From the home office

Thanks to Carolyn Foote for tagging me with this meme:

List the top 5 to 10 things that you do almost every day that help you
to be successful. They can be anything at all, but they have to be
things that you do at least 4 or 5 times every week. Anything less than
that may be a hobby that helps you out, but we are after the real day
in and day out habits that help you to be successful.

This is momentous; one because this is my first opportunity to have been tagged by someone, which shows that there are definitely people out there at least hearing what I am saying (a very cool feeling); and two because my wife and I often talk about what we need to do to become the people we promised each other we'd be when we made the big decision to create a life together. So, without further ado, here is my short list:

1. When discussing something, realize that I might know what the "last word" might be, but be brave enough and wise enough not to say it.

2. Read much more than I write.

3. Earn your showers: this sounds foul, but it refers to the fact that there must be some part of a day that is dedicated to physical activity.

4. Get down on my hands and knees and play whatever my two-year old tells me to.

5. Smile when I am not expected to.

6. Make light of stressful situations at work, because it does not have to define us.

7. Make lists, and complete them religiously.

8. Play with new ideas.

9. Set aside time that is dedicated to making me a better member of my family.

10. Booby Traps (and I thank Charles Youngs for this one). Build pleasurable experiences into my days. Naps, ice cream, etc. can be planned for as well as spontaneous.

Those that I tag follow below.

• Brad Davis
• Bing Miller (whom I share a common, yet heretofore unknown, alma mater with--go 'Cuse)
• Barry Bachenmeier
• Barbara Barreda
  

Success is a interesting word, and Carolyn phrases it perfectly when she says that implying that its opposite is failure is a sketchy thing. Success to me is such a personal decision, meaning that when you decide to be a success and when you decide that you are a success, depends solely on your readiness and your definitions. External definitions of success place such undue stress on us, but are often what derail us as we move through life. Have you ever reached a measurable level of success and felt unfulfilled? For me, it was receiving my master's degree. When I finished it, I remember feeling that nothing had really changed, that, yes, I had worked hard to achieve this, but it wasn't as momentous to me as it was to say, my mother.

What I had in mind at the time, and still today, involves much more than that. I had decided that my success depended less on that degree, and more on my actions after that degree.

Balancing Levels of Concern

Teaching has always been synonymous with caring, and I see this personified at all levels. Whether I am at an elementary school, like I was yesterday, or dodging careening students at a high school like today, the teachers manifest their "caring" in different ways. Chris Lehman at Practical Theory posted yesterday about his definition of caring as it relates to teaching and professionalism, and I think it was, as is usual with Chris, a timely post. We have all been engaged in conversation at some point while explaining our choice to become educators to either parents or friends, when the idea that you have "passion" or that you "love kids" comes forth, either from you or as a suggestion from the other conversants. What does this really mean for us as educators? Many people in various professions love kids too, even ones that aren't there own. Christian Long says that we should be in love not necessarily with the children, but with the collisions we create with ideas, learning, and the students we teach. I dig that, but there has to be room for the idea of caring, or genuinely having a concern over their future, and the future of those that love them.

To continue a recent them on this blog (which might be long in the tooth), I read Chris' post with an eye on Ashley Merryman's almost simultaneous post on the responses to her an Po Bronson's article on Praise. They say similar things, whether Chris is talking about parents and choices being difficult, but necessary, or Ashley commenting that teachers should feel more comfortable about accountability at all costs. Take a look at a short sample:

Chris Lehman:

The best parents aren’t the ones who smoke pot with their kids because, ‘Well, they were going to try it anyway.’ And they aren’t the ones who let kids think that it’s o.k. to break rules, etc… they are the ones who teach kids the lessons they need to succeed in life, even when those lessons are really hard to learn. Same is true for teaching.

Ashley Merryman:

Since we began our research on praise and self-esteem, Po and I both heard many stories from parents and teachers about self-esteem issues. My favorite was from an English teacher. She'd recently given one of her students a "C," and the mother came down to complain, saying "You're ruining my child's self-esteem." The teacher shot back, "I'm not here to make him feel better; I'm here to make him do better."

For two years before I become a technology coordinator for this
district, I was a history teacher on a middle school "team." Our
philosophy, though strangely unspoken at first, was heavy on caring.
The lengthy list of issues that our students ran into, most
non-academic, were handled with a quasi-medical approach of "first-do
no harm." We genuinely cared for our students and we did everything we
could to make that known to them. Did this produce a major change in
test scores? Not that it matters, but probably not. Did it directly
impact learning? Again, I don't have that answer. What I do know is
that we all left those two years, teachers and students alike, with a
deeper level of respect for one another. What I now want to ask myself, however, is whether or not I was too focused on keeping kids feeling good rather than doing them the service of being honest.

This is the "art" of teaching, the intangible aspects of being a teacher that no length or depth of teacher training will prepare you for. These types of conversations bring us deeper into introspection, which I believe will lead us towards a higher level of empathy, one that does not involve just self-esteem for our students, but will allow us to make the difficult teaching decisions that we should.

Value-based learning

This was taken in one of the science labs at SLA last week and it reminded me of a few things, the most prescient being that I love the idea of a school organized around a few wonderful, core ideas. Chris Lehmann has this school humming from what we could see, and I have to think that these ideas are essential to his early success.

In a school here in New Jersey where I used to teach, we had similar organizing principles, called the Quality Standards, by which the students were held accountable for the richness of their work. These here are more geared to the high school level and the methodologies that SLA is employing to reach those goals. Ours were more centered around the middle school mentality and establishing habits in the type of work students produced. They looked something like this:

• Following Directions- the ability to perform the tasks asked of you
  
• Presentation- how your work appeared to others when finished
• Supporting Details- was your work substantiated
• Connections- were you able to make a meaningful connection from your research to something outside of the scope of the project
  
• Higher Level Thinking- the ability to synthesize and evaluate in your work
  
• Evaluation and Revision- your work showed that you had spent time in thought evaluating your finished product

From looking at the SLA model in comparison, I can see that the focus has shifted in education to reflect a new skill set. We want our students to be able to competently show us their abilities in some form--it's the creative component that we keep hearing so much about through people like Dan Pink.

Having been to SLA, but not really having spoken to Chris about these values, here is how I have come to interpret them:

• Inquiry- what questions are you asking, and what makes you ask them
  
• Research- use every attainable and relevant resource available to you to answer these questions
  
• Collaboration- can you use the technology available to you to create meaning with others
  
• Presentation- showing an audience what you have uncovered and the medium in which you choose is paramount in order to convey your message
  
• Reflection- you must be the first one to evaluate the merits of your own research and thought process.

The last paragraph of the Mission and Vision section of their website is what really separates this place from most other secondary institutions at the moment:

At the SLA, learning will not be just something that happens from 8:30am to 3:00pm, but a continuous process that expands beyond the four walls of the classroom into every facet of our lives.

This is where I think we need to move to.