Achieving “the Impossible”

[EAST] Baltimore: Not What Defines a City — cc flickr photo by urbanfeel

It always seems impossible until its done. ~ Nelson Mandela

Read enough blog posts, follow enough people on Twitter and attend enough educational conferences and you might be fooled into thinking that moving schools into the 21st Century is a relatively easy task. There are lots of success stories–many examples of dedicated educators making tremendous progress in shifting educational paradigms. But, I am here to tell you that this “school improvement thing” is not as easy as you might think. I am entering my seventh week as a principal, and truth be told, it has been a bit overwhelming. There have been a number of successes in our first few weeks of school, but there are a significant number of challenges that lie ahead.

Perhaps our most daunting challenge is building the universal belief that all of our kids are capable of success. A significant number of our students (well over 50%) come from low socio-economic areas in our community and it is far too easy to write off their academic performance (or lack thereof) as a product of their environment. Socioeconomics is absolutely a factor to consider as we plan educational strategies and interventions, but not one that should determine whether or not a student is successful at our school. I pulled It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools off the book shelf, in a search for ideas. It proved to be a worthwhile read.

Author Karin Chenoweth, presents the stories of a number of schools that have a proven track record of success, in spite of the obstacles encountered in high poverty communities. In addition to providing vignettes of schools that have beat the odds, Chenoweth identifies characteristics of the schools where “it is being done.” Here are a few of my favorites:

They have high expectations for their students. ”They assume that their students are able to meet high standards and belive their job is to help their students get there.” This goes beyond simply establishing expectations — it means providing the necessary supports for students to be successful.
They don’t teach to the state tests. Instead, they teach a “rich, coherent, curriculum tied to state standards” and they emphasize the importance of involving students in meaningful, engaging and collaborative activities.
They use data to focus on individual students, not just groups of students. Learning is personalized. For schools that beat the odds, it is not enough to have a general sense of how the school is performing, it is necessary to know how every student is progressing.
They constantly reexamine what they do. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. We can afford to continue doing things just because that is how it has always been done. Reflection and successful education are inseparable.
They make decisions on what is good for kids, not what is good for adults. The “beat the odds” schools consistently based decision-making on the best interest of students. This sounds like common sense, but it’s not as easy as it appears. For every action and activity we must ask ourselves: (1) what is my purpose, (2) is this a good use of time/resources, (3) is this in the best interest of my students?
They establish an atmosphere of respect. ”Students are treated with respect, teachers and staff are treated with respect, and parents are treated with respect.”
They like kids. I would hope that every educator likes kids (if you don’t, please find another profession). However, we have all had those kids who make empathy a challenge. Chenoweth makes a great observation about how these students are perceived at schools that are beating the odds, “the struggles that students have outside school only increase the regard teachers and principals have for what they are able to achieve in school.”

I wish I had more answers than questions about how to address this issue in our educational system, but I do believe that success and achievement in schools with significant numbers of students coming from low socio-economic homes is not impossible. Shame on us if we assume otherwise. I believe we have proven otherwise and will continue to do so with collaboration, hard work, and remaining student and achievement focused.

Links to Look at:

10-wonderful-common-core-standards Cheat Sheets

You know what you want your students to be able to do on the Ipad. Here are the Apps to use.

Great free geoboard App

30 Ipad Apps every teacher should be using

Videos to Watch:

A Pep Talk from Kid President....We all need a little Pep talk, and I think you will enjoy this one!

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Learn, Unlearn and Relearn

I follow many educators on Twitter, and when many of them are talking about the same book or the same topic, I feel compelled to take a look. This weekend I downloaded the book Why School? by Will Richardson after seeing numerous educators on Twitter recommend it. It was only $2.99, and though I have just begun reading it, I understand that it challenges our thinking about school.

Here is a TEDTalk given by the author, Will Richardson, talking about how the internet resources available to us today are making learning different. Even if you don't watch the entire video (which is 14 minutes) please watch the first 1:28 minutes of it as he tells the story of his daughter learning to play Journey on the piano.

I cringed when he told about the piano teacher saying his daughter wasn't ready to play Journey yet. I then wondered if there are any times that we put similar limits on our students?

Why School? is a great summary of why schools must be different than they were when we went through school. Schools are no longer the place to go to receive information and then memorize it to regurgitate it on a worksheet or a test. That is the type of school that prepared children for factory work. We are now preparing students for jobs that do not even exist today. Richardson quotes psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy who predicts that "the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write. The illiterate will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." I had to think deeply about that quote, but really can connect to how true it is with changing technologies. Think about how many times you have had to change something you do technology-wise because the program has updated (Microsoft word is the perfect example) or had to completely stop using a program and learn a new one (ex: gmail, outlook, back to gmail.....pc to mac). At the rate web 2.0 tools are coming out, this learning, unlearning and relearning can happen daily!

In the video clip above (which was from 2011 so I'm sure the numbers have changed), Richardson says that by using their phones, a student could have access to 2 billion potential teachers...no, not certified teachers, but people who can teach them how to do something. Information and knowledge is everywhere, not just in the teacher's heads to impart to students.

For our students to be successful, they will need to know how to find accurate information, think about and solve real world problems, be able to create and share with others and collaborate with others...not just in the classroom but at aglobal level.

Here are some of the highlights from Why School? Shared by Jessica Johnson:

"Remaking assessment starts with this: Stop asking questions on tests that can be answered by a google search."

"Performance-based assessments, where students actually have to do something with what they know, tell us volumes more about their readiness for life than bubble sheets or contrived essays."

"We can raise the teaching profession by sharing what works, by taking the best of what we do and hanging it on the virtual wall. Many would argue that it is now the duty of teachers to do so."

"We have to stop delivering the curriculum to kids. We have to start discovering it with them."

Be a master learner...

"There's no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn't care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know."

Do real work for real audiences.