Gathering STEAM in New Hampshire

“Steam” was in the air in New Hampshire in early May as STEAM-Ahead NH held a spring summit for schools and collaborators to propel its state-wide STEM initiative. Held at the state-of-the-art Dyn facility in Manchester, the event welcomed over 100 educators and collaborator to explore the potential of STEAM programming to motivate students and help prepare them for careers in growing fields. And, as presenters suggested, as a way to help schools make changes in instructional programming, structure and culture.

Dyn is a cloud-based IPM provider that has been pivotal in revitalizing the Queen City. Its Co-founder, Jeremy Hitchcock, along with Silver Tech CEO Nick Soggu, has championed STEAM since its inception, and both work closely with Granite United Way to help provide a base of operations for STEAM-Ahead NH Executive Director Bob Baines.

Baines, who doggedly pursued industry partnerships and resources for STEAM-Ahead, opened the day with short videos and energetic remarks about the changing workplace and opportunities for young people. He gently challenged school people and partners alike to push past some traditional educational practices to help the STEAM work take root, and received a rousing endorsement and pledge of support from Commissioner of Education, Dr. Virginia Barry. Next, STEAM students from Manchester High School West and McLaughlin Middle School wowed the crowd with insightful remarks about their positive experience in STEAM classes, and then students and teachers from the West HS team seized the day with three hands-on STEAM projects that challenged the attendees to get their hands dirty, building and problem-solving in the fashion that distinguishes learning-by-doing.

The event wound down with a reflection from West HS Principal Christopher Motika and a professional development overview from Dr. Larry Myatt from ERC. Motika, widely respected for his turn-around efforts at the school, reprised the genesis of the STEAM effort at West, lessons learned in the past two years, and insights into the leadership decisions and dilemmas that came with trying to make changes to the traditional system. Myatt, who works with inquiry-based and project learning schools around the country, capped the event asserting that STEAM efforts cannot thrive without changes to beliefs about learning and major alterations to structures and practices. He shared his experience that project learning is often deeply constrained by the nature and design of conventional school and that STEAM, with its multi-sector partnerships and prominence, offers a unique opportunity to re-imagine a culture of learning, and to build educational communities that offer better possibilities for students and working educators alike.

Anyone have $50 million for a high school?

Friends-

Two weeks ago, an ERC TREK team and a few of our best friends submitted a lengthy vision to XQ: The Super School Project.

XQ’s goal, according to Laurene Powell Jobs, is to reinvent high schools in a way similar to how her late husband, Steve, reinvented how we listen to music. She’s willing to bankroll five brand new high schools up to $50 million (total) to make it happen.

What’s not to like? A funder familiar with audacious change. A nationwide search for new ideas. A significant pot of gold to give five of those ideas good footing. And a cooperative effort where applicants can talk to one another, even join multiple teams. All for the sake of, finally, possibly, bringing public education out of the 19th century.

A chance for us to explain our dreams
Though we’ve made it to the second round – out of five, we think – I don’t think any of the TREK crew is planning our lives around winning. But, we’ve enjoyed – if that’s the right word for a few hundred hours of discussion and writing – sitting down and sharing what each of us has learned about students, schools, communities, teachers, learning styles, families, and a few other subjects I must be leaving out.

Then, add to that our discussions about education philosophies that have come and gone, those that have stayed, those that should have gone but haven’t, and those that never arrived. One of the joys of our exploration is that our team ranges from the well-seasoned (meaning a bit older) to having a fresher outlook (meaning younger). The team includes public educators, nonprofit experts, university design chairs, community activists, and a couple of cynics, which every group should have. Frankly, if every school put together groups like that, and invited discussions like ours, much of our work would be done. (By the way, if I had had a chance to get Ms. Jobs’ ear, I would have suggested she start with middle schools first. But she didn’t ask my advice.)

What we agreed upon for “our” high school wasn’t particularly radical, given the lives our team members have led (but I suspect Bernie Sanders would say the same). We had questions about the XQ project’s underpinnings, but when all was said and done, we couldn’t say no to something that called out the need for action in a loud voice. ERC’s TREK program is better for us having met and labored together. (Perhaps Ms. Jobs can spare just a million or two to support TREK; we’re not greedy.)

A few highlights from our application
We’ll show you more of the application components over the coming year -guaranteed if you’ve signed on for TREK to work with us in redesigning your school(s)- but we do want to summarize five underlying fundamentals on which we agreed an ERC TREK high school would rest.

• Education must prepare young people to face a world that will change rapidly throughout their entire lifetimes, requiring them to be flexible and able to solve complex problems.
• Learning and youth development are inseparable if not indistinguishable. One cannot look at a young person as “merely” a student who arrives at school in the morning and leaves at the end of the day. A TREK school recognizes its responsibility to work deeply with youth to enable them to act in conscious, thoughtful, and responsible ways. 
• The educational environment must be authentic on every level. Content and assignments must relate to students’ lives. Relationships with the educators must be honest, open, and fair. Activities must include an almost seamless relationship with the community and the institutions, businesses, and organizations that comprise it. 
• We must incubate and elevate the “active inquiry” that is happening with us or without us. Guided, that “active inquiry” helps youth ask and answer meaningful questions: about themselves, their communities, and their worlds. Their answers can lead to authentic assessment: real-world products, presentations, and events.
• A TREK learning environment will never again be about rows of students in chairs day after day listening to a teacher lecturing to them, penning all students of the same age together for years, studying the same subject in the same way for pre-allotted chunks of time. Dispatching the old “culture of teaching” in favor of a culture of learning is vital in an ERC TREK school.

Re-imagining high school scares the hell out of some people – we find it energizing and totally possible.

We’ll keep you posted on how the TREK team is doing. If you’d like us to visit your school, though, just give us a shout.

For ERC, and our ERC TREK team,
Larry Myatt

Social-Emotional Support in Our Schools: Three Individuals Making a Difference

By Dr. Larry Myatt, Co-Founder, ERC

It’s the biggest no-brainer in K-12 public education –match the high demand for academics with equally high levels of social-emotional support. It has proven itself true repeatedly as a core strategy to raise student achievement, but more importantly, as a way to create the kinds of environments in which young people and adults can grow and thrive.

As Robert Evans pointed out in his thoughtful book Family Matters, for a generation we’ve been, and will continue to be, in the throes of social and economic upheaval that call for us to dramatically re-think relationships between home and school, as well as the services and outlook schools must offer. Levels of anxiety and depression astound us in affluent school communities, as does the impact of trauma and neglect that plague poorer environments, undermining safety and well-being, and, understandably, students’ readiness to learn.  Sadly, budgets for this critical aspect of schooling have withered over the past decade in almost every district I work in, especially the urban and rural. What money there is flows more readily to academic programming and technocratic fixes for our schools.  Ironically, it’s happening just at the time when our knowledge of brain development and the availability of tools and practices to do powerful resiliency work have crescendoed, yet remain largely remain untapped or inaccessible in our schools.

My own understanding of these issues intensified as I followed Richard Rothstein’s seminal reporting on the impact on children of factors such as eyesight, dental care, diet, and home influences related to child-rearing and mental health in schools in New York City. As a sitting principal, I saw how our own school’s early investments in social-emotional support, gender and racial equity, and personal and family wellness paid off. Ultimately, we learned we had also sparked a growth in the percentage of graduates seeking out careers in the helping professions. Now, as an ERC leadership coach and re-design consultant to schools, networks and boards, I believe more strongly than ever that schools have a clear and compelling obligation to do better to provide for all students the benefits that come with the right ZIP code.

In this issue, it’s my pleasure to cite three individuals, consummate humanists, who energize me, sustain my faith in the power of social-emotional care, and can be guides for school communities who are considering where and how to invest their time and resources: Superintendent Ken Facin from Hoosick Falls, a rural district north of Albany, NY whose commitment to what he calls “mindfulness” has begun to transform his schools; Ray Smith, often known as Brother Ray, who calls himself a “people builder” at Providence’s Alvarez High School; and Dr. Gil Noam, whose PEAR program’s resiliency-building research and “Clover” model are providing schools with state-of-the-art tools that provide a portrait of young people’s strengths and challenges and guide programming to meet them. Each, in their own sphere of influence is contributing in novel ways to shaping perspectives and practices in resiliency and positive youth development.

Facin, in his 8th year as leader in Hoosick Falls, brings vision and a high level of personal visibility to his schools. He candidly acknowledges being a bright, yet very challenging student back in his own high school years, and uses those recollections to emphasize the importance of relationships and the need to understand what lies beneath students’ behaviors and attitudes. He brings many of the lessons from his personal life into his public school leadership philosophy. Facin comments, “The more research I did, the more it became apparent that our young people’s needs were not being met across the social-emotional spectrum. And beyond that, the proliferation of social media without clear boundaries about use is causing an adolescent crisis that schools have been slow to understand and confront”.  

In his communications and interactions, he has been relentlessly positive about the need for students to see teachers as people, and for all members of his school community to make time for and develop an attitude of “mindfulness”. With trust and resources from Facin, the social/emotional team – counselors, social workers and psychologists, administrators, resource officer, and interested teacher volunteers- have been provided with time to meet, and support from ERC, to develop a long-term plan to raise the level of mindfulness in the schools. That includes building adult and student skills, and establishing rituals and routines that make hallways and bus rides, as well as classrooms and assemblies, safe and welcoming.

Hoosick Falls students are performing academically and attending high education at increasingly higher levels, and through Facin’s efforts, a mentoring program to help students succeed and stay at college and to prepare for the workplace and citizenship is expanding rapidly, yet thoughtfully. Facin shares his enthusiasm and ideas with other regional leaders and has convened a conversation about more seamless partnerships to undergird schools’ resiliency efforts for families and children.  For what to some may seem a small community, Hoosick Falls is more and more “on the map” for its smart investments in students’ readiness to learn, both during and after their years in the schools.

Helping students be ready to learn also comes naturally to Ray Smith, a Chicago native who moved to Providence 17 years ago. “Brother Ray” has been a presence on the streets and with the families of the city, especially those who may struggle to avoid the perils of tough neighborhoods. Energetic, quick-witted, thoughtful, and relentlessly positive and welcoming with all he meets, Smith has brought the wisdom and positivity of his own experiences and those of his community organization, the Young Leaders Fellowship, into his work at Alvarez High School. Young Leaders seeks to restore and revive the passions and dreams of young people, a mission that Smith embodies in his approach to daily life and work.

Only two years ago, Alvarez was a likely candidate for closure or take-over, but as part of her own wellness plan, new principal Zawadi Hawkins-Gladstone, who knew of Smith’s work, made it a priority to get him into the building on a permanent basis. Paperwork snafus delayed his arrival last year, but once he arrived on scene, his welcoming touch, ability to connect with all students, and skills in defusing potential conflicts made a huge and immediate impact, according to faculty, students, and Hawkins-Gladstone.

As often as possible, Brother Ray begins his day by greeting every possible student at the school’s front door with a joke, a positive reminder, a wise saying (often about the value and good use of time), making their first interaction at the school a pleasant and welcoming moment to set the tone for the day.Smith also serves on the school’s Wellness Team, frequently volunteering to serve as touchstone and mentor to students experiencing family challenges or struggling in school as well as adding his inside information on families, neighborhood history and relationships that help to paint a broader picture of students for others on the Team. Well-known across Providence, he has been a key part of the 300 Men initiative, which has invited and challenged men across the city to get involved, volunteer and lend a hand to support young people in a variety of ways, keeping the peace, and “building people” as he likes to put it.

Smith’s ways of working includes citing timeless metaphors and important life lessons that help students to see the big picture, make better decisions, and distinguish between short-term gratification and more productive, helpful plans for the future. “To watch him work is to be reminded of the power of the human touch”, says Rick Schwartz, head of the communications and non-profit advising firm, StraightTalk, and a member of the Friends of Alvarez advisory group, “There’s so much genius evident in his work”.

Dr. Gil Noam founded PEAR (the Program in Education, Afterschool, and Resiliency) in 1999 as a collaboration among Harvard Medical School, McLean Hospital and the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a number of strong community partners. In the years since, the program has flourished, and has a growing staff and list of initiatives.

During his earlier work in youth mental health, says Noam, he began to recognize that the school experience has a huge impact on how young people view themselves, and that education itself is an important marker of mental health. He shared, “I see the fostering of social-emotional skills as a natural meeting point between clinical and developmental psychology and education. And in schools I saw unnecessary suffering despite the availability of more and more tools to address student needs. Knowing that the emergence of mental illness can overshadow a whole life, I decided I needed to go beyond individual patient work to focus on larger systems”.

Dr. Noam sees a very important need for what he calls “translational centers”, like PEAR, in education– a place that facilitates easy movement between practice, policy and research – and where the research field conducts continuous scanning for best practices and innovations in the field to share with practitioners. We’re able to show results more rapidly because we don’t have to wait years to get much-needed resources into school communities. We can also more readily address the need for useable tools and trainings that update the knowledge of those in the field. PEAR strives to go beyond the typical short-lived or short-term professional development to create deeper communities of practice and to create tools like the Holistic Student Assessment (HSA) that can be used widely.

Noam is quick to express the personal and professional benefits of PEAR’s work. “At the end of our PhotoJustice program, students are asked to write about their photos of their school and environment –the stories ranged from a school bathroom that had been vandalized to photos of a memorial for a youth murdered in the school’s neighborhood. At the final ceremony, you could see that this program took youngsters who were angry at the world and gave them a way to channel their voice collectively and creatively. They learned that their voice has power and it’s up to them to choose to use that voice in a way that benefits their community, instead of disrupting it. That’s the kind of story that can happen when we provide the right opportunities.”

One of my votes for “Most Likely to Succeed” in 2016

Larry Myatt, ERC Co-Founder

ERC Co-Founder Dr. Larry Myatt opens the Panel Discussion at “Most Likely to Succeed” screening

No place makes ERC prouder of our contribution to better schools for kids than the Duke City – Albuquerque, NM. The excitement there continued to mount at year’s end with three key developments for the New Mexico Center for School Leadership, its Leadership Schools network and boards, and collaborating agencies and institutions. As mentioned in a TEDX-Albuq talk.

I was invited to present in that city earlier in the year, The NM Center and it’s cousins, the McCune Foundation schools cluster, have running room and energy and are making use of both.

I’ve been working over a decade in the city, watching the birth and development of a robust progressive education conversation that respects but resists the state’s policy moves towards standardization and constraining metrics. My colleague Katrina Kennett often joins me in work there as a resource for instructional planning and technology integration, and our post-visit debriefs always include some marveling at the room to innovate and local passion that we find refreshing.

In late November I was invited to moderate a panel following the Center’s screening of “Most Likely to Succeed”, a re-imagining school documentary, presented to a full house at the beautiful National Hispanic Cultural Center. The film, which won awards at Sundance and Tribeca, pushes hard on our failure to re-imagine new ideas of school, and was extremely well received, provoking a lively discussion among industry representatives, distinguished educators, and past and present students from the Leadership Schools Network.

The post-movie panel kicks into gear about what should be happening in local schools

As Center Founder Tony Monfiletto pointed out as he kicked off the event, the film provides some emerging details of what a high-quality 21st Century education will look like, and that similar dynamism is available locally in the city since Network Schools are on to the same scheme, but with even greater community involvement in design and programming.  Panelists took questions about the readiness of the teacher corps, demands from the community and work force trends, and the depth of the learning experiences of the students, making for a full evening and a lot of buzz.

NM Center Founder and Executive Director, Tony Monfiletto in front of their new home at Fat Pipe in downtown Albuquerque.

As the Center shifts into a higher gear it has also recently found a new home --at Fat Pipe, a unique community co-working space that brings start-ups, existing businesses and entrepreneurs together in the heart of Downtown Albuquerque. The Center has also added a Director of Networking, veteran progressive educator Justin Trager, and is building capacity with collaborations in the area of research, organizational and educator development, higher education partnering, and school networking. With support from the McCune Foundation, it is also convening the regional New Metrics initiative, which works to identify new and more powerful metrics for school evaluation that support and incentivize schools to provide students with the educational experiences and skills they need to become successful adults.

In a final bit of good news, the Albuquerque Public School Board approved its first charter high school in seven years last week --Siembra, the newest member of the Leadership HS Network. The new high school, planned for the South Valley, was chartered to address some of our city’s pressing economic and educational needs. Siembra Leadership High School, according to the press release, “adopts an innovative new model for education, focused on providing students with relevant and engaging project-based learning that responds to the needs of our city’s fast-growing entrepreneurial economy. Curricula at the Leadership High Schools are developed in partnership with Albuquerque’s leading businesses and organizations and this new high school will draw on the knowledge and needs of Albuquerque’s entrepreneurship sector to inform curriculum and ensure students receive an education that prepares them for the future.”

The Albuquerque Journal reported that Siembra Leadership High School will open in August 2016. Funding is provided by the State of New Mexico with startup support from private sources, including a four-acre plot of land off Rio Bravo and Coors, donated by NAI Maestas & Ward Commercial Real Estate as the permanent home for the school. ERC plans to support the Siembra Leadership as it identifies and brings in the talent to staff a state-of-the-art small high school with deep roots in the community, as well as supporting its new Board.

Why Is Getting Teacher Evaluation Right So Elusive?

By Wayne Ogden

Where did the furor over teacher evaluation go? Just five years ago it was the behemoth that overtook American schools. The only conversation in town. Now? It’s hardly on the radar screen. What happened?

In 2001 Congress passed the “No Child Left Behind Act” with great fanfare and desperation. Politicians and policy makers believed that something radical had to be done to improve our schools and save our economy from the ravages of a poorly educated workforce. When President Bush signed this act into law in early 2002 it became the most sweeping educational reform initiative since the days of President Lyndon Johnson. The law had bi-partisan support and promised radical changes in student performance and school accountability. But, by 2010 when student’s cognitive abilities, as measured by performance on paper and pencil standardized tests, proved to be resistant to improvement a “blame game” began in Washington and elsewhere.

At that juncture, the popular rationale regarding flat student performance became, “it must be the teacher’s fault”, and its cousin, “why aren’t those principals evaluating out those bad teachers?” Our national fixation on testing was supplemented by a new fixation on teacher evaluation and administrative management. Those of us in the business –teachers, building and district administrators, and trainers- remember the flurry well.

The Federal government dangled multi-million dollar carrots in front of states and school districts to encourage an overhaul of their teacher evaluation systems. The common wisdom was that if we could tie teacher evaluation, student performance, and merit pay together we would finally have the formula for success. Many of our nation’s most prominent funders and businesspeople jumped on the bandwagon. Private money followed public funds in support of this notion. Huge amounts were spent on the development of “new and improved evaluation programs” and hundreds of millions more on professional development to train educators on how these new teacher accountability systems were going to work.

Virtually all other professional development activities ground to a halt as training of administrators and teachers to use new evaluation instruments and management techniques swamped all other needs and plans. It was the singular focus of states, districts, schools and educational professionals for three years. Surely, this was going to do the trick! Finally our public schools were going to produce higher performing students.

So, what has all of this spending and fixation on accountability accomplished? As the studies and evidence roll in, not a great deal.

Let’s take a broader look. School districts have struggled with teacher evaluation for years, making limited progress in developing systems that actually result in instructional improvement and increased student learning. State Departments of Education have regularly developed new models of teacher evaluation only to replace them every few years, but not, as I see, it, for rational and helpful reasons. In some states, teacher unions have collaborated with their Departments of Education on new evaluation models, again, only to retreat from them within a few years. 

The way evaluations play out in far too many schools and districts is that an evaluator, whose real expertise has become the area of administrative management, data management and reporting, or student affairs, announces a date at which time she/he will come to observe a teacher at work with the class, usually for all or a good chunk of a class period. Depending on the labor agreements, the teacher may or may not have submitted a plan of what will occur in the class. This “formal observation” is usually supplemented by a few more “informal”, i.e. un-announced visits, that are shorter in duration, and which may or may not provide the opportunity for more data gathering on the teacher’s performance.

What it can feel like at the school level is inauthentic and inadequate, at best, and bad opera at its worst --a pretend panorama of the teacher’s daily routines and practices, mired in forms, dates for discussions about the findings, replies, claims and counter-claims, within which the essence of teacher performance and support thereof, diminishes substantially as the days go by. From the teacher standpoint, the process provides little insight into the real dilemmas of teaching, and little by way of getting at the nuanced formulas for sustaining growth and energetic teaching and learning in demanding settings, made even more stressful by the layers of testing and test prep.

To address these issues, the federal government used legislation, its bully pulpit and boatloads of cash to encourage “teacher accountability”. Most recently, the computer billionaire and amateur education policy wonk, Bill Gates seems to have become the most recent to fail at the teacher evaluation game. After an expenditure of more than 180 million dollars in Gates Foundation and other funds, and an estimated 50 million dollar per year cost to implement and maintain the initiative, The Washington Post recently headlined, “Another Gates-funded education reform project, starting with mountains of cash and sky-high promises, is crashing to Earth”. That project in Hillsborough, Florida Public Schools was one of many throughout our country that focused on teacher evaluation as the path to improved student performance and better schools. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/03/bill-gates-spent-a-fortune-to-build-it-now-a-florida-school-system-is-getting-rid-of-it/ )

I don’t want to demean philanthropy in education. We need all the help we can get (if its spent in the right places and the right ways). I just want to highlight that when a government or groups of well-intentioned individuals make knee-jerk, simplistic reactions to highly- complicated problems like the factors that will improve student learning, those initiatives are likely to fail.

It wasn’t that long ago that the big idea about how best to bring about better student achievement was to get away from compensation systems that reward teachers for years of service and academic credentials earned, and instead implement merit pay evaluation systems that would reward educators based on the performance of their students. Unfortunately, scholars have found little or no evidence to suggest that merit pay has worked anywhere to improve student or teacher performance. No one talks about that idea much anymore. We’ve also learned that our national testing and school choice initiatives don’t sustain school improvement either.

We’ve even tried to use public humiliation as a way to improve teacher performance. At least two of our nation’s largest school systems (Los Angeles and New York) and the media that served those metropolitan areas thought that publishing a ranking of teachers by their composite evaluation scores, politely called teacher data reports in NY, might do the trick.  As scholar and researcher Linda Darling-Hammond noted in a Phi Delta Kappan article, http://edsource.org/2012/pioneered-in-california-publishing-teacher-effectiveness-rankings-draws-more-criticism/6732 )  “a teacher’s effectiveness is determined by numerous school and non-school factors that a ‘value-added’ analysis typically doesn’t or can’t take into account. These might include variables such as the impact of peer culture, students’ prior teachers and schools, summer learning loss, access to tutors, and even the nature of the tests used to measure achievement.”

So, back to teacher evaluation. Those initiatives that were spawned a few years ago have focused on the development of complex educator evaluation systems, relying on explicitly-written teacher performance rubrics. These rubrics employ intricately-crafted instructional elements describing all possible teaching behaviors arrayed on a rating grid, similar to the old-fashioned teacher checklist evaluations, now on steroids. Where those old checklists simply referred to broad categories of instructional competence (e.g. classroom management, questioning techniques, use of higher order thinking skills, etc.) the new rubrics are intended to be both comprehensive and explicit in determining the “evidence” that will suggest a particular type of instructional strategy is “exemplary”, “proficient” or “needs improvement” or “unsatisfactory” (See, http://www.doe.mass.edu/edeval/model/ for a sample of a model of the rubric used for teacher evaluation in Massachusetts).

This type of educator evaluation system alleges that it draws upon the “science of teaching” to help inform and modernize efforts around instructional improvement. However, of significant note, the rubric model itself was originally designed (see Charlotte Danielson) to foster the professional development of teachers and instructional improvement in a collegial environment, not to “judge” or “rate” a teacher as “competent” or “incompetent” for the purposes of hiring, firing, retention or promotion. And as my ERC colleague, Larry Myatt often says, the effectiveness of what teachers do in the classroom can more easily be understood and examined if we watch the students, not the minutiae of teacher behavior. The idea of teachers-as-sole-and-dominant-actors is part of a century-old model –focused on a culture of teaching. What we need now is to understand the creation of a culture of learning and how the teacher’s role must change.

So, back to my initial question --why is getting teacher evaluation right so difficult and elusive? Why have so many different initiatives failed to achieve their desired result? I believe that it’s because we begin the conversations with the wrong question. If we start with questions about judging teachers and their teaching, we’re already on an impossible path. We need to re-frame, and to ask ourselves, what it is that will lead us on the path to the best teacher growth and improvement? And how does that contribute to the best kinds of student learning? What conditions and practices will result in the instructional excellence that we all desire for our kids?

Here’s a short list of things I think we should give a sustained try:

-Beginning teachers should be apprenticed for a complete school year to a master teacher in a co-teaching scenario (not as an understudy) for at least half of each school day. This would include collaborating with other teachers in the school and district.

-Compensate all master teachers at a higher level than their colleagues, but do not select them on the basis of seniority, but as a result of thoughtful process involving administrative, peer and student feedback.

-Master teachers should be part of the school’s leadership team.

-Schools must judiciously hire corollary staff to free teachers from operational duties that distract them from their essential function.

-School districts must support and engage administrators to differentiate instructional leadership from operational functions. Principals who spend their time on bus schedules, budgets and bullies will never have adequate time to devote to developing and supporting master teachers around issues of instructional excellence. Districts can and should hire sufficient staff that doesn’t need advanced degrees, licensure, and big salaries to perform routine, non-academic tasks.

-Summers should include at least 2-4 weeks of pertinent, differentiated professional growth activities for teachers and districts should put to rest the one-size-fits-all teacher PD that changes focus and content each year based on the flimsy trends we’ve named above -or that emanates from what the district currently thinks all teachers need.

-School leaders should be observing teachers at least one hour per week per teacher in all phases of their work (classrooms, student conferences, team meetings, etc.). No system of professional growth can work when someone is observed only a few times per year

-Administrators should engage with teachers and content areas to determine the kinds of routines, support, critique and provocation that are needed this year in this school. 

-Require teachers to solicit and use student and parent feedback on a regular basis, as part of a broader conversation about how learning is taking place.

-Take a page from the world of art, design and architecture and develop faculty cultures where critique and feedback are positive, frequent and earnestly solicited, not seen as negative and unwelcome. This is the instructional leader’s real work,

-Provide every first and second-year school leader with an external coach. (See coaching new leaders:

http://www.educationresourcesconsortium.org/news/2014/12/9/new-leader-support?rq=new%20leader%20support )

Strong support for and evaluation of teaching is possible. But it’s going to take an investment in helping schools become alive and responsive again. Policy-makers need to get out of the way if they can’t do better than what they’ve shown us for the past 10 years. And framing the issue as the need to support for learning and those responsible for learning is critical, as is involving all parties in a conversation about the changes we need to make in our schools on behalf of children and families.

Wayne Ogden is co-founder of ERC, and a former teacher, principal and superintendent. He specializes in coaching school leaders and was a contributing author to The Skillful Leader, a handbook for administrators in supporting improved teaching. To see his piece titled, "The Six Myths of Coaching New School Leaders" go here.

Change At the Roots Level: Anatomy of An Urban School Renewal

Larry Myatt, Co-Founder

In my school redesign and renewal coaching, I often talk about the needs of kids in terms of ZIP code. It’s a stark way to put things, but it’s also a simple, foundational orientation to working with students from poor families. By accident, kids born with the right ZIP code get a lot of good stuff. Not that they are without their own problems – a different set of problems- but they mostly get the role-modeling and cultural imprinting they need to more smoothly enter the worlds of college, employment and social standing. I explain to the adults that one of the best ways to invest our time in improving our schools is to mimic, even improve upon, those collateral but critically important activities that happen in certain ZIP codes, that help one to understand and make his/her way in the world. 

Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School in Providence, RI has many institutional challenges. You could probably guess what they are. Like many inner-city schools with inadequate resources, they do their best to serve a predominantly Latino, low-income community, and increasing numbers of non-English speaking immigrants and refugees. The school is in the third year of an attempt to re-build its capacity, restore programming and raise achievement levels, yet again in the face of shrinking budgets.

As usual, there are big struggles and blissful moments. This edition offers two examples that reveal the nature of roots work, the crucible of creating an intellectual, socially responsible culture under tough circumstances. 

Thoreau in the City

Team Carpe Diem is Alvarez’ frontal assault on the self- repeating drop-out phenomena, when over-age and off-track students linger in the school but fail to advance. It’s a state that I’ve termed “fragile stability” – young adults OK enough to come to school 3-4 days a week, but too often unable to engage, usually with big reading gaps, and frequently volatile or withdrawn. At Alvarez, students who are over-age and far under-credited can now opt for TCD, as its known – a small but hopeful program that does its best to build team, support social-emotional needs and offer the kinds of engaging, scaffolded academics that will draw students back into an academic life.

The day before their trip to one of Rhode Island’s most scenic and tranquil nature reserves, students in a Team Carpe Diem Town Meeting read about Thoreau’s life, then viewed a provocative YouTube video about man and nature, paving the way for intense small group discussions about big questions:  have humans moved too far from nature? Is Mother Nature really in control anymore? What price do we pay for being out of touch with the planet? Transcendental questions on Adelaide Ave. in Providence.  E.D. Hirsch would be proud.

The next morning they boarded a bus and on disembarking deep in the woods they each received a photocopied paragraph from Walden. With each student seeking out their own solitary spot in the forest, they sat with eyes closed for five minutes, looked at the sky for five more, then in a final pause, looked closely at the ground around them. For a half hour they sat silently, journaled and made their own sense of what Thoreau posed about the relationship between each of us and Mother Nature. Back at school, these would become essays and discussion topics. The insights were many and powerful, the kind of insights any of us would find memorable, self-revelatory.  Solitude, in a natural setting. ZIP code work.

A Big Second Wind

In early November, the Alvarez ninth grade team had their chance to jump into activities that, again, may or may not materialize depending on one’s ZIP code. Teacher, trainer, martial artist, philosopher Jeffrey Cohen brought his “Second Wind” master class for the whole student team and their staff. Cohen moved easily between leading body stretches and breathing exercises, personal planning and executive function tips, and the science of oxygenation and aerobics. Using only their chairs or simply standing tall, students got a full workout, the kind that can happen easily in any classroom.

Jeffrey Cohen brings Second Wind to Alvarez HS Freshmen

Cohen brought a special eye to adolescent needs, sharing with them strategies for ID’ing and coping with stress, focusing on and visualizing success at the beginning of a class or test, stretching out big muscles in your chair to renew brain energy. Student volunteers who saw their chance to know and do more jumped into the fray to model different stations of more robust exercise-- lifting, deep squatting, running in place. Of note, said staff members, the enthusiastic volunteers were students who are often restless and fidgety in the 70-minute Alvarez classes.

There are dozens of studies that conclude clearly that increased amounts of physical activity increase learning, help curb behavioral issues, and foster healthy habits. Schools that embrace and add a regular menu of movement see less truancy and even more parental involvement. And it’s a simple fix. Veteran Alvarez science educator Jack Fair was one of many to observe the focus, attentiveness, and relaxation that overcame the group as the 90 minutes proceeded. Fair was hoping routines from Second Wind would soon work their way into daily routines at the school.

I was happy to play a hand in the team meetings and planning sessions that made these events possible.  This is the way I’ve learned that change happens. Against many odds and local history, the school administration and teacher leaders are buying into a hearts-and-minds approach to turn the school around. We’re doing it the old fashioned way, re-booting Judith Warren-Little: creating lessons together, sharing our teaching and learning, investing in each other and our kids. And we’re thinking for ourselves, looking for thrilling learning and exploring the marrow questions: How do you help kids really use their minds? What kind of intellectual work would we want for our own kids? Is the work good enough?

Policy-makers, district leaders, think-tank pundits and funders, this is what the work looks like. One school at a time, as frustrating as that is for some. You can tell a lot from this story about what’s needed and where to invest. This is how you rebuild a school and the hopes of its adults, how you rebuild students’ hunger to learn that’s mostly been drained from them, and how you rebuild a community. 

TREK returns. A new, better chance for our schools.

Hoping for more from our schools?

For your children?

For your community?

Are you searching for a better vision of education?

You’ve been waiting for TREK.

Our nation has been unwilling or unable to facilitate the entrance of new models
to replace the old public schools. 

—Clayton Christensen in Disrupting Schools, 2011

In the early days of the Coalition of Essential Schools, TREK spawned many of the great small schools that endure today. TREK also became shorthand for a thoughtful community journey to perform what Theodore Sizer called the most important educational task of our times:  to evolve the institutions and practices that assist  learning.

ERC is pledging to make the potential, excitement and power of education renewal available again, to families, communities and schools who believe that change is overdue --through TREK.

Why Now?

At ERC we think the timing is right. The limitations of the core architecture of schools, minted in the 1890’s, make our communities increasingly vulnerable. Look at the plan’s basic elements: all kids of the same age, all together, all day long, from kindergarten to twelfth grade; all students studying the same facts, at the same time, with the same methods. Students plucked from a contextual and larger world environment and confined to classrooms in 50-minute doses. None of the above ideas based on any learning science or good parental instincts.

Increasing numbers of smart, committed, hardworking people – like you – are frustrated by the continual retreat to unproductive ideas. In the face of bigger needs, our efforts are not improving a faulty system.

How far behind we’ve left Sizer’s challenge! Policy makers don’t tread there. They see little need to question the “arrangements”. What’s passing for innovation these days? Add an hour to the day, adopt literacy software or get more computers?

As soon as you start thinking of kids as data points, you’re in trouble.
—Sir Ken Robinson

Even good-hearted attempts to tackle the status quo end up with little to show. I was invited to be a project advisor to an I3 grant initiative a few years ago. Despite adequate money, convening and networking, the effort achieved very little and ultimately hung up on the same rocks as dozens of other such attempts I’ve seen.  Just think of such projects as the $500 million Annenberg Challenge or the more recent $100 million gift to Newark schools.  Now, Ms. Jobs want to lend her checkbook to a new effort. (Check out Jal Mehta’s Allure of Order, if you haven’t yet. He gives us some critical perspective. ) Even the latest big ideas like Common Core, PARCC, or blended learning don’t get at the outdated structures, culture and conditions which do not correlate with what we know about learning.

So, back to TREK. What we are hearing in diverse settings nationwide is that people are missing and wanting a chance to imagine more than the present arrangements offer.

If you’re still reading, you know what I’m talking about.

TREK addresses three inescapable criteria for school redesign and renewal.

People with the education “reins” underestimate the complex interplay among the three core aspects of school:

1. Social/inter-personal— how do we treat each other?
2. Cultural— what matters here that we pass on as valuable, without examination?
3. Intellectual— do we learn to use our minds well? (Although this third aspect is often referred to as “academic” mission, its often more about who does well and who doesn’t, not to be confused with using one’s mind well.)

Each of these core aspects has associated with it deeply felt values, personal experiences, and generations of institutional practices – the 1998 state basketball champs, the drama club, National Honor Society, concerts, teacher open house  – all of which rally aunts, uncles and neighbors to the school and bind the cultural fabric tighter.  Other memories and feelings, the more social and intellectual reside in the shadow of the cultural. We tend to forget the divisions among those who felt smart and those who didn’t.  Somewhere in that shadow, too, are bus rides or car pools, the cafeteria, passing time; even if we experienced them anonymously, joyfully, or painfully, it was life, experienced at a vulnerable time. We carry forward trace images, some lasting and recognizable, most far less so, but all part of our “education”.  We know we can give our kids far better. Can we muster the will?

No room – or excuse – for nostalgia

People often resist change because they’re anxious about losing something.  Saying goodbye to a vague yet familiar notion of what school means is powerful stuff. Add to that, it’s uniquely human to want to pass down a replica of what we’ve experienced --to our kids, to the next generations.  Our instincts crave a common bond of experience, of ideas, of values. This is why we must work in particular ways, with the “whole village”, to envision something kinder at the least, a journey more humane, engaging, rewarding, and memorable.

Loss need not be part of renewal. We don’t need to throw away what works  for kids, we CAN keep a lot of what we treasure! That becomes uplifting and fuels the work of TREK. But success takes a team, a team with enough time, open-mindedness and self-discipline to tackle the toughest job in education: re-imagining it.

The first steps of the journey also require outside help --high-touch and high-skills. The vision and change leadership required to manage the feelings and ideas attached to the social, cultural and intellectual worlds of our schools is exacting. ERC has created and employs a “re-design spiral” that tracks and informs the arc of the change process required. Design, planning, and facilitation must be at once forensic and humanistic. 

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TREK is not for the faint of heart, nor for those who want the kind of quick and easy fix we’re conditioned to accept as real change. TREK is not for those who believe deeply in the current model simply because it has benefitted them, or for those who think that the teachers and kids are what need improving.

If you want in, we’ll come to you. We’ll bring you the most skilled facilitators, technology, and leadership coaches, the highest quality public engagement support, the most creative change process designers, and the most experienced scenario and school redesign experts. The hard parts - building the will, assembling a team and doing the work of creating your vision to pursue – that’s up to you!

For more information or to begin a TREK yourself, email today: larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org today!   

Please note: CES schools— if you feel it’s time to re-invent yourselves, you’re especially welcomed! Please email us about our plans for supporting TREK in CES schools.

Thanks for reading.

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder, ERC

Response to Globe Magazine Education Segment

I appreciated the Globe magazine’s ten ideas for transforming K-12 education, (Oct. 1) but found nothing transformational, and that the ideas fail to address our fundamental problem- the core architecture of our schools, vintage 1890. All kids of the same age, all together, all day long, from kindergarten through 12th grade. All students taught the same material, in the same way, for the same allotted chunks of time. All learning done inside the building, divorced from community. All kids ranked from top to bottom, with “success” limited to a predictable percentage.  No learning science has ever supported these ideas! No wonder one of your recommendations is to reduce student stress. As Clayton Christensen said in his 2012 book, Disrupting Class, “our nation has been unable or unwilling to facilitate the entrance of new models to replace a failing public system”.

Not since Theodore Sizer has anyone been forceful and persistent in saying it’s not the people within the institution – the kids and teachers- that are the problem, it’s the school model itself. Policy makers and state departments of education have abetted the failure by continuing to lock in the current system and practices.  Philanthropies don’t press for smarter efforts or true innovation. Our MA business community, despite its brains and influence, only asks for more charter schools. Everyone seems happy with the present “arrangements”. Until we do more than tinker around the edges, we can expect the same results.

Dr. Larry M. Myatt

Founder, Fenway High School

Boston, MA

President, Co-Founder

Education Resources Consortium

Teacher Learning Murals: Making Planning Visible

These days, in addition to coaching administrators and helping with school redesign, I also do a lot of direct work with teachers, supporting them in designing inquiry learning experiences for teams, individual classrooms and beyond. Portfolio tasks and PBL are a part of the bigger picture of inquiry learning but I like to take it a bit further, helping schools move purposefully from a “culture of teaching” to a more authentic and engaging “culture of learning”, within which students fuel their own intellectual activities. To do well at this, I spend a lot of time exploring how to help adults engage in meaningful learning, similar to the kinds of challenges they will present to students. We’ve known for years that the highest performing organizations have the highest degree of adult learning.  

For some time now I’ve been influenced strongly by the power of visual learning and visual literacy. Among those influences are Thomas West, a big thinker and writer on visualization, graphic design educator Kristina Lamour Sansone of Lesley University, my ERC colleague Katrina Kennett, a superb lesson/project designer and teacher developer, and a host of cognitive and neuro-scientists who are proving with brain-imaging technologies that seeing usually beats listening and text for learning. Although I thought I understood the field pretty well, and had the pleasure of writing an article on visual literacy for Phi Delta Kappan, (Connecting the Dots”, November 2008), I’m always finding new examples of the power of making things visible.

Manchester West HS STEAM-Ahead staff members prepare Learning Murals for presentation to their colleagues

Something I’ve been working on of late is a process to help schools make the huge leap from teachers working in private practice to being part of small teams, where it’s critical to make their planning and teaching visible. It’s something I call a Learning Mural. Learning Murals are in no way an invention for which I can claim credit. Similar processes and products have been around for years under different names- curriculum diagrams, mind maps, brainstorm webs, and more. What feels novel is the way we’re using them, and two aspects seem to be particularly helpful about the process. One is the power of colleagues being able to actively participate in a fellow teacher’s thought process, and, two, that the plans they generate are a departure from the kind of canned or scripted lessons that have overtaken our field over the past years. Teachers have been remarkably enthusiastic, standing up in front of their teams, sharing their excitement, asking big questions, making connections, and imagining possibilities. Two schools that have begun to embrace Learning Murals this summer –the STEAM-Ahead Academy at Manchester NH’s West High School and Providence RI’s Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School have already begun to make serious strides.

When asked for feedback, what teachers key in on is that Learning Murals are dynamic –“living documents”, as we call them- and exceedingly multi-purpose. They include three key aspects of good planning-- brainstorming, organizing and incubating, all in a lively, focused setting. The last of the three –incubating- results from the fact that other teachers and students have an ongoing opportunity to add to and alter it, posing resources, activities and possibilities that will help enrich student and teacher learning in ways that traditional solo, written lesson planning seldom approach.

Alvarez High School Teachers brainstorm components of a Learning Mural in August PD with ERC

Alvarez HS Principal Zawadi Hawkins-Gladstone is ecstatic about the potential for the murals to provide documentation of evolving teacher work and concrete starting places between meeting times, with phone cameras and software applications making it easy to capture and share the murals as they morph. She has endorsed the creation of Learning Murals as a key planning tool across all grade levels this academic year. Already the school’s teacher planning rooms sport a host of murals from different content areas. 

                                        Something I’ve added to the Learning Mural with great success is a simple, flexible protocol that helps the presenter further maximize her/his unveiling of a plan for a unit, lesson or activity. The facilitated protocol provides 5-8 minutes for the teacher to share the mural (see photos), another 5-8 minutes during which colleagues can act as students (what would excite me, if I were studying this topic or trying to learn this skill?) or as teaching colleagues (how could I connect to/piggyback on this? What am I doing that’s related or complementary?), reacting to what’s been presented, and a final 3-5 minutes on suggestions to make the Mural more compelling, powerful or understandable. The protocol can be facilitated by another faculty member and, in some cases, a helper uses a marker to add thoughts and ideas, draw connecting arrows or points of emphasis so that the presenter can focus on listening and using her/his visual powers to track changes on the mural.

A Civics/Social Studies Learning Mural at Alvarez HS

At Alvarez HS, teachers are already planning for students to attempt their own Learning Murals to organize a project they choose, as well as for second and third opportunities during Team Planning for teachers to incubate their learning design ideas as the work grows and changes with real live students. At Manchester West, STEAM staff members have agreed to adopt Learning Murals as a “road map”, a way to explain to students where their course work will take them, hoping to engender student ideas up front, and to post them so that students can track the flow of activities.

Again, nothing here is brand new, but the timing seems right. Learning Murals are an effective way to offer schools and teacher teams a safe yet provocative way to pursue higher quality planning, enrich a team’s collective and collaborative understanding of its intellectual endeavors, capture the fruits of that work, and above all, invite students to experience deeper engagement and learning through the power of visual learning. 

For more on Learning Murals contact: Larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org

A Call to Action: Comprehensive Assessment for English Learners

By Sarah Ottow

As schools open this fall, our fastest growing population, English language learners (ELLs), experiences a severe achievement gap. Despite a migration of accountability from the feds to the states, the stakes remain high around big data and the issues around testing remain complex and controversial.  Attempts to remedy the situation via through English-only language policies in several states (California, Arizona and Massachusetts) have failed to prevent this gap from growing, and have actually set the work back.

Confianza: Educating for ELL Equity focuses on ELL issues, helping schools and districts get their heads around these complicated and costly challenges. What I tell them is that we need a more comprehensive assessment mindset and a set of teacher and district practices to round out the picture of what growth actually means for these culturally and linguistically diverse learners if we’re going to know how best to serve them and do what people are asking –to prepare them for life and employment in the U.S.

A once-a-year test is like a snapshot taken on one day at a given point in time.  This snapshot offers a report for outside stakeholders--the district, the state, parents, and community members- but as has often been said, no whole picture of the child, or of interim growth emerges, leaving schools with little quality information on what to do next with the student. By continuing to focus primarily on large-scale academic assessment, we get only more data on what we already know—that is, our ELLs are not yet proficient at English.  We need actionable data to drive instruction, curriculum and programming so we can not only close, but prevent, an achievement gap.

In a system laden with snapshots, I advise my clients to move towards a photo album approach and remind them the root word for “assess,” from the Latin word, “assidere,” means to sit beside.  If we’re truly “sitting beside” our students we can do a lot more to diagnose areas of improvement and give specific feedback to build awareness and autonomy of personal development. Let’s push for a balanced, comprehensive assessment system that promotes holistic, classroom-based interim and a big increase in formative measures. Many teachers are taught to believe that only summative tasks matter, and miss the obvious – good formative assessment is a learning tool.  Both in our teacher preparation and building-based professional learning, we need to do a better job of encouraging educators to look at the complexities of language acquisition in socio-cultural contexts and promote a focus on the strengths of our culturally and linguistically diverse learners.  School and district leaders need to be visible and forceful in promoting the idea of supporting students’ eagerness to succeed, to fit in, to be someone in the United States, to be someone for their families and for themselves

I remind teachers that English language development is an ongoing process, one that that requires time, support, and confidence building.  We need to provide meaningful, language-rich learning experiences and include structures like portfolios and student exhibitions, which showcase academic language development growth and promote student agency in the learning process. This is a tangible growth opportunity for most schools.

The good news is that we already have sound assessment measures like WIDA’s ACCESS to show annual progress in English proficiency.  But schools need to have more than one picture of academic language development for ELL students.  Ongoing, classroom-based interim and formative assessments can make visible the learning of our English learners.  Comprehensive assessment brings the focus back to students’ growth, not just proficiency, which is what learning is after all. 

Sarah Ottow has fifteen years of teaching, coaching and instructional leadership experience in the US and Puerto Rico focused on equitable outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse learners.  Sarah's Boston-based organization, Confianza: Educating for ELL Equity, provides practical and innovative technical support and professional learning that empowers educators with research-based tools and practices.

ERC Co-Founder Talks TED in New Mexico

I really like New Mexico. And especially, Albuquerque. I’ve been working out there for a while now. That’s why I was really pleased to get an invite from their energetic TED community to do a short talk about why we’re not progressing in public educations (it’s the design, people). I decided to add my heartfelt pitch that Albuquerque is just the kind of place to do the deeper kind of work required.
 

I have good friends in the Albuquerque schools and in the community. I’ve loved my work with their Center for School Leadership and the McCune portfolio. Somehow, it’s easier out there to think about what kids need, not what the adults stand for. There are not a lot of folks in NM competing to be the smartest guy in the room, heavy on top-down master planning and regulation (although the state education department can lean that way). If the technocrats stay back East, I think it’s a place where heritage, strong local roots, smart but humble people, and a Southwestern sense of wide-openness can do some of the transformative work we don’t glimpse elsewhere.

If you’ve got about six minutes to spare, please check out this link for my Albuquerque TED talk:

Thanks, and Happy Mid-Summer!

Larry
 
 
 

Steam Ahead NH

Since the summer of 2014, the Education Resources Consortium has had the pleasure of supporting the birth and development of STEAM-Ahead NH, located at Manchester High School West in New Hampshire’s Queen City. The idea originated when local business owners Jeremy Hitchcock of Dyn and Nick Soggu of SilverTech, both graduates of Manchester schools, were inspired to support the creation of a program focused on the STEM fields.  They were joined by Mayor Ted Gatsas who suggested including the Arts to include the creative thinking aspect often missing in STEM initiatives. The STEAM concept coincided with the arrival of new Manchester West Principal Christopher Motika, who helped to move quickly to fit the pieces together.  According to Motika, community partners around Manchester, including higher education players came together, and “bent the rules just enough” to begin the first cohort of STEAM-Ahead. 

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Fabrication Station

Motika says that the vision for West is to grow the program not only as a magnet for all students in the district interested in the STEAM fields, but also as a mechanism for transforming practices within the school.  STEAM Ahead-NH teachers are proving that inter-disciplinary project-based learning, and “un-leveling” classes not only motivates students (nearly 100% daily attendance in the program compared with 87% school-wide), but can improve learning outcomes.  Motika adds, “Our ideas would not have meant much if we didn’t have a solid team of teachers willing to take risks, change their practices, and try new things”. The program which began this year with a ninth grade cohort will expand next year to include new faculty members and a tenth grade. This year’s teaching team consists of Christine Aspinwall, Dan Colburn, Rachel Belmont, Sandra Ratliff, and Robin Henkle. According to Motika, this year’s group of STEAM Ahead teachers has proven to be great collaborators, sharing ideas openly with a constant eye on trying new things.  

One of the key reasons ERC opted to support STEAM Ahead is that unlike many "STEM" programs, STEAM-Ahead NH is open to all students, not just those who "test in" or bring prior high grades. When queried how and why that happened, and what have the results been, Motika responds in animated fashion: “When the collaboration began among community partners, higher education representatives and West HS educators, some people saw STEAM Ahead as a selective program.  But there was a small and persistent group who insisted that the program represent the whole school and the city in terms of its diversity --economic, English Language learners, students with special needs, and varying academic histories. It was also important that it be “un-leveled” because many ideas about students’ abilities are not based in learning science and limit their opportunities to grow. We wanted to show that good learning is possible in the more natural, heterogeneous settings we find in life and work.  Fortunately, many of the grants we applied for required that kind of inclusiveness, and so the program was designed to be open to all interested students. 

“Our results have proven that given the right environment, any student can succeed.  Our attendance rate alone impresses educators, politicians, and community partners –we’re doing something that is getting kids excited about coming to school.  Add a low failure rate, and the fact that students who did not perform well in middle school and were “tracked” into lower level classes have come into STEAM Ahead and now achieve at higher levels, and we have exciting results to bring to the larger faculty and the community. Words cannot express how proud I am of the teacher team and the way they embraced this project of making learning fun, exciting, and engaging for kids.”

STEAM Ahead NH Engineering Lab

Veteran science instructor Christine Aspinwall, herself a graduate of Manchester HS West, was looking for an opportunity to recharge herself and get away from the district’s “leveling” system. Aspinwall says, “Students understood that they had been placed in the ‘low’ levels, which is not helpful or motivating, to say the least, and often the “upper-level” students had an air of superiority that may or may not have been justified, but made for an unhelpful dynamic. I love the heterogeneous grouping, the dynamic is so different. I love the fact that I have seen students that were relatively unsuccessful in middle school, find their voice and grow. With the right learning opportunities, everyone learns and contributes, and everyone feels like part of our community”.

Aspinwall and Principal Motika have been enthusiastic about ERC as a partner due to its commitment to school re-design, not simply working within the boundaries of conventional school ideas and practices. As Aspinwall says, “I love the permission and support in breaking free from traditions that don’t work that well. As a biologist, I have an adapt-or-die outlook, and this fits right in for me.”

As things kicked off last fall, Lucy Weathers, a VISTA volunteer, was a fortunate find for the STEAM Team, working as college and career counselor but also as a development, public relations and community liaison for the program, helping to create real world connections to what the students are learning in STEAM classrooms. Weathers says that in-city partners like Dyn, SilverTech, and Admix have not only contributed financially but also continue to give time, effort, and experience to our students.

Currently operating without an art teacher assigned to the program, the team is help fulfill the “A” (arts) by creating a humanities aspect to all of its engineering projects, and to further the fine arts aspect STEAM has turned to the community for help. They have taken learning voyages to two well-known artistic outlets in Manchester, the Currier Museum of Art and the Palace Theatre. A search is currently under way for Artists-in-Residence -community members, students, and professionals- to get involved in any aspect of the arts; fine arts, dance, theatre, vocal music, etc. to infuse into instructional units. Says Weathers, “We’re excited to have anyone from the community –artists, business people, college students, volunteers- come in and get involved. Please be in touch with us if you have ideas and energy, whatever form that may take. Our commitment is to building and growing without boundaries”.

The Six Myths of Coaching New School Leaders

By Wayne Ogden

Myth # 1: Confidential coaching is the responsibility of the Superintendent

REALITY:  Most Superintendents do not have adequate time to effectively coach their new school leaders. Even if a Superintendent has time, there exists an inherent conflict in the roles of confidential coach and a boss who evaluates a new leader. Principals who are new to a district or new to the role need a dedicated, confidential coach from outside the organization who can be trusted to address a leader’s uncertainties, concerns and challenges in a new, intense and complicated environment.

Myth # 2: Our school district cannot afford to hire external coaches for our new school leaders

REALITY:  A Rand Corporation study reports that 20% of newly hired school leaders leave their position within two years of employment, with urban districts reporting principal “failure rates” of almost 50% within the first five years. Numerous national studies link principal turnover as “very strongly negatively related to student achievement”. (Napthali, Hoff, 2014) In New England, a typical three-year contract for a new school leader with salary and benefits ranges from $300,000 to more than $500,000. A typical one-year contract for an external coach is roughly $10,000, a modest sum to insure the success of a new principal, especially given the cost of a new search process and the impact on to student achievement and school culture.

Myth # 3: My School Board/Committee will never understand or support the idea of spending money on coaches for our new principals.

Reality: Increasingly sophisticated Board members know that from Fortune 500 companies to politics, from professional sports to the fine and performing arts, highly successful leaders use coaches to help them excel at what they do. Seasoned decision-makers make these strategic investments because they understand that organizations with new leaders perform better with high-quality, dedicated coaching.

Myth # 4: We already mentor our new leaders with an experienced principal in our district.  

REALITY:  Although colleague principals are invaluable for sharing the customs, routines & traditions of a district, they have a full time job and, frequently, on-going crisis and dilemmas of their own. Research and experience have also shown that the effectiveness of these relationships wanes because these “mentors” in most cases do not have adequate training to be a “thought partner” for a new building leader, nor the time for reading, analysis, problem-solving and deliberation.

Myth # 5: No new principal has the time to be sitting down regularly for “therapy sessions” with a coach.

REALITY:  High-quality coaching is not therapy nor does having a coach imply that a new principal has flaws or shortcomings. Good coaching provides customized opportunities for principals to think deeply about the many important decisions they must make. It allows time and opportunity for questioning and reflection. Furthermore, a skilled coach provides the opportunity for a new leader to process ideas as they develop and to obtain feedback from a trusted, expert confidant before an idea, initiative or piece of writing goes public. Time for the coaching relationship to prosper comes from time not wasted on mistakes and false starts.

Myth # 6: There is little that a coach who does not know our “system” can do to help a new school principal in our district.

REALITY: An external coach is a trained expert in both leadership and management. They are thought partners for new principals to help them reflect on the regular challenges of the job. While schools and districts may differ in some aspects, the critical requirements of the position are generally similar across all schools. Coaching can be customized to address a new leader’s needs by providing a menu of supports such as:

·      Entry planning

·      Co-observations of teachers

·      Feedback on writing (evaluations, newsletters, correspondence)

·      Learning walks, mini-observations or“rounds” visits

·      Conferencing skills/Having difficult conversations

·      Building leadership capacity for student achievement

·      Strategic goal setting and budget development

·      Facilitating opportunities for student voice

·      Leading successful meetings and teams

·      Community engagement strategies