Making a Changemaker: Five Ways to Help Kids Find Their Cause

NPR’s Planet Money recently ran a story about Madeline Messer, a 12 year old girl who wrote an op ed piece for the Washington Post about how unfair it was that she had to pay extra to play her favorite video game with a female character. She researched more than 50 games and found that very few of them had female characters available as the free starter character. In conducting her research and writing her letter, Madeline actively engaged in the public discourse about gender and equity.

I remember being about the same age and writing to my US Senator about the lack of movies being made for children. I think that year there were no G rated movies. Senator Lugar’s office wrote back to me. I remember thinking at that moment that what I thought mattered.

These early experiences small, like mine, or larger like Madeline’s provide first forays into our civic spaces. There are easy things we can do to help our children find their voice and follow their interests into the public sphere.

1. First and foremost eat dinner together and use it as a time to discuss your children’s interests. Where appropriate help them see how their interests fit into a larger community. For instance, a child who loves to skateboard will be interested to know about efforts to create a skate park or curtail skateboarding in a favorite place. Growing up, the dinner table was where I learned about the issues my parents cared about; why my mother helped start a recycling campaign in our city and why my father took a leave from his job to help manage a gubernatorial campaign.
2. In age appropriate ways discuss what is going on in your community,state, nation, even the world. Obviously, not every current event is right for young children, and yet we do our children a disservice in completely insulating them from the world around them. With young children, seek out good news, developments in science and technology, events and topics that are happening close to home. Share these with your children.There are a number of age appropriate news sources that can serve as a basis for what you discuss. When children have a question about something they have overheard, ask them what they know. Answer their questions simply and with age appropriate information. Correct misconceptions and share with them what you think. As they grow older, your conversations will deepen.
3. Model civic engagement for your children. Our children are always watching us. What we do is as instructive to them as what we say to them. Whether you are involved in protecting your local watershed, helping to choose a new pastor at your church, serving on a board of directors, or preserving a historic building, speak openly with your children about your involvement and why it matters to you.
4. Talk about politics and our system of government. While civic engagement is broader than partisan politics, our system of government works best when we are actively involved in the important discussions of the time.  Local, state and national election cycles provide us with wonderful opportunities to help our children get beyond the impossible to ignore campaign advertising and understand the underlying issues. The ability to think critically and deeply about campaign topics are important skills to cultivate. Encouraging our children to listen respectfully to the opinions of others while developing their own opinions takes practice. As they get older, encourage them to write to their representatives and their local news sources.
5. Take your children with you out into public spaces. Volunteering in local service organizations, participating in groups like Girl Scouts, attending rallies, town hall meetings and other events are all opportunities for us as parents to help our children see themselves as active participants in their communities. The Chester County Community Foundation website is just one of many resources for finding family friendly volunteer opportunities. The spring and fall are full of family friendly events. Every weekend any number of worthy causes sponsors walks, runs, and swims to raise awareness and money for everything from Multiple Sclerosis, to Breast Cancer, to AIDS, to Autism. These events need walkers, runners, AND volunteers. One way to connect with an event is to choose something that touches a friend or family member. Another way is to give your children a few choices and let them pick what you as a family will do together.

It's not enough to vote and pay taxes; democracies need citizens actively engaged in public discourse in all areas. Our children have a stake in a healthy, functioning civil society. Helping children see themselves as agents of change, as actors in their communities encourages their growth into a sense of responsibility for their communities and their neighbors. Giving them opportunities to talk with us and have early civic experiences with us, fosters their understanding of how to be generally informed and how to choose specific areas for their particular involvement.

This is a repost from A Well-Lit Path: A Blog from Westtown School's Parent Partnering Program

WEEK 26: What makes a great team mate? #savmp

This week in SAVMP we are asked to consider what makes a great team mate.

“Leaders should never work in isolation and the best one’s often create teams that will ensure they are doing what is best for kids.  In a previous article I posted on my own blog, I share some of the attributes that I look for in a great Assistant Principal.  I would like to challenge you to think and share what you look for in a “leadership partner”?  (George Couros)

I have a quote from Peter Drucker, business guru, on the bulletin board in my office " the task of leadership is to align strengths in such a way that weaknesses are irrelevant.” I have spent considerable time considering the strengths and talents (and areas for growth and even out right weakness) of those I work with. In my more usual job I serve in a role akin to a public school Vice Principal shared across divisions and help our Lower, Middle, and Upper School Principals with curriculum development and faculty evaluations. Reporting to the Head of School I also help the him with special projects. In this role I see myself as the team member rather the constructor of the team. As interim Principal I inherited the team constructed by my predecessors. In all cases I see my task as seeking out the best partners from my co-workers and drawing out their strengths.

In thinking about the attributes I most value in my educational partners I would lift up the following three:

1)  A relentless, laser focus on our mission as a school; the corollary would be a comfort with saying "no, that's not what we do." As an independent school with a very specific and aspirational mission in a very competitive market, decisions have to be consonant with our mission and sensitive to our student market. This is no easy task. In the end, mission has to trump all else. Our mission, in the limits it imposes, fosters incredible opportunities for creativity. Some of my best partners have challenged me to remain within the mission even as we are forging new ground with approaches to program and personnel development.

2) Willingness to always put students first: Teaching in any school is exhausting, in a boarding school the exhaustion can be relentless. In every conversation about balance of life or pace of life for teachers the danger is to put the needs of the adults above the needs of the students. Whether its designing a new student leadership selection process or implementing a 1 to 1 program or creating a new schedule, I want a partner who understands that what serves our students best will in the end serve the adults well too. I am not suggesting that the students run amok or are spoiled or catered too. Rather, the school and its systems are here to serve and educate our students (from within our mission!).

3) Risk taking/confidence/moxie: When I was a full time class room teacher, I experimented with my curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments as a matter of course. I thought everyone did. In a recent meeting, when a well respected, mid-career colleague said that for our emphasis on Action Based Learning to Work, she needed permission to fail, I was reminded once again that my habit of leaping before I looked is not the norm. Many of my colleagues want permission first. While I appreciate caution, I seek out partners who are willing to try something new, have the confidence to be wrong, enjoy taking a creative approach, and are willing to challenge me. I am most impressed when this confidence is accompanied by a genuine unassuming manner.

There are other characteristics I value, not the least a willingness to challenge my assumptions and present alternative ideas. But when it comes to courageous leadership I find the three I listed invaluable.

What is excellence in teaching in a Friends School Context?

One of the critical conversations happening at Westtown School this year revolves around what it means to be an excellent teacher at this school with its particular mission. In a recent discussion on the characteristics of good teaching I received some push back on the use of the word "excellent". The criticism was that the word smacked of elitism and furthermore if a teacher was an amazing, spell-binding lecturer did that make her a better teacher than one who crafted thought provoking problems for his students to solve. What is the standard if not excellence? And once we have a standard how do we define and name its characteristics?

I took these related questions with me to the recent Friends Council on Education Peer Network Meeting for Associate Heads and Division Heads. Our topic for the day was "Faculty Evaluation and Professional Growth in a Friends School Context: How does Quakerism inform how we go about doing evaluation and professional growth?" I explained that criticism of the term "excellence" seemed to be rooted in a strong strain of equality within Friend's schools. The first response to my questions after a collective chuckle was "what are we all supposed to be... equally mediocre?" But then two other members of the group nodded in agreement and said that this was a theme found among their faculty as well -- this conflating of excellence with elitism. Fortunately another member of the group offered a way forward from within the Quaker testimonies--To be excellent is to do one's work with integrity. Integrity is one of the Quaker SPICES (testimonies). The whole list includes Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, Stewardship.

Integrity asks of us to give our best in every situation, to deal honestly with our students and colleagues. At its core it calls on us to have our outward lives express our inward thoughts and beliefs. So what are the queries we might ask (rather than a check list of things to do)  in relation to whether or not we are doing our jobs with integrity? I would begin with following:

• Does my teaching in philosophy and pedagogy support the mission of the school?
• Do my actions in the classroom, as an adviser, on the playing field, in the school community, place the needs of my students at the center?
• Do I deal honestly and forth rightly with my colleagues and supervisors?
• Am I open to learning new ways to do my work in the evolving life of this school?
• Do the strategic imperatives of the school and my personal talents and beliefs align?

I'm sure this list isn't exhaustive and would welcome hearing others' thoughts.

In my next post I will explore my thoughts on Stewardship as another means of defining excellence.

Critical Conversations #SAVMP

This week's prompts for our #SAVMP blogging were questions about encouraging Critical Conversations.

• How do we create a culture where "pushback" is encouraged?
• How do we know when to stick with the minority over the majority?
• How do you create a team that will give you honest feedback?
  
  

It put me in mind of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. Certainly, Lincoln created a team where group think was never going to be a problem! At schools, I suspect leadership teams are not put together the way that Lincoln's cabinet was. Certainly at Westtown, leadership positions were not awarded as favors to political allies (or rivals), as rewards for roles played in one's election or for one's ability to hold a difficult border state in the Union. Indeed, at schools leadership teams are constructed one hire at a time and evolve with each new hire.

For me, these three SAVMP questions of the week turn me back upon myself and my own aversion to providing difficult feedback, to having difficult conversations with colleagues. When I first stepped into my new role, I knew this would be my greatest challenge. I participated in our school's peer coaching program and asked for a specific colleague as coach with the intention of leaning into this discomfort. Over the school year my coach and I worked through Difficult Conversations. He helped me explore the reasons for my dis-ease and we role played several different sorts of conversations. We also kept a log of the conversations I was having with colleagues and how they fell on a continuum from easy to difficult and challenging. What I found was that I need to always keep four things in mind when approaching any conversation I anticipate might be difficult: assume the best from the person I am speaking with, remember that the needs of our students come first, and that the well-being of our school comes second only to that of our students. Finally, and not least, never forget there is a person sitting across from me in this conversation. Not surprisingly, I generally have to remind myself of these givens before I have a difficult conversation. 

But this isn't what the original prompt was about, Creating a culture for promoting critical conversations is  about both leadership teams and faculty teams; about encouraging the realization that truth can come from any corner of the room and that not all truth is easy or convenient. In debriefing our relatively new 360 faculty evaluation process, teachers evaluated in the second year of the program reported that they had felt uncomfortable receiving difficult feedback and recommendations for growth from a peer. They had all enjoyed being commended by peers and having their successes celebrated. But they felt the more challenging recommendations for growth should be handled by a supervisor.  I believe the true power in this process is that the message is delivered by a peer. I believe that we all need to become if not comfortable at the very least adept at offering and receiving the criticism of our peers as well as their commendations. I know I am in the minority in this position (though it is shared by my evaluation clerks and Head of School). Needless to say, the peer evaluation teams will continue to give recommendations for growth that will sometimes be challenging.  In this way, I believe that teachers create a culture in which they both support and challenge each other to be excellent educators. I think an extension of this process will be a willingness to engage critically with any discussion before us and a willingness to give honest feedback. If we learn to do this with peers, we will be better able to do it with grade, division, and school wide initiatives. This is a learning edge for all of us, most especially me. 

Fourier was right!!

As you may recall from earlier posts here, I enjoy the time I have in the summer to read widely and haphazardly. By way of disclaimer I do recommend all the books below. I no-longer bother to finish books that I haven't managed to engage with by 50-70 pages in no matter how well-recommended by my friends.

This summer my picks included South of Superior by Ellen Airgood. I picked up Airgood's book at one of my favorite independent bookseller's Mclean and Eakin in Petoskey, Michigan where I vacation with my family. Wherever I travel I try and read based on where I am located. Airgood's book set in the Upper Peninsula didn't disappoint me for thoughtful summer reading well tied to its/my location. And interestingly, it fit in well with one of the unexpected themes from the books I read-- finding solutions/building our lives by looking outside our hidden assumptions. The other fiction books included  Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Plan, Louise Erdich's Round House, and Patrick Rothfuss' What the Wise Man Fears. Kingsolver is a master of setting, especially in her books set in Appalachia. The main character Dellarobia, like the butterflies she loves is transformed and by the end of the novel well on her way to her own metamorphosis -- all because she was saw wonder in her own backyard. By the way I especially loved the scene in which the northern eco-warrior shows up with the top ten things to save the planet and she makes short work of his list as impossible for her family or anyone in their economic place. This summer I returned to poets I already loved taking Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early and Seamus Heaney with me on vacation. For my soul I worked through the Book of Romans and the corresponding chapter in The Women's Bible Commentary. I also read Henri Nouwen's Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life.  For my non-fiction choices I started with Mary Cowhey's Black Ants and Buddhists and have begun but yet to finish Doris Kerns Goodwin's biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson ( this president was featured very colorfully in the movie The Butler) moved to Cathy Johnson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st century and finished with Roz and Ben Zander's the Art of Possibility. While I read Now You See it my son sat on the couch across from me reading The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr. We had a great time comparing notes and eye catching titles aside we found many things in common.

So what does the French philosopher Francois Marie Charles Fourier have to do with my summer reading? Whenever I have taught World History I tend to keep my students thinking and working at a 10,000-20,000 foot level focused on human interactions with the natural world and with other human populations. However, we do a couple of dives into more detailed looks at human ideas. One of them explores the trajectory from Jean Jacques Rousseau to Karl Marx. Fourier is one of the steps along the way. For those of you who aren't familiar Fourier is best remembered for his ideas on how to create harmonious, cooperative societies and for his thinking on feminism and human love. For him the greatest harm to the human psyche was separating our passion from our productive work. In his utopias people would choose what work they wanted to do that the society needed or wanted accomplished. One of his ideas that my students always enjoyed was the idea that because little boys like getting dirty they would be natural rag and trash pickers. Fourier recognized that for this society to work you needed a sufficiently diverse population to insure that all of the jobs got done. For him that number was 1620 individuals. As I read Cathy Davidson's discussion of the genius of Wikipedia and its truly democratic nature, I was struck by Wikipedia and other wikis and moocs as proof that Fourier was correct. Wikipedia thrives on the way it connects individual passions for any topic imaginable, to other people's love of editing, with those who want to improve the functionality or take on any number of the other hundreds of tasks needing doing and getting done through the Community Portal. All of this happens because people choose to engage. Twenty first century technology created the scale necessary for Fourier's ideas on harmony, collaboration and mutuality to thrive.

What happens in Las Vegas comes back to school!

Next week five of my Lower School Colleagues will travel to Las Vegas for the National Conference on Singapore Math Strategies. In responding to advice on how to track spending and budget for meals, I jokingly ended my email with a directive to ignore the Las Vegas advertising campaign that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. After all, I want this investment in our teachers to come back to serve our students.

Faculty at Westtown School benefit from several different programs to promote summer professional growth. We are sending three teachers to Ghana to work with and learn from the teachers at our sister school at Heritage Academy. One teacher has a grant to visit Alaska and develop a new relationship with a school there. Another teacher will spend a month in Italy deepening her understanding of the Renaissance. While she is there she will be corresponding with her students from last year, all of whom did reports related to the Italian Renaissance. For these students, their teacher will be bringing their interest in a topic to life in a a personal way. We have sent our Diversity Director and 11th grade English teacher to Eastern Europe to better understand the Cold War and how its vestiges continue to impact this region. Her students this upcoming year will directly benefit when they read How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed and other stories and poems from Eastern Europe.

Along with school funded travel many faculty are attending conferences. Along with the trip to Las Vegas teachers as Westtown will attend the Exeter Math Conference, ISTE, conferences on counseling, Admissions Boot Camps, and others. More targeted than travel, these conferences, scheduled as they are in the summer, allow teachers time to prepare for the experience, focus more completely on the conference while there and most importantly, provide time after the conference for teachers to digest and integrate what they have learned into their own practice. While conferences during the school year are excellent, upon return the immediate demands of our students often prevent time for the reflection necessary to truly draw on the new learning to inform our teaching.

We also provide curriculum development grants. These funds support the creation of new courses or significant redesign of current courses or units within courses. These grants are targeted towards supporting strategic initiatives. Priority is given to grants which are collaborative in nature. Often in writing the reports about their work, teachers reflect on the professional learning they experience as they take the time to think deeply about the work they have undertaken.

In all half of our faculty will be involved in the programs described above. And what of the other half? What is the expectation for teachers in the summer months? Many of them will spend significant time on their own reading, revamping, and planning for their classes next year. But for a few reading for pleasure will be the focus. Can a teacher in this century take the summer off? Disconnect for two entire months? The folks I work with most closely on professional development are discussing what we as professionals should be doing in our two months of time away from our students. What is expected of us as professionals and what is beyond the expectation and deserving of compensation or other recognition. (Certainly, I am a big believer in disconnecting. I try and spend at least two weeks each summer someplace where wifi and my cell phone are at best unreliable). Turning our minds to things other than curriculum, grades, or students, can be incredibly generative and beneficial to us in our professional lives. And yet, we want our students to read over the summer, to do some math to keep their abilities sharp, speak their second or third language to maintain their fluency. What do we need to do to sustain our growth through the summer months?

Focused Skiing

I have just returned from a wonderfully exhausting and renewing three days of skiing with my family.  For me, the beauty of down hill skiing is that it requires a high degree of focus. To not focus is to risk getting hurt. The past few days, every time my mind has wandered to something at work, I have found it very easy to push that thought aside and refocus on my body hurtling down the mountain on two skis. I am only an average intermediate skier with a healthy interest in NOT falling.

While sipping hot chocolate slope side I was reminded of Thomas Kelly's call for leading an integrated internal life as the best means for simplifying our lives.  Somehow or another skiing feels for me a bit of a metaphor for this. Skiing is a dynamic activity that demands coordinating a whole host of activities beginning with deciding what to wear and then over the course of the day constantly checking equipment. There is a constant feed back loop from my feet to my legs and torso to my brain.  Are my hips and shoulders pointing down the mountain. Is my right foot cramping (and why never the left foot?)? How are the Charley horses in my thighs? In the physical world there are the slope conditions. Is there ice on the trail ahead,  moguls (I hate moguls), sharp turns, or precipices to avoid (cliffs make me queasy)? On top of this there are the other people on the mountain. Where is my family? Who is moving around me? Is it a child? A teenage boy or other young male who may or may not have had a second beer on the chair lift? How is the visibility--there are few things as blinding when your are heading down a slope as skiing through a line of blasting snow making machines! Are my toes cold? I find I go from comfortable to cold in a heartbeat and once my toes hurt, my skiing becomes less effective --hot chocolate is always the solution so where is the nearest lodge?

Meanwhile, another part of my brain is reveling in the pleasure of being outdoors, enjoying the quiet and the natural world. The mid-westerner in me delights in the cold, the frosty trees, and icy creeks as I go whooshing past.  My spirit is focused and finds it natural to rest in gratitude in the present with my Creator. Though I have described all of these as separate and distinct thoughts, in truth, on the slopes this is all one singular state of being as integrated and natural as breathing. Now as I reflect on my skiing and because I am an educator, I am left considering how to lead my students to this place of simplifying their complex, dynamic external lives through focusing and integrating their internal life?