Not gold medals but glowing hearts

I've spent most of my career in high schools, so I wondered how much help I could be when I was invited to supervise a station at Ladysmith Primary School for their family math afternoon. Don't worry, Anita said, we've trained the grade 2 and 3 students to “man” the stations. You really won't have to do anything.

I arrived at the "Olympic" event and got a participant card - the Olympic logo on a clip secured by a ribbon around my neck - and was steered to my station. There were a dozen or so stations around the gym with various activities suitable for primary students. Mine was a logic puzzle. My tiny student leaders quickly showed me how to help the families do the "event" at our station, how to give the participant a "medal" to add to their Olympic logo clip when they'd completed the puzzle. And they taught me how to be "gentle." Even if they don't solve it, you can give them a medal, they told me. We honour their participation. And don't forget to be encouraging, they added. But don't just give them the answer, they admonished - that takes the fun out of it. Then with that sage teaching advice, they invited me to sit in a chair, because, really, I wouldn't have to do anything - they had everything under control. And they did. I got to watch.

Parents and their children poured into the gym, enthusiastically participating in the math "events" and gathering up their "medals" with glee. At our station, even the smallest child solved the puzzle with Ruby and Maddy's expert prompting and support. You could see the light shine in their eyes when their tiny fingers pointed to the solution - "It's that one!" And Maddy and Ruby's enthusiastic, "Yes! You got it!" was never less than genuine. What was best of all was watching the parents as they watched their children thinking hard in math. And another best - every person in the room could say, "Math is fun!"

The Olympic feat I'd like to point out is something else though. A quick glance around the room would tell you that hours and hours and hours of time was spent to make this magical event happen - everything from planning and designing the stations, training the student-leaders, creating the ribbons, "medals," and signs, ordering tables, setting up the gym, inviting parents. The list is long - surely Anita and her Ladysmith Primary team should stand on a podium and receive their own medal. And they are just one of the schools I happened to visit. Events like this take place in our schools constantly. They connect our parents to our community, allow children to be leaders, and provide educators an opportunity to showcase what's most important for learning. There are no ceremonies to acknowledge this important work; the reward, for those who are lucky enough to see it, is in the glowing hearts of the children and their families.

Do you believe?

Ordering food is the hard part. Close to 100 people are expected, but will they really show up, tired educators at the end of a long day? How many of them will have something "come up"? By the time we started, however, we realized we'd have to have chairs brought in and I began to wish I'd decided on one more platter of cheese.

Over 100 educators arrived in the end - administrators, teachers, university instructors, student teachers - to think together as productive partners in a network of educators - the Network of Performance Based Schools. Our task? To achieve our collective "dream with a deadline": an equitable future with quality outcomes for every learner by 2020. In each network school, teacher design an inquiry question to discover ways to improve learning. In our region, we meet formally three times each year to share ideas, ask question, and learn together. You can see some of our work in progress at our Mid-Island Wiki.

Here are educators deciding that it's "too late to wait," as Peter Senge says, and are working in teams in their schools or, if in their school there is no one to work with, with educators in other schools, and if there is no one to work with in their district, with other educators in our province. They are refusing to work in isolation. They are pushing themselves to think about research-based practice, designing focused inquiry questions to examine their own teaching and learning, and implementing formative assessment daily.

Is it going smoothly? No. It's messy, hard work that forces us to think hard, work hard, redesign the way we do things in schools, test our own preconceptions - and meet together at the end of a long day. But here is gold medal work that makes you want to say, "I believe."

Blowing a horn loudly for teachers

Shelley, my first practicum teacher told me, if you don't blow your own horn, someone will use it as a spittoon. For years I thought that my difficulty with self-praise was in part due to the way I was raised ("bragging" was the ultimate sin), in part because I am Canadian (we are defined by our unassuming nature) and in part because I am a woman (as Clay Shirky argues, "not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks"). However, lately I've been thinking that it is also because I am a teacher. Those of us who are drawn to teaching are more modest, less self-aggrandizing. Teachers are "behind-the-scenes" people, coaching, prompting, encouraging, pushing, carrying, cheering. The focus is not on the teacher, but on the student.

The danger, of course, is that we become the spittoon of society. Kids can't read? Blame teachers. Kids can't write? Blame teachers. Kids can't solve math problems? Blame teachers. Kids aren't motivated? Blame teachers. Kids are overweight? Blame teachers. Kids aren't responsible? Blame teachers. And because we are modest, we think, yes, we could do better. And we go back to the drawing board and add more things to our plate: literacy initiatives, numeracy initiatives, healthy schools initiatives, social responsibility initiatives and spend our professional development learning how to "engage" students.

The result? Tired teachers. Discouraged teachers. And teachers who don't feel valued. Yet the teachers I meet daily should be sung about in the streets and have their pictures hung on Olympic-sized billboards. But who will blow their horn?

I've decided to take it up - my Olympic series. Here is my first snapshot. Last week was exam week for secondary schools on a semester system. That means that teachers wrap up their semester, mark final assignments and exams, write report cards, put away the books, files, and materials of one set of courses and start to fill their rooms with a new set. It is, as you can imagine, a very busy week. And if they are teaching Socials 11 or English 10, they also have to mark the provincial exams. There is no requirement to mark them in a certain way. They could mark the papers in their classroom by themselves quickly. But teachers in our district decided to mark the exams in a district-wide process that takes a full day to complete. It begins, actually, the day before when a half dozen teachers volunteer - during this madly busy week - to create anchor papers from the stacks and stacks of written exams. The next day the whole group reads the anchor papers together and agree on how the papers should be marked and why. Then each paper is "blind marked" (neither the school nor the student is identified) and "double-marked" (two teachers agree on the mark). Throughout the day and more formally at the end of the day, teachers reflect on the student work, note areas of weakness, and consider approaches and ideas to tackle those challenges.

This heroic work done during a busy time by exhausted teachers isn't just a good day's work. It's work meant to change the future for children, to improve their life chances, to make success for each child a reality. Three cheers for our teacher heroes. I wish we had a podium and medals to hand out.

Image: Nick-K.'s photostream on Flickr

Book clubs are nice, but...

Book clubs are nice - but you have to find a club, buy a book (it's not even necessarily your first pick), go to meetings (even when you are dead tired after a long day) and take your turn buying snacks.

Now imagine reading a book online (your choice and possibly free) with a group of people all passionately interested in the same topic, making margin comments and adding stickies to the same book, chatting in real time with people from your group whenever you are reading (in the middle of the night when you can't sleep but have a burning question about why the heroine opened the door). Interested? Go to the Book Glutton.

But book clubs are social, you say. It's the friendly faces, the glass of wine, the cheese tray, the laugher. Yes. And the online world is social, too. Just different - and it meets different needs. Think, for example, about the how we could use this tool in classrooms where we've made a commitment to teaching to diversity. You are setting up for Literature Circles in your grade 9 classroom and you have a gifted reader. She wants to read a classic, but there isn't anyone else to partner her with for discussions. You contact other teachers in your district or province or the world - and you find two other students with similar interests. You and their teachers give them the choices: King Lear or Tale of Two Cities or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Room with a View or Crime and Punishment (I'm just choosing off the top of my head; the classics are freely available). Your students read, mark text, ask questions, research together using Diigo and Google Docs, and co-create a presentation using Presentit. For your gifted reader, it is a rich and rewarding experience: she meets other students with similar interests and feels challenged, stimulated and excited about learning.

We have extraordinary tools for diversity at our fingertips. We just need to learn how we can use them and how we can work together to leverage their power.

Image: Prattman's photostream on Flickr

Do you know the game?

We often make the analogy, when we argue for math drills, let's say, that to get good at anything, you need practice. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers gives us all kinds of examples of why extraordinary people do extraordinary things - they practice for 10,000 hours. As teachers, we argue that sports uses drills all the time. It's part of the hard work that makes us good at what we do. Therefore, drills in schools are a good thing. But where we go wrong in schools with practice is context. In volleyball, for example, we might practice setting for hours - but it's always in service of the game. The game is the thing. We practice over and over to win the game. But do kids know what the game is when they practice their times tables? The ones that do - win. How can we make sure each child knows about the game? And how can we ensure that we, as teachers, know the game? Sometimes we forget that it's not the test. It's not the assignment. It's not the project. And it's not the report card.

How are you doing?

I've been thinking that the question - how are you doing? - is framed from one of two opposing attitudes (and the third "Joey" way which is something else entirely and not really relevant here, except that it's interesting to consider how many people think of Joey when the question is posed). The first attitude is one of curiosity and concern - What do you need? Are you comfortable? How can I help? The second attitude is one of "accountability" and accusation - Are you meeting the quota, outcomes, checklist? Are you performing adequately? Are you "improving"?

Lately we've been caught up in thinking that the "accountability" attitude is the best one for schools. But I'm not convinced. I'm pretty sure that there is nothing more important to the future than education today. And I'm pretty sure that we all have a role to play in making sure that we have the best education system possible. But I doubt that we'll get there through checklists and performance indicators. Rather than ask - how are you doing and prove it - it might be time to ask - how are you doing, so our entire community help.

Good manners make people happy

Remember when children had good manners? Watch this Thanksgiving video just to jog your memory. Remember matching sweaters? Remember "happy times"? Aren't you glad you know what to do with a napkin? Holidays are fun.

And aren't you glad, now that you've watched the video, that you live in the 21st century? We still need good manners, but surely they go beyond which fork to use and how to eat food easily without noise and neatly without spots. Rather, good manners require us to understand, honour, accept and include very different protocols from different cultures. Good manners in the 21st century demand that we are deeply aware that there are some who are unhappy, not because they have poor table manners, but because they have no food on their table. Food makes people happy. And good manners in the 21st century go beyond offering thanks for our food to offering help to those who have none. Good manners are much more difficult in the 21st century. The new manners are less tidy, neat, and nice - but they are desperately needed for peace in our time and a sustainable future.