Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you Monday. — David
Thanks, everyone, for your continued flexibility and perseverance! I'm constantly impressed by you all!
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
Followership
I shared this article (FOLLOWERSHIP: THE OTHER SIDE OF LEADERSHIP by John McCallum) with a group of teachers in the department.
Here's the heart of it:
Followership may take the backseat to leadership but it matters: it matters a lot! Quite simply, where followership is a failure, not much gets done and/or what does get done is not what was supposed to get done. Followership problems manifest themselves in a poor work ethic, bad morale, distraction from goals, unsatisfied customers, lost opportunities, high costs, product quality issues and weak competitiveness. At the extreme, weak leadership and weak followership are two sides of the same coin and the consequence is always the same: organizational confusion and poor performance.
Good followers have a number of qualities.
First, judgement. Followers must take direction but they have an underlying obligation to the enterprise to do so only when the direction is ethical and proper. The key is having the judgement to know the difference between a directive that your leader gives on how to proceed that you do not agree with and a directive that is truly wrong.
No one disputes that good judgement is critical to being a good leader. It is just as important in the follower. Show enough good judgement as a follower and you usually end up getting a shot at being the leader. Something of an aside but there is a line that I have always liked about judgement: “Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement.”
Second, work ethic. Good followers are good workers. They are diligent, motivated, committed, pay attention to detail and make the effort. Leaders have a responsibility to create an environment that permits these qualities but regardless, it is the responsibility of the follower to be a good worker. There is no such thing as a bad worker who is a good follower.
Third, competence. The follower cannot follow properly unless competent at the task that is directed by the leader. It is the obligation of the leader to assure that followers are competent. Sometimes things go wrong because the follower is not competent at the task at hand. When this happens, leaders should blame themselves, not the follower. A sign of poor leadership is blaming followers for not having skills they do not have.
Fourth, honesty. The follower owes the leader an honest and forthright assessment of what the leader is trying to achieve and how. This is especially the case when the follower feels the leader’s agenda is seriously flawed. Respect and politeness are important but that said, it is not acceptable for followers to sit on their hands while an inept leader drives the proverbial bus over the cliff. Good leaders are grateful for constructive feedback from their team. Bad leaders do not welcome feedback and here followers have to tread carefully. If the situation is serious enough, consideration should be given to going above the leader in question for guidance.
Fifth, courage. Followers need to be honest with those who lead them. They also need the courage to be honest. It takes real courage to confront a leader about concerns with the leader’s agenda or worse, the leader himself or herself. It is not for naught that Churchill called courage “The foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend”. From time to time, it takes real courage to be a good follower.
Sixth, discretion. A favorite saying in World War II was “Loose lips sink ships.” Sports teams are fond of the expression “What you hear here, let it stay here.” Followers owe their enterprises and their leaders discretion. Talking about work matters inappropriately is at best unhelpful and more likely harmful. Discretion just means keeping your mouth shut. It should be easy but many find it next to impossible. Bluntly, you cannot be a good follower and be indiscreet. Everybody who works at an enterprise has a duty of care; indiscretion is not care, it is careless.
Seventh, loyalty. Good followers respect their obligation to be loyal to their enterprise. Loyalty to the enterprise and its goals is particularly important when there are problems, interpersonal or otherwise, with a particular leader. Followers who are not loyal are inevitably a source of difficulty. They create problems between team members; they compromise the achievement of goals; they waste everybody’s time; they are a menace. Loyalty is not a synonym for lapdog. Rather, its essence is a strong allegiance and commitment to what the organization is trying to do. Followers should remember that their obligation is to the enterprise, not a given leader at a given point in time.
Eighth, ego management. Good followers have their egos under control. They are team players in the fullest sense of the concept. They have good interpersonal skills. Success for good followers relates to performance and goal achievement not personal recognition and self promotion. Sounds too good to be true and often it is. It is difficult but the best organizations tie advancement and reward to performance and goal achievement as hard as that may be to do.
Followership will always be in the shadow of leadership. But there are no leaders without followers and on-going success with weak followers will usually prove elusive. It is true that an organization is only as good as its leaders. It is also only as good as its followers. Who would not benefit from giving some thought to how they could be a better follower? Such thought may actually hasten your trip to the leadership position you actually want.
Clarity in a list of "principles"
I really like the "design principles" from Achievement First about remote learning because of the way they're written. The "we need a simple..." pattern makes it really easy to understand.
• We need to lead with our “care for the whole person” value and keep our community together. We need to have enough touchpoints and direct contacts to make sure we have a pulse on our kids and each other.
• We create a shared “container.” Having a consistent instructional approach and schedule will enable efficiencies (family communication, tech issues, and curriculum design) and collaboration.
• We need a simple, clear plan that we can execute well. None of us has ever done this before. The more complexity we add, the harder it will be to do it well.
• We need continuity and consistency. We—our scholars, teachers, and families—need consistent routines for remote learning and remote community that will become a source of stability and comfort.
• We are designing for “most.” There will be no effective plan that works for every single student, parent, and teacher. We will need flexibility and extra support for the students, families, and staff who need it.
"Instructional Shifts to Support Deeper Learning" - McTighe and Silver - notes
One big idea that highlights "the big skills" in education (and LA classrooms):
Fordham Institute's report on lessons learned during remote learning
Here's the PDF.
Some notes:
KIPP DC created this new Maslowe's hierarchy:
Staying in touch with students and families wasn’t just about providing social and emotional support; it was also essential to keeping kids learning. The charter networks are data-driven organizations, and they doubled down on this during the crisis to learn what was and wasn’t working, employing clear goals and metrics to monitor, with dashboards that helped educators decide what to keep or change. The networks leveraged their previous investments in becoming learning organizations that could quickly build pilots, try them, gather data, learn from them, and pivot, akin to the “lean startup” innovation methodology (a method for increasing the success rate of innovative products and services through rapid prototyping and quick feedback loops).38 This use of data happened at the network school and classroom levels, with educators systematically improving lessons via trials, observation, coaching, feedback, and iterations.
A strong finding from the interviews was the central importance of regularly reaching out to students and families, including providing social and emotional support and development. This came up in nearly every interview. Most networks had an advisor or counselor system (operating before and during the pandemic), allowing them to check in on student and family needs, provide emotional support, and gather feedback on how remote learning was going among their pupils. One striking observation was how thoughtfully and systematically the networks reached out individually to students and parents, which seemed a rare practice in other schools (or an aspiration deemed to be operationally impractical).
Encourage teachers and staff to maintain a growth and innovation mindset as educators move up the steep learning curve of figuring out how to teach with these new tools.
Focus on fundamentals (for example, reading as a gateway to learning other subjects).
Ensure lessons include many opportunities for active learning, with students engaging directly with the material, instructor, and their peers
Make creative use of teaching teams, with smart use of specialization and collaboration.
Assess students effectively so educators can monitor progress and diagnose where students are and what they need.
I really like the "design principles" on pp. 21-22. The best is the one from "Achievement First" because of the way they're written. The "we need a simple..." makes it really easy to understand.
• We need to lead with our “care for the whole person” value and keep our community together. We need to have enough touchpoints and direct contacts to make sure we have a pulse on our kids and each other.
• We create a shared “container.” Having a consistent instructional approach and schedule will enable efficiencies (family communication, tech issues, and curriculum design) and collaboration.
• We need a simple, clear plan that we can execute well. None of us has ever done this before. The more complexity we add, the harder it will be to do it well.
• We need continuity and consistency. We—our scholars, teachers, and families—need consistent routines for remote learning and remote community that will become a source of stability and comfort.
• We are designing for “most.” There will be no effective plan that works for every single student, parent, and teacher. We will need flexibility and extra support for the students, families, and staff who need it.
Friday, September 4, 2020
10 Things -- not strictly school related - that came across my desk this week
- One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (Yoshitoshi...1839-892)
Poet/Artist Bernadette Mayer took a roll of pictures each day for a month in 1971 and wrote a diary to accompany it… (New Yorker article)
bike lights
E-Cargo bikes review
What I hear from people who have bought them is that they change life in small but profound ways. Such an e-bike becomes a family adventuremobile for exploring greenways and parks; kids ask to go to school on the “big bike,” not in the car; running errands becomes something other than sitting in stressful traffic and hunting for parking spaces. Life seems simpler. The point of cargo bikes isn’t to get a workout (ahem, e-bike shamers). And while they can replace a car outright, that’s a commitment few are willing to make. Really, these bikes are meant to replace car trips—as many as you can feasibly switch from four wheels to two. That means they’re among the most important kinds of bikes to make and sell.
26 tips on healthy eating (Outside)
Backpack essentials (Outside)
- 5 minutes to fall in love with violin (there are other “5 minutes” for other topics like modern music)
- I’m guessing that many teachers are now moving towards planning for bigger assessments and thinking more intensely about how remote learning makes us think about grades a little differently. We spoke last week at the department meeting about some of the issues with grading and assessment in a remote setting. Here’s an addendum to that conversation: a blog post by Kittle and Gallagher (180 Days…) that reiterates their 7 principles of grading and how remote learning impacts that. I found the posting wise and helpful. It may give us all some ideas to consider and/or some language to use with admin or parents. Their last question is an important one. link
Gallagher and Kittle on Grading during remote learning
Here's the whole post: https://blog.heinemann.com/reflections-on-grading-from-180-days
Here's my favorite part:
Let’s be clear: More grading does not mean better teaching is happening or that learning is occurring. Grades sort winners (As and Bs) from losers (Ds and Fs), but they don’t make our students better readers and writers (and in some cases they impede their progress). Today’s students are tested (and graded) more than ever, yet one in four who make it to college will be enrolled in remedial courses. Nearly half of these students hail from middle- and upper-income families, dispelling the widely held belief that only low-income or community college students are saddled with remedial courses (Education Reform Now 2016). Today’s students—perhaps more than any other students—have been graded and graded and graded, yet their reading and writing skills are not strong enough for college success. Voluminous grading of crappy writing (often essays about fake reading) does not change the fact that the writing is still crappy.
Given the political worlds in which we teach, we must assign grades, but thoughtful planning about how, what, and why we’ll grade is essential if we want our students to become better readers and writers.
We share seven principles of grading that inform our work and make grades as meaningful as possible. These seven principles can still guide grading during the pandemic:
- Students Need a Volume of Ungraded Practice
- Students Need Practice in Reading Like Writers
- Students Need Feedback
- Not All Work Is Weighted Equally
- Grades Should Tell the Truth About Progress
- Rubrics Are Problematic
- Best Drafts Receive Limited Feedback.
These principles, some perhaps surprising, help us concretely connect the actual progress students make—the work they are doing day in and out—to the letter on their report cards, and these principles are important no matter the instructional setting.
We show exactly how we put these principles into action across the most important work students do in our English classrooms. We also show how we set up our grade books. We close this chapter with the following.
Our mantra in a profession dedicated to the love of reading and writing should be to embrace experimentation and practice—lots of both—and to minimize, shrink, reduce, and if we had our way, eliminate grading. The increase in testing in the last decade has been considerable—anyone who has been in teaching that long has seen it happen—but the 2012 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results show that even with all of that grading, there has been no significant increase in proficiency. These results remind us of a farmer’s wisdom: you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it. Grading is not worth all the energy it steals from us.
Evaluation and testing eat up time that is better spent reading, writing, and talking. We steal time from our daily essential practices with students to measure their progress. We steal time from our own reading and writing in order to mark those tests and submit those grades. Worry about performance inhibits creative thinking and leads writers to choose the easiest path to finish. In contrast, expansive thinking develops over time. Constant evaluation teaches students to be dependent on a teacher’s judgment, instead of their own.
We worked hard to try to find the proper balance between the evaluation required of us by our schools and the authentic practices we believe are essential in building literate students. And whenever we felt that balance getting a bit out of whack, we stopped and asked ourselves, “Is this grading practice getting in the way of our students’ improvement?”
That last sentence poses a question we always struggle while planning for our first meeting with students. During this pandemic, with shortened instructional time, our grading practices must encourage our students, not impede their growth. Because in the midst of working with several dozen tweens or teens at a time, trying to squeeze time in for them all, and managing curricular expectations, it’s easy to lose sight of the big goal: helping kids make progress toward a lifetime of reading and writing
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