Max Learning: Oath Taker

    

Five-year-old Max stood with his small right hand raised, staring transfixed into the stern gentleman’s eyes who stood across the counter. I listened with a lump in my throat as he recited an oath in the most heartfelt, serious manner I had ever heard him speak.  “As a Junior Ranger, I Max, will do all I can to take care of and protect Rocky Mountain National Park and the plants and animals that live here. I promise to continue to explore, learn about, and respect the natural world wherever I go.” Many of you know that there are few emotions as powerful as a parent’s pride in their child. I swallowed the lump in my throat and made a commitment to support Max in his oath. 

Max had an adventurous summer in which we traversed 12 states camping, hiking, and exploring mountains, prairies and plains. He was a builder, swimmer, and a gamer. So many of the lessons he learned can be applied to a classroom environment.  Let’s explore some of these lessons.

The Power of Service – Beyond the beautiful vistas witnessed in Big Sky Country, Max especially enjoyed the fauna. Bears, elk, coyotes, marmots, and ground squirrels were some of his favorites. One can’t help but want to conserve these landscapes and the creatures that abound there. Max’s oath solidified a drive to protect and respect our natural world. One of the primary actions that the Park Rangers share is for tourists to NOT feed the wildlife. Feeding wildlife creates issues with human encounters that can endanger these precious species. I knew that Max took this to heart when he approached an adult who was tossing peanuts at a hungry ground squirrel, and redirected his behavior. It takes courage and commitment to redirect a grown man when you are not even 4 feet tall. One of the most powerful intrinsic motivators for us all is to have a sense of purpose. We are driven to have an impact and be a part of something that is bigger than ourselves. Do your learners see themselves as an important individual in the bigger community that is your classroom? How can we engage our students in service as a motivator?

Measuring Up – Max is a strong swimmer for his age. Sometimes it feels like he is almost TOO comfortable in the water. Last summer, on a visit to the Blue Bell Aquatic Center, Max was excited to go down the water slide. Unfortunately, he did not meet the minimum height requirement. What happened next was remarkable. A life guard offered to give Max a swim test to see if he was capable enough to safely navigate the pool at the base of the slide. After swimming a lap, the life guard was confident in Max’s mastery and allowed him to slide to his heart’s content. Without the extra effort on the part of the guard, Max’s experience would have been limited and his engagement would have been less. We see arbitrary limits set in classrooms every day. What can we do for our learners who walk in the door already masterful in the skills we are teaching? How can we give them a “swim test” and allow access to an area of learning that they would otherwise be denied?

Leveraging Passion – Max has a newfound love. It started as just a ripple and grew to a tidal wave. A handful of Pokémon cards purchased by Grandma Sue stretched to a binder bulging with hundreds of cards. This was followed by a drive to binge watch Pokémon cartoons on Netflix. The exclamation point at the end of this near addiction was Pokémon Go.  Courtney and I have been forced to learn more about the Pokémon Universe so we can engage with Max over his new passion. As parents, we found it necessary to set some limits on his time pursuing this passion so that he did not get lost in this alternative universe. Educators know that finding success with our learners starts with relationships. One surefire way to connect with others is by discovering their passions. This can be especially true of our most challenging students. When dealing with behaviors, remember that allowing students to indulge in their passion can be leveraged as a reward for doing the right thing.  How do you discover your student’s passions and engage them through those passions?

Keeping it Real – Santa brought Max a workbench for his 3-year-old Christmas. For quite some time, he found great joy using plastic hammers and toy saws. He connected faux wood pieces of foam with over-sized screws in the shapes of bird houses, rocket ships, and cars. Max is a builder by nature. Over time his interest in building with these toys waned and the workbench became a dust collector. To reignite his fire to build we shifted to real tools and real projects. Hammers, screwdrivers, and paintbrushes… oh my! The authenticity of the work made it engaging. In the classroom, we can extend our student’s experiences beyond artificial problems and scenarios. How do you allow your students to own their learning and make it authentic?

This post started with describing an oath that Max took to earn his Jr. Ranger badge. I propose that we modify this oath and make it fit our role as parents and educators. Would you join me in this oath?

 “As an educator/parent, I Mark, will do all I can to take care of and protect the success of children. I promise to continue to support their exploration, learning, and passion wherever I go.”

Time

This thing all things devours;

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats mountain down.

You may recognize the riddle above. It is one in a series of riddles
asked between Bilbo and Gollum in one of my favorite books, The Hobbit.
In this case, the answer to the riddle is, “time.” I find that time itself is
one of life’s biggest riddles. Many would argue that it is our most precious
resource since it can never be recaptured. How we view time has a huge
impact on our attitudes, relationships, and daily interactions. Philip
Zimbardo, a psychologist and thought-influencer, has done some great
work around this topic. How our students and staff view the world, and their
orientation to the future, impacts how they engage with us. Take a look at
this video for a deeper dig into the idea of time orientation:

The Secret Power of Time

One could argue that finding a way to grow our students from
present-oriented hedonists, to future-oriented people, is the key to their
success... and ours!

What specific actions do you take to help our learners orient to the future? 

The Power of Fun

“Make learning fun!” How many times as an educator have you said or heard this quote?  Countless times I am sure. The reality is that human behavior can be shifted in a positive way when we make things fun. Check out this two minute video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw&sns=em

As I watched the video, I was reminded of three simple things that we can do to engage our learners by making it fun.

Novelty - In low risk situations, like climbing a set of musical stairs, human nature drives us to experience things we have yet to experience.

Immediate feedback - Learners like to see the impact of their actions.  Every step here is rewarded by a note. Rewarding our learners with immediate feedback drives engagement.

Social connection - One of the simplest ways to make a lesson more fun is to let our learners work together.  Making meaning together is inherently more fun than doing it alone.

To see more videos like the one above, check out http://www.thefuntheory.com/

How do you leverage fun to engage your learners?

Mark

The Story I Told Myself

I once had the privilege of attending an 8th grade field trip to our district's STEAM center. As a science teacher of 13 years, it was good to be surrounded by engaging activities connected to my favorite content! I bounced around from activity to activity and watched my students learning by doing. One activity involved using K’NEX to create a variety of structures.

I strolled into the room about 10 minutes into the session and noticed a student sitting alone at the table, not building the model. This young man is full of personality when you interact with him one-on-one, but is not a strong student. It is not uncommon for me to see him just sitting in class, not doing his work. I know that he is a past STAAR failure and was retained in elementary school. I also know about his home situation that is not something I would wish on anyone. Despite knowing all this, when I saw him just sitting there, a story began to form. In my mind, I believed that he was just choosing not to engage. I thought he was just being lazy. I sat next to him with the intent to tell him how disappointed I was that he was not respecting the opportunity he was being given. When I asked why he wasn’t building, he said, “I don’t know how.” This seemed unrealistic and I told him just to look at the picture and make it look like that. I watched as he struggled to connect the pieces. At that point I gathered up pieces and began to build. He watched intently and within a minute, he was going. I watched his momentum build after his “aha” moment. We continued building together. I asked him if he had ever had Duplos or Legos as a kid. He said that he had not. I am ashamed of the story I told myself about this young man. Some might think that he should be grateful that I cared enough to sit next to him and help. The reality is that the biggest learning that happened that day was on my part. This young man taught the principal to beware of the assumptions we make about why students disengage. It is a lesson that I won’t soon forget!

What are your go-to questions that you ask of students when they appear to be disengaged?

Perception vs. Reality

The human mind is amazing. Our success as a species is clearly linked to our ability to perceive the outside world, find patterns based upon experiences, and learn. Despite the undeniable virtues of the brain, it is fallible. Take two minutes to view the video at the link below.

Charlie Chaplin Illusion

When I first saw the video clip, I was amazed.  How did my mind misinterpret the reality of the situation?  I rewatched it and tried to force myself to see the mask as it was. I was unable to make this happen.  Despite my best effort, the mask always became convex as it turned to its inverted back side. My perception was not reality.

The relationship between perception and reality is worthy of exploration. One truth that successful people recognize is that our own reality is skewed by prior experience, bias, and our own brain’s misinterpretation of events. This realization helps us slow judgement, seek outside perspectives, and to be truth seekers. A second truth is that other's perceptions are their reality. People, adults in particular, hold tight to their perceptions as truth. This understanding is critical when we work to shift other's thinking.

Accepting these two important truths is fundamental to a mature mindset. Perhaps that is just my perception…. :-)

How do you create an internal, reflective pause, when you are compelled to be a truth teller, rather than a truth seeker?

Alexa

Last Christmas we received Amazon's Echo Dot as a gift for the family.  This little “smart” speaker is another technology tool that is leading us down a new path.  We activate the intelligence of the device by calling out “Alexa.” Once our friend Alexa awakens from her electronic slumber, we have access to music, weather, information from the web, etc.  Dear Alexa performs best with direct, concise requests.

Listening to my 5-year-old Max make requests with his speech challenges is really entertaining!  I am impressed that she can interpret and meet his desires as well as she can. When listening to him struggle to request, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” I realized that this technology tool was both a blessing and a curse.  The blessing part is that Max, and myself, are learning how to craft simplistic language to get the information or function we want. This is a great opportunity for problem solving and honing communication skills. The downside to this is the directive nature of the requests.  Terse requests tend to sound bossy and impolite. I don’t want Max to talk to me, his teachers, or anyone else in this way. Polite asking versus direct telling tends to increase the chances we will get what we want when it comes to human interactions.

I think that this example points to the challenge and ultimately the opportunity that lies with technology usage.  In my role as a parent and principal, I need not avoid these types of tools because of great potential they have. It is also critical to remember to teach Max that there are many different ways to communicate based upon the situation.  The way we talk to our new friend Alexa is different than the way we talk to human beings. When we embrace challenges as opportunities, our perspective shifts dramatically for the positive.

How do you directly teach your students the nuances of language, including registers, to set them on a path to successful communication?

Fuzzy Thinking

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my education heroes. He is a master of using the power of his narrative to simplify the complex. This is true if he is teaching astrophysics or important life lessons. Check out the 5 minute clip from a graduation commencement at the link below:

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Fuzzy Thinking

The examples he gives in this speech are powerful in helping to illuminate the issue of an over-reliance on multiple choice or objective testing. As a teacher of science for 13 years, I enjoyed the ease of grading and disaggregation of  data that these objective assessments provided. Despite this convenience these assessments can create the problem Neil is discussing. What are some steps a teacher can take to reduce the occurrence of “fuzzy thinking” in our classrooms as a function of our assessment?

1. Minimize the number of questions that are only at the knowledge level. If the answer can simply be given by memorizing, we are only reinforcing the problem. A good filter for this is to ask ourselves, “Can the answer be found by googling it?” If the answer is an affirmative, then it is back to the drawing board to craft a deeper question.

2. Provide a variety of assessments and checks for understanding about concepts that matter deeply. Let's face it, not all learning targets are of the same significance. For those enduring understandings that are priority concepts for your content area, allow for students to demonstrate mastery in a deeper fashion. When students respond in an essay or short answer format, we can get a much clearer picture of where students are in their understanding.

3. Demonstrate that your focus is THAT students learn rather than WHEN they learn. Your behavior after formal assessments will show students what you value. Simply returning the assessment and moving on sends a devastating message for those who were unsuccessful. This practice communicates, "Learning is optional... as your teacher, I am OK with you failing." Purposeful opportunities for students to revisit the thinking behind the answers that they missed, communicates a positive message. Leveraging retest and redo practices that allow for student to fully recover show that our focus is on learning, not just a grade.

Do you celebrate the correct answer or learning in your classroom?

Oblivious or Conspicuous?

I have a life goal that has set me on a path to continue to grow as a man. My goal is to be the best man my children have ever known. On my reflective journey to become better, I have noticed something about myself. I find that when things are going well and everything is in its place, I am oblivious to my current state. As soon as something is no longer in a state that meets my expectation, it becomes very conspicuous. A simple example of this could be related to the cleaning of a classroom. Each day we enter and the room is clean. Throughout the school day, busy students traipse in dirt, sticky fingers touch surfaces, and the trash can fills. The next day, the room is clean again thanks to the hard work of our custodial staff. Over time we become oblivious to this positive state of existence. If we walk in one day and the room has not been cleaned, it is VERY conspicuous. Rather than noticing and celebrating 100 days of a clean room, we only seem to notice the one day that it did not happen. A bigger example might be how we take our good health for granted. Only when we have pain do we appreciate the pain-free existence from the day before.

I know I am not alone fighting this dark side of human nature. Why is it that we don’t take the opportunity to praise the majority of students who are doing just what they are supposed to day-after-day? We are often oblivious to their contributions. Instead, those few students who are not meeting our expectations become very conspicuous to us. This narrow focus on the small minority begins to cloud our perspective of the class as a whole, our school, and sometimes even our view of the world. I believe that shifting our focus to make those things that are in a positive state conspicuous, and become more oblivious the other things, makes our life better!

What are you doing to make the positive things in your life conspicuous to you?

A Tale of Two Windows

What a pleasure it is to walk about a new campus like ours!  Collaborative spaces, the latest technology and natural lighting abound.  I was walking about on one of my coaching days and was struck by the the variety of messages that I was getting from how my teachers chose to cover or uncover their interior windows.    

Check out the image above.  The classroom pictured on the top is identical to the one on the bottom.  Do you get a different feel when you look at them?

As I walked by the open window, a story began to form in my head.  This is a room in which the teacher trusts the students to maintain a focus on their learning, even when someone happens by. I find it noteworthy that all the students are engaged even though their principal is standing in the hall with his phone clearly taking a picture. This room tells a tale of openness and transparency.  It invites us to come and take a look at the amazing learning that is taking place within its walls. It speaks of a teacher who is vulnerable and authentic. It says clearly, "This space is all about collaboration and connection."

The tale of the closed window stands in stark contrast to the other.  It seems to say that students are incapable of recovering from the distraction of someone walking by in the hall. It whispers of something private happening within its walls. It sends the message that learning is siloed within its space.

What tale do your windows tell?

Mark