THE MINDFUL SCHOOL LEADER

ssoosay’s Simple iphone Lock Screen Mindfulness Reminders (on Flickr)

(A version of this post is currently running at Education Week, and is written by Kirsten Olson and Valerie Brown.)

The work of skillful, mindful leadership in education has never been more challenging.  Only this morning, a lively, Twitter-connected and forward-thinking superintendent wrote to one of us describing her sense that the pockets of innovation and exemplary teaching in her district,  “aren’t even scalable to our 726 square miles,”  although she has been leading this work for many years.  She is considered highly successful, yet she often feels overwhelmed and burned out.

A recent informal survey of school administrators conducted by Jerry Murphy, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (and our colleague in the exploration of self-compassion), showed that among his sample of school leaders attending a professional program on the inner work of leadership,  89% reported feeling overwhelmed, 84% neglected to take care of themselves in the midst of stress, and 80% scolded themselves when they performed less than perfectly–conditions under which few of us are primed to be our best or perform optimally.

Finally, at the most recent Educon meeting, we talked with a group of educators about the political and personal work needed to transform the educational community.  Many described the need to find external community–a group of like-minded colleagues to find courage and support (many educators are finding these communities online)–but also of the need for an internal set of  resources, to provide ballast and calm in the high seas of their chaotic professional environments–to create “permissioning,” as our friend Chad Sansing describes it.

How do we develop both? The capacity to maintain community and conviction for the work one is engaged in–particularly challenging for educators at this moment–and also the internal poise and sense of calm purpose to guide us across the rocky shoals of teaching and leading in our sector?

As mindfulness practitioners with long histories in chaotic, demanding industries, we believe developing simple, daily practices around calming, meta-reflection, pausing, and renewing are central to the work we are trying to accomplish, and vital to tapping the creativity and sense of possibility required to transform our education sector.  As leadership coaches believe our clients are already creative, resourceful, and whole, yet we know in practice, access to creativity and innate wholeness is often illusive for many of our clients.  As Westerners too, we often try to “think” our way into a sense of calm, and underestimate the power of developing daily activities, rituals, and skills that help us focus, get grounded, and center.  We have become convinced that the development of  mindfulness practice is a central piece of courageous, sustainable leadership in education–and greatly undervalued.   And we know that developing mindfulness is not easy.

FINDING MINDFULNESS

One of us (Valerie) first tried a mindfulness meditation class 18 years ago as a way to get relief from a relentless schedule as a lawyer-lobbyist.   In the meditation class the instruction was simple:  Let go of thoughts as they arise. See them like clouds floating in the sky.  “I wrestled with myself.  I tormented myself.  I tied myself up in mental knots.  This seemed so simple and yet, my mind was racing from thought to thought:  I’m sleepy. My back hurts. When is this going to be over?  On and on it went like that for two hours until the final bell rung and the meditation came to an end.  I thought to myself, What a disaster! Oh, well.  I’ll come back next week, and this time, I’ll get it right.  I have been coming back to Monday night meditation, now for almost two decades.  Over time, I have learned skillful means of extending mindfulness into my daily life.”

MINDFULNESS– -SKILLFUL MEANS FOR SCHOOL LEADERS

Mindfulness meditation, the practice of nonjudgmental awareness of what is happening inside and around us in the present moment, is innate to every person.  Mindfulness is a central element of Buddhism and is more than 2500 years old.  It was developed to enhance awareness and wisdom to help people live each day with greater ease.  Today, decades of clinical research supports the use of mindfulness practices, which have been widely adapted across disciplines.

Mindfulness goes deeper than simply generating feelings of relaxation and calm, or developing a toolbox of techniques. It is an embodied practice that creates an inner balance that allows for greater emotional stability, with clarity to act and respond with greater understanding.    Unlike apathy or indifference, mindfulness trains us to accept the moment, without judging it, without the constant running commentary, conceptual elaboration and emotional reactivity about our current condition or our current state of mind.   Awareness and acceptance are the important steps toward transformation.   Mindfulness is not about removing all thoughts (which is not possible anyway), or striving for a particular feeling of bliss.  It isn’t about mastery of the mind over body, or ‘being in a zone’, or getting rid of aspects of ourselves that we don’t like.  Instead, we train ourselves in observing and accepting without judgment sensations and emotions, even painful ones, which with practice, builds tolerance and resilience under stress.

Try this practice:  Every day, every few hours, stop and take three deep breaths through the nose, feeling the belly rise and fall.  Notice how you feel.  This builds awareness of the body and breath, and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the body and mind, reducing stress.

Try this practice:  Next time you walk around the school building notice how you are walking.  Feel your shoes on the floor.  Feel your spine tall and strong, and your shoulders wide and relaxed. Allow yourself to become keenly aware of your surroundings.  This strengthens focus on the present, sharpening awareness and mental clarity.

Try this practice:  Next time you eat lunch, try just eating not reading, texting, or attending to anything else.  Notice the food.  Savor flavors. This enhances self-care and self-nurturance, and elements of self-compassion.

Try this practice:  Next conversation, practice listening.  Set aside the desire to fix, solve, correct or judge the other person.  Listen not just with your ears (to hear), but with your eyes (to see), your mind (to think), heart (to feel), and your attention (to focus).  What do you notice about yourself?  How does it feel to listen deeply?  Listening practice builds empathy and compassion, essential tools of emotionally intelligent school leaders, and promotes connectedness with others, a fundamental element of community.

As leadership coaches, we work with individuals on listening to their inner stories, learning to breathe through disequilibrium, to caretake and pause in the intense volatility and complexity of administrator’s and teacher’s jobs.  We find that by learning how to be more present, through pausing and centering, and by explicitly developing greater self-compassion, individuals are better able to deal with work that is uncertain, ambiguous and challenging.  With these practices our clients find that life offers refuge and even inspiration, and that refuge is always there for them, right inside of them.

Our mentor Parker Palmer, speaks poignantly about the need for coherence between our inner and outer worlds, between the “person we are inside,” and the external world of our work, of the desire for alignment between “soul and role.”  Mindfulness practices in education is a rapidly emerging area, with possibilities for depth of awareness, focus, clarity, concentration and understanding that can profoundly enhance teaching, learning, and leading.  School leaders who practice mindfulness serve as inspirational role models for emotional and social intelligence, uniting schools, teachers, boards, students, and parents.  Leaders with these skills bring a richness and depth to their roles.  Mindful school leaders mean more coherent and effective schools, teachers who are more focused and better supported, and students who have the skills and appetite to interact with the complex world outside the school door.  Mindfulness is for everyone.  We’re taking a deep breath right now.

Kirsten Olson, Ed.D. is Chief Listening Officer at Old Sow Coaching and Consulting, which specializes in transformational leadership services for educational organizations. She is the author of Wounded By School and founding board member of IDEA, the Institute for Democratic Education In America. Valerie Brown, J.D. is a former attorney and lobbyist, and is now president of Mindful Solutions, promoting transformation leadership services through awareness and renewal.  They are in private practice together offering leadership coaching and professional development solutions.

The Future of the Dissertation: Hack the Diss

A couple of days ago a fine Harvard Graduate School of Education colleague, Zac Chase, and co-conspirators Tom Neville and Paul Tritter, put on a Hack the Diss (HtD) event in Cambridge, MA.  “Tonight is intended to provoke discussion of scholarly work’s future forms and purposes.”  

The evening juxtaposed John Dewey and Woody Guthrie in a knowledge-creation event around the first chapter of Kelly Spurgeon’s dissertation. Guitars, interpretive diss dancing, beer drinking, and the nature of the educative experience were highlights. (What is a meaningful life?” is at the heart of it, one participant concluded.) The evening proposed: a dissertation should be useful, a dissertation should reach beyond the academy–and asked the question: what is the performative nature of knowledge?

The night concluded with a panel on the future of the diss.  (Among the panelists were John Bohannon, Ph.D., David Damrosch, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Schnapp, Ph.D., who are invited to post their remarks here.  I was a panelist.)

My reflections on writing a diss, and the diss’ future, from the panel:

“The dissertation represents two extreme forms of human behavior: a hazing/belongness ritual for becoming an academic–a position I believe is increasingly thankless and ossified; and an Iron Man in the world of knowing: KNOWING as a way of being and seeking meaning in the world which–while powerful and occasionally pleasurable–has extreme limitations.

In my own personal practice at age 52, I am here to testify that knowing, in a classical Western sense, will get you only so far.

 And yet I enjoyed writing my diss, which became the basis for much of my work as an activist and a lot of the broader, more popular writing I’m engaged with, and formed the underpinnings of many of my larger projects.  My work with my diss took me out in the world in ways I never expected, and as something you’ve got to do for a fair number of years, I was passionately interested in the questions I was investigating.  I thought they were, and are, critically important.

I had fun, and I was playing, while I was doing the work, which is a high goal for me.

After completing diss, and kinda sorta beginning a somewhat conventional academic career–I found myself chafing and sweating as an academic, like a horse that pulls badly in harness.  I was a pony that could not be broken to saddle.  It became clear to me that did not want to give my life force to the support of the institution, an institution I regard as fundamentally colonizing, and at best morally neutral.  I left.

The future of the diss depends on the future of the institution of higher education.  Institutions of higher education are increasingly imperiled as knowledge certifiers and credentializers, as knowledge becomes more freely available and notions of validity are increasingly democratized and situationally-determined, as an evening like this one vividly demonstrates.  

 So my first question is: Do you really want to be an academic?

Over at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, moving in exactly the wrong direction, instead of embracing its marginality and low status in the academic pecking order, which would allow it to be inventive, playful, and counter-poised, its doctoral research products have become ever more conservative, stylized in a conventional social science direction, and unfortunately, less challenged by doctoral students desperate for jobs. 

The role of doctoral student is infantilizing and diminishing.  One leaves the pantheon of larger life–whatever that was–to enter the feudal guild of the department, where learning the conventions of the pecking order and adhering to thought-regimes of the professors upon whom one depends becomes essential, urgent, necessary. But it is a hair cut of almost supernatural force. 

Consequently, few students challenge the “real science” form of doctoral research at all.   The kinds of doctoral research projects approved now, even in the time since I have graduated from the school, have suffered from a terrible methodological narrowing:  What kind of inference can you draw from this particular research design, formulaic to the degree that it hardly matters whether you are doing qualitative or quantitative research.   

Low-status disciplines like education suffer from this narrowing and professional status insecurity most acutely. This is all ironic, of course, because where the real action is in the opening out of the form, the breaking up of the convention, the jumping over the walls of the institution and speaking out into a larger world of discontinuity, challenge, and paradigm shift.

The future of the diss, what kind of diss matters, and whether the diss itself matters, depends on your answers to some deeply personal questions. 

Does your dissertation concern questions that deeply matter to you?  That drive you, and involve the future of the work?

Or are you doing the diss to enter the academic guild, to get a job, to become a junior faculty member, to eventually get tenure so that then…in some imagined time…you will begin to express yourself?  If so, can you afford to wait?

If you love the production of ideas, and you are not tied to a lab, why do you need to be tied to the university? What kinds of social networks and platforms do you need to stimulate your ideas? With whom can you form alliances so that you might be able to do the kind of research teaching, and writing you wish to do?

 Most important, with whom do you want to communicate? And how?

Play is what most strikes me about the projects in John Bohannon’s DANCE YOUR DISSERTATION, or what I’ve seen here tonight.  Play is how we are going to shift the form. And the enormous power of play is in its triviality.

Is your future too serious?” 

What are you hacking, right now? 
 

Why Old School School?

 

“This is real school, this is actual learning.”

 

Every school has the potential for doing this.  Why old school school?

Bowl of Wishes for American Education

Does wishing have power? Is there danger in wishing? Are some wishes more worthy than others? And what about the ancient link between suffering and desire?

Recently we had an education party at my house.  The room was filled with high school students, activists, graduate students, policy makers, academics, deans of education, teachers, writers, and administrators.  At the end of the party we asked folks to make a wish for American education.

Here are some of their wishes, from the bowl of wishes they created…

“I wish that schools will embrace the arts, creativity, and alternative models.”

“My wish is that we leave the punitive/threatening language of a Nation at Risk, NCLB behind and become a Nation Inspired by activist organizations in education.”

“I wish government will organize large-scale conferences to pull together the multiple NPOs to share objectives.”

“Compassion.”

“That students experience joy in school.”

“My wish is for better school systems all over.  There needs to be a change not just in MCAS but in all aspects.”

“I wish for a day where students can feel that their voices are heard and they have an influence. Also that all students have a mentor to support them and encourage them.”

“My wish is that every child in our country experiences the opportunity to think, problem- solve and innovate.”

“I wish that we mend the broken relationships in our communities, in our schools, and in our homes.  That we work to build relationships of care and respect between young people, their parents, and educators.”

“I wish all students would feel valued and connected in school.”

What does it unleash to wish? What does wishing clarify?

What’s your wish?

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Sunday, October 10 on a beautiful, almost hot day in Boston, over 5000 students, parents,

My son Sam and me with DIY signs

children, educators, working people took to the streets of downtown Boston to join in support for Occupy Boston, a peaceful demonstration that says THE PEOPLE ARE TOO BIG TO FAIL.  Income inequality is killing us, corporations are not people, the middle class is dying.  We, the 99% have been much too quiet. We must take action.

I hit the streets with family, friends, students.  Using the human mike, this was the most well-organized, peaceful protest I’ve been a part of recently.  Students from UMass, Tufts, Bard, Harvard and Northeastern explained procedures as we got started.  ”We have a constitutional right to be here.”

“We have a constitutional right to be here.”

“If you need medical attention this is what you do.”  ”There are peacekeepers wearing green t-shirts in the crowd.”  ”We expect this to be a peaceful demonstration.”  ”If someone gets hurt, lock wrists and surround them.” “The police are our friends.”

Beginning slowly and picking up energy as we moved, amidst drums, a corporate 10K going on simultaneously, chantkeepers (“Ask me what democracy looks like/This is what democracy looks like!”), we left the Boston Common and marched through the financial district, our numbers growing audibly to roaring crowds.  We passed few observers who did not seem with the message. (“We are

"Self-Employed. $12K for health insurance. No retirement. I am the 99%"

the 99% You are the 99%!”)  A man working at a parking garage yelled back, “Hell yes I’m the 99%!”

At one point some office workers–folks in their offices on Columbus Day–held up a sign from their second story window. It was of FDR, with a slogan about reinstating the Glass-Steagall act, to huge roars from the crowd.  It was that kind of group–wonky Boston, in part.

Great Protester Signs:  “Things are bad when English teachers use swear words. Shit is Fucked Up.”

“1% cannot stop a new consciousness.”

I Was Told There Would Be Cake

“I was told there would be cake.”

“Who put the Slitherins in charge?”

Who Put The Slitherins In Charge?

Even with 50 Occupy Boston protesters arrested late last night, this is a movement growing all over the country.  We, the 99% are rising up to say we will not be quiet as our government is overtaken by private interests and economic elites.

#OccupyEdu is another way to get in

#Occupyedu is another way to join this movement around education, if protesting outside your door isn’t possible.

Just get in.  Just protest.

Once you’ve stood up, you’ll never sit down.

Let’s put our signs together…

Passion At The Center of New Education Model

This was originally written for the September 2011 Anywhere Anytime Learning Foundation newsletter.

From the “being sixteen” Project

If you wanted to rethink every assumption about conventional high school–with multi-media technology at the center, and a conviction about adolescents’ desire to do meaningful work–what would it look like? “This is the NYC iSchool, and we’re working on something completely new,” says Executive Director Alisa Berger.

In 2008, the former chancellor of the NYC Schools wanted to create innovative high school models as a way of re-visioning the conventional high school, the high school model that is wasteful and dysfunctional, and poorly adapted to preparing students for the next piece of their lives. Former Chancellor Joel Klein proposed a high school where “live teachers were assets to kids,” and one where kids could “basically work on their own,” using a variety of web-based platforms to augment their learning experiences.  They would be freed up to move out into the world, to engage with each other, and to build learning experiences that had social meaning and real intellectual challenge. It became co-founder Alisa Berger‘s job–along with a talented and opinionated staff–to create and build this vision. The NYC iSchool, now in its fourth year in the SoHo section of New York City, is one of the most in-demand and highly-desired high schools in the all-choice New York City high school system. (1500 applications for 100 spots this past year.)

Built around intensive, nine-week course modules focused on developing students’ understanding of big ideas and global concepts, and then using online course learning and other web-based experiences as foundational content, this past year students at the iSchool worked with the designers of the National September 11th Memorial and Museum to get a more global perspective on the ways teens think about the events leading up to 9-11.  Students interviewed kids in Pakistan and Australia about terrorism and victimization.  They designed a website to develop environmental awareness of fracking called, thinkbeforeyoufrack.  They created cultural ethnographic films about being sixteen all around the world, probing concepts like dating, what being in a relationship means, what you eat says about you culturally and socially.

The underlying vision, in my view, is that the activity we call “learning” is walking away from the institution we call “school.” Schools must transform themselves with new models of instruction that reach out into the world.  They must fashion new understandings of what powerful learning relationships look like between adults and students, and students and the world.  Most important, educational entities must hone and develop skills that help students know when they know. “Knowing when you know something is the 21st century skill,” Alisa Berger says about the school’s instructional model, as teachers wrestle with new visions of rigor and high-level intellectual work.

“It’s not about the technology, it’s about rethinking how learning happens,” Berger noted.  In my view it’s also about justifying the moral claim of compulsory education through work that is meaningful to students.

What does it mean to be a student at the NYC iSchool, from students’ point of view? Kyjah Coryat, a NYC iSchool senior reflected, “Every iSchooler is asked…what does the ‘i’stand for [in iSchool]? We’ve been asked this time and time again…it could stand for ‘imagination’ or ‘inspire’ or ‘innovate.’” Junior Drita Bedzeti thinks of the iSchool, “as an iPod except it’s a school.” Or Celina Flores, another junior concludes, “The I stands for me, since the iSchool is a new school, the students have the ability to voice their opinions of what they want or need.”

As part of a book I am writing on learning entrepreneurship, I recently visited the NYC iSchool, and have been interviewing educational innovators and big-thinking institution smashers and transformers. What are some of the central, provisional “lessons” of my research so far? What observations stand out about schools that are really reframing what it means to be a teacher and student?

1. Educational enterprises (I’m not gonna say “schools”) that embrace technological innovation, not as an add on but as a new vision about how learning occurs in the world, hire teachers and instructors for whom technology use is at the center of their learning lives. You cannot “innovate” around something you do not know and use yourself, and you will fear and diminish students’ experimentalness if you are not also experimenting and learning online yourself. What that means is that you cannot hire instructors who are “committed” to “integrating” technology into instruction, but who don’t have a daily learning practice that involves myriad social media platforms, a whole range of devices and connectivities, lots of interest in learning about new platforms and means of expression, and an intense inclination to be a learner around technology.

As an example I recently met a passionate, dynamic young instructor at the Spring Street International School–a school on a remote island off the coast of Seattle–who was intensely animated about describing the Instructure Canvas platform he was using during the summer to put articles on genocide together for his middle schoolers. We had a great discussion about students’ responsibility for curating materials, as he “walked completely away from textbooks” and a textbook-orientation towards knowledge. This instructor was so eager and excited about the ways in which this platform allowed him to create a collaborative and flexible learning environment to engage his students that he couldn’t get enough time with it! Even as his wife went into labor with their first baby!

You got to live it and feel it, to be good at it. It’s got to be a part of how you learn to help someone else learn this way.  Teaching is modeling, and you can’t model something that feels strange and unfamiliar to you.

2. Schools that are breaking through the old industrial model are passionate about relationships. Yes, I know, every school says it’s about relationships, and most teachers say, “It’s all about the kids.” But Old School models of schooling are founded on an assumption of adult control, the positional power of adults over children, and “custody” of children that often resemble minimum security prison rather than rich, collaborative learning environments. At the NYC iSchool, for instance, Alisa Berger is very, very clear that relationship comes before technology, and that technology is not a “distraction,” from relationship, but a way of creating it. She points to the myriad ways in which technology allows students to connect with other students, field experts, and other teachers around the world, as an example of their priorities. There is no need at the iSchool to ask people to “put down their devices,” and be present, Berger says. Kids and adults want to be there, and want to be in relationship with each other. They hire for that, too.

Schools that are successful using technology to create new models for learning, paradoxically, put love at the center of the learning model. Connectivity between humans is what matters, and technology is an augmentation, an extension of connectivity, a way to continue and build relationships around learning. Love is learning, and learning is love. Technology is only a means, although the means matter and shape us.

3. Successful “learning entrepreneurial” models take students interests very seriously. It is remarkable the degree to which many teachers are simply not curious about what students are interested in, a sad condition of adulthood and the dehumanizing institution of conventional school. At the NYC iSchool, and many other extraordinary educational institutions I am visiting and discovering, there is an assumption that everyone has a stake in their own learning, that learning is deeply pleasurable, if not always fun (doing hard things is not always fun, but worth it), that students are good at deciding for themselves what kinds of remediation they may need and how best to get it (in consultation with an advisor or other students). At the iSchool, to prepare for the New York State Regents exam, students do all the memorization and content-cramming with teacher-created, web-based products so that instructional time does not have to be spent on this.

At these institutions, there is a belief that if learning projects are constellated around things that matter to kids themselves, then with scaffolding and support (the NYC iSchool has a nine-week learning online course for all students), powerful and important engagement is going to happen. Whether it is probing the experience of dating around the world, or how a Pakistani student might regard 9-11 differently from a student in New York City, or why some New York City residents might be opposed to constructing a green roof on their building, students themselves are encouraged to become the modelers of their own learning, to construct their own learning plans and lives, through profound adult interest in what is compelling to them.

4. Great learning environments are passionate about passion. Many of the conventional school environments I’m in are flat, arid, uninteresting places, physically and intellectually. Bulletin boards that date from my own elementary school line classroom walls, with publisher’s slogans about trying harder or doing your best. Adults choose what goes on the walls , and the aesthetics of learning spaces seem almost deliberately ignored. However, as my young colleague teacher from the Spring Street School suggests, when the adults in a school are really fired up learners, passionate about their own quirky projects and deeply interested in their students’ learning, a school tends to be high performing and highly effective. Learning more about how kids learn, learning about their own practices as teachers or administrators, learning about stuff that interests them, are consuming passions of the adults in these schools. That passionate learning culture transfers directly to kids, where students are encouraged to be quirky and strange, to contemplate complexity and the unknowable, to create You Derive Me Crazy around their calculus coursework, to be a part of Girls Write Now, or engage with the meaning of social justice, for themselves.

5. School leaders and teachers model their own excitement about learning. In meetings, in walkthroughs, on Twitter, in their own blogs, in creation of their own professional development, teachers talk openly about what they are learning, how they make mistakes, and what excites them about their work. Through this modeling, learning is regarded as pleasurable–not a chore to be gotten through, a checklist to be completed, or something to be excused from for good behavior. The culture highly values expressions of learning: people are fired up about hearing what someone else is curious about, what they just read online, how they could put this together in a project!

What can we learn about these new “entrepreneurial” learning environments, where technology is central but not at the center? The medium that extends, defines, and mediates learning, but is not the thing? Collaboration is at the center, and people are making “little bets” on changes in school culture which allow them to fail early and adapt as part of establishing these transformative learning cultures.

In the future, as these environments demonstrate, there will be some kind of physical place where students go to do some learning activities, like film-making, and instrument playing and meeting with advisors and other students, and that place may or may not be called “school.” Much of learning will happen during field work, or in collaborative projects, or in college courses or online, or in adventures in the world. In conjunction with this, we will take much more seriously the ways in which human development shapes the projects and challenges of each learning stage, and understand that adults are influenced just as powerfully as students in the act of learning. We will use technology to honor, extend and enhance our connectivity, yet understand that connectivity, and our caring, is fundamentally about each other. It’s one-to-one and one for all.

“We are the future,” says an NYC iSchool student. We’re just figuring out how.

Paradoxes of Our Work

The ability to hold two conflicting truths simultaneously isn’t easy.  And that’s exactly what our work in education calls us to do at this moment.

We are at a moment of crisis in public education.  Only a few pieces of evidence: the outpouring of objection and outcry at the recent SOS March, Arne Duncan’s decision this week to cut personal deals with states failing to make AYP because NCLB policy is a “slow motion train wreck,” a decade into one of the most draconian federal education policies around school accountability our country has ever witnessed, new data shows widespread, and nearly universal,crumbing confidence in local public schools, and a resounding failure to achieve any real gains in equity or performance for students, across a battery of measures.

Disappointment with schools are only a symptom. We are in a crisis of confidence around institutions of government in our country generally, and lack the stories we require to understand our fear and suffering, as described in a wonderful piece on the narrative failures of the Obama’s presidency.  As activists in education, holding on to both the hope and promise of our work, and ferocious and well-informed critique, requires a deep seated understanding of, and tolerance for, paradox–the capacity to hold two complex–and conflicting–truths simultaneously.

Here are some of the complex, conflicting truths I hold simultaneously in my work:

PARADOX #1:  SWEEPING AND SMALL

The system of education we have now–an outmoded industrial model based on extremely limited views of human learning and what is valuable to learn–requires radical, sweeping transformation.  The hidden curriculum of schooling instructs in racist, classist, and competitive values, and then naturalizes and normalizes this as our self-willed state.  Transformation, rethinking, wholesale change–school riots– are required.  Language matters, and even talking about “systemic” change, implying that the structures that we have now will be replaced by another system, is inadequate and limiting.

At the same time, in day-to-day practice for teachers working with kids, for principals interacting with staff members, for superintendents reconfiguring accountability systems within their district, for parents homeschooling their own children, small changes make big differences.  Ultimately, human transformation occurs in very slight, nearly imperceptible and somewhat magical shifts between two people trying to understand each other better, to heal each other, and get out of each other’s way.  When a teacher allows a student a bit more choice, when an adult recognizes the innate competence of a child, when a supervisor takes responsibility for his or her own mistakes, transformation happens.  Small changes are at the root of everything.

PARADOX #2:  IT’S ALL ABOUT ADULTS, DEMOCRACY MATTERS FOR KIDS

The institution of school is broken, corrupt, and designed  primarily to serve the interests of adults, not kids.  The greatest barrier to large-scale transformation, in my view, is adult self-interest, not a lack of skills and knowledge about how to educate better.  The system we have now serves adults, provides employment, professional identity and relative security to 2.5 million adults; it offers inadequate and in some cases toxic “service” to children, who have no political voice.  Yet as a whole, the education sector is woefully sloppy and deeply loath to acknowledge the self-interest that is at the heart of many of its activities and structures.

At the same time, our system of schooling is the only remaining democratic institution in our country that most of our children, nearly 45 million, still participate in.  There is profound value in this.  It is an agenda item of the far right to dismantle the public education system, and most of the public sector beyond it, and the people and kids who will be most harmed by this dismantlement, in terms of schools, are those with the least choice, connections and social capital.  In the words of Yvette Jackson,  Chief Executive of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, kids who are “school dependent” require schools that focus on their strengths, and full and free access to them. The current alternatives to public education, for nearly all children, are inadequate, and accessible only to those with means, choice, or luck.  Maybe all three.

PARADOX #3:  SUPPORT PUBLIC, AND EVERYTHING THAT CHALLENGES IT

Within IDEA, a just-hatching educational transformation group of which I am a part, we believe insupporting the institution of public schooling.  We are engaged in many projects, in Vermont and Mississippi and Portland, that directly engage and showcase public schools that are committed to becoming more responsive to their communities, serving children better, and creating equity within the system.

At the same time, we heartily and vigorously support all viable alternative school models, and see much of the real action of transformation and greater justice happening in places that define themselves as “outside” the public school system.   For example, see Nuestra Escuela, a highly successful “alternative” school model founded on an ethic of human caring, love and respect.  Strategically, we have a BOTH/AND strategy for supporting innovation and change, because we think mainstream public school and alternative models, including charter schools, have much to gain from collaborating and learning from each other.

Around the country, as a movement, we need teams of teachers and activists and parents and bloggers and policy thinkers who are strong enough, and big enough, and bold enough to hold all these paradoxes as they do their work in schools everyday, and with their kids.

We need individuals who are wise warriors, well-informed, cosmopolitan about the sector, who know where their work is coming from, and why–and are able to talk about the contradictions of their work without being apologetic.  Through embracing the complexities of our work, and its many shadows, we will be stronger and better and more fleet and powerful in responding to those who critique us, or who want to shut us down.

One of my mentors, Parker Palmer, of the Center for Courage and Renewal, writes knowingly of paradox, and the way in which tension between opposites can feel intolerable, tugging us one way and then the other, making us feel that our actions, beliefs and intentions are indefensible, and cancel each other out.  Yet through his long life of publically wrestling with the paradoxes of his own soul and vocation, Palmer observes, “‘truth is found not by splitting the world into either-ors but by embracing it as both-and.” Developing the capacity to sit in this tension between opposites–and I would add–to become productive in it, will be the mark of our maturing movement.

Becoming an educational activist requires that we develop the capacity to tolerate paradox–the capacity to hold two seemingly conflicting truths simultaneously in mind and heart at the same time.  At this moment in our culture we seem especially intolerant of paradox:  some critics insist that teachers are victims, while others suggest that teacher inadequacy is at the heart of our sector’s dysfunction.  Could both be true?  And if so, how would it empower us to hold both these truths, and to delve into the complexities of both? How might this make us stronger?

While the federal department of education and major education funders continue to insist that their limited agendas for “improvement” and “reform” are the one one and only way, and founded on “real” science and “real” evidence, we must take strong positions against such hostage-taking and agenda setting, while at the same time holding on the very real and human contradictions that lie at the heart of our work.  As leaders–and I’m seeing everyone who is concerned about the state of education in this country as leaders and activists–every single one of us–the stories we tell about our work must be both simple and complex. This requires a tolerance for paradox, and an understanding of the complexities of our work in education. This complexity is something we are only starting to build at IDEA, perhaps among our corps of folks here at the Coop, in myself.
Are we as activists strong enough to embrace the both-ands of our work?

Are you?

“Contradiction, paradox, the tension of opposites: These have always been at the heart of my experience, and I think I am not alone. I am tugged one way and then the other. My beliefs and my actions often seem at odds. My strengths are sometimes cancelled by my weaknesses. My self, and the world around me, seems more a study in dissonance than a harmony of the integrated whole.” -Parker Palmer, 1979

Fearless Talk About Love In Education

Here is an absolutely beautiful reflection by Alisha Coleman-Kiner, Principal of Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, TN.  She wrote it in response to the announcement that Barack Obama would speak at her school’s graduation ceremony.  It was published online at Education Week May 26 2011. 

President Barack Obama sits with Principal Alisha Coleman-Kiner, center, as they watch a performance by students, including Christopher Dean, left, at the graduation ceremony for Booker T. Washington High School on May 16 in Memphis, Tenn. —Mark Humphrey/AP

President Barack Obama sits with Principal Alisha Coleman-Kiner, center, as they watch a performance by students, including Christopher Dean, left, at the graduation ceremony for Booker T. Washington High School on May 16 in Memphis, Tenn. —Mark Humphrey/AP

By Alisha Coleman-Kiner

Shortly after I learned that President Barack Obama would be speaking at my high school’s commencement this spring, I began receiving a great deal of attention. The question on everyone’s lips: How did you make such massive gains at Booker T. Washington? The question revealed an underlying assertion that the presence of my students near the top of lists on high school completion and academic achievement is an anomaly. Although I was thrilled beyond belief by the opportunity to meet the president, a part of me was disturbed, angered even, by the low expectations of my Booker T. Washington High School babies. After all, children rise to the expectations we set for them; they thrive on the support we give them to meet those expectations.

But before we set high expectations for children, we have to love them.

Education theory and scholarship focus on typologies of effective leadership. Leadership styles and theories sometimes consider the human-interaction aspects of the work, but the idea of love, especially in school leadership, is largely absent. In academics and politics, we try to capture the idea of love by speaking and writing about “the ethic of care,” “caring adults,” and “emotional intelligence.” It is almost as if we are afraid to say that our work is a purely human endeavor—that our jobs are to develop human beings.

Debates about how to reform urban public schools overwhelmed by poverty and surrounded by neighborhood violence focus on everything from the quality of the education professionals in the buildings to the specificity and rigor of course standards and content. We spend a great deal of time in education focusing on inputs and outputs as if we were monitoring a manufacturing process. Yes, I monitor student data. Yes, I try to stay on top of research to provide the best instruction and programming for my students. And yes, I make sure what is happening in BTW is aligned with state standards and policies. I am a professional. I hire professionals. What we do is what anyone who is well prepared to be a professional educator does on a regular basis.

This issue of dehumanizing the work of human development is not restricted to schools. It is part of the fabric of our politics and economics. Saying that our economic future rests on the success of our schools while ignoring the connection between our schools and the daily lives of people living in poverty is fundamentally dishonest. Focusing on schools with laser-sharp intensity without integrating housing, food, health, and other social-policy matters sets a trap for educators and children alike. The way we approach the education and development of children living in poverty is simply unloving.

Love is greatly misunderstood in politics and scholarship. From the appearance of women as teachers in the 19th century, love has been marginalized as a soft and feminine characteristic. But love is hard and defies gender restrictions. For school leaders, it requires rising above the human instinct of self-preservation and exposing oneself to pain and disappointment. It requires seeing other people’s children as valuable and worthy of love even when their parents and communities may not. It requires weeding out staff members who lack love for other people’s children, even when they are highly skilled teaching technicians.

In the political realm, love requires exposing the bigotry and hate that serve corporate wealth instead of addressing human poverty. It requires acknowledging that poverty is indiscriminate and working toward an equally indiscriminate solution. It requires being steadfast in the face of wily political maneuvering intended to capitalize on fear and poor critical-thinking skills. And it requires us to do so with love for those who would seek to do us harm for challenging the status quo.

The English language is insufficient in the face of love. The mere mention of the word “love” can elicit eye-rolling because it is used so often in meaningless ways. We have reduced the word to the heart symbol and no longer need to spell it out to communicate our shallow intentions. But love is far more powerful than our language can capture.

When I was a girl, my father would send me off to school every day by letting me know he loved me, I was special to him, and he expected me to do great things. I let my BTW children know I love them, they are special to me, and I expect them do great things. I hire professionals who are willing and able to communicate the same messages in word and deed. Before we can put any of our knowledge and skills to use, we have to love our students.

Children cannot eat love, but our love for them directs us to help them find sustenance. Love cannot shelter them, but our love for them directs us to support them by acknowledging the academic challenges that can result from homelessness and, when we can, helping them to secure shelter. Love cannot stand between children and abuse, but it can help them heal.

Success with children who have been cast aside by our society begins with love. Typical reforms may succeed through early adolescence when they depend on technical capacity and behaviorist methods, but by the time children reach adolescence and have fully absorbed the negative messages about their value to the larger society, the only thing that will get through is love. We can try to capture love through lists of characteristics and action steps, but until we delve into the real meaning and value of love in education, we will all be spinning our wheels.

How did I make such massive gains at Booker T. Washington? I loved my children. I hired people who would love my children. And then I did my job.

Alisha Coleman-Kiner is the principal of Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, Tenn., which was chosen as the 2011 Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge winner, entitling it to a graduation address by President Obama. The White House cited Booker T. Washington’s graduation rate—which rose from 55 percent in 2007 to 81.6 percent in 2010—in announcing the honor.

 

The Kids Are Alright

Lily and Sam walk.

This is cross-posted at Cooperative Catalyst.

Yesterday my two youngest children graduated from high school.

Unlike many of the parents cheering and hollering on the lawn on that beautiful June day, I was not deeply grateful to the institution that had just processed them through four years of standardized testing, sorted and tracked them, assessed their “readiness” for honors and AP courses, carefully measured them in relation to their peers and recommended them to colleges and universities.   I was not moved to tears by the speeches of various deans, assistant headmasters and superintendents, who in applauding graduates on a job “well done” were also justifying their own continued employment and reinforcing their own sense of self worth, while making the audience complicit in a culture that is passionately attached to competitive, individualized, high-status attainment.  I did not feel moved to chuckle at the small-bore insider jokes among administrators about who’s now allowed to have a doughnut, who’s leaving whom by retiring, and who had planned to ride into graduation on a horse and in cowboy boots.

Instead, I had a cautious, wary, somewhat dispassionate view of the institution through which my children had just passed, one filled with the paradoxes that currently characterize my relationship with the educational sector. Graduations are ceremonies of self-congratulation, moments when the fierce need for institutional justification are most nakedly on display, and when the educational values of Darwinian selection are reified and reinforced, while at the same time paradoxically, the net is cast wide and we are all one big happy family.  In the high school graduation ritual, some are chosen especially, while simultaneously, through the apparent generosity of diploma awarding, another symbol of institutional branding and enfolding, all differences are momentarily forgiven, all past arguments, family squabbles and formerly serious infractions are set aside, at least for a few glowing weeks until it all starts back up again.

At this high school, and throughout their years in public school, these two children have had some extraordinary individual teachers, teachers who are fierce and quirky and kind and powerfully interested in things.  By virtue of a small, democratically-run academic program within their conventional, high-attainment upper-middle-class public high school,  these children have had opportunities to develop as writers, critical thinkers, and social activists.  Without that, I think they might have been crushed on the rocks of conventional high school culture, or certainly ground down to a finer grain of quarry stone.  This little program acted as a breakwater within an institution in which students are fodder, to be processed and spat out, to be hazily remembered at alumni events if they do well, but mostly forgotten–like the many thousands of students who have passed through its halls and out its doors. For the teachers with whom my children came into contact during their four years of high school who saw them as unique, uniquely passionate, and beautiful young people, I am profoundly grateful.

On the other hand, the larger school culture in which those relationships occurred was one that tended, even among the most enlightened, to prize intellectual performances that accrue towards building academic capital:  grades, test scores, prizes, and an extraordinary number of extracurriculars.  Consumed by its own (adult) dramas and desire to protect its sense of specialness (a liberal, “diverse,” mostly White, meritocracy), the institution would go to dramatic ends to describe its wonders to the outside world:  constantly highlighting its “inclusive” culture while looking the other way at class and race incidents and enrollment patterns; proclaiming its high test scores while also purporting not to be test-obsessed; reinforcing among teachers that they were the best of the best, but rarely holding them accountable for their classroom practices or engaging them in serious professional development.  My children were often bored.  In her AP Environmental class in senior year, my daughter bemoaned four lost weeks at the end of the year spent preparing for the AP exam (high scores are very important to teachers and help determine teacher status);  she loved the material but, “learning just stopped, even though most of us could already get a 4 or a 5 on the test.”  Long ago my son determined exactly how not to let the institution of school get in the way of his learning, and had explicit plans for choosing courses carefully so that he had ample time to attend local university lectures and participate in arts events.  Both have come through the institution with real interests intact, but each has wasted a tremendous amount of time in high school.  Finding intellectual challenges primarily in those classes that were a part of their small democratically-run program, they learned little of great consequence except how to tolerate the endless sea of demands and counter-demands of performance that the large comprehensive high school requires, and how to shoot the rapids of an institution like school without swamping the boat.  They are out, and I am glad they are out. I am relieved.

My children are White, upper-middle-class, and amply provided for.  The system in which my kids go to school is set up to make kids like them feel very special and successful.   They are not “school dependent,” in the words of my new friend Yvette Jackson, the author of The Pedagogy of Confidence. Unlike so many kids with whom I work, my children did not have to rely on their school system to ensure their success.  And yet, high school should and could have been so much better, for them and for all kids.  I am not relieved.

Tour of Our Lives

The tour begins.

Last week 37 educators from 10 states and 4 countries gathered at the headquarters of Project Reach and Fertile Grounds in Manhattan to begin the Institute for Democratic Education in America’s (IDEA’s) first ever Innovation School tour.

After receiving our Metrocards (this was an all subway all the time tour), and a quick chance to get to know each other, we were off to do what we came to do: see four innovative, breakthrough schools, each with different histories, instructional models and student populations. (Monday: NYC iSchool, The Green School; Tuesday: Urban Academy, Calhoun School).  We were especially interested in the culture and climate of each school–each one was considered “successful” and was popular with its students and parents.  But what made each one different?  What made their cultures coherent and powerful?  What lessons could we learn from seeing them to take back to our own schools and our own work?

After two days of intense, on-the-ground classroom visiting, stairwell climbing, principal-question-asking, student discussions, processing with each other on the subway and at every meal and late into the night, here were some of the things we learned, or decided we were going to think about more…

• Schools that work well put love at the center. On this tour we were blessed to have a delegation of school leaders from Nuestra Escuela, in Puerto Rico, a school for students who have disengaged from education or have been rejected by conventional schools.  “This is a school founded on love,” says the school’s co-director, Justo  Mendez Aramburu.  Amid much talk about the accountability environments of New York City and the Department of Education, the schools that we saw that truly seemed coherent, were educating students to use their minds confidently and well, and were creating challenging and supportive environments for everyone in their community, had a message of love at their center.“We are like a family here,” said Ann Cook, legendary director of Urban Academy.  “Everyone knows everyone else,” said a student tour guide at the Calhoun School.  “We don’t have to force kids to talk to each other, said, Alisa Berger, Executive Director of the NYC iSchool.  “We value our time together in person so much everyone wants to be present.” In a harsh accountability world where prioritizing love and connection can seem like an extra we can’t afford, the truly breakthrough schools we saw understand that we learn from people we love and trust, and that real education doesn’t happen without these things.  We found ourselves thinking about how to realign policy at our schools to reflect this.

• There is nothing like getting out of your own building to see other schools. In spite of our best intentions, many of us are profoundly isolated and trapped in our own all-consuming educational settings.  Our buildings, our classrooms, our staffs, gobble  up all the oxygen in the room and make it hard for us to be the cosmopolitan, far-thinking educators we want to be.  Being out on an innovation school tour, even for two days, can be transforming.  Some of our participants said, “We saw things we never thought of, or didn’t think were possible.”  “This re-engaged me to commit to doing the things I want to do in my school.” There is nothing so empowering as seeing how other educators, just like you, are actually doing some of the things you want to do, or try, and having an opportunity to ask them how they did it.  This alone can reshape one’s professional world.

• Innovative school leaders have realistic, uncompromising attitudes about doing brave things. (See key learnings below.)

• “This was the best professional development of my life.” In a world where so much of teacher professional development is drive-by and top-down, this was an experiential, somewhat unconstructed learning opportunity.  The visits were not over-scripted or over-determined, things happened unexpectedly, people were trusted to figure out what to do for themselves and how to make the group come together as powerful learners.  Although we didn’t plan it this way, holding on to some of our unscripted informality, and trusting the learners in the group to co-create the learning, was one of the best parts of the tour.  Trusting the learners to co-create the learning.  That was one of the biggest themes of our watching, wondering, thinking and reflecting during our two days.

• Trying to do innovative work in schools requires that you get together with other people  who are also struggling and dreaming. Many of us came to the tour hesitant, maybe a little bit skeptical, uncertain if this would be worth our time.  Many of us are beaten down and made smaller by the conditions of our work and a pervasive cynicism about transforming the sector.  Simply spending two days with other educators who are all interested in learning new things together, who dream big together, was intensely inspiring and meaningful.   By going through this experience together, we were strengthened in our resolve and left with real ideas about how to create better schools.  You can’t do that on your own as effectively, and you need to get together with other likeminded folks who can help you learn new things.

• Every discouraged educator needs to go out on an innovation tour to remind themselves what can be done in schools, how education can be transforming for children and adults–why they entered the work. See above.  Why did we get into this work?  Why do we keep doing it?  Seeing schools that really are successful in the conventional sense, and also innovative and not like everyone else, inspires us to do better.

• We are very bad at carrying the lessons of innovation and best practice out into our larger professional world. In many of the breakthrough, innovative schools we visited during the two days we found ourselves wondering, why aren’t these lessons of best practice widely disseminated?  Why aren’t they copied in more schools and more educational settings?  As educators we are often isolated from each other and have underdeveloped means of learning from each other.  Innovation tours are one way to begin to do this.

• Schools that are engaged in best practice want to get their messages out to the world, and want to engage in dialog about how they could be better. Some of us were concerned that the schools we were visiting would feel we were a burden, and couldn’t handle 37 of us invading their schools for half a day.  To the contrary, what we discovered was incredible enthusiasm for our visit, a desire to discuss how each school was struggling and trying to get better at, a desire for colleagueship and knowledge-sharing.  Even the schools that are at the top of their game are always trying to get better and learn what they can to improve their practice.  “We want you to be very critical of us,” said Kenny McLaughlin, Assistant Director of The Green School in Brooklyn.  We were heartened by the frankness of the dialog and how much school leaders saw us as partners.

• There need to be many more opportunities like this for all educators. Is there a tour to be created in your area?  From whom would you like to learn?  Who could learn from  you?  How can we create more opportunities for educators to work together and learn more powerfully from each other?  If you want to participate in one of IDEA’s innovation tours, go here.  If you were on the tour and want to talk some more about it, comment below.  If you have some things we could learn from you about doing the tours, tell IDEA about it.  If you want your school to be involved in a tour, contact IDEA.

But get involved.  The message of love, and the message of action, was at the heart of our experience together.  You must feel connected to act, and to act you must be connected.   This may help you begin.

KEY LEARNINGS FROM INDIVIDUAL SCHOOLS

NYC iSchool: “Knowing when you know something is the key 21st century skill,” said Executive Director Alisa Berger about their innovative, technology-enriched experiential high school where all  students are engaged in 7-week-long projects connected to real events in NYC.

The Green School, Brooklyn: “Sustainable living on the earth is not a curriculum subject but about a whole way of living and learning, and that’s what we’re teaching,” said Principal Karali Pitzele.

Urban Academy: “The thing kids learn here is how to make an argument and how to understand multiple perspectives on a problem,” said director Ann Cook about their discussion-based curriculum for kids who have disengaged from other educational environments.

Calhoun School: Longtime Progressive school on the upper West Side of Manhattan stresses three critical approaches to learning:  start with the student, we learn best by doing, and the process of education is not linear.   Generations of students have lived and learned at Calhoun, many of whom come back to teach there, or send their own children to school there…

Other observations:

• Innovative school leaders have courage. Legendary school leader Ann Cook, long time director of Urban Academy, noted that being an innovator is, “all about creative non-compliance.”  “I don’t see any police around here checking on how student’s time is spent,” she said, urging one educator who protested “this can’t be done in my school,” as they talked about Urban’s college-like schedules for students.  The leaders we met had a clear-sighted view of the world they’re actually in, “we do all the Regents exam preparation online so we don’t waste our time with that instructionally,” said Alisa Berger, director of the NYC iSchool.  These leaders make time for what they think is important.  At the iSchool, exam prep doesn’t rule their experiential, social technology enriched instruction.  “It’s not about the technology, it’s about rethinking how learning actually happens,” said Berger.  These leaders have an attitude about doing what they think is the right thing to do, and not letting fear of the tests, or anxiety about risk taking, rule their lives.  “Design time around what you want to teach, not the other way around,” said Ann Cook.

• Students are treated as serious intellectuals. For these schools, this doesn’t mean giving them more low-level tests and pushing them to remember more, but engaging in serious, important tasks like electronically interviewing other teenagers from around the world about their attitudes towards 9/11 and creating an installation at Ground Zero, or creating a project in which students from around the world interview each other about being sixteen.   At Urban Academy, students must independently read books and discuss them with New York-based intellectuals, professors and artists to demonstrate intellectual competence.  At The Green School, students solved the problem of “floating trash” around the neighborhood as requested by the Sanitation Department.  Learning is real, and connected to real outcomes, and the attitude is that everyone is going to grow intellectually, including teachers and school staff, as they engage in serious, interesting problems.

• Teachers are taught how to do the work better and better. At the best schools, like Urban Academy, there is a 7-step “method” for teaching inquiry-based instruction and everyone in the building understands it and uses it.  On the other hand, there is not a compliance-model about instructional design.  Teachers exercise great authority and control in terms of what they are going to teach and what materials and experiences to use.  “It’s  loosey goosey and also a tight ship,” says Ann Cook.