Tag: social & emotional learning

What We Talk About When We Talk About School Reform

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on What We Talk About When We Talk About School Reform

With all due respect to Flannery O’Connor, my vote for greatest American short-story writer goes to Ray Carver.  And with all due respect to America’s current crop of leaders, my hope is that they convene a summer book club to read Carver’s stories – and heed his central message.

I’m thinking specifically of his collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As with all of Carver’s work, it’s a collection filled with a cast of characters best suited for the island of misfit toys – or the town in which you live. These are people who are down on their luck, who have fallen out of love, and who are struggling to find the right words to communicate their feelings, their thoughts, and their sense of how (and where) it all went wrong. Reflected in Carver’s spartan prose are the surface realities of life – the quotidian desperation of the things we sometimes say, see and do. But his genius comes from his ability to surface the submerged emotions of living – the weight of grief, the insufficiency of the words we live by, the slow acknowledgment of seeing what we don’t want to see. Carver’s stories are always about what we know, what we are perpetually struggling to know, and what we talk about while we linger in the chasm in between.

Which leads us to the present moment.

In the last week alone, we’ve seen a national prayer rally in Houston, the worst rioting in London in two decades, and – oh yeah – the first-ever downgrading of the U.S. government’s credit rating. More narrowly, fools like me who focus on school reform for a living are burdened by a national debate that still frames success or failure in terms of a single indicator of student performance. And everywhere, it seems, people are out of answers, in need of new narratives, and unsure of what to do next.

New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni captured the zeitgeist perfectly in his weekend column, “True Believers, All of Us.” “We all have our religions,” he wrote, “all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion deep, as they do now . . . In government and so much else there are a multitude of options to weigh, a plenitude of roads to take and a tendency to puff up the one actually taken, because doing so squelches second-guessing and quells doubt. Magical thinking, all of it.”

Bruni’s advice in response?  Less of the thinking that got us into these messes, and more of a willingness to search for entirely new approaches to solving the world’s problems. “Faith and prayer just won’t cut it,” he concluded. “In fact, they’ll get in the way.”

As I read Bruni’s column, I thought of all the magical thinking that exists in my own field. On one side I see smart, well-intentioned people continuing to discuss school reform strategies via the illusory lens of achievement, and refusing to acknowledge the ways in which that word has come less and less to reflect any fully conceptualized reflection of the real thing we seek – learning. At the same time, other colleagues seem convinced that any outside influence is nefarious, that all charter schools are unwanted, and that Arne Duncan is the antichrist.

These are not just straw men – they are, as Carver suggested, the things we talk about when we are unsure of what to actually talk about. They are what we cling to when we are unsure of what to do next. And they are massive obstacles standing between us and a new way of seeing public education – and making it better, more accessible, and more equitable for succeeding generations of Americans.

What if we heeded the wisdom of Carver’s stories and acknowledged we’re struggling to talk about what we really need to talk about because no one wants to admit we’re not really sure how to get there from here? Would doing so help us start to address not just the concrete, visible aspects of school (academic growth, prescriptive policies, structural reforms), but also the intangible, invisible aspects of schooling (emotional growth, holistic practices, appreciative inquiry)? Would such a change even make a difference?

It’s only a hunch, but I think integrating these lines of thinking – the logical and the emotional, the visible and the invisible, etc. – is the only chance we have at true paradigmatic change, which Thomas Kuhn defined back in 1970 as “change in the way that problems are posed and solved; change in the unconscious beliefs what about is ‘real’; change in the basic priorities and choices about what to pursue and what social ends to serve; change in those approaches and solutions which display the whole world view as a coherent whole.”

Is the coherent whole what we really want to talk about when we talk about school reform? Is it something else? Or am I merely engaged in my own form of magical thinking?’

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?

Posted on | by Sam | 14 Comments on How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

How do we transform the quality of teaching and learning in America?

Like a lot of people, I’ve been wrestling with that riddle for the bulk of my career. And this month, three separate events are making me wonder in a new way about how to bring about such a shift – and sustain such a movement.

The first two were meetings that represented parallel, powerful constituencies and ideas – an Imagination Summit hosted by the Lincoln Center Institute in New York City; and an Empathy in Action working group, hosted by Ashoka in Washington, DC. At each gathering, I heard stories and insights from some of the world’s most influential thinkers – from Sir Ken Robinson to Deepak Chopra to Kiran Bir Sethi. I heard compelling cases for helping our education system become more effective at ensuring that all children become empathetic, and develop the ability to think imaginatively, act creatively, and behave innovatively. And I left feeling impressed by the energy and the motivation that was driving each group to push its work forward.

In a few days, I’ll also be attending the Save Our Schools (SOS) March, a grassroots-led movement of teachers and parents from across the country that disagree with the Obama administration’s current reform path – and plan to peaceably assemble in DC to indicate their displeasure. Since I’ll also be covering the march for CNN, I’ve been reflecting on the goals of those private meetings, the goals of this public march, and the essential questions that must be answered for any movement to be successful: Who or what is the movement’s opponent? What is its core idea, and how can that idea be expressed as simply and compellingly as possible? And how can a complex network of individuals, organizations and alliances come together to forge a common agenda?

Our own history tells us just how possible, and difficult, it is to turn ideas and energy into transformational change. That’s because reforming a system requires not just the capacity to know your enemy and forge a compelling narrative, but also a systemic approach to the problem – an articulation of the whole. Too often, what happens instead is we lose sight of the whole out of our preference for a specific piece of the puzzle – I call it the sacred cow syndrome. Instead of a unified movement, we get a cacophony of parallel efforts. And instead of paradigm shifts, we get Groundhog Day.

If you’re a principal, you know this all too well. In addition to everything else you do, you have to regularly sort through the literature from a range of school-improvement approaches and programs that, to your eyes, seem to have similar objectives and research bases: is it a service-learning focus you want to adopt, or a character education program? Is civic education where you will choose to hang your hat, or will you double down on social and emotional learning?

To be certain, each of these field’s approaches to learning is distinct, and each field has its own unique advantages. Each would also clearly benefit from a larger movement that brings about a shift from our Industrial Age model of schooling to one that is suited for the Democratic Age. And yet for years the different leaders of these different fields have sought, genuinely, to unite their efforts – only to fall back, eventually, on their respective sacred cows.

Which returns us to the present. What will the future hold for these nascent Imagination and Empathy networks, and for this weekend’s DC protest? Since all three tribes talk of movement building, will one be able to craft a big-enough umbrella to unite the aspirations of the many? Will we develop the capacity to understand the whole? And is it possible to sustain a movement of sacred cows that, by definition, no one is willing to eat?

A Signature Shift?

Posted on | by Sam

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Last week, I was asked by CNN to comment on the news that most states will soon phase out cursive writing in order to give students more time to hone their digital skills. Initially, I wondered why the issue was receiving national coverage – there are bigger fish to fry, after all – so I posed a Facebook query to that effect.  A torrent of comments followed, and I received several long emails from viewers who saw the segment and felt compelled to share their thoughts. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion, and a strong one at that. Why were so many people so upset about this seemingly small development on the gigantic landscape of K-12 education reform?

This morning, as I watched my two-year old son make distinctive colorful swirls on his drawing paper, I realized what was going on: not only were we inching toward a new understanding about what each child must learn; we were also moving away from a deeply held belief about what makes each of us unique – the distinctive imprint of our handwritten signature.

The first issue is the one I tried to address last week – the powerful influence that memes have on our collective capacity to imagine new ways of addressing old problems or institutions. Ideas or memories that are shared among people in a given culture, memes are powerful obstacles to change – and they are ubiquitous in the American public school system. As Geoffrey and Renate Caine make clear in Natural Learning for a Connected World: “Traditional education is driven by a powerful meme that keeps replicating itself. One simply has to imagine several people gathering to talk about education to recognize how powerfully the meme is embedded. Individuals will visualize desks and books and a teacher in the front of the classroom. Grades, tests, discipline, and hard work will bind together the beliefs that everyone automatically subscribes to. These beliefs linger as foundational ideas that are rarely, if ever, questioned.”

Because we have such a strong shared sense of what schooling is (and isn’t), even small-scale changes to the way we think about elementary school — such as, say, phasing out cursive — will be likely to spark large-scale resistance.  And yet rarely, if ever, do you hear a discussion of memes make its way into the national debate about school reform. It’s the equivalent of trying to help a garden grow by removing all the visible weeds – and ignoring all the invisible root structures.

In other words, arguments for or against the educational benefits of cursive only represent one part of the picture. Far more influential are the social and emotional memories we bring to the idea of elementary school itself, or the level of individuality we ascribe to our own handwriting, or the extent to which we fear the prospect of replacing something so familiar with something so unknown.

What do you think?  How important, in the end, is handwriting to our own sense of individuality and self-expression? As we shift to a world where script is slowly giving way to e-signatures, and where the artfully crafted letter is crowded out by the cursorily crafted email, are we losing something irreplaceable? Or is the significance we attach to handwriting merely a reflection of our humanness that will, in time, easily migrate with us to new forms of communication and technology?