Tradition

I think sometimes we use words assuming they mean one thing when they actually mean another. Much like accountability, I think "tradition" is sometimes one of those words.

When schools use the word "tradition" they usually mean it in the sense of school pride, a kind of institutional memory of the things the school has done well and wants to continue to do well. But I worry that - in practice - our use of tradition ends up meaning something quite different from that.

Here's how Merriam-Webster defines tradition:

1. a: an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom)
   
   b: a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable
   
2. the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction
   
3. cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions
   
4. characteristic manner, method, or style

While there's nothing here that particularly conflicts with how schools define tradition, there's also much here that the school-ey definition ignores. Words like "inherited", "customary", "cultural continuity",  and "customs" all share a common element: they are accepted without thought. It doesn't matter whether the idea is good, bad, or in-between, because it's "tradition" it's what we do. Too often tradition ends up being - in practice - translated into "because we've always done it this way."

I know that folks who like using the word tradition would protest that that's not what they mean. What they mean is all the "good" traditions that we have, all the things we're proud of and that we think define us. But the problem is that tradition is more than that. If there are certain traditions that we are referring to, we should be specific and enumerate them, because otherwise we are endorsing all the traditions that we have.

For example, my school is (justifiably) proud of our relationship with the Arapaho Nation. Since 1993, we have had on-going dialogue and interaction with the Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, including taking a busload of our students up to the reservation, and a large contingent of Arapaho coming to our school for an assembly and to visit our classes. But we should also acknowledge that our "tradition" includes the 29 years prior to that when we didn't have the relationship, when our mascot was a caricature of an Indian (Native American) that we found out from the Arapaho in 1993 was actually closer to a Pawnee, and which (in addition to it being offensive in and of itself), we used in offensive ways (like putting it on the floor of the gym, offensive chants, etc.). What if in 1993 we had argued that "tradition" supported keeping our original mascot? (Which is the argument that many others are currently making, from high schools across the country to the professional football team in Washington D.C.)

To be clear, we have many great traditions at my school and we have done many things well in the past. But that was the past; we should be asking ourselves what we should be doing for our students today, and tomorrow, and for what the world is going to look like when they are our age. As John Dewey famously said,

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.

That doesn't mean we just "throw everything out" or that we "don't respect our traditions". But it does mean that we can't blithely use the word tradition to unthinkingly continue on the way we've been going. It brings to mind the song from Fiddler on the Roof:

Hodel, oh Hodel, have I made a match for you.
He's handsome! He's young! All right, he's 62.
But he's a nice man, a good catch. True? True!
I promise you'll be happy. And even if you're not,
There's more to life than that. Don't ask me what!
(italics mine)

Don't ask me what. Don't question. Don't think about it for yourself. Don't spend the time to figure out what you truly value. Just do it because it's tradition.

We can do better.

A New Mission

A little while back I wrote about my frustrations with my school's mission and vision statements. As I said then, I doubted that very many (if any) of our students - or our staff - could tell you what our mission statement said, much less our vision statement.

That doesn't mean I don't generally like what's in our mission statement (and, for that matter, our longer vision statement). You can read them here (pdf). I do want students to achieve their potential, collaborate and be life-long learners, and contribute to society. The problem is that when you have a mission statement that no one knows, and that has generic statements like that, it ends up being pretty meaningless.

In other words, it's mission impossible.

On our in-service day on Thursday we broke up into small groups to discuss our mission and vision statement, with the purpose of identifying things we wanted to keep, things we wanted to get rid of, or things we wanted to add/modify. Each group worked on that for a while and then submitted a summary of their thinking to administration, who will review it and then . . . well, I'm not sure what exactly the next step is, but I think the intent is to come up with a new (well, modified) mission and vision statement that would be applicable in 2020 (our current one was created in 2007).

In my small group we had a great discussion and we all generally agreed with the sentiments I expressed in my previous post, that while there isn't really anything we disagreed with in our current mission and vision, it was pretty meaningless because it was way too wordy and tried to be all things to all people. We reached consensus that our mission needs to be something that is succinct and meaningful, and that all students and staff should not only know, but should refer to it often.

I shared Science Leadership Academy's mission and vision as an example of the direction I would like to see us head. I suggested that framing our mission and vision around a few (maybe 2-5) essential questions and a few (maybe 3-6) core values was a good way to really hone in on what it is we're about at Arapahoe High School. What we're trying to achieve, what we value, what's important enough to put up on the walls of every single classroom and refer to every single day.

We had a great discussion around that, and my group was generally receptive, although I'm not sure they are necessarily as enamored of this approach as I am. The summary we turned in (on paper . . . sigh) included these ideas (although not the hyperlink to SLA's mission and vision). We'll see where it goes, and it will be interesting to see what other groups come up with (although I'm not sure we will see that, just the "results").

I think it's sometimes tough for folks to get their minds around a mission and vision that is not exhaustive like our current one is. Because we think lots of things are important (and they are), we want to make sure they are all represented in the mission and vision so that nothing (and no one) gets "left out." But I think that really misses the mark on what a mission and vision should be. Our mission should really be our core purpose and our core values, and to be "core" they can't include everything. And our vision, while it should be aspirational and can certainly be a bit longer, still needs to be at a relatively "high" conceptual level.

As in my "big ideas" series of posts last summer, I thought I would take a stab at writing a mission statement for AHS. To be clear, I am not suggesting that this should be the mission statement for AHS (although I think it would be a good one :-), but I think it's helpful for folks to see one particular example of how it could look in order to help foster discussion. So here we go.

Essential Questions (PPSL)

1. What does it mean to be literate?
2. How do you define "success"?
3. What is your passion and what is your purpose?

What does it mean to be literate?
This is a question that I have frequently asked during my speaking engagements. I talk about it a bit here, but I want to be clear that I'm not referring to "literate" in the traditional sense of "just" reading and writing (although even in those areas I think this is vastly more complicated than we assumed it was when I was growing up and going through K-12). This includes mathematical literacy (sometimes referred to as numeracy), scientific literacy, artistic literacy, emotional literacy, and a whole bunch of other literacies (as NCTE says, "many literacies" that are "dynamic and malleable.")

At its heart, this is really a question about what it means to be competent, capable and empowered in a certain area. I also think a key component of this is how do you know that something you've created is good, not just by some external measure (although that can be informative), but how do you yourself know that it's a quality product? Some folks might prefer to reword this as "what does it mean to be educated?", and I think that would be okay, but I decided to stay away from that phrasing because I think it has too much baggage. By focusing on a new way of looking at the word "literate," I think it frees us up to really consider a broader array of skills and habits of mind.

How do you define "success"?
We talk a lot about helping students be "successful," both in school and then in their lives after they leave school. Every school, every government official, every education reform group, every parent, and even every student will talk about needing to prepare students so that they can be successful, and who can argue with that? Well, I can. Because we never take the time to define "success." And if we don't agree on an operational definition of "success," then all those statements about preparing students to be successful are essentially meaningless.

We just assume we all know and agree on what "success" is. I think that's not only incorrect, I think it's dangerous. First, it assumes that success looks the same for every single student, that each and every individual student should have the same goals and same metrics to measure what they accomplish. I think that's ludicrous, and I think that anyone who stops to think for even a minute about this would agree, yet that's the assumption baked in to so many of our statements about what students should be learning in order to "prepare" them for their future.

Second, it assumes that success is defined by society, or at the very least by some combination of government, business, family and educators. Shouldn't success be defined by each student, for themselves? Certainly government, business and educators, as well as friends and family, will help shape and form each student's ideas around what success is but, ultimately, isn't that up to each student to decide? How often in K-12 do we allow students to define their own success? How much opportunity do we provide them to think about this ultimate issue of their lives? People scoff at "what's the meaning of life" discussions, often ridiculing it as idealistic and naive, something that only happens in late-night discussions during college. I think this is exactly wrong. I think this is the most important discussion our students could be having.

Finally, I think this is really dangerous. When we assume we all know and agree what success it, we then start making a series of decisions around students' educations that might be completely and utterly wrong if our first principle of what success is is incorrect. It's like chaos theory, where small changes in initial conditions can have drastic changes in end results. What if our initial condition assumptions about success, which are really also assumptions about the purpose of education, are slightly (or not so slightly) off? Then all those subsequent dependent decisions we've made around education are a giant house of cards, propped up on a faulty foundation. We can do better.

What is your passion and what is your purpose?
This one relates closely to the previous one about success. I think there's a fundamental decision we have to make about school - is it designed to meet the needs of our students, or is it designed to meet the needs of adult society? I would agree with those that say this isn't necessarily an either/or question, but I still think it's important for us to decide which takes precedence. It probably won't surprise regular readers that I fall on the side that school should be to meet the needs of students. I feel if we truly meet the needs of each student, then ultimately we will also meet the needs of society. (I strongly believe that the inverse, however, is not true.)

If we can agree (which is a big if) that we should meet the needs of students, then I think the issues of passion and purpose are critical. What is each student's passion in life? What do they want their purpose to be? How do we help them pursue those passions and achieve that purpose? Can they have more than one and/or can they change throughout their lives? I think so, but I think that's also part of the education of each student, helping them decide that for themselves.

As a parent, I think I feel the conflict that most parents feel, that we want our child to make their own way in the world, yet we really, really, really want our child to also conform to our morals, principles, and ideas of success. I think school is that conflict writ large; that we say we want our students to become independent and critical thinkers, yet we really, really, really want them to independently come to the same conclusions we have. If we truly want them to be independent and critical thinkers, we have to give up some control.

Core Values (C3P3)

1. Curiosity
2. Compassion
3. Community
4. Perseverance
5. Passion
6. Purpose

Curiosity
I think curiosity is the touchstone of learning, and therefore should be perhaps the principal core value of our school.

Compassion
The unifying phrase of my school is "Warriors, Always Take Care of One Another." If we believe that, we need to live that, and that is going to involve intentionally focusing on both compassion and empathy.

Community
While I emphasize the individual a lot in this post, I think that meeting each student's need ultimately includes helping them form and build community. The reason we come together as a society, as communities, is to make life better for all of us, so this must be included in our core values.

Perseverance
I want to be clear that I'm not jumping on the "grit" bandwagon here. Like many, I have concerns with some of the assumptions and implications that some folks include in their grit narrative. Having said that, I think the idea of perseverance is still a fundamental one. I think where I differ from some of the thinking around grit is the idea that I value perseverance toward achieving one's own goals, not someone else's perhaps arbitrary ones. I want our students to pursue their passion and their purpose with perseverance, so it's a core value I think we need to explore with our students.

Passion
Passion gets a bad name. Critics make fun of passion by either linking it with romantic passion or with students being passionate about something the critics feel is meaningless while living in their parent's basement. I think that there are some "puritan ethics" lurking in this conversation (at least in the U.S.), and I think this goes back to our societely-assumed definitions of success. Perhaps I'm too idealistic, but I think a life driven by passion is likely to be a key part of most people's ultimate definition of success. If we pursue something we feel is passionately worth pursuing, then it's a life well-lived.

Purpose
I go back and forth on whether passion and purpose are two items or two sides of the same item. At the moment, I'm keeping them separate, because I do believe you can have some passions that perhaps do not rise to the level of purpose. Much has been written about living with purpose, so I don't have a lot to add here, other than the observation that we again tend to shy away from helping our students discover and determine their own purpose. A core value, a core purpose, of our school should be to help students do this.

Again, I'm not suggesting this should be "the" mission for AHS - this needs to be a school-wide (and community-wide) discussion, but I thought laying our one possible vision of what it could look like might be helpful. So this would be what we put on posters all around AHS, to be referred to daily and for students and teachers to hold themselves accountable to (the only form of accountability I think really matters.)

Arapahoe High School Mission

Essential Questions:

• What does it mean to be literate?
• How do you define "success"?
• What is your passion and what is your purpose?

Core Values:

• Curiosity
• Compassion
• Community
• Perseverance
• Passion
• Purpose

Mission Impossible

My school, like many schools and other organizations, has a mission statement. I can't tell you what it is. This despite the fact that we've had it for just over seven years now and I - along with the entire staff that was here at the time - helped create it. While I haven't done a scientific survey, I feel fairly confident in saying that if you asked five random staff members at my school what our mission statement is, there's a pretty good chance none of them would be able to tell you. And I feel even more confident that if you asked five random students at my school, they wouldn't know either. Which means it's mission impossible.

That doesn't mean I don't generally like what's in our mission statement (and, for that matter, our longer vision statement). You can read them here (pdf). I do want students to achieve their potential, collaborate and be life-long learners, and contribute to society. The problem is that when you have a mission statement that no one knows, and that has generic statements like that, it ends up being pretty meaningless. I've written about this previously, talking about core values and whether students can articulate the vision, but clearly it's still bothering me. I'd like something that's meaningful, and that we can post in each and every classroom so that each day, students and teachers could refer to it. Any student would be able - and expected - to ask, how is what we are learning today going to help fulfill our mission? And if the teacher doesn't have a good answer, then they should stop teaching it. Similarly, every teacher would be able - and expected - to ask the same of what students were doing with their time.

So I was feeling all good and outraged, but then I asked myself, "What's my mission statement?" Uh-oh. I don't have a good answer for that, even though it's something I've thought about. Some of the Language Arts teachers at my school do an activity with students called "What's Your Sentence?," based on an idea in Daniel Pink's Drive. In the past, they've put out an email to staff asking for their sentence that they can share with students, and I always star it in my email and stare at it for a week before feeling guilty and not replying. This will be no surprise to regular readers of this blog, but my problem is that I can't figure out just one sentence that captures it for me.

I usually start with a sentence something like this:

To help those around me become more passionate learners.

But then I start picking at it. Shouldn't I include myself in there? But that makes the sentence awkward.

To help myself, and those around me, become a more passionate learner.

And learner about what? Do I really want them to become a more passionate learner about something that isn't meaningful for them? Say, perhaps, our somewhat arbitrary curriculum? And so I try something like,

To help those around me discover and pursue their passions.

But then that doesn't explicitly mention learning, and becoming a better learner. And it leaves out "myself" again. So then I try something like,

To help myself and those around me discover and pursue their passions by becoming more passionate learners.

or perhaps

To help myself and those around me discover and pursue their passions by becoming better learners.

Yuck. It's about now that I remember why I was better suited to teach mathematics than language arts, and then I dial back my outrage (at least a little) about my school's mission statement. So I try changing the order,

To help myself and those around me become better learners and discover and pursue their passions.

Maybe a little better, but it's awkward with the multiple 'ands', and I still don't quite like the phrase 'better learners.' So then I'm reminded of another post where I reference something David Jakes wrote talking about culture, and I wonder if somehow my mission statement should try to talk about a culture of learning.

To help myself and those around me develop a culture of learning; one where we help each other discover and then pursue our passions.

Getting closer, but I'm still not sure I can really do it in one sentence. But when I start adding sentences, it gets too involved and less clear. So does that mean it's "mission impossible" for me as well? If I can't articulate what I'm trying to accomplish, what my purpose is, does that mean that I'm doomed to fail? Maybe.

What about your school's mission statement? Or your sentence? Do you have something straightforward and meaningful that your school - and you - can rally around? I'm obviously still struggling with my own, but I think for those of us working in schools, it's something important to talk about. And, even if we don't come up with one perfect sentence or one perfect mission statement, I think we should be willing to post what we do have in each and every one of our learning spaces, and ask our students to hold us just as accountable as we hold them.

Sharing Our Staff Development – Session 3

Last week both cohorts met for their third session of the year. Our goals for the session were:

1. Write a 21C mission (worked on by all 3 groups)


2. Start working on a 21C Vision.


3. Learn from their colleagues by observing their classes and then debriefing.


4. PLN Time: Read. Think. Write. Reflect. Repeat.

Here is the mission statement they came up with:

The 21C Collaborative Learning Community exists to model continuous learning and to encourage innovative use of technology by using constructivist teaching techniques.

Note that this is a mission statement for our staff development group, not for our school as a whole. It focused on why our 21C staff development group exists. Also, please note that I am very carefully using the term “they” – this is their mission statement, not mine. And I don’t mean that in a negative way.

When we started this two years ago, our group was driven somewhat by my vision (along with my planning team’s vision). That was somewhat by necessity and somewhat by design. We made the decision as a planning team not to have the whole mission/vision/values/goals discussion at the start of our staff development, but to go ahead and jump in with readings/discussions/arguments/technology. We felt we really needed to get into all this, the theory and the practice, the technology and the “shifts,” the reflecting and the soul-searching. I don’t know if that was the right decision or not, but it certainly seemed to work out okay. The first year for both cohorts seemed to follow the same pattern. A lot of excitement, then a fair amount of push back, frustration, and even anger, then the groups came together and – while we certainly don’t all agree about everything – there seems to be a general consensus on many things.

Now comes the problem. Now we need to define where we want to go from here. I am really trying to step back and turn control over to the participants in the staff development – that’s why it’s “their” mission statement, not mine. I’ve probably been a little bit too controlling up to this point, wanting to share so many different ideas and resources, and wanting to make sure they find each three-hour session worth their time. It’s tough for me to step back because I think I’m genetically programmed to open my mouth and voice my opinion on just about every topic conceivable, but I think I’ve done a reasonably good job the last few sessions of not doing that (21C folks, you’re welcome to disabuse me of that notion in the comments). But I think we’ve struggled a little bit with this (certainly the second year for Cohort 1 was not as “productive” as the first). We still have a limited amount of time (and energy) to do this and – just like it is for our students – it’s easier if someone is telling you what to do (even if you sometimes think that someone is a little bit nuts). That’s why I think this mission/vision/values/goals discussion is so critical for us right now, because it’s going to determine whether we (as a 21C group) continue to act as a force to improve the teaching and learning at our school, or not. As I try to remove myself more from the process I wonder a lot what my role should be.

Anyway, back to the session description. We also took time during the session to observe one of our colleagues. Since we have three separate sessions (cohort 1 on one day, cohort 2 split into a morning and afternoon group on another day), each group got the opportunity to observe a different teacher for an entire period. This is something that we are always encouraged to do in our school, but it’s hard to find time for. Our focus was on observing different approaches/methods relating to constructivist teaching and/or the use of technology in their classrooms. Technology use was not a requirement, although all three did use some technology in their lessons. We then debriefed immediately following the class with the teacher that was observed present and participating in the debrief. We used a protocol based on Diane Sweeney’s work to guide our debrief. This is not an area that I have any particular expertise in, but it seemed to work fairly well. The feedback on both the usefulness and the process was positive, so we’ll be doing this again in the future.

Finally, we had some Personal Learning Network time – time for folks to read, think, write, reflect and repeat. As usual, we didn’t have enough time to do this well in two of the three sessions, so that’s something we still need to work on.

Their “homework” for next time includes watching the Creativity Panel Presentation (Elizabeth Streb, Michael McCauley, Mary Cullinane, and Francesco Pedro - moderated by Andrew Zolli) from NECC, and doing some more thinking about the vision statement for 21C.

How Much Do You Value Test Scores?

In one of our faculty meetings at the beginning of the school year one of our Assistant Principals was tasked with talking about testing. While not an enviable job, he did it well. But he made one comment that I wanted to explore a little bit. Paraphrasing, he said something along the lines of, "While many of us have issues with how important the tests are, or what they consist of, or how valid the are, all of us with young children have looked up the test scores of the schools they might go to." His point being, among other things, that even teachers who perhaps don’t agree with the emphasis on testing still check out the scores when it comes to their own kids.

So, while I don’t disagree that this is probably accurate, it made me wonder about how "true" it really is. I imagine most teachers do look at the test scores for their kid’s school (or possible schools), but then I wonder how much of an effect that has on their decision. I’ll be interested to see the responses to this post, both from the edublogosphere as a whole and hopefully from some of the folks in my building, but let me share my story in an effort to be transparent here.

I happen to live in the school district that has the highest overall scores on the CSAP, the state test for Colorado. My neighborhood school consistently scores either first or second in various categories among elementary schools in our district. Yet after a year in Kindergarten, and despite really wanting her to go to a neighborhood school, we chose to open enroll our daughter in a magnet school in the district. This is despite the fact that the magnet school is about a 25 minute drive, and the fact that this school consistently scores second from the bottom in the district on the CSAP. In other words, we chose to move our daughter from a school that’s less than 5 minutes away with some of the highest test scores in the state, to a school that’s 25 minutes away (in good weather) and has mediocre test scores (very low for the district, but middle of the road for the state).

Other than being insane (which is always a possibility), why would we do this? Well, it’s pretty simple. We think this school has the best chance of helping her become the adult human being we hope she becomes, as opposed to maximizing her chances to get a high test score. That doesn’t mean our neighborhood school is horrible, or that we don’t value readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic. It simply means that, philosophically and hopefully in practice, this school has a better chance to create a well-rounded, intellectually curious, happy, lifelong and continual learner who will live a life where she contributes to the greater good of the entire world. And, for us, that’s more important than her CSAP scores.

So, as my high school works on defining our mission and vision, values and goals, I’m curious – what do you look for in a school?