Building upon Making Connections 1, it’s possible to identify three themes emerging from the Institute, these are:

1. Focusing our community
2. Sustaining our community
3. Moving our community

Our focus will be on the learning and teaching process;

We will sustain a culture where people feel sense of belinging and where they can make active contributions; and

We will move our community forwards by taking account of the factors which can limit progress

Focusing our community

1. Developing the teaching process
2. Making an impact
3. Instructional focus

“Teaching without content – is not teaching”
Expect and support adult proficiency
Encourage people to reach into their “stretch zone”
Challenge through choice
Education must define and take control of its practice
Focus on improvement – not change
Create a sense of urgency
Develop networks of practice
Support teacher collaboration
Promoting academic proficiency should be our central goal
Improve instructional tasks
Purposeful Observation - makes a difference
Teaching matters!
Inspect what you expect
Command presence – be where the game’s happening
Feedback – tell them how their doing
What does engagement look like?
Keep an instructional focus
Reduce the variance in the quality of the instructional process
Set clear and unambiguous proficiency targets for learners
The teacher makes the difference
Identify a body of knowledge about instructional practice
Increase the knowledge skills of teachers
Believe that teachers can learn
Change the role of the student
Raise the content – more complex tasks
Social return on investment – what’s in it for society?
Effective effort – are you focussed on the right things?
Always be clear about the impact of your actions
Can you demonstrate impact in concrete ways?
Face up to uncomfortable truths if actions are not resulting in improvements

Sustaining our community

1. Leader’s learning
2. Building your community
3. Belonging

Build a coherent organisation
Be flexible with all but belonging and instructional focus
Be willing to negotiate
Build a consensus
Promote collective responsibility
Build a sustainable community, which extends beyond your presence
Develop partnerships
There can be no such thing as professional autonomy
Be aware that you inherit from others and leave a legacy to other leaders
Work to prevent atomised classrooms
Leaders must be prepared to learn from the ‘”sting” of negative feedback
Confidence – take risks  and learn
Be flexible with the leadership styles you adopt
Express a comfort with confusion
Challenge the concept of presumed competence
We can learn the most from those who are moving from “low performing” to “high performing”
Don’t expect others to go where you won’t go
Technical duties – master and deliver
Demonstrate a commitment to the instructional process above all else
Expect and support administrator proficiency
Get things done through people
Have high expectations – for all
Giving children a hand up – not a hand out
Advocate for children
There is no such thing as potential
Kids can get smart
Promoting tenacious engagement
Be aware of unwitting segregation
Our mantra must be “Think you can”
“Believe that it is possible”
Promote a confidence to learn
Interrupting children who are on the journey to failure
 Everyone must say “These are MY children”
Commit to children
Avoid symbiotic dependency
Identify factors that erode belonging in school
Ability groupings don’t work

Moving our community

1. The hurt of change
2. Cultural leadership

Develop a sense of common purpose
Move the school culture through critical mass
Concentrate on adaptive (cultural) challenges
Trust – comes only comes through consistency between action and practice
Create and sustain norms of behaviour
Present “yesable” propositions
Manage your time to create space for our real business
Open source leadership – encourage contribution
Transparency  - don’t hide behind supposed confidentiality
Underpin your actions through - rigor, relationships, relevance
Seek out and use valid data
Authenticity – be who you who say you are?
Work “on” the system – don’t be “in” the system
Inner work - what’s going on inside people’s heads?
“Cherished Theories” – reluctant to let go
“Circle the Wagons” – them against us
Remember that allegiance fills the a void of belonging
We all have an emotional attachment to practice
Emotional response to change
Displacing responsibility to others
“That’s not my swing”
Experiencing loss in the process of change
Limited through the presumption of competence
Conflict has to do with underlying change
It’s human nature to resist change
Hurt people hurt people
Reflective listening – not reflexive
Honesty – are we prepared to have the uncomfortable conversations?
Always proceed with valid data
Believe that teachers can get smart
Separate a teacher’s practice/professional behaviour from the person

Roland Barth presented the final session of our Leadership Institute and I thought he managed to tie up many threads in his inspired presentation.

In the course of a three hour session he managed to elicit responses from the audience which enabled him to identify the most positive conditions under which we learn.  I’ll try to post later about the variety of presentation styles used in the course of the last ten days but Roland’s was a masterful display of someone who knows his business and knows how to engage an audience.

He started off by asking us to think of a time in our lives when we learned best.

The overwhelming features of our collective experiences were that we learn best:

1. when we take a risk; and
2. when there is a safety strap

Barth suggest that schools don’t take this approach - they play SAFE!!!

He argued that schools are information rich - but - experience poor.

He contrasted this with John Dewey’s assertion that:

We learn from our experience —if we reflect on our experience.

By collating all of the audiences reflctions upon situations when they learned best he separated them into idiosyncratic and generic conditions for learning.

The generic conditions for learning identified from the 150 people on our course were:

• Learn from mistakes
• Risk taking
• Urgency
• Self-reflction
• New experiences
• Emotional investment
• Support
• Fun/humour
• Curiosity
• Challenge
• Feeling respected
• Going into the unknown
• Given a reason for learning

He then asked us to think about how many of these conditions we meet in our schools - the answer was predictably few.

He summarised this by suggesting that learning in school can be:

Informative - (information)

or

Tranformative (changes you for ever)

He encouraged us to go for the GOLD standard which was -of course - the Transformative.

He slipped one little nugget in which I really liked but wonder how well it might go down in Scotland:

One district in the USA issued cards to all teachers and pupils which he described as a Permission to Learn card.

The card read as follows:

On one side : - this card entitles the holder to take one risk in their own learning

On the other side: - Today I took a risk - it didn’t go as well as I had planned but I learned that …………….?

The card does not give the holder the permission to place themselves or others at risk or danger.

Would it work in  Scotland?????

 

We were privileged to spend an hour with Kurt Fischer Ph. D. who is Charles Bigelow Professor of Human Development & Psychology and Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Professor Fischer is exploring the inter-relationships between:

 Education—-Neuroscience—–Cognitive Science

He started out be exploding some of the myths which have built up around Neuroscience and learning.

“There is no such thing as someone who has a dominant side of their brain”

I was amazed to see people who had had one of the brain’s hemisphere’s removed by surgery and that contrary to all predictions for a “left brain” child he had become skilled at drawing.

Professor Fischer’s goal is to put cognitive science, biology and education together to enable optimal learning to take place.

The following video extracts show Prof. Fischer explaining this in more detail: (you will need to download Real Player to access all the videos)

Here Prof. Fischer provides an overview of this work, describing growth spurts in brain and cognitive development that occur within the same age periods during the school years.

Here he elaborates on measuring the growth in brain activity from childhood through early adulthood. He describes how EEG (electroencephalogram) techniques can be used to detect developmental patterns in brain connections.

In this clip, Kurt Fischer uses the example of children’s social role understanding to illustrate how simple representations are reorganized into more complex representations and then into abstract concepts. These new skills that emerge in children’s best performance are closely associated with growth spurts of brain activity. (view text)

Fischer’s point is that we suffer from a pervasive mataphor in our culture for learning and teaching which sees knowledge and ideas as objects  which can be exchanged, “I gave the idea to Sally” and the brain as a container “I can’t get this idea out of my mind”

Professor Fischer’s point is that we need active involvement for learning to take place.

He referred to the PLASTICITY of the brain - “it changes based on active experience” - see this clip where he explores how people are more than just their brains.

“There’s a misconception that we have to get rid of, a prevalent misconception in the English language and culture in general, that we are brains – that we learn with our brains as opposed to being people who have brains that help us learn.  We are not brains disembodied in the bucket sitting in the corner. And likewise, we don’t learn by having information stuck into our brains.

So by one image, I have a port up here on my brain – see that little mark right here on my forehead – and that’s where I plug in every morning, and the computer tells me the knowledge for today.

Well, it doesn’t work that way. We have to learn more actively than that.
So it is not true that you can plug the world into the brain and thereby know everything. Instead, knowledge has to built.”

Kurt Fischer

For me this linked very well with what Richard Elmore had been syaing about the importance of the “instructional task” which must challenge and involve the learner.

This will be a key area of research for me over the coming months - see -http://www.imbes.org/ - for more information

 

 

 

 

This will be the first of three posts which will explore the themes emerging from the Institute over the last 7 days.

The groupings emerged in the course of an exercise with our process group: 

Please feel free to leave comments and make suggestions for amendements or additions

INSTRUCTIONAL FOCUS
Promoting academic proficiency should be our central goal
Improve instructional tasks
Purposeful Observation - makes a difference
Teaching matters!
Inspect what you expect
Command presence – be where the game’s happening
Feedback – tell them how their doing
What does engagement look like?
Keep an instructional focus
Reduce the variance in the quality of the instructional process
Set clear and unambiguous proficiency targets for learners
The teacher makes the difference
Identify a body of knowledge about instructional practice
Increase the knowledge skills of teachers
Believe that teachers can learn
Change the role of the student
Raise the content – more complex tasks

THE HURT OF CHANGE
Inner work - what’s going on inside people’s heads?
“Cherished Theories” – reluctant to let go
“Circle the Wagons” – them against us
Remember that allegiance fills the a void of belonging
We all have an emotional attachment to practice
Emotional response to change
Displacing responsibility to others
“That’s not my swing”
Experiencing loss in the process of change
Limited through the presumption of competence
Conflict has to do with underlying change
It’s human nature to resist change
Hurt people hurt people
Reflective listening – not reflexive
Honesty – are we prepared to have the uncomfortable conversations?
Always proceed with valid data
Believe that teachers can get smart
Separate a teacher’s practice/professional behaviour from the person

BELONGING
Have high expectations – for all
Giving children a hand up – not a hand out
Advocate for children
There is no such thing as potential
Kids can get smart
Promoting tenacious engagement
Be aware of unwitting segregation
Our mantra must be “Think you can”
“Believe that it is possible”
Promote a confidence to learn
Interrupting children who are on the journey to failure
 Everyone must say “These are MY children”
Commit to children
Avoid symbiotic dependency
Identify factors that erode belonging in school
Ability groupings don’t work

ADAPTIVE/CULTURAL LEADERSHIP
Develop a sense of common purpose
Move the school culture through critical mass
Concentrate on adaptive (cultural) challenges
Trust – comes only comes through consistency between action and practice
Create and sustain norms of behaviour
Manage your time to create space for our real business
Open source leadership – encourage contribution
Transparency  - don’t hide behind supposed confidentiality
Underpin your actions through - rigor, relationships, relevance
Seek out and use valid data
Authenticity – be who you who say you are?
Work “on” the system – don’t be “in” the system

THE LEADER’S LEARNING
Leaders must be prepared to learn from the ‘”sting” of negative feedback
Confidence – take risks  and learn
Be flexible with the leadership styles you adopt
Express a comfort with confusion
Challenge the concept of presumed competence
We can learn the most from those who are moving from “low performing” to “high performing”
Don’t expect others to go where you won’t go
Technical duties – master and deliver
Demonstrate a commitment to the instructional process above all else
Expect and support administrator proficiency
Get things done through people

ARE YOU MAKING AN IMPACT?
Social return on investment – what’s in it for society?
Effective effort – are you focussed on the right things?
Always be clear about the impact of your actions
Can you demonstrate impact in concrete ways?
Face up to uncomfortable truths if actions are not resulting in improvements

BUILDING YOUR COMMUNITY
Present “yesable” propositions
Build a coherent organisation
Be flexible with all but belonging and instructional focus
Be willing to negotiate
Build a consensus
Promote collective responsibility
Build a sustainable community, which extends beyond your presence
Develop partnerships
There can be no such thing as professional autonomy
Be aware that you inherit from others and leave a legacy to other leaders
Work to prevent atomised classrooms

DEVELOPING THE TEACHING PROCESS
 “Teaching without content – is not teaching”
Expect and support adult proficiency
Encourage people to reach into their “stretch zone”
Challenge through choice
Education must define and take control of its practice
Focus on improvement – not change
Create a sense of urgency
Develop networks of practice
Support teacher collaboration