Tag Archives: learning

Full STEAM Ahead

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.

Unexpectedly clever

There is no such thing as a perfect worksheet, and students will often read a question and figure out an unintended way to answer it. Here are two clever responses… the difference being the teacher’s assessment.

I look at the first one and I can hear the Madagascar movie version of it in my head. The teacher states the obvious, “Not the answer I was looking for” and gives it a big red X.

It’s obvious in the second one that the answer also wasn’t what the teacher was looking for, but that teacher gave it a big red check mark and a star.

“Not what I was looking for” does not mean wrong.

A clever response may be unexpected, however whether it was an intentional circumvention of the intended outcome or just insightful and clever it deserves to be appreciated rather than marked incorrectly. In my books, both these kids deserve a star.

Good doesn’t have to be enjoyable

I said this to my massage therapist one day when she had her elbow pressed deep into my back, “Good doesn’t have to be enjoyable”. It was uncomfortable. In no way was it enjoyable. But it was so, so good! She was working out a knot in my upper back very slowly, with a whole lot of pressure. The feeling verged on pain, but it was really good. I knew that in the coming days I would feel a lot of relief thanks to my muscles being worked over in a slow, hard, methodical way.

I think it can be easy to forget that some things are good for you, even if they aren’t fun. Ask any athlete who is stuck just below the skill level required to do a challenging move. Ask a student who is stuck on a concept, but keeps working to figure it out. Ask someone new to a an enjoyable job but the work itself is challenging to do well. Ask a person in the gym working a muscle group to fatigue and their spotter pushing them to do 3 more assisted reps, when their body wants to quit… good doesn’t have to be enjoyable.

There are many things in life that are good to do, that involve some level of uncomfortableness or discomfort, yet are absolutely worth doing. Difficult conversations are another excellent example. Very often people avoid hard but necessary conversations and the lack of communication either allows discomfort and upset to continue or actually makes matters worse. It really isn’t enjoyable having hard but necessary conversation and yet it is so valuable to have these conversations rather than avoid them.

Enjoyment isn’t a necessary byproduct of doing something that is good for you. Immediate enjoyment might not even be desirable. Sometimes it is valuable to take pleasure and enjoyment out of the equation if you want to push yourself to do something that is good for you in the long run.

I think sports is a good place to learn this as a kid. Running faster helps you play better, but that means doing tiring drills. Repeating an action over and over again can be boring, but when you use that skill properly in a game you are rewarded.

Mottos like ‘Just do it’ and ‘No pain, no gain’ come to mind. Doing something well or that’s good for you doesn’t always have an immediate reward, and so it might not be fun to do, even if it’s good for you.

Lack of integration not information

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.

Listen up

I’m currently listening to two books and a long form podcast, and when I have down time I tend to be listening to one of these. Watering the garden, having a hot tub, doing the dishes, walking, riding my exercise bike, each of these are done with headphones on.

I rarely read anymore, I listen. Sometimes it’s hard to pay attention, but I actually found reading harder. First of all I’m a painfully slow reader. And secondly, the slow pace makes me more susceptible to being distracted. I would often read a book and then realize I wasn’t absorbing what I was reading. After catching myself being distracted, I could often look back 3-4 paragraphs, or even a couple pages, and not remember reading any of it. While I can be distracted listening, it’s usually only when the task I’m doing requires me to think a bit, like when I’m driving.

The first year that I started listening to books rather than reading them I went from reading 3 books in a year to listening to 26. This year I’ll likely surpass 30. Looking at my Audible stats, I listened to an average of over 3.5 hours a day in July.

Since downloading Audible, I’ve listened for over 2 months, (over 1,400 hours). There is no way that I would have read for a third of that long in the same amount of time!

And that’s just my books, not podcasts, which I listen to for a few hours each month. I don’t watch tv, other than an occasional series with my wife, and I don’t follow sports. I listen. Summer was all about fiction, now I’m getting back into books that I learn from. I find fiction too much of a distraction during the school year. When I listen to books I learn from, I get more value out of reading and out of work. But if I get a good novel recommendation, I occasionally switch up and treat it the same way someone else would treat a movie.

Audio books have transformed they way I consume books… I read them with my ears.

The Value of Critical Feedback

It’s so important to have friends and colleagues who can give you critical feedback. Yesterday I did a presentation to all of our students on the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. This was not an overview but just an introduction to the book with a personal story that demonstrated how the book influenced me in a positive way. Over the next few weeks I plan on sharing around 10 two-minute videos to help students develop and integrate one positive habit at school, using the strategies in the book.

After my presentation one of my teachers said, “Really good presentation, do you want some critical feedback?” I replied positively and she shared it with me.

I was sharing a slide about my fitness journey and tracking my workouts, and in my first year of tracking I also tracked intermittent fasting. It wasn’t part of my original plan, but I ended up talking for a bit about this too, and how it really doesn’t do much for you other than reducing calorie intake, but that it did reduce my after dinner snacking and helped me lose some unwanted weight.

This was what I got feedback on. My colleague told me that this part of the presentation wasn’t needed, and that for some of our students weight and weight loss as a topic as could be very triggering.

This was a great point! As I reflected on what I said, I not only agreed with my colleague’s feedback, I recognized how a fairly fit, pretty skinny guy talking about weight loss was insensitive… and again, wasn’t even necessary to make my point. It was easy for me to acknowledge this, see the value in receiving this feedback, and be thankful for receiving it.

This feedback will help me be a little more sensitive and thoughtful in my upcoming videos and in future presentations. I really appreciate working in an environment where my colleagues feel comfortable giving me feedback like this. Critical feedback is essential for growth, and while it can be hard to hear that my presentation might have been insensitive to some, it’s far better to know this than to be ignorant of it.

We also work hard to create an environment where our students can give each other critical feedback, and I know that this is far more likely to happen if adults in the building are also open to giving and receiving it amongst each other. Our students see their peers give a lot of presentations, and they have been getting better and better at giving good feedback, but it can still be challenging for them both giving and receiving critical feedback. The important thing is to make sure the culture is to make critical feedback constructive, even if poignant. What value does the critical feedback provide? If this is kept in mind, then the feedback can be far more helpful than just positive praise and platitudes.

But the relationship is dependent on both the giver and receiver understanding the positive intent of critical feedback. In my example above, I could clearly see my error and appreciate the feedback. That doesn’t always happen with critical feedback, and so when the feedback is not as well received, or not as obvious, that’s when it’s important to have a culture of acceptance and openness to feedback. If the culture is there, then it’s just feedback. When the culture is missing, critical feedback can be demotivating, or even hurtful.

Packaged well, in the right environment, critical feedback is a fantastic way to help adults and students alike learn and grow. It turns challenges and failures into opportunities to improve… and even the process itself holds tremendous value because giving critical feedback well is a communication skill everyone can value learning.

Big lessons from little ones

We can learn a lot from being around small kids:

• The delight and joy they find in the smallest of things.

• The ability to adapt rules to find greater joy in a game.

• The freedom to use a toy or a tool in an unintended and imaginative way.

• The way they can be completely honest without malice, shame, or ill intent.

• The comfort that they feel with their bodies and their appearance.

• The easy way in which they share love and affection with people they care about.

• The curiosity and desire to know, to understand, and to question.

It’s a shame that as adults we have let some of these little life lessons slip away.

Changing Perspectives

I’m lounging in a hammock under a couple trees:

When I look up, I see the tree that my feet point to:

Although the tree is vertical and I am horizontal, I am cocooned into the hammock and can’t see the ground, so my perspective is that I’m standing and I can just walk along the horizontal tree in front of me. This shifts the entire world 90 degrees. It looks like I can walk the tree plank over the sky. I simply raise my head to see the ground and this perspective just disappears.

In how many ways can we intentionally do this to gain new perspectives on our world?

That person at work or that student at school who you find annoying, what if you knew more about the struggles they face?

That traffic jam slowing you down, what if it was your car that was rear-ended unexpectedly and you were going to have to deal with months of physiotherapy?

That chore you hate doing, what if you found some pleasure in doing it? What if you could also use that time to listen to something interesting while you completed the task?

So many experiences can be more tolerable, interesting, engaging, or enjoyable, simply by changing perspective. The world doesn’t need to shift 90 degrees to achieve this. In fact, the change can be minor, but the experience can be significantly different… Changing our breathing, tilting our head, looking up, listening intently, smiling, seeking rather than settling, questioning rather than accepting. Everything is a matter of perspective, and perspectives are not hard to change, if change is what you seek.

I teach leadership not followship

It was my second year as a teacher and my Vice Principal pulled me aside late in Semester 1 and asked me if I’d be interested in teaching a couple leadership classes instead of Physical Education as my electives in Semester 2. I think another teacher was slated for this and it was a change he wanted to make. He told me that it would be a great opportunity for me because I would co-teach it on Day-1 with an experienced teacher, and then on my own with another class on Day-2. He made it seem like I’d be doing him a favour saying yes, but I thought I was the one getting a golden opportunity offered to me. And it was!

The teacher I got to work with was Dave Sands. Dave became my first mentor, and to this day one of my most valued friends. We meet weekly for walks and today we were talking about old times and I brought up how much this opportunity transformed my teaching career. I ended up doing my Masters thesis on Student Leadership, and a large part of my leadership philosophy was developed from this opportunity.

“I teach leadership, not followship.” 

This was a quote Dave often said to students. It was the mantra of the course, and something not just said, but lived. Dave would run activities and lessons that encouraged students to pull the lesson out on their own. And whenever there were activities run by the class, they were authentically student run. There would be a prompt, “Here’s what we need to do,” or “Let’s plan this event,” then students would design the activity or schedule, then after then event there was always a reflection afterwards.

Students ran the events. Students stepped up, tried new things, succeeded and sometimes failed… but they always had ownership, and always learned from their experience. When Dave left, it left a void that I felt I couldn’t fill on my own. I distributed the leadership of student leadership across other teachers and we developed an out of the schedule leadership program that about 1/3 of the Grade 8’s signed up for each year. As it grew, so did the distributed model of giving others leadership over different aspects of the program.

From my Master’s paper:

“Leadership is getting others to do What the group needs to get done, Because they want to do it.” …

A Working Definition of Leadership

Before being able to investigate what meaningful student leadership is or can be, there needs to be some consideration as to what leadership itself is. It is evident that any currently usable definition of leadership would in fact be very different than a usable definition from only thirty years ago. Senge (1990) sees the traditional leader of the past as the charismatic decision maker and/or the hero. In this view, myths of great leaders coming to the rescue in times of crisis perpetuate the view of leaders as heroes, and “they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning” (p. 8). Senge sees current leaders in a different light, he sees them as, “designers, teachers, and stewards. These roles require new skills: the ability to build shared vision, to bring to the surface and challenge prevailing mental models, and to foster more systemic patterns of thinking” (p.9). These new skills require leaders to be thinkers and learners.

The quote I started this paper off with is an adaptation of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s quote, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” I adapted this quote several years ago to better fit with the times as well as to fit with my own ideas of shared leadership. The focus on a ‘top-down’ leader in Eisenhower’s quote was very appropriate for its’ time, however, today it is more fitting for a leader to be concerned with the group’s or team’s goals.

The quote, subtly but poignantly reworded, states, “Leadership is getting others to do, what the group needs to get done, because they want to do it.” Within this quote there is: a suggestion of influence, getting others to do a task; a suggestion of service, aiding the group rather than just the leader; a suggestion of inclusion, doing what the group wants; a suggestion of teamwork, working within a group; and, a suggestion of motivation or inspiration, getting people to want to assist you or the group. A lot of literature on student leadership focuses on the first three points, influence, service and inclusion. Literature focused specifically on either teamwork or motivating others, as principal themes, tends to relate to managers, primarily in the realm of business and not nearly as much in education.

In considering a definition of leadership that functions well when considering student leadership in a middle school, I think that leadership pertains to getting students to be of service to others, while teaching them to effectively influence and motivate others. This can be successfully accomplished when students work in inclusionary groups or teams that create and take advantage of opportunities to act as servant leaders.

Creating leaders, not followers. That’s the underlying lesson. Too often leaders run activities such that they are the lead and those around them follow. “Students we need to… and we need people in the following roles… and here is the ‘to do’ list… and …and …and.”

It’s more than just a subtle shift to change this to providing students with an authentic leadership opportunity.

Prompt: Here is the task/activity/opportunity. How shall we do this?

Activity: Authentically planned and organized by students.

Reflection: How did it go? What went well? What could have been better? What would you do differently if we did this again?

Empowering students. Letting them lead. Teaching leadership, not followship.

Undershooting Your Potential

“If you’re always right, you’re not learning.

If you’re never failing, you’re not reaching.

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.

They aren’t trying something epic and failing. Back in 2009, in a post called, Chasing the ‘A’, I quoted Bud Hunt,

“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.

Grades don’t guarantee success.

Passion + Determination + Positive Attitude = Success

I’ll give you an A if you transform the world.”

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.