So one of my students posted this note on facebook with the title "The Concept of School:"

So I just had to respond, right? This was my response... (and yes, I did get my student's permission to post his note on the blog. And yes, I love that my students are willing to even engage in the question.) So here was my response:

And here was his response:

I'm going to add a few more things here... I think that it is important to note a few things... one, even at SLA, we all can get frustrated by what we have to do, but I think that's o.k. Life is hard sometimes, and we all get frustrated and learning how to deal with that is one of the most important lessons we can teach. And we shouldn't just learn only what we want to learn for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that we don't always know what we want to learn until we are learning it. But also, struggle is o.k. In fact, struggle is downright good. But it's important to ask the questions that my student asked, and I think it's all the more important that we take the time to engage fully and seriously in the answers. I don't think that conversation between us is done. There are days when I hope he will take my ideas to heart. There are days when he will come back and give me a lot to think about. (And yes, his opening salvo definitely did.) This all is a snippet of a long conversation about this stuff, and that's a good thing.

Oh... and yes, this all happened because kids and teachers "friended" each other. These are the conversations we can have when we all remember that we have to interact as people, not as subject and object, and not just teacher and student. If and when the technology facilitates that, all the better.

I'm writing this post sitting on the steps in my backyard (yay wifi!) and watching my kids play with some of the neighborhood kids. In six hours, I get on a plane to San Jose where I'll be presenting at the Innovative Learning Conference and then it's back on a plane so that I can be back at SLA when it opens on Tuesday morning.

I don't encourage or endorse that kind of nuttiness, but the sad thing is that while the specifics of my travelling may be something that most teachers are strange, all over America today, teachers are grading papers over their morning coffee, principals are desperately trying to keep up on their emails, and educators are thankful for just one more day to try to catch up.

This is part of what I mean when I talk about putting good people into bad systems. In Philadelphia, a typical high school teacher would have over 165 students on their roster. This is why many teachers who would like to do authentic assessment regress to the simplest form of assessment or why teachers grade student writing by making grammar corrections on the first page only and then reading for content only on the rest of the essay. It's why some science teachers teach from textbooks, rather than asking kids to delve deeply, because with 165 kids, you can at least feel like you got "through" the material and had some rudimentary form of assessment because the idea of trying to help that many students through a true, deep level of inquiry seems daunting at best and impossible at worst.

And yet, there are teachers all over this country doing their best, and most of them aren't blogging. They are in the classrooms for 10-12 hours a day. They are bringing home papers to grade, and doing physics experiments with paper towel tubes, and as they hit their fifth, tenth, twentieth years in the classroom, they are forever making Faustian bargains about the balance between life and work.

And let me say this -- that's no way to run a public education system.

I want to celebrate every teacher who has made this job a calling. Thank you. But my concern is that this nation thinks that building an entire system around martyrdom is the way to go -- that if you aren't spending 80 hours a week and thousands of your own dollars, you can't be an effective Title I school teacher. (And yes, I know that it's not THAT much better in the wealthier districts.) We cannot build a national system on the idea that KIPP and TFA and the 60-70 hour work week is acceptable. It's not.

So as I watch Jakob and Theo play, stealing a moment where I can both be a dad (you have NO idea how many breaks I've taken in writing this entry) and a principal (I've answered about ten emails during the writing too,) I have a call to arms for us all.

Every time we see a teacher celebrated for their Herculean efforts, let's all be sure to ask the following questions:

• What can be done to support and sustain you?
• How can we change the system that more people can be as successful as you?
• How can we create schools where it does not require Herculean efforts to be a successful teacher?

Until we are willing to engage with those questions, we are going to continue down the path of the unrealistic and unattainable expectations for our urban teachers and our urban schools, and we're going to continue to wonder why so many of those schools aren't giving the kids the education they deserve.

And with that, I'm off to steal a few hours of playing with my kids. Have a wonderful Sunday.

Tags: school_reform, sustainability

SLA History teachers Gamal Sherif and Joshua Block were featured in the national publication Education Week in a story, "Historic Election and New Tech Tools Yield Promising Vistas for Learning " talking about how the SLA history teachers are using the 21st century tools to examine the Presidental election.

As the Nov. 4 election approaches, Mr. Sherif's students will continue blogging about the issues, and start creating their own campaign ads that promote the candidates' platforms.

Those kinds of activities have gone a long way toward getting students' attention for election-related lessons, said Joshua Block, a humanities teacher at the same school, the Science Leadership Academy. He set up an online discussion group about election issues after his students spent most of one period in a heated debate about the economy and the candidates' plans to address the nation's financial ills.

"I want to make sure they can discuss [the issues] in a sustained manner without getting annoyed, without attacking each other," Mr. Block said.

"Often on these forums you hear from students who don't necessarily speak up in verbal discussions," he said, "but they will when they have a chance to think and compose their ideas online."

They can also continue the discussion far beyond the confines of the classroom, he added. One recent debate, Mr. Block said, continued over the weekend and ended with dozens of online posts from students, some of whom suggested readings and other resources for their classmates.

Read the whole article!

Tags: sla, ed_week

A reminder that the deadline to submit a proposal for EduCon 2.1 is November 1st! We are looking for folks who want to bring people together to learn about and talk about how we can investigate the marriage of pedagogy and technology to make our schools better. The instructions for submitting a proposal can be found on the conference wiki.

And even if you don't want to submit a proposal, we want you there! So be sure to register to attend -- and of course, before EduCon is Gary Stager's Constructing Modern Math and Science Knowledge. You can register for both at our site.

Come see SLA on Friday, attend our Friday night "Future of Education" panel, and then spend Saturday and Sunday at sessions run by some of the most innovative educators, including Will Richardson, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Gary Stager, members of the SLA faculty and many, many more!

So a few weeks ago, I got the chance to speak at IgnitePhilly. You get five minutes -- you prepare twenty slides, and you get fifteen seconds a slide. It's a really, really fun, fast-paced way to try to communicate an idea, and the evening was a ton of fun. It was amazing for me to get to talk about school reform and 21st Century schools in an audience of so many new media / social media / creative class folks in Philadelphia. If you get the chance to go to an IgnitePhilly event, do so. It's a blast.

And it was really fun and tough to try to boil down what I think and believe about school reform to a five minute speech to non-educators. And it's a good thing I talk fast. Enjoy.

[Cross-posted at Leader-Talk.]

This is an extension of some thinking I was doing in this entry -- Citizenship, Workforce and the Ethic of Care.

Nel Noddings writes a great deal about the ethic of care -- the idea that our relationships with students should be grounded in "receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness" -- and her work has been important to me in thinking about my relationship with students and in the way we try to craft relationships at SLA.

The sad thing, of course, is that there are many, many caring adults in schools, yet students do not feel cared for. We have to ask ourselves why this is... the vast majority of teachers went into teaching because they care about kids, because they want to be positive influences in the lives of children, and yet -- especially in our high schools -- it doesn't seem to happen. And, of course, for many of our at risk students, when they don't feel cared for, they drop out.

So what causes the disconnect? Why do adults care and yet students don't feel cared for?

That question begs us to examine the structures and systems -- both philosophical and procedural -- that make up our schools and are, seemingly, getting in the way of caring relationships between students and teachers.

So then, some thoughts...

• School Level: We need to create space for adults and students to come together around their shared humanity, not around a subject to be taught. For us, that's Advisory, but that can take many forms. Noddings suggests the idea that students and teachers could take meals together, for example. Just that one change could create upheaval in the way many traditional schools look at their structures.
• Societal Level: We need to create policies that encourage teachers and students to look at each other with humanity -- and that means finding ways to look at all of a students' work, not just a test score. Again, this could look at a school accreditation program similar to Middle States where the entire school is assessed.
• Semantic Level: We need to stop talking about what schools "create," schools don't create the "21st Century Workforce." Doing that encourages us to think about our students as objects -- that education is something that is done to them. We need to change our language so that even the very way we talk about education breaks down that barrier between school and student... between subject and object.

I really think this is one of the major problems we have in schools today -- they don't feel like very caring institutions, and that needs to change at a very foundational level. We need to better leverage the enormous good will that most teachers enter the profession. We need to remember that teachers come into the profession to make children's lives better.

The good news is that despite every structural impediment there is -- and it's damned near complete these days -- students and teachers keep finding ways to connect as real people all over our country. We just need to change the system to make it a little easier, that's all.

Tags: caring, nel_noddings

Over the past few years, many administrators have asked me how SLA has such an incredible faculty, and while I think there are many reasons, not the least of which are the colleagues that you get to work with and the edu-blogger network that has made SLA more well-known than the average high school, I do think there are some things we do are replicable for schools that are looking to both get more candidates for teaching positions and find teachers more aligned with their school's philosophy in their candidate pool.

• Write a job description of your school that speaks directly to the mission of your school. For example, the first qualification we list on the page (after needs to be certified) is "Must believe we teach students before subjects." Don't be afraid to turn-off some teachers with it if you feel that it will excite the teachers you want.
• Increase your reach using online tools -- I believe that teachers will move to go places where they are valued. For progressive schools, I strongly suggest the Coalition of Essential Schools Job Board, but I know of schools that had success using the EdWeek job board also. A principal here in Philly has had success using Craigslist too.
• Don't forget about the ed schools. We reach out to education schools near and far. They have alumni lists, job fairs, departmental list-servs, and they have lots of teachers looking for jobs.
• Get out to job fairs -- send teachers, send students, send parents, send admins, but get to job fairs.
• Have an interview process that is designed to ask teachers to think about the things that matter most to you. A lot of schools design the interview process to find the "best" teacher, but I think that's a mistake -- I think you want to find the "best fit" teachers. So design an interview process that allows teachers to show you how their vision of education fits with your school's vision of education -- and include teachers, students, parents in that process.
• And then, of course, walk the walk of the vision of your school so that the teachers you recruit feel validated and excited by their choice. That's the hardest part.

I do believe that -- just like with students -- if more teachers found schools that matched their teaching and learning styles, we'd have a lot more success in our schools. And I think those teachers are out there -- especially all those who are leaving the system frustrated -- who could make our schools better. I hope someone finds this helpful.

Tags: recruiting, teachers, school_reform

Okay, maybe, possibly, I’m off hiatus. (Probably not). I just want to take a second, get my head above water, and talk about something I did this Friday.

At my school we have to use every possible means of contacting students. We are truly in the struggle to save lives and contact by any means necessary has to happen. Although I am strong in communicating with my students by email, and blog, and video, one of the areas I know that I have been weak in over the last six weeks in by using the plain old phone. This is not a good place to be weak because I know that’s where most of my student’s parents exist. They’re not watching YouTube but they do have a cell phone in their pocket.

I needed a way to get over this weakness, quick.

Many months ago my source of all things good on the web, Mashable, mentioned a new service called PhoneVite.

PhoneVite allows you to make mass phone calls and collect a response. So, this Friday I placed a phone call to sixty-or-so students that I am concerned about. Let me walk you through the process:

1. Set up a PhoneVite account and set my cell-phone as the caller ID number (I couldn’t use my work number because I’m behind an extension).
2. Recorded the message I wanted to send out using the same headset I use for Skype (but you can do this by phone as well).
3. Bought $20 worth of phone calls from PhoneVite.
4. Inserted the phone numbers I wanted to call.
5. Clicked send.
6. Watched both my work and cell phone explode for about 20 minutes.

Now, there’s a lot of talk about how parents aren’t involved in their students education. I’ve got about 20 minutes of evidence that would refute that. My work phone wouldn’t stop ringing. My cell phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. There were calls that I missed in that 20 minutes because both of the lines were tied up. In short, it was awesome.

$2.85 and ten minutes later all sixty phone calls had been placed and all but two connected. PhoneVite shows the amount of time that the call was listened to and all that connected made it though the entire 50 second recorded message. Only one family blocked future calls from PhoneVite (one of the options offered at the end of the call) but it provided the number that asked to be blocked, so next time I’ll just make a personal call to them.

In the future I’m going to use more of the features in PhoneVite to poll parents and get feedback but for this first round I couldn’t be happier with the results.

Technorati Tags: phonevite, using old technology in new ways, hey is that my horn? Let me toot it for a second