Learning is Change

It is about knowing and trusting where your students are in their learning. It is about trusting your technology to be there for you when you need it. It is about trusting what it means to be a teacher is not tied up within a particular lecture or a format that you established just out of college.

But, the trust goes deeper than this. The trust that we place in Blended Learning as an innovator and a way of getting us to the future of education is immense. We are placing our trust in something new, in something that has only been really tested within the last 10 years. We have a long history of reform in education, but it hasn’t looked quite like this.

So, we must look to our traditions and look to the spaces where we know what works. We must construct mentorship models where we can learn from one another and apprentice ourselves with one another.

Our trust is not a blind date. It is building on what our innovations have led to, as Blended Learning is standing on the shoulders of giants. While we are creating something new here, it isn’t newness for its own sake. It is the way that we will build the future of education, but it isn’t a bridge too far. It isn’t the single revolutionary step, but rather it is the missing link.

We’ve been doing differentiation in our classrooms for at least 100 years. We have been asking “essential questions” and allowing students to “own” their learning through big ideas for just as long. We just haven’t had the same capacity to do so for each and every learner and to connect all of those learners (and their teachers) together in an open network. That, is truly new.

Teacher Leadership is kind of an awesome thing to see. When teachers feel empowered enough to create the future of their school, the limits just seem to vanish.

In teams that trust one another, learning happens and ideas are disseminated rapidly. When the doors are open for a reason, teachers really do have an expectation that you will be walking through to meet them. There is no illusion of movement or momentum where the teachers take on a leadership role. No one is trying to sound smarter than they are or trying to hide their students scores inside of some buffer. Transparency is not a buzzword, but rather a matter of discourse.

In a school where the teachers are empowered, this openness is pervasive. When a few teachers talk about doing their long-term planning using Google Docs, I hear the subtle whisper of an invitation to everyone to do the same. When that invitation becomes an expectation for all teachers in the school to take part, the classroom has shifted beyond the four walls.

Where I saw this happening most clearly last week was at the Sabin World School. This clarity came from a single protocol they use to establish consensus. They have set an expectation among teachers and leadership that if you do not agree with something said or a decision made, you must propose an alternative in order to voice your discontent. I love this. I love the intense level of trust this requires of teachers. I believe there is nothing so powerful as being compelled to create something rather than fearing what comes next. It changes your orientation.

The fact that you cannot just say no or stand in the way of change without proposing your own reasoning is groundbreaking.

It will impact students as well. If we trust teachers enough to create the change that they want to see, then we have to allow students to create that change as well. When I look at Sabin, and the teachers found within, I see the future of inquiry: asking the right questions, and making the right decisions based upon the needs of the teachers and students within the school.

Yeah, Teacher Leadership is kind of awesome.

There’s a part of me that wants to map everything. I want to be able to map ideas and I want to be able to map out direction. I want to be able to map out what the future looks like, displaying it for others to interact with. This part of me, the mapping part, is small but growing. I see so much of our work being tied to the geographies that are either real or that we create in order to better understand the connections between things. Our ability to put things on a single plane and show the area within which we will learn is no small feat. And that is why I am even more glad there is someone whose job is actually mapping the things going on in DPS.

Oh, and he is going to fix global warming too. Robb Menzies, our GIS specialist, is working both on the large scale mapping needs of the district and he is busy building mapped simulations that help students to understand their carbon footprint. When I spoke with Robb the other day, he told me about the project that lets students actually see the number of kilowatts In their bedroom, then in their house, then in their neighborhood and city, and then as a part of the utility itself, solving the problem of energy usage. When I heard about this, I thought he was literally “mapping out the future.”

Then we started brainstorming together the ways in which we could simulate a visualization for where global temperature is heading. We were simulating rolls the dice using a Google Fusion Table and determining which city would have above above and below average temperature. It was both fascinating, yet somehow it seemed like I had stepped into someone else’s universe. It sounded like an amazing project that could only see the light of day if someone championed it and made it happen. I was struck that this type of mapping doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be intentional.

I believe the mapping of our district has to be just as intentional. I’m really interested in what our map looks like. Where are the spots that we marked with an X, and where are the treasures that we are questing after? And the bigger question I keep thinking about is: “What should we be mapping?” If we have designated champions of our GIS information and empowered them to create things beyond just number-crunched heat maps, where should we be placing our capacity to lay everything out on the table and see what there is to see?

We should probably be mapping where we want students to go.

What do we do with those who don’t speak the language?

Whether that is English or the strange version of it that we use in Education that I would term “Eduspeak”, what do we do for those who need direct translation? What do we do about their specific needs, and what can we do when they don’t understand?

One option is that you can push them to the side. You can continue to use your own language, confusing them and not serving their needs. Or, conversely, you can advocate for them and try as much as possible to help them to learn both the content and the language.

Helen Butts, our English Language Acquisition coordinator, does the latter every single day. She advocates for those students whose home language is something other than English (often Spanish) and does so because she believes in the power of matching a student need to the right instruction. She is not ambiguous in supporting these learners. Specifically, she wants there to be materials used in classrooms across Denver Public Schools that are written in Spanish and not as mere support for their English counterparts.

She does not believe that the level of rigor or the level of resources that we give to our Spanish-speaking students should be any less than the ones that we give to our English-speaking students. Her defense of these students is both passionate and extraordinary. Her ability to speak for those who are not in the room makes it much easier to create the kinds of inclusive environments that we all strive for.

As an extension to these environments, though, I believe that we should not only advocate for those who do not speak the same native tongue, but also those who do not speak the same “educational language.” I believe that by only using acronyms we are shutting out a large portion of the population that would support what it is that we do. I believe that by using “Eduspeak,” we are insulating ourselves.

Learning is not something that only happens in schools, and making up language that only works with in a school environment to discuss and promote learning means that it can’t apply or be used by the outside world. The buy-in that we achieve from both parents and from the community can be directly linked to whether or not we are teaching and using their native educational tongue.

We can build capacity by showing that we have value. We can’t show that value many times because of our own self-inflicted language barriers. It leasds us to only reaching those in our community that have the lingo of the Common Core or DLC, ELO, or any of the other semi-meaningless phrases that get thrown around in meetings. We are not being advocates for the community when we make acronyms. We are not being advocates when we are irrelevant outside of the administration building.

It may be more convenient to teach English for those schools with over 90% second-language learners, but if we did it that way, they wouldn’t be second-language learners because they wouldn’t be learning at all. It may be more convenient to use acronyms and our own language to describe what education looks like, but by separating ourselves from the rest of the community we lose our ability to join the larger conversation. Just like Helen Butts in her work with English Language Acquisition, I would like to be an advocate for student and adult learning everywhere that it can exist no matter what language they use at home.