Imbalance

While warming up this morning on the elliptical at the gym, I was watching the dueling  televisions hanging in front of me. Sanjay Gupta was reporting on the vanishing water supply in the Middle East with images of dried up lakes, wells, and shriveled up people digging in the sand for any bit of moisture they could find. Then the television to the left, at the same time, was advertising a new type of hose showing a man hosing down his boat in his back yard and another person washing a car. The juxtaposition was stunning. People in desperation while others waste. And as my mind often does, I started looking for parallels in education where haves and have nots coexist side by side.

In some states, good public schools are easy to find simply by buying a house in the right zip code. Within a school, some classrooms are places where kids are challenged, loved, and valued and in others the teacher is simply doing time. No matter how often unions and district offices say publicly that every classroom teacher is good, they know it is a lie. The students know it is a lie. The parents know it is a lie. The teachers know it is a lie.

A long time colleague of mine asked our principal years ago, "What incentive is there for a good teacher to remain good in this system?" There, of course, was no real answer that made my colleague happy about the time he invested beyond the doing the basics.

We have to stop pretending that there isn't an inequity in classrooms. We all watch the competing messages coming from different classrooms.  Parents who have the time to navigate the system know which educational landscapes are suffering from drought. While Michelle Rhee's original plan to evaluate teachers was too reliant on a publisher's test, we do have to find a real way to open up our classrooms to the light of day.

Most teachers I know want to do their best. They want the kids in their classrooms to learn and love learning. As teachers we have to open up and admit that teacher training did little to prepare us for the reality of the classroom and we have to stop relying on procedures and pedagogies that we remembered as kids and shift to a new way of doing things. We have to wake up and realize the water is going away. Our factory model is failing and will only fail more in the knowledge economy.

We have to have classrooms where teachers share the knowledge, ideas, and resources freely with each other and push our profession to not settle for the intellectual drought of today. Textbooks, testing, and ticking off standards taught is simply not enough! Our profession needs to realize that we can change education if we stop waiting around for some bureaucrat to tell us what to do. Committees cannot respond to the needs of children in a world where things are changing so rapidly. 

And where some teachers choose to stay in an intellectual drought, unions and other teachers need to stop protecting them. They need to get out of education and stop the educational malpractice. 

If we are to help our students become creative, imaginative innovators, then we have to start by embracing those same qualities as teachers. We have to insist that our time be spent collaborating on classroom instruction that encourages these lofty goals at the same time we make sure all students are becoming literate and fluent in 21st Century pedagogies.

Stop waiting for someone else to lead the way. There is no reason to be stuck in an intellectual desert waiting for aid to arrive. Gather a team and move! Our kids are only kids once. They deserve our best efforts to help them succeed. Stop being sheep!

Introverts in an Extroverted Classroom

Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts

It is always fascinating to me where ideas come from. It is even more fascinating how they find a home in my world when I least expect it. Such is the case yesterday on my way to sort out a problem with my newly purchased and twice undelivered new dryer from Lowe's. I happened to flip the radio to my local public radio station where I heard Susan Cain being interviewed about introversion. The few minutes I was able to catch had me hooked. Of course I knew I had to race home and listen to her Ted Talk. 

There is a resonance with me in what Susan presented. Being an only child, I am no stranger to having time to myself. I would easily define myself as someone well down the introversion spectrum. And yet, I work in the very professional where we tell children introversion is bad and this has always bothered me. Colleagues often make comments about kids like, "That child eats lunch alone. That is sad." Now I understand what the deeper concern is in that comment and yet, perhaps that child just wants the comfort of their introverted space for the few precious moments in the day that she can grab them? Especially considering the amount of time she was just forced to work in groups in the classroom. An endeavor which may have been excruciating.

Others have made comments about children being "alone" as if it were a diagnosable mental condition! For some of us, being alone is awesome! It brings me great joy personally to have time away in the wilderness, as Susan called it. Yes I value collaboration and my colleagues. I love the interaction and flow of ideas. And then I need to go to my cave to be alone and think.

Loneliness is not the same as alone.

When considering how we need to change education for the 21st Century, we have to stop for a moment and think again about how much collaboration time is too much! If nearly one third to a half of all of our students are introverts, how is constant group interaction helpful? And even more in my mind, if extroverts never are required to shut up and live in their own head, what kind of disservice are we doing to them?

More ominously, Susan argues that the current overemphasis on extroversion is a result of the industrialization of our world. Yes the factory model of society! A world where being crammed together in a working environment of strangers necessitated the rise of the charismatic individual. Fascinating ideas...and a cautionary note for people wanting to change schools. If we leave in place the bias for extroversion, we are still holding on to an element of the factory. Learning environments need to adapt to the learner. This will require much more time alone to think about.

Susan has three calls to action:

1. Stop the madness for constant group work (Privacy, freedom, autonomy)

2. Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha. Have your own revelations.

3. Take a good look at the hidden passion and skills you bring to the world and share them.

Just take a step forward

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." -- Lao-tzu

Teaching is the most bizarre profession. Mind you I have been at this for 22 years now and I still marvel at what can happen inside the walls of one room. In spite of public perception and college course descriptions, teachers are rarely prepared for what teaching is really about. Teachers are given very little training in reality. We manage the maze of legislative regulations to be able to interview for that first job. Once landed, the magnitude of responsibility suddenly becomes clear when you open the door to your first classroom.

I have a friend who is in charge of a division at a highly successful hi-tech company. He and I have swapped stories over many glasses of wine. One night I was trying to find a way to explain the bind I feel teachers find themselves working under. We are given a room, furniture (usually), teacher's editions of state approved textbooks, and keys. It is like we are entrepreneurs on one level and then we are told we can and can't do things based on "managers" who may or may not know a single thing about teaching. Usually we are told nothing. Since we are all very successful in the current educational system, because we survived, we are terrified at the idea of failure. So we are going to succeed no matter what!

Unfortunately, the stress of that pressure leads us not forward to innovation and competitive advantage, but backward to a reliance on what has been done to us in this process of "education." Compliance. The right answer. Atomized learning by slicing and dicing subject matter and isolation. Teaching is a very lonely profession without colleagues who share a vision of something better.

And therein lies the dilemma. Our traditional education system is a monster that feeds on itself. Without the space, support, motivation, and courage, teachers fall back on to what was done to them as a model for what to do to others. 

The first step for our profession is to stop being sheep. The reality is we can close the classroom door and help create a space for students to dream big, think, create, and find a world they didn't know existed.

Undoing the mechanistic mindset that still enslaves most American educators takes time, practice, and courage. We need leaders to change education. Notice I didn't say they system. The educational system is a feudal state invested in the status quo and it cannot change by degrees. Just like the collapse of feudalism in all societies, the dysfunctional system ended because of forces beyond its control.

All stakeholders in public education have to demand better. We have to stop accepting that this is the way it has to be. We have to stop being passive, compliant sheep. Sheep Don't Lead! And we need leadership for the change our kids deserve.

Thankfully there are many parents, educators, and thinkers out there who are on the same journey.