THE NEW NORMS? (or, Look Outward, Angel)

I have lately spent quite a lot of time delving into the world of specialized programming, what we might once have called “centers of excellence,” in independent schools. I’ve simultaneously been working my way through Kevin Kelly’s amazing What Technology Wants?, which contains among its opening chapters some persuasive arguments for a kind of determinism in realms ranging from evolution to invention. Some solutions, and some ideas, seem so inevitable that they just have to happen at a certain point. With invention, this point is a confluence of ideas, materials, and something vaguely resembling need. There is borrowing and inspiration, yes, but there is a kind of overarching synchronicity.

The independent school world is only slightly less separated in its parts than were the labs of, say, Edison and Tesla or the desks of Darwin and Wallace. We have publications, listservs, and conferences via which the interested can see what other schools are up to and where we can share our own ideas. But we also have schools and teachers who labor in relative isolation, solving problems and making policies that suit the needs of their schools and their times with little knowledge of the world around them.

In particular, my research has suggested to me that independent schools are currently developing a body of practice, if not standard practice at least best practice, that shares enough characteristics across the range of schools that its elements qualify as elements of not just a new normal but of new norms.

There are others, but these are the big themes around which I see practice coalescing in what I will call “leading schools”—schools whose work might be seen as exemplary and who are either now or on the road to becoming thought-leading institutions:

1.  “Centers” that serve as umbrellas under which are gathered initiatives around service learning, community engagement, social justice, and multicultural education. Often named and funded by grants or gifts, these centers provide not just a locus and administrative coherence for such work but a mechanism by which efforts in these areas can be strengthened and ever more deeply embedded in the work of the school. And if this sounds like so much left-leaning cant, the higher purpose is to focus on creating alert citizen activists and advocates—a goal that spans the political spectrum. Furthermore, these centers can also serve as explicit expressions of their schools’ public purpose by building community connections.
2. Building, teaching, and focusing operations on environmental sustainability. New construction with LEED certification of some sort is de rigueur these days, even with higher initial costs. So is developing ways to make the actual functioning of new construction a teaching tool, either by measuring energy use or building specific scientific or ecological processes and resources into the facility. Operational exercises include acquiring materials, including food, from green and often local sources—including school-operated gardens, which are a teaching tool in themselves.
3. Design thinking. Two years ago almost no one had heard of design thinking, but in the summer of 2012 it is possible to send teachers to any number of design thinking workshops around the country. As a teaching tool to support, in particular, project-based learning and as an administrative tool to support institutional planning and decision-making, design thinking is regarded as having great promise as a way to harness creativity and the innovative spirit of students and teachers; as a corollary, “entrepreneur” and “maker programs” are beginning to find traction in many schools.
4. Global education. Logistically challenging and often expensive, “global ed” for many years has been localized in school travel programs that have had relatively short reach within schools. More and more schools, however, are beginning to look deeply across their programming and find areas of authentic global learning that can be brought together, harmonized, and enhanced to create opportunities for true global education. Coursework, the use of tools like Skype to connect students and classrooms around the world, and of course travel programs—increasingly funded in ways that don’t exclude less affluent students—are giving students the chance to experience a clearly defined and comprehensive global learning experience.
5. STEM and STEAM learning. For a number of years now the buzz has been that American students lag behind their global counterparts in areas like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Independent schools are increasingly expressing their strategic interest in enhancing the ways in which they prepare students in these areas, often drawing (sometimes through “centers”) on local resources in higher education and industry and generally thinking more creatively about the ways in which science and mathematics curricula are organized and delivered. STEAM, with the added “A” for arts, bridges more technical subject areas with opportunities for creative work; design thinking and STE(A)M often go hand in hand.

This list is not exhaustive; I could also add the resurgent power of “backwards curriculum design” or the hard work being done in many schools around “character education.” I could speak of the increasing reach of technology as a tool for teaching and learning, or of the ways in which independent schools are expanding their overall programs in the arts. I could speak of a growing interest in assessments that transcend the limitations of classroom tests and quizzes or of the kinds of standardized testing associated with secondary school and college admission.

But for now, I would suggest that the five areas listed above are new norms, models that most if not all independent schools should be aware of and working on. What has been especially interesting to me is to see a number of what we might call “old line” schools, places with established reputations and global prestige, that are beginning to leverage the very gravitas of their institutional prestige and brand in order to move change forward in the kinds of directions we believe "schools of the future" need to go. When St. Grottlesex puts its resources into global or environmental education or design thinking—not just giving lip service but making a big institutional commitment—it might be a signal to us all that these are ideas whose time has indeed come.

Furthermore—this may seem like a reach, but I think not—it is getting to be time for independent schools to begin showcasing their exemplary and most forward-thinking programs in the service of education as a whole. There are those who believe that independent schools have been too silent in the face of the decline of American public education, but, by telling the stories of ideas that have worked and that offer legitimate and effective alternatives to the cram-and-test culture of too much public education, here is a way for independent schools and their leaders to enter the conversation, not just to cry "Woe is us!" but to offer real ideas.

It’s New, It’s Exciting—but Keep Expectations Proportional to Expertise

I spent some really hot days in the middle of the past week in Baltimore, Charm City, home to a number of independent schools and (apparently) a whole lot of cooks specializing in crab in various forms—and in making diners very, very happy.

It was also the site of the FolioCollaborative Summer Institute, where I had the chance to work with 50 or so amazing school leaders in a series of conversations about Folio, an initiative originally out of McDonogh School that calls itself “a framework for holding conversations around teaching and learning to promote teacher growth.” Growing out of a pretty neat system built by McDonogh folk (Tim Fish and Jack Hardcastle get original credit, I think, but the enterprise has grown some) to capture information useful in the school’s evaluation process, Folio is much more about promoting authentic communication between teachers and the people who supervise and lead them.

The Summer Institute had teams and a few individuals from over 20 schools, and to say that I was pumped by the experience would be the understatement of the year.

Real conversations, it seems to me, are the essential and probably undervalued resource in all our schools that can move teaching and learning forward. How often do we approach institutional culture shifts by dealing with our faculties en masse rather than as individuals? Even when we know where challenges lie, we tend to place a kind of blind hope in the idea that momentum will push the stragglers and resisters (oftentimes well meaning people) along, devil take the hindmost—except that the hindmost still have teaching loads. How much more effective might our work be if we approached our faculties one teacher at a time? Of course, that takes time and the capacity to hold sometimes difficult conversations, so it’s easier to do other things instead.

My “guest presenting” counterpart has an answer to the conversation piece. A certified life coach and a former school head of exceptional talent, Abigail Wiebenson had us all spellbound—if a little apprehensive—at the idea that we could develop the capacity to hold those conversations—as denominated in the title of one of the Institute’s “texts,” Fierce Conversations. I’m pretty much hooked.

I’m excited by Folio and have been ever since I saw it as a standalone at McDonogh some years back. It’s elegant, it’s simple but powerful, and it speaks the language of teachers.

It’s powerful enough, in fact, to be attracting a growing number of independent schools to the nonprofit Folio Collaborative spun off by McDonogh and headed by Tim Fish. At the Institute most participants were about to embark on the use of Folio—academic administrators and at least one H.R. specialist—whose jobs it will be in 2012–13 to guide faculties through a brand-new process built around developing personal goals for professional growth and then working, under guidance, to achieve them. For many schools there is some explicit link to evaluation, which only makes sense. And then there’s one of Folio’s mantras: Every teacher, every year. No one evades the responsibility for growth. And administrators have to take on the job of making this happen.

Naturally there was quite a bit of nervousness in the room. Call it what you will, mandatory evaluation or monitored professional growth makes faculties nervous, and the potential of Folio, its power, can make it seem to new Folio administrators and their faculties rather like a Jedi light saber in the hands of farmboy Luke Skywalker. It’s a potent tool; used wisely, it can have transformative power as schools become increasingly deliberate and smart about helping all teachers grow.

So part of the Institute program was knocking back some of that nervousness, and as our conversations—deep ones about teaching, teaching standards, and the very nature of schools—proceeded, I had a kind of a revelation about the nature of new initiatives in schools and why they sometimes come a cropper.

Even when they come from committees of wise owls or enthusiastic teachers instead of springing from the fevered brain of an administrator, many of the most exciting and promising ideas that find their way to implementation in independent schools get us jazzed because it’s easy for the visionaries in the group to immediately jump to the veritable New Jerusalem that these ideas, fully implemented and matured, seem to promise. Even if we’re not quite sure exactly what the path from Now to the Golden Future will look like, we dive in, because we know that this idea will make teachers’ lives, and kids’ lives, and the whole culture of the school better.

I think most of the time we’re even right about the long-term vision and the delightful image it creates.

But here’s my revelation, and a new mantra—at least for me—that goes with it: Keep expectations proportional to expertise. In other words, don’t let your expectations for this new idea in the moment, especially for something brand-new—run ahead of your level of mastery of the idea in that same moment. Experience is a powerful teacher, even for pros, and we know how critical it is for leaders to have not just knowledge but a deep, highly contextual understanding of an idea and its “why” before they can create the conditions for that idea to take root in a school’s culture.

I think back, as I suspect many of us can, on GREAT ideas that went south on us because we asked ourselves, our managerial colleagues, and our teachers to do things about which we did not have that deep, highly contextual understanding. We asked everyone to run when we should have started out walking.

This doesn’t mean not to embrace new ideas and new ways wholeheartedly, and, when necessary, right now. It means that as academic leaders we sometimes need to know more about how to do things before we do them, and especially before we expect faculties, even the most capable and well meaning faculties, to do them, too. Nothing spells failure, and nothing leaves a worse aftertaste, than initiatives undertaken way too quickly or in bites way too big that fizzle and disappear, feeding disappointment and cynicism.

Sometimes waiting, rolling things out in steps, keeping expectations modest (which is not the same as low, if you please), offers a much better path to success than even the most enthusiastic, YES!! kind of immediate total immersion.

So, next time you have the greatest idea since sliced bread, take a deep breath before jumping in with both feet and expecting everyone else to jump right along with you. Keep expectations proportional to expertise including, most of all, your own.

Fortunately, the wisdom of Tim, Abigail, and the other Folio leaders was well up to the task of getting this message out. Keep it simple to start with, keep goals achievable and clear, and let faculties themselves develop, in time, an understanding of what Folio could mean, and become—realizing this potential all the more fully in time because they will all truly understand it. It's a lesson any of us with a great idea should remember.

From Idea to Initiative: It's About Looking Hard, Not Just Looking Good

It's been way too long since I last posted. A year has ended, my last kid has graduated from our school, and I have finished up an exciting project that NAIS should be rolling out at some point soon. Better still from my point of view, I am on an air-conditioned train en route home from one of the more energizing professional experiences of my recent life. More on this soon, but not today.

 Last time out I left you, Gentle Reader, a more-or-less promise to take up the question of when a program--in particular an innovative program--is truly a SCHOOL's program, rather than a thing that someone at a school is doing. This question turned out to be crucial to my recent project, and it led me to a few conclusions and general principles that are worth keeping in mind if a school truly wants to leverage a good idea into an institutional "center of excellence."

These days plenty of schools are working hard to trade on unique, novel, or indeed truly innovative programs hatched by creative teachers and nurtured into life by persistent, patient leadership and vision. Some of these are in full alignment with a school's strategic directions and undertaken with the full might and resources of the school behind them.

Others, however, are the brainchild of a single teacher, department, or other small group, sometimes working in traditional independent school isolation and carried forward by sheer blood and sweat. Many of these are truly brilliant, and some represent serious deviation from the norms of the school.

Nevertheless, and no doubt to the benefit of their creators in time, schools suddenly awakening to the clarion call in the larger independent school community to innovate, to advance, to feed the entrepreneurial spirit of teachers, are often willing to lay claim to these bright ideas, discovering their marketplace utility and ballyhooing them as if they had been the "school's idea" all along. No doubt the entrepreneurs behind these programs cheerfully roll their eyes and go along. Their moment has come at last.

But are these truly school programs? Does the spirit and purpose behind them pervade the whole school? Is there a clear link to other work or values that characaterize the whole school?

Some observations:

1) I came up with the "two click" test for myself: How many layers of a school's website does the curious surfer have to penetrate to find some substantial information on the initiative? Does it have its own web page, its own links to further resources or information? Two clicks makes the program truly institutional; more than four, strictly a very local project.

2) There ought to be a simple test for this one: I have written before that the head at my own school has sent us into each of the last couple of years with an exhortation to "make excellent mistakes!"--invoking the spirit of Daniel Pink's Johnny Bunko to try new things, even if they don't work quite the way they should the first time out. Any initiative that originates with full school permission to "make excellent mistakes" gets my vote as an institutional program.

3) A program that explicitly enacts specific concepts laid out in a school's mission or core values statement--a global education program in a school that wants to create "citizens of the world," for example--truly represents the school. (My jury is still out but likely to judge harshly on limited or occasional--and expensive and thus offering potentially limited access--travel programs; one trip to Senegal that some kids can't take because it's too expensive does not a global service-learning program make.)

One of my recent correspondents was adamant that truly exemplary, diffused-throughout-a-school programming absolutely requires not just acquiescence or passive enthusiasm but active leadership from the top levels of a school's management. Certainly a head and a board can direct the resources required to make something new and wonderful work well, but more importantly their active curiosity, enthusiasm, and moral support is what will really make a good thing into A Good Thing for the school.

If you've got people quietly doing something new and wonderful at your school, don't just send the photographer and the newsletter writer down to check it out. Check it out yourself, and, if it's really exciting, figure out how to make the idea go viral all over your campus. Give the creators all the credit, of course, and then give them the chance to show others how to make it real for the whole school.

We are trying to change our schools in time to change the world (before the Crack of Doom, maybe), and to succeed in this we not only have to think and act strategically as institutions but also to update the ways we look at some of our faculty outliers--those brilliant, sometimes eccentric, and totally passionate teachers schools are sometimes content to let "do their own thing," to be different because they're good, even if we don't understand (and often don't appreciate) them. If they have something really great going on--and sometimes we just have to pay attention--then perhaps it's time to shift them from being outliers into teacher-leaders.