educators’ voices: some responses to sandy hook

Posted on December 18, 2012 by admin

In “Our Stories Matter Because We Matter: Thoughts on the Power of Our Voices” Brene Brown writes, “The truth is that in the midst of tragedy nothing matters more than our stories. Our complex, nuanced stories are the path to healing and change. They are the truth and there’s no better foundation for change than the truth.” It’s in this spirit of sharing stories, of sharing our reflections and responses, that I offer a quick round-up of educators’ thoughts and voices on last Friday’s events at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.

I offer them in chronological order, mostly because I’m in awe that these educators and colleagues could not only articulate their thoughts and feelings so quickly, but also that they chose to do so in a public and vulnerable way. I’ll share some tentative thoughts too.

What happened on Friday, December 14, 2012

    The Wall Street Journal shares the stories of each of the 26 people who died last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary.

    Here is part of Kaitlin Roig’s story. Beyond her acts of bravery in a crisis, I’m moved by the moment when she told her students that she loved them. I think we teachers need to say this more often, though I know we show our love in ways both big and small.

    Saturday, December 15 response

    Before the Sandy Hook news broke in her school, Jessica Lahey was in her office grading papers, and she overheard a group of fifth graders talking about tape. Lahey writes:

    I poked my head out of my office, door, unable to resist.

    “Why do you guys want all that tape?”

    They looked up at me blankly, uncertain why anyone – particularly a teacher – would need an explanation as to why a kid would need tape.

    The youngest boy looked up at me, and stated the obvious: “To hold stuff together.”

    In her eloquent way, Lahey writes about the allure of tape: it binds; it organizes and makes the discordant more orderly; it holds “stuff together.”

    On the day after the shooting, Lahey writes that she is “forced to admit that I may not always be able to keep my students safe and complete. I can, however, re-stock my tape drawer, and teach them how to hold their world together as we move forward as a community.”

    Sunday, December 16 responses

    John Spencer looks back and wonders, “Did I handle the news well with my students on Friday?” His students asked to watch “it” live during class. He refused; instead, he provided a space for them to share, to ask questions, to listen, to wonder together.

    Spencer writes:

    I don’t know if I handled it right.

    At lunchtime, I notice on Facebook how people kept posting advice to parents on how to talk to their kids about the tragedy. Everything from psychologists to pop psychologists to Mr. Rogers. It’s fine, I suppose. But the thing is, there’s no instruction manual. Every child is different. Every relationship is different.

    So, I’m a little nervous about anything that seems to suggest that there is one particular way to approach a topic like Sandy Hook. There’s a ton of pithy, sanctimonious lists out there. But I’m not sure any of that would have made a difference. None of them know my classroom or my students as well as I do.

    Jim Burke writes about his students’ recent reading of Frankenstein and how the class focused on the concept of “inflection points” and the idea of the “abject.” He ties together those notions and how they appear in the events and people from Friday. Burke also pivots to how he might proceed with his students on Monday, and he wonders if he might do anything different. “No,” Burke writes, and then he explains:

    I will do as I have always done: Get to know them all, what they are interested in, what they want their lives to look like in the future, what they care about, what they think. When they are in our classrooms, our students are our community, they are our country, our future. And so we see in them only what we hope they will become at their best, then devote ourselves to helping them make that story come true for them, their parents, for all of us.

    Bob Peterson writes that on Monday teachers all across the country will mourn and grieve and honor. Then, he writes, we must organize.

    Given the events of Sandy Hook, parents and educators have a particular role to play, including the NEA and AFT leadership. Likewise, community leaders must demand a community-wide response, and religious and business leaders must call upon their colleagues. Together, we all must demand that our elected leaders address the epidemic of gun violence and the crisis in mental health care.

    In the coming days, we will mourn the victims of the Sandy Hook tragedy.

    But we must also organize to prevent future such tragedies. We have no choice.

    Sunday night, President Obama at the Prayer Vigil in Newtown

    On Sunday night the President spoke at the prayer vigil in Newtown. Early in the speech he mentioned the educators at Sandy Hook.

    As these difficult days have unfolded, you’ve also inspired us with stories of strength and resolve and sacrifice. We know that when danger arrived in the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary, the school’s staff did not flinch. They did not hesitate.

    Dawn Hocksprung and Mary Sherlach, Vicki Soto, Lauren Russeau, Rachel Davino and Anne Marie Murphy, they responded as we all hope we might respond in such terrifying circumstances, with courage and with love, giving their lives to protect the children in their care.

    We know that there were other teachers who barricaded themselves inside classrooms and kept steady through it all and reassured their students by saying, “Wait for the good guys, they are coming. Show me your smile.”

    (full transcript here)

    Monday, December 17 response

    Mitch Nobis wrote with his students Monday morning, and he shares what he wrote during that time. Nobis wonders why gun advertisements are interspersed with the comics section of his Sunday paper. He wonders about our larger culture and its acceptance and even hunger for violence.

    He writes:

    Friday’s shooting was a tragedy, and the bigger tragedy is that it is only another school shooting. The fact that I have to type another is all we need to know. I, too, cried a lot over the weekend. I played my ass off with my two-year-old son and then bawled like, well, like him because others cannot play with their kids today.

    Tuesday, December 18, my thoughts

    One reason why I share the links to the stories above is that I simply have not been able to process or articulate all that I’m feeling, because truthfully the events at Sandy Hook last Friday have shaken me. I keep thinking about all the moments when I’ve had to comfort a student or a group of students because a parent, a sibling, a peer, or a friend died – sometimes violently, sometimes by suicide. I keep thinking about the tears students left on my shirts when I have hugged them at wakes and funerals. I keep thinking about all the young people who felt violence was their only way out or for whom violence is simply a part of their day-to-day lives.

    I keep thinking about the dance between being fragile and being resilient, and how that dance is played out time and again in our classrooms, especially during those moments when loss is so sudden, so personal, and so very senseless.

    When I heard the news on Friday, I was in a meeting with educators from across Idaho. Our task was to review and recommend new standards that will guide teacher preparation programs in our state. If you’ve ever been in one of those meetings, you know that it’s close reading and long conversations over what words like “understand” or “evidence” mean. It’s a conversation that can feel futile or tedious, because it is an attempt to try to capture what teachers know and do. Throughout our meeting we kept checking the news and searching for updates.

    I kept wondering, how do we help new teachers prepare for a day like Friday in Newtown? How do we help new teachers prepare for a day like Monday in every classroom around the country?

    I’m not sure there’s a way to prepare anyone for heightened moments of pain and loss and confusion. The best I think we can do is to not shy away from the hard conversations and to provide stability for our students.

    We teach young people how to “hold stuff together.”

    We see each young person as a distinct individual with her or his own hopes and fears and goals.

    We help young people to be their best and most honest selves.

    We organize and advocate for young people and for the kind of school communities that allow young people to share their own stories and to move toward the kind of stories that they want to tell about themselves.

    We show our love through our focus on our students as people who will grow, rather than only focusing on them as a series of “achievements.”

    We guide. We question. We even disagree.

    We share our stories, because we are nuanced, because it’s how we change, because it’s how we heal.

    Peace to you and yours.

Posted in teacher education, teacher reflection, Uncategorized, videos | Comments Off

“reading” the classroom: silence

Posted on December 12, 2012 by admin

It’s fair to say that in my work as a teacher educator I want to help beginning teachers develop their repertoire of teaching strategies; however, I think one of the central aims in my work is to help beginning teachers develop their professional judgment in order to use those strategies wisely. More simply, I want to help beginning teachers “read” the classroom so they can use their own judgment to consider what they might do next.

As a teacher of readers, I need to help people who are new to this kind of text by making visible what I notice, what I think it might mean, and how I might respond.

More precisely, when a beginning teacher and I discuss a classroom situation, my line of questioning might be something like the following: What did you see or hear? Why do you think it might make sense for the student to say or do that at that particular moment? What might be another reason it makes sense to that student? What might you do next to be sure?

Perhaps the most perplexing kind of classroom situation is “silence.” For example, when I recently asked a pre-service teacher, “What did you notice about the boy in the group sitting by the door during the whole-class conversation on Chapter 4 of the novel?”

She said, “Oh, he’s always quiet. He never gives me any trouble. He’s a good kid.”

“What do you think he thought about what happened in the chapter?”

“I’m not sure, but I think he likes it. He’s reading ahead – or at least he was yesterday.”

“What do you think he thought of the class’s discussion?”

“I don’t know.”

“How might you find out? Do you think he was participating?”

“I could have given them an exit note to see what questions he had.”

Our conversation moved on to other moments during the class, but the quiet student has me thinking more about how I could help this teacher think more about how the quiet student was or was not making sense of the book and, perhaps more importantly, what the student thought about the classroom community and his role in it.

Since that conversation last week, the idea of “silence” seems to be everywhere around me.

*** Susan Cain’s Quiet keeps popping up. Here she is with an RSA animation as she tries to explain the balance between extroverts and introverts. Classrooms are filled with each, and sometimes who is an extrovert or introvert changes by the day or by the conversation.

*** In the car I heard this interview on the Diane Rehm show. The guest was biologist David Haskell who wrote the Forest Unseen. He sought out “to better understand forest ecology: he visited the same spot in the Tennessee forest every day for a year. His days were spent quietly listening and observing.” Haskell got me thinking about how I do or don’t provide opportunities for my students to just sit with a situation over time and how silence could be a catalyst for making observations and patterns and connections.

*** Someone in my twitter feed linked to this opinion piece by Silas House in the NY Times. The piece is entitled “The Art of Being Still,” and House makes the case that too many writers are afraid to be still. The piece had me wondering about why people avoid silence. That is, people have their own relationship with silence, and silence means something different to each person and in different contexts.

*** Somebody else linked to this link to an Atlantic blog post. The piece presents a study that explains how “moderate noise level in busy cafes” can “perk up your creative cognition.” It made me think about how in some moments of my writing process I need and crave that kind of background noise and how in other moments I do better with less noise and more silence.

*** I saw this Scientific American piece entitled “How to Use Your Ears to Influence People.” The piece ends with a few tips for people who want to be more attentive listeners, “don’t zone out or interrupt; be open to alternative points of view; incorporate details that someone said previously into a current conversation. Basically, pay attention.” This got me wondering about how people use silence in order to understand others.

With each mention of “silence” I hear or see, I keep coming back to this question, “How do I help the teachers I’m working with to explore what the silence in their classroom might mean?” This is an interpretive question (e.g., what does it mean?) that leads to a judgment and possible actions (e.g., if that’s what it means, then what do I do about it?)

Often, I think we tend to think of silence on a few different continua. There’s the frequency scale (e.g., “He is always quiet.” “She is never quiet.”). There’s the expectations scale (e.g., “My mentor teacher always wants the class to be quiet.” “The teacher next door never wants it quiet.”). There’s the compliance scale (e.g., “Silence means students are good and illustrate how much I’m in control.” “Silence means that students are never leading which means I’m just trying to transmit knowledge from me to them.”). Of course, these scales are simplified, and they often compete with one another.

I’m left wondering how I could help beginning teachers interpret silence, especially within the context of the kind of classroom community they want to cultivate and lead. How do I help beginning teachers develop their professional judgment about silence or silent students? And, why do I think reading silence matters?

This post is really one way I’m trying to work through these questions, and my current response seems to involve a few things.

One, it involves naming what we notice. For example, what do beginning teachers notice before, during, and after the silence? Can they name what they see and hear? What do body language do they notice? What do they notice as the triggers for a break in the silence? And, how might I describe what I notice and name too so that I can model my “reading” for the beginning teachers?

Two, it involves making visible our assumptions about silence, about learning, and the connection between the two. Bringing these assumptions to the surface is the kind of move someone who practices teacher or practitioner inquiry might do. Marliyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle write about this in their book Inquiry as Stance (more here).

As educators we need to be intentional about the stance we take in classrooms and by extension we need to enact that stance with particular practices. Silence and listening can be practices for us too. That is, we can choose to be still and observe; we can listen to and learn from our students.

Three, it involves the process of interpreting silence rather than simply labeling it as good/bad, frequent/infrequent, or as an indication of compliance and control. Katherine Schultz does extensive and careful research in interpreting the meaning of silence. She focuses her work on what silences mean in classrooms. Schultz describes her work a little bit here …

The National Writing Project features Schultz here, and she talks about silence as a form of participation. Schultz suggests “that teachers inquire into the meaning of silence and attempt to understand what it indicates about students’ response to ongoing classroom interaction (142).” I like this idea of trying to understand what silence means, because that aim is different than jumping ahead to evaluating it. Instead, it encourages an inquiry of sorts – “I notice there is a silence here. I wonder why it would make sense to the person (or people) to be silent. I wonder if that silence is a choice or not.”

As for the question, “Why do I think it matters that I help beginning teachers learn to ‘read’ classroom situations, including situations that involve silence?” I have a tentative answer: I think we can learn from silence, which in turn, makes us more responsive teachers and people.

To be sure, I was a quiet student and if you were to watch me today in any of my many meetings today you would see me being silent for long stretches of time. Yet, I know from my own experience that being silent does not mean someone isn’t participating. When I’m silent I’m often trying to piece together the different points of view in a conversation. Or, I’m trying to think about what I want to say when I have a moment to interject. Or, I’m wondering what the group needs me to say in order for us to move forward. Or many other possibilities.

More broadly, perhaps, is that I want my students to be independent and strategic in their teaching. Silence can be a part of their teaching repertoire, and I want them to be comfortable and intentional in using silence to reflect on their own thoughts and feelings. In addition, I hope they are curious about what silence might mean for groups and for individual students.

I also hope beginning teachers are vocal and are able to take action when they need to do so. Part of reading classrooms and reading silence in classrooms means knowing when and how to respond to what young people in a community need from the teacher leading the group. As students read and write and even converse, silence is part of any process and can always be an option. As students form and sustain a classroom community and a creative space, silence will be present. Therefore, being able to recognize silence, to use silence purposefully and with empathy, and to foster a comfort with silence are elements of any teacher’s repertoire.

I need to keep learning how I “read” silence, how I respond to it, how I choose to keep using it. I need to be still and listen to myself. I need to keep learning.

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on fear, failure, and falling short

Posted on November 29, 2012 by admin

It’s true that a parent once looked at me during a parent/teacher conference and said, “My son just needs to be inspired. My high school teacher used to jump on his desk and celebrate our ‘A’s. Can you just do that for my son?”

“Ma’am,” I said. “The problem isn’t that your son needs me to inspire him. It’s that he’s a afraid to do anything, because he doesn’t want to do it wrong.”

I think about this parent and conversation more than I probably should, because it happened almost 20 years ago. When I’m swapping teaching stories with colleagues, I often turn this story into a laugh, because at the end of the parent/teacher night, my principal looked at me and said in his best deadpan delivery, “Well, I know what you need to do during the next in-service day?”

My team looked at him and then at me.

“What’s that?” I said.

“You’re going to practice jumping on tables.”

We laughed, and I was able to let the parent critique go. Clearly, though, the parent struck a nerve. She said aloud – in front of my colleagues, in front of my boss, in front of her son and my student … you’re not inspirational. To a young teacher, her words felt an awful like being called a fraud. I wondered what ultimate goal I was pursuing with all the time I was spending with and on the young people in my classroom.

Over the years, I’ve begun to think of that story (and many other moments) in a new way. I think I was on to something in what I was noticing with the student: He was afraid and that’s what motivated his actions and his inaction. More and more, I am beginning to see my work as an educator as one in which I help people deal with failure, falling short, and fear.

Five or six weeks ago I watched a movie that I still can’t shake. Monsieur Lazhar is about an Algerian immigrant in Montreal who takes over an elementary classroom mid-year, because the class’s teacher committed suicide. The movie could have gone a bunch of different directions, and I almost turned off the movie after the first scene in which a young boy comes in early from recess to find that his teacher had hanged herself right there in the classroom. I stuck with the movie, though, because I wanted to see how the story revealed how young people and the adults in their charge responded.

I found the movie to be lovely in the most humane of ways: it’s a story of how a teacher and a group of students grieve together, how they learn from one another, how their relationship is a fragile one. Lazhar, the teacher, creates structure to help make the classroom distinct and predictable. He sees the healing power of a simple touch, despite the directive that any physical contact between students and teachers was out-of-bounds. He creates opportunities for students to talk, and he does so by slowly and deliberately building trust within the walls of the classroom. They laugh. They cry. They do mundane things together. They heal but don’t really find clear answers or tight endings.

This is not a movie in which the teacher-as-superhero myth is presented. It’s an intimate movie in that we slowly grow to know and respect the people we spend time with together. It’s the closest I’ve seen a movie capture what it’s like to grow close with that special class you have every now and then. People aren’t “saved” by sweeping actions, but by doing the work that all healthy relationships do: talk about the hard stuff, celebrate successes, put disagreements on the table, forgive, and more. It’s those small, quiet, difficult actions that create the chance for people to change or to heal.

Of course, not every class or school year deals with as dramatic and draining of situations as a suicide. However, we do ask our students to take risks with or in front of peers each time we meet. This is especially true in classrooms where students create art, stories, poems, music and/or where students publicly offer personal positions and anecdotes to support those claims. Falling short, flopping, and simply not meeting one’s hope is a constant possibility for us and for students. It takes courage to create, because ambiguity, uncertainty, and flopping miserably are possibilities. (Ralph Keyes writes well about this in The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear).

I wonder, how do we help young people to recognize fear, but not be paralyzed by it? How do we do so not just in one-on-one instances, but also in classroom and school communities?

Carol Dweck and Peter Johnston each write about developing dynamic mindsets, rather than fixed mindsets, through our talk and actions with young people. That is, we want students to not see themselves as a fixed set of traits (e.g., I’m a good/bad writer. I’m a good/bad student.), but rather we want to help them see growth and change as possibilities (e.g., I’m not a good writer … yet.)

This plays out in organizations and communities too. Yesterday, the NY Times ran an opinion piece entitled “The Power of Failure.” It’s a piece that focuses on nonprofits, development agencies, foundations, and other kinds of organizations that each experience failures, such as a organizational drift, misspent or dwindling dollars, risks taken that fall through, and so on.

Some nonprofits are tempted to hide their failures, partially for fear of donor reaction. But most acknowledge that transparency about what works and what doesn’t is crucial to their eventual success.

“Not talking about [failure] is the worst thing you can do, as it means you’re not helping the rest of the organization learn from it,” said Jill Vialet, who runs the nonprofit Playworks. “It gives [the failure] a power and a weight that’s not only unnecessary, but damaging.” Vialet instead supports failing “out loud” and “forward,” meaning that the people involved in the failure should speak about it openly and work to prevent history from repeating itself.

Recently, I spoke about the logic of narratives. To me, narratives are about trouble and how people respond to it. I said then (and I think now) that narratives matter, because it’s our response to trouble – the fear of failure, the flops, the falling short of our hopes – when we learn about what is important to us and about what we can do next.

The opinion piece in The Times talks about the traits of organizations that learn from failure: they think it’s crucial to talk about failure aloud; they create limited or short-term experiences where risk-taking is encouraged; they develop long-term relationships that foster trust and allow for failure and growth; they are transparent about what is happening, how it got to that point, and where it’ll go next.

I saw these traits at play in Lazhar’s classroom community, and maybe that’s why I can’t shake the movie: it’s about healing, in ways both big and small. Over time. With others.

I wish I would have told that mom in that parent conference 20 years ago how I aimed to create a space to make it ok for her son to move beyond the fear of performing poorly or publicly, beyond seeing school as another place to comply. I wish I would have taken out his in-process work and showed her where he took a chance, fell short, but then came up with another way to make the move well in another piece. I wish I would have been able to say that I saw where her son was growing as a writer and as a reader and how that growth was celebrated each time I pulled up my chair next to his to talk about his writing or about the story he was reading.

I fell short in that conversation 20 years ago, but I’m still growing because of it.

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Update: edited slightly since original post for clarity

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nwp annual meeting & ncte annual convention ’12 in las vegas: a roundup of reflections

Posted on November 27, 2012 by admin

This year’s convention for the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) was held in Las Vegas. Below is a roundup of some blog posts from educators who attended the conference. I’ll add more as I run across them.

First, Bookhouse Boy15 shares part of his experience of meeting authors, collecting books, and connecting with colleagues … (bookhouse youtube channel here)

Jillian Heise shares her appreciation for being able to connect with colleagues who she has known through Twitter …

“I’m exhausted and exhilarated and rejuvenated and ready to go again next year. Tuesday was a sad day as I had to say goodbye to friends I’d spend the whole six days with – it was a bit like summer camp ending, but I know I get to talk to them on twitter all the time and just because we again scattered across the country, I know we’re all still supporting each other every day.”

Anne Marie Corgill shares the why, the what, and the how the conference matters to her…

“…this conference has caused me to think, rethink, and revise my practice. I’m reminded of how critical it is for us to think for ourselves as educators and be willing to revise that thinking.”

Cathy, a teacher in Ohio, writes about her winnings, the nuggets she wants to keep thinking about, and books she is planning to read next…

“Always one of the best things about NCTE’s convention is the conversations with other educators. Opportunities to listen to speakers share their latest thinking, chat with colleagues, and discuss education in +140 characters with Twitter educators who always push my thinking. Somehow I never manage to meet everyone I hope to meet, but this year I did get to meet Alyson Beecher (@alybee930), Kristin Ziemke (@1stgradethinks), and Amy (@amylvpoemfarm). How fun to finally make connections with educators I’ve been learning from for such a long time.”

Chad Sansing connects Sir Ken Robinson’s keynote with the standards conversations educators are engaged in around the country …

“This year at #ncte12, we listened to the chipper and charming Sir Ken deliver “The Element.” We laughed; we applauded. Our challenge now is to examine sincerely our own readiness to co-create, physically build, and work in a passion-driven classroom – a classroom governed by students’ needs, not ours. A classroom driven by authentic work, not standardized testing. A classroom dedicated equally to all the people in it – and to their mutual and inviolate agency and authority – , not to the test results that come out of it.”

Brenda Krupp writes …

“Sometimes when you are at a conference like NCTE you just don’t know what kind of swag you are going to come home with. Will it be five new strategies I can use to improve my teaching of reading? (Yes!) Will I have found new technology to enhance the publication of student writing? (Yes!) Will I have the status quo challenged? (Yes!) I came home challenged to really look at what I am asking my students to do and what I spend my time doing with them. Am I helping them to find creativity or compliance? Am I helping them do something with their imagination or presenting a narrow curriculum with limited chances to journey down different paths that differ from the text–book-prescribed road? Am I helping children find their “element” – what they love and are good at and then helping them pursue that passionately?”

Mike Rose, as he so often does, writes with dignity and curiosity and humanity. This time he writes about a cab driver he met during the convention …

“I thought about that short ride off and on all the next day: Both hands on the wheel, the slight turn of her head, the unfolding, semantically and syntactically elaborated conversation about making a living in Las Vegas. I assumed my driver was new to the country, that her English was pretty limited. But as is always the case when people feel just a little more comfortable, so much can open up.”

- – - – -
Update

Franki Sibberson has collected many more reflections. She writes:

“NCTE’s annual convention is the time that we connect in person with all those people we learn with throughout the year. We continue conversations we’ve been having over Twitter and we start new ones. We meet old friends for the first time and we make new friends who we immediately follow on Twitter. It is a time to connect and reconnect, a time to refocus our conversations.”

Troy Hicks, my colleague and friend and fellow writing group member, writes a thoughtful post on mentorship being the theme he takes away from the time in Las Vegas this year.

“As I do each year, I head back to campus to work with pre-service teachers, fresh with ideas, knowing that all of these mentors and mentees, colleagues and friends will come with me. I try to describe the power of these professional networks to my students, but even in writing this post I know how futile a task this really is. Handshakes, hugs, and smiles are the best way to see what I mean, and these are way to hard to capture writing, or even in pictures, as these are fleeting moments.”

Tanya B. writes about the National Writing Project Annual Meeting experience she had in Las Vegas. I’m particularly thankful for this post, because Tanya had such kind words for me when she introduced me and Jeff and Michael to our colleagues for the NWP keynote. She includes her gracious and generous introductions in this post. Thank you, Tanya, not only for your kind words but for everything you have done for me and for everything you do for the NWP network.

“What I really want to say thank you for today, though, is the amazing National Writing Project Network. As has been the case for the last eight years, I spent the week before Thanksgiving talking, working, and learning with some of the best writing teachers in the nation. As has been the case for the last eight years, I was touched, moved, inspired, and impressed with the work that teachers in our network do and by the way that together we continue to move the conversation about teaching and learning forward.”

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learning together in cultural institutions: opening up museums

Posted on November 26, 2012 by admin

“I want to share with you today the passion of my professional work, which is about opening up museums,” begins Nina Simon, “turning them into places that are not just places where people come to visit, but where you can actively participate, where you can connect with culture, and hopefully through those experiences connect more deeply with each other.”

Thank you to Christina Cantrill for linking to this talk in her slice of Twitter. There is a lot to take in from this 15 minute talk by Nina Simon, the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and author of The Participatory Museum. Simon sketches out some of her key points in her blog post “Opening Up Musuems: My TedX Santa Cruz Talk.”

As I listen to and think about Simon’s ideas, I can’t help but think of what it might mean for young people, educators, schools, and communities. Simon’s ideas include thinking of a museum as a place of active participation in which museum directors design invitations that encourage people to interact with the artifacts and with one another. That is, she sees the artifacts in her museum space as objects that mediate relationships, as reasons and opportunities for people to talk, to collaborate, to share. In this way, the museum space is a community space. It’s a place that can facilitate change outside the walls of the museum because of how people participate inside those walls. That’s her hope, intention, and working theory.

I believe young people, educators, and communities want schools to be places where people do not just visit, but where they actively participate. To me, this requires seeing schools as places where students AND educators learn. It requires educators to share how and why they participate with artifacts and through the practices they do in their disciplines AND for young people to also share how and why they participate with the artifacts and through practices they do in their various communities. It suggests that schools must also “open up” and participate in the local community.

I wonder how schools might design the kind of invitations Simon does in her museums, invitations that suggest participating is important and valued. I wonder how young people might see themselves as “creative agents” too. I wonder how educators might position the artifacts of disciplines (e.g., primary documents and texts) as objects to mediate “big” conversations about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we want to go.

I wonder what “opening up” might do for the relationships between young people and educators in the various communities in which they find themselves in – disciplinary communities, school communities, local communities. It seems to be a promising concept and a hopeful practice.

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nwp blog radio

Posted on November 25, 2012 by admin

In this episode of the National Writing Project’s (NWP) Radio program, Jeff Wilhelm, Michael Smith, and I share our work based on our books on teaching argument, teaching informational texts, and teaching narrative. Tanya Baker, Director of National Programs at National Writing Project, hosts the episode.

Here is a link to the episode with our discussion.

For an archive of more episodes of NWP’s Radio shows click here.

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on inquiry, choice, and learning to write in schools: my post in The Atlantic

Posted on November 24, 2012 by admin

I was fortunate to be able to contribute to The Atlantic’s discussion on young people writing in schools. Peg Tyre features New Dorp High School’s efforts, and a number of people responded to it. Here is a link to my post.

Briefly, here are the principles I saw at play at New Dorp based on Tyre’s account.

  1. New Dorp considered its school as a place where teachers learn too.
  2. New Dorp brought in outsiders — not to tell their own faculty what to do, but rather to provide a perspective to help them think though their own needs.
  3. New Dorp applied these lessons across its classrooms, approaching writing not as a stand-alone subject but as an important tool for getting work done in all disciplines.
  4. New Dorp teachers taught writing as a way to not only demonstrate ideas, but also as a way to discover them.
  5. New Dorp teachers do not seem to focus on explicit parts of speech as much as making rhetorical choices visible.
  6. New Dorp’s story is not over, and the school will continue to learn more about its students and its pedagogy.

I end by writing “that New Dorp’s success is rooted in the principles I’ve outlined above, which seem to me to be about processes that empower. The school has shown that it values its teachers, and that it sees writing as a way people circulate ideas across disciplines. It is approaching writing as a way to discover ideas and conceptual relationships. And it has created a culture of inquiry and choice, for students as well as for teachers, which means that the learning will never be quite over. That’s an important lesson for others and a hopeful path for the New Dorp community.”

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itay talgam

Posted on July 26, 2010 by admin

One of my favorite TED talks is this one from conductor Itay Talgam. In it he shows videos of different conductors and how each conductor has his own leadership style. I like the way Talgam presents his take on leadership, particularly since I think it is applicable to how teachers and coaches and advisors and administrators in schools can think about how they lead the groups of people in their charge.

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bridget duffy

Posted on July 21, 2010 by admin

Bridget Duffy is the former chief experience officer at the Cleveland Clinic. At the 2008 Good Experience Live (GEL) conference she talks about her work in helping the clinic re-think about what they do from the point of view of their patients. I’ve often thought that school districts should have Assistant Superintendents of Experience, and their work would be to focus on the experiences students, teachers, and other stakeholders have with one another through the school community. It would, I think, help us see schools and their role within their communities differently, and it would help position everyone, not just students, as learners and participants.

Bridget Duffy at Gel 2008 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

And here she is at the 2009 GEL Health Conference

Bridget Duffy at Gel Health 2009 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

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pam grossman is smart and right on

Posted on July 21, 2010 by admin

Pam Grossman is a professor of Education at Stanford University. In the video below, she is speaking at Vanderbilt University about her work that analyzes how different professions teach newcomers to their field how to participate well in that community. In particular, Grossman talks about how to break down a practice into its constituent parts. One important point she makes is that teacher educators can learn from this by identifying central practices teachers engage in and then breaking those practices into its steps.

She has much more to say, and the clip is worth the time to watch it. Thanks to Dr. Grossman for her work and to the good people at Vanderbilt for taping and sharing this talk.

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