Justice over achievement

Image via https://twitter.com/lunchbreath

One of my big takeaways from COVID-19 is the importance of equity. Our society, including our educational system, has been built on a model that values overall achievement over equity. In other words, as long as you are enabling your top students, or at best, most students, to achieve at high levels, you are doing a good job. But this is wrong. I've been wrong. I have historically had it backwards, idolizing human potential and achievement and neglecting equity. Here's what I'm learning:

1) Prioritize equity: Better to live in a just society than an advanced one. If forced to choose between a just society or school and a high achieving one, choose just.
2) Don't teach or test in a way that disadvantages some students.
3) If that means the quickest won't progress as fast because you can't support those who are less ready, then that's how it will have to be until we can get better at supporting and challenging everyone. "Do no harm" is the guiding principle.
4) Challenge every student, but not more than they can actually handle. Set the bar high. Let them try. Then adjust it, always trying to challenge them and inch it higher.

So how can we actually do this in the COVID-19 world?

Let's take a look at the primary hinderances kids are dealing with, and some possible solutions.

Access to technology

Problem: Many students of low socio-economic status lack fast, stable internet or computers. This can lead to an inability to participate fully in Zoom calls, especially if webcams are required.

Possible solutions: Don't require webcams. Provide asynchronous options for learning, and extended deadlines. Bring these students in to school, in-person and full time, if possible.

Homelife

Problem: Many students have home environments that are not conducive to participating in live classes. Some are caring for siblings. Others have distracting activity all around them. Others may be embarrassed to show their homes or families.

Possible solutions: Same as above, plus multiple opportunities for learning and success. In other words, mastery-based learning. They need flexibility. They need to be able to take or submit an assessment when they are ready, not on a deadline. They may also need extra academic help and social-emotional resources and instruction.

ADHD, sleep issues, low conscientiousness, low SEL skills

Problem: Many students attempting to learn from home are hindered by a lack of non-cognitive skills: the ability to get up on time, stay awake during class, manage their sleep, schedules, and tasks, stay focused, manage depression or anxiety, etc. These things prevent them from accessing the curriculum.

Possible solutions: Same as above, mastery-based learning, with a focus on explicit instruction in social-emotional learning and 1:1 SEL support. Instruction, assignments and assessments that target SEL skills separately from content skills.

Lack of readiness

Problem: Many students lack the pre-requisite academic skills and knowledge to access the curriculum.

Possible solutions: The mastery model. Extra academic help and support. 

As you can see, I keep coming back to the mastery model. I think it's really going to be the only way forward if we want to keep standards high and value equity. The impact of COVID-19 is going to ripple out into the coming decade, with students entering each successive year less ready than they would have been--and less equal. COVID-19 has disproportionally impacted at-risk students, so we can unfortunately expect gaps to be wider. 

Moving forward, we can either be driven by the fear of losing some imagined edge or status as a individuals, schools, country or society, or we can be driven by compassion and a desire for a just and equitable society. 

2020 was a unique and challenging year, and it's been hard to accomplish much, but one thing we can do is learn. Unfortunately, in our society we have a history of valuing some people over others. We have the opportunity to learn better and change.

Hitting the restart button at the start of the school year

There are so many things weighing us all down these days. Our brains are overloaded with negativity. For me, I need to refocus as I head into the new school year... and focus on the kids. That's what this is all about, and that's what gets me back on track and back into a positive mindset. And one of the cool things about the summer vacation is that it's like we get to hit the restart button every year for us and our students.

But that doesn't mean it will always be the best start it could be. In a recent issue of the Marshall Memo, Kim Marshall writes:

"In this article in AMLE Magazine, teacher/consultant/author Rick Wormeli bemoans the fact that students’ eager and receptive frame of mind at the beginning of each school year is often deflated by the endless succession of going-over-the-rules, filling out forms, and stale getting-to-know-you activities. “Students grow increasingly disillusioned,” says Wormeli. “We’ve missed a golden opportunity for them to dive into the subject material with neurons firing on all thrusters. It’s probably the most significant time of the year to hardwire students’ minds to embrace our subjects, and we don’t want to miss it.”

He recommends mixing mandatory stuff with lively activities, so students learn something new about your subject every day."

I love his idea of making sure we grab their interest at the start of school, but I would add a couple of other goals to my list of the three things I want my students to take away from the first few days of school:

1. Piqued interest - As Wormeli recommends, I want to hit the ground running the first day with high-interest, challenging and content-rich activities. Earlier this summer, as I was planning this year's Science Project Block I asked myself, "What are the most interesting topics in biology that can be tackled with a simple hands-on approach?" I want to make sure the first day they are diving right into that.
2. Success - When I ask myself what these kids need most, the answer is confidence. The students I work with are all in dire need of a feeling of competence and success. This is true for all of us. When we feel successful at something, we will not only be interested in it, we will tend to become more successful at it. And the opposite is also true, which is why school failure is a downward spiral.
3. An expectation of hard work - At the same time, I want them to be in the zone of proximal development--not overwhelmed, but challenged. Expectations are key, so I also want them to expect to work hard every day.

So what does this mean for the first day/first few days? It means I need to provide learning activities that are:

1. Inherently interesting.
2. Easy enough to ensure success.
3. Challenging enough to require help.

In the case of Project Block, this year we'll be trying to raise trees from seed and cuttings in order to help fight climate change. The first day, after introducing the idea of climate change and the "Trillion Tree Solution," we'll go right out into the woods to look for tree seeds that we can bring back inside for the next steps. We humans have a natural interest in living things, and while I am sure they will all be able to find seeds, I also think it will be challenging.

If I can infuse success into these kids, then I've succeeded. Success here could restart their whole lives, and that's what this job is about. It's not about all this other stuff that's going on in the world or in education these days. It's about these kids and their futures. It's about what we can do to help them.

Notes to self on the eve of the first day of school

Here are some notes I'm making to myself as the school year starts up again. Maybe you can relate.

1. It’s like jumping in a cold pool or starting a tough workout. You just do it, and then it gets better.

2. Remember that it’s the same for the students. We’re all jumping in together.

3. Remember that it’s about the students. This is for them.

4. Do the best you can. There will be obstacles you can’t overcome. Students will have difficulties that are beyond you. No one expects you to work miracles. No one, that is, except you.

5. It’s OK if you don’t feel passion all the time. Maybe what is called for is just dogged determination and focus.

6. It’s OK if you fail. As Conor McGregor said, “I never lose. I win, or I learn.”

7. There’s value in the work, even if you don’t get the results you want. Not only are you learning, you’re making money, you’re supporting your family, you’re expressing love and honor and doing what life is asking of you.

8. There will be successes. There always are. There will be smiles. There will be rewards. You will help people, even if they don’t realize it.

9. There will be breaks. There will be rest. It won’t be a non-stop grind.

10. Make sure that it’s not a non-stop grind. Plan in plenty of rest and fun. Burnout is a very real thing.

11. Don't be an island. Don't be a hero. Lean on your supports.

12. Allow whatever is to be enough. Not that there is no need for improvement, but there is no NEED for improvement. The universe will be just fine without it.

13. Enjoy yourself. Every day. Find the pleasure in every moment. It will be tough, but have fun with it.

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.

Top 3 takeaways from my first year in admin.

Just finished my first year as director of this little alternative school we call The Depot. Here are my top three takeaways:

1) A year ago, I had been 100% sold on Daniel Pink's model of motivation--that if you just increase autonomy, opportunity for mastery, and purpose, people will be naturally self-motivated. I was excited to see it in action when I started last September at this little Big Picture school, but by halfway through my first year, I changed my mind.

I'm not saying the model is wrong, but at least in the simplistic way we were applying it, it's incomplete. We need to scaffold the independent learning process and make sure they have the foundational skills they need. My new working model for motivation incorporates Pink, but within a broader framework. It has led to some new supports this year, a new assessment system, increased data tracking and a new incentive and support structure in the works for next year.


2) Speaking of support, the second biggest thing I've learned is how much I need other people. I've always been kind of a self-sufficient type. OK, maybe that's an understatement. But this year it became very evident, very quickly that I could absolutely not do this alone.

I'm still learning this lesson. I'm learning to reach out for assistance when we have students we don't have the resources to serve, for advice when I'm faced with a tough disciplinary situation, and for help when I'm getting overwhelmed. Delegation is something I'm working on, as well as supporting my staff so they can support our students. But I'm also very much aware of the support and encouragement they and others provide me. Without them, I'd never have made it. Together, we had a very successful year. 


3) The last big takeaway is another work-in-progress. I have a lot to learn about balancing demanding and understanding. At the end of the year, I gave the students a survey that asked them to identify the worst thing about the Depot. Four of them wrote, "Bill," and half of them said they didn't feel like they could come to me with their concerns.

Maybe they were students who'd been disciplined or pushed harder than they wanted to be, but it may also represent a real failure on my part. I'm a perfectionist, and that comes out in the way I relate to others. I need to make sure I do as much smiling as I do keeping a "stiff upper lip." As I'm raising the bar, I need to be constantly holding out my hand.

My wife and I watched Lean On Me last night, the classic film about high school principal, Joe Clark. His radical, authoritative approach turned an inner city school around in the 80s. I met his son, J. J. Clark (UCONN's track coach), at the gym the other day, and he recommended the movie. I'm so glad he did. I saw lots of parallels with the Depot this year, and I was impressed by the way Principal Clark balanced discipline with showing care and concern. I walked away with another reminder of my need to work on being more understanding and caring, even as we continue to increase structure and standards.

It's interesting, now that I've got them all down here in print, that these three takeaways have a theme: they're all about support--providing it, seeking it, and balancing it with demands. I'm not surprised that this theme rose up like this, because I'm convinced support is the central issue in education today. I used to think the problem with American education was a faulty model. Now, I'm convinced is just a lack of sufficient support for kids who need it.

I want to be part of that change.

Coffee with Mara: Facing our feelings, failures, flaws and fears

In Buddhist tradition, there was this evil god named Mara who used to try to get Buddha caught up in negative thoughts, desires, and emotions, like shame and fear.

But Buddha knew fighting this guy was just falling into his trap. He knew the way to peace was radical acceptance--just accepting things as they are, without judgement, so he took a radical approach to Mara's attack. He said, "I see you, Mara," pulled up a cushion, and invited him to sit down for a cup of tea.

I've been having lots of encounters with Mara lately. He showed up this past Thursday, when I read over the end-of-the-year student surveys. Feelings of failure and inadequacy welled up inside me as I read some pretty nasty comments mixed in with hard-to-hear, but true, feedback. The last couple of days, the issues were different, but shame, judgement, and fear still swirled through my neurons, my whole body tensing up, ready for fight or flight. Millions of years of survival instinct bracing itself against imagined threats.

Lately, I've been reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Harari. In his chapter on religion, he sums up Buddha's teaching about suffering: It's not the troublesome feelings or emotions themselves that are the suffering. Suffering occurs when we want painful emotions to stop or pleasant ones to continue. It's the craving, the discontentment, the tension between what is and what we feel should be. It's the lack of acceptance.

That's how I was. I was like one of my students earlier this year. She had come to my office, almost crying. She didn't want to tell me what was wrong. She said she didn't want me to think less of her. I told her that would never happen--nothing she could say would make me think she was any less than awesome. I could imagine the things she was harboring, and the shame she felt, but I felt such compassion for her and could honestly say I would love her unconditionally. That's what I need to do with myself at times like this, when Mara comes around.

Some of my most peaceful times are early in the morning, when I sit at my desk for some mindfulness meditation and a fresh cup of coffee. Looking out at the sun through the trees in the backyard, I feel at one with it all. But the other day, after a restless night of stewing, I woke up already tense.

Then I remembered the story of Mara, and I decided to just radically accept it all--what Eckhart Tolle calls "acceptance of the radically unacceptable." I imagined that everyone knew all about me, and that I was exposed just as I am... and that it was OK.

In that moment, the tension melted away.

Of course, it came back later, but that's OK, too. Whenever I accept myself with all of my feelings, failures and flaws, then fear melts away. Others might judge me, but that's OK. They're welcome for coffee, too.

Moments like these are too rare

During my son's second year at college, he started working with a professor  who really took him under his wing. My son, Luke, worked for his business, even did yard work, and his family became like a second family for Luke.

After Luke's graduation this past week, this man had us all over for dinner at his beautiful house on Long Island. This highly distinguished man, who has helped my son so much over the past few years, was going on about how much he appreciates Luke and how proud he is of him.

I turned to look out the huge window overlooking Long Island sound, fighting back tears. I know it's not over--Luke has a lifetime of challenges before him, but at that moment, there was no worry about what was next, about how he would overcome his next hurdle or make it in the world. At that moment I was overwhelmed with pride and gratitude for what he had achieved, for who he is, the support he'd received, and just the simple fact that he'd made it safely and successfully this far.

Right then, that moment was enough.

Moments like these are too rare. The fact that it was as if a huge weight had been rolled off of me speaks to my tendency to see dangers around every corner and flaws everywhere I look. The fact that the approval being heaped on my son overwhelmed me speaks of my own "trance of unworthiness" and life of never being good enough.

But it all points to a different way. That moment on the Sound was profound, but moments like it should be much more common. There's no doubt that some landmarks of life have particular emotional significance, but every moment should be full of gratitude for those around me, who we are, and that we've made it this far. Every moment is an opportunity to awaken from the trance and shower our loved ones, those around us, and even ourselves with acceptance, encouragement, and approval.

"All my life, I was never good enough"

Probably the most peaceful moment of my life was lying flat on my back in my family's old gravel bank, my hand applying pressure to where the chain saw had cut into my shoulder, watching the clouds pass by in a clear blue sky.

I didn't know the extent of the damage, and it seems like I should have panicked instead of soaking in the feeling of the stones beneath my back and feeling at one everything.

It was as if, with nothing I could do but wait for help, I could finally just relax and not worry about striving for whatever it is I'm always striving for.

For just a little while that day, I was free from what Tara Brach, in her book, Radical Acceptance, calls the "trance of unworthiness." Like many people, all my life I've been walking around believing there's something wrong with me--that I am never good enough, that I have to prove something to the world, and always fall short somehow. And I find myself pushing my wife, kids, and students in the same way I push myself, always seeing deficiencies and room for improvement, sending the message that I don't accept them for who they are right now.

Improvement is good, but judgement and lack of acceptance is not. It keeps us from enjoying our moments, trapped in anxiety, resentment, and discouragement. It causes us to hide, pretend, and react to things in unhealthy ways, and keeps us from seeing clearly enough to bring about the change we need.

Radical acceptance, on the other hand, means facing and embracing everything about ourselves just as we are right now: weakness, anger, mistakes, envy, flaws, lust, frustration, fear, and failure. It means opening up to everything about our circumstances as they really are right now, denying nothing, hiding from nothing, feeling everything. It means seeing these self-imposed requirements and judgements and the suffering they cause to us and others. It means accepting ourselves without judgement.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to prove. What I am and what I have, right now, is enough.

Wait, is that true?

If not, then enough will be impossible for me. I know myself well enough. It's either enough now, or it never will be. I don't know if I'll have another minute on this planet, and I don't want to be like the woman in Brach's story who woke only long enough to say to her daughter, "All my life, I was never good enough," and then slipped back into her coma.

Accepting allows us to experience "enough" even in the midst of pain. Like the Buddha of legend, we can say to shame, fear and anger, "I see you Mara," and invite him to tea. Instead of being swept away in cascades of negative thoughts, we can defuse the chain reaction and experience the good around and within us, even in the bad.

But accepting doesn't mean being content with staying where you are. Like Tim Ferriss, whose interview with Tara Brach introduced me to her, I worry that accepting myself will mean I stop improving. I've struggled in the past on this blog about the balance between contentment and improvement. Tara Brach's answer is that honest and non-judgemental awareness of where you are (radical acceptance) is the only first step to real change.

My trance of unworthiness manifests itself in high achieving, never satisfied obsession, but I have students who are not high achievers, yet struggle more than I with self-condemnation and the trance of unworthiness. The outcomes may look different: me, enslaved to stressful striving, they, paralyzed in fear of failure. In both cases, we suffer.

For all of us, radical acceptance means being free: free to be enough, just as you are, to just lay there, feeling the grit through your shirt, maybe even bleeding, and just watch all those self-imposed requirements float by in a blue sky.

And then it means being free to act mindfully, and change.

So this is what I'm working on these days: practicing radical acceptance. 

Me, Gramps, Brooklyn, and the boundaries of family and place

One of the things I learned, living in Mississippi during the late 90s, was the importance of a sense of place. As humans, we need to belong. But to what do we belong--a family, tribe, nationality, race, or something bigger?

When a native Mississippian asked, "Where are you from?," he didn't mean "Where have you most recently lived?" He didn't even mean, "Where were you born?" He meant, "What town are your ancestors from?"

Their sense of place blew me away, but it also resonated with me. I grew up in the woods and hills of a small town called Brooklyn, Connecticut, tucked into the northeast corner of the tiny state, right in the heart of "Swamp Yankee" country. As far as I knew, that was my nationality--Swamp Yankee, because that's what my grandpa Green always said when we asked him what nationality we were.

He had grown up in Canterbury, a town just south of us, and moved to Brooklyn as a young newly-wed. He cleared the pines on this hill in big valley of the Quinebaug River, and started raising dairy cows on its sandy glacial soil. His love of the land was so much a part of him that he spent most of his free time, after he retired from a career in politics, working it, clearing it, and tending it. He dug a big pond out back, the one that Long Brook runs through and locals fish in.

But back then it was a rough start for he and my grandmother. Stories tell of the two of them driving a car without a wind shield and sawing wood in their living room in order to make ends meet in the early days. I have often imagined grandma in her kitchen, after her morning milking duties, serving up what she called "flap jacks" to a crew of a dozen or more children, farm hands, and foster kids. It's easy to imagine, because she did the same for us, my dozen or so cousins, brother, sisters and me, later on.

Grandma and Grandpa came from a very different time. A great aunt on Grandpa's side, who hunted and cut wood well into her 70s, told me stories of growing up on that Canterbury farm. She told me how my ancestors made  apple liquor called "rot gut," in their still, steam billowing out the door of the shed. They hid the bottles behind the seat of the car in order to deliver it to a local funeral home, where it was sold in secret during the days of the Prohibition.

This is where I'm from, and it became a part of me as I grew up and worked weekends and afternoons for the family business. The dairy had morphed into a construction business that thrived for decades, and I spent my childhood digging trenches, sweeping floors, spreading loam, planting grass, and washing trucks. I can still here my grandfather saying, "If you're gonna do something, do it right," and I can still see him inspecting his car after I washed it, in his old, worn shoes and work shirt. I have him and my dad and uncles to thank for the work ethic that is rooted so deeply into my bones.

This place and these people became a part of me as I spent holidays with so many aunts, uncles, and cousins I have trouble counting them, shooting dart guns at each other, playing tag, sledding, riding snowmobiles, Big Wheels and bikes.

It became ingrained in my soul as I walked in the woods every day, setting crude animal traps, building shelters, making pine tea, camping, dipping my hands into sand springs and soaking up the earth and life around me.

It all became such a part of me that I could never separate myself from it for long. I identified so strongly with it that it always pulled me back. After spending 5 years away in graduate school, I felt that magnetism again and returned for good in 1998, dragging my patient wife back here with me. I'm glad she hasn't felt as strong a pull as I have toward her place in central Illinois and her memories of walking beans, raising sheep, and helping with the corn harvest.

Our kids were young when I was at college in Illinois and Mississippi, and my daughter's cute little southern accent didn't last long after we returned north. Now, I think, this place is almost as much a part of them as it is of me. It's been such a privilege to be able to raise them with this kind of stability.

I wonder what it would be like not to have this sense of place--this physical identity with the land and people. It seems very primal and natural--a close-knit people tied to a place with it's plants, soils and geology. I'm grateful for it, and that I could raise my kids with it.

But I know I'm lucky. I know there are millions born into millions of little Hells-on-earth, and I was lucky enough to be born into a little Eden. I just started listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. My childhood was far from perfect and painless, but it was heaven compared with his, and there are millions who make his look like a paradise. For them, their sense of place, the culture of their childhood is more a source of pain and poison than security and strength.

And then I wonder what will happen as more and more people are displaced, living increasingly mobile lives, increasingly removed from family and homeland. Can we replace physical places with digital ones and biological families with virtual ones?

Or will it just mean adjusting to the reality that we are all family, and that the whole earth is our home? Because, after all, that's the truth. Being human means belonging to something bigger than yourself--the whole human race and the whole earth. I love what Neil deGrasse Tyson said in an interview a little while ago:

"We are all genetically related, every human being. Any two humans on Earth have a common ancestor if you go back far enough in the family tree. So the fact that you draw a circle this big around family and say 'That's my family and outside the circle it's not'--that's an arbitrary circle. That's biologically arbitrary. You've decided for yourself that inside the circle's my family, outside it's not, when we have genetic links among all human beings."

I wonder what the world would be like if we could all draw our circles larger? What if I could develop the same attachment, the same sense of identity with the whole Earth and human race that I have with my family and place here in Brooklyn?

I may have been born into a family of Swamp Yankees in the Quinebaug Valley, but I could just as easily have been born in the ghetto or worse. And more than that, this circle of family really is arbitrary, as are these boundaries of town and state and country. I really am related to everyone, and I really don't belong to this piece of land any more than any other.


I picked up pieces of Illinois and Mississipi along the way, and 15 years as a teacher in Mansfield has changed me more than I could have imagined. I am a work in progress, an amalgam of every person and place I've spent significant time with, worked with, related to. Our lives are intertwined.

It's exciting to think of the potential for absorbing pieces of other places and peoples, broadening our "circles." That's what I liked so much about Ramez Naam's awesome book, Nexus, in which he envisioned a drug that could connect people's minds, breaking down the ultimate barrier between people.

As important as family and village and tribe are, we need to somehow move those boundaries and circles out until they encompass it all. Though I am thankful for all my ancestors and homeland instilled in me, I am a citizen of Earth and a member of the human family.

That's also where I'm from.