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.

“I Am Not A Good Boy”

In this marvelous video, Paulo Freire speaks to Seymour Papert about the meaning of education, and Freire’s understanding of education–what education means for him.  “Look at how many envelopes of teaching you have deposited into me today…” the girl described by Papert might have said, notes Freire.  “I am the opposite of that, and I insist, I am the opposite of that.  I am not a good boy.  I try to be a good person, god knows, but I am not a good boy.”

The beautiful legacy of Freire, in another radical educator’s words:

“Teaching in a democracy, teaching among free people who respect and honor the autonomy of all people (including children) is about confronting knowledge in all its forms, including where the power lies in our society, why the privileged are living in privilege, why people increasingly suffer the weight of poverty, and why a free people continue to allow their leaders to say one thing while doing another.”

Paul Thomas 2011

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?

Men Can Stop Rape

My son protesting in Northampton, Massachusetts against the blaming of victims of sexual assault “because they asked for it.”  Slutwalks are a do-it-yourself way of saying, we can do what we want, wear what we want, and we aren’t asking for it.

My son inspires me.

Stomp and Holler March, October 23. Smith College

Real Education Is Human

#BLOG4IDEC, HUMAN, IDEC2012, POWERFUL, RELEVANT, TRANSFORMATIVE

This post supports Blog for IDEC 2012 week and is cross-posted at Cooperative Catalyst.

Photo by taylorgreene flickr

At an extraordinary and unusual school I visited recently, I observed a seven-year-old girl come before the school’s judicial council. The day before she had violated a cardinal rule of the school.  She had failed to look after her own safety.  She and four of her friends had ventured to a pond dock on the school grounds, where they saw a water snake.  Intrigued, they wanted to catch it.  Using a Tupperware container, string, and some duct tape, they made a trap and dipped it into the water.  The little girl, her heavy backpack still on her back, leaned too far out over the dock and fell into the water.  Some of the older, high school boys saw her fall in, rushed to the pond, and pulled her out.  The water was only waist-deep and slow moving, but in the life of the school, where children are allowed full freedom to roam the school grounds as long as they look out for their safety, no kid had ever fallen into the pond before.  The adults at the school, understandably, were beside themselves.

As I watched the judicial process unfold–the judicial counsel is run entirely by students with a carefully developed set of understandings and procedures evolved over many years–I wondered, how could holding a seven-year-old responsible for her own behavior in this way be “human,” the topic of this post?  Developmentally, aren’t seven-year-olds just a bit too young to be expected to think about these kinds of things for themselves, especially in moments of intense curiosity?  What were the implications of sanctioning this little girl more severely than her four friends, perhaps simply because her backpack made her unbalanced in ways she was unaccustomed to?

Human education is about exactly these sorts of questions. Real and important questions about individual liberty, collective responsibility and accountability–and how ironically, safety can sometimes be achieved only in a confrontation with danger.

The love and care with which the students on the judicial body, ages 8 to 17, gently questioned the little girl, was touching, beautiful and very serious.  When she entered the room (each little girl was questioned separately), she was asked to explain what happened.  She said, “I’m afraid,” and an adult she had chosen to accompany her to the meeting held her in her arms.  A fourteen-year-old girl gently queried,  “How far were you away from the edge? Can you show me on this table?” “Did you hear the older boys calling to you to be careful?” The little girl answered in calm, clear tones. “This far.  No.”  The council asked her: you know that you are going to be charged?  Yes, she said.  Do you know why?  Yes, she said.  A member of this community for a couple of years already, this child understood what was afoot, and perhaps also, why it was a very big deal.  As I watched this little girl, in a pink t-shirt with a peace sign on her tiny flat chest, I saw her grow under the gaze of this serious attention.  Charged and unforgettable, it was a moment of human beings in real consideration of the right way to hold each other and love each other, and offer each other freedom and boundaries at the same time.  And how little people can grow into themselves in such a circumstance.

Later in the day, when the whole school deliberated the recommended punishment–lack of access to the pond and a suspension–the adults in the community passionately disagreed with each other.  They debated the philosophical principles the incident represented. If a fence goes around the pond, then what?  When we tell parents that we expect their kids to be responsible in this way, and we live it, then it creates a “charge,” real and important, for us, the parent, the child. Powerful human education continued on for everyone, in all its unvarnished complexity and lack of clear answers.  Small, squirmy nine-year-old boys sat through the entire two-hour meeting voluntarily; older girls knit while the talk went on.  The whole-school meeting was ably run by a senior girl.

Without writing at length about the circumstances of this fascinating incident–and its complex and multi-hued punishment–what I saw at this extraordinary school was almost the direct opposite of what I observe in many American schools, where children are schooled down to size almost from the moment they enter.  They are–even now with our slightly-better-informed understandings of human capacity–still tracked into ability groups, labeled and sorted around learning abilities and disabilities, and denied creation of a truly accountable community, because adults are almost entirely in charge. (It is inconceivable for them not to be.)  In the conventional educational system, the places where children are allowed to show initiative and to be in charge, are all around individual attainment (get good grades, do well on the state tests), competition, and engagement in adult-sanctioned activities.  Legally and morally, students are inmates in a system that denies them access to the complexity of the question of what to do if a seven-year-old falls into the pond.  When one of our members has violated a rule, what does this mean for all of us, when we are all truly bound together?

A tiny girl becomes big, through contemplation of the seriousness of her own actions.  A community becomes more complex and interknit through passionate disagreement, not bland adherence to a set of rules.  Children are allowed genuine and near-complete adult authority, and they handle it ably and maturely.  Human education means that we will break some of the old rules because they no longer serve us.

International Democratic Education Conference, March 24-31, 2012, Caguas, Puerto Rico

How big are you willing to let kids be?  How big are you willing to let yourself be?  How many rules are you willing to break in service of a new kind of education?

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

Where Does Joy In Learning Come From?

When I was 7 years old, I read my first Laura Ingalls Wilder books.  I remember struggling with many of the words, like “soddie” and “half-pint” and the sense of danger that “Mr. Hanson” represented, but so extraordinarily captivating was the drama of these books that I persisted in sorting out the words, voraciously devouring them often when I didn’t really understand them.

Heroic adventure lay here, in the little sod house beneath the bank on Plum Creek.  It was the 1870s.  A family had come to an end in one place and needed to make a start in another one.  They had nothing.  They had each other.  For a seven-year-old girl growing up in a family that wasn’t very safe, in which Mom and Dad didn’t take very good care of the kids, in which love was inconstant and attention could be punishing or shaming, a story about relying on your wits, on your own good sense, and most especially your sisters, a dog, and Ma and Pa, was archetypally attractive.  I persisted with the words.

Page 1, On The Banks of Plum Creek

I found exemplars on every page.  From the bulldog Jack, who taught me the grace and magical presence of animals in our lives, and the way we human beings learn from them and are transported and reconfigured by them;

                                    Laura milking

To the father who recognized competence in a 7-year-old, and took her feelings and thoughts seriously;

To the mother who was thoughtful and wise, and who protected and treasured little girls;

To the little family who had to make it on their own…

                            

To the illustrations by Garth Williams, who told an interviewer that he believed that “books, given or read, to children, can have a profound influence.”  For that reason he used his illustrations to try to, “awaken something of importance, humor, responsibility, respect for others, interest in the world at large.”

To the magic of a prairie, and flowers that sang their glory, morning glories, on the roof of the little house.

“All around that door green vines were growing out of the grassy bank, and they were full of flowers. Red and rosy pink…and wide open as if they were singing glory to the morning. They were morning-glory flowers.”  -On The Banks of Plum Creek  

The pages filled me with lust for adventure, and longing for what I did not have.  Without realizing it at all then, and not until many decades later, this story became the narrative of my life, and has become the story of my life, calling out to me archetypally in ways that I did not understand at all, but was drawn to with incredible power.

Later, as a feminist critic and reappraiser, I read critiques of gender roles and nationalism embodied in these pages…

-Anita Clair Fellman, Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact On Amerian Culture (2008)

But to me then, the books were simply captivating.

And so my friend Audrey and I, the girl next door and my best friend, spent the next several years creating our own soddie house on the banks of the creek where we lived.

We worked tirelessly.

We transformed a mulberry bush into our sod house, and created a whole camp of white-washed walls and pretend fire places.

We made a dam in the stream and raked and “planted” our fields.

          

We went from suburban middle class girls, to Ma and Pa passionately creating a new life on the prairie.

We become Pa and Ma.

It was one of the most joyful and passionate learning experiences of my life, and the years we spent devoting ourselves to this project, and reading avidly about prairie life and the lives of Laura, Alamanzo and all the Ingalls clan, became a template for passionate research on attractive and obscure topics of great emotional and spiritual resonance.

During this early learning adventure, we were never supervised by an adult, had no learning goals attached to our reading or knowing, and our activities rarely had productive outcomes.  We were obsessed, productive, happy.

Where does joy in learning come from?

Seeing Ourselves Clearly

As a Positive Psychology News subscriber, I recently completed an exceptionally perceptive and painless-to-administer online survey of my personal strengths, based on several decades of positive psychology research about the characteristics associated with positive outcomes in the workplace, authentic happiness, and thriving.  There are many strengths assessments available, some of which have been taken by millions of people, and all are grounded in innovative research and ongoing, real-time practice in daily life.  The one I took cost $15, could be completed in about 20 minutes, offered me an immediate PDF and interactive narrative final report of my top strengths and optimal roles, along with an explanation of when I am at my most powerful.  In my case,

Summary from StandOut Assessment

I am a “connector” and “pioneer,” an assessment I found useful and perceptive as I think about my work as an educational activist and consultant. (Page 5 of my report says, “You are a multiplier, always trying to put two things together to make something bigger and better than it is now.”) 

In education, wouldn’t it be powerful if we had an online, research-based tool that would help us understand our own educational values and desires? In education we fight a lot, often not at all productively, about what are essentially value differences, while assuming, incorrectly, that we all believe the same things, that we want the same things for our kids, that the future parents and teachers wish for their children are all the same, and that we all essentially agree.  We don’t.

For instance, over at the COOP where I blog, the gathered group tends to be pretty classically Progressive, and believe that education is a spiritual and integrative process that is best served by holistic, experiential, individualized learning experiences–ones that are about strentheng capacity for personal meaning making. (See Column #3 of the slide below.)  At the COOP folks are also deeply concerned with creating a more civil society through education, and social justice issues.

Do we know where we fit? 

I meet lots of parents for whom these are not their central concerns. These parents don’t believe that experiential, project-oriented, learner-constructed educational experiences are “real” or serioius, and don’t think schools and classrooms constructed in these ways will help their kids get into college or be successful in the world after school.  Equally, I also meet parents and teachers who are interested in educational experiences for their children that specifically instruct kids in a particular moral, behavioral, or religious philosophy.

Yet based on the outrage and frustration of these many conflicting voices, it’s clear we don’t sufficiently understand our educational value differences, we don’t acknowledge them, and therefore, have a hard time working productively together on a larger vision of change.  Not everyone wants a progressive, experiential education for their child.  Some people really do believe that high-stakes testing prepares kids for the challenges they will face in their lives beyond high school.  Many parents do want uniformity, strong and decisive discipline in school, want their children to be taught that they are part of a group rather than emphasizing their individuality, and think that a fair amount of compliance is helpful in creating good and productive citizens. That old John Dewey quote, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community wants for all of its children,” just isn’t right anymore.  There isn’t a best and wisest parent, the goals of education are too diverse, and the kinds of educational environments that are beginning to be available now are too varied for there to be one best and right way.  We have poor ways of talking about this.

Wouldn’t it be helpful if we had an online, easy to administer, inexpensive, verified-by- research, thoughtful and non-judgmental tool for getting at these differences?  If  as a parent, I could go online and understand that what I really want for my children is an educational environment like that offered at Jamie Steckhart’s Northwest Passage High School in Minnesota  (abundant choice, experiential learning), whereas my neighbor next door is much more interested in a school like SEI Charter Academy, in Portland OR, where children are rigorously disciplined, and offered a full-range of support services and extracurriculars, but must maintain a code of conduct for receipt of those services?

The issue is, of course, we don’t have the research that supports this kind of tool, and until quite recently we didn’t have the range of school choices to make these distinctions.  Most especially we don’t have the sophisticated ways of talking about our differences that would undergird such a tool.

But we desperately need it.

What would help us begin?

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.

If You Were A Learning Entrepreneur

This is cross-posted at Teacher Magazine.

You decide.

If you were a learning entrepreneur, you would consider school part of your “balanced portfolio” of learning experiences, but one and only one venue for  learning some kinds of things.  If you were a learning entrepreneur, you would craft a lifelong learning plan that helped you chart your cognitive, social and practical learning goals over your lifespan.  (These goals would change a lot, but you’d still have a view of them year to year.)  If you were a learning entrepreneur, you would see yourself as the manager of your own learning, authorized to use hundreds of different tools to get the information and skills you need, and you’d have a sense of how and when to ask for help.  If you were a learning entrepreneur, you would understand the importance of finding mentors and key supporters to challenge you to get good at what you are doing, and you would encourage others to step up into their own learning.  If you were a learning entrepreneur, you would think of every day as an exciting opportunity to learn something.

Are you a learning entrepreneur?  Does your school allow you to be a learning entrepreneur?  Does the classroom you’re in encourage kids to be entrepreneurs of their own learning?  Do you think of your learning as one of the most vital and important aspects of your life?  Are you the “owner” of your own learning?  Steve Mariotti, the founder and president of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), an organization that teaches the entrepreneurial skills of business to kids who are not wealthy, and do not go to fancy schools, says the power of entrepreneurship is that it challenges kids to be “owners” instead of outsiders, risk takers and responsible, instead of passive recipients.  Since a lot of conventional schools, and traditional instruction still reward passivity and compliance, and encourage kids to accept someone else’s evaluation of them, there is tremendous educational value in owning your own learning. When you own something, you are the creator of it.  Instead of being outside, you are the agent, you are responsible, your rewards are commensurate with the risks you are willing to take, and the effort you are willing to make.

As those who hang out at here, and at #edchat and EduCon and thousands of blogs say all the time, education is walking away from this thing we call “school”– increasingly, inevitably, inexorably.  As dozens of books, social media philosophers, and everyday folks have discovered, the old-fashioned power the institution to define valuable knowledge, to purvey specific content, and to determine how the student learns, and how the learner is to value him or herself within that institution, is increasingly challenged.  Anya Kamenetz notes in DIY U, “Changing education makes people really, really nervous.  In a shakeup, the current elites have the most to lose.” Whether you think this decoupling of learning from institutions of education is a fabulous new world, or a frightening turn towards social chaos and intellectual superficiality–the movement is happening right now, everywhere, every school day in every wikispace, edmodo platform, friend request and tweet.

As the educational sector struggles to adapt to these challenges to its authority and utility, what are individual learners to do?  What are they doing?  Back in the 1970s, before the Internet, social media and social entrepreneurship, one of most profound critics of education ever, Ivan Illich, described something he called learning webs.  In a deschooled life, Illich proposed, individual learners would educate themselves through apprenticeships and communities of practice, in “webs of learning,” created by the learner and his or her larger community. We are fooled, Illich felt, by the perceived need to be educated in school–education as an institution serves its own purposes and is intent on insuring its own survival, whatever the costs to the learner. As those of us who get around in the socioeconomic strata that describes schooling, in well-heeled schools, for children of privilege, freedom to learn what one wants, and in relation to who one is or might become, is much greater than for poor kids, where KIPP-like behavior regimes, and sitting in SLANT and tracking the speaker are becoming the norm. What does it say to a child about the nature of learning when the most important messages to children in class are how to hold the teacher in his or her gaze with utter and fixed attention, where 100% attention is an absolute good?  Is a child the owner of his or her own learning, in a profound sense, when “there’s one acceptable percentage of students following a direction: 100 percent.  Less, and your authority is subject to interpretation, situation, and motivation.” (That’s Doug Lemov, in Teach Like A Champion.)

As school as we know it breaks up on the shoals of its own inflexibility, redundancy, and unwillingness to engage in reflection on the meaning of its current favored practices, students need to become learning entrepreneurs–to begin to write their own business plans for their learning, to analyze their learning lives, and to be taught the skills of risk taking and reinvention. Children at the K-12 level need new models for conceiving of learning in their lives–models that are lifelong, emphasize the necessity for flexibility and creativity around the developmental nature of learning, models that embolden the learner to be more risk-taking and self-authorized, models that challenge children to discover and model best practices and important bodies of knowledge, but do not see acquisition of them as the purpose of education.

Being a learning entrepreneur combines some of the freedom of unschooling, which conceives of the whole world as a curriculum designed for learning, with the intentionality of business planning:  what is your goal? What are your unit costs? What raw materials or skills do you need to achieve your plan?  Unlike one-on-one learning, which is still organized around laptops and avenues of information acquisition, or full-time virtual learning, which requires extensive parental involvement and resembles school-at-home; becoming a learning entrepreneur is a mind-shift, a movement towards collective engagement in learning that is not attached to a particular institution, set of courses, or authorizing body. It is, in the words of Tony Baldasaro, a trouble-making principal of a virtual high school in New Hampshire, about, “passion based-learning models.”

Our minds, our fears, and our lack of models, are our greatest barriers to learning entrepreneurship, not the absence of tools to achieve the vision.  Who are the greatest learners you have known in your life?  What made them great? What do you admire about them as learners?  How can you adapt these qualities to your own learning projects, right now, where you are, knowing what you know now?  As we work towards describing the how, and the what of learning entrepreneurship, lowering students’, parents’ and teachers’ conceptual barriers to learning entrepreneurship is the greatest hurdle.

Where are these learning entrepreneurship models developing?  Everywhere.  The Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation profiles schools all over the world that see the development of passionate learning as central. “All that matters is what the experience becomes for students.”  Or as iconic entrepreneur Richard Branson recently said, “My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself.  I see life almost like one long university education that I never had.  Every day I’m learning something new.”

Do you see learning at the center of your life?  Are you conceptually bold enough, hardheaded enough, and persistent enough to become a learning entrepreneur?