Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
I’m thankful for TJ, teaching me and allowing me to share his story. I’m thankful to Inquiry Hub student Madison for sharing her ‘Every Child Matters’ artwork with our school and community.
I am thankful that as more Truths come out about Residential Schools, the stories have inspired us to recognize that there are two parts of Truth and Reconciliation… there is the truth of what happened, and the reconciliation that is beginning to happen.
It would be easy to see Truth and Reconciliation Day as just another holiday from school, It’s harder to understand why it matters. Harder to see that reconciliation work is something to foster beyond the day off from school, and well into the future of our communities and our country.
Every child matters. Wear orange today and share your support.
Yesterday Dave Sands presented to our teachers and shared the district STEAM initiative with us. He also ensured that the presentation was tailored to our school.
Three concepts that really stuck with me from the presentation and conversations I’ve had with Dave:
1. We are moving from trying to do STEAM education in course silos, to multidisciplinary projects, to ‘transdisciplinary’ – fully integrated STEAM initiatives and perspectives.
And the path to do this is through more inquiry based learning.
2. This isn’t about doing a project and thinking, “Oh, I can add this Math concept here, and this is the way I will tie in Science.” Neither is it about trying to pull out curriculum outcomes from each of the subjects. Instead, this is about doing projects that foster curiosity in these areas and then students needing to delve into these areas to learn and do more.
3. The approach to get students there is through different lenses. A lens provides the opportunity for both teachers and students to approach a project with intention, and allows for a specific line of questioning that makes the connections easier to see and make.
Lenses help students focus on what’s important, and not just get lost in the busywork of the project, without making the necessary connections to the learning.
While I think Inquiry Hub is already focused on multidisciplinary learning, the idea of lenses can help us do this even better, and move us more towards transdisciplinary learning.
We have access to more information than we could ever use. The sum of knowledge available to us is far beyond anyone’s comprehension. Creativity and ingenuity do not come from more knowledge but rather two kinds of integration:
1. Integration of understanding.
There is a difference between understanding how an ocean wave works, and knowing when to catch a wave when surfing or body surfing. There is a difference between studying covalent bonds and understanding how two chemicals will interact.
2. Integration of fields of study.
A mathematician who sees poetry in a series or pattern of numbers. An engineer who sees an ant nest and wonders what they can learn about airflow in buildings.
In this day and age, lack of information is seldom the problem, but lack of integration is.
For schools, integration means getting out of subject silos, and thinking about cross-curricular projects. STEM and STEAM education, and trying to solve hard problems without a single correct answer. Integration of curriculum, inquiry learning, iterations, and learning through failure by hitting roadblocks that require out-of-the-box thinking and solutions.
Integration comes from challenging experiences that require base knowledge in more than one field. So, while knowledge and information are necessary, information is not sufficient without integration of ideas from other subjects and fields. The learning really begins where subjects and concepts intersect… and where learning across different fields is meaningfully integrated.
The objective is to be right. The objective is to succeed.
But if you’re always winning, you’re undershooting your potential.” ~ James Clear
I’ve written about this as it relates to school a number of times… but I like this slant of ‘undershooting potential’. Our school system is filled with smart students who know exactly what to do to get ‘A’s. They jump the provided hoops, they strive for the 95%, rather than 88, or 90. They complain to the teacher about the 96% because they want 98. They know how to play the marks game, and yet they are nowhere near their potential.
No, I’m not saying that their potential is actually 100%… I’m saying the entire system allows them to underperform. They do a dance to earn an extra 2-3%, they read and re-read the criteria to make sure they hit all the targets, they spend an extra hour editing their work. But that work is nowhere near their potential. They are doing work that shows their answer is right. They are proving they can succeed at the task. They are winning at the good marks game, but they are undershooting their potential.
They are answering the same questions as their peers, they aren’t developing their own questions.
They are responding to questions that have a clear and definitive answer, they aren’t trying to solve complex problems with no clear answer.
They are following textbook experiments with pre-defined procedures which have been replicated thousands of times with the same results, they aren’t testing their own unknown variables.
“In no way am I suggesting getting good grades is a bad thing; that would be foolish. Getting good grades is not the problem. Allowing grades to dictate one’s life is.
When you chase marks, good marks are the goal. Many students can play that game without really hitting their potential. The problem isn’t wanting good grades, these are still needed to pursue future dreams. The problem is a system where students always succeed without knowing what their potential is. I’ve said before that this is an injustice:
Every student will encounter failures later in life, ‘in the real world’, so if we don’t challenge them in school, we have not given them the tools to face adversity later on. The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are we challenging students enough, so that they are maximizing their learning opportunities?”
The pursuit of an extra couple percent on a cookie-cutter assignment with uniform cookie-shaped answers is a system designed to allow students to undershoot their potential.
Students need to design their own learning challenges, and learn to fail and to overcome those failures along the way.
Connecting with colleagues in the world of online learning, I realize that we live in a unique world of change. If I ask most school principals that work in traditional schools about student funding, and funding policy, few would know much in this area. If I followed up with audit questions, many would know even less. But in over a decade of working in online learning. I’ve dealt with audits and funding policy changes, and constant shifting of expectations and goal posts… and so have my online colleagues in different districts.
Many of them wear several hats (I’ve run 2 schools for years, and 3 schools for a year and a half.) Some are Vice Principals, some are district principals. Some are responsible for alternate students, others adults, still others both. Many got a good dose of ‘other duties as assigned’ especially during the pandemic. Most saw dramatic increases in students because of the pandemic.
Change, change, change.
When I’m around this group, I’m connected to people that know my job better than almost every principal in my district. I hear about the challenges they face and I totally get it. And more than anything I see dedicated educators who face constant changes and are always thinking about the impact of those changes on kids.
It’s really special to spend time with people who understand how to not just cope with change but to strive in it.
I won’t pretend that I didn’t do any work over the last couple weeks of March break. I’m on a Ministry committee that required two online meetings, and there was a district deadline for online learning that required a fair bit of communication with my bosses. But for the most part I really let work go from my mind and enjoyed my break.
Now on the eve of returning to work, work life is creating back into my brain. There are new covid protocols to review. There are neglected emails to look at. There is a ‘To Do’ list pushed to my calendar for my return.
I’ll enjoy a nice family dinner tonight, I’ll do a bit of planning for the week, I’ll get a good night’s sleep. And tomorrow I hit the road running.
I hope fellow educators got some rest and relaxation, and feel refreshed as we head into the home stretch.
I just went back to my very first blog post, originally written on March 29th, 2006, and added with a reflection to DavidTruss.com 2 years later. “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
First of all, it’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging for 16 years! At the time of my reposting this first post onto my own website, I wrote about my 2 year journey to that point, “As I approach the two year mark since first blogging this, I can honestly say that becoming a blogger has been absolutely transformative!I feel like I’ve learned more in the past 2 years than I have in 22 years of one kind of institutional learning or another.“
Now going back to the point of that post, I wonder what the purpose of our current systems are?
Social media seems to be about gaining and keeping attention at any cost.
Governments seem to be about managing risk in wasteful ways.
Law seems to be about expensive litigation with justice sometimes prevailing.
Education seems to be about ranking students for university.
Higher education seems to be about putting students into debt to pay for credentials.
Of course there are exceptions, shining examples of how things could be. But how many of our systems do things that, if you look at them you think, that’s not the purpose of that system? And if the results aren’t what we want, if our systems keep giving us unintended results, at what point do we recognize that these results are the purpose of our systems? And then, what do we do about getting to the real, intended purposes?
One of my favourite sayings, that I learned from a former Hare Krishna devotee is, “There are many paths to the top of a mountain, but the view from the summit is the same.” I was at a professional development session about restorative practices last week and I shared this quote in a circle.
This little saying reminds me of three things. First, good people are good people. If they are on a good and kind path, it doesn’t matter what their faith, background, or ideology is. If they are on a path to being the best they can be, if they are doing their part to make this a better world for themselves, their friends, and their community, well then they are on a good path. It doesn’t have to be the same path as me.
The second interpretation of this quote is that sometimes it’s good to take the 2,000 foot view of things, to not get lost on your own path, and not see that others’ paths are going in the same direction. A good example of this is when dealing with upset parents. It’s easy to get lost in the issues, but if you pause and look at the issue from above, suddenly you can see clearly… you both have the best interest of their child in mind… you both want the same thing. With this perspective, it’s easier to see the forest through the trees. It’s easier to not focus on your own path, but a mutual path. The view from the summit is not hindered by the path.
When it comes to faith and religion, I think of this quote as meaning there are many ways to seek God, or to be spiritual. The biggest issue I have with religions is their fervour that there is only one path to God. That seems ridiculous to me for 2 reasons. First, how many 2,000+ year old religions are now dead? How many people lived before modern faiths even existed? Surely God cared about some of those people that lived before the ‘one true religion’ even existed. Surely He/She cares for people today who are good and righteous, but have never been exposed to that one religion. And secondly, if a benevolent God were truly that concerned about a specific unyielding faith, then He/She would have given us scriptures that were more universally interpreted and less framed in the era and geography they came from. Just think about the animals mentioned in religious texts, and whether they should be eaten, not eaten, or sacrificed… these animals had relevance not to a wise God, but to the people at the time that these people wrote the scriptures. No scripture is written well enough to be the words of God, they are all so obviously written by people.
“There are many paths to the top of a mountain, but the view from the summit is the same.”
A Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Mormon, a Jew, an Atheist… each one of these can be good people on a path to a kinder world, and each one of these can be selfish jerks that are of a belief that somehow their faith or ideology makes them righteous and heaven bound or makes them better than others. What if they just saw each other on the same mountain, and all heading to the same summit?
‘Doing STEM’ or ‘Doing STEAM’… there is a saying, “Put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.”
I don’t want this to sound like a rant, and I don’t want to knock teachers for trying to do STEM projects. I do want to say that if 5 years ago a teacher did a project with kids where they broke them into groups and had them assemble a limited number of straws and a specific length of tape into the tallest possible tower, and if they do it again today it isn’t suddenly a STEM project.
Now, if that same lesson included teaching geometry and/or structural integrity; or if students had to design it such that their design had to have a function such as offices or apartments; or hold a weighted satellite dish; or if it had to factor in wind resistance (such as a blow dryer at close range); or if they had to model their design first and estimate the height they will achieve… if there was some thinking, designing, modelling, or estimating that was required before or even during the build process, well then it’s looking more like STEM.
Hands-on does not equal STEM. Building something does not equal STEM. Group challenges does not equal STEM. Meaningful integration of cross-curricular concepts, where problem solving requires thinking in more than one subject area relating to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math is STEM. It doesn’t have to check all the boxes, but it should include thoughtful integration of at least a couple of these.
It’s about making the cross-curricular connections explicit, or at least thinking through how the outcomes and expectations relate to these connections. It’s about developing competencies in the areas of STEM and not just doing a project that looks like STEM.
I’m genuinely excited about the year ahead. I know things are far from ‘back to normal’. I know safety is still a primary concern, and we’ll be wearing masks for quite some time yet. I know there will be unexpected challenges that come our way…
But the first day of a school year always holds so much promise! There is so much potential for us to do awesome things, and to watch our students shine. It’s an opportunity to look forward knowing that as educators we make a difference in people’s lives.
“With great responsibility comes great power”… that’s the reverse of the Spiderman quote, “With great power comes great responsibility”, and a teacher, John Sarte at Inquiry Hub, uses this to explain to students that while we give them a lot of time to work independently (a lot of responsibility) that comes with a lot of power. This is something that teachers understand, because they are given the great responsibility to teach, and they have tremendous power over what that experience looks like.
And collectively we have so much power over what the year ahead looks like… Let’s keep our optimism up, and make this school year exciting, engaging, and full of meaningful learning for everyone (teachers and students alike).
