Archive for the ‘Pam Moran’ category

The “K” Playbook: Professional Learning for a Lifetime*

April 5th, 2011

dancing-house-prague(google image)

A mentor once said to me that he had never seen a kindergartner arrive at school with the idea that he or she was not a learner. During my professional years spent as an elementary principal, I cherished the opportunity to “kid-watch” kindergartners on a daily basis.  The block area served as a favorite space of the kindergartners- and me. Here the fantastical imaginations and risky behaviors of five-year olds led them to design and construct post-modern expressionist structures reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s most interesting work.

I learned kindergartners aren’t afraid to explore the intersection of disparate materials that leads them to create whimsical, sometimes even absurd architectural spaces – towers, homes, castles, even whole cities- combining Legos, wooden blocks, aluminum foil, cardboard- whatever they could find in the kindergarten co-laboratory.  Turned loose, kindergartners epitomize the dispositions of lifelong learning. They are adaptable, flexible thinkers who will play in the sandbox for hours, despite their short attention span in circle time. They love math and science and writing and painting and music and mythical stories and non-fiction information and chasing each other and dancing- all in the name of learning.

Tower Building

Taking a page from the kindergarten playbook, I wrestle with how we can grow the passion for learning inherent in kindergartners in our own work as educators. What it means to educate and be educated takes on new meaning in today’s technology-driven world. The task of educating young people who will graduate from our high schools with the capability to add value to our communities and workforce presents a challenge unique to these times. Our country’s very economic survival depends upon our educational community doing its best work ever in the history of public education.

We educators have watched Shift Happens (Mcleod and Fisch) on YouTube, read Tom Friedman’s the World is Flat, and listened to Tony Wagner push us to not just focus upon the national achievement gap but also the global one. Yet, the momentum necessary to make necessary changes never quite gets us off the ground.  In fact, as Larry Cuban noted in 1992 in the article, “Computers Meet Classroom. Classroom Wins”, reforms do not change schools, but rather schools change reforms and, in such a way that little change ever occurs in schools.

A lifelong quest as an educator has been to figure out why we educators are less likely to change, indeed to incorporate new learning into our work, than almost any other field. I have come to believe that the potential for“deep change” in which knowledge, practices and processes shift is a function of the availability of substantial time for our own adult learning- something that is in little supply in America’s Pk-12 schools.

We educators have little time to play in the sandbox; to explore the intersections of disparate ideas, disciplines, and cultures that would lead us to create, design, and invent the curricula, assessments and instruction necessary to provide learning sustenance to contemporary learners. Instead, teachers work long hours during a 200 day school year, using what daily planning time is available to accomplish clerical and administrative tasks related to operational details of the job. Little to no time exists for a typical Pk-12 educator to read, think, reflect, collaborate, write, study, listen, converse, create, problem-solve; indeed, simply learn. This situation is inconsistent with other professions in this country and with the professional life of educators who work in high performing educational communities around the world.

I have come to the distinctly simplistic perspective that our educators need more unencumbered professional time dedicated to learning and that if they had access to such time, education would be transformative for learners and learning. However, expecting educators to acquire and use skills and then assimilate rapidly shifting technologies into their work with students, means coming to terms with the fact that integration of new technologies, new pedagogies, and new content demands far more time than our teaching educators are obligated to work in traditional contracts and on traditional calendars which do not serve us well in the twenty-first century.

Time to work together

On the other hand, some aspects of educating young people well in today’s world aren’t a lot different than 10,000 years ago. I suspect the best tribal teachers knew the value of team learning, hands-on approaches, practice, coaching and high levels of Bloom’s. For early Homo sapiens, teaching well surely meant the difference between the life and death of a tribe’s young people. Our earliest teachers knew that neither they nor their pupils could afford to rest as learners, but rather that they all had to constantly adapt and flex as they acquired new knowledge and skills essential to survival. Tony Wagner describes the skills that teenagers need in this century’s colleges, workforce, and communities as survival skills, too. These skills include Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence, Agility and Adaptability, Initiative and Entrepreneurship, Effective Oral and Written Communication, Accessing and Analyzing Information, and Curiosity and Imagination.

Opportunities to develop and use Wagner’s skills don’t typically emerge as a result of traditional curricula, instruction or assessments used in most of America’s public schools. If Tyack and Cuban are correct, not much will change as a result of any of our ghosts of reform – past, present or future. So what will it take to drive home the deep change needed so that our digital learners get the learning spaces they need today? And, if educators have little opportunity to engage in and assimilate new professional learning, why would they not remain closed and resistant to change?

Lifelong learning is essential to practitioners in the field of education. We must provide time for our teachers to continue learning if we expect them to embrace meaningful and necessary changes to transform schools of our past into schools for the future. This means providing significant time to try out new strategies and tools, to build relationships with each other as learners, and find the value inherent in participating in both virtual and face-to-face learning communities.

Time should not be either a luxury or an excuse for educators to do the hard work and play essential to their own learning. Just as in kindergarten, creative and inventive ideas in the block area or sandbox come with the time to think, to collaborate, to try out different construction materials and strategies, to analyze, and decide what to do next. Expert kindergarten teachers purposefully schedule the time needed for young children to do the messy work of learning. School calendars and contracts that reflect the time needed for educators to engage in their own learning work are a must. The biggest challenge is finding the funding, and, even more important and scarce, the will to make the necessary changes in structures leftover from the agrarian and industrial ages of public education.  Perhaps, if our communities and educators believed our survival depended upon it, change would happen tomorrow.

*I first composed this piece 12/09 and never posted it until #edchat reminded of it tonight.

2 comments »

Posted in assessment, Authentic learning, Big Idea, Bloom's Taxonomy, Coaching, Collaboration, Creativity, critical thinking, cross-disciplinary thinking, Curriculum, disruption, educational reform, Harvard Graduate School of Education, imagination, Innovation, interdisciplinary thinking, Pam Moran, Pedagogy, Relevance, School Community, teaching, Tony Wagner, Uncategorized

Tags:

Analyze This

February 6th, 2011

10 education warning signs that somebody needs to heed as this next decade unfolds:

1)   Between now and 2020, America will need to hire more than 3 million new teachers.

http://inform.com/science-and-technology/impact-baby-boomer-retirements-teacher-labor-markets-439094a

2)   More than 40% of school principals will retire in the next decade according to survey data collected by national principal associations.

http://www.elearnportal.com/student-center/do-you-have-what-it-takes-to-be-a-school-principal

3)   50% of current superintendents in America do not plan to be on the job in five years.

http://www.aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=17184

4)   Teacher turnover is highest in poor, urban school districts where positions may remain vacant or filled with less than qualified and/or inexperienced  teachers.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/tb/2007/08/24/3336.html

5)   More families are living in poverty and since 2008 this has resulted in increasing numbers of America’s students taking advantage of free and reduced lunch services.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-06-10-schoollunchinside_N.htm

6)   PK-12 public school enrollment will increase about 4.5 million students by 2018.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/projections2018/sec1b.asp

7)   No data have been collected in a decade but the National Education Association estimates that school facility infrastructure improvements needed are in neighborhood of $322 billion. Report Card Grade: D

http://apps.asce.org/reportcard/2009/grades.cfm

8)   Arts education and funding declining over last decade, mainly due to budget cuts to public education.

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/blog/news_features_releases/2009/06/on-the-chopping-block-again.html

9)   Despite decades of focus on improving literacy rates, we as a citizenry read about the same as we always have.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69

10) By 2018, America will need 3 million more college graduates for the workforce than we’ll graduate.

http://chronicle.com/article/Number-of-Workers-With-College/65948/

1 comment »

Posted in Achievement Gap, Basic Skills, Education Reform, Education spending, Leadership, Literacy, Pam Moran, School Finance, state financial crises, Uncategorized, urban education

Tags:

Civil Discourse: It’s Common Sense

January 9th, 2011

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

U.S. Declaration of Independence

Events occur, as did the mass shooting in Arizona this past weekend, that remind us a culture of civility does not come without explicit teaching in the home, our schools, and every community in this nation. While we don’t know all the facts or motivating factors, serious discourse among citizens from all walks of life has led many to reflect this weekend upon the vitriol that dominates the political rhetoric of our nation.  We know that this rhetoric influences and cues a culture of disrespect.

However, parents, educators, and leaders from all sectors of a community possess the potential to form a powerful teaching team to help young people learn the art of civil discourse, especially when holding a dissenting opinion or when confronted by others who hold different beliefs or perspectives. The hallmark of this great nation has been our inalienable right to a liberty that includes being able to speak our piece without fear of imprisonment, retribution from our government, or loss of life or liberty at the hands of those who may not agree with us.

“ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

1st Amendment, Bill of Rights Ratified June 21, 1788

Our nation’s powerful words, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, define a set of beliefs in us: the American people. We believe ourselves to be models for freedom throughout the world. We believe ourselves to be a people who will defend the rights of others, even when we disagree with them. In protecting that right for some, we protect that right for all of us.

I believe the vast majority of Americans value civil discourse because the language of respect helps us weave together the fabric of America’s communities. Civil discourse is the hallmark of adults who care enough to state their opinions publicly and boldly- but with respect. Civil discourse represents the best of communities of responsibility, whether in the real world or in a virtual network. In responsible communities, people care enough to speak up. They also understand their behavior determines the community’s culture that will be created and honed over time.

We are a nation facing critical issues politically, socially, and economically. Such times create emotions of fear, anger, and frustration. Those emotions spill over into our communities and tear at the fabric of responsibility that’s essential for its members to feel safe. We have become used to hearing and reading daily attacks both publicly and anonymously at the national, state, and local levels. These attacks have lowered the bar for any standard of civil discourse representative of opinions on both sides of political and social aisles.

However, we are a nation that’s grounded in hope and perhaps we can get back there if we can see our way to work together. There’s a bipartisan movement afoot in Utah to establish a cultural shift towards civility. For several months, my friend and colleague Dave Doty,(@canyonsdave) superintendent of Canyons District in Utah, and I’ve been discussing a need for more positive models of civil discourse in every area of society. It appears that he lives in one state that has leaders willing to do something about it.

We, who have responsibility for raising and teaching children, must consciously and consistently model a language of respect even when we disagree with each other. We need to teach our children that dissent and respect can occur in the same sentence. But, civility isn’t solely an issue of public schooling. We educators are part of the solution, but we aren’t the only solution. Civility begins in the home. It’s modeled in the community. And, it must be supported by everyone; religious leaders, political leaders, and arts and entertainment leaders. Media personalities need to step up to the plate and take responsibility for shifting the culture, too. If we don’t all do our part, then shame on us for talking the talk of civility for a few days without walking the walk for the long haul.

Do we want a nation where people can confidently speak up and share different opinions? Do we want schools where children can confidently engage in discourse about different perspectives from their peers and others? Do we want communities where people confidently consider a diversity of perspectives from other citizens? If so, we all need to start leading from in front for civility. Everywhere. All the time.

Thank you, Utah, for setting a tone that leads the way.

No comments »

Posted in Forum for Education and Democracy, Pam Moran, reason, School Community, Sphere of Influence, Uncategorized

Tags:

Our Only Charter Should Be Radical Invention

October 16th, 2010

Seth Godin writes about the power of the tribe “just waiting to turn into a movement.” We educators who write on October 17 have the potential to become a tribal movement to form, not “reform”, a positive learning future for our young people. To become a movement, we’ve hard work to do. We have to stop acting like a crowd without leadership. We must invest ourselves in forward motion towards DARPA-like radical invention of education’s future learning spaces rather than incremental change in reaction to our past. The past is over. America’s factories have all moved elsewhere. It’s time for our school factories to disappear as well.

We, who write today, know we face significant challenges to realize Godin’s view of a viable movement. Nevertheless, we step forward to “tell our stories about who we are and the future we’re trying to build.” Tomorrow, we must build on the connections we make today to become a different kind of tribe- one from which grassroots leadership, rather than a singular leader, emerges. Then, we must create momentum within our tribe so our writing transcends this one event.

Over the last two decades at the expense of our workforce, politicians and corporate heads blew up our old manufacturing factory economy by outsourcing America’s work anywhere in the world where they could realize increased profits. They sent 2.3 million jobs to just China alone between 2001 and 2008. However, they seem to have forgotten a key step- building a new economy to replace the old one.

It’s now apparent to just about everyone that our country can’t survive these profit-making decisions unless we hyper-change into a “new economy” workforce that’s both “knowledge- and creativity-able”, regardless of the job or sector. Now, some of the same politicians and corporate heads that outsourced our workforce want to do the same with public education. I propose we invest differently in our economic future, national security, and our democratic way of life. My dream strategies speak to the need for changes in the very marrow of what we consider as public education:

  1. In-source educational invention to our educators and set them loose on a DARPA-like mission in which “their only charter is radical invention.”
  2. Close down our factory schools and simultaneously form new learning spaces for America’s children.
  3. Implement the National Educational Technology Plan as a model 21st century learning blueprint for ESEA reauthorization. It’s the best work ever from the USDOE.

New learning spaces demand a quality of teaching never before experienced in our schools; contemporary teaching that intersects pedagogical, technological, and knowledge expertise so that learning is accelerated, not remediated, for all young people. This new learning world must provide every student with the tools they need to access the most in-depth, creative and critical knowledge work possible. This world represents implementation of the innovative National Educational Technology Plan. This world looks like DARPA for education with an end in mind as wildly out of the box as the inventions of the Internet, GPS, and speech translation. This world looks like schools that are as different from what we call classrooms today as the telephone is from the Internet.

So, we tell our stories today in a symphony of voices; passionate educators who chose this profession for reasons that are incomprehensible to many professional peers in other fields. We aren’t here for fame or fortune. We are here for one simple reason- to provide young people with the best we have to offer. That’s why we’re educators. We teach America’s future.

5 comments »

Posted in Pam Moran, Uncategorized

What Administrators Need: Part II (Pam Moran and Matt Haas)

October 8th, 2010

Cross-posted from Dangerously Irrelevant

My cell phone rang from the passenger seat of my car as I crossed the last intersection before a two-mile stretch of Hydraulic Road leading to Albemarle High School, my high school. A clear blue May sky stretched out above the Blue Ridge Mountains. The time was 7:40 a.m., and I had just dropped off my seven-year-old at school; my thoughts were on the AP and Virginia Standards of Learning testing schedule ahead of us for the day. I reached for the phone, flipped it open, and lifted it to my ear. On the other line was a parent of one of our juniors and a friend of the family. Her voice was anxious.

“Matt, there’s been an accident where Ashland Drive crosses Route 29 North!” she said.“I think it’s a student. I think it’s all right. The traffic is backed up, though.”

I thanked her for the information and dialed our school resource officer to see if he had any information on the accident. The word forlorn comes to mind.

“Hi, Matt. I was just about to call you. There’s been a bad accident up here. A panel truck ran a red light and just – well – just t-boned her car.”

I pulled over to the side of the road, “Whose car?”

One of our students, on her way to take an AP exam that morning, was killed. It has been three years since that day, and I still haven’t reconciled. As any principal can tell us, losing a student is heartbreak, devastation with no reprieve.

Before calling in the crisis response team, I called my wife for strength. In the wake of our student’s death that morning, I followed all the steps we take in a crisis situation: notified central office, called an emergency staff meeting, and then waited for the AP testing session to finish before informing all the students in the session what had happened. They were her friends; they had to know first. Just prior to that, I found her brother and walked him to our school resource officer to be driven home. Her parents wanted to be the first to tell him what happened, but the fear in his eyes told me he was guessing hard. He must have read my face.

The day culminated with a live broadcast from our in-house TV production studio to the student body. I shared the story with them, simply confirming for some what happened. That evening the athletic director and I visited her parents at home. She was the third of our 1,700 student family to die tragically in the past four years. I know and feel that any child’s passing is a tragedy; some grip a whole school community.

When I arrived early at school the next morning I was greeted at my office door by the school psychologist. Before he really had a chance to say anything, I started to rattle off actions for the day to take care of students, staff, and parents.

Patiently, he waited for me to finish. We found seats across from one another. Sunlight settled on us through the office windows. He gave pause, looked me in the eye to get my attention, and asked me what I needed. The guilt I felt for his asking me this was overwhelming.

“Well, I think I need to rewind about 24 hours and be up there at the intersection to stop that truck. Otherwise, I don’t need anything.”

He waited for what I said to sink into me and then let me know he was there to help me too, but I’ve never been very good at expressing my own needs. I have never met an educator who really can. We almost always express our needs in terms of student needs.

I challenge any teacher to ask and answer this question without naming something that is meant to help a child: “What do I need?” A teacher is a parent in every sense of the word. When passengers on an airliner, we are all trained to don the dropped, clear-plastic oxygen mask before putting it on our child, but we are all revolted by that thought.

Using a pyramid to represent hierarchy, we have long structured human needs from basic to the most profound as defined by Abraham Maslow. I think there is no coincidence that we have also structured school leadership as a hierarchy as well. I offer a Venn diagram and propose that three communities or sets of needs merge in a school: those of students, teachers (including support staff), and administrators. At the point of merger is the set containing our most vital need, the need to actualize. Each of us needs to become everything we are meant to become, and we need each other to do it.

In a school, needs become communal, and I believe, less hierarchical and more situational. People tend to rely on one another in order to realize their needs. I hesitate to say that we need from one another; rather, we need one another.

As these merging sets of needs grow and distend from lack of satisfaction and clarity of moral purpose, they can tend to squeeze and shrink our central merger of actualization. I think that many teachers today feel the pain of this state. I also think that students have felt this pain for a long time: the pain of deferred needs and dreams. Often, as I illustrated above, administrators are the last to even express a need, let alone a need from someone else at school.

So the question is, “What do administrators need from teachers?” The answer is that administrators need teachers and students. I have never felt that we need something from them. We need them. We need their relationships, their friendships, their dreams and achievements, and their acceptance. There is really no hierarchy with leadership; people construct a hierarchy to manage.

In turn and in merger, we all need each other as we work toward the moral purpose of learning. When we realize our overlapping needs, we lean toward problem solving rather than evils; we merge around creativity rather than fear; and we actualize individually and as a community. We can put ourselves first to save children, and we can put them first to save us. We synergize.

When I think in these terms, I can frame the relationship I had with my departed student: the child I watched running – long red hair trailing her like a comet’s tail – across the soccer field two weeks before her passing. I needed to be the one who shouldered her passing for the school, to console her parents, to honor her, and to be someone on whom the teachers and students could depend. I would give anything to change what happened; I was needed.

No comments »

Posted in administration, Pam Moran, teaching, Uncategorized

Tags:

The Teaching Story: August 2010

August 22nd, 2010

We educators teach learners that stories have a beginning, middle and end. We also know that each annual cycle of our career takes the form of a story, too. Many of us look forward to writing a new story each year-creating fresh learning plans, developing new relationships, redesigning our learning spaces to gain different perspective upon learning. On the flip side, some of us change so little over the course of our careers that we seem to simply repeat the same story over and over; almost as if stuck in the movie Groundhog Day. What leads teachers to choose one or the other of these two career pathways? Years ago, I worked on a little writing project to ask and answer the question: what motivates some teachers to continue evolving practice over the course of their career? After hours of listening to and transcribing audio tapes, a few specific themes emerged from these teachers’ reflections on their practice- or artwork- as one teacher labeled it.

2 generations of teachers; Ashley's retiree mom helping her set up kindergarten

Each year, just before school refreshes its cycle, I hear those teachers’ voices reminding me of their perspectives on the importance of the first day of school. These teachers, all recognized master teachers with years of teaching under their belts and with no intention of ever doing anything else, believed that the power of their successes was grounded in the relationships they began to build with young people in the first moment of the first day. One teacher said to me something akin to this, “When I began teaching, one of the old-timers advised me to not smile ‘til December.. I ignored that advice and think it was one of the best decisions of my career. How can you begin a positive relationship without smiling?” Another said in thinking about a mentor who helped her survive her very first day of school, “A teacher in the math department stepped in to help me with discipline early on. She became a mentor and critical friend for life. Every time I was failing to reach a student, we would talk. She would ask questions. I would think about different approaches. Eventually, I began to realize I owned the change that’s needed, not the learner. Sometime it’s about the relationship. Other times it’s about their needing a different learning strategy from me. Sometimes, they just need more time and – more of my time.”

These teachers engaged in professional careers grounded in efficacy. They believed they were capable of making a difference in every learner’s life and they never gave up on a young person, especially those who challenged them the most. Importantly, they all shared a professional power gained from finding and connecting to one or more critical friends with whom they bonded because of a commonly held belief in their own self-efficacy. They supported each other, listened to each other, pushed each other, and shared with each other. Often, they considered themselves to be part of an underground group of educators who stayed out of the fray of others’ criticizing conversations; not because there isn’t always something to criticize in a school but because they saw those discussions as debilitating to their work with young people. They held a viewpoint about their students and their work that could be labeled as “glass almost always full.”

Paragons of teaching? I don’t think so. Teachers aren’t perfect but I believe teachers who care and work hard are more the norm than the exception. As I walk schools and chat with teachers, step into their rooms, listen to their dreams for the first day and every day afterward with the learners they serve, I think the media, the politicians, and our communities often sell short the many professionals who teach their heart out, day in and out; living their careers inside and outside of work. These teachers know what’s worthy to learn and they put their energy into realizing that work to the greatest degree possible, even if means being a bit of a Neil Postman-like“subversive activity” teacher. They understand the importance of staying current and working to learn new skills. Despite being beleaguered professionally by back-to-school stories such as the recent teacher evaluation coverage of the LA Times, they work on new ideas for learning projects while on unpaid summer leave, rearrange their learning spaces over and over again before pre-service week, put a smile on their faces, and reach out to find the good in each learner who crosses the threshold into class on that first day of school. Our schools, our learners, and our teachers represent a different century of learning than the one Norman Rockwell captured when he painted Happy Birthday, Miss Jones, an image of what once was America’s quintessential teacher. However, today’s teachers still represent the best of what teachers have always been and always will be; educators who make a difference in the lives of the young people they serve.

2 comments »

Posted in 21st century skills, narrative, Pam Moran, Sphere of Influence, Teacher Efficacy, teaching, voice

July 5 2010: Edu-Retrospective on Independence Day

July 6th, 2010

July 5. 2010. It is the day after Independence Day.  I am reminded of the film starring Will Smith in which aliens fly monster spaceships over major cities to colonize Earth. I would not have even thought of the movie if I hadn’t been thinking that our nation’s notion of Independence Day seems to be more about what we do to entertain rather than educate ourselves.

July 4. 2010. 6:00 p.m. I go to a hometown celebration of Independence Day with the simple goal of connecting with family and community members from a long time past.  Some might say this annual celebration has the makings of the best of current day America’s annual birthday party – country music, beach music, gospel music, civic booths with every 4th of  July “fast food” delicacy that a heart can desire or ill afford, and spontaneous line dancing by friends, relatives and acquaintances from all sides of the tracks. The crowd on the baseball field settles into lawn chairs, bracing their backs with umbrellas against the languor of a Deep South settling sun.  A toddler in her sundress of red, white, and blue twirls in front of the stage, mirroring what appeared to be requisite clothing of the senior citizens, tee-shirted, capped, and swathed in red, white, and blue.  Nearby, folks of different hues stand and chat about the weather, the gosh-awful oil mess in the Gulf, and the cost of fireworks that are expected to last longer than ever before- despite the tough economy of one of the poorest counties in the state.

July 4. 2010. 9:15 p.m. I wait with this former community of mine, along with Americans across the country, in big cities and small towns, farm fields and parklands. Twilight slips into night, and we all anticipate the first burst of flaring color to wrap us in a patriotic moment in time. The explosives begin to the accompaniment of America’s music-  “1812 Overture”, “the Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “America the Beautiful”, “This Land is Your Land”, “God Bless the USA”,  “Rockin’ in the Free World.”  Generations gather together to honor an assembly of radical thinkers who believed it was the colonies’ time to declare for freedom from tyranny, from unjust rule, from a king who believed he ruled because of divine power, rather than rule derived from the will of the people.  But, there’s one problem. The boom of fireworks and the cheers that accompany each spray of color drown out the words of the Declaration, the words of the music.

I sit in my lounge chair and watch the faces and cameras upturned to capture the fireworks moment. I wonder about the question I asked my son two years ago as part of a July 4 post, “After all the years of learning U.S. history-the textbooks you’ve read, the lectures you’ve heard, the six state-required multiple choice tests on Virginia history, U.S, History I and II, Civics, AP History, and U.S. Government, what’s freedom really mean to you?”  His reply? “Actually, it became most real last semester in Spain-you know, you can’t even publish a cartoon critical of the monarchy there.  Insulting the king is illegal.”

July 5.2010.9:15 p.m. Despite our teaching generations about how “We the People” came to be, I wonder the degree to which we suffer from the phenomenon of “I taught it, but they didn’t learn it.”  How many of the people sitting here tonight actually understand why the Boston Tea Party occurred and how that first Tea Party differs from the tea party movement in the news today?  Why did Texas legislators miss the intense and brilliant philosophical debates of our founding fathers that set the stage for Thomas Jefferson to craft the Declaration of Independence and espouse religious liberty as one of many freedoms? Why did Jefferson espouse freedom from “kings, nobles, and priests”? (Jefferson, 1786, August 13 to George Wythe) Why can’t generations of citizens identify Great Britain (Curriculum Matters, EdWeek) as the nation from whom we declared our independence?  How did we become disconnected from the idea that the United States of America was created by immigrants and the children of immigrants; many of whom came here voluntarily as well as some who did not? Why did knowledge that successive waves of people from all walks of life journeyed to our shores, seeking freedom and fortune, get lost in the resentments of nativists such as those who once resented nineteenth century Irish immigrants (NYC Tenement Museum)?

Jefferson understood the power of an educated populace. I suspect he would welcome our young women and children of color into our schools today despite his unfortunate and limiting prejudices of the time. I imagine he would advocate for new learning technologies while asserting the importance of knowledge in all disciplines, including languages, science, history, mathematics, literature and the arts. I believe he would be appalled to think that the general populace could not describe the basic tenets of freedom outlined by the founding fathers who received the main credit for conceiving our independence in conjunction with a few founding mothers who did not.

Images of the dancing toddler and friends and neighbors chatting capture the best of communities gathered to celebrate with each other; a ritual that began with the earliest of tribes.  However, I also am left with a sense that the occasion of this nation’s birthday gets lost amidst beach vacations, July 4th sales events, and our beloved fireworks displays. How many of us take the time each year to read or listen to our Declaration of Independence – and reflect deeply upon the self evident truths and ‘unalienable’ rights which we oft take for granted.

I have learned in life that that to go to school is not the same as to be educated.  Mr. Jefferson knew that a foundation of public education was essential to our continued independence and freedom. Freedom is an expression of the concept of ‘unalienable’ rights and Independence Day is not a movie full of aliens.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

T. Jefferson to Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816.

3 comments »

Posted in Pam Moran

Learning Leadership Lessons: Culture… People… Determination

April 29th, 2010

Of late, I find myself in the early morning hours in front of the late night blue screen searching for words to emerge to describe how I feel about micro-conversations in which we share, chat, discuss, and, with some predictability, argue about all things education on twitter. There have been few moments in my life when I could not find words to describe perspective on this. But of recent, I just couldn’t get anything to stick to the page. But today in a room full of kindergartners, I think I remembered the words I need- not new words, not 21st century words, not ed-jargon words- but simply the words of the person who helped me understand that nothing holds more power than the voice of an educator who remembers that we are first teachers, no matter our position.

We are, at any given moment, in 140 characters or less, political, social, educational, and emotional bedfellows, living in word-based relationships that occasionally verge on divorce or fickle love over the turn of a phrase. We bridge distance and time in a real-virtual world that sometimes pulls me into a fleeting thought about the philosophical conundrum of materialism-dualism in our world. But then, I am pulled back to the reality of iPads, charters, teacher quality, testing, unions, TFA, Ravitch, Rhee, performance pay, grading, tenure, assessments… a place where sometimes, I worry that my own words inside the tweet world create an identical magnitude of earthquake out of every cause on my list. Then, I begin to ask myself, “Of all the things I can choose to spend time on and care about, what’s most important to the learners and educators I serve?”

And it is that question which led me back to my mentor and to connections, reconnections and bonds that began on thefirst day of my teaching career and ended two years ago when I was tapped to speak the eulogy voice of educators’ he had touched. He was a champion of the powerless, a fierce voice of passion on behalf of our profession, and a mentor who cut to the heart of what it means to be a leader, a teacher, and a learner. He might have been a TFAer if growing up today, but instead he entered the Peace Corps after his Ivy League school graduation; then dedicated a life to our profession. He taught me long ago about the hope our profession offers; and what I learned from him helps me see beyond our issues, divides, and the current crises of our educational heart.

Lesson I:  You the leader set the tone for the culture in the classroom. Build and model a culture of learning, not punishment, for adults and the children they serve.

How can you create chaos in the first ten minutes of your teaching career? Pull a snake out of a pillow case in a roomful of seventh graders, say something like, “ he won’t bite.. “ and then stand there with a black rat snake chomping down on your hand, dripping blood on to the floor. With kids screaming, standing on tables and chairs, I knew “this will be my first and last day as a teacher.” Then the principal opened the door, never saying a word as I attempted to regain crowd control, and waited just long enough to know I was okay.  It was my first teachable moment with this mentor. I said to him later that day when we talked, “I thought you were going to fire me.” His response, “and how would that help you teach?” I laughed, he smiled, and in that moment we together launched my career in education.

Lesson II: Keep your door unconditionally open and be available to the people you serve. Relish the opportunity to help them find solutions to problems. In doing so, you both become part of the solution and not the problem.

He was the eternal optimist and where some people see problems as rocks that cannot be moved or surmounted, this mentor worked like water flowing in a river; always finding pathways over, under and around problems. There have been many times over the years when I would knock on his door or pick up the phone and call or email after our pathways diverged. I can hear his voice now, a caring, but confronting, voice which did not brook escape from responsibility:

“So, are you going to spend your time admiring the problem or actually solve it? Do you just want to ‘awfulize’ about this, or work it out? You might as well spend your time rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic unless you are willing to really do something about this problem.” Or, I might hear his favorite comment on who really owned the problem, “Pam, you can bring your monkey into my office- and I will pet your monkey- I will even feed your monkey, but when you leave- you need to take your monkey with you.”

Lesson III: Determination comes from inside people. It’s what keeps young people learning when adults move out of their space. It’s what moves adults to remain open to trying new ways of reaching a young person disconnected from learning. It’s the realization of passion, inspiration, and joy through both work and serious play.

  • Our children are still developing adults, they make mistakes, and our job is to make sure they learn from them and are not defeated by them.
  • Make decisions based on what is best for children, no matter what.
  • Trust that teachers are always in the best position of making instructional decisions.

This mentor, a master weaver, created a fabric of influential professional voices over time; facilitating many of us to find our teaching voice, our leadership voice, our personal voice in the service of young people. He articulated a powerful vision that all children (and educators) will learn, given enough time. He taught me that what’s important to learn transcends that which is simply rote, and, we must walk the walk of commitment to create rich learning options for every child we serve. Every day he modeled unswerving passion for and gratitude to our profession; a lifelong choice for a man whose brilliance and resources allowed him the option of pursuing any career.

These lessons that I learned frame the compelling work of teaching, learning, and leading and define a profession that must be about culture, people, and determination. The kindergartners with whom I spent time surprised and delighted me with their enthusiasm for all things learning, seeing themselves as growing up to be scientists, Olympic swimmers, artists, paleontologists, and, yes, even teachers. When I think about all the “earthquakes” on my list, it’s the kindergartners who remind me of what’s most important. I thank them for reminding me of my mentor’s learning lessons, the most important of which is make sure our young people leave us with a love of learning.

No comments »

Posted in Pam Moran

Tags:

Economic Crisis: Education’s Challenge, or Opportunity?

December 23rd, 2009

Collaboratively authored by Chad Ratliff and Pam Moran; originally posted on Customized Leadership.

Schools of our past are over. The biggest survival challenge facing educators right now is not Economic Storm ’09. It’s designing contemporary learning spaces for today’s learners. We understand our young people will be members of a national workforce competing in a global economy. They also need the skill-sets to be leaders and members of a global community. The needs of contemporary learners demand more from the education sector than ever before.

We educators know well that the human drive to learn and participate in a community runs deep. Over time, in villages and towns across the globe, this drive morphed into the place we know today as school. Tinkering around with schedules, room arrangements, new strategies, and different learning resources has become second nature for educators. Few of us have imagined schools being downsized, privatized, outsourced, or virtualized as has occurred within many companies in Corporate America. But, fellow Americans who worked in the steel mills of Pittsburgh or provided tech support in Silicon Valley once believed in the security of their workplaces, too.

John Maeda writes, “Boundaries that separate disciplines appear to be solid lines but up close are really dashed, and ready to cross.” Whether across our classrooms or across sectors –we can no longer afford to see only solid lines. To do so puts our profession, our children, and our society at risk. Contemporary learners will need to solve increasingly complicated global problems crossing geopolitical boundaries: poverty, water shortages, conflicts, and global climate change—to only name a few. Inside our borders, the rapid shift from manufacturing toward a project-driven service economy is clear. Contemporary learners will need to work collaboratively and be able to think quickly, critically, and creatively. And, whether young people leave or choose to stay and take non-fungible jobs in our local communities, they depend on us to equip them for successful entry into the workforce or college, or both. We can’t wait for the federal and state governments to make this happen. This is our job. Right here. Right now.

We must do everything we can to accelerate learning. This means eliminating the distance between learners and learning –a distance traditionally defined by the ratio of 1 teacher to 25 students or so. Today, the distance between learners and learning can be dramatically reduced. Great technological tools in the hands of youth can shift the learning distance from 1 to 25 to 1 to 1—no learning downtime, no arbitrary time limits. Young people should not have to power down when they come to school or stop learning when they leave. Neither should we.

Technology coupled with great learning practices accelerates achievement. So, how can we embrace technology to accelerate our work with young people in contemporary learning spaces? We can take down filters and facilitate social learning networks to create global learning communities. We can put handhelds, netbooks, livescribe pens, smart phones and other technologies in the hands of students and educators. We can learn how to best use these tools together, inside and outside of the place we call school. Indulging any resistance to using technology as tools for learning and administrative work can no longer be an option. If we attempt to maintain the schools of our past in a contemporary learning world, we will likely consign our schools to a Darwinian future in which all who can abandon them will do so for a continuum of customized options that we educators appear loathe to offer. Schools as we know them could become as obsolete as steel mills.

So, how do we turn the Economic Storm ’09 into an opportunity rather than a challenge of epic proportion? We must use the resources we have available to support innovation zone work—teachers and students aligned in research and development; figuring out learning for our future. This means redirecting limited resources to fund innovation projects: setting up model learning spaces, creating design labs to tinker with new approaches to curricula, and encouraging educational entrepreneurs in both public and private sectors. We cannot be afraid to fail, we cannot be afraid to learn, and we cannot be afraid to change.

If we transform our schools so that the distance between learners and learning truly becomes 1 to 1, we’ll create a learning grid that powers a future for our young people which exceeds our wildest dreams. After all, isn’t that why we’re here? It’s important to consider that doing nothing is a choice. Maintaining the status quo is a choice. What choices will we make? What choice will you make?

Dr. Pamela Moran (@pammoran) is the Superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools and Chad Ratliff (@chadratliff) is the Assistant Director of Instruction and Innovation Projects.

2 comments »

Posted in Chad Ratliff, Innovation, Pam Moran

Switch to our mobile site