Refreshing Wednesday

Questions and Postures for Leaders Closing the Year

I think it's safe to say that, in schools, we know how to start things, how to initiate initiatives, how to launch . . . But we don't always know how to close, how to say a thing is finished, how to count gains or commit to adjustments.

As the year closes, then, I have a set of questions for school leaders. 

1. What do you want to know/gather/learn as the year closes?
2. Are there important questions to be asked, data to be collected, cases to be closed as the year ends?
3. Were any projects started in your area/department?  Do you need to check in on them?
4. Did you, or anyone in your area/department, change a book/unit/approach?  How did that go and how do you know?
5. Is everyone in your area/department aware of the summer work that will be happening in your area/department?
6. What do you want people on your team to think about over the summer?  (Nothing is a fine answer.)
7. What's on the horizon in your area/department/school?  (Put down some some mental velcro for your team, even if it is rather vague mental velcro.)
8. Where do you want your team to be in one year?  What deterrents might prevent you from leading them there, and what will you do to avoid those deterrents?
9. Did any projects/experiments/initiatives associated with your area/department fail?  If so, what have you learned from the failure and what process will you follow to end these projects/experiments/initiatives now or in the future? 
10. Is there anything you really should ask the students before they leave for the summer? 

We all know that May is a mad dash to the finish.  But leaders have (to have) the ability to keep their eyes on a few targets while moving quickly.  Or, to offer another metaphor, sometimes leading means sidestepping the oncoming flow of traffic, getting on your tiptoes, and glancing ahead.  Someone has to. 

Tech Tools = Paper Plates. Discuss.

~from #leadingonline (Chapter 5)

The True Learning Machine

Two stories, then a point of sorts:

1.

When I came home from work last Tuesday, my son was hard at work on a drawing. Midway through, he ran up to show me.

"Look at this," he said, and I said, "tell me what I'm looking at."

He said, "I'm not sure what it is or what it's going to be.  That's why I'm drawing . . . to figure that out."

2.

Last Friday, my son explained to me a story he was writing at school. The story was typically zany, but it included one new wrinkle -- math. Hunter has recently developed a fondness for very large numbers, and he usually arrives at them by using calculators to multiply and add, over and over again. 

The neat thing about this story (about a story) is that Hunter felt empowered enough to pull out a calculator in the middle of a writing lesson. 

*

I'll admit that small exchanges like the ones detailed above fill me with awe and fear.  I experience awe when I'm faced with the creative and native intelligence of children.  I experience fear -- usually right on the heels of the awe -- that, somewhere along the lines, school, or society's views about what is important in school, will teach my children, and most children, to unlearn what they already know about being creative and curious.  About inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge.  So I ask myself:

• At what point will Hunter stop using art as a tool for inquiry? (And what will I, as his father, do?)
• At what point will he only pursue problems with clear answers? (And what will I, as his father, do?)
• At what point will Hunter feel that product is more important than process? (And what will I, as his father, do?)
• At what point will Hunter stop pulling out his calculator in English class, or worse yet, at what point will he be told that he's not allowed to use his calculator to solve a problem raised by his English class? (And what will I, as his father, do?)
• At what point will the disciplinary lines of Hunter's education become so fossilized that he can no longer slalom gracefully between them? (And what will I, as his father, do?)

The machine below is a picture of what Hunter was drawing last Tuesday.  He never felt the drawing was completely finished, and moved on to something else, discarding it like a punched ticket at an amusement park.  But for me, it is as finished as it needs to be, and I'm going to save it for a very long time.  Though I haven't told him this, I call this picture "The True Learning Machine," and it has inspired me professionally like nothing else has recently. Note the battering ram on the front:

Sleep, Obviously

Ever since I discovered the work of Tony Schwartz, I have been keenly aware of the connection between the way we care for, and feed, our bodies and the way we experience a typical school day. A statement like that sounds obvious and natural, I know. . . .  I know because my first grade son told me about his health class last night, and it was all about eating properly.  He talked to me about protein and carbohydrates and energy and why we shouldn't eat junk food.  Obvious.  I know because I watch my three year old daughter tug my shirt when she's starting to get tired and ready to go to bed. Natural. 

But somewhere between the age of childhood and the age of adulthood, most of us simply forget about the basics when it comes to human physiology. 

I am thankful that the topic of health and wellness seems to be prevalently featured in many media outlets these days.  Simple articles or tweets help to remind us about the basics of a healthy lifestyle.   

A recent example comes from a Wall Street Journal article  by Lauren Weber "making a business case for bedtime."  

It starts with some facts that might be of interest to those kinds of businesses that track billable hours and value face time: "One-third of American workers aren't sleeping enough to function at peak levels, and that chronic exhaustion is costing billions of dollars in lost productivity, according to researchers from Harvard Medical School."  The article goes on to discuss sleep hygiene programs at some prominent companies, while continuing to talk about productivity + the Internet, concentration, smart phones . . . the usual suspects and the usual crimes. 

But the salient point for schools and school people appears in the discussion of a hotel in Colorodo:

During busy holiday periods at the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek resort in Avon, Colo., long hours sometimes lead to short fuses among staff. "You have to try to figure out who's feeling frustrated and help them cut loose to get some rest," said Scott Gubrud, director of sales and marketing at the hotel. . .

Bingo.  The "business case" for sleep in the world of education is not the same as the business case in the world of business.  Yes, productivity is important.  And, yes, teachers need to be able to concentrate.  But more often than not, teacher productivity and concentration is steadily interrupted anyway.  A teacher's "knowledge work" is constantly broken up by drop-ins and duties and conversations in the hallway and emails and fire drills and lockdowns, etc. 

Teachers and administrators should sleep more, and more effectively, because this practice will help lengthen those "short fuses" noted by the manager at the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek.  It will help rescue those conversations with students or parents where the wrong nuance leaves everyone in the room feeling agitated or unserved.  It will reduce the passive agressive, or downright agressive, remarks that leave colleagues feeling bitter toward one another.  Learning is hard enough -- why would we want to cloud it with the negative emotions that can result from blearyheadedness?

Or, since I slept soundly last night, I can put it more positively: The second you walk into a school, you walk into an incredibly interpersonal web. What a great and joyful place to be if you are fully awake to it. 

My Big Announcement for 2013

I love good, old-fashioned books and can tell you stories about most of the books on my bookshelves.   I can tell you where I bought them or who gave them to me.  I can explain to you the difference between my annotation system and my page-folding system.  I can tell you where I read each book or stopped reading each book, and why.  And for as long as I can remember, I wanted to write and publish an actual book.  This impulse was more than just a "bucket list" item; it was a life's mission.  

I completed this mission in a satisfactory, albeit anticlimactic, way back in 2009.  I wrote a book about what I knew -- working in schools.   People I respected told me the book was professionally useful and personal enough to be interesting.  I got to write about great mentors like Gray Smith.  I got to write about watching basketball games with my father.  One of my heroes wrote the Foreword.  Though it wasn't a novel, it counted.  It fit on my shelf.  

My next book is not going to fit on my shelf or your shelf.  Which is not to say that it will be a gigantic book. . . .  

I always tell my writing students that the form of a piece of writing should fit its function (like the old architectural adage form follows function).  My next book is about leadership, but not just any kind of leadership.  It's about what leadership looks like when it happens in a strictly online environment.  It is also about collaboration, and how to lead and be part of productive collaborative enterprises. With a nod toward authenticity, and the form that follows its function, this book about the online world will be available only online; and this book about collaboration will be a total collaboration; it will live out its principles. 

Could it have been a real, old-fashioned book, the kind that fits on a shelf?  Probably.  But, as a reader, I always scratch my head a little when I find myself flipping through a book about how great and world-changing the Internet is . . . but then realize that the author of said book didn't think the Internet was great and world-changing enough to serve as the actual delivery mechanism for his/her book about the Internet.  I could name names (other than my own), but I won't.  

But I will name my collaborator.  He is Reshan Richards, a polymath if ever I met one.  The last time we seriously collaborated on something, we were riding in his car, headed toward a conference.  Our primary collaborative task was to arrive at the conference.  On our way down the Parkway, we hatched the idea for this book and incubated it a while, overshooting our exit by a half dozen exits. 

We have big plans in 2013 to again end up somewhere unplanned: our primary collaborative task is to write a book about online leadership, called Leading Online, available only online. If you want to join in, we'll be hosting a weekly chat on Twitter: