leading from the heart

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A while ago I created a post in response to recurring themes I was seeing in many blogs around creating change in our schools towards authentic, meaningful learning situations for our students and teachers.

Here is that post.

Today I finally got around to creating a wiki to continue the conversation (thanks to John Brandt for the reminder).

I’ve called it TeachingFutures and am inviting all of my wonderful readers to join and add to the conversation. I think I made it public to join, but if it isn’t, post a comment asking for an invite.

As you can probably tell from that last line, I am a wikinewbie and will be relying on your help to make this one work for us

Here’s a question - I have added a page, but it does not appear as a tab…is it supposed to? Will it only appear if I create a link to it from a main page? I went to edit the ‘home’ page but did not seem to have the option to keep the welcome content there, which describes a bit about how a wiki works. I’d like to keep that there for any other wikinewbies who may need it. I did manage to create a link from the menu side bar, though…woohoo!

So, to see the new page (and discussion) I started, click on the sidebar link called ‘Discovery’ when you get there.

Technorati Tags: wiki learning teaching education appreciativeinquiry conversation will-richardson dennis-harter kevin-sandridge nancy-riffer john-brandt tracy-rosen future development collaboration edtech educationtechnology web2.0 support vision schooltech relevance professionallearningcommunities mindfullness leadership emergentdesign connections change communitiesofpractice

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I came across this quote today on Angela Maiers’ blog:

“When will we teach our children in school what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are
unique. In all of the world there is no other child exactly like you.
In the millions of years that have passed there has never been another
child like you. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a
Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel.”

~ Cellist Pablo Casal~

It rips my heart out each time I hear a teacher refer to a student as a monster, as unteachable, as not wanting to learn.

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I have been involved in a very stimulating conversation on Durff’s blog around the issue of ethics in the classroom.

Both Durff and I agree that ethical behaviour must be stressed in the classroom and modeled by teachers. I think you can tell from our comments that we are both quite passionate about this.

Where our views start to differ is how this is done. You can read about our differing viewpoints in the comments to the original post - what I find interesting is the conversation that has developed.

Ethics is messy - it really does have to do with our own world-views and it can be messy and difficult to talk about the things that really matter to us, the things that hit us in our gut, that touch our values around what it means to be human. The rub in all of this is that we do not all have the same values nor the same world view.

Two of my beliefs related to this topic:

• I strongly believe that we can not assume there to be one ethical plumbline to live by. Furthermore I think that this assumption implies another, that if one does not adhere to this plumbline then one is acting unethically. I think this is problematic in any society that is diverse.
• I believe that ethical decisions should be contextual and arrived at from within a situation rather than determined from external sources like codes of conduct/ethics. (I have written more on this subject, if you are at all interested I invite you to read this paper, though I warn you it is a bit lengthy Conversations for ethical decision-making in secondary schools (Rosen, 2005) )

I do think it important - indeed necessary - to create a common ground in order to be able to have conversations around ethics, in order to be able to teach about ethics.

In trying to understand Durff’s insistence on an ethical plumbline, I wonder if perhaps this common ground is something along the lines of what she means.

Such a common ground for me would have to:

• acknowledge that there is more than one world-view in the room
• acknowledge that my world-view is not better or worse than yours, just different
• be prepared to learn about different beliefs and world-views
• be prepared to take a considered position when I am involved in decision-making
• understand that a considered position includes more than one or two considerations

What would be important for you to have in this common ground?

Technorati Tags: ethics, world-view, decision-making, behaviour, modeling, teaching, reflection, mindfullnes, culture, community,

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I’ll be starting a new job on the 27th of August. I’ll be teaching and designing a new program for students in Grades 9-11 at Howard S. Billings High School in Chateauguay, Quebec.

This morning I published a new blog to accompany this new adventure of mine and to give voice to the stories I am sure will unfold.

Bridges

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Since yesterday, I have been involved in a conversation on Will Richardson’s post The Future of Teaching.

The first part of this post was originally posted as a comment to The Future of Teaching.

I am getting the idea that we, at least those of us involved in this conversation, are ready to act on new ideas. People have asked for priorities, have asked about where we go from here.

I think that something like this can help us get there. I know that Gervase Bushe has been using Appreciative Inquiry with the Vancouver Public School System. This was published in the Summer 2007 edition of the SFU Business Newsletter, the Executive Edge:

In the last Executive Edge newsletter we told you about a $150,000 three-year research project to study a change management trend called appreciative inquiry. It’s a new process that works to change the way people think – to get them thinking collectively about how they want their organization to operate.

Gervase Bushe, SFU Business associate professor of management and organizational change, who is consulting and studying the process and its outcomes at the Vancouver School Board, reported on the results of the first year of study. “Preliminary indications are that the change process has been so successful that the BC Schools Superintendents’ Association is offering appreciative inquiry training and is also planning an appreciative inquiry summit for Kelowna in August,” says Bushe. What’s more, he says, numerous BC School Districts are planning to use appreciative inquiry in their schools next year.

It’s a powerful change process, based in the very foundations that have been brought up in with Will’s post.

Here is a recent article that Gervase wrote, which I think does a great job at outlining just what Appreciative Inquiry is:

G.R. Bushe (2007). Appreciative Inquiry is not about the Positive.

He talks about the generative nature of AI:

Generativity occurs when people collectively discover or create new things that they can use to positively alter their collective future. AI is generative in a number of ways. It is the quest for new ideas, images, theories and models that liberate our collective aspirations, alter the social construction of reality and, in the process, make available decisions and actions that weren’t available or didn’t occur to us before. When successful, AI generates spontaneous, unsupervised, individual, group and organizational action toward a better future.

If we were to design an appreciative change process for our school systems I think we could find our way to get there…together.

It would begin with a conversation that has already begun not only in Will’s post that I referenced above but in various places across the blogosphere - on LeaderTalk, on Scott Mcleod’s blog, Kevin Sandridge’s, Barbara Barreda’s,  Miguel Ghulin’s, Justin Medved’s, Dennis Harter’s, Stephen Ransom’s,  and many others.

Is anyone interested in continuing that conversation? I’d love to be part of the process with you.

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Found this, love it.

We must reject the ideology of the “achievement gap” that absolves
adults of their responsibility and implies student culpability in
continued under-performance. The student achievement gap is merely the
effect of a much larger and more debilitating chasm: The Educator
Achievement Gap. We must erase the distance between the type of
teachers we are, and the type of teachers they need us to be.

From Teaching in the 408 by TMAO (really hoping that means what I think it means.)

Reminds me of a quote that used to hang in a colleague’s office:

If you’ve told him how to do it a million times and he still doesn’t get it, then who is the slow learner?

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I came across this little statistic today.

65%

Proportion
of former public school teachers who say they’re better able to balance
work and life now that they’re working outside the education field.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics Teacher Follow-up Survey.

What do you think about that?

I found it reading an article called Why teachers quit by Kimberley Palmer in Teacher Magazine.

(if you aren’t already a subscriber - register already! It’s free!)

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[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

I will be returning to the classroom at the end of August after a year as a special education consultant and professional development facilitator. I decided to return for a variety of reasons, the most important being that I miss the energy I pick up from daily contact with students and the next that there are so many things I want/need to try with students as their learning contexts change at such an exciting and fast-paced rate. I am excited about this new position because I will be beginning a new program for students who are falling through the cracks in a big high school (Grades 9, 10, 11) and I will have the opportunity to continue my work in professional development within this new school community.

Today I am still a consultant and I am preparing for a teacher induction session we are designing for new teachers in our school system, the Association of Jewish Day Schools of Montreal. (Interestingly enough, I will be facilitating that session on the 21st and participating in one at the new school system on the following day!) The other day I spent the afternoon looking for video examples of different aspects of classroom management to include in the session. What I found was certainly food for reflection.

Essentially, I seem to have a choice between the inspirational teacher a la Erin Gruwell
(Freedom Writers) and Jaime Escalante (Stand and Deliver) in Hollywood teacher movies or the angry teacher in student cell phone videos on youtube.

I have yet to meet a teacher who become one in order to be angry at his or her students or in order to expect mediocrity from them (check out this cute little movie on that theme ) yet … I know teachers who do this on a regular basis.

On the contrary, most teachers I have spoken with became teachers because they want to make a difference in the lives of learners, like Erin Gruwell, and because they want to share a passion they have around a certain subject and see it grow strong in young people, like Jaime Escalante.

I have recently had the pleasure of working with teachers who had forgotten why they became teachers.

Yes, it was a pleasure.

I want to give my reason by framing it a bit first. Kelly Christopherson’s recent post in LeaderTalk addresses the issue of motivation and it got me to thinking.

How do teachers stay motivated to teach and to learn when the playing field changes on such an astounding level?

I am motivated to teach and to learn, to action, when what I am doing has relevance for me because it is tied to my core values, my passion. The answer for me, therefore, lies in this next compound question:

How do we reconnect teachers with their passion AND reframe it within changing contexts?

I firmly believe that before we can motivate teachers to do anything new we need to connect it to what is important to them, to tie it to their values and their passion.

Relevance and seeing purpose are key to internal motivation - and we know that internal motivation is key to learning. Dr. Marvin Marshall writes, in Using a discipline approach to promote learning:

“True change must come from INSIDE an individual, and therefore a teacher must understand how to create an environment in the classroom in which children WANT to learn, WANT to behave appropriately, and WANT to achieve.” (para. 5)

Not only must a teacher understand this for students in the classroom, but the same understandings apply for leaders about the teachers in their schools.

Now, to return to the teachers who had forgotten why they became teachers.

It was a pleasure to work with them because we began a change process that started off as some run-of the mill PD on Differentiated Instruction (DI) that is becoming a shift in school culture that will allow Differentiated Instruction to take root as a learning model in that school.

It was a pleasure because I saw angry and unmotivated teachers rediscover their passion for teaching by being allowed to have the time to talk with each other and their school leaders about their concerns and fears, but most importantly about their dreams for themselves as teachers.

At first, many of the teachers at this school did not want to learn about DI. They said it was nice in an ideal world but would never work in their classrooms. So we stopped teaching the theory and the strategies and we started to focus on the teachers. I asked them - What is it about teaching that touches your soul? And the conversation grew from there. By the end of two sessions the teachers (all but 3 who are still holding out, but their colleagues are working on them!) asked us to return to the DI workshop we had begun because they insisted it was relevant to their needs and the needs of their students.

The school’s principal fully supports the learning that her teachers need to do together and has abolished monthly staff meetings in order to allow structured time for groups of teachers to meet to talk and learn together. This support is integral. The most inspired of teachers can lose their inspiration without it. In researching this post today, I found an article that underlines this importance:

Stand and Deliver Revisited. The untold story behind the famous rise — and shameful fall — of Jaime Escalante, America’s master math teacher.

As I transition back into the classroom and into a new school community I will bring what I learned while working with this group of teachers with me. Values and passion are powerful stuff. If we can stay connected to that our schools will become powerful indeed - and imagine the students!

So, I ask you…

What is it about teaching that touches your soul?

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