This week started rough, but then I remembered...

Depot students making fund raising muffins.

I knew I was in trouble when I felt tired before the students even came in.

I really knew I was in trouble when they started coming in, and there weren't many smiles. Negative vibes seemed to be rippling out of them (or were they coming from me?).

There weren't any more crises than usual, just a vague feeling of weight.


Maybe it was just a sort of regression to the mean: Friday was so cool, the new week had to be a bit of a let down. Or maybe it was the effect of a weekend of stewing on all of the troubles of my students. Or maybe I had fixated on my own recent failures to reach them. Whatever it was, it weighed on me... until I remembered.

I knew that constant crucial conversations are needed, but I also knew they drain energy. They're heavy. And that's all I felt coming into this week--the weight.

By the time Tuesday rolled around, things were brightening a bit--I had some great convos with students as they cleaned and baked (part of their Depot Tier 2 Internship work), and a powerful conversation with another student about strategies for dealing with stress and relationships.

But then on Wednesday that same student crashed again.

And then my Quantitative Reasoning group went into meltdown mode--angry, hurting students rebelling against math.

That was the low point, and turning point, of my week. As I reflected on the meltdown later, I realized it would have been a great opportunity to talk about anger and social skills. I made a note for a future lesson adjustment strategy. We emphasize basic life competencies here at the Depot, and my plan is to change gears as needed during lessons to address them explicitly: "Soooo, what's happening with your mood right now, and how is that affecting the rest of us?" It's about explicitly teaching things like social/emotional skills, goal setting, organization, and self-control. (I'm so fortunate to have a teacher on staff, Shannon, who is a master at this sort of thing, so I can learn from her.)

This principle was driven home again on Thursday. As I talked with one student in the morning about the career skills rubric and setting goals for productivity, we set a goal for him of two job shadow letters by noon. He frowned and hung his head, not believing he could do it. He ended up sending out five job shadow letters.

A tough conversation later that morning with another student led to questions about depression, and later, there were conversations with students about sharing food they'd received while volunteering--all great opportunities to mentor kids and help them develop the key skills they need.

As Thursday wrapped up, I had remembered something. While talking with a staff member about issues she was having with student motivation, I remembered that this is a process. We can't expect instant success, either from ourselves or our students.

This work is heavy, and sometimes pretty rough, but it also has tremendous meaning, and it's more than worth it. Every little success is a reminder of that.

I'm not sure how I lost sight of those successes coming into this week, how I lost sight of that progress, the slowness of the growth process, or how I lost my patience, but it doesn't matter. What matters is these young people and their success, not mine.

The real work is the conversations

They were trying to come to an agreement about how their teams would play their next moves in our simulation of the "prisoner's dilemma." His reply was put to music, and they agreed to abandon their selfish, cut-throat strategies and start cooperating. It was a fun example of what Kerry Patterson and his colleagues call a "crucial conversation."

According to Patterson and his team, "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."


Lately, I feel like my life has become one big string of crucial, and difficult,  conversations. It's been like CrossFit for my relationship skills. And that's OK. In fact, maybe that's how it should be.

If my job as an educator is to do whatever it takes to see every one of my students succeed, then it's going to take lots of intentional, intensive one-on-one conversations.

It's going to take difficult conversations with a student about her depression, another about her difficult home life, another about behaviors that need to change. It's going to mean conversations about a student's need to improve his social skills or manage his anger, or another's failure to progress and need for extra support, or whether this school is the right place for him.

It's going to mean uncomfortable conversations about teacher evaluations, fundamental beliefs, and facing facts about ourselves and our relationships--conversations that create what the authors of Crucial Conversations call "a common pool of meaning." They are conversations about compromise. They are relational negotiations.

If my job as a human is to maximize every one of my relationships, it's going to take the same kind of effort, at home and at work. It's going to be messy, but good, and this is a big part of my philosophy of life: I want to immerse myself in it, pain and all, difficulty and all.

In our game, both teams had been using a destructive and selfish strategy. Their negotiation was an effort to change that, but in the next round, his team betrayed her trust, and maintained their destructive strategy in order to win the game. I guess his team had realized how difficult their side of the bargain would be and wasn't willing to follow through.

Of course, I'm hoping for better results from my crucial conversations, but I'm also realistic. They're not all going to fix all the problems. When I do a poor job of getting all the meaning on the table, when difficulties arise, conflicts are still unresolved, conditions still haven't improved, or one of us does something else to hurt the other, all is not lost. We begin a new conversation.

What we don't want to do is avoid these conversations. They are the real work of life. Shying away may save us some difficulty now, but we'll also miss out on the benefits later: improvement and the kind of relationships humans are built for.

A rubric for the new year

At school, we set clear goals with students, establish clear criteria for success, and track progress with rubrics. Why don't I use this approach at home?

It's kind of funny to think about. Imagine pulling out a rubric during dinner time to score your younger children on their table manners, or pulling out a "relationship rubric" to talk to your teens about their relationships with their significant others (or to your wife about your own relationship).

But this is exactly the sort of thing we're trying to do at The Depot--using rubrics and setting goals for improving our students' noncognitive skills. We're trying to be intentional and objective about helping our students grow in important ways. Why should home be any different?


Some people really don't like rubrics at all. Maybe they feel like they are artificial. Maybe they feel like that's not how humans operate.

And maybe I don't talk about specific goals and criteria for success with my own kids when I discuss life skills with them, but maybe I should. Having clear expectations, rules, criteria for success, and feedback is essential to improvement, whether you're improving your basketball skills, your fitness, or your relationship skills.

Of course we don't want to make this all about scores or constant judgement, but using data doesn't have to be the way. It can be a powerful tool for avoiding natural cognitive biases that cloud our view of how we're actually doing. It's about being willing to look at things as they really are, and improving.


To various degrees I try to track my own stuff, like cholesterol, fitness, meditation, and reading. I recently discovered I had high cholesterol, so I started a series of experiments to see what might bring it down. I started with a baseline data point (here's our current paleo-primal winter meal plan), then I cut back on a bit saturated fats for a month. This meant skipping my coconut milk breakfast smoothies and cooking in vegetable oil instead of bacon grease. Then I got another blood test. Then I started up my old supplement regime again for a month, and retested. The results are in the figure on the right.

This month I'm drinking red wine every day. Since I saw a drop with the saturated fat reduction (the middle point on the graph), I'll kick it up a notch next month and try the Mediterranean diet (here's the tentative meal plan).


What if we had similar measurements for relationship variables and subjective well-being (actually, there are a bunch of ways we could measure these) and then came up with specific strategies to improve them?

Maybe it would look something like this: Hey, honey, how about we take this relationship test and then try something new, like going out every week, and take the test again later to see if things improve?

Or how about this: By the way, son, I've noticed you've been working towards some serious fitness and professional goals. Have you thought about setting any personal or relationship goals? Are you interested in some ideas about how you could track them?



I know there must be a balance between contentment and striving. There's a time to be content with who you are and where you are, and just be. But as long as we're talking about improvement, I know I need to be more intentional about it, whether at work or home. If there's something wrong with this approach at home, then why am I doing it at school, and if it works at school, then why am I not I doing it at home?

I don't plan on developing any relationship rubrics for myself or my kids right away, but I do plan on working towards more intentionality in helping everyone around me, including myself, improve. And maybe a little rubric for that wouldn't hurt.

Instead of a resolution, here's a rubric for the new year:

Just getting started	Developing	Meets expectations	Exceeds expectations
Bill offers to help his kids and wife establish new personal goals and tracking systems. He begins to work on a new tracking system for one of his own personal goals.	Bill offers to help his kids and wife establish new personal goals and tracking systems, and follows up with them during the year. He also establishes a new tracking system for one of his own personal goals.	Bill helps one of his kids and/or his wife establish new personal goals and tracking system, and follows through with them all year. He also establishes a new tracking system for one of his own personal goals.	Bill helps his kids and wife establish new personal goals and tracking systems, and follows through with them all year. He also establishes two new tracking systems for his own personal and relationship goals.

Teaching the skills they really need to succeed

A student swipes in at her hospital internship.

Last weekend I read this report called "Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success."

To sum it up, when it comes to success, non-cognitive skills are just as important as cognitive skills: "Conscientiousness predicts years of schooling with the same strength as measures of intelligence." And most significantly for us at the Depot, non-cognitive skills appear to be more malleable than cognitive skills once adolescence has been reached.

And according to this report, the best way to teach non-cognitive skills appears to be programs that include a workplace and mentoring component.

Bingo. That's the Big Picture model.

The Depot staff and I have recently begun trying to measure both types of skills with our new Competency Rubric. This trimester, we asked the students to pick one Competency from the rubric that they will focus on (in addition to Communication), for the Exhibitions. It's interesting that most of the students so far have picked Career Skills or Life Skills, which both have indicators related to the Big Five non-cognitives, like collaboration, responsibility, adaptability, self-monitoring, social skills, curiosity, and goal-setting.

During their Exhibitions, which consumed the entire week, students had to present evidence that they have been mastering these skills. Usually, this means discussing their internships and other real-world experiences.

One student told detailed stories about the brake job he'd helped complete at his job shadow, how he worked independently to remove a differential gear, and how he collaborated with other students to figure out how to speed up the breakfast cooking process on Friday mornings at the Depot.

Another showed pictures from his shadow day at a The Vanilla Bean: his kimchi prep work was a meticulous work of art.

One shared the schedule she developed for the toddlers at the daycare where she interns (and where she is absolutely loved by the staff). She shared how she is learning to deal with misbehavior by redirecting students, rather than "saying 'No'."

One student shared about how he has been installing hydrogen fuel systems in cars at his internship, and has been asked by his mentor to get involved with a new business he is starting. Another has been repairing computers, completing some repairs on her own.

Many of these students struggle with completing their "schoolwork" at the Depot, but thrive in their internships. One told how she adjusts and adapts to new environments constantly at the middle school she works at, switching from PE class to social studies to literacy, helping prepare lessons and making classroom motivational posters that are in high demand. She mentioned to me yesterday that her mentor at the middle school is the person who has had the greatest positive impact on her life.

Though we have a lot of work to do measuring and teaching non-cognitive skills, I'm excited that we're on the right track. As Kautz, et al. wrote (emphasis mine):

"Adolescent remediation is possible for children who grow up in disadvantaged environments in their early years. The available evidence suggests that the most promising adolescent interventions are those that target non-cognitive skills as well as programs that off er mentoring, guidance and information. Many adolescent programs that focus on academic skills or temporarily change a participant's environment are only successful in the short run although the short-term results can often appear to be spectacular. Workplace-based programs that teach non-cognitive skills appear to be e ffective remedial interventions for adolescents. They motivate acquisition of work-relevant skills and provide for disadvantaged youth the discipline and guidance which is often missing in their homes or high schools. Successful interventions at any age emulate the mentoring and attachment that successful families give their children."

Of course, we can't neglect cognitive skills, and we won't, but if Kautz et al. are right, they're only half the story, and we need to be intentional and rigorous about teaching all of it.

Testing what really matters

Measurement is good, as long as what you're measuring is meaningful.

Thanks to @kburiano

for the link to this great article that beautifully explains the importance of measurement and the importance of non-cognitive skills. There's been a lot of talk about these so-called "soft skills" lately in the business press, and for good reason. But they're generally neglected in schools (especially high schools), where we focus on content knowledge and skills. This is probably  because many educators don't think it's the job of the school to teach these things, but it could also be due in part to the difficulty in measuring them.

We struggled with this when we were working on our new graduations standards at the high school. Some of us wanted something about community and making a global contribution to be part of the standards, but we dropped it in part because of concerns about how we would measure it.

Maybe this is why typical standardized tests focus on easily measurable things like memory of facts, vocabulary, and mathematical techniques. But it's more likely we just haven't really decided, as schools and as a society, to really value the things that really matter.

Measurement is an essential factor in improvement, and measuring the things that matter really is possible. I believe that everything is inherently measurable, and as I've read books like Mindset, Flow, and the Happiness Hypothesis, I've often been excited by clever ways psychologists come up with for quantifying human psychology. This piece by Susan Engel just confirmed it all. She outlines a set of 6 attributes we should and could measure in schools, attributes that are much more important than a set of SAT vocab words or factoring a polynomial:

1. Reading
2. Inquiry
3. Flexible Thinking and the Use of Evidence
4. Conversation
5. Collaboration
6. Engagement

I'd add a more to the list: maybe perseverance, self-control, creativity, compassion, mindfulness, to name a few, but I don't have metrics handy (though I'm sure we could come up with some).

So let's get going. It's time to focus on what's really important, and we can develop the tools.

My Teaching Goals--Every Day

I asked him what it was like at his elite arts college. He had taken my AP chemistry class a few years before. He said college was "Less like a prison and more like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, where everyone walks around singing all the time."

It's that prison-ness, that same-ness and rote-ness and (too-often) uselessness of secondary ed that I want to get away from. And it's that Willy-Wonka-ness I'm going for.

So I needed a memory device, a tool to help keep me out of the rut of routine learning, the creativity-killing lecture-worksheet-quiz-repeat that is the path of least resistance I slip into more than I'd like to admit. I needed something to help me remember the techniques that work and the outcomes that are really important, so I can do them all every day. It is also something that will help me cover the bases in the Danielson Rubric (yes, kids, we have rubrics, too), which, it just so happens, is a pretty good guide to the kind of teacher I want to be.

So I started by asking myself, what do I really want my students to get out of school?  Then I tried to make an acrostic. GLEAMS is what I came up with. Sorry, it's a bit cheesy, but I think it kind of fits. And here's what it stands for:

Give globally - because that’s how to be happy, and so it's a great motivator. I want to encourage and help my students to make real, authentic contributions to people all over the world.

Learn to learn - because if students learn to be expert self-teachers, then they won’t need me anymore, and there will be no limit to what they can accomplish. We’ll start by training to ask 4 questions indicated by the sub-acrostic: WWHH--Why learn? What will I learn? How will I learn it? How will I use what I have learned?

Examine everything - because as Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Only through constant evaluation and questioning of everything can we keep improving. This includes thinking critically about our own conceptions, our teachers' ideas, and the ideas of authority figures of all kinds. It includes honestly evaluating our own and others’ work and being open to admitting we are wrong and open to change. This is a lesson I learned too late in life from my son, who as a young teenager, refused to let me skirt around his tough questions.

Aim at (self-)actualization - because this is our highest need in life--to realize and develop our personal potential, purpose and fulfilment. This will differ for each of us, but it is within the reach of each one us. This involves setting the intermediate goals that will get us there, including learning goals for today.

Maximize your mindset - because only by having a growth mindset can we achieve self-actualization. Carol Dweck's book had a big impact on my thinking here, and I want to pass that on to my students every day. Brains can be trained and strengthened. Their growing, changing plastic, not stone. Failure is just the by-product of pushing the envelope.

Synergize socially - because only through social collaboration can we achieve all of the above. As social animals, we can't reach out true potential for achievement and happiness without others. Ideas having sex, as Matt Ridley so powerfully put it, is what drives human progress. And Hargreaves and Fullan have convinced me that  collaboration is absolutely central to effective teaching and learning.

It'll probably be a while before I can consistently work GLEAMS into every lesson, but that's the idea, and I think it is also scalable. In other words, A large scale global contribution project (G), like creating a wiki, could be spread over several days, and might include L, E, A, M, and S components, but I'm still working this out.

Nothing really new here, I know, but I need to boil things down for myself. Humans are so powerful, but so complicated, and there's so much going on in and around the classroom (and I'm so scatter-brained sometimes) that it's easy to lose track of what's really important. It's easier to allow myself to get sucked into playing prison-guard-professor than to empower future magical-chocolate-factory-designer-world-changers. But that kind of stagnation and incompetence is not where I want to be.

I know there's a better way for me to contribute globally (G).

I know how to learn these techniques (L).

I see that I am not there yet (E), but I'm aiming for self-actualization (A).

I'm not afraid of failure (M), and I can collaborate with colleagues and students to improve (S), so what am I waiting for?