Tag Archives: school

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.

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.

Starting a new school year

As a kid I didn’t enjoy the first days of the school year. I feared getting into a class without any of my small group of friends, and then even if we got in the same class, the seating plan would separate us. I worried about who my teachers would be and if I’d like them.

Once in class with all my updated supplies, I always found it hard to start writing in a new workbook.

Even after writing my name and the subject on the cover that first blank page was daunting. My first words written were not the start of a new adventure, but rather the destruction of something perfect… and the start of a lot of work ahead that I wasn’t very excited about.

Now as an adult, I get excited about the metaphorical ‘blank page’ that the new school year brings. The year ahead has no blemishes, only an open book to be written in. The empty pages hold so much promise. The adventure ahead is real, unknown, and unrealized.

The year holds potential, it has promise, and it sits before us, students and educators alike, waiting for us to seize it. There are some nerves, even a little apprehension, but the open book is there before us and it is exciting… we just have to get the first few words out of the way.

Final countdown

Just two more sleeps and the new school year begins. Some people get away for the last weekend, my wife and I almost never go away on this long weekend. We find it busy and our minds are too preoccupied with school. I’ll probably go in on Monday for a couple hours and make sure I’m ready.

Every new school year begins with so much promise, and this year feels especially filled with potential. I know we aren’t completely out of the covid cloud, but most of the restrictions we faced were to ensure there were not too many hospitalizations that we’d overburden our hospitals, and with covid cases being much milder, I think this year will be much more normal.

I never thought I’d be thankful for ‘normal’ but here we are. This year doesn’t need to be special to be good, it just needs to feel less restrictive, less focused on what we can’t do, and more focussed on what we’ve done well in the past. Rebuilding is not as hard as paving the way. The infrastructure is there, we know how to do it, we just need to execute well. But even that can be a little nerve racking looking at the whole year ahead.

Two more sleeps until the new year begins. I’m a little nervous, and quite exited about what lies ahead.

Quite Quitting

I stumbled across the idea of #QuietQuitting which led me to this TikTok video.

The premise is that you don’t actually quit your job, you still perform your duties, but you quit the idea of going ‘above and beyond’. You view work as something you need to do, not something that defines you or determines your self worth.

There is a part of me that struggles with this idea. I can’t see doing the job I have and not wanting to do more, to give more, and to give myself over to my job. Then there is a part of me that totally gets it. I have a job where no matter how many hours I put in beyond the work day, my salary doesn’t change. I’ve fallen into cycles where I’ve dedicated so many hours to my job that I’ve had nothing left for myself or my family. I’ve left work late, and then stayed on my phone working, then gone to bed thinking about the things I still needed to do.

I have recently found a good balance. I get up very early, write, meditate, and exercise so that I feel I’ve accomplished something for myself before I even start my work day. I will stay at work an extra 30 minutes or even an hour longer than planned, but then I don’t do work when I get home. These things provide me with some balance and help me enjoy work more, and still feel like my whole life isn’t work from late August until early July.

But going back to the idea of #QuitQuitting, I see the appeal for people. I don’t think I could do it, but I understand the desire to separate work life from life, and to compartmentalize the two experiences. There are companies now that are seeing the value as well. They are doing things like telling employees what their expectations are and not requiring 8 hour days, (‘This is what you have to do by the end of the week and we don’t care how long you spend doing it or what hours of the day you choose to do them in’). Or, giving employees 4-day work weeks, or ‘Friday optional’ days if work is completed. When you think about it, for many jobs a 40 hour week is completely arbitrary, and a 60 hour week isn’t sustainable for healthy living.

Now in education, where you are responsible for the care of students, a shift to a 4-day week would take a major shift in a culture to adopt, and unlikely to be seen any time soon, but in many other jobs, this is a very likely possibility on a large scale. That said, I think our school, Inquiry Hub could do this. For example, we could make Wednesdays completely optional days, and I could have half my staff there on those days to support students doing their projects. Or we could have Grade 9’s and 10’s off on Mondays and Grade 11’s and 12’s off on Fridays, and focus our learning and support on half of the school on each of those days.

My point is that there are options… and these options can provide a balance for people that give them more time to live their lives outside of school/work, and thus reduce the desire to ‘quit quit’. Because this isn’t just something people are doing at work, I see kids doing this at school too, showing up just to do the minimum.

Maybe the 5 day work week is the problem. Maybe it’s time for us to reevaluate the way we distribute our time between work and the rest of our lives and then maybe people won’t see the need to be #QuietQuitting. Maybe quiet quitting is a signpost that we need to create more work/life balance rather than people trying to unsuccessfully do it on their own.

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.

2 weeks left

This was part of a text conversation I had with a colleague a couple days ago:

Colleague: “… Generally speaking i feel so out of touch. Need some rest this summer I think.”

Me: “Me too! It’s like we are all in pandemic mode AND we have to do ‘normal’ mode on top of that… it doesn’t feel like a shift, it feels like yet another ‘add-on’. I feel like June started 5 weeks ago.”

Colleague: “Oh man – that’s exactly right.”

The two craziest months to be an educator are September and June. Some people (not in education) will ask, “Are thinks winding down as you head into summer?” They don’t realize that there are so many activities to organize, and that we don’t just coast into July. But this year has really been different. I feel like June mode started in the second week of May.

I’m used to sustaining this pace for 4-5 weeks but I’ve been going at it for 6 weeks already and my body is signalling that it’s time to crash for the summer. Right now 2 more weeks feels like an eternity… and simultaneously like not enough time to get everything done.

In the end, I will get everything done. Some things will get pushed to July, and that’s ok. But I’m going to be reflecting on how and why June mode started so early this year, and figure out how to shorten it next year, because I don’t want another year to end like this.

Two weeks. I’m not usually a count-down-the-days kind of person, but this year I think I’ll make an exception.

Undoing the pandemic

It takes a long time to build a culture of a school community, and a relatively short time to undermine it. The pandemic has been a major dismantler of school culture.

Next year our Grade 12’s will only have had from September to March of their Grade 9 year in a normal pre-pandemic school. The new Grade 9’s will have experienced their last pre-pandemic school experience at the start of middle school in Grade 6.

So, next September instead of our Grade 9’s being invited into a new school culture that has been well established, they are entering a school culture that only the Grade 12’s have a vague memory of. They are entering a school culture designed by maintaining ever changing Covid-19 safety precautions.

Next school year will be a critical rebuilding year. This has a lot of promise if it’s done with thoughtful intentions. If next year starts with a ‘business as usual’ expectation, the post pandemic culture will feel more like the pandemic shaped the school. If the year starts with a sense of community building and fostering the culture you hope to see, the afterglow of the pandemic can fade rather quickly.

Cultures don’t rebuild themselves.

So what about your school do you miss? How do you get it back?

What about your school has changed positively? How do you keep these things?

What can you do to start rebuilding in June rather than waiting until September?

If these things aren’t talked about intentionally, if they are not shared by staff and students, the effects of the pandemic on your school culture might linger for a long time. Either intentionally build the culture, or accept what is built out of the ashes of a 2.5 year disruption to what your school culture used to be like. Because whatever your school culture was back in January of 2020 is highly unlikely to be rebuilt by itself in September of 2022.

Homework (again)

I wrote this about Homework, 11 years ago today.

“I question the value of most homework.”

The post shared a scenario where a Math teacher gives homework out and only 30% of the class gains from the practice. Do the math… That’s 21 out of 30 kids not getting much value out of the assigned the work.

The post also talks about how ‘equal’ is not equal to ‘fair’, and giving the same homework to every student isn’t fair when one student can do it unassisted in minutes, and for another the same homework would take an hour with help.

In August of last year I shared another post on homework and imbedded a Tiktok where a parent basically says the purpose of homework is to condition students to do unpaid overtime at home. And then I list: “When is homework a valuable use of a child’s time?”

My first response on the list: It usually isn’t.

It usually isn’t. 11 years later I still question the value of most homework. Let kids be kids at home. Want them to do homework, create something they actually want to do at home. Otherwise, teach them what they need to learn at school.

Teach them how to manage their time well. Teach them it’s ok to ask questions when they don’t understand something. Teach them to focus on something for a concentrated amount of time and then to take a brain break. Teach them to teach something in order to learn it. Teach them habits that help them get work done when it needs to get done. And then let them be kids at home.

A quick life lesson

“If I couldn’t handle not being good at something, then how can I consider myself a successful person?” ~ Gerald Hodges

Watch this story about a young man who picked a sport that was the most challenging one he could choose, to prove to himself that he can find success when challenged.

https://fb.watch/bROEBEZ6cB/

Even if he didn’t get his team to qualify for the state championships, which he did, this is the kind of attitude I want to see in my kids and the kids in my school.