Elementary School Leadership

Greer Mid-year Teacher Survey

2011-12-30T13:58:00.003-05:00

Below is a copy of the survey we sent out to our teaching staff the week they returned from break. We used google forms to do it which was simple and easy. I have found that a mid year survey of staff is a great way to take stock of everyone's take on the various initiatives at our school. And after reading the responses, while sometimes hard to appreciate, I love the honesty and sense of community that is growing at our school. I hate BS in the education world, and leaders who make claims about their staff that they cannot stand by. For those who do, they should do an anonymous survey to see where their staff really is.

The survey really helps us (me) grow as a teacher and leader. And we share all of the answers with the entire staff so everyone can see it.

Mid-Year Greer Teacher Survey 2012

Please take some time this week to fill out this survey. We will close it out Monday, January 9. Because we believe the improvement and growth of our school is a collective process, all of the answers will be shared out with the staff.

One of major focus areas this year is reading, especially engaging and motivating all of our students to read. What do you need to sustain energy and passion around this initiative and help you become the best reading teacher you can be?

What is working about your PLC? What would you share about your PLC with other PLCs to help them?

What is not working with your PLC and what would help it improve?

Our work with Expeditionary Learning is in its third year. What staff development or staff work do we need to grow stronger in this initiative?

Committee work is in its third year of implementation. What is working about the committees? What can make them even more productive?

Reaching out to our school community through a variety of means is important to us. What else do you think can be done to make this relationship stronger?

Name and describe a little thing that could be done by the administration, fellow staff members, or yourself, that would make your job a little bit easier to do.

While Greer has begun to full implement the RTI model, we realize staff members need to know more about how it works and how they fit in the process. What do you specifically need to know about the RTI process?

We are in our fourth year of implementing Responsive Classroom. What do you need to help you develop more as an individual teacher with this model?

What can happen that will enable you to have more fun at school and enjoy your job?

What am I? or Who am I?

2011-12-29T09:53:00.003-05:00

I have been growing increasingly tired of the shrillness of the education debates online. But it has lead me to the all important question, first not who am I?, but what am I?

Am I a pro-reform educator? If you define reform as increasingly test score driven teacher evaluations as the path to education nirvana, no I am not. If you define reform as getting school districts to get courageous and create more options, empower teachers and admins, and make school an exciting place, yes I am pro-reform.

Am I an education reform critic, or a critic of education reform critics? I am a defender of nuance. My five years as a teacher in Baltimore in the 90s proved to me that unions sometimes protect incompetent teachers, principals do not always know what they are doing, and that good teachers and principals find ways to muddle through but most importantly not enough student needs are met by either side of the debate. Both sides of the debate need to find nuance, soon, and those of us with experience and intelligence are dying for some.

Am I progressive?

Am I a back to the basics educator?

Am I 21st century?

Am I an evangelist of anything in the education world?

Am I a Responsive Classroom principal?

Am I an Expeditionary learning principal?

Perhaps the more important question is who am I?

As a person who happens to be an educator I am sum of some sort addition of my beliefs and my actions, with my wonderful glaring faults thrown in as well.

I believe that it is my responsibility to make my patch of the world better than when I came to it, in my classrooms, in my schools, in my relationships, and in my neighborhood.

So what is better.

More authentic educational experiences for students, teachers, and family members
Better communication through community building and responsiveness, honestly and dialogue
More empowering belief in one self through the teaching of all literacies
More focus on the important things like developing a culture that supports intrinsic motivation and enjoyment of learning

I know, I know, lots of things that are hard to measure. But to make it happen requires a few things.

People in the school work way past their contract.
A solitary test score focus has to be co-opted into something bigger.
Policies need to be bent.
Asking forgiveness, instead of permission.
Having incredibly high expectations of the people you work with.

Things I am not certain either side of the reform debate would always support.

Sometimes I think I have become some sort of master of this type of leadership and I know a growing group of teachers and administrators around the glove have as well. I sometimes feel that my hands are tied by policies, sometimes by the policies intended to untie my hands.

We are the group who make the most in our classrooms or our schools while the ones with time on their hands bloviate endlessly about why their side is right.

We are the group who are making a difference while the nattering class keeps on nattering.

What should be call ourselves? Or does it even matter?

Interesting side note and full-disclosure- I am the principal of a school in formal school improvement with the state of Virginia for not meeting AYP in reading for several years. During the time of my leadership, reading and math scores have improved for all membership groups but not fast enough. That bothers me. During that time, our school climate has improved dramatically and the collective learning environment is one of the most vibrant in the area but I guess I am biased. In the three years school choice has been offered to all of our famlies, 1% of our school community has chosen to leave us. We continue to focus on improving the achievement of all of our students and making our school the best place for learning and growth it can be.

Creating School Traditions- A few things we know for sure

2011-08-20T10:23:00.003-04:00

We are creating new traditions as a school. Last year was the start with intensive learning expeditions at each grade level and student led conferences for every single student in the spring. We also took an older school tradition of visiting neighborhoods before the start of school and ramped it up a bit with pairs of teachers knocking on doors and visiting every single family before the start of school. Each child got a little bag of "back to school goodies" and if they weren't there it was left on the door. This "Stepping Out" day is quickly becoming once again a powerful school tradition. Our commitment is to visit and knock on every door. Last year, we met about 50% of our families face to face. This year I am guessing that figure is somewhere between 60-70%. Some students were woken up or still in their pajamas (and it was not that early). Other times teachers were invited in for tea, juice, or treats by the families.

A few things we know for sure. It took an incredible amount of work for teachers at Greer to pull it off. And it will help us build powerful connections with all of our families. A local television station did a good job covering one of the visits. Here's to another amazing school year at Mary Carr Greer Elementary School!

The different journeys we all take as educators

2011-07-24T09:30:00.004-04:00

The New York Times this morning has an article about a new teacher training graduate program in New York City that was founded by three separate charter management organizations. The program prides itself on utilizing little to no reading or theorizing but instead an intense focus on practical classroom teaching strategies that raise student achievement. The founder is quoted as saying "if you think tests are evil... this is not the program for you." The program bases a lot of its pedagogy on the book, Teach like a Champion, whole class type teaching strategies.

When I was a beginning teacher in Baltimore in the early nineties, I struggled. My school noticed that pretty quickly and attached a master teacher to me for about three weeks. She modeled for me, co-taught with me, and finally just observed me teach. The strategies (a lot of positive reinforcement type stuff) she taught me brought order to my classroom and enabled me to start teaching the students. I used these strategies through my second year of teaching as well and got even better at them.

During my third, fourth, and fifth year of teaching though, I really started questioning myself:

Do I need to reward students with points for almost everything they do?
Shouldn't students have more choice in their daily life?
Shouldn't I be developing more of a supportive community of learners?

So, without much or any support, I struggled to implement some of these strategies and realized that kids I taught did not need points for everything they did and when they chose their own reading material they were infinitely more motivated to read. I would love to say that I became a master teacher but I did not, I struggled up until the last day of my teaching career. But I new there was something different that I could be doing in education and in my classroom.

The journey of an educator is hopefully more than just learning new strategies over the course of thirty years. The journey hopefully leads us to some semblance of what is real learning, what is truth, and what really prepared students for the real world out there.

This past year, I have stumbled upon two educators who have had some similar journeys. Marc Waxman, a former TFA teacher and KIPP teacher, is now heading up charter schools in Denver that utilize Responsive Classroom and a more constructivist teaching style. Eric Juli, a central office administrator in Massachusetts is taking on a new job of running a small, innovative high school in Cleveland. Both of their journey's appear to have taken place because of a great amount of reflection and thought. One aspect of Marc's journey that is interesting is that he started to question his teaching as he started to have his own children.

My own journey as I enter my 11th year of being an elementary school principal has me working with a staff that is embracing the core principles of Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning. I have learned more about myself, about learning, about children, and about people the past three years of implementing these principles than I have during any other aspect of my career.

So, in thinking back about the new teacher training program in New York, I probably could have used some of those strategies to survive and in some regards thrive as a new teacher years ago. Some of the new teachers I have worked with over the years could have used some of those strategies as well. I don't disdain them at all. But I also realize that there is a richness of thought and reflection when you try to go past test scores and develop a true learning community that I hope, hope, hope that those teachers in the program get at some point in their career but worry in the current reform climate, they never will.

If your school teaches to the test, it’s not the test’s fault. It’s the leaders of your school.

2011-07-03T07:05:00.005-04:00

So David Brooks wrote a column in the NY Times the other day about the school reform debates. This is not my attempt to add to the debate. I don't have the time to add to the fray. He ended his column though with a rather enticing line though: "If your school teaches to the test, it's not the test's fault. It's the leaders of your school."

The line invoked in me the most irritating response, I both agreed wholeheartedly to it and wholeheartedly was aggravated by it in the same moment.

I am a principal of an elementary school in a high pressure, high stakes environment. 70% of our students qualify for free/reduced lunch. We are the most ethnically/racially diverse school in our school division and in the entire region. If you just look at AYP during my tenure at the school, the results are mixed. One year, we did not make it, one year we did, one year we just barely missed it, the the jury is still out on this past year. We are in our second year of formal school improvement with the state. We are a public school choice school and have mandated outside tutoring as part of the NCLB law. I attend monthly meetings with the state department of ed and turn in data reports to them on a regular basis. Everything in this world tells me as a leader to lead a school that teaches to the test. Every meeting, every statement, every webinar, every powerpoint. The words teach to the test are never used, but it is always implied.

The past two years, however, we have embarked on a different journey. Along with a focus on data and results, we have implemented different strategies through our intensive work with Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning:

Intensive community building through classroom and school-wide morning meetings
Student led parent conferences for every single student, Prek-5
Learning expeditions (you can see them here) at every single grade level
Instructional rounds for all teachers (learn about them here)
Extensive use of formative assessment strategies

Now, I know many good educators would look at that list and say or think that those strategies would increase student achievement for everyone. I agree. But, the prevailing wisdom in the world in which I partially inhabit (the high stakes world) does not push or even nudge school leaders in that direction. We do the right thing at Greer because we have a culture of professionals who value the strategies above. The does not mean we never doubt ourselves, or worry we are doing the right thing. But we have held the course. We also have a superintendent (@pammoran) and a school board who support our work as well.

Our school is going in the right direction with both our school culture and yes, student achievement, slowly but surely. The school has a vastly more positive and learner supported feel than it did four years ago. But David Brooks, and most other policy wonks, would look at our data and label us as failing. We are not failing, and I would argue we are improving in a more authentic way than most other schools.

What David Brooks fails to realize is that for a school leader to swim up the fast flowing stream of "not teaching to the test", it takes an incredible amount of support, collective courage, and belief in children to accomplish doing things the right way. Most people in education right now, because they are in schools that don't face these issues or they simply refuse to face the issues themselves, don't really have an idea of how tough it is.

David Brooks certainly does not. He is pretty darn clueless.

A Red Shouldered Hawk Visits Mary Carr Greer Elementary and We Have a Hawk Party

2011-05-11T20:33:00.001-04:00

A little interesting thing happened at school today. I was out on the playground watching some fourth graders play basketball at recess (it was a very nice day in Central Virginia). Suddenly, my walkie talkie crackled to life. Usually it is Dorothy, our office associate, telling me about a phone call or a classroom I need to visit. Instead, I heard this "Mr. Landahl, there is a hawk on top of the flag pole. You should go take a picture of it with your phone." Despite my shock, I hustled to the front of the building as fast as I could to see this hawk.

It was magnificent and was sitting as still as can be on top of our flag pole. Our fifth graders were about fifty feet away running the mile in our bus loop and it was them and our PE teacher Mrs. Bond who first saw it.

So, naturally the next step was that more people needed to get invited to this hawk party. Our fourth graders are in the middle of a learning expedition exploring the return of the bald eagle to Virgina as part of a intensive study of our local ecosystem. I decided to use the walkie talkie again and called to one of the teachers at recess and said, "we have this enormous hawk on the flag pole and it is not really going anywhere. You might want to bring the fourth graders to see it." The response I got was, "ok".

A few minutes later I received another communication from a fourth grade teacher, "is it still there?"

Indeed it was. So, our fifth graders are still running the mile in front of the school and our fourth graders are now walking very quietly to stand and sit in front of the flag pole to watch the hawk.

The above picture only captures a fraction of the kids watching the hawk. As we stood there looking at it, I am sure all of the adults, me included, were starting to wonder, "how long do we stand here looking at this hawk?" The kids were all well behaved and seemed genuinely interesting in this rather majestic creature perched on top of our flag. But shouldn't we get back inside and start doing some work, I am sure crossed more people's minds. Finally, one teacher said," maybe we should wait until the hawk flies away so the kids can see its wingspan in flight."

So we waited some more. Kids still looking at the hawk. A pair of nesting mockingbirds began to fly at the hawk in an attempt to scare it away. We got to watch that for a while.

And then finally the hawk flew away and all the kids cheered for it. It was really quite an unusual, special fifteen minutes.

I am not going to overdo trying to attach some sort of significance to these fifteen minutes. But, the more we get interested in the world outside, the more ready we are to investigate and explore this incredible world outside the school door, the more hawk parties we are probably going to have.

Author's note: when our neighborhood black bear makes his annual visit, we are not going to do the same.

The power of listening

2011-04-10T12:45:00.003-04:00

I recently was exposed to two slightly different takes on communication from a leadership position and both involve one on one meetings with people.

The first was from a Corner Office interview in the NY Times a few weeks ago. In this interview of Doreen Lorenzo, she talks at length about the power of one on one meetings with people in her design and innovation firm. In these meetings, she lets each person guide the conversation and spends most of the time listening. She also uses this time to communicate the mission of the company, because she feels strongly that people need to hear it from her.

The second exposure is a short video from The Learning Community School in Rhode Island. The co-directors two times a year sit down with every person in the school and just listen. They then do an interesting next step and track all of the things people say, take notes on it, and then share it with everyone in the school, and finally try to facilitate some action steps from the data.

I have done bits and pieces of this as a leader over the years and I value this type of data probably more than any others.

But I need to improve on:

Communicating the vision one on one with everyone.
Truly listening to people and letting them guide the conversation.
Doing it in a systematic way and finding the time to implement that system

It is powerful stuff. The best thing I know I could probably ever say about a boss is that I really felt listened to. I hope I can improve in that area as a leader myself.

A good Sunday morning

2011-04-10T12:28:00.002-04:00

The Sunday morning paper is a ritual in our house. Since moving to the east coast years ago, it has become the New York Times. But, this morning, I was filled with a bit of dread when I saw that education was a focus of the magazine section. Dread, because, so often I have found that anything written about education, seemingly almost anywhere, seems to miss the nuances behind what actually happens in a school. So, I had to make a decision, read it right away and work the rest of my Sunday on not being annoyed by it, or just push it off. I decided to read it.

And, I could not believe it. It was one of the best articles about a city school that I have ever read, especially in the context of the current state of reform. It is a good article because it is real. The principal, Ramon Gonzalez, seems amazing and he struggles with many things: the encroachment of charter schools, the inexperience with Teach for America teachers, kids with a lot of needs moving into the school any day of the year, finding funding to the extra things, lack of support from central office. What is great about the article is that it seems to have no "angle". Teachers unions are not evil at the school, they copy strategies from some charter schools but ignore others, and they go all out for kids and do not always find success because of their own fault or the circumstances of the child's life. Really an amazing read and I hope that folks in the policy field, because their own experience in actual schools was most likely rather fleeting, give it a read. It would help them understand what impact certain policies have in a real school trying hard to improve.

Our Planned Learning Expeditions at Greer for this Spring

2011-03-15T20:23:00.003-04:00

Listed below are summaries of the learning expeditions that our grade level teams have put together for the very first time. Some are being implemented right now and others later this spring. The summaries are in the words of our teachers and instructional coaches. I know we have a lot more hard work to accomplish but we are proud of getting this far.

Kindergarten

Kindergarteners will investigate and understand the basic needs and life processes of plants and animals. They will explain how living things change as they grow and describe what living things need to survive. Each class will study one animal in depth as a case study that they relate to other living things. The product of this expedition will be a ‘how to’ care manual that will be developed by students for an animal fostered by each Kindergarten class from the SPCA. The manual will include photographs of the animal in the classroom and in-depth information on its behaviors, habits and needs, as studied by the students. The manual will be available to the SPCA and prospective families for future use when caring for this species. Students will investigate how the SPCA supports our community and will gather resources needed for the animals such as cleaning supplies, blankets, animal food, and volunteer support.

First Grade: Souper Soup

First grade is currently in the middle of our first expedition, Super Soup. Through the lens of soup, we are tackling a variety of standards, while providing authentic learning experiences that are relevant to our students. Integrated standards and topics include:

Science: states of matter and dissolving, seasons, and the needs of living things
Math: volume, measurement, and fractions
Writing: functional and non-fiction writing, revision, writing with clarity, and publishing
Social studies: community service

Students are developing is a grade-wide cookbook, which will include a recipe from each student. By cooking a variety of soups in class, reading about different cultural soups, experimenting with vegetables, talking to expert nutritionists, and visiting farms, we are building background knowledge so that students can successfully write soup recipes. We are formatively assessing their learning through each step of the process and meeting individual needs through modeling and one-on-one conversation. We are keeping an Expedition Journal to record our work and students actively use previous pages to find and write vocabulary words, add more details to drawings and record their thinking.

Additional plans include a return visit to the farm to see how it changes in spring, consultation with the nutritionist to make sure our soups are healthy, a visit to the food bank to see how soup can help our community, and a calendar to show people, plants, animals, and the weather in each season.

Second Grade: From Seed to Plate - the Cycle of Waste

We are looking at 3 separate investigations: How do plants grow? What happens to food waste? How does weather affect growth? Our product will be a public service announcement. This expedition will involve science (life processes, living systems, weather, scientific inquiry), math (measurement, estimation, data collection/graphing, calendars) and literacy (oral, reading, writing).

Student projects along the way will include planting and caring for vegetables, as well as keeping an observation journal. We are beginning seeds in the classroom and will plant outside in a school garden as weather permits. The Local tennis club has pitched in with a grant to revamp existing garden beds as they explore “Healthy bodies, healthy eating.” They will also be involved in measuring cafeteria trash and various composting projects as they learn about the cycle of waste. Some classes are creating in-class compost bins, others are participating in vermiculture, and everyone is contributing to the grade level compost bin for long-term use. Students will create, maintain, and document various weather stations. Also, classes will complete case studies with animals to compare life cycles and systems. For fieldwork we will visit a compost business, a local farm for hands-on experiences with where food comes from, as well as others opportunities not yet scheduled. Our hope is that students will be able to make a difference in the amount of food that is sent to trash.

Third Grade: Into the WIld
Third grade’s Spring expedition is based on animals. The guiding question for the first case study, entitled What’s For Dinner is “How do animals meet their basic needs?” The students distinguish between predator and prey, create a food chain, design a plate showing what omnivores, carnivores, and herbivores eat, and describe the importance of producers, consumers, and decomposers. They also perform research and write a report based on an animal of their choice.

The second case study entitled, “Survival of the Fittest” has the guiding question, “How do animals adapt to their environment?” The students begin with a gallery walk of animals that showcase their physical adaptations. They move on to read a common text on animal adaptations and then expert texts on hibernations, mimicry, migration, and camouflage. The students continue to their animal research reports in this case study. In art class they make their own paper which will be used to make “Animal Fact Cards” as a product. We had a guest speaker from the VMNH outreach program talk to us about animal adaptations, with objects for the kids to explore hands-on. The students will perform a mimicry experiment and hide butterflies to exemplify camouflage.

There is a third case study that will be finalized for next year. It will deal with the human impact on animals and conservation. Throughout the expedition we are using quick checks, graphic organizers, art projects, drawings, and note taking to assess the children. As each item is completed we are displaying the work, along with the Learning Targets, in our community.

Fourth Grade – Through the Eyes of Eagles

The Through the Eyes of Eagles learning expedition will allow 4^th graders to explore the interdependence of every part of ecosystems by studying the purpose and importance of each aspect of the ecosystem of the bald eagle in Central Virginia. Learning experiences are designed to help students form answers to the questions: Can eagles survive in Charlottesville or Central Virginia or Albemarle County? Is survival enough?

Each student will choose one part of the bald eagle’s ecosystem to draw (scientific, museum quality). They’ll include a short explanation of what would happen to the ecosystem if their part were to disappear. The final draft of their drawings will be displayed along with other student panels to show the interrelationships within the ecosystem. The final gallery presentation will be hosted offsite with an audience of parents and community members.

Their study of the eagle’s ecosystem will bring students to the water sources in our area that are shared by all of the plants and animals in our ecosystem. Students will test water at four different local locations and produce a water quality report analyzing the health of the watershed. They will also research and suggest action steps for community members to take that can reduce water pollution.

Fifth Grade

As a part of our study of Virginia History, we are taking a very local focus on Charlottesville/Albemarle from the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement. Specifically, we’re learning about our school’s namesake – Mary Carr Greer. Our project has three main parts:

1. Who was Mary Carr Greer?

Students will follow the Carr/Greer family from emancipation through Mrs. Greer’s principalship in Albemarle County. We are working with Mrs. Greer’s descendents to learn more about her as a person and why our school was named for her. We’ll ultimately rededicate our school in her memory at the end of the school year.

2. Virginia History Timeline

We’ll be working to expose our students to a variety of primary source documents and recordings to help them build a timeline of our local area – from the end of the Civil War through the present – with attention to issues of rights, freedom, and equality in education.

3. Community Biographies

Students will interview local community members about their experiences during school desegregation and Massive Resistance here in Virginia. Small groups of students will interview their subjects and produce a biography that we’ll ultimately display as a gallery for our interview subjects and other community members to view.

What do we do next?

2011-02-13T19:53:00.003-05:00

Our school just completed our mid year review in the form of a "gallery walk". Each team reflected on their progress with their students both in terms of student achievement but also in use of instructional strategies (a big focus for us is assessment for learning) and then created a display for all of the other teachers to take a look at and give feedback.

We have a professional learning day in a week so this year we decided that we did not want the mid year review to seem like an isolated event but instead wanted to build on this major information sharing on February 21st. At the gallery, we asked for each teacher to do some reflecting and provide some idea of an area or areas we could focus on for our conversations. After reviewing this reflective data over the past few days, it is a hard call. We know in our journey as a school that we need to be more consistent in our language and instructional practice. Should we use the day to build on what we are already working on this year? Should we introduce something new? Should we do a little of both?

I always find analyzing this kind of feedback from every staff member to be a fascinating process. We often share it all right back to the staff so they can see where everyone is coming from. Sometimes though, when receiving all of these ideas and feedback, it is hard to stay focused. I don't want to seem to slow moving as a leader, and ignore the call for faster change, but I also don't want to go to fast, and pretend that everything has changed when it hasn't.

So, what will we do. We probably will try to do some sharing and consistency development around our initiatives for this year, but also try to spend some time honoring where we want to go in the future.

I find myself thinking all of the time about the next step. I find these reflective moments are more challenging yet more fruitful when I ask the entire staff to weigh in on the decision as well.

Why is the Edreform world having trouble finding turnaround principals?

2011-02-13T17:56:00.003-05:00

There were two fascinating pieces in the New York Times last week that centered on issues in the principalship. I don't often get my education news from the times but the juxtaposition of these two articles just one day apart was too much to resist.

The first article centered on the national effort to use different turnaround models for the most struggling schools in each state. Quick summary, these schools often leave the same principal in place that they had before or they really struggle finding people to take the positions. Not a real surprise to me because the turnaround principal job has got to be one of the hardest in education and for the people who take on the positions, there is absolutely no guarantee of success.

The second article focused on New York City Public Schools effort to collect unpaid lunch bills by charging school principals with the collection duties or else the money comes out of their individual school budget. Which, as a principal, seemed to me a completely insane policy. If you want principals to be instructional leaders in schools, it seems obvious to not saddle them with even more non-instructional duties.

How are these two things related? The reason we have a turnaround school principal shortage is that we keep putting up roadblocks to principals who are put in these positions. If we want more people to go after these jobs, they have to be given a ton of support, and not lunch bill collection duties to complete. It may seem like an absurd policy, but probably most districts in this country expect principal to be superheroes, to be strong instructional leaders, manage everything in the building, and make sure all policies are followed.

The principalship is a very unglamorous position. I happen to love it, and I embrace that element of the job. But if you are trying to turnaround a school, you better not have to collect lunch money too.

Collaboration Kills says Joe Klein.

2011-02-12T15:17:00.003-05:00

I tried really hard to stay digitally away from the Teach for America summit this weekend. Both the TFA is the enemy and TFA is the answer tweets and blog posts make me weary. As a TFA alum, I too have mixed feelings about the organization. So I stayed away, except when working on making some revisions to Chapter 3 of my dissertation, I accidentally just clicked on the video of this morning's panel and hopped around for literally two minutes before I stumbled upon this quote from Joe Klein: "Don't buy into this notion that if all the adults just collaborate, it will be just fine for the kids, the adults have been collaborating for a long time, and the kids are getting screwed." It is about 1 hour and 18 minutes into the panel and after the quote many cheered.

I get it to some extent. I am now just a small city, elementary school principal and have no ideas about big city battles between administration and unions. I am one of those (increasingly rare?) people who see the anger at unions for protecting mediocre or worse teachers and also the deplorable working conditions and leadership that many big city teachers deal with that drives them to unions in the first place. So, I am not one that will pretend I know the answers.

But, to back to the quote, if you mess with collaboration, you really make me angry. The sound bite about collaboration got applause from the TFA audience because it conjured up images of union teachers collaborating only around how little they were going work the next day or something.

What worries me about all of this is the notion of leadership that TFA seems to engender. Just tell people what to do, blast them if they don't follow the mandate, and if they question things they don't have the best interests of the children in mind.

What if there is another way? What if there are school leaders out there, TFA alum like myself included, that fully believe in collaboration. That believe that involving all of the voices in a school in the slow and messy process of improving and building a dynamic learning environment. That believe that test scores measure some things but not every thing. That seek out feedback and input at every step of the process, no matter how difficult and time consuming.
I don't think our kids are getting screwed either.

I know, I know, I am just a principal of a little elementary school. What could I possibly know about leadership and change and human behavior? I think I had spent more time both teaching and leading a school than anyone else on the panel, except maybe one. I guess I know that much more than them.

Solitude and Leadership

2010-12-31T22:26:00.004-05:00

I read a great essay a week ago, "Solitude and Leadership" By William Deresiewicz in American Scholar magazine. It is based on a speech he gave to cadets at West Point. It is really worth the time to read and makes a few key points. We need original thinkers in leadership positions. To be an original thinker with vision, a leader needs to find some time to be alone and comfortable with new thoughts. A final point he makes is that multitasking is extremely detrimental to the kind of thinking a visionary leader needs to do.

Two quotes:

"For too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they are worth doing in the first place...What we don't have in other words are thinkers...people, in other words, with vision."
Multitasking with technology, TV, newspapers, etc. is "just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that human beings throw in your way."

So, a few thoughts as I head into this new year.

I want to multitask less. For me, that means being more thoughtful about how I use my time (and looking at my iPhone less).

I want to read more complete books and less snippets of things.

I want to take time for solitude.

I want to deal with the difficult and troubling questions head on.

This essay is worth a read, it has a lot more to say than this post gives it credit for.

Happy New Year!

Instructional Rounds at Greer

2010-12-31T15:06:00.004-05:00

I am inspired to write this blog because of Pam Moran's wonderful post "Spring of Hope" and then @chadsansing's tweet response to it:" piece on where we are, what we need 2 do: share, believe, act me: devil is in the how, what, & why".

I never pretend to know all of the answers to hard questions like Chad's but I love exploring potential answers in my work as a principal.

Greer Elementary is in school improvement with the Virginia State Department of Education and one of the things we need to do as a result is write a school improvement plan with the VDOE. They empower us at the school level to choose 5-7 improvement strategies from a list of a couple of hundred. One of the strategies is to develop a system of peer observations in the school. We chose this strategy for some simple reasons: it was a lot better than some of the other ones, it had real potential to change culture in our school, and I was personally tired of paying lip service to peer observations every year and never really implementing them.

So with the leadership of our instructional coaching team at Greer, Ken Ferguson and Sue Harris, we dove into the book Instructional Rounds. Ken has especially been instrumental in leading the effort of rounds in our building from developing our unique philosophy behind it and working out all of the details.

A couple of choice quotes from the book:

"The rounds process is an explicit practice that is designed to bring discussions of instruction directly into the process of school improvement. By practice we mean something quite specific for observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction that can be used to improve student learning at scale. The practice works because it creates a common discipline and focus among practitioners with common purpose and set of problems."
"The process of rounds requires participants to focus on a common problem of practice that cuts across all levels of the system."
"You improve schools by using information about student learning, from multiple sources, to find the most promising instructional problems to work on and then systematically developing with teachers and administrators the knowledge and skill necessary to solve those problems."
"Language is culture. Culture is language. How people talk to each other about what they are doing is an important determinant of whether they are able to learn from their practice."

The book is powerfully written and gets at what it calls the core of interaction between student, teacher, and curriculum. It provides some vignettes of fictional schools that have looked at data until they were collectively blue in the face without ever really analyzing how they interact around the core in the classroom. So, we adopted instructional rounds as one of our strategies.

Here are some of our rounds strategies unique to Greer:

Every single teacher and administrator is involved in rounds. We decided against piloting. We are all in. If we ever want to make teaching public at Greer, we could not have this be an opt in event.
Every teacher gets coverage two hours a month to practice observing from video and then spending time observing in different classes.
We have focused relentlessly on having everyone practice non-judgmental feedback. It is a harder skill to learn than people think.
The teacher involved in rounds on a given day debrief after school.
We took feedback from every teacher after a few months of rounds and had the school improvement team do old fashioned sorts and wordle sorts with the info to come up with our school challenge of practice. Our challenge of practice- how to improve as a school at checking for understanding multiple times in a lesson.

I am pretty realistic person. Not everyone in our school sees rounds as a wonderful, transformational process. Some see it as a waste of time. Some like it. It is very different than just about everyone's experience either teaching at Greer or at any other school. Most schools do not develop systematic procedures for peer observations. But, we are sticking with it. I personally see it as a three-four year culture changer. It will take a long time to really affect change.

PLC meetings can get old. For those of us schooled in the Dufour model, we can sometimes look at test data every which way til Sunday and still never really talk instruction in a meaningful way. Rounds helps get at it.

But one caution. Although the book is written more for division rounds teams, the first few chapters are essential for understanding the process. Rounds are not walkthroughs. Rounds are not observation checklists. Do not implement the process if you are just doing that because you will not change culture in a building. "Language is culture, culture is language" and we cannot make that phrase meaningful until we foster powerful conversations among a staff around what is actually happening in the classroom.

#blog4reform!

Some Notes from Chris Lehman's talk on the Educator's PLN: Progressive Schools Need Systemic Structures

2010-12-23T12:39:00.003-05:00

In some quiet moments in my office this week with our students out for winter break, I have had the chance to listen to @chrislehman 's talk on the Educator's PLN and I picked up some interesting ideas that either validated what we are doing at Mary Carr Greer Elementary or challenged me to think about where we are as a school. Chris is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia which is a progressive, magnet high school. Our school is elementary and just plain regular public. We are in the midst of an overall change/improvement process using the core ideas of both Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning. While I do not use the terms progressive or traditional very much, we are definitely on a path as a school to increase the level and spirit of community and the level of engagement with our students and our teachers.

So, here are the ideas or quotes from Chris:

"Progressive schools need systemic structures". It is a simple yet powerful quote. Greer right now is struggling with implementing learning expeditions, student led conferences, and new technology while maintaining our assessment model among other things. I firmly believe that we need systemic structures to flourish as a school but I am also realizing that we are not close to having them yet. We will have them but it will take time. We need to develop systemic structures for our planning of instruction, delivering it and also our assessing of our student learning.
"A common language of teaching and learning drills down to the process...The way we talk about project based learning and inquiry is the same across all teachers." With systemic structures comes a common language and vision for teaching and learning. I find myself hearing "common language bla bla bla" coming from many educators but I don't often see it. I don't often see it because I know how hard it is to accomplish in my own school. It takes a hell of a lot of work and is hard and maybe harder to do in a regular public school. I know it is worth every ounce of effort.
Grade levels have essential questions, the school uses a common lesson planning format, teachers work over the summer to develop these. We have made some amazing steps with this work at Greer but again have a long way to go. Our last summer retreat with our staff had each grade developing essential questions in social studies and science through some intensive work. We had that time because of the quirk of making up a vast amount of snow days. How do we find a way to do that this school year? An individual school will not grow without this intensive summer work.
A committee structure guides all of the work at the school. We are in our second year of a committee structure at Greer and again, have seen some amazing growth with it. I also feel that it is probably two or so more years away from getting really powerful. This work takes a long time!
The school requires a unit plan for teaching interviews. When a teacher is scheduled to come for an interview, they are given every piece of information about the school in advance so there are no surprises. They are also told to design a unit given what they know about what the school believes about teaching and learning. Hiring is always a consensus decision. I have generally been a good recruiter and hirer of teachers but I think this would be a great advance for us at Greer. It would be more in depth and more democratic.
"Our school is a hard place to work"- I love this quote. Greer is also a hard place to work. It used to be hard because we had the most students coming from poverty of any school in our entire district. It is now becoming a hard place to work because we have such high expectations of ourselves. We are getting there, but like everything else, we have a long way to go. And a hard place to work does not also mean fun, joyful, supportive and caring as I am sure it is at SLA.

So, I loved listening to the talk after the fact and it has me inspired for 2011! My main goal from the talk is to find ways to add and grow systemic structures for the kind of teaching and learning we want to take place in our school.

In Memory of My First Mentor: My Mom

2010-12-12T17:09:00.003-05:00

I have not posted in a few months with I guess would be good reasons. My mom Carolyn died quite suddenly in late October and the fatigue from that experience left little time for wanting to post on my blog. I also returned to the usual busy of school and dissertation work which left little mental energy for blogging.

We were able to celebrate Carolyn’s life with a beautiful service and remembrances written by my two sisters and me. The one thing I have not had a chance to pay tribute to is my relationship to my mom as a teacher. So, here goes.

Carolyn had and still has an enormous influence on my career as an elementary teacher and now an elementary principal. She taught mostly third and fourth grade for a total of 28 years (she stayed home with us kids until we started kindergarten) in a suburban Chicago school district. My first memories of mom as a professional teacher were of how hard she worked. I knew this as a child because she would spend lots of time planning on weekends and on school nights. I also knew it because she would be tired on many weeknights from putting so much into her teaching day. My parents were both hard workers and took their professions very seriously but they were always there for us kids as well. They were amazing role models. I will always remember in junior high watching the show MASH on Monday nights with my mom. By the end of the show, she was always asleep on the couch from that hard Monday at school.

My senior year in college, I decided to try to become a teacher. While I was not sure if I wanted to do it as a career, I wanted to at least give it a try. While going through this process, my mom was enormously proud of me. I knew it because she would tell me all of the time. Many public school teachers discourage their children from going into the profession. Carolyn took the exact opposite approach. She talked to me often during those decision making times and was supportive throughout. She viewed teaching as the most important job you could do. And with that view, she was honored that her son would think about following her in the profession.

I taught fourth grade in Baltimore City Public Schools my first year of teaching. That year my mom was also teaching fourth grade. She was my first professional mentor. Our classrooms may not have had a lot in common, hers was mostly white and middle class, mine was mostly poor and African American, and our level of proficiency was vastly different, she was a master teacher, I was just surviving, but despite all of that we still managed to have frequent professional conversations. We talked about reading instruction, classroom management, dealing with principals, and probably more important, dealing with teachers’ unions. Through those conversations a few things carried through: the importance of planning and hard work, the power of a good book with a class or individual student, and always with mom, having a sense of humor about things.

She helped me out in material ways those first few years as well. In trips home, I would go over to her school during some “off hours” and load up my Ford Escort station wagon with “gently used” sets of books from her school’s book room and slightly faded construction paper that was deemed unusable by her school. I would often bring so much back to Baltimore that I would share this bounty with my team mates.

I will always remember that we both taught Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli to our fourth graders as a read aloud and I was always fascinated by how much both of our groups of students, despite all of their differences, just loved that book.

After five years of teaching, I decided to move into administration with a first step in the graduate program at the University of Virginia. I think she was a bit nervous about this move. I was young, and in her view had probably not taught long enough to become a principal. Despite these misgivings, I will never forget her one bit of advice she gave me before my first assistant principal job. She said, “Matthew (she always called me that), never ask your teachers to do anything that you would not do yourself.” Good advice, all could probably agree, and it has had an amazing impact on me throughout my career. Often when I am struggling with a decision, or with the direction my school needs to take, I think about those words and I can always hear my mom’s distinct voice saying them. The words have helped my leadership style because although I have high expectations and want great things for the schools that I have worked in, I also know that every action we take is an enormous human enterprise with people watching me to see if I will roll up my sleeves and do it too. Since that start, I have had the chance to introduce myself to two different staffs as a new principal. One of the first things I always say to the group of people that I am about to start working with is that my mom was a teacher.

My mom and I talked school quite a bit. I will miss those talks greatly. I will also miss my Virginia snow day tradition. Whenever we had a snow day, I would call my mom and let her know and she would always say the same thing, “How do you all ever accomplish anything in that school district?” She was a teacher in Chicago, where there is never a snow day.

The last professional gift my mom gave me sadly came at her funeral. As I stood at the receiving line, in the midst of receiving condolences from old friends , family, and strangers, I got to meet some of her old students. The meetings were quick but the students would always say the same thing, “ your mom was the best teacher I ever had”.

The impact of a teacher goes farther then we can ever imagine. All of Carolyn’s hard work, planning, and patience was worth it. I don’t think she ever had any doubt about that though. I just hope I can continue to live up to my first mentor’s example. Thank you Mom for everything!

It's all about building culture

2010-09-25T14:46:00.000-04:00

I have been mulling over the theme "reconciling standards with 21st century learning" for a few weeks now, or to be honest, for the last sixteen years or so (I have been in education for seventeen years). The first year of teaching, there was no mulling or reflecting, just surviving.

Since I an relatively new to the world of blogging and tweeting, I thought I would first tell a brief bit about myself and so you could put my thoughts into some sort of context. I began my teaching career in a very large, urban elementary school in the early nineties as a Teach for America teacher. I absolutely loved it, became a certified teacher, and stayed for a total of five years at my placement school, three years beyond the two year commitment most TFA members serve. I served at my school during an interesting time period because I taught there before there were any sort of state standards and while I served standards were put into place by the state of Maryland. I have to be honest, I am not anti-standards in any way, shape, or form. Before standards were instituted, my school was the education version of the wild west. Everybody just did their own thing and there certainly was no sheriff in town to keep things orderly. I survived on some old textbooks, an educator's library card from Baltimore County that allowed me to check out vast amounts of books, and my wits. My colleagues, once they saw I was not a quitter (which was well into my second year of teaching) started to help me too.

Toward the end of my tenure in Baltimore, standards were put into place. I felt a certain a sense of relief that I did not have to come up with everything myself. I also liked that I had some sort of measure to strive for with my students. I also knew our school, with new leadership along with the state standards, began to take the education of poor, minority children much more seriously than they had before.

Fast forward ten years and I am now an elementary principal in Albemarle County, Virginia in a school that is a majority minority school with two thirds of our students qualifying or free/reduced lunch. I was placed in the school, my second as principal, to "turn it around". Turning a school around, in case you have not been reading anything for the past five years or so essentially means getting those test scores up. My first year at the school in 2007, I was confident I could raise those test scores from I guess my sheer presence. That first spring, the test scores actually went down.

That began the major "aha" moment that has carried me through the last three years of leading my school. With the scores going down that year, we qualified for a school improvement grant from the state and used some of the money on some powerful staff development the folks from Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning. What I started to learn that year from this professional development that I experienced with our staff was that it was all about building our culture and it was not just about test scores. Sure, we went on to significantly raise our scores two years ago (with a dip in reading this past year) but we started to make some intentional changes in our community of learners, adults and children, that have allowed us to attempt the reconciliation between 21st century learning and the standards movement (for the purposes of this post, 21st century learning standards equals our work with expeditionary learning, hands on learning, authentic products, public audience etc.)

So now, a few years later, our school is on a continual path of working deeply and thoughtfully with state standards in a way to make them meaningful to 21st century learners, our students. We have a long way to go in the process, but I have learned some things along the way as a leader that I think, helps support teachers in public schools to deal with the tests and also make learning engaging and meaningful.

All learners in the building must have social and emotional needs attended to through respect and basic human kindness. Our work through Responsive Classroom has been powerful and transformative and has taught us that adult learners have a need for support and connection as much as kids do. Most of our meetings have some sort of connective time that allows to value each other or just plain have fun.
To borrow a phrase from Bob Sutton, the principal must serve as a "human shield" from this awful world of punishment and corrective action that we experience with NCLB. A true leader never uses threat and "if we don't get the scores up bad stuff is going to happen" kind of language with a staff. Of course, I have probably resorted to this a time or two over the years, I am human and have been in a high stress position. But as soon as a staff is threatened, innovation and change end. And I have not done it in a long time.
The leader must model not only good quality instructional practice, but also be completely honest when things go wrong. When you ask a staff to innovate, mistakes will happen all of the time. They are wonderful mistakes, and they will happen a lot, but mistakes must be seen as reflective opportunities and we must model that constantly. People will want to take more risks when they see a leader or colleague to the same. When I lesson plan a meeting, and the lesson does not go according to plan or was just plain bad, I admit it. That can be a powerful thing.
Leadership must be distributed throughout the school. I am lucky to work with a very powerful group of people. I used to try and make all or most of the decisions, and I did it poorly. Now, we are creating structures to tap into the real leadership that is evident throughout our building and are helping us to build a culture of honesty and collaboration at a level that I have never experienced before. In a committee meeting just two days ago, teachers were having a lively and spirited discussion about what true achievement in math really means in an elementary school. If that comes from me in a meeting, it is about a tiny fraction as powerful as it is when it happens among colleagues.
A leader needs to set in place feedback loops from both parents and staff that help keep us on course and also help us realize where we are not communicating very well. Everything always makes perfect sense in my head. My first year at my current school, everything was in my head and no one had any sense of what was wanted. Beginning this fourth year, I am trying relentlessly to see if people are understanding all of the goals and trying to get feedback about where we are in terms of that communication.

A good leader of a public school in this country is in constant reconciliation mode between standards and 21st century learning. If you put supportive, honest, and strong structures in place to help everyone in the building learn and take risks, I firmly believe that we can live well with the standards without losing engagement and deep understanding. It is a long hard journey, but in my mind, the only one worth taking.

Lesson Planning for Administrators

2010-09-12T18:00:00.002-04:00

In my seventeen years in education as a teacher and administrator, I have taken part as a participant or a leader in hundreds or even thousands of meetings. As a principal, I would always really plan with participating teacher leaders any sort of staff development that was offered at my schools over the years. These staff development sessions would include pre-service week meetings and school based staff development days. But these staff development sessions were only a fraction of our time together. We would also spend a large amount of time in "meetings". For meetings, I would prepare an agenda, with letters on the side and if I was really organized, time allotments next to the items. Sometimes we would do a reading and have a great discussion in these meetings, but they still felt like meetings.

In the past three years, I have been very lucky be a part of my school's involvement with both Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning. Every time I have ever taken part of any sort of staff development or meeting with folks from either of these organizations, the time together is as well planned as a master lesson from a strong teacher. In fact the meetings have a very powerful feel, time is well spent and purposeful. Everyone who attends is asked to participate and that participation is valued. I have learned greatly from this experience.

Learning only really happens if it causes new action of some sort. During these past years, I have planned some of my meetings, but this year I am committing to lesson planning every single meeting I lead and sharing my lesson plans ahead of time with the participants so I can get feedback. These lesson plans will include learning targets, both short term and long term, focused reading and structured discussions, and maybe most importantly they will lead to some sort of committed action. These are all strategies that we our teachers are working on so I need to do the same.

It is perhaps embarrassing to say that I am really coming to this in my tenth year as a principal. Already though, it has me more excited for our meetings and I think our teachers are more engaged.

I know I need to find more ways to use Assessment for Learning strategies in my meetings so that will be a goal of mine as the year goes. It is a motivating and empowering to realize that every time we meet should be well planned and thoughtful.

It also makes it hard when I attend meetings outside of my school that use the typical agenda outlines with times attached. But hopefully I can find ways to influence that as well as the year goes on.

Things that worry me (in the eduworld)

2010-08-22T12:40:00.002-04:00

This is a random list of worries:

Posting teacher's value added test scores in the paper a la the LA Times. I know I should have some sort of nuanced feeling about this, but it just makes me feel yuck.

Educational technology advocates who are all about the tools and the stuff, and not about what aims we have to help learning for all (and yes, I worry myself with my own behavior on this one).

How often we miss the importance in a school system or a school of face to face engagement with people and devising ways to get all people talking (yes, it is possible)

How often the notion of control is a dominant thought in education leadership, especially at the big system or policy level. We need to create equally wonderful working and learning conditions for both students and teachers. And no, this is not a touchy feely thing. It actually takes a lot of hard work and hard conversations. I know from experience.

Back to the LA times teacher test score thing. Another thing I worry about is that if I think publishing those teacher test scores is a yuck type move, that I would be labeled as anti-accountability. In actuality, I love accountability. I started in education as an inner city teacher in Baltimore in the 90s which for those keeping score, was pre-accountability. It was the wild west of education. I have seen accountability improve things dramatically for students in many ways. But again, publishing teacher test scores in a major newspaper, yuck.

Another worry. Is the only way to really innovate in a large school system by creating a charter school? Can large school systems support schools that want to go a different path? Or do large school systems just want schools to be the same, idealistically equally good.

Another worry. I really should be doing some work right now if I am at my computer instead of this silly blog. A hallmark of an effective individual, worry about the things you have some influence over. The above, I have very little. Ok, I am out. Thanks for the vent.

Leadership Thoughts from Netflix

2010-08-22T12:17:00.002-04:00

Reading Dan Pink's blog this morning, and then looking at the Netflix slide deck shared on the blog, got me thinking about a question posed to me a month ago in a school leadership class at the University of Virginia that I was visiting as a practioner. A student in the class asked me a classic question, "when trying to turn around low performing schools, what works better, the carrot or the stick?" Since I don't come to visit graduate level classes very often, I stumbled around for a while before answering, "neither". I know, I was not very impressed with that answer either.

So in typical fashion for me, that question has been stewing around for quite a while with the thought of trying to blog about it. It took some thoughts from the leadership at Netflix to get me writing this morning. Here are some choice quotes from the slides:

"The best managers figure out how to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control their people."

When things go wrong, "ask yourself, what context did you fail to set?"

"When you are tempted to control your people, ask yourself, what context you could set instead. Are you articulating and inspiring enough about goals and strategies?"

And finally, "high performance people will do better work if they understand the context."

I love all of these quotes because I think they get at the ideas that truly define leadership. It is about building culture (I word I do use a lot) communally, and about setting context (I word I don't use but will now) or another way of putting it is it is all about framing things for people.

The thing I also love about the quotes/philosophy of Netflix is that it puts the responsibility to respond and reflect on the leader. If things are not going well, how can I communicate better, is a question I typically ask myself. I am not always sure other leaders in education do the same.

There is a lot of "blame the teachers and principals" in the current education policy world and blogosphere. As a principal in a building, I always cringe when I hear other administrators talk badly about teachers in any sort of way. Teachers, any sort of employee or humans in general, are largely creatures of their context.

In my school division, we are in the midst of pre-service time for teachers. It is THE Time to set up context for the staff.

What contexts have we tried to set up a Greer during this time?

Shared and distributed leadership
Shared focus on instruction
An "all out" effort to reach our community
Giving people some time to wrestle with our school improvement goals and strategies

We will see over time this year how successful we are with these contexts. I will be able to see through implementation in the classrooms. I will be able to see through carefully looking at feedback loops from both staff and community. And I will have to keep asking myself the tough questions when things do not go well, like, "where did I go wrong in setting the context?"

Here's to a great school year at Greer and schools everywhere!

The Power and Potential of Planning

2010-08-07T16:33:00.002-04:00

There are lots of cliche/quotes about planning. Failing to plan is planning to fail comes to mind. Or the planning is more important than the plan. Which, is a quote/cliche I actually like. But, needless to say, the word planning really gets no one excited in the world of education reform. It is, however, an extremely powerful action that would help us bring the "change" in education that we want.

At our school, we try to plan more than the normal school. We have an annual retreat in June where teachers work together to either plan instruction or fine tune the school improvement plan. This summer, I also have spent several powerful days planning with our assistant principal and instructional guides trying to plan leadership retreats, our pre-service week agenda, and our school improvement plan. I still feel like it is not enough. We need time to plan our work together. And we don't seem to have the resources to plan enough.

Our highly progressive, high functioning school system has a June and August leadership retreat where we review goals for the school year and learn new leadership strategies. They are powerful days but nowhere near enough. We need time to work through some of our improvement issues together as a leadership team, but we don't have the time.

One of my summer reads, Quiet Leadership by David Rock, says that "to take any kind of committed action, people need to think things through for themselves."

When we plan together, we can plan learning activities that engage all of the activities in our school so we can think through things for ourselves. We just need to rethink our use of resources to make things like this happen.

If a school continues with the "summer off" method of scheduling, teachers and school leadership teams should have several weeks of planning to make the kind of powerful changes we don't see enough in classroom instruction. During summer time, or some other off time, people have the mental space to think through things for themselves, in order to change.

That does not really happen the way we want it to, because we do the majority of our planning on the fly when we all have a million things going on during the school day or after school.

I don't think change will start occurring until we start to rethink the way we structure adult learning in our schools. Give me the resources to gather teachers for a few weeks every summer.

And I will stop bothering everyone.

In the Trenches Part II

2010-05-31T15:14:00.003-04:00

I regularly read Bob Sutton's blog called "Work Matters". Bob is a business professor at Stanford and I love what he has to say about leadership and the workplace. He created the following list of twelve things that good bosses believe and bad bosses ignore.

I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is "what happens after people make a mistake?"
Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
How I do things is as important as what I do.
Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

It is a powerful list because he has a way of clearing through all of the b.s. that is out there about leadership and distilling what we need to do as bosses and leaders in order to be effective.

I especially like number 2 and 3. Education is rife right now with policy theories and debates, especially in regards to what will make the American education system better. I know the policy world does not work this way, but what if we started to focus on supporting and developing school district leaders and school principals who try to do embody the twelve beliefs above. I don't pretend to embody all twelve myself. Anyone who works for me will tell you that I get some a lot better than others. That is why my focus is on number two and three on the list.

To lead my school well, I need embody both of those ideas. What does that mean? It means that I need to refine my instructional leadership and be a better evaluator, supervisor, and frankly, a better teacher. It means that I can have all of the big ideas I want but if I don't try to create the vision with the staff through thousands of small wins in our actions, the big ideas mean nothing.

I have a habit of trying to escape "the trenches" by getting into the world of ideas too much. This mainly happens through books, blogs, and simply thinking about how great things would be if all of the wonderful ideas in my head just simply became reality. Ideas are important, but without action, they are meaningless. Our school is in the early process of trying to change mid course into an Expeditionary Learning School. Everyone in the school has a slightly different idea of what means and some are much more excited about it than others. For a long time, the idea of an Expeditionary Learning School was simply an idea in my head. Now, it ever so slightly is starting to become a reality. But I am now realizing, in the day to day moment, it loses its power as a big huge goal and idea. Where the power resides is in the day to day actions of individuals at our schools who do something just a little more engaging with their students than they did before, and who expect to be a part of decision making and that their feedback is heard, and who create and recreate community each and every day through our morning meetings and circles. At this moment, that is the idea of Expeditionary Learning for me. I am also learning that it is becoming the idea of Expeditionary Learning for a growing number of our staff.

So to get reestablished back into the trenches and do some real work to make this happen, what am I to do? I need to get better at mastering the day to day workings of my school, be a better evaluator, give better feedback, or just simply give some feedback, and I also need to find ways to root out the negative that gets in the way of our best teachers from trying to implement the vision of Expeditionary Learning. I also need to become a better teacher. I need to do my job as boss, and do it very well, but I also need to become a better teacher, or better put, not forget that a large aspect of my job is teacher.

So yes, this "in the trenches" thing does not appear to be going away anywhere. I guess it is just my state of mind in this moment of my life. It is simply my way to validate what I do, and choose to do every work day morning (and many weekend ones as well). The trench work of helping to lead a school and hopefully help to make it just a little bit better every day and every year that I am there. And believe me, there is a lot of hope in that last statement.

Bob Sutton's list has so much meaning to me because he gets it. It is the thousand of little things I do or not do as a leader that makes the difference to the people I work with and the students they touch. I expect there will be more ruminations on Bob's work in the coming weeks if I find time.

On the value of being (and staying) in the trenches!

2010-03-28T16:20:00.001-04:00

On the value of being (and staying) in the trenches!

Of course, the metaphor of “in the trenches” is a bit extreme, but I imagine in every profession it exists. In my case, the metaphor stands for people who stay in schools to work with kids, parents, and teachers. Once you leave to work in central office, the university, or a non-profit, you have left the trenches of building level work. I need to start by saying that I find many folks in central office helpful and sometimes inspiring, deeply value the close work I do with a couple of professors at the university level, and am constantly impressed by some of the new education non-profits that seem to be sprouting all over these days. So, this is not an “us vs. them” dichotomy.

But when you live in the trenches, life can be tough sometimes. When we are working in a school day in and day out, we can deal with volatile emotions and behaviors that sprout up at a moment’s notice and come from unexpected directions. Our valuable think time and less valuable paper work time is done late into the evening or on weekends. That is just the way it goes I guess. So every once in a while, when you are in the trenches, motivation is important. I found two great examples recently.

One is the example of Principal Mike McCarthy of King Middle School in Portland, Maine. Mike has been the principal of King for a couple of decades and has implemented Expeditionary Learning during his time there and transformed it into a model school. His list of ten “must do’s” for school leadership are totally quirky and honest, a hallmark of someone in the trenches doing the work. I love number six on the list: Take Responsibility for the Good and the Bad
“If the problems in your school or organization lie below you and the solutions lie above you, then you have rendered yourself irrelevant. The genius of school lies within the school. The solutions to problems are almost always right in front of you.”
That is the creed of the “in the trenches” principal. We have no job description, really, except that we take responsibility and help people to figure out the way through issues.

Mike’s work has supported and validated me for years in a vicarious manner. Years ago, while teaching in Baltimore, Jeannette’s school worked with Mike and his teachers on developing interdisciplinary units. That was my first introduction to Expeditionary Learning and I have had the dream of implementing this kind of education for years and am now finally starting to do it. Mike also inspires me because he has stayed at his school for so long. In the world of education leadership and policy, many of us are constantly looking for the next job, promotion, speaking gig, whatever instead of focusing in on what really matters. Mike, obviously a talented leader, chose to stay. We need to recognize people like that more often.

My second bit of inspiration comes from someone outside of the trenches, Richard Elmore of Harvard. Writing in the latest Harvard Education Letter (unfortunately not fully available online), he decries the glut of education grad students currently who taught for two years and now want to change the world through policy and leadership. When Elmore sees these students, he wants to tell them “use your time in graduate school to become a better practitioner and get back into schools as quickly as possible. You will have a much more profound effect on the education sector working in schools than you will ever have as a policy actor.” Why do so many leave school though to become “actors” at another level. I would argue that the school work is just plain hard.

I am sure Mike could have been an assistant superintendent or policy expert but he chose to stay in his school and have a profound effect on students.

I do understand the desire sometimes to leave the trenches. When a student tears up my office in a momentary rage or after a day (or many) of spending inordinate amounts of time supervising the cafeteria, bus duty, hall duty (you get the picture) I sometimes think that I should be doing more than this.

When I am able to step back though, and think, and find some motivation from people like Mike, I realize that it is through that kind of work, the day to day “trench work”, that allows me to have the impact on students that I have and hope to increase in the future. It also allows me to have credibility with all of the people I work with without going through my credentials. That is a valuable thing to have and something I don’t want to give up for another twenty to twenty five years at least.

Why no posts?...The dissertation moves slowly along. An interview with myself.

2010-02-24T19:34:00.003-05:00

I just realized I have been away for a month but I definitely have been writing. I have been busily trying to finish Chapters 1,2,3 of my dissertation to get ready for my proposal defense, hopefully held by the end of March. And, I have most of it done. I am still trying to finish Chapter 3 but hopefully I have completed most of my work with Chapters 1 and 2.

What is my focus?
I am doing a descriptive study on elementary grade level classroom organization. In other words, how do the elementary schools in Virginia organize their classrooms in relationship to what a teacher teachers. Do teachers teach all subjects? Do teachers specialize? Do they teach somewhere in between?

Instead of trying to prove what model works over another, I am stepping back a bit and just trying to find out what exists out there in terms of models and then ask a few secondary questions of elementary principals in terms of why that particular model is used in the school.

Why this study?
There is remarkably little research on it, and I am interested in the rise of standards, especially math in elementary school, and whether that has forced more schools to have specialized teachers.

Why a dissertation?
This is a question that one asks himself quite a bit in the midst of the process. Why in god's name do this?
As I am deeper into the process now, I can now see that that was more of a procrastination question more than anything. It is enjoyable, it is very intellectually engaging, and it is a powerful feeling to be able to contribute a little piece of dust to the mountain of educational research.

I am working with two professors at UVA that are really forcing me to think and be as analytical as possible in this work. In the age of twitter, I find really spending some time and thinking completely through a body of research to develop a conceptual framework to be important to my growth as a professional.

Will this cut down on the blogging?
Yes, it will, but I think my three readers will understand. Three might be a little optimistic.

Social Entrepreneurship in an Elementary School in India

2010-01-24T15:23:00.002-05:00

I read Thomas Friedman's motivating column today and then found that one of my colleagues, Darah Bonham, was blogging about entrepreneurship in schools and calling on readers to inspire entrepreneurship in schools.

It got me thinking about our work with expeditionary learning. Implementation of expeditionary learning takes a long time, five to seven years is what most experts say. We are in year one. Yet, we are slowly but surely starting to find that one of the things that expeditionary learning will help us design is units of study that help students make real world connections. The work and slow because it is uphill. Not necessarily with the staff but any work to make things more authentic in a public school is an uphill slog (see NCLB). I have found that continual inspiration for me and others is crucial to help us keep that momentum uphill.

Then I found this wonderful video on TED.

One could argue after viewing that the Riverside School is an expeditionary learning school without calling themselves that. They have a simple motto: I Can and as a result they have created a group of young social entrepreneurs in their school and country. We always find reasons to not do things, bad budgets, stubborn people, but we need to focus more on the spirit of "I can".

Loving the Honesty

2010-01-23T16:05:00.002-05:00

I am currently reading Kim Marshall's new book, Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation: How to Work Smart, Build Collaboration, and Close the Achievement Gap. I love it.

In the book he lays out some cornerstones to what he feels make an effective instructional leader.

Principals must conduct brief "mini-observations" followed up with conversations regularly with all staff
Principals must monitor and support teams of teachers developing strong unit plans
Principals must monitor and support the use of more frequent, formative assessments
Principals must be efficient and effective communicators of school vision and beliefs and must manage their time powerfully

Kim has been putting these thoughts together for a long time and you can get a look at his articles on his website. Some of my favorite articles center on what he calls HSPS (hyperactive superficial principal syndrome) and he details that further in the book. This book is a great gut check type book for a principal and I found myself very lacking in all areas after reading. Instead of overwhelming me though, it motivated and inspired me. Why?

Because he is so damn honest. In the opening chapter of the book, Kim recounts his fifteen years of experience at an elementary school in Boston. He tells the story focused on the many mistakes he made and the various battles he lost. He tells those stories to show how his current views became a reality.

In the principal business, we often don't like to talk about what is not working at our schools. We don't ever want any negative "press" about our schools so we often just talk about what is working. We rarely troubleshoot in my experience and rarely are we ever close to being as honest as Kim is as he recounts all of the different stories of his principalship. The honesty is authentic and motivating because I make dozens of mistakes a day and rarely do I share them or talk about them. From his mistakes, he has developed a very powerful vision of what makes an effective principal. That is how we learn, right?

My new (old) obsession: time

2010-01-18T17:15:00.002-05:00

Education Sector's paper Teachers at Work is incredibly enlightening. It focuses on the ridiculously small amounts of time teachers have to plan and collaborate and focuses on a small group of charter schools (Generation Schools) that are creating new structures that give students more learning time and teachers more collaboration time while using the same resources.

According to the paper, American teachers have the least amount of planning time (time away from students) of any industrialized country in the world. We need to change this but I would guess that the reason this is not currently part of the Race to the Top policy focus is that we are not trusted to use extra time wisely.

The teaching needs to be more professional. If it is not a focus of the current Race to the Top, then we need to create more examples of schools that do creative things with teacher time and student time. Teaching is an incredibly hard grind and with all of the things we are asking teachers to do i.e. close the achievement gap and teach 21st century skills, we need to give them more time.

If we can create more school examples that are successful like the very early pilot of Generation schools, then it might become a policy initiative that cannot be ignored (I have decided to be hopeful today).

Worried about Teacher Merit Pay

2010-01-17T15:08:00.002-05:00

I am worried about all of this talk about merit pay. Kim Marshall's essay last month in edweek made some great points but I think one of the most interesting ones is that it will undermine team work in a school.

I have been in education for seventeen years and at least in the schools I have worked in during that time, team work has come a long way. It has been a long slog of change to get stubborn educators (definitely including me) to be more collaborative in our professional learning work. Could merit pay turn that back? The jury is obviously still out on that one but hopefully they take those things into consideration when developing these new policies.

The other thing that I worry about that Kim does not mention is just that it might be too damn hard for principals to enact. I share the supervision with my assistant principal of about seventy five people. The demands of the principalship are huge and now we will ask these already incredibly taxed people to spend countless more hours thoughtfully linking student test data to raises for teachers. I will need a lot of help with this one.

My other worry is that in the end, whatever version gets enacted, still has little to no effect on what happens in the classroom, but we have to spend even more time on it to justfify monetary raises.

What does have a strong effect on classroom learning (my belief at least): a positive professional culture in a school. Will merit pay help to develop that?

Insightful Quote from An Ethic of Excellence has me thinking

2010-01-17T14:48:00.002-05:00

Every teacher at Mary Carr Greer received a copy of Ron Berger's An Ethic of Excellence this year. Ron taught for twenty five years in a small elementary school and now works for Expeditionary Learning as a school designer. The book is a very personal and passionate read on one teacher's authentic journey in creating work of meaning and value with kids. Here is the quote:

"Imagine if students and schools were judged instead on the quality of student work, thinking, and character. Imagine an expectation that an adult should be able to enter a school and expect that any child in that school older than seven or eight would be ready to greet him politely, give an articulate tour of a well-maintained courteous environment, and present his portfolio of academic accomplishments clearly and insightfully, and that the student's portfolio would contain original, high quality work and document appropriate skill levels. If schools assumed they were going to be assessed by the quality of student behavior and work evident in the hallways and classrooms, rather than on test scores, the enormous energy directed toward improving student work, understanding, and behavior. Instead of working to build clever test takers, schools would feel compelled to spend time in building thoughtful students and good citizens."

That quote comes very close to summing up what I want to happen at Mary Carr Greer. I find one of the arts of my current state of leadership is skillfully navigating my way around and inbetween federal, state, and local policy that has little to no impact on student learning but that I must comply to. I worry that with Race to the Top and the other Obama-Duncan initiatives, we will spend even more time focusing on test scores and tests, especially with the potential of merit pay.

How do you create a school where all the children have a full understanding behind all of the activities that they do and an understanding of their own achievement through thoughtful portolio development? A school where children feel a strong sense of belonging and trust? That the adults feel the same sense of belonging and trust.

It takes years, I am figuring that out now, but I do think it is possible. Especially if I am able to keep figuring my way through all the things that policy makers develop that they think will help kids.

Some New Thoughts for the New Year

2010-01-17T14:24:00.002-05:00

Now that I have graded my school related resolutions from last year, I have been giving some thought to this year and I keep focusing on one thing- feedback.

Right before winter break, we offered the entire teaching staff at Greer to offer up their thoughts in the form of a narrative survey. The survey was of the old school variety: a sheet of paper with eight questions on it and I locked them in a faculty meeting until it was done. We used very specific questions to gauge people's feelings toward our new initiatives like Responsive Classroom, Expeditionary Learning, reading grouping, faculty committees, and then asked people to also write about how communication could be improved. We did not use any numerical rating systems, just qualitative feedback. It was a very powerful experience for me as a leader for a couple of reasons: the quality of the feedback was very high, people really took the survey seriously, and the feedback although quite varied gave us some very concrete and actionable next steps as leaders.

I compiled the feedback over winter break and we shared it with the entire staff. Every planning conversation we have had the past three weeks goes back to the survey. The survey feedback inspired me to try to communicate better and be better at developing and communicating a vision for our school.

It also has gotten me thinking about feedback. How do we create a more feedback rich environment at Greer? How do I improve in giving feedback to people that I work with?

In all honesty, I am woefully unskilled at giving feedback as a school administrator. My goal is to improve that this year. Part of my work toward that goal is to read two books, Drive by Daniel Pink and Rethinking Teacher Evaluation and Supervision by Kim Marshall. Both books get at real and authentic ways to help adults grow and learn in any setting. As I read these books and reflect more, I will try to find ways to make this goal more specific than the incredibly vague "give better feedback".

Another thought I have for this year, not really a goal or resolution, but instead more of a reflective thought is how much time and energy we spend in a school and even more so in a school system on things that have no or little effect on improving the quality of instruction and learning in individual classrooms and for individual students. As I reflect on this, I will try to point out these activities in as diplomatic a way possible, but also try to find ways to eliminate these systems, procedures, behaviors in myself and my own school.

Update on Last Year's New Year's Resolutions

2010-01-01T17:00:00.002-05:00

I think on New Year's Day you are supposed to look forward, not backward, but who really knows or cares. A year ago, I felt the need to post some professional goals for New Year's Resolutions .

I will describe them briefly here with a grade, self inflicted, about my progress in accomplishing these goals. One note, I think goals are different than resolutions, but I have resolved to not worry about the little things this year.

1. Finish the dissertation. Grade- incomplete- but I have made significant progress for the first time in some years now. I have solid drafts of Chapters 1 and 2 and aim to defend a proposal in February.

2. Get the children's garden and hiking trail started at Greer- Grade C+- We have eight garden plots for twenty five classes, not enough, but have started growing things. We have not done much with the trail.

3. Sing more outside of music class- Grade B. We now have school wide morning meetings where we all sing something as a school. It is very powerful. In every classroom morning meeting, singing sometime occurs, and at our teacher retreat last summer, during the post work time we had a singing competition. I hope that all digital copies of this contest have been lost or eliminated.

4. This goal was kind of vague about using technology more in school and in my professional life. Grade ? because I am not even really sure I knew what I was writing about.

These were obviously not my only goals or even the most important ones. If I can remember back to last year, I think I was trying to challenge myself in areas that were not typically areas of focus for myself.

I will try to post this year's goals in a couple of days.

Expeditionary Learning on the NewsHour

2009-11-07T23:39:00.003-05:00

Follow this link to watch a little bit about Expeditionary Learning on the NewsHour.

Expeditionary Learning Assessment for Learning for Leaders

2009-11-07T22:05:00.000-05:00

Reflections on my attendance at Expeditionary Learning Assessment for Learning for Leaders:

I had just about every excuse in the book for not attending the three day Expeditionary Learning for Leaders Institute in Baltimore last week. I had just attended a god awful mandated by the Virginia Department of Education training for principals of “failing” schools in Williamsburg the previous week (more on that as well) and I did not want to miss more days of school. We were holding one of parent conference nights during the institute. I just did not feel like being away. I had to work on my dissertation. I could come up with more but that was just bore you. I did end up going, on the advice of several people close to me, who if I could just sum up what they said it was something like this: “Are you crazy, you love EL workshops, your school would probably like you being gone for a few days, you love Baltimore, just go.”

So, as one who is willing listen to feedback from others, I decided to go.

Wednesday morning arrived in a smallish meeting room in the Hyatt in downtown Baltimore. I was surprised by how small the meeting room was. I immediately looked at the number of chairs in the circle (because that is how we start things at an EL meeting) and there were only sixteen. My first thought, was one of dread, there will be no hiding at this, no not participating, not just sitting in the back, no just looking at my iphone the entire time. It is interesting that this immediately fills me with dread is that connection, interaction, learning with a strong social component is what I want, but not necessarily what I ask for or seek out. It is one of the main reasons I love Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning so much. It takes the quiet kid ( or quiet adult like me) and makes us participate and learn in a way that we never thought we could.

So anyway, I made it though that fist circle, but interesting, so little of it was about what we did, how long we have done it for, what school we lead, etc. that it actually just helps us deal with each. A community began to came together in that first circle and built over three days where there was a high level of sharing, problem solving, supporting, listening, and laughing between sixteen virtual strangers. Pretty cool.

The purpose of the workshop was to get school leaders at expeditionary schools to use principles of assessment for learning (primarily developed for the classroom) with staffs and individual teachers. We did this by analyzing the assessment for learning strategies, looking at different kinds of change, research on relational trust, reading parts of different texts including parts of the book Quiet Leadership by David Rock, and using what we learned to develop some sort of plan or idea for a plan to further strengthen assessment for learning strategies through coaching. All of this was accomplished in three days with only one “presentation” that lasted just about ten minutes. All of the other time was used with the instructional techniques of discussion, different grouping strategies, group initiatives, individual thinking time, reading and reflection, feedback protocols, and just plain deep thought coupled with social group learning. It was a powerful learning experience.

The biggest aha I had for my own school context was that despite all of the gains and growth our school has made in various areas, we are still have a feedback poor learning culture for adults in the building. This comes from various different areas but mostly from me. I am somewhat feedback adverse for whatever reason. Part of the institute had me develop an action plan for my work at Greer. I won’t bore you with the specific details about this plan except that it has us trying to put some structures and protocols together to help our coaches actually coach and allow teachers to peer coach each other. Just as important or even more importantly for myself, it has me forcing myself to improve my ability to give feedback by just doing it. We will see how it goes.

I am riding kind of a learner’s high right now which is powerful enough to last for my than just a little while. It is always a struggle to keep these experiences lasting but it is worth a try.

What has happened lately with our EL implementation?

2009-10-06T20:25:00.001-04:00

It has been a while since last posting. During that time I have been busy with life and writing my dissertation. Which is slowly starting to take shape. Some things have happened with our Expeditionary Learning implementation during the past few weeks as well.

Lisa and I decided with our EL school designer Ken that we would start our journey with EL through work with learning targets, not implementing the signature focus of EL which is learning expeditions. Grade level teams working with learning targets looks and feels like doing the basics but our hope is that it gives grade levels a solid foundation of designing meaningful learning experiences with students and implementing an assessment system that involves students in their learning. Each grade level and our specials teachers were able to work with Ken for a half day of release time. Our plan is to have a half day release day every month for grade levels to work through curriculum and designing learning investigations. So, we got started on this goal. Some teams ran with it further than others, but each team got to wrestle with the work which was mainly our goal for the first few days. Ken will follow up with teams next week on Thursday with shorter meetings during their 45 minute team meeting block to see how the work has progressed. Lisa and I will focus our walkthroughs on learning targets as well. I think it was a relief for the work to begin. There was anxiety present with many on the staff about what were we going to do with Expeditionary Learning and through some purposeful, focused time, we were able to start on the work. We really want the staff to start seeing the work with EL as our school improvement work, not some separate entity but I realize that will take a while.

We have had another new development last week with our students. We held our first school wide morning meeting. We held this meeting with all 45o students on a Friday morning and it combined our work with Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning. We went through the process of a typical morning meeting, first doing the pledge and minute of silence and then doing the greeting, announcements, energizer, sharing, and closing activity. It was truly a special morning for us. I know a school wide assembly is really nothing special and every school has them but to see all of the kids going through the process of the morning meeting, and embracing the aspects with our teachers and staff, was really special. I think it really made me feel how far we had come in the past few years. The agenda for this meeting was developed by Lisa and some teacher leaders and it really worked well. But part of my reflection on it was that two years ago we could not have had this meeting, last year we really were not ready, but finally this year we were. Hopefully it can continue successfully as teams pick up the hosting duties, it will get better most likely, but it really was a special moment for our school.

Lastly, I want to comment on the work of our committees. Committees are new to Greer, at least during my time and we have our committees focused on every academic and cultural aspect of our school. It is messy work, and hard work, but I am starting to see some progress with it, and will update more next week when they meet again.

The Slow Pace of Change

2009-09-13T14:44:00.002-04:00

At Greer this year, we are beginning the long, slow journey of becoming an Expeditionary Learning school. As noted in previous posts, this is something I have been interested in being involved in for a long time. Here are some of the steps we have taken since last spring:

1. About ten of us visited an EL school, Russell Byers, in Philadelphia.

2. We had a two day, all staff retreat that focused on EL learning and principles of collaboration.

3. Four of our staff attended a week long EL reading seminar in July.

4. Twenty five of our staff attended a week long Responsive Classroom training in July.

5. Eight of our staff attended an Intro to EL learning experience in August.

6. Working with our school designer, we designed much of our pre-service week around developing a committee structure that are built on the Core Practice Benchmarks of EL and have worked hard to continue momentum of the seven committees.

Ok, we are now a month in, why don't we look and feel like an EL school yet? I say that with a broad grin on my face but sometimes I feel that "change expectations" in our world are so quick. I partially think this is true with the fast pace of technological change in our society, we feel that other changes need to happen as fast.

Anyway, why is change so slow?

The first thing I want to say is that I am not one of those "blame the teachers" principals. I hate that. If you spend your time blaming the teachers for everything, you should get another job.If things are not working for you as a principal at your school, blame yourself!

One of the reasons we are going slow is because of me. Greer experienced huge gains in reading and math test scores this past year and I am terrified of implementing new and deep changes quickly and losing that success. Why else is it a slow change? Developing an EL school is a craft, a slow one, and involved craftmanship at the teacher level and at the principal level. It is a theme throughout Ron Berger's Ethic of Excellence which I read last spring and we bought for every teacher at Greer this summer. I found myself re-reading it again this morning. Changing school culture, valuing people in the process, protecting and improving student achievement, engaging everyone in a new vision and mission, take a long, long time. It is important to keep reminding myself of how much we have already done this year when in the face of how much more we have left on our journey.

Fresh Fruit and Veggies for Greer

2009-09-05T14:39:00.002-04:00

Greer won a grant this year from the USDA to provide fresh fruit and veggies as snacks twice a week to all of our kids and adults in the building. We started last week with raspberries and peaches, both from local farms.

Trying to follow one of my many important rules of the principalship (that would be do fun things when you have the chance to do them) Lisa and I went around school delivering these snacks to excited kids.

We have some details to work out like getting kids to do the deliveries and delivering the snacks at times that are not disruptive to the learning process in the classrooms but it has been a fun grant to implement so far. Snack time seems like a great time to sneak the healthy stuff at kids because it is not competing with chicken nuggets, french fries, pizza etc. on a lunch tray. It just is there all by itself and teachers have been great about getting kids to "just try" things. I have to love all of the money we have been getting from the federal government this year.

What Motivates Us? Greer's Own Race to the Top

2009-08-30T16:19:00.007-04:00

I wish some people would watch Dan Pink's recent presentation on motivation on Ted Talks website. Who? Policy makers for one, from my own school division all the way to Arne Duncan's office, or anyone who wants to incentivize teacher and principal performance in the hope of more accountability, better results, and more innovation.

Dan Pink lays out the case simply. Incentives do help us perform simple tasks in a more effective manner. The more complex the task or job becomes, incentives actually begin to have a negative impact on innovation, problem solving, and creativity. Do these policy makers see teaching and leading as simple tasks or complex ones? Hmm, makes you wonder.

What does help improve motivation?

Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives.
Mastery: The desire to get better at something that matters.
Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Race to the top federal funds and our own school system are looking for ways to improve teacher performance through incentives and more accountability. Why don't we look for ways to increase autonomy, mastery, and purpose in our schools? And yes, I do realize that true autonomy does not mean you just do whatever you want. The reason we do not is that there is no trust, or there are very low levels of it in the education world. Many studies show that one of the most important indicators of school improvement is the high level of trust in a school building.

Why don't we commit to expanding trust in our schools? I have written in the past about expanding the amount of time that teachers, teams, and schools have to plan quality instruction and experiences for students. Why do we never look to improve professional time? Because for the most part educators are not trusted by policy makers to use that time wisely. All of our actions should have a sense of purpose at their foundation and that is where our focus should be.

The notion of motivation leads me to a great article in the Sunday NYtimes about one teacher implementing Reader's Workshop in a middle school. Reader's workshop allows students more autonomy, choice, mastery, and probably a sense of purpose. The article is very realistic though. Many of the students, especially the boys, were not motivated by the new instruction technique. Was it because they had been in school for eight years already and had never experience this kind of instruction? I don't know, but I do know we need to begin to implement these kinds of strategies in our schools with kids and adults too.

Greer is going to learn about Reader's workshop this year in our relationship with Expeditionary Learning. We are trying to increase levels of trust and collaboration among adults in our school.

I have decided that it is our own "Race to the Top". I just wish people making policy had spent time in successful schools that try to improve the conditions of students and adults through trust.

Read this book!

2009-08-23T16:35:00.003-04:00

Read this book! Zeitoun by Dave Eggers does not have much to do with education, but it is a great non-fiction read about the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the War on Terror on one family in New Orleans. This is an amazing, simple, and powerful book. I read it just in the past day.

Dave Eggers is growing on me: and interesting interview here and a great TED talk about his after school writing program 826 Valencia.

In the interview he predicts that current kids will still be reading newspapers and books some day. I love when people go against the grain of the digital age. He says that kids he works with love to see their writing in actual print publications.

The First Week Back For Teachers

2009-08-22T12:58:00.003-04:00

Greer teachers have been back for almost a week and we have been busily getting ready for the return of our students on Tuesday, August 25. Most of our time has been spent just getting the building ready because about half of our teachers were unpacking from renovations etc. We have spent some time together as a staff though putting our direction forward for the school year.

This year, as part of our learning about Expeditionary Learning, we have formed a new committee structure set up around the EL Core Practice Benchmarks. The five benchmarks are:

1. Learning Expeditions

2. Active Pedagogy

3. Character and Culture

4. Leadership and School Improvement

5. Structures

Since we are just in the learning stage about EL, teachers will not be implementing learning expeditions this year. Our seven committees will have the following focus:

1. Active Pedagogy- Reading Focus

2. Active Pedagogy- Writing/Content Integration Focus

3. Active Pedagogy- Math and Technology Focus

4. Character and Culture- Student Focus

5. Character and Culture- Community Focus

6. Leadership and School Improvement- Decision Making

7. Structures- Communication

What we did first with the help of our EL school designer, Ken Ferguson, was have teachers learn about the EL core practice benchmarks through some building background knowledge activities. Then teachers rated which committee they would want to serve on for the year and we started meeting with some framing questions provided by Lisa and I. The committees will meet again on Monday to continue their work and share out with staff. One of our "late" days each month will be dedicated to committee work.

These committees will each serve the various roles as think tank groups, prof. development planners, and "getting things done" folks for projects in the school. These committees will involve all staff members in the school.

This is hardly revolutionary thinking or "innovative" (by the way, the word innovation is coming oh so close to jumping the shark it is not even funny). Most schools have some sort of committee structure.

Some lingering questions remain for me with this structure:

How do committees communicate to each other?

If everyone is involved, how do we deal with folks who really don't want to be a part of things, or get in the way of movement forward?

How do we keep from committee balkanization i.e. committees bumping into each other or getting in the way of each other's work?

How do decisions get made in the long run and short run?

I will keep you updated but there was an awesome energy in the building this week and in open house Thursday night.

How Greer did it

2009-08-15T10:37:00.003-04:00

Here is an excerpt from our school division's recent press release about AYP results:

Greer Elementary School had a 13 percentage point gain in overall reading performance, moving from 78 percent pass rate in 07-08 to a 91.42 percent pass rate in 08-09. Performance by black students at Greer Elementary surged from 59 percent in 07-08 to 85 percent in 08-09. Greer Elementary also posted a 21.5 percentage point gain in reading for economically disadvantaged students, a 15 percentage point gain for Hispanic students and a 25 percentage point gain for students with disabilities in reading performance. Greer reported more than 25 percentage point gains in mathematics performance for black students, students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students.

“Last year, Greer Elementary did not make AYP, and in 2008-09 it is one of our top performing elementary schools, while also being our most diverse,” Haun said. “Their focused efforts on improving student achievement and creating a culture of success have really paid off. We will be looking to replicate the initiatives Greer has successfully piloted in schools across the Division.” "

So, now I can finally write about this because it is not all embargoed from the state department.

How did we pull it off?

Here is the short list that will be expanded on when I have more time.

1. People (teachers, staff, kids) worked their butts off. Nothing replaces good old fashioned hard work and their was just a plain amount of great effort from everyone involved.

2. We tried to keep focused on the important things, like relationships. Our school division espouses rigor, relevance, and relationships but sometimes a school under the intense focus of NCLB and AYP can focus simply only on rigor as their way to improve achievement. Last year, every class held a morning meeting every single day and staff learned about elements of Responsive Classroom throughout the year.

3. We focused on writing, and writing is thinking. We implemented the Being a Writer program in every class, every grade and even though writing is not part of AYP measurements kids wrote vast amounts more than they did in previous years and we feel that it impacted every area of learning.

4. We focused on student learning data in a more frequent, "real-time" manner. Upper grade teams used quick, every two week assessments in reading and math to gauge student learning and make adjustments. I think this probably had the largest impact on pacing of instruction more than anything else.

5. We trusted the process of producing a school improvement plan through the involvement many and then followed and adjusted in a more strategic manner throughout the year. Probably the smartest thing we ever did was hold a staff retreat in June last summer right after our poor scores came out. We laid out the reality, put forth some non-negotiables and dreams for the school, and tried to empower people to answer the age-old question, "how do we get there?"

As I make this list, one of the cool things about it to me is that with every single point, we have a long way to go. We have in no way arrived and our quest to make Mary Carr Greer Elementary an exemplary school in this state and country will involve working the above list and adding many other important school improvement strategies on our journey.

Why do you teach?

2009-08-12T20:38:00.004-04:00

There was a thought provoking essay in Sunday's Washington Post by Sarah Fine titled "Schools need teachers like me. I just can't stay." I can't say I agree with everything in the essay but I do have to say that it really got me thinking about the profession of teaching. After four years of teaching in a DC high school, she quits for some of the usual reasons: long hours, low pay, unsupportive, unimaginative, and undemocratic administration. But she cites another reason which took some bravery to admit. The low esteem the teaching and principal profession gets from her peers, ivy league grads etc. Excerpt below.

"Why teach?" they ask.

Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it's unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it's not for the ambitious. "It's just so nice," was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.

I used to think I was being oversensitive. Not so. One of my former colleagues, now a program director for Teach for America, has to defend her goal of becoming a principal: "When I tell people I want to do it, they're like, 'Really? You really still want to do that?' " Another friend describes her struggle to make peace with the fact that a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession. "I want to be able to do big things and be recognized for them," she says. "In the world we live in, teaching doesn't cut it."

I often feel the same way. Teaching is a grueling job, and without the kind of social recognition that accompanies professions such as medicine and law, it is even harder for ambitious young people like me to stick with it."

Now, what she says it totally true. I entered teaching through Teach for America, every one of my friends entered non education professions, and I still have many friends who aren't in the business. I have felt that from many people. Not necessarily disdainful, more like, why the hell do you do that. But the longer I have stuck with it, and the better I have become at it, and the more involved in my profession I have become, the less I feel the disdain. Even though I have no complaints about my job, there are times that I feel that peers of mine are making way more money, getting more respect, with the same skill set that I have. Those times are far outweighed though by how much I love my job.

The Sarah Fine essay made me sad. Sad that she is leaving teaching, sad that her administrators don't do more to understand instruction and involve teachers in the work of improving the school, but also sad that she did not stick it out a little longer to see that the whole worrying about what my ivy league friends think of my profession is no way to live a life.

She ends her essay with some discussion of a last reason for leaving teaching: it does not satisfy the millenial generation's need to be engaged.

She writes: "In their book "Millennials Rising: the Next Great Generation," sociologistsNeil Howe and William Strauss characterize the members of my generation as "engaged," "upbeat" and "achievement-oriented." This is why we become teachers. We seek to challenge ourselves, and we excel at pursuing our goals. Howe and Strauss go so far as to call us a "hero generation." Our engagement also explains why we are leaving the classroom. We are not used to feeling consistently defeated and systemically undervalued."

I would add that not wanting to be consistently defeated or systemically undervalued is not something that hurts millenials, it hurts human beings in general. Maybe people of other generations stuck with the defeat and undervaluation because they had mortgages to pay and mouths to feed other than their own and their back up plan was not traveling and writing for a year, it was retraining and paying for that retraining in a whole new field or career.

But that might just be my 37 year old, "generation X" self talking there, I don't want to spoil the youngsters their pain.

Obviously though, despite some minor quibbles with the essay and/or the youth of it all, what she writes about it all to true. Teachers too often are treated as if they were the problem in our education system and too often we don't support them enough, or listen to them, or make the workplace a vibrant place to be. As a principal, I don't always live up to these expectations myself, but at least I try to remind myself of them every once in a while. And I will try to do my best to engage and value not only the millenial teachers at my school but the other ones as well. Thanks for the essay Sarah.

Is it Scalable?

2009-08-09T12:14:00.002-04:00

It seems that many of us school administrators who are writing through blogs right now are really interested in education policy. There are probably two reasons for that: one is that we are all really well versed in the current policies of No Child Left Behind and they have had a major impact in all of our professional lives and more importantly the lives of students and two is that we have a new president and secretary of education who have us all interested in what is going on and what changes lie ahead in our future.

Sometimes principals go to a conference and are implored by the various speakers to raise our collective voice when it comes to policy, especially with No Child Left Behind and now with the current conversation of national standards and experimenting with merit pay. I follow these policy conversations as close as I can or that time allows but for some reason I find myself getting less and less intellectually interested in all of the debates. Why?

I am helping to lead a change effort at Greer Elementary of learning about and implementing Expeditionary Learning in our school. Expeditionary learning is a network of about 150 schools across the country and it essentially offers intensive support and professional development to schools in its network. It is criticized at times for not being scalable? It is intensive work that requires deft and authentic leadership by more people than administration, and requires us all to be very thoughtful about what we do with kids. We are finding again and again that these things are not scalable in the current education policy debates and think tanks.

When I hear this I wish instead that we spent more time talking about how to replicate the kind of education the Obama children are getting than how to pay teachers differently. How do we support more schools to be thoughtful, reflective, accountable, authentic? I have no idea but I find little discussion of how to actually do this myself, let alone across the country.

What are the things that are scalable in our country right now? Fast food, pop culture, Starbucks, etc. Is this what we want to replicate in education?

Is expeditionary learning scalable? I don't care. But we need to look at why reforms like expeditionary learning are so difficult to implement and make those systemic changes instead of just looking at the things that won't directly effect kids.

I know I have to work on my thinking a bit more with this and will try in some posts in the future. I guess I am just tired of us all implementing changes that make us feel better but don't impact what we believe about learning and what we do on a day to day basis with kids.

A Crew from Greer Elementary goes to Baltimore

2009-08-04T20:17:00.003-04:00

For five years in the 90s, I was a fourth and fifth grade teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools. It was my first job out of college and still remains the hardest thing I have ever done in my career. I never had a class of under 35 students, never had enough books, was lucky to have enough desks, and taught in an elementary school of almost 1000 students. In retrospect, the stress and difficulty of trying to reach that high number of students day in and day out was almost unimaginable. But I did love it, and I was pretty good at it too. A movie will never be made of my teaching days but I did care, and I wrote the grants for books, and tried to do my best for the class. But still, despite all of that, it was never really right. That many kids should never have been in a class together. I still vividly remember those days like they were yesterday, I remember what my classroom looked like, smelled like, and I still have what I call Baltimore dreams of being back in my class.

To relieve the stress, I would often go on long walks with Jeannette. One of our favorites was walking the Harbor walk from Fells Point to the Inner Harbor and back. In those days, the Harbor walk was not all connected and instead of walking past high rise condo towers, you usually walked past vacant lots or decaying structures that had not yet been Inner Harborized. One of the anchors of the walk was going past the Living Classrooms Foundation, right on the water at the foot of Lancaster street and Caroline I think. I did not know much about, this was pre-internet, so I could not really look it up, but I always thought to myself as I walked past, that place looks really cool. It was two well designed buildings, with a dock, with various boats attached. From the little I knew, it was where active learning took place. I knew I needed to do something different than what I was doing in my school, and that little highlight on the Harbor walk would always remind me of something different than a classroom of 35 plus kids that I was just trying to bring some sort of kindness and control to.

Well, to make a long story short, my principal in Baltimore did one cool thing with me by letting me run the summer school for a couple of years. I ran it like my own little Living Classrooms Foundation, with field trips, and interdisciplinary projects, and engaged learning environments. It was never a total success, but it helped me start to see what I could do.

I came down to Charlottesville to officially learn to become a principal at UVA. From there, I became an assistant principal then an elementary principal where I was doing a good job, but not following my dream of what the Living Classrooms Foundation represented to me. What did it represent anyway? Kids doing real things, kids outside of the classroom, kids interacting with their environment, kids making connections with adults from the real world.

Why this boring, maudlin trip down memory lane? Because I am starting to walk my leadership's knife's edge a little bit, and am working on Greer becoming an expeditionary learning school. As part of that, we have created some summer learning experiences for some of our teachers and right now, seven of our amazing teachers and our wonderful assistant principal are in Baltimore getting ready for an experience with expeditionary learning and, you guessed it, the Living Classrooms Foundation. Even though I am not there, the significance to me is incredible. In fact, it really just hit me today how I cannot really believe that I am taking steps with staff to make this happen. That twenty something teacher who walked past that classroom on the harbor every week and thought, there has got to be a better way, now is a late thirty something principal working with some kids who need this kind of learning just as much as kids in Baltimore did. It is scary to put myself out there, and scary to be finally doing what I have always wanted to do. This will be an interesting year to see how it all pans out, but I am just going to enjoy the moment right now about this experience happening for several of our staff members.

Kids, Outdoors, and Unstructured Activity

2009-08-02T20:22:00.003-04:00

Two essays recently had me thinking again of the power of nature and the outdoors for kids. First is Michael Chabon's recent essay in the New York Review of Books. In it he describes his suburban childhood in the late sixties and seventies of exploring the woods behind his house and having lots of time for playing with friends without the supervision of parents or other adults.

The second is Nicholas Kristof in the NyTimes today with an essay about his hiking trip with his 11 year old daughter. His family goes on yearly backpacking trips and he talks about the power of the outdoors on his kids.

Just two childhood remembrances these essays brought up. Most of my playtime growing up after a certain age, 9 or ten maybe, was leaving the house in the morning on a weekend or summer day and coming back at dinner time. Most of that time was spent playing pick up games of baseball, basketball, and football. I went up until high school when organized sports took over. I think my friends and I enjoyed our games much more than the organized ones for the most part and we were able to solve our problems without intervention usually. Or when we couldn't, the kid who owned the ball or bat or other necessary equipment just picked it up and went home. This seems to be lost through the fault of no one but still makes me sad.

The other is starting in high school going on canoeing trips with my dad and other teens from the church in Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario every August. It was an incredibly powerful experience for a teenager and has influenced me my entire life.

How do we make this happen in school more often, or at least my school? More on that soon.

Feeling Rejuvenated

2009-07-29T19:51:00.002-04:00

Why? I just spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at a state department of education conference for schools that are in formal school improvement who have applied for and won money to use for school improvement coaching. The money is awesome, they are letting us use it in a way that makes sense for our school. We just have to attend some dry meetings. Two days in a huge ballroom sitting in round tables with water pitchers in the middle and fake chandeliers on the ceiling. Yes, I think you get the picture. I actually think that I am going to dedicate the rest of my career in education to avoiding "learning situations" that in ballrooms in generic hotels across this great land of ours. It is a pretty hateful place to try and learn something. Especially when the learning is looking at a powerpoint and flipping through a notebook. Page by page. You get the picture. Except that the state is empowering us as schools to figure our own ways through the school improvement process which is awesome for me as a leader who definitely has strong views on how to do this. But I guess that you are not feeling the rejuvenation part yet.

Across town this week, twenty five of our teachers are attending a Responsive Classroom week long training with twenty five other teachers from various division schools. I finally was freed up to today to attend and I immediately remembered why this is so important. The social aspect of learning is as important as the academic aspect. Responsive classroom gets that. It really does. The day ended up with our staff in a circle on the floor singing a song and playing a game. Our assistant superintendent and chief information officer happened to drop by at that very moment and were goaded into joining on the floor. That is why it is important. There is a point to all of this and building a community in a school or a school division takes work but it also takes fun and play as well.

One thought from EduStat University

2009-07-26T20:48:00.002-04:00

I attended Edustat University last week in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia right down the road from my home at Monticello High School. Often times, I will attend a big conference and come away with just a few random thoughts. Well, one thought I came away with is how teachers' professional lives are structured here in our country. In Tony Wagner's keynote, he spent a bit of time on international comparisons. America, as we are well aware, is well behind many or most of the industrialized world in terms of student achievement in all academic areas. We are also well behind in another factor, according to Wagner: teacher planning time. In Finland, the top performing education nation in the world, allows teachers to meet and plan for about 40% of their paid time. Now, I am sure that time is well focused and well used, or Finland would not be the best in the world. But, they can't use the time if it is not there. In our country, I would hazard to guess based on my limited knowledge that teachers teach (meaning responsible for many children) about 80% of their day have 20% left to plan, meet, and reflect both individually and collaboratively. We never talk about this issue in this country. In fact, we tend to highlight successful charter schools where teachers teach at the same 80/20 ratio for even longer days (and have high percentages of burnout). What about schools that focus on teacher learning as much as it does student learning but holds teachers and administrators to high levels of accountability. Wouldn't this be "innovation" as well or just another bone thrown to "lazy" teachers who already have two months off in the summer and have those darn unions over protecting them. Why are we so afraid to learn from more successful structures and innovations in other countries?

Things that may affect student achievement

2009-04-26T17:57:00.003-04:00

Link to an American Prospect article which I do not have full access to. Just reading the heading has me interested. I always remember from my teaching days in Baltimore in the nineties. I taught on average about 35 kids every year in my fifth grade class. On average, probably one of those kids wore glasses consistently. Visit an upper middle class school and check out a fifth grade class and see how many kids are wearing glasses. There is probably a difference.

More on Data from Meier

2009-04-26T17:53:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite blogs is "Bridging Differences" and Deborah Meier is one of my education heroes. This latest post of hers delves into some of the issues with data these days.

More of the Moyers interview of David Simon

2009-04-22T20:26:00.002-04:00

From the transcript of the April 17, 2009 interview:

DAVID SIMON: Well, and facts-- one of the themes of THE WIRE really was that statistics will always lie. That I mean statistics can be made to say anything.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats." Take a look.

[...]

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.

ROLAND "PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?

TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.

PREZ: Juking the stats.

TEACHER: Excuse me?

PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.

TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.

[...]

DAVID SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they're solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn't represent anything, once they got done with them.

I have been a huge fan of the Wire. I miss that it will never be on television again and I am not quite sure if we will ever have another show like it. It may resonate with me personally because of my experience teaching in Baltimore Public Schools in the nineties. I always felt that the above excerpted scene was always a bit simplistic in my mind. It may be a defensive posture on my part, because I have played the part of the "assistant principal" many a time, in many a meeting with teachers imploring them to focus on test structure and language with students. It may also be that I have always felt that the "teaching to the test" line has not always rung true to me. I have always thought that you should, as an educator, want students to do well on anything that is put in front of them, including the state tests.

That all being said, I do agree with much of what Simon says about stats in general. Joe Klein, chancellor of New York schools, Arne Duncan, and other big name leaders in american schools throw around stats a lot these days. Future posts will cover some of the "juking" that is going on, and also a concern about the current focus on merit pay for teachers. And of course, more Wire stuff.

The Wire- Watch this!

2009-04-19T15:54:00.002-04:00

If you love the Wire and miss it, or if you have no idea about it, watch this Bill Moyers video journal. It is an interview with David Simon. I have been mulling over the idea of doing some writing about the Wire, this has inspired me. Watch this and stay tuned. The interview shows some of the best clips from the five seasons of the show and some great commentary from David Simon, especially in regards to today's headlines.

Expeditionary Learning

2009-03-08T15:42:00.000-04:00

I was able to attend the Expeditionary Learning (EL) national conference in Baltimore last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It was an amazing learning experience for me. EL has been around since 1992 and got its start from an idea to transfer some of the learning principles of Outward Bound into classrooms and schools. It now has a few hundred schools in the national, both regular public and charter. I have had a personal interest in EL for many years now, but that interest never really went beyond reading books, articles, and looking at their website. Attending the conference has increased that interest about ten fold. I tend to be pretty cynical about conferences in general. They seem like a lot of money, there is a cattle call mentality to them, and I am generally suspicious of people who become, for lack of better words, professional presenters. This conference was completely different.

They utilized as many of their design principles as they could in a conference setting and as a result I was more engaged and learned far more than a typical conference. We were all assigned to a "crew" as in "there are no passengers, we are all crew" which comes from Outward Bound. We engaged daily with our crew members. Every session was led by current practitioners, teachers and principals, and I don't think I saw one powerpoint the whole time I was there. Each session had an agenda and posted learning targets and utilized active learning strategies. All in all, an amazing experience and for this normally shy guy, I interacted with way more people than I ever would have because of those strategies. I am going to share more EL thoughts as time goes by but just had to write briefly about this experience joining an adult learning "crew".

Bill Gates on Education at the TED conference

2009-02-15T18:04:00.000-05:00

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at the TED conference on what he is working on in his quest to change the world. If you move the video player forward to the 8 minute mark past all of that saving millions of lives fighting malaria part you will get to his talk on education. The Gates Foundation has focused over the past nine years on scholarships, small schools, and libraries and now his focus is on teacher quality. He is dead on with both the power of good teachers and that the typical things that teacher's get paid more for,experience and master's degrees do not necessarily make a teacher more effective. In this short talk, he discusses factors that he feels would improve teacher quality: lessening the influence of unions, using data more effectively through collaboration between teachers and as an evaluation tool, and the use of video analysis of teaching strategies. He then highlights KIPP charter schools as an ideal entity to emulate in this quest to improve teacher quality. I do have issues with KIPP. I don't think it is scalable, I worry about its over reliance on young/pre-family teachers, and students, although they are all poor, choose to go there and some quit. I do not have issues with the fact that KIPP itself is trying to be and is successful at innovation. Now I just have a challenge for myself. Find or create and present alternatives to KIPP as the one and only innovative force in education today.

Call me Arne

2009-01-27T10:52:00.001-05:00

This is a great link to the Talking Points Memo written by I think an anonymous Education Department staffer on Arne Duncan's first few days in office. I never weighed in on the whole education secretary debates of a month or so ago. I was very pleased to not see NYC chancellor Joe Klein not be named (just too many darn bad things written and said about him) and understood why Linda Darling Hammond was not picked (too academic, too much of an enemy to the TFA/self important education reform crowd). The Duncan pick made sense. There was too much written about him that said things like he was a good leader, he was able to both reform schools and work with the teachers' union in Chicago. When those things are written about someone over and over, there has to be some truth in it. He seems to mirror Obama's predilection/obsession with bipartisanship and bringing a sense of unity to to our divided political world. Duncan's job though is bridging the divide between education reform camps within the Democratic party but needless to say it will be very interesting to see Obama/Duncan and all the rest try this way of doing things.

I just love the story of Arne eating in the cafeteria and walking around and introducing himself to staffers at the department. It is what a good or natural leader does when new in a situation. What is even more striking is that this seemed to have never occured under Paige and Spellings. I good friend of mine who is a career state department employee said the same thing about Bush's higher ups. They had absolutely no interest in developing relationships or trying to work with career government employees and treated many people around them as simply objects to lecture at and point fingers at etc. It is good to see that attitude gone for the next few years. Good luck Arne.

Sir Ken Robinson speaks out (again)

2009-01-24T14:32:00.000-05:00

Sir Ken Robinson has a great post on the Huffington Post website. I only now Sir Ken from his TED speech on schooling and creativity that has found some fame on youtube (I was originally linked up to the speech but one of our Bright Stars teachers in our school). The speech is funny, entertaining, and dead on. The post is just plain dead on. Again though, how does a high accountability system work with schools that are trying to also foster high levels of creativity. Do the two coexist? I know every school leader in the country is hopefully trying to figure that out, I know I am. You can't help but listen to Sir Ken and be inspired by the possibility of it all but also confronted with the brutal reality that we often just muck it up in our attempt to improve things in large, whole scale fashion like NCLB.

By the way, on a personal note, I have always been a bit of an anglophile dating back to my semester in London in college and then bolstered over the years by a love of both ales from the British Isles and BBC spy and mystery dramas. You just have to love the whole knighting thing, don't you. How can we get the whole Sir/Dame thing over here?

Quote from WhiteHouse.gov on NCLB

2009-01-24T14:19:00.000-05:00

From the White House website, when you click on agenda and then education. "Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests."

Is that what we are doing when we prepare students for the end of year tests in third, fourth, and fifth grades. We are also teaching them reading and math, science and social studies. When I look at the Virginia math test at any level, I want my students to pass it. It is a pretty good multiple choice test. I have more issues with the Virginia reading test, which goes beyond reading skills I feel and with a small part of the test assessing students on how well they use encyclopedias and other reference materials, which I would like to add, in this century students pretty much will never use.

But with our school facing daunting pressure to meet AYP in both reading and math, how often are we just preparing students to master the material and how often are we teaching them to outsmart the test or practice filling in bubbles. I would like to say we always focus on the former but when the pressure is on, we also want to make sure students know how to take a test. That appears to be what Obama and Biden don't want but under this current system, when pressure is high, that kind of teaching does occur in any school in this country. How do we have accountability for schools without multiple choice tests or having students practice filling in the bubbles? I encourage you to check out the White house website and I will have to watch and see what Obama/Biden mean when they put quotes like the one above on their website.

MIke Rose on the current state of education policy

2009-01-07T20:15:00.001-05:00

Since I post to this blog somewhat infrequently, I end up having more blog posts in my head than are actually written on the screen. I have been working up to actually writing a post about the "debate" about who will be the next Secretary of Education, then the naming of Arne Duncan to the post, and finally just about all of the education policy talking heads in the media lately discussing what needs to be done. Well, in waiting to get my lazy butt in gear to write this post, Mike Rose, a far better thinker and writer than I, wrote it. Check it out on his blog. Wow! It pretty much hit how I have been feeling lately. I haven't even read any of his books during my career but I certainly will now. I don't actually agree with everything on his blog, I actually support different aspects of NCLB, especially the focus on achievement of all groups of students. But all of the education policy mavens of late have been driving me a bit crazy. I was having trouble putting it into words. Mike Rose did it beautifully. So few of these people have ever taught. So few of these people have ever ran a school. And they always know how it should be done. The thing about his post that made me laugh with recognition was that he was reacting to the same NPR piece on education that made me crazy too as I was driving around one day doing errands. Here is the story. It is not actually a "Letter to the President" piece but just an update on education in Obama's administration. For some reason, the story made me scream. Mike Rose helped. Enough said.

New Year's Resolutions Oh My!

2009-01-02T11:37:00.000-05:00

I usually try to avoid making New Year's resolutions. Like most people, they really don't work for me and since this blog has more of a professional focus I really don't want to list a bunch of things that I may or may not actually be able to follow through on. And being on the school/acadademic calendar since I was five, I never really view January as the start of the year.

Despite all of this, here are few fun resolutions for my life as a principal.

1. Finish my dissertation in the 2009 calendar year. Ok, maybe not so fun but I really have to get this done. I have been able to work on it some during winter break this year and it feels good to be doing that. Finding the time once the school year gets going again will be tough but I will apprise you all of my adventures with time management.

2. Get the children's garden and hiking trail going at my school. I should not describe these things as solely my responsibility because they certainly are not but I am a big fan of the good old great outdoors. I have skimmed the book about Nature Deficit Disorder ( I am capitalizing it because I will pretend that we can really diagnose people with this illness) and kids need to be outdoor more, in the woods, planting stuff, etc. We have made some headway on this already this school year and we hope to make more.

3. For my next resolution, I am not sure how to describe it exactly. For a professional development day earlier this school year, we had Steven Levy of Starting from Scratch and Expeditionary Learning fame speak to all of the elementary schools. Anyway, I won't get into his presentation that much except for one thing. He talked about how he sang every day with his class and how it built community. With our implementation of Responsive Classroom this year, there is more community building type activities and in a few classrooms more singing. We need to do more with singing because the kids seem to absolutely love it. And I am not talking about music class, I am talking in homeroom morning meetings. It brings me to a This I Believe link on NPR in which Brian Eno (awesome music producer) discusses his belief in communal singing.

4. I need to bring technology more into my professional life and the lives of our students. I will post more about this one later.

Those are all of my resolutions for right now.

Ok, one more.

More visuals in this blog!

Education Speakers and Professional Development

2009-01-01T14:43:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite education blogs is Dangerously Irrelevant by Scott McLeod. He is a professor of Education Leadership at Iowa State University and just all around great questioner of the way we do things in education. Please read the posts Beware Outside Consultants part I, II, and III.

I am not aware of the first person but have attended workshops by Ruby Payne and the DuFours and share many similar concerns with education speakers. Ideas are oversimplified for audiences and made to seem easy. We are always searching for silver bullets and wanting quick fixes to our problems. And last but not least, it is rare for education professional development to use quality instructional techniques in these type sessions. In these tight budgetary times, I hope systems spend less on outside speakers and consultants. Thanks to Scott for starting to question these people "on the circuit".

More thoughts on Whatever it Takes by Paul Tough

2009-01-01T14:13:00.000-05:00

Some more random thoughts on Whatever it Takes. I was thinking of writing a multiple post sort of "book report" on this book with different themes but that is really not necessary. Some highlights of the book though are the following.

Tough does a great job providing some background on James Heckman, a Nobel prize winning Chicago economist. Heckman's work (some complicated stuff which I won't really try to pretend to know more about) says that a "skills gap" happens with children from impoverished backgrounds at a very young age. Children who receive quality early child care either from home or pre-school show gains from that experience fare later in life.

This work leads to Geoffrey Canada's idea of the conveyor belt. Canada is interested in far more than schools. He wants to do away with generational poverty in Harlem. So he created Baby College, which is a weekly class for expecting parents in the neighborhood. He also tries to start school for his students at the age of three, thus starting the "conveyor belt" to college at a very young age. I absolutely am thrilled with this approach for several reasons. Canada is definitely a no excuses kind of man and leader yet he acknowledges through his work that to have a better change at making a huge difference in children's lives you have to start at an incredibly early age. I also like that he does not just put it all of this work on the backs of teachers but instead enlists the support of social workers, child development experts, etc. This is a very powerful notion that I see in my own system in many different ways but not in a unified "conveyor belt" kind of system, probably because of different jurisdictions in a close geographic area.

The story of the middle school, the first school Canada and company created, is quite a story and in the end, heartbreaking to say the least. Part of what I liked about the book is the unvarnished nature to the story telling, especially about the middle school. Long story short, the first principal was fired because she was not tough enough on discipline and focused enough on test scores. A new principal was brought in and made some vast improvements with student discipline but test scores did not soar immediately and there was still quite a bit of struggle with the first group of students, at the end of the book, they were 8th graders. Looking at the years of struggles they had with many of the 8th graders and lagging test scores, Canada and company decided to not continue their education by creating a 9th grade class, despite earlier promises to the contrary. This was hard to stomach, and Tough is unrelenting in his description of the anger and sadness the students and parents felt. Tough also does a great job describing how Canada's unrelenting focus on test scores was in part stoked by a board of investment bankers who were interested in bottom line type results. In Canada's defense, he was forthcoming about what he did in closing out the education of the 8th graders that year, and it appeared to be one of those tough decisions all around. It does take me back to my concern about many of these high standard charter schools: what do you do with tough kids? Just wait for them to quit or close down the school because you don't want to deal with them anymore?

When the Harlem Children's Zone is bandied about (deservedly so) as a potential policy model by Obama we should look at the good (Heckman, conveyor belt, etc) and the not so good (letting the tough kids go through "attrition"). A great book though, and I am an even bigger fan of early childhood education than I was before. I want a three year old program at my school now!

Watch Geoffrey Canada on the Colbert Report.

Whatever it Takes Part I Focus on Paul Tough

2008-12-28T18:31:00.000-05:00

I just finished Paul Tough's book Whatever it Takes. The book is entirely focused on Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone, a non-profit organization in Harlem, New York that manages charter schools, pre-schools, after school programs, and parent education classes all in an effort to end generational poverty. Instead of writing a long, rambling post about the book, I will instead do a series of shorter, more focused posts. My large reading audience I think will prefer this blogging style.

For this first part of the review, I am going to simply write briefly about the author, Paul Tough. I don't know anything about him except that he writes and edits for the New York Times Sunday Magazine and he seems to focus mostly on education. From a purely stylistic standpoint, I loved reading an education book written by a skilled writer. So many of our education tomes these days look at things from a rather simplistic lens and/or are poorly written. Tough's book is both well-written and takes a complex view of the role schools play in defeating poverty.

One of Tough's previous NYT's pieces I want to briefly mention here was written two years ago and focused on the success of charter schools with inner city children across the country. The stories of every single one of these schools inspires me as an educator. As someone interested in education policy, the touting of these schools as "the answer" concerns me. Student attrition at these high standards charter is high and the teaching staffs are mainly young, dedicated teachers willing to work long hours to deliver quality instruction. What happens to kids in these schools that decide to not attend anymore? What happens when teachers start to have families and begin to have issues with working 55-60 hours a week for a teacher's salary? Whatever it Takes does not look at these issues but they have to be considered when reading the smaller picture, inspiration story. More on Whatever it Takes in future posts.

Malcolm Gladwell on Teacher Preparation

2008-12-23T16:26:00.000-05:00

I love reading the New Yorker. My dad has given me a subscription to the magazine for as long as I can remember. What I really appreciate about it is the incredible writing and the fact that I just read it, and I find myself reading whatever is in there. The article could be centered on just about anything and I will probably read it. One of the ways I make myself well rounded I guess.

So what am I supposed to do when the New Yorker has a piece about education? What I usually do is I put off reading it. I feel that I read a large amount of professional material. I read books about leadership, teaching, subscribe to several magazines and journals, and in the past year I read about two dozen education blogs. But when that education piece is in the New Yorker, I put off reading it. The New Yorker is my fun read, or one of them, and sometimes the two should not mix. Sadly, when I think about that for a second, that must mean fun and education should never mix. Which is sad, really. I don't think that, I promise. And, just to prove my point, I will read education articles in the New Yorker from now on.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting article about choosing the right people for a job in the New Yorker recently. He compared picking quality teachers and quality quarterbacks. Leave it to Gladwell to think of such strange, yet very interesting comparison. He goes at length to describe how the NFL has such a hard time picking good quarterbacks from college. School systems, he says, have a quarterback problem. They have a hard time knowing who is going to be a good teacher.

Studies are being completed that say that traditional teacher credentials do not make much of a difference with student achievement. Bob Pianta, the dean of my education school at UVA, plays a big role in the article. So, what are we to do?

I was not really trained before I entered teaching as a Teach for America teacher. I learned on the job, mostly through a brutal and painful trial and error process and through the help of a school "master" teacher. I became a good teacher and ended up staying in my placement school for five years. During that time, I did not take one education course. I know things are very different now with TFA, both with a much better preparation program and they are required to pursue Master's degrees. My leadership preparation program at the University of Virginia was unique as well. I was a full-time intern assistant principal while I took classes on the weekends. I learned much about being an administrator both through the internship and then through taking a series of classes with the same cohort of people. It was probably the most useful educational experience of my career. The program does not exist anymore however. Not enough people are willing to take the financial hit to go to school full time (even for a year) and so many alternative routes to administration exist as well.

After getting the master's in education administration, I have been pursuing a doctorate in education administration and supervision...for a long, long time. Part-time doctoral work is a hard, long slog. The long, hard slog has led me to question what the point of the work is. Will it help me be a better leader? Will completing an original work of education research help the students and teachers in my school? These questions pop up more lately as more and more education leaders seem to eschew the doctorate for just going out and being an education entrepreneur. Arne Duncan does not have one. The founders of KIPP do not either.

What prepares a good teacher? What prepares a good leader? Life experiences, innate ability, quality mentoring, formal education programs? The first three are probably the most important but are the hardest for bureaucracies to manage. In the end, isn't that what it is all about anyway?

Oxygen for teachers

2008-12-13T16:55:00.001-05:00

After my first blog post two weeks ago, I have followed that up with zero posts until now. I guess I am now in the category of "slow blogging". For me, it could also be called lazy blogging, or too busy to blog blogging, or no one really reads my blog so why bother blogging. I will stick with slow blogging for now though. It has a much more refined ring to it.

Instead of a long post, I am planning to do a series of shorter posts this weekend. I love this piece written on the Quick and the Ed blog called "Oxygen". The Quick and the Ed is one of many edublogs that I subscribe to and it comes out of the Education Sector policy organization. The Time cover story on Michelle Rhee stirred up the edublogsphere and this was a great response. I think so often all of the education reform debates, whether at the federal and state level, or even at the little old level of my own district, forget the realities and day to day lives of teachers. The job is harder than just about any job and we always seem to forget that. I can't stand when education reformers feel that we can just fire our way out of problems. True, incompetence needs to be dealt with at the school leadership level, but improving the working conditions for students and teachers should be our first priority.

Beginning of the Blog

2008-11-30T13:17:00.000-05:00

Just read something from Wired magazine that said blogging is so 2004. That about sums it up for me. I am always a little bit behind. Actually, I am pretty proud of the fact that I appear to be only four to five years behind technologically speaking. That is pretty good for me. I don't really know why I am starting this blog except that I have always enjoyed writing about being an elementary school principal. There is one small problem with that though. I don't have the time or fortitude to write an article or a book for publishing. I am having a hard enough time writing my dissertation. I do, though, have a lot of thoughts about my work. I don't expect many to read this so it will serve as a kind of online reflective journal for me.

There is an interesting yet fairly typical article about Michelle Rhee in the latest Time magazine. Chancellor Rhee was a year ahead of me in the Baltimore Teach for America group. I never knew her but admire what she has done with the New Teacher Project and what she is doing with D.C. Public Schools. I won't pretend to understand much about the situation of D.C. public schools or what I think needs to be done. I instead will only comment on one of her quotes in the article. It's not even a real quote but here it is from a moment visiting schools with the writer from Time: "In the hallway, she muttered about teachers who spend too much time cutting out elaborate bulletin-board decorations or chitchatting at "morning meetings" with their third-graders before the real work begins."

Now, I have never been a big bulletin board person, as a teacher and principal. The morning meetings comment hit much closer to home. My school is in the first year of formal school improvement for not meeting AYP (my second year with the school). We are in our first year of implementing Responsive Classroom which has gotten our school chitchatting in morning meetings before the real work begins. We based our implementation on both the literature from and professional development from the Northeast Foundation and the work of Sara Rimm-Kaufmann at the University of Virginia. It seemed obvious to us that the research showed Responsive Classroom that it helps improve climate in diverse schools. So far, in our early implementation, it looks like it really is working in terms of less discipline referrals and improved climate, that second claim being completely anecdotal of course. Also, in my research of Responsive Classroom, it looked like some D.C. schools implemented it years and probably a few superintendents ago. I have no idea what the current state of implementation of it is now.

Where my concern lies is with the idea that the "real work" of schools is always academic and that it never has a social component. Those who know me as an educator, either as a teacher or principal, can attest to the fact that I am not the most "touchy feely" person in the world. I am idealistic or naive enough to feel that we can do both in a school, raise the test scores and achievement of our students but also grow and improve school community at the same time. Radical and lasting change can sometimes occur in a school with a laser like focus on student achievement and effective instructional strategies but also through morning "chitchat" meetings with our students. It is important for all people to feel like they belong.