TREK returns. A new, better chance for our schools.

Hoping for more from our schools?

For your children?

For your community?

Are you searching for a better vision of education?

You’ve been waiting for TREK.

Our nation has been unwilling or unable to facilitate the entrance of new models
to replace the old public schools. 

—Clayton Christensen in Disrupting Schools, 2011

In the early days of the Coalition of Essential Schools, TREK spawned many of the great small schools that endure today. TREK also became shorthand for a thoughtful community journey to perform what Theodore Sizer called the most important educational task of our times:  to evolve the institutions and practices that assist  learning.

ERC is pledging to make the potential, excitement and power of education renewal available again, to families, communities and schools who believe that change is overdue --through TREK.

Why Now?

At ERC we think the timing is right. The limitations of the core architecture of schools, minted in the 1890’s, make our communities increasingly vulnerable. Look at the plan’s basic elements: all kids of the same age, all together, all day long, from kindergarten to twelfth grade; all students studying the same facts, at the same time, with the same methods. Students plucked from a contextual and larger world environment and confined to classrooms in 50-minute doses. None of the above ideas based on any learning science or good parental instincts.

Increasing numbers of smart, committed, hardworking people – like you – are frustrated by the continual retreat to unproductive ideas. In the face of bigger needs, our efforts are not improving a faulty system.

How far behind we’ve left Sizer’s challenge! Policy makers don’t tread there. They see little need to question the “arrangements”. What’s passing for innovation these days? Add an hour to the day, adopt literacy software or get more computers?

As soon as you start thinking of kids as data points, you’re in trouble.
—Sir Ken Robinson

Even good-hearted attempts to tackle the status quo end up with little to show. I was invited to be a project advisor to an I3 grant initiative a few years ago. Despite adequate money, convening and networking, the effort achieved very little and ultimately hung up on the same rocks as dozens of other such attempts I’ve seen.  Just think of such projects as the $500 million Annenberg Challenge or the more recent $100 million gift to Newark schools.  Now, Ms. Jobs want to lend her checkbook to a new effort. (Check out Jal Mehta’s Allure of Order, if you haven’t yet. He gives us some critical perspective. ) Even the latest big ideas like Common Core, PARCC, or blended learning don’t get at the outdated structures, culture and conditions which do not correlate with what we know about learning.

So, back to TREK. What we are hearing in diverse settings nationwide is that people are missing and wanting a chance to imagine more than the present arrangements offer.

If you’re still reading, you know what I’m talking about.

TREK addresses three inescapable criteria for school redesign and renewal.

People with the education “reins” underestimate the complex interplay among the three core aspects of school:

1. Social/inter-personal— how do we treat each other?
2. Cultural— what matters here that we pass on as valuable, without examination?
3. Intellectual— do we learn to use our minds well? (Although this third aspect is often referred to as “academic” mission, its often more about who does well and who doesn’t, not to be confused with using one’s mind well.)

Each of these core aspects has associated with it deeply felt values, personal experiences, and generations of institutional practices – the 1998 state basketball champs, the drama club, National Honor Society, concerts, teacher open house  – all of which rally aunts, uncles and neighbors to the school and bind the cultural fabric tighter.  Other memories and feelings, the more social and intellectual reside in the shadow of the cultural. We tend to forget the divisions among those who felt smart and those who didn’t.  Somewhere in that shadow, too, are bus rides or car pools, the cafeteria, passing time; even if we experienced them anonymously, joyfully, or painfully, it was life, experienced at a vulnerable time. We carry forward trace images, some lasting and recognizable, most far less so, but all part of our “education”.  We know we can give our kids far better. Can we muster the will?

No room – or excuse – for nostalgia

People often resist change because they’re anxious about losing something.  Saying goodbye to a vague yet familiar notion of what school means is powerful stuff. Add to that, it’s uniquely human to want to pass down a replica of what we’ve experienced --to our kids, to the next generations.  Our instincts crave a common bond of experience, of ideas, of values. This is why we must work in particular ways, with the “whole village”, to envision something kinder at the least, a journey more humane, engaging, rewarding, and memorable.

Loss need not be part of renewal. We don’t need to throw away what works  for kids, we CAN keep a lot of what we treasure! That becomes uplifting and fuels the work of TREK. But success takes a team, a team with enough time, open-mindedness and self-discipline to tackle the toughest job in education: re-imagining it.

The first steps of the journey also require outside help --high-touch and high-skills. The vision and change leadership required to manage the feelings and ideas attached to the social, cultural and intellectual worlds of our schools is exacting. ERC has created and employs a “re-design spiral” that tracks and informs the arc of the change process required. Design, planning, and facilitation must be at once forensic and humanistic. 

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TREK is not for the faint of heart, nor for those who want the kind of quick and easy fix we’re conditioned to accept as real change. TREK is not for those who believe deeply in the current model simply because it has benefitted them, or for those who think that the teachers and kids are what need improving.

If you want in, we’ll come to you. We’ll bring you the most skilled facilitators, technology, and leadership coaches, the highest quality public engagement support, the most creative change process designers, and the most experienced scenario and school redesign experts. The hard parts - building the will, assembling a team and doing the work of creating your vision to pursue – that’s up to you!

For more information or to begin a TREK yourself, email today: larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org today!   

Please note: CES schools— if you feel it’s time to re-invent yourselves, you’re especially welcomed! Please email us about our plans for supporting TREK in CES schools.

Thanks for reading.

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder, ERC

Response to Globe Magazine Education Segment

I appreciated the Globe magazine’s ten ideas for transforming K-12 education, (Oct. 1) but found nothing transformational, and that the ideas fail to address our fundamental problem- the core architecture of our schools, vintage 1890. All kids of the same age, all together, all day long, from kindergarten through 12th grade. All students taught the same material, in the same way, for the same allotted chunks of time. All learning done inside the building, divorced from community. All kids ranked from top to bottom, with “success” limited to a predictable percentage.  No learning science has ever supported these ideas! No wonder one of your recommendations is to reduce student stress. As Clayton Christensen said in his 2012 book, Disrupting Class, “our nation has been unable or unwilling to facilitate the entrance of new models to replace a failing public system”.

Not since Theodore Sizer has anyone been forceful and persistent in saying it’s not the people within the institution – the kids and teachers- that are the problem, it’s the school model itself. Policy makers and state departments of education have abetted the failure by continuing to lock in the current system and practices.  Philanthropies don’t press for smarter efforts or true innovation. Our MA business community, despite its brains and influence, only asks for more charter schools. Everyone seems happy with the present “arrangements”. Until we do more than tinker around the edges, we can expect the same results.

Dr. Larry M. Myatt

Founder, Fenway High School

Boston, MA

President, Co-Founder

Education Resources Consortium

Teacher Learning Murals: Making Planning Visible

These days, in addition to coaching administrators and helping with school redesign, I also do a lot of direct work with teachers, supporting them in designing inquiry learning experiences for teams, individual classrooms and beyond. Portfolio tasks and PBL are a part of the bigger picture of inquiry learning but I like to take it a bit further, helping schools move purposefully from a “culture of teaching” to a more authentic and engaging “culture of learning”, within which students fuel their own intellectual activities. To do well at this, I spend a lot of time exploring how to help adults engage in meaningful learning, similar to the kinds of challenges they will present to students. We’ve known for years that the highest performing organizations have the highest degree of adult learning.  

For some time now I’ve been influenced strongly by the power of visual learning and visual literacy. Among those influences are Thomas West, a big thinker and writer on visualization, graphic design educator Kristina Lamour Sansone of Lesley University, my ERC colleague Katrina Kennett, a superb lesson/project designer and teacher developer, and a host of cognitive and neuro-scientists who are proving with brain-imaging technologies that seeing usually beats listening and text for learning. Although I thought I understood the field pretty well, and had the pleasure of writing an article on visual literacy for Phi Delta Kappan, (Connecting the Dots”, November 2008), I’m always finding new examples of the power of making things visible.

Manchester West HS STEAM-Ahead staff members prepare Learning Murals for presentation to their colleagues

Something I’ve been working on of late is a process to help schools make the huge leap from teachers working in private practice to being part of small teams, where it’s critical to make their planning and teaching visible. It’s something I call a Learning Mural. Learning Murals are in no way an invention for which I can claim credit. Similar processes and products have been around for years under different names- curriculum diagrams, mind maps, brainstorm webs, and more. What feels novel is the way we’re using them, and two aspects seem to be particularly helpful about the process. One is the power of colleagues being able to actively participate in a fellow teacher’s thought process, and, two, that the plans they generate are a departure from the kind of canned or scripted lessons that have overtaken our field over the past years. Teachers have been remarkably enthusiastic, standing up in front of their teams, sharing their excitement, asking big questions, making connections, and imagining possibilities. Two schools that have begun to embrace Learning Murals this summer –the STEAM-Ahead Academy at Manchester NH’s West High School and Providence RI’s Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School have already begun to make serious strides.

When asked for feedback, what teachers key in on is that Learning Murals are dynamic –“living documents”, as we call them- and exceedingly multi-purpose. They include three key aspects of good planning-- brainstorming, organizing and incubating, all in a lively, focused setting. The last of the three –incubating- results from the fact that other teachers and students have an ongoing opportunity to add to and alter it, posing resources, activities and possibilities that will help enrich student and teacher learning in ways that traditional solo, written lesson planning seldom approach.

Alvarez High School Teachers brainstorm components of a Learning Mural in August PD with ERC

Alvarez HS Principal Zawadi Hawkins-Gladstone is ecstatic about the potential for the murals to provide documentation of evolving teacher work and concrete starting places between meeting times, with phone cameras and software applications making it easy to capture and share the murals as they morph. She has endorsed the creation of Learning Murals as a key planning tool across all grade levels this academic year. Already the school’s teacher planning rooms sport a host of murals from different content areas. 

                                        Something I’ve added to the Learning Mural with great success is a simple, flexible protocol that helps the presenter further maximize her/his unveiling of a plan for a unit, lesson or activity. The facilitated protocol provides 5-8 minutes for the teacher to share the mural (see photos), another 5-8 minutes during which colleagues can act as students (what would excite me, if I were studying this topic or trying to learn this skill?) or as teaching colleagues (how could I connect to/piggyback on this? What am I doing that’s related or complementary?), reacting to what’s been presented, and a final 3-5 minutes on suggestions to make the Mural more compelling, powerful or understandable. The protocol can be facilitated by another faculty member and, in some cases, a helper uses a marker to add thoughts and ideas, draw connecting arrows or points of emphasis so that the presenter can focus on listening and using her/his visual powers to track changes on the mural.

A Civics/Social Studies Learning Mural at Alvarez HS

At Alvarez HS, teachers are already planning for students to attempt their own Learning Murals to organize a project they choose, as well as for second and third opportunities during Team Planning for teachers to incubate their learning design ideas as the work grows and changes with real live students. At Manchester West, STEAM staff members have agreed to adopt Learning Murals as a “road map”, a way to explain to students where their course work will take them, hoping to engender student ideas up front, and to post them so that students can track the flow of activities.

Again, nothing here is brand new, but the timing seems right. Learning Murals are an effective way to offer schools and teacher teams a safe yet provocative way to pursue higher quality planning, enrich a team’s collective and collaborative understanding of its intellectual endeavors, capture the fruits of that work, and above all, invite students to experience deeper engagement and learning through the power of visual learning. 

For more on Learning Murals contact: Larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org

A Call to Action: Comprehensive Assessment for English Learners

By Sarah Ottow

As schools open this fall, our fastest growing population, English language learners (ELLs), experiences a severe achievement gap. Despite a migration of accountability from the feds to the states, the stakes remain high around big data and the issues around testing remain complex and controversial.  Attempts to remedy the situation via through English-only language policies in several states (California, Arizona and Massachusetts) have failed to prevent this gap from growing, and have actually set the work back.

Confianza: Educating for ELL Equity focuses on ELL issues, helping schools and districts get their heads around these complicated and costly challenges. What I tell them is that we need a more comprehensive assessment mindset and a set of teacher and district practices to round out the picture of what growth actually means for these culturally and linguistically diverse learners if we’re going to know how best to serve them and do what people are asking –to prepare them for life and employment in the U.S.

A once-a-year test is like a snapshot taken on one day at a given point in time.  This snapshot offers a report for outside stakeholders--the district, the state, parents, and community members- but as has often been said, no whole picture of the child, or of interim growth emerges, leaving schools with little quality information on what to do next with the student. By continuing to focus primarily on large-scale academic assessment, we get only more data on what we already know—that is, our ELLs are not yet proficient at English.  We need actionable data to drive instruction, curriculum and programming so we can not only close, but prevent, an achievement gap.

In a system laden with snapshots, I advise my clients to move towards a photo album approach and remind them the root word for “assess,” from the Latin word, “assidere,” means to sit beside.  If we’re truly “sitting beside” our students we can do a lot more to diagnose areas of improvement and give specific feedback to build awareness and autonomy of personal development. Let’s push for a balanced, comprehensive assessment system that promotes holistic, classroom-based interim and a big increase in formative measures. Many teachers are taught to believe that only summative tasks matter, and miss the obvious – good formative assessment is a learning tool.  Both in our teacher preparation and building-based professional learning, we need to do a better job of encouraging educators to look at the complexities of language acquisition in socio-cultural contexts and promote a focus on the strengths of our culturally and linguistically diverse learners.  School and district leaders need to be visible and forceful in promoting the idea of supporting students’ eagerness to succeed, to fit in, to be someone in the United States, to be someone for their families and for themselves

I remind teachers that English language development is an ongoing process, one that that requires time, support, and confidence building.  We need to provide meaningful, language-rich learning experiences and include structures like portfolios and student exhibitions, which showcase academic language development growth and promote student agency in the learning process. This is a tangible growth opportunity for most schools.

The good news is that we already have sound assessment measures like WIDA’s ACCESS to show annual progress in English proficiency.  But schools need to have more than one picture of academic language development for ELL students.  Ongoing, classroom-based interim and formative assessments can make visible the learning of our English learners.  Comprehensive assessment brings the focus back to students’ growth, not just proficiency, which is what learning is after all. 

Sarah Ottow has fifteen years of teaching, coaching and instructional leadership experience in the US and Puerto Rico focused on equitable outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse learners.  Sarah's Boston-based organization, Confianza: Educating for ELL Equity, provides practical and innovative technical support and professional learning that empowers educators with research-based tools and practices.

ERC Co-Founder Talks TED in New Mexico

I really like New Mexico. And especially, Albuquerque. I’ve been working out there for a while now. That’s why I was really pleased to get an invite from their energetic TED community to do a short talk about why we’re not progressing in public educations (it’s the design, people). I decided to add my heartfelt pitch that Albuquerque is just the kind of place to do the deeper kind of work required.
 

I have good friends in the Albuquerque schools and in the community. I’ve loved my work with their Center for School Leadership and the McCune portfolio. Somehow, it’s easier out there to think about what kids need, not what the adults stand for. There are not a lot of folks in NM competing to be the smartest guy in the room, heavy on top-down master planning and regulation (although the state education department can lean that way). If the technocrats stay back East, I think it’s a place where heritage, strong local roots, smart but humble people, and a Southwestern sense of wide-openness can do some of the transformative work we don’t glimpse elsewhere.

If you’ve got about six minutes to spare, please check out this link for my Albuquerque TED talk:

Thanks, and Happy Mid-Summer!

Larry
 
 
 

Steam Ahead NH

Since the summer of 2014, the Education Resources Consortium has had the pleasure of supporting the birth and development of STEAM-Ahead NH, located at Manchester High School West in New Hampshire’s Queen City. The idea originated when local business owners Jeremy Hitchcock of Dyn and Nick Soggu of SilverTech, both graduates of Manchester schools, were inspired to support the creation of a program focused on the STEM fields.  They were joined by Mayor Ted Gatsas who suggested including the Arts to include the creative thinking aspect often missing in STEM initiatives. The STEAM concept coincided with the arrival of new Manchester West Principal Christopher Motika, who helped to move quickly to fit the pieces together.  According to Motika, community partners around Manchester, including higher education players came together, and “bent the rules just enough” to begin the first cohort of STEAM-Ahead. 

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Fabrication Station

Motika says that the vision for West is to grow the program not only as a magnet for all students in the district interested in the STEAM fields, but also as a mechanism for transforming practices within the school.  STEAM Ahead-NH teachers are proving that inter-disciplinary project-based learning, and “un-leveling” classes not only motivates students (nearly 100% daily attendance in the program compared with 87% school-wide), but can improve learning outcomes.  Motika adds, “Our ideas would not have meant much if we didn’t have a solid team of teachers willing to take risks, change their practices, and try new things”. The program which began this year with a ninth grade cohort will expand next year to include new faculty members and a tenth grade. This year’s teaching team consists of Christine Aspinwall, Dan Colburn, Rachel Belmont, Sandra Ratliff, and Robin Henkle. According to Motika, this year’s group of STEAM Ahead teachers has proven to be great collaborators, sharing ideas openly with a constant eye on trying new things.  

One of the key reasons ERC opted to support STEAM Ahead is that unlike many "STEM" programs, STEAM-Ahead NH is open to all students, not just those who "test in" or bring prior high grades. When queried how and why that happened, and what have the results been, Motika responds in animated fashion: “When the collaboration began among community partners, higher education representatives and West HS educators, some people saw STEAM Ahead as a selective program.  But there was a small and persistent group who insisted that the program represent the whole school and the city in terms of its diversity --economic, English Language learners, students with special needs, and varying academic histories. It was also important that it be “un-leveled” because many ideas about students’ abilities are not based in learning science and limit their opportunities to grow. We wanted to show that good learning is possible in the more natural, heterogeneous settings we find in life and work.  Fortunately, many of the grants we applied for required that kind of inclusiveness, and so the program was designed to be open to all interested students. 

“Our results have proven that given the right environment, any student can succeed.  Our attendance rate alone impresses educators, politicians, and community partners –we’re doing something that is getting kids excited about coming to school.  Add a low failure rate, and the fact that students who did not perform well in middle school and were “tracked” into lower level classes have come into STEAM Ahead and now achieve at higher levels, and we have exciting results to bring to the larger faculty and the community. Words cannot express how proud I am of the teacher team and the way they embraced this project of making learning fun, exciting, and engaging for kids.”

STEAM Ahead NH Engineering Lab

Veteran science instructor Christine Aspinwall, herself a graduate of Manchester HS West, was looking for an opportunity to recharge herself and get away from the district’s “leveling” system. Aspinwall says, “Students understood that they had been placed in the ‘low’ levels, which is not helpful or motivating, to say the least, and often the “upper-level” students had an air of superiority that may or may not have been justified, but made for an unhelpful dynamic. I love the heterogeneous grouping, the dynamic is so different. I love the fact that I have seen students that were relatively unsuccessful in middle school, find their voice and grow. With the right learning opportunities, everyone learns and contributes, and everyone feels like part of our community”.

Aspinwall and Principal Motika have been enthusiastic about ERC as a partner due to its commitment to school re-design, not simply working within the boundaries of conventional school ideas and practices. As Aspinwall says, “I love the permission and support in breaking free from traditions that don’t work that well. As a biologist, I have an adapt-or-die outlook, and this fits right in for me.”

As things kicked off last fall, Lucy Weathers, a VISTA volunteer, was a fortunate find for the STEAM Team, working as college and career counselor but also as a development, public relations and community liaison for the program, helping to create real world connections to what the students are learning in STEAM classrooms. Weathers says that in-city partners like Dyn, SilverTech, and Admix have not only contributed financially but also continue to give time, effort, and experience to our students.

Currently operating without an art teacher assigned to the program, the team is help fulfill the “A” (arts) by creating a humanities aspect to all of its engineering projects, and to further the fine arts aspect STEAM has turned to the community for help. They have taken learning voyages to two well-known artistic outlets in Manchester, the Currier Museum of Art and the Palace Theatre. A search is currently under way for Artists-in-Residence -community members, students, and professionals- to get involved in any aspect of the arts; fine arts, dance, theatre, vocal music, etc. to infuse into instructional units. Says Weathers, “We’re excited to have anyone from the community –artists, business people, college students, volunteers- come in and get involved. Please be in touch with us if you have ideas and energy, whatever form that may take. Our commitment is to building and growing without boundaries”.

The Six Myths of Coaching New School Leaders

By Wayne Ogden

Myth # 1: Confidential coaching is the responsibility of the Superintendent

REALITY:  Most Superintendents do not have adequate time to effectively coach their new school leaders. Even if a Superintendent has time, there exists an inherent conflict in the roles of confidential coach and a boss who evaluates a new leader. Principals who are new to a district or new to the role need a dedicated, confidential coach from outside the organization who can be trusted to address a leader’s uncertainties, concerns and challenges in a new, intense and complicated environment.

Myth # 2: Our school district cannot afford to hire external coaches for our new school leaders

REALITY:  A Rand Corporation study reports that 20% of newly hired school leaders leave their position within two years of employment, with urban districts reporting principal “failure rates” of almost 50% within the first five years. Numerous national studies link principal turnover as “very strongly negatively related to student achievement”. (Napthali, Hoff, 2014) In New England, a typical three-year contract for a new school leader with salary and benefits ranges from $300,000 to more than $500,000. A typical one-year contract for an external coach is roughly $10,000, a modest sum to insure the success of a new principal, especially given the cost of a new search process and the impact on to student achievement and school culture.

Myth # 3: My School Board/Committee will never understand or support the idea of spending money on coaches for our new principals.

Reality: Increasingly sophisticated Board members know that from Fortune 500 companies to politics, from professional sports to the fine and performing arts, highly successful leaders use coaches to help them excel at what they do. Seasoned decision-makers make these strategic investments because they understand that organizations with new leaders perform better with high-quality, dedicated coaching.

Myth # 4: We already mentor our new leaders with an experienced principal in our district.  

REALITY:  Although colleague principals are invaluable for sharing the customs, routines & traditions of a district, they have a full time job and, frequently, on-going crisis and dilemmas of their own. Research and experience have also shown that the effectiveness of these relationships wanes because these “mentors” in most cases do not have adequate training to be a “thought partner” for a new building leader, nor the time for reading, analysis, problem-solving and deliberation.

Myth # 5: No new principal has the time to be sitting down regularly for “therapy sessions” with a coach.

REALITY:  High-quality coaching is not therapy nor does having a coach imply that a new principal has flaws or shortcomings. Good coaching provides customized opportunities for principals to think deeply about the many important decisions they must make. It allows time and opportunity for questioning and reflection. Furthermore, a skilled coach provides the opportunity for a new leader to process ideas as they develop and to obtain feedback from a trusted, expert confidant before an idea, initiative or piece of writing goes public. Time for the coaching relationship to prosper comes from time not wasted on mistakes and false starts.

Myth # 6: There is little that a coach who does not know our “system” can do to help a new school principal in our district.

REALITY: An external coach is a trained expert in both leadership and management. They are thought partners for new principals to help them reflect on the regular challenges of the job. While schools and districts may differ in some aspects, the critical requirements of the position are generally similar across all schools. Coaching can be customized to address a new leader’s needs by providing a menu of supports such as:

·      Entry planning

·      Co-observations of teachers

·      Feedback on writing (evaluations, newsletters, correspondence)

·      Learning walks, mini-observations or“rounds” visits

·      Conferencing skills/Having difficult conversations

·      Building leadership capacity for student achievement

·      Strategic goal setting and budget development

·      Facilitating opportunities for student voice

·      Leading successful meetings and teams

·      Community engagement strategies