Expeditionary Learning on the NewsHour

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

Expeditionary Learning Assessment for Learning for Leaders

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?

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

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

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

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!

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.