Dangerously Irrelevant | @mcleod

Attaching band-aids to our current work doesn’t change much

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Image credit: Patching up school items, Penywise, Bigstock

Until the life success of our students is more important than our own comfort levels, any change we initiate is doomed.

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Jennifer Rich said:

It has been lamented before that our children are overprogrammed and our schools are pushed to the brink with standards and standardized tests. We have also managed to slip down the rabbit hole with character education and social-emotional learning. Somehow, rather than following Mister Rogers’ lead, rather than being responsive to what our children need when they need it, our school districts buy expensive social-emotional learning programs.

We spend thousands to import standardized curricula to teach young children about regulating their emotions, while never pausing to ask the kids in front of us what feelings they have, and why. Schools embrace “character counts” programs and offer students rewards for kindness, rather than simply expect kindness from everyone and model it ceaselessly.

What if we took the bold, brave step and did what Mister Rogers did in each episode: slow down? Rogers took time to explain things to his young friends: feeding the fish, how long one minute really is, how to control “the mad you feel,” and what it means to be a friend. Perhaps our classes would be a chapter behind in math. It is possible, even likely, that they would be better human beings learning math, better able to envision using their new skills in democratic ways.

via https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-mister-rogers-voice-of-reason-in-the-tumultuous-60s-still-rings-true

Great point. Reminds me of all of those awful advisory period / home room curricula that schools can purchase… Hey, teachers, connect with your students by implementing this artificial activity that we bought for you to use!

We can’t purchase meaningful relationships with students from a vendor.

Image credit: Teacher in library with students, weedezign, BigStock

Tomorrow I have the privilege of launching a 7-day Innovation Academy with school leaders across the state of North Dakota. The dates are spread out across the year. We end next May. 

The Innovation Academy is sponsored by my national center, CASTLE, and the North Dakota Council of Educational Leaders (NDCEL), with the extremely generous support of Ted Dintersmith, author of the excellent book, What School Could Be, and executive producer of the amazing film, Most Likely to Succeed. North Dakota’s Governor and other state organizations have been focusing on school innovation for many years now. I am honored to have the opportunity to build upon their past work.

We have 72 participants – yes, that’s right, 72! – in the year-long Innovation Academy, representing a variety of school districts and other organizations across North Dakota:

• Alexander,
• Beulah,
• Bismarck,
• Fargo,
• Grand Forks
• Jamestown,
• Mandan,
• McKenzie County,
• Northern Cass,
• Rugby,
• Solen/CB,
• Valley City,
• Williston,
• Legacy Children’s Foundation,
• Missouri River Education Cooperative,
• North Dakota Council of Educational Leaders,
• North Dakota Department of Public Instruction,
• North Dakota Governor’s Innovation Task Force, and the
• South East Education Cooperative.

THIS is my favorite kind of work: long-term investments in leadership capacity-building. Previous statewide or in-district innovation academies in Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and Kentucky all have gone incredibly well. I can’t wait for tomorrow! 

What are you doing to invest in your leaders’ ability to facilitate transformative school change?

Image credit: David Flowers

Journalist I.F. Stone said:

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” Or, as Camus put it: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

via https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-global-warming.html

Although this article is in the context of climate change, I thought it quite apt for our efforts at school transformation. It’s so easy to feel down about the slow pace of change and our perceived lack of progress. As leaders and parents, we must be determined and persistent and dogged in our quest for something better for our children.

We must.

Image credit: Woman rolling a giant stone, Sergey Nivens, BigStock

After 4+ years of piloting our 4 Shifts discussion protocol with thousands of educators, I am delighted to announce that our new book, Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning, is now available!

Over the past few years the protocol has really started to take off. In schools and districts all around the world, we have teachers, principals, instructional coaches, and technology integrationists who are integrating the protocol into their instructional (re)design work. We are finding that the protocol accommodates a variety of educator starting points, skill sets, and comfort levels. It’s a great complement to SAMR because it’s an instructional discussion tool, not just a technology usage continuum. And it’s occupying a wonderful design space between more traditional practice and full blown, ‘gold standard,’ multiple-week PBL projects.

To celebrate the book’s release, Julie Graber and I are inviting educators to participate in the #4Shifts Challenge and publicly (re)design a lesson, unit, or instructional activity using several of the sections or bullet points in the protocol as levers for (re)design. If we want deeper learning, greater student agency, more authentic work, and rich technology infusion to happen, we have to design for them. We hope that you will join us in sharing what powerful instructional redesign can look like. We need examples that we can point educators to for inspiration! If you’re game, simply post your redesign and share it using the #4Shifts hashtag, which will help us find your post and drive some traffic to your site! Thanks!

Why buy the book when the protocol is free?!

The protocol is open source and always will be, as will numerous other resources on the 4 Shifts Protocol resource page. Feel free to use and/or modify those resources as desired. The new book, however, takes a deeper dive with the protocol. In the book we provide eight concrete examples of lesson and unit (re)design so that you can see the protocol in practice across various grade levels and subject areas. The book is aimed squarely at practitioners and their day-to-day instructional (re)design needs. We also explain in the book why we think the protocol is a great complement to SAMR, TPACK, RAT, PIC-RAT, and the Arizona and Florida Technology Integration Matrices. And we include numerous tips and suggestions for using the protocol in your school(s)!

Let Julie and I know what you think. Please reach out if you have questions or if there are ways that we can be of support to you. We are happy to set up a chat to address questions or concerns and share how we are using the protocol with educators. And if you feel like leaving us an Amazon review, we’d love that too! 

A great big thank you to the thousands of educators who have helped make the protocol better!

Learning math by building bridges or designing aircraft wings is inspiring. Chugging through the odd-numbered practice problems at the end of the chapter is not.

Improving our community by collecting data and investigating the causes of local environmental challenges is inspiring. Participating in artificial, recipe-like science ‘experiments’ from a publishing company is not.

Wrestling with controversial but important political issues is inspiring. Regurgitating decontextualized historical names, dates, and places is not.

Writing for and advocating to authentic audiences around societal issues that we’re passionate about is inspiring. Writing 5-paragraph essays about books that we don’t care about is not.

Investigating our own questions about the world and how it works is inspiring. Spitting back the ‘right answer’ to someone else’s low-level questions is not.

Finding areas of interest and passion is inspiring. Slogging through a lifeless textbook is not.

Active, energetic, enthusiastic, maybe messy, and probably noisy collaboration is inspiring. Working in isolation and sitting quietly in rows and columns are not.

Using technology to learn with and from students in other parts of the world is inspiring. Using technology to complete digital worksheets is not.

Interdisciplinary learning that is seen by students as meaningful, authentic, and connected to the real world is inspiring. Subject-siloed, isolated, disconnected learning is not.

Internships and community partnerships and impactful service learning opportunities are inspiring. Pretend word problems and scenarios are not.

Learning spaces that honor children’s dignity and value their worth are inspiring. Learning spaces that are overwhelmingly focused on compliance are not.

And so on…

Inspiring… or not. What vision are we selling to our students, parents, and communities?

And, no, we don’t have to do the uninspiring before we can get to the inspiring, particularly if we rarely get beyond the former…

Image credit: Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin

The St. Vrain Valley School District is arguably the most innovative school district here in Colorado. And I’m incredibly excited to lead their next principal licensure cohort starting in January 2019. Woo hoo!

Here is the district’s latest video. Public education proud, indeed. Get ready to take the world by #StVrainStorm!!!!

Happy viewing!

On a side note…

1. Notice that there’s nothing in here about content regurgitators.
2. What videos could you make to get YOUR community excited about what your schools are doing?

Recently I shared some stories of youth using technology in amazing, empowered ways with a group of educators. One of them asked me:

So you believe that students should be on computers all the time in school?

I was taken aback for a second. It’s an enormous leap from ‘technology can empower students in interesting ways’ to ‘technology should be used in instruction all of the time every day.’ I quickly clarified that, although I surely believe in the power of technology to empower students, I don’t actually believe what she alleged. But it was a good reminder that when we’re having conversations or working with educators in professional learning settings, what we say to them may not be what they hear.

Everyone brings their own lenses and belief systems to the work. We know this. Sometimes we see it in the body posture of our conversational colleagues: head nods, smiles, and lean-ins are easily discernible, as are frowns, crossed arms, and lean-backs. Sometimes they’re just disengaged or disinterested – it’s always a joy to share something that you think is really powerful about student learning – something that you think will really resonate with folks – and then have someone from the group ask you about … the digital countdown timer you’re using. It is what it is.

As school leaders, if we want to effectuate lasting change, we have to meet our people where they are. And that means unpacking their lenses and belief systems so that we can connect with their side of the conversation and their side of the thinking process. This is difficult, complex work but it’s necessary. Otherwise we’re just talking past folks.

One more time: as with our children, just because we said it to our fellow educators doesn’t mean they heard it, understood it, or cared about it.

Image credit: Shrugging woman, koldunovaaa, Bigstock

Seth Godin said:

Useful modern education is not the work of rote. When you tell someone the answer and then give them a test to see if they remember what you told them, that’s not education, it’s incented memorization.

via https://seths.blog/2018/09/the-trick-question