What Could We Do If We Were Brave?

1. Learning without Limits What Could We Do If We Were Brave? EARCOS Leadership Conference 2013

2. Adams, William Cavaletti, Anthony Duch, Phuc

3. @rickwormeli (Twitter) rwormeli@cox.net

4. The best teachers of my own children have been the ones who respect the school’s system, but parted from it as necessary in order to teach my child.

5. Our greatest Compass Rose: Doubt

6. “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.” - Emerson

7. “Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s the judgment that something else is more important than that fear.” -- Ambrose Redmoon, rock band manager in the 1960’s. Oh yeah, he was a quadriplegic as well. What do we judge as so important, it trumps our fear of rejection, failure, and questioning from colleagues, parents, administration?

8. Courage is 90% mindset, only 10% craft and mechanics of pulling it off.

9. ”All thinking begins with wonder.”-- Socrates Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking.” - Fred Friendly, broadcaster

10. “4/5 of my students keep failing their tests!”

11. ‘Forged by the operating tenets with which we perceive the world and conduct our actions. Effective educators regularly assess these principles for validity and revise them in light of new evidence/perspective. Mindset In teaching and leadership, we seek integrity: Our actions reflect our principles. Put another way: We minimize our hypocrisies. Have you identified your own mindset to see if it’s constructive?

12. Ask what a respected colleague or leader would do.

13. Create moral imperative.

14. Build teacher autonomy. When teachers retain autonomy to make lesson changes they find effective, they take responsibility for the outcomes. They commit to a lesson’s success more personally, analyzing their actions and revising thoughtfully.

15. What Were We Thinking? • Everyone in the same subject in this grade level is on the same page on the same day of the week • Plan accordingly because there is no more paper supply after January • The master schedule cannot be changed to accommodate a compelling guest speaker. • Students cannot re-do final exams. • Sacrifice good pedagogy because people who are untrained are telling you what to do.

16. What Were We Thinking? • We can’t incorporate a new “app” in our lessons because it promotes the use of personal technology that school hasn’t sanctioned. • Our new students are three grade levels below grade level proficiencies but they have to do well on the final exam anyway. • We can’t take that field trip with the class because that would be too much time away from preparing for the annual state or provincial exam. • “Stop being so creative,” a colleague comments. “You’re making me look bad.”

17. Consider how personal technology is changing the way our students do things. We’ve entered a 24-7 work cycle. Official homework as we know it will soon fade.

18. Information Age is old school. We’re in the High Concept Age, and we have the tech to pursue it: Twitter and other social media Daily newspapers downloaded for analysis Museum school partnerships and Virtual Tours QR codes attached to classroom activities Student-designed apps Khan Academy and similar on-line tutorials Graduation in four states now requires one course taken completely on-line Google Docs Google Glass/Eyes – wearables, implantables, augments

19. MOOCS – Massive Open On-line Course Crowd-Sourcing MIT Open Courseware TED talks and ed.Ted.com Screencasts (ex. Camtasia Studio) Voicethread Moodle PBL’s Prezi iMovie Edmodo

20. Just because we can’t fathom the logistics doesn’t mean we abandon the principle.

21. #1 Most Common Characteristic among the state Teachers of the year: They broke the rules.

22. Thanks, Gordon Dryden, for yesterday’s promotion!

23. It’s notan answer chase.

24. It’s a question journey.

25. “We went to school. We were not taught how to think; we were taught to reproduce what past thinkers thought…. …Instead of being taught to look for possibilities, we were taught to exclude them. It’s as if we entered school as a question mark… …and graduated as a period.” -- Michael Michalko, Creative Thinkering, 2011, p. 3

26. “Do they know how to ask good questions?” -- Tony Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap, 2008

27. What should a lawyer never do in a court trial? Ask a question to which he doesn’t already know the answer. Get students to ask more questions than we do

28. Sample Acts of Courage for Teachers that Can Be Facilitated by Teacher Leaders • Ask the larger questions of what we do • Manifest expertise • Retain autonomy: Pacing guides, not mandates; teach out of sequence as warranted • Require all students, teachers, administrators get residential, outdoor education experiences of a week or more • Teach the way students best learn, not the way we best learn (Students use that secret code…)

29. As leaders, we all have our own philosophy/pedagogy that we believe. To what degree will we allow our teachers to hold beliefs and conduct practices different from our own?

30. “Most of the time I’m a leader, but sometimes I have to be the boss.” -- quote from a highly accomplished middle level principal

32. Our future depends on this one here.

33. Transcendformulaic responses.

34. Could you teach the differences between architecture in the Middle Ages and architecture in the Renaissance period in such a classroom?

35. How about the principles of algebra here?

36. Writer and educator, Margaret Wheatley, is correct: “We can’t be creative unless we’re willing to be confused.”

37. Cultivate Teacher Creativity. Seriously, it’s just as vital as content expertise, professional behavior, and maintaining proper records.

38. Do teachers have the creativity to solve their own problems? • My whole lesson today is based on accessing those three Websites, but the school’s Internet is down, so what can we do instead? • Small groups are not working in my class, yet I know they’re important for many students’ learning. How do I get these students to stay focused on their group tasks? • I’ve backed myself into a corner explaining an advanced science concept, and it’s not making sense to me, let alone to my students. What should I do? • Angelica is far beyond where I’m comfortable teaching, but we have two more weeks in this unit for the rest of the class. What will I do with her that honors her readiness level?

39. I’m supposed to differentiate for some of my students, but I don’t see any time to do it. • My school’s current electronic gradebook system doesn’t allow me to post anything but norm-referenced scores, and I want to be more criterion-referenced in my grades. What can I do? • Because I’m a veteran teacher, I’ve been asked to be the rotating teacher using a cart and moving from classroom to classroom each period so the new teacher can have his own room and not have so much to deal with his first year. How will I handle this?

40. (Sampling from Innocentive.com, page 1, downloaded June 24, 2012) • Seeking Orthogonally Functionalized Cyclobutanes • Navigating the Inside of an Egg Without Damaging It • Cleveland Clinic: Method to Reconnect Two Tissues Without Using Sutures • Seeking 1H-pyrazolo[3,4-b]pyridin-3-amides • Synthetic Route to a Benzazepinone • My Air, My Health: An HHS/EPA Challenge • Mechanistic Proposals for a Vanadium-Catalyzed Addition of NMO to Imidazopyridazines • Seeking Highest and Best Commercial Application for Breakthrough Innovation in Building Technology/Structural Optimization • Desafio da Educação: Como atrairpessoastalentosaspara se tornar professor naredepúblicabrasileira

41. “The problem solvers...were most effective when working at the margins of their fields….While these people were close enough to understand the challenges, they weren’t so close that their knowledge held them back and cause them to run into the same stumbling blocks as the corporate scientists.” (p. 121, Lehrer) Check out InnoCentive at www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse What would this look like in education?

42. Consider: Immigrants invent patents at double the rate of non-immigrants.” (p. 240, Lehrer)

43. Combination and Re-Combinination • Hall duty and Teacher Advisory • Service Learning and Students in danger of dropping out • Miniature Golf and lesson sequence • Students’ cafeteria behavior and architecture • Unmotivated faculty and farming, astronomy, marble tabletops. • Parental involvement and medicine Math Properties Furniture Miniature golf architecture

44. Grades are compensation. communication.

45. F.A.I.L. First Attempt in Learning

46. More than “okay!” After 10,000 tries, here’s a working light bulb. ‘Any questions? Re-Do’s & Re-Takes with students and their teachers: Are They Okay? Thomas Edison

47. A Perspective that Changes our Thinking: “A ‘D’ is a coward’s ‘F.’ The student failed, but you didn’t have enough guts to tell him.” -- Doug Reeves

48. If we do not allow students to re-do work, we deny the growth mindset so vital to student maturation, and we are declaring to the student: • This assignment had no legitimate educational value. • It’s okay if you don’t do this work. • It’s okay if you don’t learn this content or skill. None of these is acceptable to the highly accomplished, professional educator.

49. We don’t let a student’s immaturity dictate his learning and thereby his destiny.

50. Do not wave from the rim of the pit the child has dug for himself. Instead, jump in and walk with him.