Learning is Change

I like this dissection of what makes a great superintendent, but I think the team is just as important as the single person at the helm:

I love that you have based this upon research and empathy interviews. I believe that you have looked at many different facets of leadership and you have done it by asking the people most affected by that leadership.

In my role within a large urban school district, I have seen the power of a strong superintendent to move a large system forward. However, I only believe that this works when you have a distributed leadership, where the many layers below the superintendent feel empowered to move the district as well. It doesn’t work if every decision has to be pushed back to the executive leadership team in order to change something.

The real question for me is, “How can we create superstars where there are none?” I do believe that any district team must be collectively a “superstar” and that it isn’t enough to have a single person at the helm doing this. We must get to a place where there is a system and a structure of leadership that can do the things you mentioned. If it is left up to a single individual, the whole things falls apart when they leave.

via creativeStir: The Myth of the Superstar Superintendent… really?.

How can we recognize more biases of our teaching practice:

Recognizing your bias against images as text is wonderful and will serve as an important point of reflection. While I too struggle with media as text, I believe that there are so many new types of media that blur the lines and make for a much richer world of analysis than only choosing to look at what can have it etymology dissected.

The rich texts being created in video form are no longer simply off the cuff video blogs. Rather, many are carefully written and shot and can be analyzed as such. Even the texts of Animated Gifs and/or Memes are ripe for discussion. These moving images are combined with words to make meaning. While these are not the great american novel, they do hold a place in our discourse and should hold a place in our classrooms.

Thank you for providing your perspective on this important topic, and especially for being introspective and calling out a specific bias.

Shanahan on Literacy: Teaching Visual Literacy Makes a Big Difference.

The way that we make writers is to make writing more authentic:

I love the way in which you have mixed memes into your writing and brought out the most salient points for others to take and share. I agree with you that we should stop the artificiality of on-demand writing, but as I think about my own writing, I am struck that much of it is on-demand.

When I reply to an email, it is on-demand. When I write up a new document explaining something we are working on, it is on-demand. When someone asks a question and I feel compelled to write a blog post in response, this is on-demand. I don’t think the way we create a community of writers is to deny that on-demand writing can be valuable, but rather that on-demand writing must be authentic (a real audience and a real purpose) for it to make an impact.

The writing ritual itself is fairly on-demand, but this demand of writing is one of the most satisfying and fulfilling ones I know.

via Stop teaching on-demand writing, make writers instead | Metawriting.

What a wonderful example of shared student work:

I love how transparent you are being about your children’s work. By including all of their responses, as well as the analysis you have done upon them, you are allowing us to draw our own conclusions and see them in the context of your own.

I haven’t spent as much time in thinking about thick vs. thin questions for adults, but I think that is the next logical step. I wonder what kinds of thick questions we can ask of one another about teaching and learning. What isn’t in the “text” or “data” of our students? What helps us to dig deeper and strive for meaning and understanding?

Reederama: Assessing the fifth graders’ understanding of thick and thin questions.

Trusting teachers is essential. How we get there is still up for debate.

I really like the ways in which you have dissected the building of trust. The Vulnerability and Accountability sections are particularly spot on when I look at the biggest shifts that we might be driving toward in creating more trust.

However, I am really struggling with the idea that we can’t simply look at our current actions and ask if they are building or destroying trust. If they are building trust, we should do more of them. If they are destroying trust, we should stop them. Do we need it to be more complicated than that?

While I would agree that we cannot create a blanket unquestioning trust, I do believe that trusting teachers can be a default stance rather than a default stance of distrust. We can build from here, rather than starting from scratch with every teacher.

More Trust is NOT the Answer: A Co-Blog with Ann Rose Santoro (@Arsant10) — Medium.

The people that you are at the PD buffet with matter. Those who support you in making better choices are better than those that keep you going back for the same items again and again.

I think the most important aspect of what you have identified is that you do have a passionate community that is supporting you through your PD. The LeadWild Voxer group (and other extensions of your PLN) is something that allows you to learn in any environment. You are able to take what you have learned and go back to them and ask more questions or go deeper with your learning.

I think it is that many folks do not have this community that they turn to PD gluttony (or whatever you might call going back to the same buffet of PD opportunities again and again). Without having the right community of support, you are unlikely to move forward. Without folks who are constantly pushing your thinking (between events), you are very likely to stick with the same conferences and sessions you know.

The real question for me is “how do we create more opportunities for community within PD?” If we can solve for that problem, I don’t think we would need to have the same conferences year after year.

via Professional: Development vs. Learning | Outside the Education Box.

The people that you are at the PD buffet with matter. Those who support you in making better choices are better than those that keep you going back for the same items again and again.

I think the most important aspect of what you have identified is that you do have a passionate community that is supporting you through your PD. The LeadWild Voxer group (and other extensions of your PLN) is something that allows you to learn in any environment. You are able to take what you have learned and go back to them and ask more questions or go deeper with your learning.

I think it is that many folks do not have this community that they turn to PD gluttony (or whatever you might call going back to the same buffet of PD opportunities again and again). Without having the right community of support, you are unlikely to move forward. Without folks who are constantly pushing your thinking (between events), you are very likely to stick with the same conferences and sessions you know.

The real question for me is “how do we create more opportunities for community within PD?” If we can solve for that problem, I don’t think we would need to have the same conferences year after year.

via Professional: Development vs. Learning | Outside the Education Box.

I didn’t mean for this to be a rant, but I think I was on the right blog to leave this comment:

I was once a young teacher. It is not so far into my distant memory that I can’t vividly remember exactly what it felt like to be nervous about teaching a new reading strategy. Those days were exciting and passionate and the work of the Young Teachers Collective should be heralded as a great way forward for many aspiring teachers.

I can’t help but feel, though, that in my current role of supporting teachers in a large urban district we have fetishized new teachers in a lot of ways. While we may insult their knowledge or experience and talk down to them in PD, it is the veteran teachers that I believe we are writing off the most. We hold new/innovative practices of the new teachers (at least those who have made it past their first year), on a pedestal, even if those practices are not sustainable or do not have the research to back them up. But the veteran teachers, the ones we are asking to retire early to bring down the budget, that end up receiving a lot of the “Jerk” rhetoric.

In saying things like “they won’t change” or “we just have to wait until they retire”, we are underestimating veteran teachers and their ability to be learners. I believe that anyone will change if you give them a compelling reason to do so, and because of the experiences that veteran teachers have gone through, many of the reforms are just not compelling.

Suffice it to say:

1. We should not be jerks to new teachers for going into teaching. We should also not fetishize new teachers as the hope of all mankind. I trust all teachers to build this together.

2. We should not be jerks to veteran teachers for staying in teaching. We should not denigrate their experience or stereotype them in a fixed mindset. I believe that most teachers want to grow, but they want to build upon their years in the classroom.

3. We should not be jerks to teachers. At all.

via CURMUDGUCATION: On Not Being a Jerk To Young Teachers.