Learning is Change

An Extraordinary Gift

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the structures that support us and those that hold us back. Something that has been helping this thinking along is reading a book on Holacracy (a distributed, rather than hierarchical, structure for organizations): http://a.co/d4TrGE0.

I have a feeling that I will be sharing a lot from this book over the next few weeks, but something from the first chapter struck me with such resonance that I thought it needed to be shared more immediately. In a passage about why a new structure was needed and why the author started going down this path, he wrote:

“The human capacity to sense dissonance in the present moment and see the potential for change strikes me as one of our most extraordinary gifts—our restless, never-satisfied, creative spirit that keeps us always reaching beyond where we are. When we feel that sense of frustration at a system that’s not working, or a mistake that keeps getting repeated, or a process that seems inefficient and cumbersome, we are tuning in to a gap between how things are and how they could be.”

I see this within us a lot. I see it in our conversations and in our supports to Schools. We are trying to fill that gap (or help others to fill it). We are looking for ways to use our gift of “reaching beyond” to create the future of APS.

The questions is, “how do we best do that?”

That’s what I aim to find out this year, and I’m so looking forward to the journey. Let me (or, better yet, all of us) know if you have ideas.

Assessment and Data Puppies

I attended an assessment literacy session put on my by the Colorado Department of Education. Among other things, it let me dive into my beliefs about the role of assessment and data in Aurora Public Schools. This was further informed by a colleague’s note about unsubscribing from Standardized Testing. It made me think that we might need a different frame for how we consider assessment and data. Fortunately, in this session there was an opportunity to do just that.

We were asked to choose a metaphor for how we see might see assessment. The choices were: beach ball, puppy, microscope, and clipboard. I chose puppy. Below is the result. On the left of the page are the benefits of assessment puppies. The right represents the struggle with our assessment puppies.

I share this with you all to encourage you to think in different ways about pillars of instruction (i.e., assessment, content, etc.). What metaphor is most apt for re-considering long standing issues or concepts in Education?

The Great Unsubscribe

For the past 5 years, I have used a tool called Unroll.me in order to take all of my subscription-based emails and “roll them into” a single digest. This includes every newsletter I have ever signed up for. It includes every account I have created for a web tool when they decide to try and sell me on a new feature or an upgrade. It also includes every promotional email and almost-but-not-quite-spam sender that uses Mailchimp or Constant Contact to send out messages.

At the beginning of the summer, I decided it was time to take a look at the results of this, and here they are:

  • I had added nearly 1800 senders to my digest, and this caused nearly 100 messages to be “rolled up” into the digest every day of the week.
  • I hadn’t opened a daily digest in over a year.

This means that a tool that was meant to save time and allow for me to get a better hold all of my promotional and serialized email was simply kicking the can down the road. I looked and over the last 5 years, I have accumulated over 100,000 of these messages and they are just sitting in my archived mail.

Armed with this data, I decided to embark on The Great Unsubscribe.

I turned off Unroll.me and started aggressively tapping that unsubscribe button in every single one of the emails that came in. It is both incredibly satisfying and rediculously frustrating. It is satisfying because I really am cleaning up my workflows so that I can focus on the work and personal relationships I most want to cultivate. It is frustrating because I really have let this go for years too long.

This is the most concrete example I have for what distracting “sand” feels like as it fills up your bucket. Every time I tap on a Unsubscribe link, I have to take 30 seconds of distraction before getting back to my real work. This sand is getting into everything in my account, and I have to clear it out so I can make room for things that matter more.

The question I keep on thinking about each time I perform this task is, “What else can I unsubscribe from in my life.” Are there any conversations or investments of time that I am making that should be removed to allow for deeper impact and fulfillment.

I don’t have an answer yet, but I wonder if there is anything you see in our work (or your own lives) that could be Unsubscribed to.

In the background…

Often, I find myself gravitating toward a song or style of music as the backdrop for a season of my work. I will put that song on as I think through big ideas, or when I need to power through a particularly complex facilitation or piece of content that needs to be created. I find that this consistency of background allows me to go back to a particular place in my head and get inspired anew or retrace my steps through a line of thinking.

This summer, the song has been “Take Your Guess” by Tom Rosenthal:

I didn’t walk how you said I should walk
I walk how I do walk, and that’s fine
It didn’t go how you said it would go
It went how it did go, and that’s fine

I look out the window somedays
I see a million ways and that’s fine
I didn’t dance how I wanted to dance
I did a bit of prance, and that’s fine

Take your guess, spurious at best, can’t you see its all just chaos

I breathe in and then I breathe out
I’ve got a trillion doubts and that’s fine
I took a road that wasn’t a road
But it was something I chose, and that’s fine

It didn’t go how you said it would go
It went how it did go, and that’s fine
Take your guess, spurious at best
Can’t you see its all just chaos

 

While clearly this is not an entirely uplifting sentiment, I draw inspiration from it in that my (and our) choices are “just fine” and it is the making of those choices that holds power. It is my hope that we dance how we want to dance and that we embrace the “trillion doubts” that we have and move forward into “the chaos” anyway. I also hope we choose roads that no one else has chosen, some that others don’t even see as roads to travel. In the end, no one will be able to “guess” the amazing things we will do together for Kids and Teachers this year, and any attempt they make at it will be “spurious at best.”

With all of that said, I wonder what the background music has been for you of late, or what you have drawn inspiration from in the past. Is there a piece of media or idea that you keep on coming back to that continues to impact your thinking?

I’ll see many of you soon, and we will continue this walk together.

I almost bought a house.

As we continue to build out this year, I would like to draw upon our own experiences for both strength and inspiration. With that in mind, I’d like to share that my wife and I ALMOST bought a house this summer. We put in an offer, it was accepted, and we went through the inspections. We were weeks away from closing and moving everyone 2.5 miles down the road. And it was stressful.

We spent over 40 hours cleaning out and packing up our garage. We got rid of (donations and trash) 20 trash bags of stuff in the process. It was incredible. And something happened in the process: we realized that we truly loved our home and could do many of the things we were buying a house for within our current home.

Sure, we lost our inspection money. We caused ourselves a lot of unneeded stress. We made our kids cry a couple of times (both with happiness for their new rooms and sadness for changing Schools, and then again for not changing schools when we told them we weren’t moving). But, I wouldn’t take the experience back.

Through it I learned that it is (sometimes) far better to fix/make the thing you have into the thing you want than to try and buy your way to a solution. I also found that this had deep resonance with our work in APS. Many times, we try to “buy” a new solution (or App, or resource, or idea) rather than doing the deep investment of time that we might need to make in order to get the most out of what we have.

It is my sincere hope that we ask ourselves how we might be able to fall in love with our own problems, our own spaces, and our own people enough to solve for them.

I hope this wasn’t too much of a tangent for you this morning. This experience has given me a refreshed perspective and energy for digging in to the work we have ahead. I hope retelling it has at least been interesting, if not empowering.

My Try At Bullet Journals

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about my first two years of teaching and the lesson planning notebooks I used. This was the last time I used a paper-based planning method, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I started using the Apple Pencil consistently last year. While, clearly this is not paper-based, writing things out in my own (terrible) handwriting slows me down long enough to make sure I’m not forgetting anything.

 

Going further down this rabbit hole, I have become obsessed with Bullet Journals (http://bulletjournal.com/) and the analog ways I might be able to better chronicle my waking life. If you have never heard of such a thing, I highly recommend searching on YouTube or Pinterest for “BuJo” spreads. It is an amazing subculture where people love to plan! Anyway, I’m going to try a digital form of Bullet Journaling with the Apple Pencil, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

I’d love to know what systems you are setting up for yourself to help manage the school year. Are you using new apps, new processes, or just more finely honing something you did last year. Please share!

Recharge

I plug in my phone every night. It is a habit that I don’t even think about any more. I have to think far more about my own batteries that need recharging. Mostly, I have long talks with my wife or listen to podcasts as I wash dishes. How do you recharge?

6 End-Of-Year Google Classroom Clean-up Tips

Great advice for how to clean up your Google Classroom now that the kids (or adult learners) are gone.It will make it a lot easier to manage when you come back too!

Supporting Digital Citizenship Development as a School Counselor

All of the roles in a school can support our students in becoming citizens, even with their digital tools. Many kids need models for how they should interact with one another online, and a school counselor can be a great resource to do just that!

Badge Wiki

I really love the idea of creating ‘knowledge repositories’ for important work, (in this case, digital badging). As the school year ends, how are we capturing all that we have learned into a repository for others to learn from?

Transformation

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what has the power to transform learning. The only response that always rings true is, ‘People.’ We have the power to transform experiences with and for kids. All of us.

Digital Citizenship: From Compliance to Moral Imperative

Digital citizenship is more than not bullying people online. It is the recognition that digital tools change our lives in fundamental ways. We must make intentional and strategic choices with technology in our classrooms, and here is one more reason.

Update – New Google Sites – Duplicate Page – Google Sites Experts Designs Development Intranets Websites

The New Google Sites are simply the easiest way for students (and adult learners) to share the best artifacts of their learning. We have started thinking about these as ‘Visible Learning Portfolios’. Now, with the power to copy pages, we can do even more!

Breaking the Mold

As we accelerate toward the end of the year, there are lots of opportunities to reflect. We still have to grab a hold of those opportunities, though. How will you be reflecting upon this year’s progress and sharing the story of your growth?

Why I celebrate College Signing Day

Some truly wonderful reflection from a first generation college graduate who is now Google’s Education Evangelist. Also, you can now virtually visit dozens of college campuses using Expeditions too!

It’s That Time Again

An incredibly reflective look at how we can change the nature of our work to be about the important, and not merely the urgent. Our very own Jan Parker displays real vulnerability in sharing her thinking and is a great model for all of us!

Important Product Migration Announcement

As ActivInspire goes ‘off support’ and we transfer to other tools (Classflow, Google Slides, Nearpod, etc.), we have a chance to rethink the purpose of such displays. Are they about: Sharing student work? Presentations? Interactivity? Collaboration?