Inchworm, inchworm…

Here’s the 4th question for the #ossemooc #innovatorsmindset bloghop series. Thanks, as ever, to Tina Zita for the amazing visuals.

As I let this question bounce around the inside of my brain this week, I was reminded of a song I used to sing to my kids when they were small:

The words that were sticking in my head were: “inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds. Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are.” But when I went back and listened to the whole thing, I realized that the image of the inchworm, based in his numeric framework, cheerfully reciting his math facts that will probably help him “go far”, was also relevant.

We are, in many ways, caught in the inchworm’s dilemma.

As we begin to shift our practice, to take on the innovator’s traits, to ask our students to be co-learners with us, to genuinely question the status quo, we are still expected to come up with something quantifiable to show growth. Something that can go into a data portal, something that results in improvement on a standardized test, something that can have a numeric result assigned to it to go on a report card. Like the inchworm, that’s the existing language we have to work with, and, as classroom teachers, that’s the language that students and parents and administrators (and on, up the chain) understand and expect to see.

That puts us in a difficult spot, because it’s very difficult to quantify the fact that we’ve begun to look at the marigold’s colour, and where it prefers to grow, and what uses people made of it in the past, and the fact that it’s a native North American plant, and what it might bring to our schoolyard gardens and a whole bunch of other things we’ve found out by letting our students go deep with their learning, and show that learning in myriad different ways. Being able to convey the value of that learning, and the growth involved is going to take a lot of deep conversation and reframing for all of us. It’s not going to be easy, but things that are worth doing rarely are.

One of the biggest things I’m taking away from this book study is that we have to start that conversation – whether it’s having students record their thoughts (digitally or analog) after a learning cycle, and sharing those with parents and colleagues, or being brave enough to ask an administrator to let you try and go without numerical grades for a term and use ongoing descriptive feedback and discussion and metacognition/reflection instead. Otherwise, we stay locked in the inchworm’s limited mindset, trapped by the numbers. (As Alfie Kohn writes here)

This March break, I watched my younger son and his friends use a variety of technologies to communicate with each other, problem solve, and plan excursions.  This amazing group of 12 year olds troubleshot audio problems in a transcontinental Skype call; used a combination of Google Hangouts and texting to set up a detailed cross-city bus excursion involving multiple departure points and destinations; and worked through the bumps that inevitably come when people are taking public transit from all different points. They laughed a lot, helped each other through their frustration, and found and solved real-world problems. Exactly what we want for our students, and one way that we could measure the impact of innovative practice. Are these the skills we’re helping develop?

Inchworm, inchworm….

Other people’s thoughts:

Leigh Cassell

Donna Fry

Tina Zita

Mark Carbone

Amit Mehrotra

Stacey Wallwin

Jennifer Casa-Todd

Peter Cameron

Don’t forget you can add your thoughts to this discussion. Comment on a blog, join the Voxer group, chime in on Twitter, or post your own blog on the topic here: https://ossemooc.wordpress.com/

Let the sparks fly…

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What if…?

image: Tina Zita

This is the 3rd question in the bloghop series for the #ossemooc on-line book study of George Couros’ book The #innovatorsmindset. Chapter 7, which marks the end of the second section of the book, ends with a series of “What if…?” questions.

image: Lisa Noble(highlights mine)

As you can tell from the highlights in the above image, I’ve been thinking more about some of these questions than others. The risk-taking question is one that I’m particularly interested in, and often, frustrated by.

I know risk-taking is a huge piece of the puzzle for any learner. I also know it’s an extremely difficult one for me. I’m a gifted student who always played “school” very well, but who shied away from anything that I couldn’t do right the first time. It took the patient coaching of my spouse (also a gifted learner, but one who has always been much more open to learning experientially than I am) to convince me, in my 20’s, that it was okay to not be really good at something the first time, and to allow myself to “risk” in order to gain a new skill. Now, I sometimes see that stance of fear reflected in both my students and my own kids. I try really hard to model my “risking” behaviours and talk about my learning process, at least partly because I’d like to save them the grief and missed opportunities my fear caused me.

I see the fear of failure coming from two very different places with my students – those who don’t want to risk because they’ve tried before and the existing school system has made them feel like they can’t succeed; and those who don’t want to risk because they’re afraid of what will happen if they don’t succeed, because that’s not a place they’re willing to go, or have experience with. I’m realizing that my colleagues are probably coming from very similar places, and if we are going to move forward at all, we have to both be willing to name that fear, and address it. Creating an environment in which people feel safe to do that takes us back, as Leigh said in last week’s hangout, to “relationships, relationships, relationships”. Without taking that first risk to trust each other in our professional context, the safety net won’t hold. How we build that net with the diversity of learners and experiences in our school communities is still one of my biggest questions.

how do we create a robust “safety net” to support a culture of “risking” in our learning spaces? credit: flickr user Rob via cc

My other “what ifs”?Those tend to be aimed more inward than outward, and I offer them for your reflection. What if I just stopped making excuses for why I haven’t tried an activity I think looks interesting, and just did it? What’s the worst case scenario? And of course, what if we were easier on ourselves when things didn’t go as wonderfully as we thought they would, and what if we were better about sharing those experiences with our peers – the plateau and the ravine, as well as the mountaintop? How might that change the discussion?

Let the sparks fly!