21st Century Professional Development 09/08/2010
One of the challenges set forth in our school's new set of Strategic Ideas is to look very closely at professional development for our teachers and to find ways to budget creatively for the best possible training for our greatest assets. On Monday, four colleagues from PS and I will embark upon a new approach to professional development in the 21st century, which promises to be both exciting and informative. Billing itself as a community and not a course, the Professional Learning Practice (PLP) model will stretch all of us in ways that will be interesting and challenging at the same time. Job-embedded professional development is not new, but a program like this one that utilizes 21st century technologies like blogs, wikis, and webinars almost exclusively in an attempt to foster a "connectivist" paradigm of learning promises to be fascinating not only to watch but to participate in as well. Teams from the Lower School and the Middle School will take part in this adventure, and I am sure that you'll get regular reports here and elsewhere on what we are discovering together. Stay tuned . . . During our Board's first meeting of the year on Tuesday, our yearlong process of assessing and articulating the vision for our school's future culminated in the unanimous adoption of Strategic Thinking 2010, our collective response to the dynamic and interesting times in which our students find themselves. At the heart of this initiative is a fundamentally different approach to the entire strategic planning process, which I thought I would share with you here in advance of our release of the document itself at the beginning of October. Here at the beginning of the 21st Century’s second decade, traditional strategic planning runs the risk of being passé. Economic uncertainties coupled with information available at the speed of light make following yesterday’s monolithic, five-year “strategic” checklists a poor substitute for confronting the real and dynamic challenges facing our schools. In light of this new context, the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) has articulated five “continua of sustainability” along which it advises all strategic thinking and planning must operate, or independent schools run the risk of becoming “elitist, unapproachable, and financially and socially inaccessible”:
Indeed, NAIS makes the powerful and provocative claim that unless schools plan for sustainability across these five continua as they did for diversity in the last generation, schools like PS will struggle to “keep up” and “prolong” our very existence. Working hand-in-glove with this context of sustainability is the reality that the core function of strategic planning is to secure certainty and relevance for our institution in an increasingly uncertain world. As a result, we must embrace the idea that the product of our collective thinking will be a journey rather than a destination and an outline rather than a blueprint. With this in mind, the approach that we have embraced during our year-long approach to this process is embodied in Robert Evans’s recent article in Independent School (Fall 2007) magazine entitled, “The Case Against Strategic Planning”: Even with good leadership, no strategy can succeed if it overreaches, promising — as so many mission statements do — all things to all people. Given schooling’s 10 percent window on students’ lives, it is vital to concentrate energy and resources, especially when these are scarce. The question is not, “What are all the worthy goals we embrace,” but, “Which few goals matter most right now?” Being truly strategic means being clear about . . . purpose and conduct. Purpose can be summarized as “what really makes us us”: it captures the essential core values that define the school. Conduct can be summarized as “the minimum non-negotiables of membership here”: it captures the ways the core values apply to all the school’s constituents [as well as] the norms and expectations that make the school a community. Purpose and conduct require clarity about what the school is and what it isn't, about whom it’s good for and whom it’s not good for, about what it can — and can’t — become. Nothing could be more strategic. What does this mean for what you will see in October? How will our responses to these challenges differ from others the school has offered or that our peer schools may be following today? We draw from Evans again for these answers: True strategic thinking favors pragmatic, flexible approaches to key challenges, approaches that acknowledge the non-rational and “un-plannable” aspects of the world and of organizational life and the importance of being ready to respond to rapid change in both . . . It favors plans that are simple and that concentrate on a very few targets over a relatively short period of time. It anticipates the likelihood that changing conditions may call for changing targets. In the end, our Strategic Thinking 2010 is deceptively simple: we are discovering new and authentic ways to affirm or clarify who we are (Mission and Identity), how we operate in unpredictable times (Governance and Financial Sustainability), and why delivering a distinctive and challenging program to all of our constituencies assures our relevance moving forward (Academic Challenge and Servant Leadership). The approach we will put forth does all this in the context of lifting our institution higher in terms of performance and esteem. Here’s what you will see when we release our Thinking in October:
Convocation 2010 08/20/2010
Convocation 2010 Psalm 19:14 Please Pray with Me: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, Oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” --Amen Toothpaste First of all, I have to say welcome back to Presbyterian School for the 2010-11 school year. I am very excited about the year ahead, and I am just as energized to see all of the wonderful things each and every one of you will do over the course of the next several months. As I look out today, I see so much talent, so much intelligence, and so much potential. To be sure, the Lord has richly blessed our school with you and with your families. For my talk today, I’ve asked my friend Akshay Jaggi to come up and help me as I begin. Many of you may know Akshay because he is a tireless worker, he is intelligent, and he is a gifted critical thinker. He has been at the school since he was a wee, little Alpha and will certainly be a leader this year among his classmates and in the future wherever his path leads him. You may not know that he is also an accomplished chef, able to whip up tasty meals in the middle of nowhere. I appreciate his willingness to help me out, and we should all show him how much we appreciate his leadership this morning. Here’s what I want you to do, Akshay. Please squeeze this tube of toothpaste as hard as you can and try to get all that’s inside out into this bowl here . . . Good work. I had no idea you were so strong! Now, using all of your intellectual powers and all of your creativity, I need you to do one more thing for me. Please put all that toothpaste back in the tube. As I make my talk this morning, I want you to remember the impossible task of putting toothpaste back inside its tube when we discuss the impact our words—whether they are the “words of our mouths” OR the “meditations of our hearts . . .” Fences and Bridges—Who is my neighbor? Good fences make good neighbors. Let me say that again: good fences make good neighbors. Ever heard that before? Well, it’s the last line of one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems called, “Mending Wall.” Set in the countryside, this poem’s speaker who questioning why he and his neighbor must rebuild the stone wall that divides their land. The line that I’ve quoted serves as the ambiguous resolution to this question. In a sense, it is left to us as the readers to judge whether, in fact, good fences DO make good neighbors. Well, do they? In Frost’s day, some thought good fences kept neighbors happy because a good wall could, for example, serve to keep one neighbor’s animals from straying where they didn’t belong. Perhaps this is the reason why the speaker is “mending” his wall; perhaps this is also why he continues to force the question: do they really? Do good fences REALLY make good neighbors? While we’re at it, what is the opposite of a fence? For the sake of time, I’ll suggest the image of a bridge as the opposite. Fences and bridges . . . let’s get pictures of each of these in our heads. As Mrs. Smith has already said, this year we’ll look closely at who our neighbors are, and we will consider the role of mercy in our relationships with those neighbors. At the same time, though, I think we ought to look just as closely at whether we are building fences that separate us from our neighbors or bridges that connect us to our neighbors when we communicate with them, whether they are sitting right next to us in the Sanctuary today or whether they are on the other end of a wirelessly connected “conversation” on Facebook or in a text message. Speech—The Words of My Mouth: Fences or Bridges? Have you ever been in really thick fog? It’s disorienting, isn’t it? You can easily lose your way or become confused about where you are. In Mark Twain’s novel (and one of my favorite stories) Huck Finn, Huck and Jim become separated from each other in fog near the beginning of their journey. Jim calls and calls for Huck in the thick darkness, worried that his friend is lost forever, drowned in the river. Finally, Jim cries himself to sleep on their raft, convinced that he will never see Huck again. All the time that Jim has been calling out, Huck has heard him only a short distance away; he didn’t say anything to answer Jim because he decided it would be funny to play a trick on Jim, his best friend. Huck returns to the raft while Jim is still asleep, and when Jim wakes up, Huck tells a tale to Jim to make him believe that he imagined the whole thing. Though he takes some convincing, Jim finally believes Huck . . . only to have Huck then say (very cruelly) that he has been playing a trick on Jim all the time. As you can imagine, Jim does not take kindly to Huck’s joke and tells him so in these famous lines, pointing at some trash on the raft that has been left over from their night in the fog: When I got all wore out with work, and with the calling for you, and went to sleep, my heart was broken because you were lost, and I didn’t care any more what become of me and the raft. And when I woke up and found you back again, all safe and sound, tears came, and I could have gotten down on my knees and kissed your feet I was so thankful. And all you were thinking about was how you could make a fool of me with a lie. That stuff there on the raft is trash; and trash is what people are who put dirt on the heads of their friends and make them ashamed. Now don’t get me wrong, I like a joke as much as the next guy . . . and I have been known to think things are funny that no one else does—just ask your teachers! In fact, this incident with Huck and Jim reminds me of something I said just about a week ago. Luckily for me, I have friends who remind me when I speak before I think . . . when my spoken words (or, my jokes, perhaps) are putting up fences instead of building bridges. In the end, this event in Huck Finn does sharpen Huck’s understanding of his own fences and bridges. He says at the conclusion of the scene—after he has “humbled” himself to Jim by apologizing, “I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t a done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.” Are our spoken words serving as bridges or as fences? Are they connecting us to our neighbors or separating us from them? How often do we wish we could put our “word toothpaste” back into our “mouth tubes”? Technology—The Meditations of My Heart: Fences or Bridges? Ahhh, technology: I really love it, don’t you? Just this summer I got a new MacBook laptop and a new iPad along with several new “Apps” for each. Too often I find myself walking around the house with one of these completely unaware of what’s going on around me. When my wife or my daughter attempt to engage me in a brief and cordial conversation, I usually do one of two things: (a) make absolutely no acknowledgement whatsoever, continuing to walk straight ahead, mindlessly worshipping the almighty technology in my hand OR (b) I will make brief, annoyed eye contact with the person interrupting my important work for the duration of exactly one nanosecond. Good fences make good neighbors. Is technology a fence, or is it a bridge? I want desperately to believe that text messages and email and FaceBook can be powerful bridges that bring us closer together with our “neighbors”—and that they are doing this amazing feat almost ALL THE TIME. But, then I spend the better part of a day hunched over my am part of an encounter like the one I’ve just mentioned, and I have to admit that technology may just be pulling us all further and further apart. We are in constant and instant contact with anyone we want from the moment we wake up in the morning until after we fall asleep with our iPhones on our chests at night, and we use these powerful mechanisms to say and do some really mean and hurtful things. We have all of the ability to connect positively, but too often we lack the WILL to do so. Again, technology—is it a fence, or is it a bridge? In the end, we all possess the power to help each other forge a better life by connecting with each other in authentic and meaningful ways, by recognizing the force and the wonder of the diversity that surrounds us, by sacrificing what we want for what others need . . . by building good bridges instead of good fences . . . by being good neighbors. So, here’s my question for all of us this year: Will we build fences or bridges with our words and our thoughts? What sort of neighbors will we be? Another TED with Ken Robinson 07/22/2010
During the last school year, I posted in the blog Sir Ken Robinson's compelling TED talk from June of 2006 about how schools kill creativity. He's just completed a second (in May) about what he's calling the "Learning Revolution". He uses this great quote from Abraham Lincoln to challenge us to innovate fundamentally and try to overcome what he calls the "tyranny of common sense": "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country." Recent "Reforms" in Education 07/16/2010
I don’t know how many of you follow developments in public education, but the article below from last week’s Washington Post is important for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the impact that it will likely have here in Houston for our own public school system. I encourage you to read the article first, then come back and think about what I say below it . . . as always, I welcome your input. http://tinyurl.com/39g8had Michelle Rhee (the Chancellor of DC schools) really is a visionary leader with whom I am familiar from my work with Teach For America over the years, and I admire her tenacity and her commitment to her vision of education reform. Unfortunately, I am fundamentally opposed to the "reforms" she has pushed through on a variety of levels. First of all, the system of "assessment" that she and others in the public sector advocate—i.e., standardized, multiple-choice, one-size-fits-all tests—are the worst ways to get at the sorts of higher order thinking skills that the 21st Century is demanding and will continue to demand of our students and their schools. I also know from Dan Pink's new book Drive that extrinsic motivation and incentives for teachers (like money) aren’t always the best results-producers when the task at hand is one that involves critical and creative thinking, as teaching in the 21st Century surely does. Don’t get me wrong, teachers’ salaries need to be higher in order to attract the best and the brightest; however, transparent accountability ought to accompany that pay increase, and that’s something teachers’ unions across the country have traditionally resisted. Fortunately in independent schools, we don’t have to deal with the additional level of bureaucracy that unions bring. With all this being said, my opinion is that any proposed "reform" of the current educational system that simply puts a band-aid (like more frequent use of the same flawed assessments) on the gushing wound that is an over-crowded, under-funded, anachronistic institution is doomed to fail. We should laud Rhee’s (and others’) determination and commitment, but the reality is that they are trying to fix an antiquated, 18th-century education system that was built for a pre-industrial age. We no longer live in that age . . . not even close. Rhee’s approach, while noble, is akin to Thomas Edison working day and night to invent a better candle. Obviously, he didn't do that . . . he invented the light bulb to replace an outdated and unsustainable source of light. To be sure, Edison's innovation and creativity is what the outdated and unsustainable educational model around the world (in public schools and independent schools) really needs in order to provide the sort of academic challenge that we believe our students are getting here at PS. Back on the Blog 07/12/2010
As you all know, our greatest asset here are our teachers, and one of the most voracious readers among that talented group sent me two articles this weekend that have pushed me back into the blogosphere . . . The first (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/opinion/09brooks.html?_r=1&emc=eta1) is a provocative piece by David Brooks in the NYT, which caused me to ask a question about the following quote: "The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture produces better students." Here's my question: better students in what sort of classroom . . . One best suited for producing workers in the hierarchical, industrial society of the 19th Century, or one best suited for producing critical and creative thinkers for the egalitarian, 21st Century's information age? I wonder what your thoughts are about the same question. The second article (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html) ought to be required reading for all parents and teachers in the current age. I've heard of IQ and EQ but not CQ . . . what an important concept for us all to embrace and try to understand better. Have a great summer! Alice in Wonderland 04/29/2010
It would be a missed opportunity in the brief life of this blog if I didn't acknowledge the peerless performance of our 8th graders in Alice in Wonderland tonight. For those among the standing room only crowd who were lucky enough to see the play, you were treated to Presbyterian School at its best: truly confident young men and women sure enough in themselves and in their abilities to dare to be excellent. What a proud moment in the lives of these students and their families and what a proud moment in the life of our school. To the class of 2010, you have made us all very proud; thank you for your commitment and for your generosity. The bar is certainly high for next year . . . Three Powerful Words . . . 04/21/2010
I was in the 9:30 church service at FPC last Sunday listening to Jim Birchfield talk about generosity as a part of the church's annual stewardship campaign. He said something that really stuck with me, so I thought I would pass it along here with a couple of web articles that are related. He said that generosity is really rooted in humility, which I thought was just eye-opening. Truly generous people, Jim argued, think less of themselves and think of themselves less--a great turn of phrase and a great lesson to learn and pass along. As fate would have it, humility happens to be one of my three favorite words--primarily because it is a quality I don't think I possess but wish I did. My other two favorites are connected to humility and generosity, I think, and are just as important to convey to our children: Respect and Empathy. Here is Ryne Sandberg's fantastic Hall of Fame induction speech about Respect (and baseball) that I would have benefitted from reading when I was younger: http://www.cubsnet.com/node/526 And here is a very thought-provoking article about the importance of building empathy in our children: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1982190,00.html?hpt=T2 Humility, respect, and empathy . . . three terrific and value-packed words. I hope they are qualities that we are instilling here at Presbyterian School--not only among our students but in our relationships with each other as well. What are your favorite words and why? A Video Worth Watching 02/09/2010
Our new Head of Finance, Jan Whitehead, passed this video link along to me, and I thought it was one of the most creative I've seen in a while. It's funny and powerful and speaks, I think, to some challenges of communication that we all face. Tell me your thoughts: http://vimeo.com/3829682 Great Article from the NYT 02/02/2010
The following article was passed along to me by a friend and mentor, and I thought it provided one of the best (and most concise) explanations of what we need to be doing in schools in the 21st Century. I was excited when I read this because we are having some of these same sorts of conversations here at Presbyterian School this year. Read and comment if you have the time! http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02engel.html?emc=eta1 |  AuthorBachelor of Arts, English ArchivesJuly 2010 |
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