Expeditionary Learning

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

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

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)

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

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

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!

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!