talented & gifted’ programs. Yet in most early chilhood settings, we observe a high level of creativity across the population.

For many years I have admired the Reggio model. I found this interesting article showing how it can be expanded into an elementary milieu. Last year we had one 4th grade science project where the collaboration team included the classroom teacher, the art teacher and myself (the tech integrator). The nowfuture reveals itself as a time when teacher, children and parents alike have much to learn.

FindArticles - Project work with diverse students: Adapting curriculum based on the Reggio Emilia approach
Childhood Education, Summer 1995, by Abramson, Shareen,
Robinson, Roxanne,
Ankenman, Katie

You can make a handsome living if you are an expert on teamwork and collaboration but we still insist on educating and evaluating children’s capacity to memorize and mimic the bits of the curriculum. While we may be creating well-trained individuals, they are not learning how to learn.

We all can verify this. Recall a test that you scored well on, or even check your transcript and pick out one of the A’s you earned. In some cases we earn an A and have learned something, but I suspect that you will find an A (for me Geology comes to mind) that leaves you flummoxed. My present day knowledge of igneous, sedimentary etc. leaves me on a slippery slope <grin>.

It was of course, my study skills, that let me hold onto enough information to pass the exams etc. But I did not learn much about Geology. This is standard operating procedure in most educational venues, and dutifully ‘good’ students learn to navigate school successfully. But what have they learned?

The role of the teacher is to create a safe, loving space where the learner develops learning skills. Working with other children allows the learner to be both teacher and learner. Teachers should help children learn about working in teams; perhaps our biggest problem is that as products of the factory school model, we teachers need to learn to learn together too!

How Birds Sing

One is not taxed;
one need not practice;
one simply tips
the throat back
over the spine axis
and asserts the chest.
The wings and the rest
compress a musical
squeeze which floats
a series of notes
upon the breeze.

–Kay Ryan

Ah, celebrate the poet.

Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Innovation arises from ongoing circles of exchange, where information is not just accumulated or stored, but created. Knowledge is generated anew from connections that weren’t there before.

—Meg Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

At our public K-6 school, we are fortunate to have a great recycling relationship in place. A 4th grade class does the gathering each week and a small local business makes the pickup and recycles paper and some plastics for us. This is just a beginning, but most journeys start in a humble manner.

We have this relationship because of a terrific 4th grade teacher. She was working in the environmental safety field prior to deciding to teach elementary school. Blessed be the profession switchers: they bring important new ways of examining what too often seems a tired landscape to those who have labored too long and have lost their sense of purpose.

The energy crisis will be long-lived for us in the US northeast until we replace our fossil-fuel dependency. We will be facing increasingly high energy related costs that will skew our school budgets in the same way that every family adjusts their own budget as we look ahead towards winter.

New Hampshire public schools are always hard pressed to deliver an acceptable budget to the taxpayers. It is time to develop and implement 3 ideas:

1. A statewide initiative to install solar collectors on each school property. It is time to have the electric meters spin backwards at school. This technology is cost effective and starts paying back in a very short period of time. The Schoolhouse then becomes a demonstration location for the whole community
2. A 4 day, full day school calendar. The school district in which I live encompasses thousands of miles of bus routes. Think fuel savings of 20% and bus related salaries reduction of 20%. Think about resetting the thermostats (of course all replacement stuff must meet or exceed Energy Star designation.
3. Increase the use of online learning. We might even call it homework! We need to do some pathfinder projects. Our children are already very comfortable using technology. We can create compelling and engaging online environments. Blended learning makes as much sense for children as it does for adults. This point also amplifies the need for us to consider the use of technology as a design and curriculum challenge and move beyond the idea that we are talking about technology. We’re not!

Of course there are any number of naysayers who can derail these ideas. Not enough technology at home, not enough technology in school, what will families do with an extra day of no school each week, and so on. All of these questions require additional solutions, and we are clever enough to find them if we are brave enough to move forward into a future that is still blurry to our vision. Long ago Lucretius opined, ” The first beginnings of things cannot be distinguished by the eye.”

I think this Daily Show segment of the New Yorker Obamas cover could fuel a terrific 1st class discussion in a high school media literacy or social studies class.

The Fourth Estate seems to have lost its way in their changing profession. I recommend several chapters from Good Work,an excellent and thought provoking work regarding what it means to do ethical and moral  work in this time. The authors, Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner examine two: genetics and journalism and seek to determine how to synthesize high-performance and social responsibility.

The theses presented in Good Work applies to our teaching profession also. We bandy about phrases about student engagement and promoting higher-order, critical thinking. This succinct and serious piece from Stewart will be instantly recognizable to our secondary students. How many of them would benefit from seeing this in a school context?

My time in corporate work included project management and training and development for John Hancock. It was an interesting time, as the company was moving from being a benign, family-oriented Boston institution towards becoming a public company. The cultural implications were huge and we were immersed in a variety of organizational efforts to facilitate the evolution of the company. We rengineered our processess and led the IT professionals through what was dubbed reskilling. Reskilling essentially meant moving their skillsets from mainframe environments to a client-server, object driven one.

It was difficult for many programmers and analysts. I often find myself thinking back to those efforts as I struggle to address the same scenario in the schoolhouse. I am always cautious when I try to link my learning from the corporate sphere to the public education sphere because in many cases we have brought the worst practices rather than the innovative. But I do know a 3 things that we can do right away to facilitate successful professional development that will allow our teachers to move to new ways of teaching and learning.

1. Being sent to Training(s) - Besides training being a poor word choice, we too often surmise that if the flock is sent to spreadsheet training, they will all be capable users. We used to have long training events in business, and many of you will remember glazing over as you and your classmates plodded through a step-by-step workbook. The results were usually abysmal. Two weeks later, when you are trying to make the pivot table behave for the school board presenation dagnabit, the thing doesn’t work right. Think about mini-lessons, little video tutorials and an experts list - people (including students and community members) who can mentor and coach on specific challenges.
2. WIIFM - we need to do a better job of ensuring that 1:1 coaching/mentoring and other small, informal learning groups (skunkworks), are able to be used to meet recertification requirements. Most importantly these hours should be credited to the content area of the teachers endorsement rather than labeling the hours towards some type of technology endorsement.
3. Integration - The modern teacher has been king/mostly queen of their classroom for more than a century. We need to learn how to teach collaboratively and to see the profession of teaching as a multi-disciplinary practice, requiring multiple collaborators to be most effective. My best example would be to examine the practice of medicine. The Doctor and Teacher previously held omnipotent roles in their domains. But for a number of reasons, including increasingly ubiquitous access to information and the ability to practice more effectively using information tools, we have better success in collaboration rather than solo.

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