A "MicroLab" for continual collaborative clinical exploration and development

Friends,

I commend your leadership team for writing a clear and specific set of recommendations that seem well-linked to the data (I did not read the original report, nor of course seen the actual data, nor been privy to how the data was gathered). What I recommend to you is a model that effectively fosters collaborative on-going research and clinical practice by all stakeholders (faculty, administration, parents, and students):

1. request a team assembled of all stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, administrators: only those intimately engaged with classroom learning and instruction)
2. this team sets up a Clinic Classroom (CC) designed to model positive/cooperative practices by each population of the stakeholders
3. the content of the classroom might be a course in study skills (pertinent to any content course)
4. any teacher or administrator can use CC to model pedagogy (preceded by a brief written proposal/interview with team's "OK") 
5. any student can offer to participate in the planning, design, learning experience (preceded by a brief written proposal/interview with team's "OK")
6. any parent, community adult, student, or teacher can observe CC practices (preceded by a brief written proposal/interview with team's "OK")
7. CC would also provide any stakeholder an opportunity to gather students, design curriculum, and select pedagogy to experimentation/revision/instructional learning on an on-going basis.
8. CC can begin small and grow organically as needed (i.e. take place during he lunch period times to allow for the greatest number of teachers and students to participate/create the CC climate and content 
9. CC becomes then a kind of MICROLAB for collaborative study of all stakeholders by all the stakeholders ...thus fostering unity, on-going research, and the truth about education:a collaborative process among all the stakeholders, rather than a "hierarchy" public education must acknowledge the essential interdependence among each stakeholder population, and that any human endeavor improves only overtime with concerted efforts that design-deliver-disassemble-design to deliver again!  
10. Education is all about learning (and updating/revising this store as we continually acquire new information).  A thriving human climate welcomes thoughtful risk-taking, respect for individual needs and strengths, on-going dialogue (not debate),  and learning-focused collaboration among all stakeholders ... free of bureaucratic controls. 

An Open Letter From Arne Duncan to America's Teachers

An Open Letter From Arne Duncan to America's Teachers

The comments address the real matters ... and Arne until you have served daily, and for an entire school year, in an inner city school, as the "teacher of record," WE KNOW THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.

P.S.

Arne, until you (or those who take your "place") have authentic and extensive professional public school teaching experience, you not only have no credibility, you become just another obstacle in the great American obstacle course -a course manufactured by hierarchically-minded non-educators usurping the priority decision-making positions at what they see as the top of the great American food chain.

Helping Students Motivate Themselves

Helping Students Motivate Themselves

This review of the psychological underpinnings of MOTIVATION THEORY is essential for parents as well!

The article identifies elements of good pedagogy ... and good parenting that can be applied at home, e.g. building a solid relationship with each child so the adult encourages growth within the context of the child's authentic interests.

Another benefit of strong adult-child relationships is that it front-loads resiliency -the capacity to bounce back from challenges and set-backs.

Not enough can be said for the magical and multiple gifts inherent in project learning -both at home and in school. Feeling responsible for accumulating a representative series of "grades" Classroom Teachers (CT) often feel reluctant to use project learning as the centerpiece of their classroom curriculum. Let's face it, projects need to be carefully designed...and lots of advance planning, materials, check points, assessment tools require up front planning time. Summer lends itself well to this type of advance organizing, planning, gathering, designing.

Home projects make just as much sense, and require parents to be diligent and consistent in checking on the stages of life-skills projects, e.g. maintaining a clean and organized room. It doesn't happen altogether on a Saturday afternoon, and if it does I am pretty sure we have one overwhelmed child on our hands...and trash bags filling up with a chaotic mass of "good stuff" because it would take a week to restore the hundreds of scattered parts and pieces back to their original boxes/kits. Throwing away "stuff" we paid good money for -as a way of restoring order to a kid's room that got out of hand -challenges our values and principles on many levels. And what is it teaching our children about the stewardship of resources, the value of our hard-earned dollars, conservation of resources, their capacity to manage their lives, and finally our capacity to manage them?

So if you are a parent, grandparent, engaged aunt/uncle, guardian, or babysitter...open the link above and enjoy an invitation to live in a more engaged way.

And if you are a teacher, jot down some key words connected to fascinating project ideas that will underpin any subject's content in much more meaningful ways than a textbook can. Ask the kids to dream up projects that would answer the deep questions they keep under their hats because there's usually no time in a school day set aside to project work. Bring in a baseball cap... everyone can deposit slips of paper describing ideas/asking big questions. On the last day of school this thinking cap goes home with you until one month of full leisure and recovery has passed. By the end of July, your summertime thinking cap will inspire you...and come September you will inspire your students to develop their own MOTIVATION through project-filled learning (and you will have creatively figured out how to gather grades at multiple check-points along the way).

Helping Students Motivate Themselves

Helping Students Motivate Themselves

Very close friends of mine have cultivated their children's interest and affinity for swimming.  More than a dozen years back, the parents asked me what was really important to cultivate self-motivated and excellence oriented kids.  Among several key pieces, I noted the importance of developing commitment to something beyond school learning...music, art, physical performance.

This family chose swimming and the girls were enrolled in a structured swimming program throughout their school careers.  In high school now, each young lady competes in meets leading to Olympic proportions.  Naturally, their parents have invested in, have indeed stewarded their daughters' interest, affinity, and achievement.

Time, talent, and treasure have backed them up and launched levels of achievement that are synonymous with The American Dream.  The older daughter, about to enter her senior year, is being courted by five universities this summer.  Financially, she will be supported -well deserved for the five a.m. risings that characterize her hard-earned success across her high school years.  Financially, her parents will be partnered throughout their daughter's college career -well deserved for their steadfast persistence to being the parents that fashioned an extraordinary environment that made dreaming realistic and within reach and worth working for daily, monthly, annually since first grade!

My thrill comes during visits with this family in Colorado.  I witness first-hand the fruits of my professional advice merged with their faith in such, their focus, persistence, and steadfastness in their family pursuit of The American Dream.  Each teacher development program should witness then study the learning-training elements of swim practice.  Witnessing the mindfully coached workings of early morning swim practices, combined with focused interviews during meets, has made it clear to me as a veteran educator and psychologist, that student performance in schools would benefit greatly.  

This is particularly true for urban classrooms where we find the majority of learners arrive at school woefully under-prepared for the curriculum destined to be delivered.   The introduction of skill, modeling, mirroring, and zone of proximal development combined with formally structured drill of skill sets, and culminating in regularly scheduled real-life and self-informing "meets" matches the structure missing in under-prepared school kids.

In a file on my laptop, brews a practical handbook for urban teachers devoted in spirit to delivering the classroom learning structure that will do what stickers have failed to do: build and drill skill combined with motivation swim-style.  What's more, we can do this not only for a room filled with children who arrive and develop via different personal schedules, strengths and needs, we can do this on a school-wide basis.  As skill acquisition and drill design structuring advancement within and among widely varied individual swimmers successfully buoys them daily upstream  in their pursuit of bronze, silver, and gold -so can we channel the advancement of literate and self-propelled learners.

Let's hear it from the swimmers among us...

For our insider groups: Classroom Practitioners in the Great Field of Education

This is a call-out to our Public School P-12 Classroom Practioners only. 

... if your instructional practice is at a college or university 

... if you practice in a private, independent, or charter setting

... if you practice specialty consultations and school programming (i.e. School Counseling of Social Work, Sp/L, OTT, Vision/Hearing Impared, Autism Spectrum, School Psychology, School Administration, Support Staff: PTA, Security, Food Prep, Paraprofessionals)

...then your level of pedagogy/child development/content area training and population experience is inherently different.  THIS IS NOT YOUR SITE FOR DIALOGUE. 

The quantity and quality of the rules, regulations, and resources available under your particular circumstances differ sufficiently from those currently allocated to Public School P-12 Classroom Practitioners. 


Since our research intends to identify the true needs of  of P-12 Classroom Practitioners -as well as all support professionals, our methods strive for fullest integrity.  We know you support our highest intentions ... for the sake of everyone, everywhere.

Our Great Field of Intention at Palladio International Campus needs your utmost cooperation in order to maintain PIC research  purity!  Our many different "gardens" in the great field of education (designated in the qualifying statements above) are in fact different -and require resources and research assessment tailored to those differences. 

We thank you in advance for navigating to your designated site before 

• signing in, 
• identifying yourself/practice category, 
• and engaging in our SPRING campus-wide dialogue. 

Dialogue questions:

1. Which is preferable: practitioners devoted to the reciprocal relationship between instruction and learning? (or selective testing, outside-designed schedules and curriculum presecriptions?) 
2. Which is preferable: principals devoted to the principles of pedagogy? (or outward appearances, schedules, presriptions, selective test results assembled to reassure outsiders that the insiders know what they are doing? )
3. Why would professionally prepared and devoted practitioners be pressed to divert pedagogically sound focus and effort these ways,  when the actual learning needs of our nationally diverse population demands every bit of our focus and attention? (Okay, so this one wasn't brief...forgive me: it truly is the big question to begin with! Unpacking this question leads everyone in dialogue to sources of the real problems with our public education system ...as manufactured over time.)

Teachers Protest Passing Of Education Reform Bills - Local News Story - KIFI Idaho Falls

Teachers Protest Passing Of Education Reform Bills - Local News Story - KIFI Idaho Falls

Schools are not factories, teachers are not machines, and children are not products.

When non-experts (general public serving on decision-making school boards) (government lobbyists, committees, legislators) (media misrepresentations) exert more influence on the content, structure, and direction of social science systems, the system will become more and more incapacitated...this is what has happened since Reagan's interference in 1983 through his committee of non-experts assembled to "study" America's schools. Competition with other nation's performance (a direct legacy of the Sputnik Era) fueled Reagan's assembly which included only one professional classroom teacher. Inflammatory name of their final report? A Nation At Risk...

Like the "Reformation" and the "Inquisition" defamation and bullying and punishment are the tactics used by big guys coming down hard and fast on the "little guys." The little guys in this case by the way are mostly little women...80% of secondary teachers are female; 90% of elementary teachers are women. Women have generally not been looking out for their backs; instead they have been dedicating before time, during time, and after school time to our kids.

After forty-five years of serving teachers and kids and parents and administrators (Preschool through Graduate School) in my various roles, I know without a shadow of doubt that the very great majority of classroom teachers are good professionals with good intentions doing extraordinary work with the greatest range of children worldwide. In no other nation do we find EVERY child arriving at the school door from the truly widest range of backgrounds: severely under prepared to anxiously over-prepared homes.

Let educators once again use the science they spend four to six years studying at the onset of their career choice. That is before recent efforts to fill overly difficult classrooms with teachers who will work under grueling conditions because no one wants to fund these properly! That is before city, state and federal government began recruiting non-educators with ANY undergraduate degree and placing these unfortunate recruits day one in the most challenging classrooms -under supported, under "enculturated," under prepared, under financed, and finally undereducated.

We now have problems in education because as a nation we do not value the development of children, nor do we value the majority of those who daily engage and advocate for children (mothers, teachers, social workers, day care providers, preschool teachers and service providers...the list can go on). This practice is testimony to systematic under-valuing and demeaning of the true experts by those who regulate "the big bucks."

When will America graduate from the industrial era of thinking...and put it's logic, appreciation, authentic support, and money where our future's resources truly are? Children, Families, Schools are our future...handle them with CARE and INSIGHT.

A Teacher's Value=A Mother's Value

Those who "demean" the nature of, intensity of, and dedication required throughout each day, every day by Classroom Teachers are using their childhood-perspective brain.  Take your adult self to school now and shadow one regular teacher for one full day...your brain will update!

Children have no idea what goes into good and dedicated parenting until they grow up and have reason to "review" revisit and revise the nature and calling of Parenthood (...usually when they have a child of their own, or become a teacher, social worker, family counselor).

The same "oversight" occurs with the general public with regard to Classroom Teaching...and those who engage this calling.   We tritely call these altruistic and conscientious adults "teachers." We easily demean their dedication to learning and young human beings by using a little "t" "teachers."

And we infantilize them by talking down to them and about them because the great majority of them are women who are expert in adapting to children's needs... in multiple ways (vocabulary and tone and pitch).  As informed and naturally-adaptive parents use their child-tuned voice to speak with and encourage learning at home, teachers do the same in the classroom.  And as we stereotype seniors by talking down to them...or very loudly because we think they are as a class hard of hearing, we do the same to teachers ... we demean the nature of their work (without even knowing the nature of their work-not from an adult perspective that is, or an informed perspective to be sure!)

Yes, teachers are bewildered right now in Wisconsin and Indiana...as we should all be all over the planet...because the amount of scorn leveled at "teachers" comes from a few not very honorable sources:

1. unupdated childhood (an adolescent) perspectives on the actual nature of teachers' work 
2. personal projections from other "workers" who mechanically go each day to do a "job" in which they are not personally and professionally engaged
3. unfulfilled wannabees who detect a mismatch between the person they are becoming and the value of the career they've invested in already in so many ways (not to mention the house and the car payment and all the gadgets and loans and credit card debt ...just going through what seems to be the motions in order to get paid and then pay out of all the stuff they've acquired).

As professionals (Masters are earned in five years of entry), Classroom Teachers have a NAME/LABEL problem we need to address:
... brains are funny things. Brains categorize and then the human behavioral system is tempted to think of all entries in the category as if they are all alike.  Hmmmmm.  "teacher":  my mommy, my daddy, granny, swimming instructor, piano tutor, day care assistant, lady at the gym nursery where daddy drops me off while he works out?

Each of these role exemplars are readily thought of as "teachers" regardless of dramatic and organic differences among them in the nature of their work and relationship with a learner, not to mention that professional classroom teachers engage a large group of very individual learners who are learning to learn.

As professionals, Classroom Teachers have a Public Acknowledgement problem we need to address:
... As we stereotype seniors by discounting the background, inculturation, training, and experience that got them where they are now (and all the mastery and wisdom acquired along the way which we could now benefit from if we purposefully pursued inquiry/learning outside the formal workplace to systematically learn from the experts who have earned their retirement from 'on demand performance")  we do the same to teachers.  Our hierarchical government, and the underinformed media, and the general public demean the nature of Classroom Teachers' work from insufficient inquiry, minimal interviewing, non-existent dialogue and shadowing.

Classroom Teachers have relied on professional unions to do the speaking, representing, bargaining, and marketing about the nature of our work...perhaps we each need to speak up for ourselves and the nature of our preparation, commitment, and career paths more purposefully, publicly, intentionally, systematically and collaboratively.

Waiting for Superman...heading west via American Airlines!

Wow... American Airlines is showing a film WAITING FOR SUPERMAN...basically it does honor good teachers, even average teachers, and does reveal systemic problems that impact schools's success because of home factors, motivated and unmovtivated parents, neighborhood, and states rights problems that foretell real issues schools can do nothing about.  It also makes a huge deal about Unions and tenure as the real problem with fixing everything else.  Such a shame to "educate" the public through Americal Airlines, during this time in Wisconsin.  One fact that slipped by and should be the focus is that if the lower performing 6% of nations teachers could be replaced just by average teachers, kids performance would soon match the performance of kids in Finland (who are highest in the world).  
This says to me we need to be honoring the amazing work 94% of our country's teachers are doing with problems created by home factors, motivated and unmovtivated parents, neighborhood, and states rights ...we need to look at what these 94% accomplish and make  movies about this.  Focus on good generates, multiplies  greater good. And so it is!

David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea..: Teacher's Journey ... exploring the work that stru...

David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea..: Teacher's Journey ... exploring the work that stru...: "Welcome, Journeymen and Journeywomen! Our purpose here is to have a forum for asking questions, reflecting on experiences, sharing tentativ..."

Top 10 Things You Don't Learn About Teaching in College!