The obstacle becomes the path: A short commencement speech

There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft. He wanted to teach them a lesson, so he put a big rock in the middle of the main path to town, blocking the road. Then he hid in the woods to watch what they did.

One by one they came. Most just complained. Some would try a little to move it, then give up.

Finally, one lone peasant came along. He pushed and pushed at the rock. Tried to get his hands under it and lift. Nothing worked. Then he had an idea. He went into the woods and got a large branch and used it as a lever to move the rock.

Under the rock the king had hid a purse of gold and a note that said: “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”*

You have all had your share of obstacles in your paths. But you didn’t give up. You found new levers.

And you found new strength.

Don’t forget that.

Don’t forget that there are always other levers, and there will always be new strength.

High school will not be your last obstacle. I can guarantee that.

So remember this lesson. Remember what happened when you didn’t give up.

Remember how the obstacle became your path.

And don’t give up.

I hope that you have also learned a few things about effort--that it’s not easy to move those stones, even with a lever.

But effort pays off with new opportunities.

Now that you’ve graduated, you automatically have multiplied your opportunities.

You can repeat that process of multiplication. Every obstacle you overcome, every challenge you take on will be a multiplier.

Jobs, college, new degrees, new learning, will all multiply your options.

That’s the point. It’s not about gold purses. I think the purse of gold coins was a little lame, actually.

Here’s my version: The guy works and works on the stone until he gets so strong he can move it. He becomes like Hercules. And then he walks to the city and gets a job as the king’s own bodyguard. Or something like that.

Or maybe this version: She moves the stone and finds that the path beyond is not just one path, but a whole bunch of paths to places she hadn’t even dreamed of.

The point is, the obstacle doesn’t become a prize. It becomes a path. A new path.

And here’s the other problem with the story. You’re not alone. You don’t need to move the stone alone. Reach out for help. That guy or girl should have gone and gotten some help with that lever. The story would be just as cool and so would you. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It takes guts to ask for help, just like it takes guts to keep pushing at those stones that don’t seem to budge and to go looking for levers.

See, that’s the other benefit to obstacles. They draw us together with other people, and that’s what’s really important in life.

So congratulations Depot Graduates! You moved this stone! And I am excited to see what you find beyond it!

And good luck as you continue on your paths and convert more obstacles into new paths to success.



*Thanks to Ryan Holiday for the Zen story and for his excellent book, The Obstacle Is the Way.

It's good to be wrong

Depot students having a blast during fitness block.

"I feel like you treat us like delinquents. I feel like we're always being watched with suspicion."

We were sitting around the table, having a little conference. I had been sensing some negative vibes lately between the students and me, and so I called some of them together. The student who just spoke had been quiet, but he drummed up his courage and got right to the heart of the matter.

I was glad he did, because it's good to be wrong. That is, it's good to know you're wrong, because then you can change.

There had been several recent disciplinary incidents, and I had responded by taking away some privileges. On top of that, this year we've vastly increased accountability at the Depot. We added the CHIPS incentive system, ALEKS math block, competency ratings and progress tracking, and careful credit accounting. All this came together to generate lots of stress and negativity. The kids in the meeting had also complained about the Chips and how some students may not be able to go on the outing to Lake Compounce.

As I listened to what they had to say that day, I knew they were right. I knew the importance of focusing on support--that accountability is a poor driver of improvement, but I had lost focus. We had increased support along with the increased standards, but it wasn't enough, and according to our recent school climate survey, compared to last year at this time, more students felt like we don't care.

Time for a course correction. As Brian Tracy says, an airliner is almost never heading straight for it's destination. It's constantly correcting its course. It's constantly wrong, but the pilots know it, and they constantly adjust.

So I reinstated the privileges I had taken away. I reduced the Chips requirement for the latest reward outing, and finally, I made it easier to get math credit through the ALEKS system.

This last adjustment was the result of me looking more closely, after that little conference, at the sources of stress on the kids. I suspected that a few of the behavioral incidents and the slow accumulation of reward Chips were actually due to kids struggling with their math. They were nearing the end of their courses, and only the most difficult topics were left.

It may be coincidence, but since I adjusted the ALEKS requirements, there has been a notable change in behavior and attitude among a few of the students I had been concerned about, and spirits, in general, have been higher since the changes.

Lesson learned.

Being wrong is good stuff.

Bringing order to your chaotic life with Trello

Ever feel like your life is a hurricane of responsibilities? Of course you do. So do I. That's why I write so much about managing stress and priorities. That's why I've been using the Bullet Journal method for a few years now. But I've recently retired that stack of black journals on my shelf and discovered an even cooler tool for time and task management.

Last fall, Elizabeth Brott Beese, a Ph.D. student from Purdue who spent some time studying our program, saw my notebooks and knew what they were. I thought that was really cool, because I'd never met anyone who knew the system. I told her how much I loved it. Then she told me why she didn't use it. She'd discovered something better. It was called Trello.

It looked really cool. I tried it. I said goodbye to my black journals.

Why is Trello So Darn Cool?

What I like about Bullet Journal is the physical feeling of writing stuff down and drawing little boxes and arrows and checking things off my list with a G2 pen. It's an ingenious system designed by Ryder Carroll that enables you to move tasks from week to week and manage tasks by category or calendar.

But it has weaknesses. Though you create your own index, it's still hard to find stuff when you try to go back in previous journals for important info, and everything becomes disjointed. Pages of unrelated stuff separate related tasks and topics from each other.

Trello is better. It helps you visualize your tasks by category, and it's super easy to move stuff around, reschedule, and find stuff you need, when you need it.

My Trello System

There are lots of ways to use Trello, which is of one of the cool things about it. I made this video about Trello for my students that explains the basics--the four essential pieces of the Trello system: boards, lists, cards, checklists and calendars. Start there for the basics, but here's how I use it for my stuff:

I like to make the boards very broad. For example, I have one board for my whole, entire job at the Depot Campus. On my Depot Master board, I divided all of my responsibilities into categories. This was a cool exercise, because it forced me to really think about what were the most important aspects of my job. It helped me bring order to a job that involves a sometimes bewildering array of very different responsibilities.

In each of those categories, I create cards for particular projects and tasks, and then within each card, I create checklists. I set due dates for each card based on the next checklist item that is due in each card. When I complete a checklist item, I change the due date.

Once in a while, I'll go through each list just to remind myself of what I need to do, what's coming up, and do a priority check. It's a great way to reorient myself when I'm overwhelmed or refocus when I feel like I'm running around like a chicken with it's head cut off.

When I have new ideas, I jot them down as cards and tag them with follow up dates.

I periodically go through the whole board and archive old stuff, finished stuff, and stuff I no longer care about.

Trello is also really cool for delegating. I can easily move cards to my program assistant's board, for example.

I have a dual-screen set up on my computer, and I always keep Trello open on the right hand screen. This gives me a continuous birds-eye view of my job.

It's not perfect, but neither am I. You see all those little red rectangles on the screen shot above? Those are missed deadlines, or just cards I haven't updated.

But it still helps... a lot.

It's like a map of my working life.

Breaking out of to-do list tunnel vision

I love my Moleskine notebook, even though people make fun of me for the stack of black, dated volumes on my desk in an age where it seems like there should be an app for this. My favorite part of the Bullet Journal system is the check-lists. I absolutely love checking off those little boxes, but sometimes I get caught up in the to-do-list and lose sight of what it's for.

I guess you could say I'm goal oriented. I even like SMART goals, which many educators have come to dread. Under the new state Teacher Evaluation Plan, we have to set goals for our students that must be:

Specific,
Measureable,
Achievable,
Relevant and
Time-bound.

That's why I started listening really closely when Charles Duhigg started talking about the problems with SMART goals. For one thing, people often just start focusing on whatever quantifiable goal they can get done and lose sight of the big picture. Their job becomes all about checking off boxes.


I can relate. I often find myself focussing on making phone calls, submitting P.O.s, filing paperwork with the State, entering data, making more check-lists, and other tasks that need to be done, because they are easy to measure and complete. Or I start a bunch of new initiatives: new rubrics, progress tracking and reporting systems, a kitchen crew, a fitness challenge, a Quiet Study and Support Center, tracking more and more data, without stopping to ask if all of this getting me closer to my real goal.

Wait, what's my real goal again?


The answer to the SMART goal dilemma, Duhigg says, is stretch goals: big audacious goals that will make sure our SMART goals are actually getting us where we want to go. Start with the big goal, says Duhigg, and write it at the top of the page, and then break it down into SMART goals. Our stretch goals don't need to be SMART. We use them as a guide to build a list of appropriate SMART goals.

So how's this for a stretch goal: To make every one of my students really ready for the college and/or career of their choice. A whole list of SMART goals could explode out of that one stretch goal: assess current college and career readiness of each student, determine areas of weakness, identify strategies to support each student, etc.

But hang on. Is that really an audacious goal? Isn't that what school is supposed to do?

That's the other problem with the SMART goal habit--the "A" makes us aim too low. High expectations is one of the key ingredients to student success, and we need to aim higher than we really expect people to attain.

So let's take it up a notch: We'll bring in at-risk students, and every one of them will exceed State benchmarks for college and career readiness. And taking it even further, they'll be like arrows shot from a bow, already on their way to making the world a better place.


I've had something like this in mind since the beginning, so I'm hoping that all of the initiatives we've started this year are moving us in the right direction, but I also know I need more focus in my day-to-day activities. I need a compass needle that will keep drawing me back to this goal when I get bogged down in the little stuff, something to re-calibrate me every day as I make my check-lists.


And this is just one strand of my life that needs this. I need stretch goals for my family life, relationships, and physical and mental health. I need to remember that I started Crossfit for stress management and not to make fitness the focus of my life. I need to remember that as important as my job is to me, I'm really working, first and foremost, to support my family, so they can't take a back seat.

Getting bogged down in the minutiae can get us off track in life, plodding along with our eyes on the ground, only to finally turn our heads up and realize we've walked in a circle, tired, bored and burned out.

Every day, we need to start by asking ourselves: "Where am I headed, again? And why?" We need to break out of the tunnel vision, look around at the landscape, refocus on the goal in the distance, and ask, "Now, what do I need to do today to get closer?"

Controlled burns and catching what needs to be caught

The Depot Crew

During my administrator prep program, professors and administrators often warned us of the danger of reactive leadership--becoming so overwhelmed by crises that your entire job becomes nothing more than putting out fires.

One day last week, I had planned to start the day with some 1:1 interviews with  students, then check my messages, visit an advisory, and work on some internship or volunteer coordination and student database management. But that was not to be.

The Big Picture model of education is for every student, but many of the students at the Depot come from very difficult backgrounds and struggle with the repercussions of their histories. On this particular morning, as I sat down at my desk after Pick-Me-Up (our daily whole-school meeting), a student walked in with and started to unload some very heavy stuff that had been happening in her life. She needed lots of support. And it was no wonder she had been struggling with motivation.

After an hour well spent with her, I had to step out to deal with another sensitive student issue, and on my way there, I walked into an escalating argument between two students that required my intervention.

All of this within the first few hours of the morning.

One month into my new job, and I could give 4 weeks-worth of similar examples of serious, high priority, sensitive student issues that have to be dealt with carefully, thoroughly, and immediately. I could give example after example of lengthy, worthwhile, but immediately necessary difficult conversations, check-ins and counselling sessions with students and parents and outside support personnel.


And all the while I'm being peppered with mini-crises and administrative issues: purchase orders that have to be submitted, required forms, phone calls, questions from students and staff, meetings, etc., etc., etc.

And then there's the internship and volunteering coordination, memos and agendas, presentations I give, Book Teams, QR (Math) Groups, and fitness (Dance-a-thon) sessions I run, and lots of instructional, motivational and relationship-building conversations with students, staff, potential mentors and volunteer sites, and parents.

I really do love it all, but somewhere under all of this is my Entry Plan--my plan to interview every staff member, student, and parent, and collect data on school climate, level of rigor, student engagement, and curriculum so the whole school community can improve.

Volunteering at WAIM

I'm probably about 25% done with my Entry Plan, but it's hard to keep a grip on this part while crises blow toward me like debris in a hurricane. The cool thing is, these real crises are truly important and meaningful, and if we deal well with them, we'll be naturally moving toward the end goal--strengthening the students, school and community. The challenge is to make sure that happens and that we don't get so overwhelmed that all we can do is react, rather than pro-actively making these crises part of movement toward the goal.

I had the chance to meet Big Picture Co-executive Director Andrew Frishman yesterday (along with Chris Jackson, BPL's communications officer) and he talked about the importance of doing controlled burns to prevent wildfires. We need to make sure we're doing lots of "controlled burns" in our schools.

Another challenge is to recognize which of these crises flying by are real, and need to be caught, and which we can just let fly us by while we keep pushing slowly, but steadily ahead toward the goal. People need to be caught, carried, counselled, and cultivated until they conquer their own challenges and come out at the other side whole and powerful and fulfilled. The papers and forms and procedures... We'll do the best we can, but it's the other stuff that really matters, after all.

Why the success of everyone is up to all of us

The message of Malcolm Gladwell's provocative book, Outliers is either kind of discouraging or really exciting, depending on how you look at it.

According to Gladwell, it takes four things to be successful:

1) Practice. You need 10,000 hours of what has come to be called "deliberate practice" to become a world class expert. That's 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3.4 years.

2) In order to get that, you need plenty of lucky breaks, like Bill Joy, who basically just fell into lucky opportunities to get in tons of computer hours--at a time when they were hard to get, and at a time that positioned him precisely on the ground floor of an industry about to explode.

3) And you need the right upbringing--one that teaches you it's OK to ask for and, if necessary, fight for opportunities. You can't be like Chris Langan, the genius who's defeatist attitude he learned as an at-risk youth cost him a college education--twice.

4) This unhelpful attitude of powerlessness toward authority may also be passed on by your culture, so you need the right cultural heritage. And it helps to be from a culture that also instils a strong work ethic, like that of southern China, where the simplicity of the language and the lessons of rice farming combine to make people into mathematical powerhouses.

This can feel a bit discouraging if you're not someone who meets these criteria, like me, but here's why we shouldn't despair.

1) Subsequent studies have suggested that "deliberate practice" actually accounts for only one third of whatever it is that determines whether or not someone will become an expert. (Tim Ferriss also takes issue with the 10,000 hour rule. He's done it again and again--in months instead of years. It's all about how you learn, rather than how long.)

2) It's hard to argue with Gladwell about the importance of upbringing and culture. But it just means those of us without the best backgrounds will have to work harder, and that's no surprise to any of us. The good news is, change is possible, as the success of the KIPP schools demonstrates.

3) Gladwell's ideas echo Carol Dweck's concept of the growth mindset--the belief that talent and intelligence are not fixed, but flexible and responsive to effort and attitude. Gladwell says in a footnote that IQ is 50% genetic. If that's true, that gives us a lot of room for improvement by effort and strategy.

4)  There's been some controversy over the idea that success is determined by grit or perseverance. Critics seem to think this means blaming disadvantaged people for failure of attitude. But Gladwell's book shows us the balance--even "character" can be inherited, and changed.

5) More than anything, the central message of Galdwell's book, to me, was that, because success depends on these factors, there are things we can do--as parents, teachers, friends, as a society, to help everyone be successful. It's within reach.

If we can dump this outdated mindset that we live in some sort of global meritocracy where people automatically get what they "deserve" and realize that we are all subject to all of these external and internal factors--that some have great advantages, and others, great disadvantages, and that we can do something about that, "The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for."

Four things I gained from my admin. prep program

Two years ago I decided I wanted to be a school administrator (why? see here). Last week, I finished UCONN's school administrator preparation program (UCAPP), and here are four things I gained from the program (not including all the things I learned in my internship):

1) Perspective. I walked in there thinking I had education all figured out, but being exposed to other perspectives has a way of shaking up your paradigm. Somewhere along the way, through nine courses--courses like Program Evaluation, Educational Policy, Law, Supervision, Curriculum, and School Climate, my paradigm shifted. It was a shift from seeing my job as mostly about the kids who could (or wanted to) learn, to seeing it as about every single student, equally. I began to see the job of a principal as making that happen (by building capacity in teachers).

2) Practice. I'd like to think it also improved my teaching practice. Two years of poring over the CT teaching rubric, studying the new teacher evaluation system, observing teachers and practicing evaluations, and listening to my colleagues talk about their teaching, gave me perspectives and insights I'd never been exposed to before. I feel like I learned more about teaching in the past two years than I had in my previous twelve.

(Funny how that works. It proves that experience alone does not lead to improvement. Improvement takes more than that. It takes new ideas and outside perspectives. And it takes other people. It takes collaboration, because otherwise we get stuck in ruts, comfort zones, confirmation bias and the status quo.)

3) Preparation. I feel very well prepared to be an administrator. We produced school improvement plans, program evaluation plans, school climate analyses, teacher evaluations, theories of action, and curriculum plans. We looked at tons of data, from case studies, our own schools, and our internship schools. The hands on projects we did, cutting-edge readings and research we studied, case-studies and data we analyzed, and discussions we had, built on and amplified our internship experiences, and I feel like we walked away with authentic experience.

4) People. UCAPP uses a cohort model for their program. Fifteen of us spent two years together. I made new friends--lifelong colleagues I’ll be able to call on in the future. And I learned a lot from them. It was a two-year collaboration, and I was introduced to approaches and perspectives different from my own. They challenged and changed my thinking in many ways, and I’d like to think I absorbed a part of each one of them.

Less competition, more improvisation

I was talking with a classmate last week about how easy it is to start feeling like our administrator prep program is a competition, with all of us competing for a limited number of positions as we start our job searches.

So this principle from Pink (To Sell Is Human) hit home today:

Always make the other guy look good.

The principle comes form improvisational acting. When you're an improvisational actor, the strategy is to listen carefully to what your counterpart says, and then build on it in such a way as to make your partner look as good as possible. Rather than making you look worse, you'll both look better, and the whole thing looks like it was planned, like a dance.

And that's how life should be, right? Not a competitive, zero-sum, win-lose struggle for supremacy, but a cooperative dance of mutual benefit.

One practical strategy Pink suggests is called "Yes, and.." Too often we get caught in battles of "Yes, but.." Contradicting and questioning each other in an endless competitive circle. What if, instead, we always said, "Yes, and..." and then built on each other's suggestions instead of tearing them down.

I'm anxious to try this out in the classroom. When a student answers a question inaccurately during a class discussion, I usually try to emphasize what he or she got right. But Pink's strategy is more powerful. You listen carefully, say "Yes," and and then build on what the student says. The result is that instead of the usual competitive game of right and wrong, the whole thing becomes a dance.

I've posted before about Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jetha's awesome book, Sex at Dawn. One of the coolest things about their book is the picture they paint of a human nature that is basically cooperative and hypersocial, rather than competitive and aggressive. Being human is all about this kind of dance of mutual benefit. And this isn't some kind of pie-in-the-sky mystical idealism. It's what makes us tick. It's how we work.

If we want workplaces, classes and classrooms that fit better with human nature, we need less competition and more cooperation, less contradiction, and more collaboration.

A model for collaborative leadership: Empowerment evaluation

I'm beginning to feel like a broken record (is that idiom out of date?) in my administrator prep classes because I keep coming back to the same strategies and principals in every discussion and on every paper or project. One of them is Michael Fullan's concept of the wrong drivers for education reform, but an even bigger one is empowerment evaluation.

Empowerment evaluation is a strategy for evaluating programs and organizations that involves all (buzzword alert!) stakeholders in the process. I first read about in Glickman, Gordon, & Ross-Gordon's text, SuperVision. The idea is that by including all stakeholders as part of the process, you get  widespread buy-in while tapping into the power of collaborative problem solving. Basically, it's a kind of democratization of leadership.

My own vision of this process has gone through several iterations, but here's my latest:

You start by forming small representative groups (like focus groups or committees) of stakeholders: students, parents, teachers (PLCs would work well here), staff, business people from the community, senior citizens, etc. You provide some training to each on how to look at data, then provide each with an appropriate summary of some data and a problem to be solved--the recent school climate survey results and the question of how we can improve the climate of the school.

Each group looks over the data, individually and as a group, and comes up with a summary and recommendations and/or further questions for the administration.

Each summary goes to a central "committee," also made up of representatives from each group, which then reviews all of the summaries and recommendations and condenses them into their own summary, which it sends to the stakeholder groups and the administrative team.

The administrative team reviews the report and either develops a preliminary plan or a new set of data and questions, which they send to the stakeholder groups for feedback. This cycle continues until the administrative team is ready to move forward with implementation.

This process is leaves enough control in the hands of the administration to prevent gridlock, while at the same time giving everyone a real voice. It goes beyond just evaluation to real collaborative governance. And it should also go a long way toward breaking down barriers between stakeholder groups and opening everyone's eyes to the perspectives of the others. And this is the real power of empowerment evaluation.

Pushing the envelope, and loving it

I know I'm late to this party, but my instructor showed this vid in class the other day and I keep thinking about it.

I know it focuses on the first follower, and that's important, but I feel like the "shirtless guys" need the most encouragement. Isn't their role the scariest? And isn't that partly why the first follower is so key?

And I think that's why watching this video is encouraging.

If you've ever been on the front lines, on the edge, risking things and trying things and making yourself vulnerable and open to criticism and failure and pushing the envelope of your abilities and maybe even the envelope of what people expect or think is possible, then you can probably can relate to this guy, too.

Of course, he's just having fun. It's pretty low-stakes to dance at a concert. But then again, most of what we're usually worried about is actually not as high-stakes as we think.

And isn't it pretty cool even before everyone joins in? In fact, isn't that the coolest part of the video, before everyone else joins in? When he's out there alone, "making a fool of himself," and then when the second guy comes out (the first follower).

Of course it's exciting when everyone joins in the party, but the coolest part is clearly the beginning.

What if it had died out after the first few? 

No party, but still pretty cool.

What if the first follower had not come out?

Not quite as cool, but I would still love it, just because this gutsy and fun-loving shirtless honey badger of a guy is throwing it our there.

So what are you afraid of? What am I afraid of? The fear, the challenge, the rush, like you're about to crash... that's what it's all about, isn't it?

It's not just about success. It's about the process of pushing that envelope.

And that's what leadership is about, too, at least a big part of it: Vision, and overcoming that fear of change and criticism and failure and having the guts to be that shirtless guy.

Hit the ground learning

Many leaders feel like thay have to hit the ground running when they come into a new position--change things, fix things, save the organization, prove themselves, etc. But this superman-style leader is obsolete, if he ever was anything more than  just a figment of our imaginations. More likely, he'll come in like a whirlwind and wind up alienating every stakeholder in the place and just making a mess.

A better approach, say Barry Jentz and Jerome Murphy, is to "Hit the ground learning, rather than running."

Their EntryPlan approach starts with a one to six month "no change" period in which the new leader just gathers information. Instead of changing things right off the bat, she makes a plan for interviewing stakeholders. She embraces the inherent confusion of coming into a new organization and embraces a collaborative model of leadership--prioritizing stakeholder voice. And she establishes trust and lays the groundwork for a collaborative culture.

She presents the info collected during the interviews back to the whole community and asks the question, "How can we make sense of this?" This leads to (hopefully) whole-community ownership of the problem, and better buy-in to collaborative solutions. As Ronald Heifetz and Donald wrote in their classic HBR article: 

"Jan Carlzon [the transformational CEO of the Scandinavian Airlines System] encouraged responsibility taking at SAS by trusting others and decentralizing authority. A leader has to let people bear the weight of responsibility. 'The key is to let them discover the problem,' he said. 'You won't be successful if people aren't carrying the recognition of the problem and the solution within themselves.' To that end, Carlzon sought widespread engagement."

I don't need much convincing to go along with Carlzon's decentralizing approach. I think that's where we need to head as a society. But there's no doubt it's radical. We're all so used to hierarchies and top-down authority, and we're all so not used to distributed, collaborative leadership in which everyone takes responsibility for decision-making and improvement. But the EntryPlan approach seems a great way to introduce the concept while beginning to build real capacity for collaboration. What a great way to hit the ground as a new leader!

Well, that performance didn't go so well. Now what?

The guitar playing got progressively worse as the song went on. I could tell when I glanced out at the faces in the audience, which I couldn't do too much, because I had to focus so hard on my playing and singing, which was going downhill fast.

I knew what was happening. The adrenaline was kicking in, and the fight-or-flight response was draining the fine motor control from my fingers. I was powerless to stop it. I also knew it didn't sound too good, so later I felt this sense of failure. Even a desire to quit and not try it ever again.

Then I realized that was just my fixed mindset talking--the belief that abilities are fixed. The fixed mindset makes us want to avoid situations in which we might fail, because that would mean we're no good. It's especially powerful when we believe we are good at something, because then that belief is threatened by failure. It's what's behind the common belief that effort is bad, because it means you're not naturally smart or talented enough. It believes that success should be instant. And breeds a fear of failure.

The growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that success always requires effort, failure is a necessary part of the process, and growth is always possible.

While I have a growth mindset in some areas, I  have fixed mindset in others, like my singing. I guess maybe it's because I grew up being told how good I was at singing, and so it became a part of my identity, and I guess failure threatens that.
But it's time to approach musical performance like any other challenge: failure is just the by-product of pushing the envelope.

So bring it on.  I'll keep working on the self-accompaniment as long as there are folks patient enough to put up with my failures.

Come to think of it, that's a big part of my role as a teacher--to put up with my students failures, and not just to put up with them, but encourage them, because failures are necessary stepping stones to success.

What's my core message?

"No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers."

-Chip and Dan Heath, Made To Stick

The Heath Brothers derived this clever little saying from the classic military proverb, "No plan survives contact with the enemy," and their version is no less potent. As I said to a student teacher yesterday, "Teaching is a constant process of monitoring where the students are and adjusting your strategies." (Sort of life life, as a matter of fact: constantly adjusting your strategies.) That's why we need a core message.

Made To Stick promises to be chock full of gritty lessons for teaching: like their concept of a core message. They call it "Commmander's  intent" because military commanders use it. Knowing they can't dictate every move of every soldier in the battlefield, commanders communicate their core, key intent, like "protect the flank." This gives each soldier under that command a guiding principal that's always true no matter the circumstances--something she can fall back on if everything else about the plan falls apart, even if she's the last one standing. It's got to be a short, easy-to-remember and pithy statement of what's really important.

So what's my "core message" as a teacher and aspiring school leader?

I'm pretty sure it will look something like this:

"Every student engaged"

Cold comfort or change?

Every now and then I read or hear something that so lucidly expresses such a deep truth or so resonates with reality that it's like someone struck the gong of my mind. That's what happened when I came across this passage in Transforming School Culture by Anthony Muhammad in which he summarized the findings of Dan Lortie about teachers who resist change--teachers Muhammad calls "the fundamentalists" (emphasis mine):

1) Teachers have been socialized in the field where they have practiced since they were 5-year-old children and have not been removed from that context since entering kindergarten. Since age 5, educators observed others' practice in the field in which they would eventually practice themselves.

2) On average, teachers were very good students and occupied the highest levels of the organization. As teachers, they bring that experience to the classroom and seek to preserve the same system that they enjoyed and benefited from as students.

Lortie concluded that it is irrational to expect people who benefited from a system to be the catalyst for changing that system. In fact, we should expect them to try and preserve a personally beneficial system.

BOOM.

That's it. That's why this is so hard. That's why changing the system from a filter and gateway and sorting system into something that actually aims to help every student succeed is like pulling teeth.

But isn't this true for all of us. Change--admitting we've been wrong, or that the system that benefited us is wrong, or is not what's best for everyone, is hard. Breaking out of our comfort zone is hard. It's risky.

But reality is risky. Being human is risky. but we have to choose. Cold comfort or change. Personal security at the expense of humanity, or exposure and vulnerability with increased humanness.

That's what I'm going for here.

Humanness. Openness. Change. Not for changes sake, but in a constant quest for something better: A sort of infinite flexibility, an evolvingness that is willing to be daily deconstructed in response to new data--a worldview that sees wrongness and failure as a springboard to rightness and success.

To be wrong, to see it, own it, then turn around and change, and realize you may still be wrong. To realize that the cold comfort of pseudo-security that comes from fundamentalism can't compare with the vibrancy of running right into reality and and the warmth of real humanity.

Bringing order from chaos in the classroom

"Leadership is about bringing order to chaos, fighting ambiguity and staying true to your company’s—and your own—principles." -Ray Hennessey, Entrepreneur Magazine

Chaos. It's not hard to find in a high school classroom.

I spotted this article this morning, and I've spotted chaos in my classroom a couple of times this past week. It didn't look like anarchy or total disarray. In fact, it might have been hard for an outsider to spot.

Last week in bio, it revealed itself in the feedback my students gave me on some survey questions I embedded in their last test. The class is mastery-based, and I have different students in the class working on different assignments at any given time. Lately I had started writing a list of all the assignments on the board at the beginning of each class to remind them (some typically need to go back and revise a previous assignment). Two students mentioned this in their feedback, writing, "there are too many assignments at once" and "since we are doing more than one assignment at once it is overwhelming." And I started noticing the ways in which the students were confused and overwhelmed by what seemed to them to be a constant barrage of things to keep track of. Now I've stopped listing all the assignments on the board, but I'm still working on how I can streamline the system better to reduce the number of things the students have to keep track of.

Then it happened this week in chemistry. having a student teacher necessarily introduces a bit of confusion, but we made it worse when we rushed them through the first section of thermochemistry. They hadn't had time to finish their first problem set on the first day before we introduced a lab activity and a second problem set on the second day. To make matters even worse, I gave them another problem set to replace the first, which hadn't been sufficiently complex for this honors level class. The result was three problem sets and a lab on their desks, confusion, struggles with the concepts and calculations, and more off-task behavior than normal.

Take home message: Any time there is lack of clarity, any time you introduce confusion into the situation, you're breeding chaos.


Time to step back, regroup, and take time to bring more clarity and order to the situation.

Top 5 things I learned in collaborative PD

Kudos to our professional development committee for planning collaborative round table discussions for our PD day today. I got to facilitate one on the topic of differentiated instruction: 16 teachers, mostly veterans, many of us having taught together for years, sitting around a cluster of desks discussing a topic that none of us are experts in, but all of us want to know more about. I presented what I do, other's shared what they did, and we all asked questions of each other, not always agreeing, but hopefully all  coming away with something.

I did, anyway. Here are my top five takeaways:

5) A new idea: differentiated semester and final exams. (Hey, if we should be differentiating assignments, why not summative assessments?)

4) A challenge. By presenting my own strategies, I was forced to question them. they didn't sound quite so watertight as they normally do in my head or on paper. And that's good. I need to be always challenging my own ideas and exposing them to others. That's the only way I'll improve them.

3) New knowledge. I feel like I know my colleagues a little better--got a peak inside their classrooms and their heads and hearts.

2) Encouragement. I came away refreshed by the honest dialogue and encouraged by the obvious passion of my colleagues for improving their practice and helping students succeed. (My favorite part was a spontaneous discussion of risk-taking.) And encouraged the camaraderie of colleagues engaged in a common struggle.

1)  Confirmation. Our time together was further confirmation of the power of the collaborative approach to PD. My colleagues a source of tons of ideas, insight and experience, and we are literally all part of the same team, working toward the same goal, and it's only going to be through this kind of honest discussion  that the whole school will improve. This is where the real fears, difficulties, and visions emerge, get ironed out, refined, hashed out, and grow.

Teamwork. Synergy. Collaboration. Whatever you want to call it. It's how humans work best.

By letting go of control, control remains.

Finishing up Deal and Peterson's book on school culture today, I was particularly impressed by their Taoist list paradoxical leadership principals:

Do what you are told; do what you are not told. 

Mistakes are expected; do it right.

People don't work for rewards. Reward people.
 
Plans must always be revised. Plan carefully.

Proud to be the best. We aren't good enough.

By letting go of control, control remains. 

The leader is in control. The leader does not control.

Those last two are my favorites. They remind me of Hargreaves and Fullan's concept of collective autonomy.

And they remind me of my favorite animals (after humans): ants and bees.

Lot's of people think the queen is in charge of the colony or hive, but she's really not. No one is.

A simple set of "rules" is built into their DNA, and as thousands of individual ants or bees interact with each other within this framework of hardwired rules and order emerges from chaos.

Humans are no different, really. So what is the role of the human leader?

Find those rules, and tap into them with carefully planned structures and actions, and then stand back.

Making the school bigger than the building

The two teens stood in front of a small crowd at the senior center, explaining their project to help feed the hungry in the local area, how they'd already raised $6,000, and how they'd be working with Feeding Children Everywhere to assemble 40,000 meal packs at the high school, and how they'd like the seniors to join them. They said there would be lots of fun and music, and that they wanted it to be a whole-community event.

The teens were energized, eloquent, and sincere. The seniors began firing off questions, "Will this be a regular event?," "Will we be able to do it while sitting down?," "Do you have a website?," "Can we donate if we can't make it that day?," "Can we sign up now?," and "Can we choose the music?"

Laughter followed the last one.

The young man replied, "It will be all big band hits."

More laughter.

The organizer of the senior center closed the session saying how excited she was that the high school was excited about intergenerational activites.

And this, I thought, is how you build community through the school.

Find common purpose, and strategies are just details

Lately I've been part of a new initiative at my school. Surprise, surprise. Any of you familiar with American education will know that new initiatives are nothing new--they're the like an addiction.

But this one, I really do like. It's about using mastery-based performance tasks to measure students' progress toward broad, practical graduation standards like communication and problem solving skills.

But, frankly, to many teachers, it is just one more thing (and for some, it's the straw (after the straw after the straw) that broke the camel's back).

That's why my ears perked up when I heard the following. I've been listening to Crucial Conversations during my morning commutes (and sometimes afternoons, though those are usually reserved for blowing off steam with my favorite Dutch DJ, Armin van Buuren). And yesterday they were covering their C.R.I.B. Method for establishing a mutual purpose (C.R.I.B. stands for Commit to seek Mutual Purpose, Recognize the purpose behind the strategy, Invent a Mutual Purpose, Brainstorm new strategies.) 

When we are in disagreement with someone, one of the most important things we can do is seek a common purpose. Instead of arguing about strategies (like mastery-based learning or performance assessments), what if we first found our common purpose? Maybe it would be something like: 

"We all want to see all students succeed."

(BTW, I hope it would be exactly that.)

Once we establish that all of us want every student to succeed, then the only question is how best to do that. And then the details are really minor issues in my book. We can work them out together. Whether the strategy we use in the end is mastery or the old fashioned lecture, as long as we agree that the goal is to get every child to succeed, and as long as we measure our progress and really do progress toward that goal, I'm satisfied.

And I think the same thing goes for so many relationships and issues in life. If we can establish a common purpose (and if we have trouble with that part, that's what the C.R.I.B. method is for), the rest is just details.

Crucial conversations

Here's the claim: Any time you find yourself stuck in some area of performance or improvement that's important to you, what is keeping you stuck is very often one or two crucial conversations that you're not holding or not holding well.

-Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler, Crucial Conversations

I'm pretty sure this is a crux issue for me, and I'm pretty sure this will be a life-changing book, right up there with Drive.

My goal: One-a-day. One potentially emotional, high-stakes conversation that I don't particularly want to have per day--with a student, colleague, family member.

Not that I intend to force it, but if I interpret it a bit loosely, I doubt I'll have much trouble coming up with convos I need to have--like that conversation with a student about how his lab partner seemed distressed after the lab.

And I'm looking forward to honing my crucial conversational skills. After all, it's one thing to have a difficult conversation, and another to do it well--to make it a positive thing rather than a negative thing.

So maybe I'm broadening their concept a bit, but that's OK. More skilful communication, at the point and place and time where it's needed is the key.