Tag Archives: school

Share less tragedy

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We don’t have to feign naivety and pretend something horrible didn’t happen. Sad things happen in the world and we need to understand this. What we don’t need is a constant flow of news and a detailed account of the event pushed on to us, and more importantly pushed onto kids.

This was some professional advice shared with me 14 years ago, after a tragic suicide in our community that was followed shortly after by a school shouting in the US.

  • Refrain from sharing images or video of the incident.
  • If discussions do take place within the classroom, we recommend they be limited to a brief sharing of facts.
  • There will understandably be some anxiety around this incident and staff and students may have some level of emotional impact from the news.
  • Please watch for any changes in behaviour, particularly among vulnerable students, and refer appropriately to your school counsellor as needed.

Children don’t need to see report after report about a tragic incident. It doesn’t have to be the topic of a current events discussion. And nothing needs to be shared about a perpetrator of a horrific crime. Not even the perpetrator’s name. Not at school, not at home.

I could go on, but I’ve share a lot on this already, many years ago:

‘Care or Fear’

Excerpt: We often get results based on the pictures we fill our young impressionable  students’ heads with. Tomorrow, I fear that well-intentioned teachers could stir up thoughts of fear for personal safety in young minds, as concerns about Newtown are discussed. As I said, ‘I’m willing to bet that hundreds of thousands of students that might have felt safe in their school, and would not have questioned their own safety, will now think of that question (Am I safe?) and perhaps be more frightened than if that question did not get discussed.’

And then I followed up with ‘A new tragedy of the commons’

Excerpt: The fact is that we know, both through research and from historical evidence, that glorified stories perpetuate the very sadness we are appalled by. But that doesn’t stop a major national magazine, MACLEAN’S, from glorifying a killer on their front cover page. I’ve shared the cover below, but took some creative liberties with a red pen to prevent this very post from doing what I wish others wouldn’t.

When I see a cover page like this, I’m left wondering what we truly value in our society?

It comes down to this: We need to care for those who are concerned, we don’t need to amplify concern. The less we share tragic stories as a community, the more care we are showing for that community.

Keeping the friction

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I’ve been a proponent of integrating technology into schools and classrooms for a couple decades. And in many ways I’m excited about AI and what it has to offer in the field of education.

But I have one major concern above all others: Making learning easier is not the goal.

Decreasing the challenge doesn’t foster meaningful learning. Reducing the required effort doesn’t make the learning more memorable. Encouraging deeper thinking is the goal, not doing the thinking for you.

We need to make sure that AI is not taking the friction out of learning but rather maintaining or increasing the friction in the best places to promote meaningful learning. Friction is required.

Reconnecting and remembering

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I had lunch with a former student yesterday. It was great to connect and hear how things are going, not just for him, but for his brother and a few other former students he still connects with. It grounds me when I have these opportunities. It reminds me that school is just a short stop on the journey of life. It puts school into perspective.

And yet, despite saying that, the experience we give to students is so important. I read a post on LinkedIn yesterday by an educator I admire and respect. He has a wonderful, high needs kid with challenges that make her school experience difficult. In the post he shared how inflexible the system, or more specifically some people in the system, have been with her… and how hard it has been for her to cope with this in addition to the challenges she faces.

Going back to my visit, this student went to our school when I was overwhelmed, running 3 schools and also dealing with chronic fatigue. He remembers how I struggled. He reminded me of my own challenges I had. But that wasn’t the focus of our conversation, and it wasn’t the only thing we reminisced about.

Still, this provides a little insight into a couple things. First of all, we all deal with things that affect how we cope with daily life, and we can’t really see how we are affected by circumstances or even be aware of how circumstances are affecting others. Secondly, as short as the school journey is, it makes a huge difference in peoples lives.

Our interactions, our attention, our considerations, our disposition, and our actions make differences in the experiences of students. We don’t know the full impact we will have. We don’t know the things people will remember about us when they move on… the best we can do is to remember that all of our interactions matter, and that we have an impact whether we realize it or not, so let’s work to make that impact the best it can be.

Appreciate the autonomy

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One of the elements of being part of a large system is that is that sometimes you lose autonomy for operational efficiency. It’s hard for an organization to allow everyone to do things differently and still both display some consistency and provide meaningful support.

In our district all of our schools are getting an update to their websites. The new sites are a lot more user-friendly and do provide a bit more choice. However when our tiny school, Inquiry Hub Secondary was built, our cofounding principal, now an Assistant Superintendent, decided that the school needed a different look online and we chose to build an Edublogs site, based off of WordPress. Our website looks nothing like any of the other schools in our district. And, we use it quite differently than most school do.

Two examples of how we use our website differently are that we emphasize the kind of projects students do on our website and we provide our PAC – Parent Advisory Committee with a very flexible WordPress blog as their ‘Parent Portal’.

Yesterday I got a call from our district principal in charge of the website transition for our schools and it was a great conversation where we discussed if our school was going to make the transition. It wasn’t a directive, it was a conversation. It was an opportunity for our school to participate or to keep autonomy.

I can’t express how much this is appreciated. It is challenging for large organizations to allow this kind of freedom, and often small, unique programs need to ‘toe the line’ and follow along so that operationally things go smoothly. For example, we are a Microsoft Office school district and if one school wanted to be something different, it could be a nightmare for tech support to provide trained support. However, all of our high schools already use Edublogs, so our website choice isn’t adding anything new with respect to support.

So, we were given a choice. It might seem like a small choice, but I understand the challenges to complexity it creates and I truly value being in an organization that provides such choice when it can.

Thinking Requires Effort

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I recently read a great article by Alec Couros, The Radical Act of Thinking. In it he said, “The challenge isn’t finding the tool anymore. The challenge is avoiding it. We’ve reached the point where AI is the path of least resistance for almost every task.”

And then he concluded with this:

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

Here are a few ways that I see teachers doing this at Inquiry Hub:

  1. Community video or podcast challenges. Part of the challenge might include creating the video in a specific genre, or a meta part of the presentation where students explicitly describe what they have learned.
  2. Personalized inquiry projects. This is offered through a course designed around the process of learning, not content. So it doesn’t matter if a student is learning to code, designing a website, publishing a book, learning a specific skill in art, composing a song, starting a business, or even learning to crochet… the inquiry is designed around students learning skills they want to learn.
  3. Solving problems in class. I’ve questioned the value of homework for over 15 years now. Watching our senior math teacher teach Math & Physics, I see him focusing on the why of questions. I see his students working in pairs and groups to solve problems together on white boards. I see students actively struggling and learning in class, where they have access to support, and the focus is on the struggle and understanding the problem.

Something else that we do is to be careful not to add things to students loads unnecessarily. I can’t tell you the countless times I hear well-intentioned educators say, “You know what would be a good project for your students to do?” Followed by a legitimately good idea. But we are not an alternate school, we are a regular school with an alternative approach. Our students still need to fulfill the entire regular curriculum on top of the inquiries they do for credit. As good as other ideas may be, they become make-work activities that not all students are interested in, and this just invites students to use AI or to feel like the work is just busywork.

Will Richardson asks, “Every time you’re about to implement a new program or pedagogy or technology or initiative or building project or anything else, ask and answer this simple question: “In service of what?””

When we add anything to our schedule, it’s to serve one of two purposes:

1. Integrate curriculum or make the curriculum more engaging. Our students go on to universities, colleges, and technical institutes, and they need the required courses to get there and do well. But the required curriculum doesn’t need to be taught in a linear, boring fashion. When a project is added in class, the intent is to meaningfully cover more curriculum in less time.

2. We add things in service of students. A recent example: For the last 10 years our PAC has fundraised to provide students with FoodSafe every 2nd year. So all our students learn life skills around preparing and serving food. This year our PAC is also providing our seniors with first aid training. The plan is that they will alternate years between FoodSafe and first aid so that every student who goes through Inquiry Hub will have these life skills when they leave the school. Carving out 8 hours of training time over 2 days involves our senior teachers reworking their schedule… in the service of giving our students a life skill.

I won’t pretend that everything we do is AI proof, and that there aren’t lessons and activities where students could avoid thinking using a tool that does the work for them. I also won’t pretend that every assignment and project is ‘in service’ of authentic learning for students. But I will say that we’ve worked hard to make the learning meaningful for students. We provide them with opportunities to work in our community towards common goals, and we provide them with opportunities to pursue projects meaningful to them, focusing on the process of learning… on the struggle, with a perspective that failure and struggle are a path to real learning, not a barrier.

I’ve said before,

“We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.”

This fits with what Alec said above,

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

The secret sauce is in providing the space and time for students to struggle out in the open, facing challenges or learning life skills that they will use. However, you don’t create these opportunities by continually adding things to a student’s plate. Adding more to their plates only invites them to find tools to do the work for them.

Thinking requires effort, and providing students with opportunities to demonstrate that effort in meaningful ways is, in my mind, the project of schools. Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.

The upside down bell curve

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The bell curve, also known as a normal distribution, is a graph that depicts how values in a dataset are distributed. Most values cluster around the average with fewer values appearing at the extremes… those rare few that do very well or very poorly.

But there is a new curve evolving that matters more, the upside down bell curve where the ones on the extremes are where most of the data points are distributed. In an era of free and openly available information, this is the new learning curve. There is no more average majority, instead there are those that understand and those that do not. Those that participate and those that opt out. Those that engage and those that choose not to. Those that seek to learn and those that disengage.

The resources needed to do well are available. The access to information is there for all who want it. The opportunity to get that information in a format or delivery that makes sense to you is easy to find. The question is, are you willing to put the effort in?

If you learn how you best learn, then access to information is no longer a barrier and you will likely learn very well. You will be with the majority of people on the successful side of the distribution curve. If you decide it’s too hard, or choose not to engage, you will be with the other majority, ignorantly selecting the unsuccessful side of the distribution.

There will be anomalies, those that have learning challenges that are not met and struggle, and those that make no effort yet still find it easy to understand things. There will also be those few that just choose to squeak by, capable of more but neither excelling or struggling. But this is the era of extremes. This is a time when the ‘A’, the ‘Exceeding Expectations’, the ability to excel, is available to most… and yet will only be achieved by the ones who actually choose it.

The mathematical average of the curve might be the same, but the distribution will be starkly divided.

A community of learners

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Here are 4 quotes from student self reflections. I saved the most creative on for last. I absolutely love how the kid created a metaphor, but understood that it wasn’t a perfect analogy, so he updated the comparison to make it work. Very clever.

I need reminders like this sometimes to remember what a unique learning environment the teachers have created for our students. It lifts me up to see these kinds of comments in self reflections. It reminds me that we are not just teaching kids, we are fostering a special learning community.

These all come from the ‘Student Self-Assessment of Core Competencies’ section of our recent report card. The first and last ones are from Grade 9’s and the middle two are from a Grade 11 and then a Grade 10. As a bit of background to the first one, we use scrum project management for a lot of group work at our school.

~~~

“The most important thing I have learned this term is with the French Revolution, we learned about the different social estates and how each estate was treated differently and unfairly by their king, which led to the third estate starting a revolution for better rights. With that knowledge, it gives an example of how a good scrum leader should act and how they shouldn’t act, they should be inclusive, fair and treat their group with respect and consider everyone’s opinions, while a bad scrum leader might choose to ignore their group’s input and be controlling over the project.

Some of my favourite things to do at school are the different group projects we have, with the group projects they’re mostly assigned groups so it gives me a chance to get to know my classmates and see who works best with what. When I work really hard at something, I have a better understanding and I will be able to get my work done.”

~~

“This term I am proud of my ability to take in information during lectures and lessons. I find it useful in 20th Century History, and especially Pre-calc 11. The most important thing I have learned this term is the significance in attempting to be passionate in the things you’re learning. To find interest in the things you might find boring. Some of my favourite things to do at school are talking with people and their interests and views.

When I work really hard at something, I feel accomplished and proud that I have the capacity to learn.”

~~~

“This term I am proud of how much I’ve improved in managing my time and finishing my work on schedule. I’ve become more organized and responsible with deadlines, and I’ve learned how to plan my tasks better so I don’t feel rushed at the last minute. I’ve also noticed that I can focus longer and stay “consistent” even when the workload gets heavier. The most important thing I have learned this term is that effort and patience make a big difference. Even when something feels difficult at first, I’ve realized that I can get better if I keep trying and don’t give up too soon. I’ve learned to see mistakes as part of the process instead of something negative, and that mindset has helped me improve both academically and personally. Some of my favourite things to do at school are working on hands-on projects, doing group activities, and learning through discussions instead of just notes or lectures. I enjoy collaborating with classmates, sharing ideas, and finding creative ways to solve problems together. I like lessons that are interactive and allow me to apply what I’ve learned in real ways.

When I work really hard at something, I feel proud and motivated to keep improving. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and shows me that consistent effort pays off. It reminds me that I can do more than I thought if I stay determined and keep pushing myself, even when things get challenging. Next term I would like to try challenging myself more, especially in areas I usually find hard, such as writing and analyzing. I also want to take more initiative in group work, contribute more ideas, and help others when I can. My goal is to keep growing not only in academics but also in teamwork and confidence!”

~~~

“During my first few months of Inquiry Hub, I’ve found that I’m quite proud of how many connections I’ve made already. At my old schools, it was difficult to find any friends, at all. In middle school, I thought I’d found them, but I was actually in a really toxic friendship. I think that was because I just wasn’t around my people. Here at iHub, I’ve found some really good friends, just in the first weeks!

During those weeks, however, I watched the higher grades, and tried to figure out what was going on. They didn’t act like the people I’d known at all. After a little bit, I figured it out:

(iHub) = (Normal School) – (Discrimination)

It’s not just another school, it’s another ecosystem entirely! A place where all predators were locked out, and instead of the ”’prey”’ destroying the environment with overpopulation, they create an actually self-functioning society.”

~~~

Reading comments like these reminds me why I like going to work. They remind me of the awesome students we have and the incredible team of educators who bring the best out of our students. I really love our learning community.

Fuelling my disillusionment

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A few months ago I wrote the following in response to a LinkedIn post, and then saved it in my drafts. The problem is, I didn’t copy the link to the original post properly. Furthermore, if I recall, it didn’t really answer the question that was posed. It was tangentially connected but not completely on topic.

I’ve edited my comment slightly, and I want to share it since I’m wonder if ‘it’s just me’ feeling this way?

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

It’s the doing more with less that fuels my disillusionment.

  • Greater and often unrealistic expectations of parents and universities.
  • Greater student social-emotional as well as educational needs.
  • Greater demands to prevent litigation (more documentation, more protection of data, more health & safety requirements… all ‘necessary’, but time consuming.)
  • Greater demands and expectations from the Ministry of Education, and Worksafe BC.
  • Greater costs – pay hikes, heating costs, perishable supplies. Even with no cuts to education, less money gets to the classroom.
    I could go on. I’ve watched my role shift from educational leader to middle manager of an educational machine. I feel like a shield trying to redirect and manage the above impacts away from teachers so that they, rather than we, can do great things with kids.

Still an important role but a lot less personally rewarding.

Am I the only principal feeling this?

Access to Accessories

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Never let access to accessories be a barrier to using technology. On a shelf in my office I have a small plastic set of drawers with every kind of adapter a teacher or student would need. I also have an extra 3ft and 15ft HDMI cable. I’ve got chargers for laptops and phones. I’ve got a few different dongles. And for my online teachers, I’ve got extra laptops pens, which make marking easier. Your mouse broke? I’ve got you covered.

In all honesty, the overall cost of these items is not exorbitant. Sure, there are a couple small items I’ve purchased that haven’t been used, but most of what I’ve purchased has needed to be replenished at some point. The difference is, that I’ve pre-ordered them and there is zero delay from the time a teacher or student needs an accessory to the time I’m able to provide a replacement, instead of there being a delay of access while I purchase the replacement.

To me this is a low bar, providing access to accessories is an easy hurdle to jump when you’ve already got the accessories waiting when they are needed.

Chat GPT chose us

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A couple Fridays ago the school got a call from a guy with an Australian accent. He said he was a former school principal who now does consulting promoting progressive and innovative practices in schools. He said he knew it was short notice but he was in town and could he visit our school. I had time at the end of the day and invited him to visit. He Uber’ed in from Vancouver and after a quick chat we had a tour, talked to a couple teachers, and a few students.

He got to see the tail end of a presentation and hear some of the feedback our students gave. Then we went back to my office for a chat. So I asked him, how did you choose Inquiry Hub as a school to visit? He said that he has been working with AI recently and he had put all the factors he looks for in progressive schools, and asked Chat GPT which school he should visit. Inquiry Hub came up.

I find it fascinating that we were found this way. A chance encounter created by an LLM.