Addressing the Behavioral Challenge and Helping Students Be At Their Best

What Schools Need Right Now: The Power of Carol Miller Lieber’s Guided Discipline 

Larry Myatt

Preface

I spend a good deal of time in and around schools, talking and working with educators at all levels. These days, in so many visits and conversations, I am struck by a consistent question, what can we do to manage the troubling student behaviors we’re seeing? Fortunately, I can respond without hesitation. Here’s why….

 Behind the worry and stress so many schools are experiencing, there are some powerful forces at work:

  • The academic/socialization recovery from the Pandemic that people expected is proceeding far more slowly than we’d like.

  • An emergency declaration of childhood mental health remains in force from the Children’s Hospital and Academy of Pediatrics people. Can you imagine that? An emergency declaration! And yet, so many school boards and superintendents don’t realize it or fail to take heed.

  • Teachers are saying in every survey that it’s much harder to work with young people and their caregivers.

  • Early career teachers routinely state that they got little or no helpful university training in managing classroom behaviors, nor did they get it in their school-based practica. Its trial-and-error for too many of them and they’re stressed.

 Compounding the challenge is the generational change in how our young people are growing up. It has of late become fully apparent, characterized by the loss of multi-age, neighborhood play, insidious technology algorithms and the onslaught of social media, hurricane-force winds that render the old ways of dealing with unwanted behaviors in school increasingly ineffective. Schools need more resources and support at/from the societal and policy levels, but more immediate help is required.

As one might expect, a proliferation of well-intentioned fixes has emerged, the majority for profit, claiming to address these issues. Some of them offer helpful ingredients, but partial approaches don’t meet the need. I can honestly say at this time there are none on the market that provide what schools really need. Some popular or mandated programs such as PBIS or Restorative Practices may unintentionally compound the challenges.  

The good news is that there’s a comprehensive blueprint available that can address many of the student-centered challenges facing schools, an approach that provides the skills, tools, and outlook staff members need but seldom get. If implemented carefully and conscientiously over time (i.e. the 3-5 years it takes any complex initiative to successfully embed in a school), it will provide not only the right ingredients to help students do better in academic and school social settings, but young people can then use the skills and language attained to grow into a productive and rewarding adulthood.

My strongest recommendation?   Revisit the work of Carol Miller Lieber and Guided Discipline. Please read on and contact us for support.

Where We’re At In Schools:

Our national policy fixation on testing over the past two decades has resulted in a decrease in training and support for both in-service and beginning teachers in understanding youth development and managing today’s classroom environments. Nor have we  been paying enough attention to the generational change in growing up and all that has come with it. Sadly, excellent school culture programming like Guided Discipline and advisories, and stout academic practices such as portfolios, exhibitions and extended projects that were taking root in the late 1990’s have fallen by the wayside.    

The fragmentation of learning caused by our century-old allotment of time and  piecemeal approach to subject matter already dampen student curiosity and suppress achievement measures. Add to that our two decades of teach-to-the test and we can understand why more and more young people have become disinterested in classroom learning and the trappings of school life (see the Yale Center study pictured above). Classroom boredom, the on-going stress of managing the scads of content to memorize, and little quality time on meaningful subject matter they might choose have created conditions for student buy-out. The Pandemic caught us napping, to put it mildly, and we’re paying the price.

How I Learned About Guided Discipline

Let’s get down to the why and how of Guided Discipline.

In the early 2000’s, after two decades as founding principal of Fenway High School in Boston, I became the Headmaster-on-Assignment for the Boston Public Schools Office of High School Renewal. It was a well-funded office, with a small but potent crew of smart and experienced people, with regular consultation with higher ed, work force, and organizational development partners. 

Our first significant task was the conversion of three large, comprehensive high schools with sagging achievement and attendance into eleven new high schools of less than 400 students. Each new small school had a “design team” including teachers who signed up for those units specifically, as well as both higher education and community-based partners. New leaders were chosen specifically for a good fit for the school’s mission .

Our HSR Office was responsible for supporting the initial vision-building, the creation of curriculum frameworks, and developing positive team and school cultures.

With that culture-building work as our centerpiece we welcomed the eleven schools to an  intense, kick-off professional development week. Needless to say,  a critical element would be the choice of a proven program to establish a positive school culture, with tight guiding principles and the requisite tools and resources . Luckily, as a district member of several school restructuring networks, we had contacts and resources in and from a number of cities. We did our homework, and with the help of ESR, a hub for teaching social responsibility and later to be known as Engaging Schools,  our clear choice was Guided Discipline.

Carol Miller Lieber

The “main brain” behind Guided Discipline was Carol Miller Lieber, a gifted yet down-to-earth thinker and educator.  She taught in both middle and high school, was a clinical professor of teacher education, an author, and a designer of programs and professional development on the national level. She also founded and led the Crossroads School in St. Louis, which spawned a generation of thoughtful progressive educators.

At the time of publication, Getting Classroom Management RIGHT, with Guided Discipline, was a welcome alternative to the decade-old “zero-tolerance” approach which not only punished and exiled thousands of students with a “behave-or-else” stance. Zero-tolerance  policies also short-circuited the growth and development of a generation of teachers who were “relieved” of chronic disruption by policies of long-term suspension, expulsion, and banishment to holding tank “alternative schools.”  Adults could handily avoid working with non-compliant students by getting rid of them.

One of the first educators to recognize the significance and potential of Guided Discipline was Dr. Pedro Noguera, now Dean of the Rossier School at USC, and then the Director of the Metropolitan Center for Uban Education at NYU. He observed for ESR, “creating an orderly environment  is essential for optimal teaching and learning, and Guided Discipline does that by moving beyond punitive approaches and placing greater emphasis on relationship-building and a student’s intellectual engagement.” 

One of the first places Miller Lieber found success was her work in the Chicago Public Schools. Known for their struggles to manage student disruptions, CPS had become known for their “zero-tolerance” stand and soaring expulsions and suspensions.  Thoughtful educators and community members were border-line desperate for something different to bring into their schools. Miller Lieber and her ESR colleagues offered a refreshing new approach. One that worked.

Her experiences and vision for creating safe, positive, and high-functioning school enjoyments were vast and we at HSR were fortunate to have our new Boston schools spend that full week with her prior to launch. As a principal, I was drawn in by the way she thought through the complexities of school culture and youth development and how they could mesh.

We saw right away as she worked with teachers, how her tools, language, and frameworks made sense and could quickly take root. During the week teachers of all levels of experience took to the conferencing skills she modeled and the ways in which she would reframe behavioral challenges into opportunities to engage. Something new and different they enjoyed were opportunities to reflect on how they presented themselves in their classrooms, routines and structures for student problem-solving and success, and drama-free invitations for them to self-correct. That notion, to “leave out the drama,” and providing ways for students to save face or repair relationships helped distinguish Guided Discipline as good for adults as well as young people. The buy-in and appreciation were immediate.

The Core Ideas

As stated by Miller-Lieber, the design and intent of Guided Discipline is appropriately deep and broad:

  • to help students take responsibility for their behavior or academic problems,

  • to understand the effects of their behavior on themselves and others, and

  • to learn and practice behaviors that are more skillful, responsible, and productive.

In other words, its fully about learning and practicing the rules of a successful journey through life.

 

I’ve worked in more than one hundred schools, much of that time focused on helping schools in low-income areas, urban and rural, develop approaches to managing student behavior and increasing wellness support. What I would add to Dr. Noguera’s observation is the way Guided Discipline, unlike many other approaches, does not overlook using the power and skill of  adults as problem-solvers and role models, or expect young people to manage change on their own or through negative consequences.  

Although originally intended for a mostly middle and high school focus, I should mention the many successes of elementary schools I’ve witnessed using Guided Discipline language and tools long before students leave for the upper grades. Guided Discipline concepts are precisely what are needed foundationally, thereby contributing to making other approaches such as Restorative Practices, PBIS, “Full Value”,  Conscious Discipline, etc., more likely to succeed as additive ingredients, if desired.

Why does it work so well?

Guided Discipline is a careful combination of guided instruction and support, interventions and meaningful consequences that helps students learn and regularly practice more skillful behaviors and responsible decision-making. In contrast to punishment or permissiveness, meaningful consequences are  a part of the puzzle to be solved directly with the student.  

Much of the power of Guided Discipline  flows from its central assertion that all good discipline is self-discipline. Even to adults, that notion can seem vague and not so important until we think about self-discipline in our own lives: not driving 60 in the 30-mph Zone, getting to our taxes on time, showing up punctually to pick up the kiddos at school or a friend’s, renewing licenses and permits, paying our bills, even staying off the late-night pizza. Somehow, most of us learn that way of life and that it helps us to stay out of trouble and to live in gratifying and productive ways.

Something other approaches often assume is that all young people bring a social/emotional vocabulary to school and can employ personal assertiveness rather than aggression or passivity . We may also assume they’ve developed “mental models” for use in situations where empathy, apology, or conflict arise . These are certainly things we’d like every child to experience as they grow up, but it doesn’t work that way. Instead, Guided Discipline  teaches the language and the mental models required through conferencing, scenarios, and practice with adults and peers. Rather than the limited range of reactions we often see and hear students bringing to complicated experiences (“good-bad-sad-mad-glad”), we can move students into a new comfort zone with more helpful and appropriate ways of matching their speaking to their feelings. That modeling and “gradual release” from adult to student becomes the central work.

As mentioned above, unlike some approaches, in Guided Discipline there remains a clear and important role for a wide range of graduated and differentiated consequences and interventions. The idea is to match appropriate consequences to the frequency and severity of a problem behavior and provide the kind of instruction and support that best matches the needs of individual students.  Unlike punishment-and-control approaches, or overly focusing on inauthentic rewards , Guided Discipline is “present and future oriented.”  The idea of  “doing better next time” is a key concept, and  focuses on the student’s need to regain control, self-correct, redirect focus, and get back on track. Positive and negative consequences are viewed as natural outcomes of the choices students make.

Thinking about the importance of school in youth development, it makes complete sense for teachers to play a central role in helping students be ready to learn. Rather than butting heads as adversaries, or having students left largely alone to negotiate complicated problems, a teachers’ guidance, coaching, and support helps students develop greater personal self-discipline and foster classroom habits and routines that create a more  welcoming and gratifying learning environment.

Learning the Rules of Life

One of the hallmarks of “Helping Students Be Accountable” is the central role of these four axioms:

  • “I’m accountable for my behavior”

  • “My behavior affects others”

  • “I should expect to carry out an appropriate consequence”

  • “I am expected to change my behavior”

Educators who have successfully practiced Guided Discipline routinely speak about  the conferencing involved  as helping young people learn the “rules of life” and how they make so much sense at every age. Each of the four comes with some questions to ask oneself : how did I get here? how did what happened make others feel? how do I get back in good standing? what could I do differently and better next time? As students imagine answers to these questions, with help from others and increasingly on their own, they can create new mental models of success as they also learn the accompanying language. 

I could go on about the power and promise of Guided Discipline but I’ve laid out the basics. And we’re proud to say that we have become the premier provider of Guided Discipline support for schools. If you’re part of a school community trying to figure out ways to help reduce disruption, support staff, and help young people do better and appreciate the chance, I cannot recommend any programming more fully.  

I’ll close by offering a  huge, but sadly, posthumous thank-you to Carol, in memory of  her many years of work on behalf of young people, families and educators.

I’m happy to take calls or emails to discuss it on a deeper level and keep mind that we provide high-impact professional development in implementing it across a school or district.

Larry Myatt, Co-Founder, ERC             

larrymyatt1@gmail.com 

Note: The best collection of Carol’s Guided Discipline tools and approaches is found in Getting Classroom Discipline RIGHT, published initially by ESR. Copies are still available online from several publishers and warehouses and we extensively use and have adapted many of those items.  

 

At Odds with the Natural Desire to Learn: the Standard ‘Core’ Curriculum

 

At Odds with the Natural Desire to Learn: the Standard ‘Core’ Curriculum—adapted from the work of  Marion Brady

Updating and remodeling a 19th-century curriculum approach that is constraining and problematic by virtue of how it rigidly shapes and defines school organization is by far the most important beginning step in improving our schools. In particular, we need to address the fragmentation of learning caused by an assembly-line allotment of time and a piecemeal approach to subject matter. The standard “core” curriculum breaks knowledge apart, ignoring its systemic, mutually supportive nature.

There will be no significant improvement in learner and school academic performance until learner experience, systems theory, and authentic thinking replace school subjects and disciplines as the primary organizer of information and general knowledge.

Long before our present attention to “standards” and “competencies”, or a “Common Core,” the centuries old, traditional “core” of courses offered in almost every school—language arts, math, science, social studies—along with the time allotment and teaching methods- have been dramatically limiting education. Here are some of the ways in which this continues to happen.

1. The standard “core” curriculum breaks knowledge apart, ignoring its systemic, mutually supportive nature. Understanding any major problem or issue—crime, urban gangs, discrimination, energy sourcing and distribution, environmental concerns, taxation, public services, international conflict, waste disposal, poverty, infrastructure, abuse of power, resource depletion, land development, corruption, etc.—requires an understanding of links between human behavior, economics, statistics, societal norms, technology, biology, demographics, public media, historical change, and often much more.  Classes sometimes focus on issues, but usually in superficial ways featuring arguments of people for and against whatever is being discussed. Nowhere does the curriculum deal with relationships between such things as attitudes toward the future and investment, links between shared insecurity and growth of religious feeling, or dysfunctions caused by faulty assumptions (e.g. “Merit pay improves performance”). To understand complex reality, students need to understand its underlying systems, the interrelationships that create and determine those systems – physical, environmental, social, economic, political, etc.- and the meta relationships between and among them.  Solving any problem requires an in-depth understanding of the significant systems that are linked to that problem. This may sound far more difficult than it is in reality. Even younger, “elementary” students who are given simple concepts for “system analysis” can use those concepts in creative ways to develop their understanding of themselves, of each other and of the world around them.

“The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any spark of vitality. A child should make important ideas in the worlds his or her own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of their actual life. From the very beginning of schooling, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which he/she has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through into life, which is life.”

—Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Education”            

2. The standard “core” curriculum is keyed not to learner aptitudes, abilities, and interests, but instead to age-alike cohorts. Virtually every course taught in today’s schools assumes that students in each class should proceed in lockstep, and that all are capable and interested in learning at the same rate. This is, of course, at odds with reality in two ways. First, the role of curiosity, even with students who wish to succeed or please, is powerful, and a learner’s lack of interest, ability to make choices or sense urgency, will seldom sustain their interest. Second, learners vary hugely, and even within a class of students supposedly selected for ability, students will differ a great deal in their grasp of ideas. One fundamental principle is routinely ignored: until and unless a learner has a grasp of whatever idea or concept is the present focus of instruction, there’s no point in moving on to the next idea or concept.  Ideally, education wouldn’t ignore the individual differences between learners, but would instead build on them, moving each toward her or his maximum potential. This, of course, requires a dramatic rethinking of many of the ways schools remain traditionally organized.

3. The standard “core” curriculum ignores vast and important fields of knowledge. Missing, for example, are studies of principles of group dynamics (essential knowledge for the workplace), principles of graphic communication, historical forces such as group responses to loss of autonomy, polarization that leads to conflict, the close relationship between economic diversity and stability, ways to analyze effects of technological development on human behavior, ways of dealing with problems in interpersonal relationships, the effects of emotion in selective perception, and much more that lies between and beyond the traditional disciplines.

4. The standard “core” curriculum emphasizes secondhand rather than firsthand knowledge. Acquiring understanding first hand means acquiring it from reality (or by analyzing direct evidence such as primary sources). This allows the exercise of cognitive skills far beyond those needed for passive, textbook-based learning, and actively involves the learner in the learning process. Active involvement in investigation and problem solving increases the learner’s pleasure in learning (Bronowski), and ensures that what is learned will be understood in more depth and retained permanently.

5. The standard “core” curriculum vastly overworks short-term memory. Digital textbooks, instructional manuals, model units, etc., virtually all sources of teacher lessons focus on conveying a large body of information to the reader, then tests retention of that information. Recall and limited low-level application are the only significant mental operations expected. Some students excel at the kind of short-term memorizing this standard approach requires, but most don’t. And as we know there’s virtually no correlation between that memorizing ability and later success in life.

6. The standard “core” curriculum treats brain-building play, the range of arts, music, design, animation, dance, games and gaming, and so on, as “frills.” There’s a growing body of evidence from brain studies that indicates that the arts and design, patterned movement, music, and similar activities contribute in a major way to growth and successful development of learners, while improving academic performance.

“We turn to a building body of neuroscientific research on the brain’s so-called default mode network (DMN). This network is thought to be important for narrative construction (i.e., for thinking about the self and others across time and in relation to values and ideas). Because this network’s functioning is dampened during task- and action-oriented thinking, it is possible that overly and consistently focusing students on tasks requiring immediate action and task orientation could undermine the long-term cultivation of giftedness. There is a fundamental tension between the expression of creativity, which requires breaking consensus to push forth new ideas, and organizational culture (school-based), which values individuals who conform to the group. We argue for a need to shift the school culture to accommodate creative expression, and for more time spent on skills supported by the DMN to allow students’ creative giftedness to shine through. “

 —Gotlieb, Hyde, Immordino-Yang, Kaufman, ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

7. The standard “core” curriculum is implemented in ways that ignore research on retention in grade, class size, length of school day, homework, need for a sense of autonomy, and other important issues. For years now, non-educators—philanthropists, legislators, and state governors—have been allowed to make decisions based on vastly oversimplified ideas about education. They’ve been ignoring powerful evidence that suggests that those ideas (and the policies that they engender) are, at minimum, ineffective, and often harmful. Naïve assumptions about learner and teacher motivation, the value of market forces, the efficacy of computers, and the causes of failure, for example, have been tested and found to be wrong, but wrong-headed policies remain in place.

8. The standard “core” curriculum has no criteria establishing what new knowledge to teach, or what old knowledge to discard to make room for the new. The amount of information is expanding geometrically, becoming simply more overwhelming each day. Textbooks, be they hard copy or digital, are out of control, overloading students with more and more information. Without mental tools for sorting and organizing what they’re learning, and practice doing that, students are certain to forget most of the vast number of “facts” to which they’re exposed. There’s a bigger underlying problem here that we talk about but have never come to grips with: the erroneous assumption that education is about absorbing information; a giant, expensive game of Trivial Pursuit. Education should focus clearly on the development of skills for information gathering, mental processing, communicating, and problem solving. Further, education should develop learners’ understanding of the kinds of relationships and meta-relationships that characterize all of reality, i.e. an understanding of systems.

9. The standard “core” curriculum has no built-in mechanisms that allow or force it to adapt to change forces –social, political, environmental, etc . Education today is almost entirely information based (textbooks, standards, etc.), with a host of negative consequences. The information in textbooks and the high-stakes tests that follow is largely dictated by the expectations of those doing the selecting, and this is a powerful force keeping innovation to a minimum. What the selectors expect to see is what they’re used to seeing. Unfortunately, there’s no way to anticipate much of the knowledge that learners will require as adults, but it is certain to differ a great deal from the contents of those textbooks, which already don’t fit learner’s needs.

10. The standard “core” curriculum is silent on complex ethical and moral questions. Most ethical issues are related to values and assumptions that come into conflict. These may differ from person to person, group to group. Despite their importance, study of values and assumptions are not a significant part of the traditional curriculum. For example, if those in power assume “those living in poverty just lack incentive to improve their condition” their society will tend to perpetuate social stratification. By reasonable standards, rigid social stratification is an ethical issue. Understanding ethical and moral issues also requires a grasp of the complex consequences of personal and group actions. Some of these subjects may be “covered” in school, but understanding their interlocking relationships are certainly not a focus of present-day curriculum, and those relationships are at the core of ethical problems.

11. The standard “core” curriculum isolates educators in “fields,” making dialog about their shared task difficult. Reality is seamless, and breaking it up into disciplines creates unnecessary barriers. For example, language arts may have the goal of helping the young send and receive information effectively via words, but communication that is isolated from the world of humans and their surroundings (the focus of other disciplines) is an empty exercise. Why not combine courses and disciplines, so the young read, write, observe, illustrate, and in general develop a wide range of communication skills while simultaneously applying these skills to subjects such as science, social studies, and history? This would bring educators from different fields into the same room, working with the same group of learners, and everyone would benefit.

12. The standard “core” curriculum gives thought processes other than recall short shrift, or no attention at all. Our learners should be inferring, generalizing, hypothesizing, analyzing, finding analogies, making inductive and deductive leaps, valuing—using many complex forms of thinking that are vitally important in real-world problem solving, but are nearly impossible to evaluate “objectively.” However, because prevailing pedagogies and machine-scored tests predominate, and these only evaluate memory and low-level application of information, more complex thinking skills are ignored. This is an old problem, but one that isn’t going away, despite “Common Core” lip service to critical thinking. One major reason these practices persist is our reliance on our memory-and-information approach. Textbooks, digital or otherwise, and lessons overwhelmingly contain pre-processed information—conclusions formed or adopted from elsewhere by the author. All the complex thinking was done before the textbook was written, leaving nothing for the kids to do but remember conclusions they read in the book, and perhaps apply that information in some simple, standardized way.

13. The standard “core” curriculum is so inefficient it leaves little or no time for apprenticeships, internships, co-op programs, projects, and so on. The reasons for inefficiency—passive learning, too much random information, failure to engage students—are described elsewhere in this list of problems. The time used in schooling is way out of proportion to the amount learned. Increasing this time—one of today’s “increase the rigor” trends—doesn’t improve the amount students learn significantly. Learning is far deeper and more effective when the learner participates actively in the learning process, rather than passively reading and listening. Opportunities for active learning are disappearing from our schools and lives; even laboratories and workshops are fading away.  Given little chance to apply what they’re learning, it’s not surprising learners soon forget most of it.

14. The standard “core” curriculum costs a great deal to “deliver” but represents shallow learning. A great deal of what is happening in classes is expensive, and those costs are increasing, while what little learning is engendered by traditional information-based, passive education is inefficient and shallow. Much of the knowledge and even the skills that are “covered” in school are soon forgotten, because they aren’t exercised by being applied to the real world.  We ring our hands over the “summer break learning loss” but it’s clear that anything learned was learned superficially, and wasn’t truly understood.  

15. The standard curriculum emphasizes reading to the neglect of other ways of learning. Long before kids go to school, they’re learning by observing, by poking and prodding, by playing, by listening and mimicking, by trying out possibilities, and the like. These forms of learning are largely ignored once school is begun, giving learners the false impression that reading is the only significant way of acquiring knowledge and then we follow up by making that come true. Second-handed, pre-processed versions of reality, rather than reality itself, become the focus of almost all schooling. Life beyond school requires abilities to observe and make sense of the surrounding environment and the humans that impact each person’s experience. Developing those abilities is hardly ever a part of what goes on in school. Most of the answers to future personal and shared problems won’t be available from words on a page or screen. Methods of learning called “inquiry”, “discovery”, “constructivist,” “hands-on”, or “active,” are essential to generating the intense experiences needed for in-depth learning. These experiences exercise the full range of cognitive processes that learners need for life-long problem solving.

16. The standard “core” curriculum lends itself to “minimum standards” testing rather than maximum performance evaluations. Every learner, every child, is different. Those who could excel and lead their fields as adults aren’t being challenged by lock-step education. Those with special talents and interests are largely ignored. Education now focuses on improving math and reading skills of that group of learners who are performing below some arbitrary level, as indicated (often inaccurately) by tests. Evidence suggest that even the goal of raising performance of those students lacking in adequate reading and math skills isn’t being achieved by many subjected to present-day reform rigor.

—This essay is adapted from the works of Marion Brady and several of his commissions and work groups.

 

 

Some Ideas We’d Welcome in 2025

Happy New Year and Welcome 2025!

 

It’s that time of year. People are thinking about things they’d like to do better, enjoying greater rewards, promoting wellness, even contributing to the state of the world in the coming year. We like the idea and here we are to offer some thoughts to the people “at the top” of our school districts and the schools themselves.

 

#1- School boards: take the youth mental health crisis much more seriously.

 

When school-age mental health issues are substantial enough for the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare a national emergency, where does that leave our schools? Schools are, and have been for some time, the locus of youth mental health issues in our communities, but schools are not built or prepared for that burden. Far from it. Don’t expect to have district and school leaders cope with the surging demand for mental health support when you are “level funding” them or asking them to cut a teacher in order to get another mental health professional. Tinkering with “SEL” or Restorative Justice barely scratches the surface of what the situation demands. Behavioral issues buffet virtually every school with striking intensity. Class and geography are no longer sufficient insulation to cyber bullying, orchestrated and videoed fights, or anxiety from the threat of weapons and active shooter drills.

School principals rely on resources granted from above. School leaders have told us they worry that they will be seen as complaining if they raise such issues. Many are unfamiliar with how best to integrate such precious investments in ways that make a difference. -That has got to change.  In addition to more trained professionals in each building and far greater outreach and engagement with families,  school districts must routinely invite and host mental health partner organizations. It’s our most critical work at present and we need an all-hands-on-deck approach, convened by school leaders but involving the broadest possible audience.

2- Superintendents and Boards: Don’t kid yourselves --get your principals the kind of coaching they need.

In our coaching for principals and other administrators we’ve seen the job change dramatically, have enumerated the challenges faced by school leaders, and watched them only get more numerous and more complicated.

As we’ve pointed out, good coaching is not a “how-to” exercise best achieved by an occasionally-available district colleague. It’s high-touch work, helping to surface blind spots, reallocate precious time more strategically, escape from administrivia to address volatile or neglected areas, or getting a safe and informed opinion on a complicated decision.

It remains a mystery why more districts and especially their boards don’t make the modest investment to support leaders at this incredibly challenging time in and around schools. The large number of interim administrative placements, the shrunken applicant pools, and frequent brief tenures at the helm tell us that the job has changed and that working solo, or with misguided or limited help from someone in-district, cannot yield the results students, families and staffs deserve.

3- Principals: Give your teachers time and structure to talk about student learning and assessment.

Assessment and grading are such a huge, combined thing in schools, yet remarkably they are almost never explored in intentional ways, and if they do happen they can become quickly and dramatically discordant. Wildly different and unexplored approaches conspire against making a school’s approach consistent and understandable to parents, to its professional staff, and perhaps more importantly, to the students themselves as they stress over how to navigate which behaviors and standards work with which teachers but not with others.

 

In an attempt for consistency, some districts have added “standards-based grading”, an extension of the competency-based or “mastery” learning belief system. (After trying the mastery idea a half dozen times over the past 50 years some places are still at it, with virtually no evidence that it really does what it says it will.) Visits to schools that have implemented standards-based grading often reveal two bumps in the road: the onset of professional cultures where formative assessments are few and poorly designed, and second, classrooms where  the “re-teaching” component, intended for students who may not do well the first time around, seldom if ever takes place despite the promise of the theory’s rhetoric.  In such settings it’s striking to a visitor just how quickly teachers lurch from any discussion of the quality or characteristics of a student’s work to inserting the “grade”.

Where to start? Veteran teachers, teachers new to the school, teachers in key pre-requisite classes – all of them would benefit from an annual group trip through our assessment “board game”, exploring key values and beliefs that shape a school intentionally or unintentionally. Multiple, mushy definitions of the term “grade” need to be clarified, keeping in mind what so many schools may have forgotten: grading is not assessment. It’s a great whole-faculty series of conversations that are absent and/or overdue in far too many schools.

4- State Departments of Education, Superintendents, Boards, and Parents: Dig in together to learn more about literacy and the “Science of Reading”.

We’re all about science, as well as the many artistic dimension of planning for good learning and working with young people. But its been unsettling to see the political hurricane that has overwhelmed the sector: the “Science of Reading”. We all need to ask, is the new dogma a good one? Is there only one science to reading? Is there more than one way to learn to read? Could it happen in different ways, at different times? What can we learn from the litany of mandated, top-down “how-to” policies of the last two decades?

We suggest that anyone involved in a conversation about literacy spend 15 minutes with this compelling reading, which offers the kind of insights, respect for differing opinions, and breadth needed to halt yet another lurch towards some policies that ultimately may prove as unhelpful as previous mandates.

5- Teachers: Let’s use choice, along with our technology resources, to expand learning and act on student’s intense curiosity.

We know how flat achievement has been for the past decade, before and after COVID. There’s abundant qualitative data showing student’s growing negative attitudes toward  classroom learning. It’s not a great leap to link some if not most of that boredom to what students have to say:

  • “We never get to suggest topics”

  • “I don’t get to ask many questions”

  • “We get lots of lectures and worksheets”

  • “Everything is from a text book or an on-line guide, we just follow one day to the next, changing topics”

  • “If we bring up something in the world or here in our city, we get told, we don’t have time for that”

Student boredom is a problem that impacts educational institutions and parents all around the world and while boredom is often connected to disengagement, its influence grows stronger as students advance through their academic journey. Research suggests that students are bored from a third to half the time they spend in school.

Most adults see boredom as a lazy, low-motivation state, but experts say the opposite is true. “When you are bored, you generally have a desire to be engaging with the world in some way that is meaningful,” says cognitive neuroscientist James Danckert. Failing to satisfy that drive is what produces boredom’s itchy feeling. Boredom is most likely to occur when an environment is out of sync with one’s needs and interests.

Many are suggesting that screens and social media are to blame. Perhaps, but there is good data pointing to two classroom culprits for boredom: too much or too little challenge, and content that doesn’t seem meaningful. Linked to those causes are three consistent themes that appear in many student voice-driven explorations of in-school boredom.

  • Lack of relevance:  Students may not see the practical application of what they are learning in their daily lives or urgent issues happening beyond the school. 

  • Unhelpful teaching methods: Repetitive lectures or teaching styles that don't cater to diverse learning styles. 

  • Lack of engagement:  Passive learning with little opportunity for interaction, discussion, or hands-on activities. 

One simple place to start in addressing boredom would be to give students what they’re asking for: some choices, some topics they find relevant, making time for things happening in the world, letting them generate questions, (big pitch here for QFT!) and making time for discussions. Each of these strategies from Inquiry Learning can involve research, writing, presentations, team work. They don’t have to be devoid of challenging intellectual work, they’re  in fact more likely to produce it.

Another quick and easy foothold in bringing in present and past events of the world would be to have students peruse our Grand Challenges, exploring ones that most interest them or that link to topics currently under study. Teachers use the GCs to get familiar with the power of this kind of connectivity to the world. Read through the explanations and then head down to the bottom and scroll through the many subjects there, each of which links to one or more of the  Grand Challenges whose origins are explored here. Some network teachers use every Friday for a Grand Challenge “peek”, often having students identify their own challenges as a prelude to research and presentations of opinion and evidence. 

In any event, if you want to tackle student engagement AND student achievement, listen to what they’re saying. Let’s use our technologies as connections to life beyond the classroom, to give students access to the urgent and compelling topics in the world and in their lives.

Here’s to education leaders at every level taking on work that will make a difference for young people, those who work with them, and our communities.

A rewarding 2025 to you all,

Wayne Ogden & Larry Myatt

For more information, tools and connections, email larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org.

 

 

 

 

Helping 9th-Grade Students Get It Right: Norwood First Year Academy

We’re enthusiastic about a new project we’re supporting at nearby Norwood High School. The school has completed smart and thorough preliminary planning across academic, student support, and operational domains for a First Year Academy which will open in the 25-26 academic year.

Members of the Academy’s Planning Committee, almost two years old, joined prospective teachers in digging into what the school experience could be like for all concerned in an intense two-day August retreat. The agenda was ambitious: exploring values and beliefs, assessing the efficacy of systems and policies already in place, identifying the need for new thinking, understanding the rules of the road when making durable consensus decisions and managing high-stakes meetings. Exchanging  work groups on different tasks, using different strategies to meet the desired outcomes, and working with student and teacher life in the mind’s eye made for a productive outing.  

As we’ve known, “middle school” students can come in all shapes and sizes and, across a typical 11–14-year age span, display great differences among factors such as social adeptness, family background and norms, body strength and coordination, motivation and outlook, academic acumen, reading level and vocabularies, executive function, and a host of others. Recognition of those potential differences was clearly on the page for the Norwood team, who seem game to welcome all of their learners and caregivers, going out of their way to be inclusive in their planning, the development of their vision and the daily experience that will make it tangible.

 

Norwood Faculty at Work at their Summer Retreat

                               

Principal Galligan

Zooming out to the big picture, focusing more directly on entering ninth grade students is now happening frequently. A number of large and mid-size city school systems have made it a priority to examine their capacity to support learning and development at that transition point from middle school to high school, but it’s also happening in rural and suburban schools. The impact of COVID on many students who were in mid-elementary school at the time is being felt in schools across the nation. During the pandemic, many students got less than full attention in developing literacy skills in the lower grades, making the critical flip from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”. Many others felt the lack of opportunity to be part of a community, honing social skills as part of their learning. In addition, the acute mental health challenges that spiked then have not receded, and schools, not adequately resourced or structured for that burden, can groan under the load.

 

Given that so much in education policy seems cyclical, it’s helpful to recall that  “Ninth Grade Academies” were popular in the mid and late 1990s, as the energy and investments of those times included taking a deeper look at that pivotal year of entry into high school. During those exciting years new learning in adolescent development, including a pivot from deficit-based theories to “positive youth development”, and burgeoning new and engaging teaching strategies such as Inquiry Learning were springing up from networks like the Coalition of Essential Schools, the Accelerated Schools, the Turning Points Middle School Network, and a host of progressive university Schools of Education.

The introspection of the 1990s also revealed the crucial nature of transitions in schools, especially those serving low socio-economic populations. One popular saying became “transitions are the villain” , meaning likely places for students to go off-track. Moving teacher to teacher, class to class, grade to grade, school to school, brought with it potential negative impact on the strength of relationships, outlook and motivation, and resultantly, achievement. Entering high school, which was viewed by many as the biggest and most important of all transitions, spawned a proliferation of attempts to improve the hand-off from “middle school” to the classical “upper school", where all the rules and ways of daily life are new and different.

Unfortunately, in 1999 the No Child Left Behind legislation bound schools together in following a top-down agenda, froze innovation and new approaches, and cemented the century-old architecture of high schools. Not much of that era’s new learning was carried forward as schools moved towards standardization and test-based “accountability”.

Norwood High School, refreshingly, has made a significant commitment to making sure entering students do see what’s ahead of them, get critical support, and can take advantage of its many resources. Working in the library of their spacious new high school, Principal Hugh Galligan invited retreat participants to practice activities calling for shared leadership and consensus building, choosing from a menu of options that included positive character development, conflict resolution, critical media literacy, digital etiquette, and executive function, among others.

The ”builders” of Norwood High School’s new First Year Academy

Since we met, I’ve been impressed by the thoughtfulness and transparency of the Norwood effort, led by Galligan’s energy and high touch skills. It wasn’t surprising to me to learn that he was the 2022-23 Massachusetts High School Principal of the Year. Galligan routinely shows his own leadership tool kit: honoring the hard work that has occurred while keeping people open to new possibilities, digging in hard to the thinking but having fun and laughs in the midst, owning important chunks of the work himself while inviting others to take on significant tasks moving forward.

In creating the First Year Academy new ideas, survey data, and planning documents have been meticulously captured, shared and vetted with stakeholders on a consistent basis. High School representatives have been in dialogue with community members, middle school staff, their fellow faculty, and current students in assessing which elements would make for the most positive social and academic experience. Planning Committee members have visited other schools with similar academies, brought back anecdotal data to share with others, and are keeping an open mind as they co-design the Norwood prototype.

The Summer Retreat included a diverse group: newer faculty along with veteran teaching staff, representatives of differing curriculum departments, guidance and social work staff, and members of the school’s administration.  In addition to assisting with presentations and facilitation, Associate Principal Cindy Derrane thoughtfully provided table tools and puzzle pieces for the group to assemble in a final “show your learning and progress” activity.

Committee member and Assistant Principal JuanManuel Gonzales, who’s served in other schools prior to arriving at Norwood, recalled that one important driver for the Academy was to front-load supports for students, rather than waiting until later years when they better understood such issues as grades, credits, and academic performance and how to access help when needed. When asked what he thinks will be factors in success he had two things to say, “As a school veteran I know that for something as big as this you need a good plan, and I think we have one. And we’ll need teachers working closely together, taking responsibility, being willing to grow and learn, solve problems, and being flexible, and by all signs, we’re ready for that as well”.

The Retreat  ended with a viewing and assessment of those afore-mentioned puzzle pieces to display consensus on key tasks while pointing forward to next steps. Photos of participants in their “building and construction” outfits and an ice cream truck with sundaes for all made for a great departure celebration. We recalled that in our planning, describing what he hoped for over the two days, Galligan stated, “we want to take this opportunity to get as close and tight as we can, since we know once we’re in regular school mode, things can loosen up”.  Looking back, we’d say, “mission accomplished”.

The ”builders” of Norwood High School’s new First Year Academy

We at ERC look forward to facilitating the teams going forward, sharing tools and perspectives and learning from Norwood’s efforts as well. To learn more, feel free to contact us or the administration of Norwood High School.

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To explore our ERC coaching, professional development and strategic planning resources, contact larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org

 

Critical readings for school professionals and their communities

Greetings,


As the leaves fall here in New England, we offer you three important school stories:

  • An unprecedented challenge to young people’s mental health clearly identified and confronted.

  • An articulate and forensic look at why we can’t seem to make our schools different and better, and a guide to redesign, from our own ERC co-founder.

  • An eloquent and reasoned look at school accountability and why its off the mark and unhelpful.

 Enjoy this urgent commentary on key issues.

                                                                                 Wayne Ogden, ERC Co-Founder

Professor Jean Twenge takes on a frequent conclusion that we don't have enough evidence about social media use associated with harm to young people’s mental health, and says, “Yes, we do know social media isn't safe for kids.”

technoskeptic.substack.com/cp/137579842?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email 

Addressing The Neglected Elements of School Redesign tracks why things stalled in improving schools back in the late 1990’s, why we’re so stuck engaging students and raising achievement and,  most importantly, identifies the seven areas that we need to tackle.

medium.com/@larry.myatt1/addressing-the-neglected-elements-of-school-redesign-5ac95a58728b

Peter Greene’s testimony before the Pennsylvania State House Appropriations and Education Committee offers a much-needed, common sense take on school accountability.

curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2023/10/my-testimony-for-pa-house-education-tour.html

These are three serious reads that one hopes will spawn serious conversation in schools and their communities. School leaders, make time to share, analyze and discuss these issues. Things are stuck in the K-12 sector and here are three ways we can dig out from under the weight of inertia.

Good luck in your conversations!

ERC Summer Newsletter August 2023

Welcome to our Summer Newsletter – as is our custom, we’re sharing what we see on the school front lines --in classrooms, the principal’s office and in district administrative suites. This August there are two things we think deserve attention.

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More screen-based instruction as the remedy for "learning loss"? We don’t think so….

Brain POP

Responding to last year’s troubling NAEP scores, i.e., the “nation’s report card”, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said, “Let’s be very clear: the data prior to the pandemic did not reflect an education system that was on the right track.  The pandemic simply made that worse.  It took poor performance – and dropped it down even further.” Cardona was referring to the fact that after a decade of flat achievement, test scores have fallen even more and a crusade has begun to help school children recover from COVID “learning loss” (referring to a loss of knowledge and/or skills, or a “reversal in academic progress”, most commonly due to an extended interruption in a student’s education –summer vacation, illness, absences, etc.)

In response, tens of billions in federal aid began its flow to our schools to combat learning loss. The largest chunk of the federal largess, $122 billion that was included in the American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, requires that schools put at least 20% toward battling that “learning loss”. Schools need to spend most of their recovery funds by 2024, and summer is the main buying season, so new tools can be delivered in time for school to start. We ask, who’s set to benefit from that?  

An armada of companies are now pressing the case that schools should spend the money on their products. In particular, as reported by Pro Publica, the ed tech industry is not only poised to benefit from the surge in federal funding but also enjoyed a huge wave of private funding as the federal tap opened: The annual total of venture capital investments in ed tech companies rose from $5.4 billion to $16.8 billion between 2019 and 2021.  Firms that track such investments also predict that global edtech venture capital will nearly triple over the next decade. (chart below)

We certainly agree with an obligation to respond to genuine learning loss, but  we’re hoping that educators keep their eyes on the gigantic irony herein: a host of studies showed the negative impact of increased school-based screen time during COVID and that the extent of learning loss was closely correlated to the amount of time that students had spent doing remote learning, rather than receiving direct instruction. And now companies are offering us more screen-based instruction as the remedy. 

Although we’re in support of limited and very careful investment in on-line learning, what we recommend more strongly is to focus on and buck up district “impact solutions”, among others intensive tutoring, focused skill review, counseling support, and extended-day and extended year programming. Building-based teams and community partners should engage in granular, wrap-around planning and care coordination which address a full range of key aspects, most critically literacy and “reading recovery”,  emotional and physical wellness, varied instructional strategies in content areas, establishing homework centers, and providing one-on-one check-in’s and mentoring and coaching  beyond school hours. 

These are practices which have always made a difference in addressing gaps in student learning, and importantly, bring an essential, high-touch element which simply cannot be replaced. Spend the “learning loss” funds close to home in ways that address the core issues.

(For support in planning and implementing “impact solutions”, contact us here at ERC) 

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Take On the 800-pound Gorilla of Teacher Evaluation – But don’t rush out for a new system! 

Almost everywhere we go these days we find school administrators groaning under the weight of cumbersome evaluation procedures. Its difficult to find many who feel that that work is making a significant difference in their school, that their investment pays big dividends in supporting teachers and improving instruction. And now its back in the news.

Istock- Getty images

Some history. Teacher evaluation reform during the late 2010s was one of the fastest and most widespread education policy changes in recent history. Thanks mostly to Race to the Top and ESEA “waivers,” over a period of about 10 years, the vast majority of the nation’s school districts installed new teacher evaluation systems. We were a part of that ground level work in a dozen school districts. Conceived in what must be acknowledged as a climate of teacher mistrust, the mandate required a vast expenditure of time to learn and adopt new and more stringent procedures. Evaluation methodologies began to include expanded rating categories and incorporating multiple measures, some based on student outcomes – i.e., testing results. 

Schools have now been at that work for a decade, and regrettably, two visible outcomes we encounter are a burdening of school administrators that distracts them from other critical work, and a general disbelief among educators that the whole process really makes a difference. It’s one of the 800-pound gorillas that we’ve come to live with in education. In most schools it’s not something that teachers complain about. The unspoken trade-off seems to be, “I don’t really get much support for my actual teaching, but evaluation is not something I have to pay a lot of attention to or worry about”. Not what we’d like to hear or believe but an accurate assessment of how things stand in too many schools.

But a major new report issued in April 2023 on the impact of teacher evaluation reform has garnered attention. The research on student outcomes with data from 44 states comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University  and offers a strong analysis of multiple locations that finds no aggregate effect of the new systems and that national evaluation reform has not been successful in improving measurable student outcomes. [Bleiberg, Brunner, Harbatkin, Kraft & Springer.]

That report dovetails with what we’re seeing on the ground-- that the implementation, the actual day-to-day practices, seldom provides the payoffs we’d want: familiarity with over-all teacher practices, meaningful support and incentives, rating systems that work, and improved teaching. In a nutshell, evaluation frameworks and procedures are too top-heavy and time consuming, and don’t allow for timely dialogue, instructional intimacy, or support a growth mindset. 

But whether provoked by the report or attempting to get more results from the process, many districts are suddenly looking to move to yet another new evaluation framework. We’ve even heard of two districts close to each other where one is giving up on a system while the nearby district wants to adopt it.

Poets&Quants

Stop! Pay attention to the report! There is NO evidence that one particular or different approach to evaluations would have changed the results. We did not somehow “miss” the right approach or framework. It’s in the implementation and conditions. But many districts are on a hunt for yet another teacher evaluation system despite the fact that they’re expensive, they take lots of time to understand and implement, as well as to negotiate with teacher associations. And the usual suspects who  monetized teacher evaluation a decade ago are making a comeback, with new logos and Zoom modules,  and school districts are looking to buy. 

We have a better idea and its taking root. Our approach has become to bring school leaders and teachers together. The task is to collaboratively choose two, perhaps three, areas to focus on, areas that are likely to support growth and achievement, and using frequent mini-observations and conversations, develop mutual expertise in those areas. Formative assessment, lesson planning, managing classroom environment, student engagement, the use of multiple strategies -these and others all hold the potential to make teachers more successful in engaging and growing young people in their intellectual work. 

This doesn’t mean that other elements of an evaluation framework don’t matter. They have their place. But regular feedback and conversation among administrators and teachers on a few key agreed-upon areas can foster improvement, build a culture of growth and trust, and give teacher support and evaluation the boost it needs. It’s a simple approach that makes better use of time, energy and wisdom in all regards. Its careful work, to be sure, and requires good decision making, smart public engagement, and a strategic road map. 

We’re doing more and more in this arena and would love to share our methods and coaching support if your school would like to get to the heart of the work. Let us know if you’d like more information. 


Larry Myatt Wayne Ogden

Assessment and Grading: Taking the Right Road

Over the past 4-5 months I’ve been helping one of our longest-standing ERC client schools, The White Mountain Regional High School in New Hampshire, with some deep work on assessment. Under new administrative leadership and with several new faculty members it was time for a “refresh”, an opportunity to revisit core values about teaching and learning and to develop the flexible yet durable set of agreements around teacher practices that every good school needs.

 

Middleweb

Assessment and grading are such a huge, combined thing in schools, yet they are seldom explored in intentional ways. Not only does that neglect make for a weak instructional fabric, but it can also get us in trouble. In addition to the many small “grading” skirmishes that occur regularly in every school among students, parents, and teachers, every so often there are bigger, more splashy beefs. I was reminded of a recent case in Maryland and another one in Texas.

Courtesy, The Conversation

Not every situation gets as heated and public as these, but our ERC experiences in schools suggests that grading and assessment, which are surprisingly infrequent topics of discussion, can become quietly but dramatically discordant. Wildly different and unexplored approaches conspire against making a school’s approach consistent and understandable to parents, and perhaps more importantly, to the students themselves as they stress over how to navigate which behaviors and standards work with which teachers but not with others. They’re often told, that’s just how school is, right?

Over the years, as we’ve forgotten the roots of our normative workings, we’ve made it comfortable and routine to assign a single number or letter to a stunningly complex body of work emerging from a  developing mind, with each teacher largely guided by their own beliefs and standards. That’s where instructional leadership should come in. Schools should routinely make time for discussions of how they want to deal with the paradoxical undertaking that teachers must live with – managing the equilibrium between two different purposes of schooling: honoring each child’s growth, their different ways of seeing the world, their grasp of skills and content at that moment in time of their development and, simultaneously, complying with the demand to sort and report  the “grade” or rank of their students.

 

Teachers spend huge amounts of time on grading. In some cases, they spend a good deal more time on grading than on planning engaging lessons and on looking at formative assessment results.  The latter often in particular gets short shrift, with easy to score “quizzes” serving as the primary indicator of a student’s understanding of key concepts and skills. Most teachers will say it’s just too time consuming to dig in on formative assessment --how each student is doing with their learning-- and so, over the years, quiz grades have become the coin of the realm. Visiting a state still struggling to gain some benefit from competency-based learning, I was struck by how quickly I heard teachers lurch from any discussion of the quality or characteristics of a student’s work to inserting a “grade”, and how easily they conflate grading with assessment.

As a remedy for these potential ills, and to help new White Mountain Co-Principal Patsy Ainsworth get her teaching staff grounded in the key issues and beliefs, we co-developed a series of professional conversations about assessment and grading. As Ainsworth, who takes the instructional lead, shared with staff in one of their meetings, the need for a revised Program of Studies for the high school made it more important than ever that the faculty have some strong agreement and beliefs about how to approach the complicated issues teachers inherit when they enter the field.

 Central to those professional development conversations has been what we’ve taken to calling our ERC “Assessment Board Game”.  Digging into the purposes behind formative and summative assessment can take us back to how we look at motivation, compliance, rewards, and reporting to multiple audiences. These can be incredibly complicated  topics as each of us recalls and examines our own experiences, attributes certain results to certain behaviors, some rooted in the psychology of learning but many not so much. Hence the value of the Board Game  --giving these topics their due fresh air.  

Teacher Leader Jeannine LaBounty, who has shouldered much of the professional development work with Ainsworth, shared that this work has been important and overdue at the Regional, “It not only allows teachers to examine their work but to come together and build consensus about grading practices, how we define and develop formative and summative assignments, and importantly how we inform and report to parents and the ‘permanent record’. This assessment work will really pay off because the conversation is around common topics and will have a direct impact on instructional practices at WMRHS.”  

 

Initially, the differences in opinion, definitions and assertions were striking. But by making time for recurring discussions, conducted in multiple, varying groups, and being sure to have each teacher share thoughts documented at each session, the more prevalent and enduring values began to emerge. A strong and clear statement of values and beliefs about assessment and grading, from the professional community, will undergird the Program of Studies. My guess is that people will take extra care as they wield that grading pen (or mouse) and enjoy greater confidence in answering a question from a student or parent.

 

The work I’ve seen firsthand at White Mountains has been incredibly rich and thoughtful. And it has reminded me of the perils –small and large—in not having these discussions. Fairness meters are part of a student’s tool kit, and they can help remind us of how students think about what honesty, integrity and accountability look like in the adult world, a civics education in its own right. School folks  deserve the chance to enjoy being part of a real collaborative community, one that takes learning seriously.

 

If you’d like to know more about how you can elevate your work in this arena, or how to use the Board Game, please contact us.  

 

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder, ERC

 

 

Support for First Year School Leaders: It Makes a Difference!

The research is abundant. The literature is clear. Coaching for leaders is common in all types of businesses and organizations, and it’s a difference maker. Actors, CEOs, athletes, musicians and physicians are just a few of the professions where having some kind of coaching support is the rule not the exception. This is not a new concept. Coaching has been recognized for decades as a key ingredient to a professional person’s growth and success. So, I’ve been puzzled for a while about why more school districts don’t provide a more robust support system, including an external coach, for new leaders that get hired into the district, people in critical roles. I wanted to start someplace that saw that need and acted on it.

The Natick (MA) Public Schools started providing external mentor/coaches for newly hired principals over a decade ago. Anna Nolin oversaw that work as either assistant superintendent or superintendent for most of those years. Natick is one of a few school districts in New England that provides a broad and consistent level of support for its newer leaders.

I discovered shortly after meeting her that Superintendent Nolin places a high value on supporting building leadership, especially in the crucial first year. Anna learned early in her career as both a teacher and a middle school principal the connections among student learning, excellence in teaching and having consistently strong building leadership. Even though we develop a systematic plan for principal support and training, I can be rocked by certain forces that may mean I can’t be as responsive as a principal might need”. She adds, “a strong coach can follow the principal’s growth as a learner and go deeper into their particular needs than I can as the supervising superintendent. Between the coach and the support of our Principal Professional Learning Community, I think our principals get a top-notch and comprehensive experience. And that’s what new administrators deserve!”

Michael Lewis, author of fifteen or so books, including Money Ball, The Blind Side, Liar’s Poker, and The Premonition), recently created the podcast, “Against the Rules”. He devoted the entire second season to the subject of coaching. Near the conclusion of the first episode of Season Two he summarizes the comments of one of his guests saying, “Funny thing is, the best coaches don’t leave you needing them!” To which I say, isn’t that the point of good coaching? Lewis’ persistent focus on the value of coaching rekindled my curiosity about what people take away from it, how it not only helps but endures, and why some people believe in and invest in it and others don’t heed the lessons.

So, over the past few months I set about checking in with six of Natick’s school leaders about their experiences being coached during their first year as principals. One of those six individuals had been a principal in another district before coming to Natick, the other five were first year, first time principals. These principals have now been in Natick anywhere from one to ten years.

For starters, to a person, these principals agreed that having a coach who was familiar with the district was a good thing. While an external coach brings a significant skillset with them when they enter a new school district the coaching advantage seems to increase as the coach becomes more knowledgeable about the district, local expectations and its professional culture. While the superintendent and her staff ware there to support growth and understanding around matters of policy and procedures, their coach was also able to support the new leaders in their assimilation of the district’s “mindset!.” This mindset was really the culture of leadership in the district. How principals supported each other and the teachers and students they served. It also was about how principals worked together to find solutions to all types of problems rather than struggling alone in the isolation of their individual schools.

There was also unanimity among the principals about the notion that having a confidential coach who could be trusted with their most daunting challenges and biggest fears was the essential ingredient in growing a relationship. The principals most frequently cited things like, “having an objective sounding board on difficult parent and staff issues” was key to their successes during their first year. As one principal shared, “My coach shared her viewpoints, but also asked me pointed questions to help me sort through possible solutions and thinking through the implications of differing scenarios. That weighing and sorting, in a safe space, helped me grow more confident in my own decisiveness.”  Another principal referred to that process as the “gradual release of responsibility” that was similar to the teacher/student relationship over the course of a school year. 

Anna Nolin
Natick MA Superintendent of Schools

As a veteran coach, I get asked routinely about the potential for confusion or conflict when a principal has both a boss (the superintendent) and a confidential coach. So I wanted to ask the principals I checked in with, had they experienced any situations where this resulted in some kind of conflict for them? The replies were clear and  unanimous. Nothing negative or vexing ever arose from that context. One principal reflected that sometimes there were different opinions coming from the coach and the superintendent but he, “found these differences interesting and thought-provoking” and helpful in coming up with good solutions to problems.” Another explained that she, “used her time with her coach to think out loud, formulate thoughts and responses to specific situations and then be better able to explain her action plan to the superintendent and others.”

I was also curious about the academic training they received in becoming a principal versus their learning within a coaching relationship. Again, the responses were consistent. One commented, “Graduate school learning and licensure programs were strong in the theoretical aspects of leading a school but having a coach in my corner who I could call whenever the going got tough was hands-down the most valuable tool in my tool box!” Another compared the difference to that of a college student preparing to be a teacher. “Some of the things I learned in college were helpful, but my learning in the trenches of student teaching was by far more important to my development.”

Each principal could identify significant new learning during their year in a coaching relationship. Although these learnings varied by individual and situations, each principal felt that she/he had grown in some consistent and important domains: instructional leadership, confidence, being clear and consistent, listening skills, having difficult conversations, asking good questions and being the advocate for children in their building.

These overwhelmingly positive conversations with principals led me back to the question of why Natick commits to such a robust plan for supporting new leaders that not only involves coaching but also ongoing membership in a principals’ PLC group? When I asked Supt. Nolin how coaching for principals compliments Natick’s district priorities she responded, “A core value of mine is that every educator deserves to be coached if they are open to it. Coaches provide a safe learning environment that is not impacted by the evaluator/supervisor to principal relationship. She explained further that her school committee, “knows that we have a mentoring ethic within the district and that we invest highly in teamwork.” Furthermore, “I also provide internal mentors to all new principals regardless of certification (licensing) status. The outcomes are consistently powerful and lead to principal retention.”

I know that school districts take a variety of approaches to onboarding new principals: in district colleague mentoring, principal PLC groups, regional role alike groups, leadership seminars and personal external coaches. But Natick’s comprehensive plan for supporting new school leaders stands out in the way it includes most of these activities for each and every principal and the district’s success at growing, recruiting and retaining principals  --the end result of Anna Nolin’s thoughtful leadership.

A special thanks to the following Natick Public School Leaders: Anna Nolin, Karen Ghilani, Mary Beth Kinkead, Aiden McCann, Jodie Cohen & Jordan Hoffman (now a principal in Wellesley, MA). You each have helped me become a better coach and I would not have been able to write this article without your help.

Nature-based Programming in New Mexico? A “natural”. A Biophilia Symposium Brings School Partners Together to Dream

People across New Mexico know and appreciate their outdoors, and they covet their time in the natural world. There’s a deep and historical understanding. That sentiment helped to drive the planning and activities at a late September Symposium on Biophilic Programming. The event was hosted by the dynamic Albuquerque Sign Language Academy (ASLA) a front-runner in the NM education sector across the domains of programming, wellness, and policy.

ASLA is successfully pursuing a growing number of partners and collaborators who offer different opportunities to connect students and families to a literal world of outdoor activities. A number of dignitaries representing Bernalillo County, New Mexico Highlands University, the University of California Los Angeles, Harvard University, and various outdoor education groups in New Mexico were in attendance. A key goal for the symposium was to connect those people and organizations in dreaming about new ways to expand and make the most of what the world is coming to understand about “biophilic” programming.

Longstanding  ASLA Executive Director -and parent to two students- Rafe Martinez welcomed the two dozen participants with an acknowledgement similar to the above -- that is, that people in New Mexico bear intimate relationships with the land, sky, and other species and that “modern New Mexico” retains a culture of appreciation of and deep emersion in the natural environment. He went on to cite the state’s growing commitment to stewarding the natural resources and to making them increasingly a part of all student’s school day, another prime motivation for the Symposium. In attendance along with partners and invited guests were the ASLA Leadership Team and select staff members.

At that point, Martinez handed the program over to two longtime friends of the school who designed and facilitated the event:  Kristina Lamour Sansone, founder of Design Instinct Learning and ERC Co-Founder, Dr. Larry Myatt.  Myatt began with a reference to E.O. Wilson, who in the 1980’s proposed the possibility that the deep affiliations humans have with other life forms and nature as a whole are rooted in our human biology. Wilson’s work helped to cement its standing among behavioral and natural scientists and thinkers, and provided many of the possibilities for today’s intensifying “re-launch” of biophilia.

Myatt then offered an explanation for this recent surge in interest in the education sector: an urgent and intensifying quest for more therapeutic programming to cope with the mental health crisis schools are facing Link to ERC mental health blog; a hopeful, initial effort to reverse a decade of growing student disinterest in classroom learning and its causal effects on chronic flat achievement; and third, accelerating research, on an international level, of a wide range of intellectual and social-emotional benefits from biophilic programming. 

Myatt then introduced Lamour Sansone whose work linking design principles with teaching and learning strategies has a long track record of success in engaging students and their teachers. Lamour Sansone welcomed the audience to a reflective journey, a succession of eye-catching, salient images symbolically recounting our human journey from the oceans to our present Anthropocene dominance. 

She prompted the audience to let themselves “go deep” into memories and experience, sensory recollections and preferences, and own mental imagery, a 15-minute “deep dive” into our conscious -and sub-conscious- ties to the natural world.

Following the “image journey” participants gathered in virtual groups of 4/5 to first share their reflections on the slides, and then to pose ideas for collaboration and initiatives built on the collective resources and possibilities “in the room”. People in those groups had little trouble and clear enjoyment in recalling a host of experiences, learning, and discovery from and in natural settings, paving the way for energetic conversations about what might be possible

Bringing the audience back together, Myatt facilitated the sharing of comments and ideas from the different groups, a summary of which will be shared by ASLA soon, and closed out with a brief set of slides featuring a host of rigorous learning activities that addressed the question, “is this stuff academic??”  In addition to those examples, Dr. Rebecca Gotlieb from the University of California Los Angeles Department of Neuroscience helped lay to rest the arcane idea that “academic” or intelllectual learning is different and apart of feeling, emotions and developmental growth, saying “from a neuro perceptive, the social, emotional, and cognitive are intimately entwined”.

As the event neared completion, ED Martinez introduced Dan Caruso, an architect with RMKM, based in Albuquerque, who shared his firm’s three-dimensional drawings of ASLA’s pending new facility. Groundbreaking is scheduled for January for a structure that will embrace tenets of Biophilic Design and intimacy with natural elements.

As mentioned, in addition to Dr. Gotlieb, other attendees from beyond New Mexico were Rachel Kolb, scholar, writer, and disability advocate and  Junior Fellow at Harvard University and Dr. Katrina Kennett, an ERC Consulting Practitioner and faculty member at University of Montana Western with education students and in educational technology. In closing, Martinez thanked participants, with a promise that this gathering was only a first step in exploring biophilic programming for the ASLA community and the many possible collaborations among this group and others.

Note: If you’re interested in exploring authentic biophilic programming possibilities and connections, feel free to contact Katrina@educationresourcesconsortium.org and or Kristina Lamour Sansone at Kristina@designeducator.com

 

 



 

The school mental health crisis: gaining a foothold

I opened my newspaper this morning, yet again, to school news that isn’t news to me.

The Boston Globe today reported, “School leaders nationwide have again reported a general uptick in discipline and behavior issues, including fighting and bullying, since students returned to full-time, in-person school following two years of disruption. The troubling trend has been linked to the mental health toll of the pandemic and to social development delays due to student’s extensive recent isolation.”

For some, it seems to have happened rather suddenly, perhaps a by-product of COVID. But if you are a veteran educator you know that the change began to happen almost a generation ago. Schools have now become a --perhaps the-- locus of community mental health issues. This past year, counselors in schools where we work reported sexual aggression and related assaults up by 28%, self-harm by almost 20%, chronic absenteeism up by over 20%, bullying and cyber-stalking up 30%, self-referrals for counseling up by 25%, and most sadly, a stark rise in attempted and successful, suicides.

How do we get our heads around this? Here are three immediate take-away’s:

The first is recognizing that we’re in a seriously dangerous moment for schools and young people. When school-age mental health issues are substantial enough for the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare a national emergency, where does that leave our schools? Where are school and community leaders even talking about it? It needs to move to the top of every meeting agendas. Its far worse than most people think.

Second, we need to move beyond band-aids to begin an immediate and dramatic youth development and mental health retrofit for schools, and it’s a generational undertaking.

In-school responses to the issues mentioned above have been slow and inadequate. Emphasizing such things as “SEL” or Restorative Justice barely scratch the surface of what the situation demands. What “SEL” actually is remains different and mushy in every district, ranging from 45 minutes a week to “talk about feelings”, to a curriculum full of slides on compassion or bullying, to on-paper assessments of student mental health by teachers using an “outside provider’s” off-the shelf rubric. (I had to intervene in plans for such an activity in a school we work with!) A school culture shaped by Restorative Justice practices is a supremely worthy goal but its effectiveness is too often stunted by poor training and near-total lack of significant adult participation, showing that it cannot be parachuted successfully into school. We need deeper and better solutions for our new age: prevention, early warning, targeted responses, in and out-of-school partnerships are some elements of school readiness.

Third, schools and districts seem unable to organize around these issues --we need to mobilize and prepare school leaders for this new conversation. Years ago these phenomena seemed more apparent in low-income settings, where social determinants have long challenged families. Now, behavioral issues buffet virtually every school with striking intensity. Class and geography are no longer sufficient insulation to cyber bullying, orchestrated and videoed fights, and anxiety from the threat of weapons and active shooter drills. School principals rely on resources granted from above and are often unfamiliar in integrating such precious investments in ways that make a difference. Leaders have told us they worry that they will be seen as complaining if they raise such issues. That has got to change.  Its our most critical work and we need an all-hands-on-deck approach, convened by school leaders but involving the broadest possible audience.

There are no easy answers, no packaged solutions, none of the how-to guides we’ve become used to receiving about the other complicated issues that happen in school. By definition, this will be a DIY undertaking --a school-by-school, district-by-district, community-by-community effort, a generational change in how we think about supporting our young people. Its time to make this a priority and dig in to the challenge.

Larry Myatt, Co-Founder

ERC invites school and community leaders to connect with us and, in turn, with each other. We have a variety of free resources and experience in organizing these critical conversations. We also offer coaching support for public engagement, tools for assessing school capacity with essential qualitative methods, and professional development to make restorative practices and other approaches to behavior and climate far more effective.

Email us at wayne@educationresourcesconsortium.org or larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org.

Moving Math Forward: A Landmark Change Driven by Front-Line Teachers

I’ve been looking to do this story for a long time. I didn’t know where it would take place, if ever, or who the actors might be, and as I said, it’s been a long time coming. It just so happens that the good folks of White Mountains Regional High School in New Hampshire have helped me -and all of us- out. I’ll explain the key ingredients as I recount the story, but the short version is, finally, a public high school is taking on many of the issues that have wrecked the study of math for too many kids for too long. This rural school, located just above Franconia Notch in what’s known as NH’s North Country, is paving the way for others to follow suit, a story of potential national significance.

The context is perhaps best explained by stating simply that math is, well, ….. math. When that subject comes up, we know what we are likely to hear. “I’m not someone who did very well in math” or “I’m just not a math person.” Others confess, “I’ve always had math anxiety” or, “I had to take History of Math to get through college.”

We’ve made it ok for people to feel this way long ago, “Well, you really don’t need a lot of math in most jobs” or “you know, most math is really not related to the real world.” Do we notice that in almost every suburban mall we can find “math-nasiums”, those ubiquitous tutoring centers specializing in all levels of math? Are that really that many kids just not able to do math? Or is it something bigger? Check out some of  these topics:

  • More kids fleeing math, right from the start: from Psychology Today, link here

  • High-paying jobs for people who hate math, link here

  • Math teachers aren’t the problem, link here

A major part of the math conundrum is Algebra I: the single most failed course in American high schools. It’s also the single biggest academic reason behind the huge dropout rate at community colleges. And it’s totally unnecessary. Algebra may be viewed as foundational to “formal” mathematics, but it’s not at all necessary for many important and useful forms of mathematical literacy. Statistics, probability and data analysis, for example, hallmarks of “functional thinking,” often come easily to many who cannot fathom abstract algebraic thinking, yet they remain beyond the reach of students who do not rise in our “traditional” math sequence. What’s ironic and rather maddening is that these are the very skills that business leaders have been asking for going on four decades, to the deaf ears of the education sector.

It’s not only that Algebra has been the bane of so many student’s school experience over time, but  we’ve overlooked the larger price we pay for squandering interest in math: limiting access to science, cramping our own STEM workforce pipeline, and relying on other countries to fill that gap. STEM  investments in K-12 public education remain consistent and substantial, but continue to show mediocre results because schools like to do more of what they’ve always done. If you’ve been following this topic, you’ll know that every year or two there is some logical outrage from a variety of sectors -such-as this 2011 piece in the NY Times-  but nothing has ever changed. The math elite just circle the wagons and wait for it all to subside.

Over this past year as COVID continued to impact schools, and federal money was becoming available, I was struck by the number of districts quickly, rather mindlessly, earmarking funds for yet another off-the-shelf math curriculum, combined with that old stand-by, “math coaching”. These were such wide-spread, knee-jerk responses to flat standardized test scores it amazed me that people weren’t raising their heads up, looking around and noticing, “hey, they’re flat everywhere! And they’ve been flat for years! It’s not just us here.”

Happily, that kind of noticing is just what happened at White Mountains. Veteran math educators, several of them new to the school began to question the wisdom of doing more of the same, living with the notion of too many kids foreclosing on math. What’s cool and really significant, is that neither did they want to overlook the many others who could soar higher in that subject but are limited by an approach that is traditional, but was never really good practice. That is front-line teacher leadership!

I’ve fortunately been privy to this work because ERC has been with the Regional for five years now. We’ve provided leadership and organizational coaching, brought in our Inquiry Tool Kit, and have been collaborating with both school and district leaders, looking at practices and outcomes.

“Doing more for more kids” has been the school’s de facto mission statement since I arrived there to help build an inquiry-based STE(A)M program that could go deeper than watery “PBL.” The ideas behind inquiry work spread, leading to more collaboration, new curricula, and a rising tide of teacher leadership. A generous grant from the Barr Foundation, the school’s second in four years, is a major indicator of the school’s commitment to innovation, the first step of which is a willingness to question the present realities and results of traditional practices. That’s precisely what happened with the math conversation.

This NH-bred change narrative began with a pre-COVID set of discussions about possible ways to spark more interest in math and science among students entering at ninth grade. One of the school’s dedicated collaborative planning rooms became a regular site for the intersection of veteran staff and new-to-WMRHS teachers. I was fortunate to be present for some of those discussions. That conversation, and the potent mix of perspectives and experiences, identified many aspects of the traditional curriculum that were not engaging for many students. The team of math and science teachers concluded that a framework of application, relevance, and interaction would serve students better in both the short and long terms. The teams advanced a proposal to design an inquiry-based, integrated Math/Science (MS) curriculum which was accepted by school and district administration and which is now in full swing at the school. A central idea of that MS strand is viewing math not as an isolated set of concepts foreign to other subjects, but math as a helpful and interesting tool of science.  

A key arrival at The Regional was veteran math educator Shane MacElhiney, one of a core group that has played a leading role in this story. Having been one of the central conversants in the high school’s move to an integrated Math/Science sequence, MacElhiney began to include more reflection on math results in team meetings he was asked to facilitate. Among others, the team included versatile Erica Hicks, and Jeannine LaBounty, an experienced math educator who also serves as a dynamic Teacher Leader, supporting faculty in developing inquiry strategies and reflecting on practice.

Shane MacElhiney

Slowly but surely the team’s collaborative conversations focused on performance data, including paying attention to their own experiences in teaching certain skills and concepts as well as what students had to say about the learning and the material. The team began to track concepts and activities that engaged students at a deeper level and which had greater relevance in career development of all kinds, outlining a list of changes that seemed to make good sense going forward. Several teachers also participated in the NH Spreadsheet Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by ERC and What If Math which helped teachers  think more broadly about functional thinking and cross-disciplinary activities to engage students. Concurrently, viewing math as a helpful tool of science logically pointed the teachers towards statistics and spreadsheets, concepts and tools used by most adults in a majority of work and domestic circumstances.

    Art Bardige

Another of the conversants was Art Bardige, a founder of What If Math in Cambridge, MA, who visited the school in 2019 and struck up friendships. Bardige, who might be called in many schools an “outside expert”, has at various times been an entrepreneur, designer, teacher, filmmaker, curriculum coordinator, university trustee, and for the past 40 years, a digital learning developer. He shared his philosophy with the math staff, the school administration, and with me:

“Much of the traditional math that we teach is obsolete. There is no serious reason for our kids to learn it. On the other hand, the math used in business, science and industry in the 21st century, is largely spreadsheet math, with functions as the primary math element and thus functional thinking—model building—as the essential method of problem solving. Recapturing the time spent today in classrooms on paper algorithm practice, we can open the way to focus on the future, preparing students to be problem solvers and to use functional thinking as an essential quantitative part of that process.”

The school’s math stuff was on to the same idea, including Susan Zielinski who arrived in 2020, attracted by the school’s dynamism and collaborative fuel. Zielinski is another mid-career math teacher with a variety of experiences and lots of intellectual energy. With these members, conversation about where and why math goes off track became more regular and focused. To my eye, these are folks who deeply understand curriculum and student learning, and are neither wedded to old ideas nor intimidated by tough questions about the math itself. They’re also people who understood the variables:  the intricacies and politics of college admissions, standardized test scores, parents’ hopes for their children, and the reluctance of policy makers to change things that are familiar and recognizable.

Susan Zielinski who joined

the Math faculty in 2020

Needless to say this story couldn’t have taken place without the involvement and attention of school principal Jacob Hess, who listened carefully, probed the data and the new approaches, and enlisted the support of Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Dr. Steve Nilhas. One of the dilemmas the team, and Hess, encountered was what to do about the old “geometry sandwich”, referring to the ossified

curriculum gauntlet math students must enter and endure, Algebra IGeometryAlgebra II. Such a smart yet potentially risky move against unexplored tradition needed vetting, which MacElhiney and LaBounty took on, engaging school leadership.

Thinking as a principal, Hess concluded, “ I wanted to move away from the ‘geometry sandwich’ for three main reasons. First, it’s boring and stale, and has been that way since I was a student. Second, when you look at the big picture, it has only seemed to serve the purpose of sorting ‘smart kids’ from ‘the other kids’,  a sorting that starts long before high school and which I’m not sure is helpful. The data are fully convincing that that approach does not serve a majority of our students well. Finally, and probably the biggest factor for me, is that the issues coming out of our discussions, and the ideas for a new, integrated Math 1-2-3, seem to check all of the boxes for ways to improve math education for all students. The right skills, the right topics, the right pedagogy to have our students ready for whatever they choose next.” Added Nilhas, “having a class that devotes so much time to such a narrow part of the math experience in particular, but also the overall learning experience, takes away from the kind of learning that is better for a far greater range of students, including our math high-performers.”

  Principal Jacob Hess

Following a host of internal critical reviews and reflection, plans proceeded to bring the idea to the school board’s curriculum review sub-committee. In that meeting, with the aid of a well-conceived PowerPoint and presentation strategy,  the team put forward that the primary goal of the new Math 1-2-3 was to elevate the applicable skills and content (raw data analysis, statistics, spreadsheets, basic functions, everyday proportional thinking, extending out to data-based journalism and media studies) while keeping only the minimum amount of the traditional yet largely inapplicable content. That content persists, said MacElhiney and Nilhas in the deliberations, because it’s a vestige of the SAT’s. What the team understood correctly is that the SATs have been one of our classic sorting instruments, one which persists in testing for a number of likely-to-never-be-seen items, yet whose influence is increasingly on the wane across the nation, as college admissions are roiled by decreasing enrollment.

Spreadsheets will be an important area of focus in the new approach as has been pointed out. In their discussions with Nilhas and the curriculum committee, the team pointed out their agreement with What If Math that spreadsheets change the name of the game. They are the tools students will use in the workplace so they should begin practice and familiarity in school. And spreadsheets are not just computational tools, but are powerful visualization and data science tools, employing functions and functional thinking to build and work with models essential to all STEM projects.

In the dialogue, the school/district team added, “we believe students will be more engaged, be more likely to stick with math, see science as a more inviting domain, and be far more ready for business, domestic and higher education setting with their spreadsheet skills. In reviewing their position with the PowerPoint, MacElhiney posed, “we’ll be able to look students in the eye and say what they are learning is relevant and applicable. And that they don’t have to see school as something they’re not good at because math and science are kind of closed off to them, and those represent a large chunk of what high school is. Plus, we fully expect, and data will support us, that high-achievers in math, and science, will fly even higher.”

The team’s presentation met with success and moved on toward inclusion in the district’s Program of Studies. It was a quiet yet energizing victory for the math team, the school, and especially, for the students.  LaBounty comments, “Moving forward, we’ll continue to encourage students who are looking to progress to the traditional end-of-high school math class --Calculus.” In the school’s recent history, she shared, Calculus classes have had increasingly low enrollment. She went on, “The new pathway will offer more student choice, and rigorous skills and content will be at the heart of it. That’s likely to increase the number of students who feel confident enough to dig into Calculus.”  There’s a rare, math win-win.

 

Teacher Leader Jeannine LaBounty with a student

I like the folks at White Mountains for a lot of reasons, but in this case one really stands out. They could have been like many schools, content to allow cadres of incoming students pass through four years of low-engagement and low expectations in math. Instead they’ve built new and engaging learning activities, integrated Math/Science, created a dynamic Humanities sequence, and now paved the way for the new Math 1-2-3 sequence. They knew it would take a lot of work, including the politics of public engagement, sharing their insider knowledge in understandable ways, and addressing the complications of changing something truly significant in a school, something that almost never happens.

The Spartan community of White Mountains worked hard to make important changes in math and have embarked on an exciting journey, one that will undoubtedly pay off for the students in both the short and long runs. Let’s hope other schools take notice and embark on something better for young people, the learning mission, and the study of math.

Larry Myatt,

Co-Founder, ERC

A New Grand Challenge Enriches Our Explorations

In 2018, the ERC team was pleased to be at the forefront of rethinking how we could organize student learning in our schools, i.e., the “curriculum”, moving away from a second-hand, 150-year old organizational approach to a more compelling way to engage young people. We explained one way that overdue change might be accomplished in this Grand Challenges newsletter. (Check out the comments people added at the bottom of that post, by the way.)

Since then our ERC Grand Challenges Network has provided teachers and students in a wide swath of schools with opportunities to explore urgent topics while offering meaningful choices to engage in deep learning. If you’re not familiar with these ideas, it’s worth repeating where the Challenges came from and why, and to note that now there has been a new and significant development.

The journey began when I had a breakthrough moment -the good fortune to read a brief yet especially thoughtful article, “Synergies”, by G. Wayne Clough, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. As Clough said at the time, “Our age has seen an explosion of experts in hundreds of disciplines, all creating huge amounts of specialized knowledge, which ricochets instantaneously around the world over the Internet.” How can we make sense of it all?

His insights into the urgency of organizing human thinking in a collective effort moved and excited me just as they had inspired his colleagues and collaborators at the Smithsonian. His notion was to have Smithsonian teams seek out like-minded global partners at universities, nonprofit organizations and government agencies willing to tackle high-risk/high-return problems  and address them collaboratively within a framework that could make a difference.

G. Wayne Clough

Finally, here was a way of making sense of our intellectual efforts, our potential as social and thinking creatures, and doing so in a way to make for a better planet and a better “civilization”.  The Grand Challenges presented themselves immediately to me as a framework for re-igniting the passion and curiosity kids bring to the early grades but which are mainly lost as they learn to conform and to please, solving tired, predetermined puzzles. Here is a framework that can help us dig out from under the glut of competencies, one-size-fits-all “do-now’s” and “exit tickets”, etc. that no one wants to come to grips with, but which continues to turn students off to classroom learning.

As initially conceived, the Challenges framework was four-fold:

·      Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe

·      Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet

·      Valuing World Cultures

·      Understanding the American Experience

 

Now, the Smithsonian has added a fifth Challenge to its framework for study and examination: “magnifying the  transformative power of the arts and design”. In their description, they ask us to explore “how the arts and design improve the lives of individuals and communities, how they have served as means for people and communities to express and share values and ideas, and how the creative process can help all people experience our shared humanity.”

Our many friends in the worlds of design and the arts are pleased and excited at this truly significant, perhaps overdue, recognition of those fields as central and vital, occupying a critical place in human learning and understanding. Interestingly, if one looks back at the long list of previous ERC Grand Challenge Network topics, it’s clear that many of them have honored and explored those very issues.  

Here are a few links to people doing interesting things in those worlds of design and

the arts:

We look forward to including this new Challenge in our network activities and conversations. The collective energy associated with this new development increases our hope that people can begin to slowly put aside our tired approach to “curriculum” and replace it with explorations and activities that use the Grand Challenges as a framework for learning, activities that erase some of the unhelpful boundaries and structures that inhibit passionate learning. Whether you use the Challenges in an existing unit of study, as a larger scaffold, as an alternating curriculum, or as your basic framework, you’ll be helping us move the dial.

 

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder,

Education Resources Consortium

 

Take a look at the full five Grand Challenges here: si.edu/about/mission

For more information or to be a part of the ERC Grand Challenges Network, email us at larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org.


Innovation in Action: Experts Explore a Working Model of a New and Different School

By Katrina Kennett

 

I’m told that former Boston school superintendent Michael Contompasis supplied the push for a fabulous event I had the honor of facilitating in late October. Contompasis, also a long-time Headmaster of the esteemed Boston Latin School, is quoted as saying, “Repeatedly stating the obvious, that schools are not working for too many of our students, has just not been sufficient. We need to present new mental models of the future of school.“  

 

Oscar Santos, Executive Director of CCE-Boston, took him at his word and joined in putting together an expansive group of thinkers for a deep look at what has been described as one the few innovative school prototypes to appear, the Vanguard Academy Design for Learning.  Participants were invited to join in critiquing the design elements of Vanguard, reading along with the story of a day in the life of “Zach”, a student at the school. Following a welcome from Santos, I explained the afternoon’s activities to the more than two dozen invited guests, including front line educators, district administrators, higher education deans, neuroscience researchers, writers, policy makers, and funders.

The core ideas for Vanguard have come from ERC Co-Founder Larry Myatt, who has been at serious school redesign since his involvement with Theodore Sizer’s Essential Schools movement. Along with ERC colleagues, me included, and with a host of researchers, teachers, engineers and private industry and STEM collaborators, Larry has ably “reversed engineered” to address persistent flaws in traditional school design that continue undermine learning and development. Link here.

Zach’s “day in the life” takes him, and us, through a typical school day. Typical for him, perhaps, but dramatically different than what American high school students have experienced for more than a century. A refreshing new curriculum approach draws Zach and his fellow students into urgent local and global issues, connecting with far-flung experts as well as local partners, and spawning deep, sustained  projects that emerge from their passions and curiosity. School days offer unique, flexible structures that support learning in differing student configurations with support from teachers who represent innovative, integrated knowledge and skill bases. Relationships, rituals and resources in the school make it a safe place, less prone to bullying and isolation, and free of a reliance on age-alike cohorts, as Zach says, “I like that here you almost always work with different age students, not just the kids you were with every year since kindergarten.”

Modules, lasting a week or two, provide chances for students to catch up and regain confidence in a particular skill or subject matter, while Accelerated Learning Labs connect students who are particularly enthused about an issue or subject matter, where they can “go deep” as Zach says, and keep a project going for months and even year to year. Outdated “Algebra I” has given way to spreadsheets, programming and functional thinking, and math now has a new and far more positive reputation. Technology, arts and design are continuously integrated into the schedule, rather than being siloed, and provide students opportunities in each area generally not available in a comprehensive high school “master schedule”.

 

As the event unfolded, after reading each section aloud, small breakout groups pursued three key questions – what’s different (from traditional schools)? What do we like about it? Is it better than what we have? Those small-group conversations were energetic and far-reaching, produced no shortage of differences from traditional “school”, and a series of resounding “yes” answers to “is it better than what we have?” Participants enjoyed diverse points of reference from group members from different professional domains and parts of the country.

 

After the third and final reading and analysis activity, each breakout group was asked to identify two changes they would want to make in schools as soon as possible that derive from the Vanguard prototype. Link here.

Here’s what their responses look like:

Link above: http://www.educationresourcesconsortium.org/grand-challenges-network

Mary Helen Immordino Yang, Director of the Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE) at the University of Southern California attended, joined by a colleague, Rebecca Gotlieb, educational neuroscience researcher at the University of California Los Angeles. Professor Immordino Yang provided a penultimate piece to the day with commentary linking key aspects of Vanguard with the growing body of research intended to guide changes in the student and teacher experience. (Of note, after the event, a conversation emerged among several of the participants, newly  dismayed at the number of things we do in school that in truth may be stressful and damaging, rather than helpful.)

Santos draw the event to a close by asking audience members for final thoughts, pledging more innovation events and conversations to come. Meanwhile, Contompasis concluded his experience as a part of the critique group, reiterating his assertion – “This was a major event, so many new possibilities. Proof that more than ever we need to present new mental models of the future of school, of schools that work. Vanguard does just that.”

 

After the event, Myatt was pleased, but noted he was not greatly surprised with the reactions and the depths of the critique. “These Vanguard elements appear in Zach’s story because they offer starkly preferable approaches to things we know work poorly in schools. Vanguard was a design exercise. And this prototype -not a “model”, he adds- can be and should be, adapted for different communities -their values, resources, and traditions- things that both matter and differ greatly. This is a “reciprocity” approach, intended to reframe the role of schools as places that enrich their communities, starting with being better places to learn for its young people.”

He cites the benefits of a long collaboration with Design Instinct Learning and the use of the ERC Design Studio tool with providing new insights and starting places, including “the ability to build upon, not  ‘end run’ around, what we’ve learned from Prof. Immordino and others from the neuroscience community over the past decade.”

*** *** *** *** ***

 

For more information on the event and/or on The Vanguard Academy Design For Learning TM,  email me at Katrina@educationresourcesconsortium.com.

 

Dr. Katrina Kennett is a Professor of Education at University of Montana Western and serves as a Consulting Practitioner. See her bio here.

Can We Fight Racism with S.T.E.A.M.?

ERC is proud to be a founding partner in The Reciprocity Project, a new community development and education movement, from the ground up.

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This month we’re proud to feature a compelling interview by a pioneer and warrior in the fight to make career opportunities available to all students. Michael Dawson’s decade long campaign to redistribute the spectacular resources of Cambridge’s Kendall Square and to help grow young scientists, designers, thinkers, and activists, and has become legend.

Please join him in exploring:
Can We Fight Systemic Racism with S.T.E.A.M.?
with Michael Dawson | Founder, Executive Director of Innovators for Purpose

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The Reciprocity Partners

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