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

Last week, four of our upperclassmen raced each other down a very public flight of stairs. I smiled and waved them on, despite the many important eyes that turned to follow their movement. There would be no stopping them anyway — these students were drawn by the irresistible light of celebrity. When they reached the bottom, they gathered around the special guest and, giddy for autographs, attempted conversation. One asked for his phone number. She received it, and two of the kids got warm bear hugs.

The guest was renowned intellectual and author Cornel West. The stairs were in the newly renovated Franklin Theater, part of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. The students were juniors at the Science Leadership Academy. They were invited to serve as hosts for the Institute’s “Politics of Slavery and Race in America” lecture. As a bonus for taking tickets and guiding people to their seats, they were given free admission to the event.

This comes from Matt Kay's latest post on the New York Times Lesson Plans site -- The New Village. In it, he speaks to the need for the adults of a community to step up and work with kids to give them the role models they need. He does this in the context of our Franklin Institute partnership, our Individualized Learning Plans and the experiences that our students have through those programs -- including meeting Cornell West last week.

It's a fantastic piece of writing, and he speaks to the transformative nature of these partnerships -- and how important they are for our kids. I just want to add that it is my hope that the adults who work with the students of SLA feel, in some way, transformed and enriched by their interaction with the kids too.

I'm re-examining the work of Nel Noddings, so I'm reading The Challenge to Care in Our Schools, so that's what is informing this post. On a personal note, It's exciting to reexamine her work after a few years away from it, especially since her work has been so formative in the way I think about the structure of the relationships at SLA. (There's a few dozen posts worth of work in that last sentence, but anyway...)

Noddings argues that so many students don't think that teachers care about them and yet so many teachers do. What is the cause for this? One of the powerful arguments that Noddings makes is that the standards -- and I would argue, standardization -- movement has created an objectification of students. We search for the best way to teach some mythological "student" object and then attempt to craft systems where all students are taught that way. What we have done, in the service of worthy ideals, is create a distance between teacher and student and the distance between is a mandated curriculum where the "why" of what we teach is rarely questioned and the "what" is defined in such a way that students end up feeling that teachers care more about the subjects they teach than the students they teach.

Noddings writes in detail about the ramifications of that idea, and she puts forth a compelling argument for how we can change our schools to make them more humane places, but that's not what I want to write about today. (And Dan, before you think that Noddings is someone who is arguing for a wishy-washy definition of care, she's not. In fact, I think she's a theorist that if you were to read, you'd love because she's someone who gives powerful language to many of the things you do in your own practice.)

But I want to examine a different but necessary change in the rhetoric of schooling that, in my opinion, stems from this revaluation of care. It is common in the language of school reform to hear people talk about the need for a 21st Century workforce. Now, there are a lot of reasons why I think this is shooting too low, but Noddings offers another reason why that's the wrong lens. The notion that our job as teachers is to create a new workforce suggests to our students an objectified relationship that is the antithesis of care. To me, the language of school as pathway to workforce does not suggest an active, engaged, caring relationship between teacher and student. It, instead, suggests that education is something we do to kids in service of the larger need of society -- and a market economy -- to have an educated workforce. Personal growth, emotional well-being, the need to educate and care about whole child take a back seat in that rhetoric.

Instead, if we talk about schools that help students become 21st Century citizens, we can speak to their need to be engaged and involved in their entire world. We can talk about how our hope for them to find their place in our society, not just as worker but as person. That rhetoric, to me, speaks to a transaction of care, because it aspires to help students find a rich and meaningful life while also teaching the need to be part of the larger society in powerful ways. Surely, we can find ways to explain the need for mathematics, science, literature and the like through that rich lens. Surely, we can explain why our desire to teach those ideas to students speak to a care for them and for our world that can convey to students the belief that our schools -- and the people within it -- are there because they care about them.

[Forgive me if this is a post that isn't about the stuff I usually write about, but the idea was rumbling around, and here's where I put ideas that rumble around. -- Chris]

This post comes from thinking about the financial crisis of the past week (and next decade) and spending time with some old college friends of mine this weekend. Both are Wharton grads and both still are in the world of business. One is high ranking executive at a Fortune 50 company, and I always am intrigued to talk to them because their view on the world is very different than mine, even when our ethical values are often very similar.

This post comes at the intersection of two conversations we were having. On one level, I was listening to them discuss the financial realities of their businesses in the wake of everything going on. At another point, we were talking about the environment and issues of sustainability. What concerns me, and what I want to write about, is my creeping feeling that our current economic system is uniquely unsuitable to the need for a sustainable society.

The corporate structure -- by definition -- is designed for growth. That's where the shareholder profit comes in. Because there is a need to always take money out of the system to reward investment, a zero growth sustainable corporation -- by my definition, the ability to reach a stable presence in the market -- is a losing proposition.

Now, on any micro-economic level, that's fine. Companies come and go, but it strikes me that on the whole, we are reaching an end-game with a growth economy, as there is a limit how much markets can grow, and much of the growth we have seen of the past twenty years (the dot-com boom, the housing boom) has -- it seems to me -- been built on parlor games and mathematical tricks. We hope that new technologies, new innovations, will grow new markets. We hope that increased wealth of developing nations will mean growth for old corporations. But all of this also comes at a point where we are seeing a growing environmental crisis, as there are serious questions about the degree to which our planet can sustain our current environmental pace without serious repercussions.

Much of the current mainstream political debate deals with the need to tweak the current economic / environmental model. Do we regulate more? Do we bail out? Do we use market forces to encourage a reduced carbon footprint? It was fascinating for me to listen to two business executives agree that there should have been a massive gas tax years ago to a) change American behavior around gas consumption, b) raise necessary funds to fund alternative energy research and c) alter the market so that the the price of gasoline reflected the actual price of gas once the externality of pollution was factor in so that alternative energies became cheaper alternatives more quickly. Certainly, those are all important questions, and the need to question and alter the role of government in the coming years to deal with the realities of our changing world will be one of the fundamental question of the coming decade.

But at the root is the legal organism of the capitalist corporation. Has it outlived its usefulness? Have we, as a society - a world - reached a point in our evolution where the growth model of the market organism is more harmful than helpful? The sole proprietorship, the "mom and pop" did not have the need for growth that the corporation -- by definition -- has. I'm not suggesting that we can go back to an atomized capitalism - to the days of Adam Smith, nor am I arguing for a state-sponsored socialism (although is it just me or did we just nationalize a massive section of the banking industry last week?). Instead I am questioning our ability to imagine a new model of economics -- one that harnesses the best notions of the marketplace while recognizing the limits of growth as the altar at which business must worship? Can we imagine a model of economics where sustainability is the goal of business? Where the idea of "enough" at the macro level was considered? Is there a model of a market economy that does not have to include macro-economic growth?

Because I am concerned that without a new model, the macro-level rapaciousness of a corporate capitalism as that legal organism is currently constructed will lead us into a need for more and more where we must hope that technological innovations stretch ever-dwindling resources and increase the efficiency with which humans interact with their environment outpace the need for the market to grow. And that is a frightening end-game that, to me, we are destined some day to lose.