We all know what a good teacher can mean in a kid’s life. We all have had those teachers who showed us something different, treated us as the special individuals we are, and shared their power so that we may grow our own. Good teachers change kids lives. Most of us are fortunate enough to know this first hand – some many times over, and for some maybe there’s just been one.
 
What I didn’t realize, however, in my own educational experience and in all of my years as an advocate for and with students is what a good teacher can mean to a parent. My older daughter is finishing Pre K at McKendree Daycare in Nashville and her year in this class has not only inspired and helped her grow, but it has inspired and helped me grow as her parent.
 
In this Pre K class, my 5 year old has learned to explore, to ask questions, to solve problems, brainstorm, work in groups, create, and delve deeply into topics of her own and her class’ choosing. She has learned to work alone and with others to define and refine those topics of investigation. She has practiced democracy in her classroom. There is joy in her classroom. She has in Pre K experienced all that I have ever advocated for in our middle and high schools.
 
She has done this because she has a teacher who listens deeply and respects her and her classmates’ ideas and questions, regardless of their ages (or perhaps because of them). Her teacher has instilled inquisitiveness and validated her personal learning process because he exposes and models his own inquisitiveness and learning. Her class has never been about Education even as she hits and exceeds the necessary Pre K educational milestones. The educational curriculum is hidden behind a powerful learning relationship.
 
My daughter and I laugh when she often starts to ask me a question by accidentally calling me her teacher’s name. What an extraordinary thing! He and her learning are so closely intertwined. It is also a motivating thing – that I may be a father who so models and supports her learning, inquisitiveness, sense of democracy, and so on.
 
As she finishes Pre K and leaves this class, I feel anxious. I know what a special teacher and experience she has had this year. I am worried what the next 13 years of formal schooling and education systems will bring and how they will compare. But, at the end of the day, I can only hope for more good teachers. I know they are out there and I’m confident that we will have many more great experiences, that my daughter and I will develop many more powerful learning relationships as we navigate her formal education.
 
For now, as we speak of her last day in the current class, it just feels like a leap of faith.
 
So, I guess this is a note of thanks to Mr. Anthony and a prospective thanks to those great teachers to come. Please know how much we appreciate you and need you. Know that you have the ability to impact not only the life of your students but also of their parents.

Anderson William’s book Creating Matters is gaining traction.  We are using Creating Matters as a guide in the development of the Seton Catholic Schools Academic Team.

Creating Matters is helping us to think differently about our work as educators: our priorities, relationships, and what we are creating – in this case high performing schools and effective leaders.

The world has always belonged to learners. Creating, building creative relationships, and purposefully reflecting can generate continuous learning and help us think differently about transforming a school, a business or one’s life.

We have to think differently or we won’t grow and understand the changing world around us.  Lifelong learning opens our minds exposes us to new vantage points, more things to see, to touch, to explore.  Lifelong learning is hard work.  It is not for everyone, but for those who commit, the joy and engagement makes one’s life better.

To sustain lifelong learning, we must depend on our creativity.  Creativity defines the nature of our relationships. It puts our learning into action. It is a philosophy of how we see the world and our role in it. Creativity will determine whether our efforts will ultimately create impact, whether we transform schools and build new leaders, and pass that work to a new generation.

Creating anything new starts with asking questions: questioning the perceptions of the others, the sources of accepted fact; the thinking that verified it; and how we rethink the work of transforming schools from scratch. Too many schools and districts are great examples of organizations that have failed over time to recreate themselves while convincing themselves they are better than the facts show.  In the case of Seton Catholic Schools, Creating Matters guides us in creating with a focus on what kids should be learning and becoming: creative, lifelong learners who are ready to change and engage in their community.  Isn’t that what schools are charged with doing?

Schools in transformation must ask this question: If we are starting from scratch and wanted the kids to become lifelong learners, is what we are doing now what we would design from scratch? Answering this question and wrestling with its implications require us to be more creative, to have stronger relationships that survive the necessary arguments and conflicts, and to build our work on a model of creating rather than constantly fixing.

At Seton, we are seeing some bright spots in teaching and learning along with better student engagement with faculty who are starting from scratch.  We are collectively creating and questioning our own assumptions, learning new skills and creating lifelong learning across our school community.  When we bring this shared purpose and focus to our classrooms and students, the transformation is palpable. We are building a community of students, faculty and staff who are committing to lifelong learning and to creating the kinds of schools where that commitment is put into practice.

Read Creating Matters and then put it into practice.  This isn’t about “seven easy steps to a better you” or some other seemingly simple approach to creativity or leadership. It’s about renewing your awareness of who you are and what you can do when you commit to creating what matters in school, business, or most importantly, life.

This is the expanded Q&A interview with Anderson Williams that appears in Volume 25, No. 1 of the Youth Voice issue of the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network Newsletter from page two.


Q: On Page 1 of our Newsletter, you reference what led you to create the youth voice framework Understanding the Continuum of Youth Involvement.  You say that the Continuum can help educators avoid some of the common pitfalls in executing youth engagement initiatives.  What are they?
 
A:  I think the reality is that when you look at the examples in the Continuum, you’ve got young people making a broad range of decisions, and implementing [projects] based on those decisions.  There can be a couple of places where you can fall short:  one is offering young people who’ve never practiced decision-making the opportunity to make decisions, and then expecting them to do it with 100% success—that’s one problem.  And when the project is not successful, adults rescue the students so that the students don’t ever understand consequences, or feel accountability for their decision-making. They either aren’t allowed to fail at all or are allowed to fail in an unproductive, unsafe way. [If students are going to fail], it needs to be in a safe environment where they learn and understand not just the results related to accountability, but the nature of the decision-making that got them there.  So it’s failure without learning, and that’s another pitfall that really pushes young people away. Failure with learning isn’t really failure. It’s learning.
 

Q:  What constitutes a safe environment for students?
A:  It’s about trusting that somebody has your back, that somebody shares your interests, and trusting that somebody can tell you the truth in a way that’s respectful and is about learning, and shared goals.  It’s all of those things that you’d expect in any trusting relationship—whether that’s within a family, in a community, the workplace, or if it’s a teenager in a school.
 

Q: Is there a temptation for an instructor to jump to the “Engagement” column of the Continuum and try to start there instead of building up to that achievement?
A:  The way that I use the Continuum--and the reason I created it—was to say “be honest about where you are and start there.”  The Continuum is not designed as a hierarchy:  it’s a strategic growth map on how to get to engagement.  Because if young people have previously only been participants, they’re not ready to be engaged fully; you don’t have a relationship there to engage them successfully and effectively.  [Young people] haven’t developed the tools, practices, or understanding of “cause and effect” with decisions, accountability, results, work and rework, and all of the things that go into being engaged. You aren’t ready and they aren’t ready
 

Q:  What do teachers and students need to keep in mind when venturing into a youth engagement initiative?
A:  It would be a stretch to take someone who was, say, a successful assembly line employee, and suddenly make them CEO of the company and tell them to “go do it and bring everybody else along.”  It doesn’t mean that an assembly line person couldn’t become CEO, but you don’t make that jump without some investment, practice, and learning over time because the skill sets are different—even though the context is theoretically the same.  How you engage in the classroom requires a lot of different skill sets on the teacher’s part, but also on the student’s part, too.  Youth engagement is not just a change in practice for the teacher, but a change in practice for the young person, as well.  And that’s why on the Continuum, the emphasis on accountability is detailed for both teachers and students at every level of the work.
 

Q:  But a student can’t expect that engagement will be a component of every class they attend every day, can they?
A:  That’s the reason why youth engagement needs to be a core strategy in education.  And that means that engagement isn’t something that happens in one classroom—it happens across the educational environment.  And that’s one of the pitfalls to [youth engagement] efforts that have burned teachers— and principals and administrators—who have put their necks out to engage young people.  [Youth engagement] has not been systemically understood as a strategy for educating young people. So, it hasn’t really been safe for adults or young people trying to make it happen.
 

Q:  If engagement is part of one class a student takes, and not part of another, couldn’t that cause a student to become further disengaged in courses that don’t embrace engagement?  Doesn’t every instructor want to be the “cool teacher” who’s always able to engage their students?
A:  I’m glad you brought that up, because youth engagement is not about “cool.”  That’s a misconception.  It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what engagement is, and it’s a conversation I’ve had many times with adults.  Kids know which of their teachers are trying to be “cool,” and trying to be their friend—and those aren’t the ones they’re engaged with.  With the kids I’ve worked with, I made sure they understood that I wasn’t their “friend,” [but their partner and supporter in whatever we were trying to accomplish.]  I’m generally a friendly and easygoing person, but in this relationship, the engagement [with my students] was about a shared goal, discipline, and solid, trusting relationships—we were working together on something.  I always told them I would work as hard for them as they were working for themselves. But, that as soon as I was working harder, we would have to stop and assess our relationship, focus, and work together. Students may like some of those “cool” teachers, but if they’re not teaching them, they know it, and they’ll call you on it.  It’s really important to note that engagement isn’t about popularity, it’s about effectiveness. Students are smart and intuitive about this.
 

Q:  The teachers I remember from high school and college whom I learned the most from, they were all pretty serious about what they were
teaching.
A:  Authenticity is absolutely at the core of it.  If you think about who your really great teachers were, although some of them might have been cool, some of them were absolutely not cool.  There is research out there that talks about how the nature of the teacher-student relationship guides and determines how effective that learning environment is, and what subjects kids end up being drawn to.  And it’s not necessarily the subject, but how it’s being taught, and how you and the teacher engaged in that learning together.
 

Q:  You’ve pointed out in our conversations that there’s a difference between a “youth” and a “student.”
A:  We have this really bizarre structure where we call a 15 year old kid a “student” from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and from 2:01 p.m. to 6:59 a.m. the next day, he’s a “youth.”  The role of student and the role of youth are fundamentally different.  They have different expectations. The adults they interact with behave differently, have different training, and provide different opportunities.  And what adults do in the “youth” world and what they do in the “student” world typically don’t connect.  So we create these multiple systems because it’s how we’ve approached things historically, rather than thinking about what does it mean as a city, for example, to provide good opportunities for youth to grow up here?
 

Q: So these terms aren’t interchangeable?
A:  In no way, shape or form except that [you’re] referring to the same kid.  Teachers don’t learn about youth development, youth development people don’t know what’s going on in classrooms, afterschool programs aren’t tied to what’s going on in schools, and [adults] in the classroom don’t know where kids are going afterschool.
 

Q:  Service-learning has become a popular way to engage students.  Is that an effective way to introduce students to youth voice and engagement?
A:  It certainly can be.  I’ve seen service-learning in a variety of forms:  I’ve seen it where a box is checked and where the kids only participate and do what they are told, or, at other times, where the kids have only nominal voice, and still others where service-learning is transformative, where there is true engagement. Service-learning as a tactic for youth engagement can be really transformative—for student and teacher—with the right approach and philosophy behind it. The devil is in the implementation details.
 

Q:  Going back to a term you referred to earlier:  how do you introduce students to the concept of accountability?
A:  If you watch young people interact with each other, there’s a whole lot of accountability [because] they’re approaching each other from an equal power position.  There is a sense of mutual responsibility. It reminds me of a quote I read somewhere to the effect of “accountability is what is left when responsibility has been subtracted.” Students don’t have much responsibility in school. The structure of education leaves them only accountable to sit down, stay out of trouble, and [get good] test scores.  They’re not responsible or being held accountable for offering ideas to improve the school, to help prevent bullying, for mentoring younger students in their school. They don’t see their role in creating a positive school climate or maintaining the cleanliness of the school.  Without any real responsibility, they are merely held accountable for taking the test, making the grade, be a decent kid and stay out of trouble. If they don’t do those, then there may be consequences.
 

Q: You often hear students complain that they’re never going to “need” a certain course or area of study because it will have no bearing on what they want to do in life after high school. Why is youth engagement important in a longer view?

A:  Youth voice and engagement is about relationships, about learning how to navigate institutions, and learning how to communicate with adults, now and as young people move forward in their education or even careers.  How do you ask good questions?  How do you deal with uncertainty?  Ambiguity?  How do you have the confidence to connect with others when you’re on a strange campus that you’ve never been to before?  How do you make decisions?  All of these things have to do with how engaged you are in school, and in life before you get to college, for example.  There are kids who are returning home from college because they’ve never been in an uncertain situation, or in a place where adults weren’t controlling the environment.  They’ve never been in a place where they’ve had to make decisions that can have a significant impact on their education.  And so they get to college and have to figure out what courses to take, they have to figure out their financial aid, where their dorm room is, and meet the person they’re going to be living with.  They haven’t done any of that and it’s incredibly scary, and they don’t have the tools.
 

Q:  There’s a lot of discussion of issues like Common Core at all levels of government.  Do you think that youth engagement as a core value of education will ever get that kind of attention?

A:  I don’t see anything yet in any of the discourse I’m aware of that indicates a shift toward the development of young people as a focus in education.  If you look at what the dialogue is, and what the debate is about in this country, it’s about twists and turns in the institution of education, it’s not about learning, and keeping up with all that we know and continue to learn from science about how learning happens.  We’ve built this superstructure that is the education system, and we’re creating all kinds of pedagogical debates and philosophies around Common Core issues, while remaining beholden to the same old structures and systems.  There are all these conversations and policies trying to shift the rules in a system that has never decided that its goal for improving is actually to engage our students better in learning.
 

Q:  You’ve put forth some ideas and concepts about education that people might not be comfortable with.  Some of your ideas could even be called subversive.
A:  (laughing) Well, they are.  They are!  They’re “subversive” because we’re really comfortable in education in running the Institution of Education—we’re not really comfortable in engaging students.  It’s the context of a navel-gazing approach where we keep looking and tweaking The Institution as it exists, and iterating off The Institution as it exists without ever coming back and asking the fundamental questions about our relationship to young people and our goals [for them].  It is subversive because everybody is sitting comfortably in institutions of education and school districts that have failed chronically—particularly in urban areas—for generations, and a bureaucracy that keeps them from fundamentally having to change their approach.
 

Q:  What do you see for the future of education and our students?
A:  I think that the monolithic “one size fits all” school district is a model that is a thing of the past.  Some are going to dismantle more slowly than others, and for a range of reasons including a lack of faith in government, and shifts in politics more broadly.  I think that the centralized source of knowledge and expertise is no longer a part of our sociopolitical and cultural belief systems. If charters [charter schools], for example, are managed and learned from appropriately, and are they are successful, there are opportunities for more input and more learning than there is with one central gatekeeper and system.
 
If you’ve got 10 charters in your district and a central office [then] you get to learn from perhaps 11 different, nuanced approaches to education, rather than one.  To me, that’s how we can do better. But, districts and charters don’t often have that kind of relationship unfortunately. Charters aren’t a panacea. They are an opportunity to learn. I’m hopeful we can learn.  Some of the best charters in our district [Metro Nashville Public Schools] are criticized for being “overly disciplinarian,” and for having an almost military type structure.  But, the thing is that kids don’t innately dislike that.  If they trust you, and you share a goal, and [this structure] is about achieving that goal, and they understand it, then they don’t resist that kind of thing.  What kids resist is “command and control,” from people they don’t trust force-feeding them an idea they haven’t bought into, and don’t have a shared interest in.  Once you’ve built a shared interest and a relationship of understanding, kids will engage when they understand that it’s part of getting them where they want to go.
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Well, now that I have your attention, there’s a good chance you are continuing to read to confirm your established “down-with-charters” position, or alternately, you are a “charter” advocate with your defenses up ready to blast me in the comments section. 

But, there is a reason I put “charters” in quotations. So, if you are an ideologue and obsessed with that word, either for or against it, or if you have established your “position on the issue,” this blog is especially for you. 

I am calling for a moratorium on the word itself: no more “charters”. Stop saying the c-word! 

It is a word about adults. It is a word about adult-led systems. It is a word about ideology. It is a word about politics. It has nothing to do with kids or families or communities anymore.

This is a challenge to the School Board, educational leaders, policymakers, advocates, funders, unions, teachers, families, and everyone else.

Let’s talk about kids. Let’s talk about communities. Let’s talk about the quality and direction of education reform by talking about student outcomes, about parent choice and engagement, about diverse opportunities to meet diverse student skills, interests, and family needs. Let’s hire a director of schools who wants to talk about these issues in their complexity and messiness, who won’t bite at the attempt to simplify things for the sake of politics and punditry. Let’s hope we have a new Mayor who will do the same.

As a city, if we can’t engage in educational discourse without this word, then we aren’t having the right discourse, and we probably aren’t getting anywhere with it. 

If we can’t take this challenge then maybe the conversation is really about us and defending our position and fueling our righteous indignation. We thrive on the high emotions and the intensity of the debate and simultaneously over-simplify education reform to the point of meaninglessness.

There are kids across the county in public school classrooms, in a variety of public school designs, with a range of curricula and a diversity of teachers and pedagogies, from diverse communities and families, with differing needs, aspirations, and expectations for their education.  We need an education system that supports success for every one of them. We won’t get there with a binary debate or singular strategy.

So, let’s take the challenge. Let’s drop the c-word and start a meaningful conversation about education in our city. ​

by Teri Dary, Anderson Williams, and Terry Pickeral, Special Olympics Project UNIFY Consultants

In our last blog, we focused on what creative tension means in the context of relationships between young people and adults in our schools. We outlined core principles and assumptions that are critical for this work, and discussed how the roles for young people and adults shift in the creative tension model.

This blog presents a series of real-world examples that demonstrate the use of a creative tension in carrying out intergenerational work within the school context. There are a few key ideas to keep an eye on. First, each example shows youth and adults working toward shared goals, with young people being viewed as meaningful contributors and partners in the process. Second, supporting their shared goals, you will see how personal goals and aspirations align with and support their collective work. Finally, each values the other’s experiences, perceptions, skills, beliefs, and ideas and understands that they are critical to achieving personal and shared goals.

Ultimately, these examples are intended to demonstrate the varying ways schools and systems can support and nurture collaboration and shared outcomes between youth and adults.


Curriculum and Instructional Design

A high school chemistry teacher created a more connected learning process by organizing unit information on his white board by the content standards, and then highlighting for the students where each of these standards were addressed in labs, quizzes, class activities, homework, and tests. Rather than simply posting the standards, this is an active, dynamic process to help students understand how each discreet learning element ties to the bigger picture and connects to other learning. These connections then play out in quizzes, homework, and summative labs, which guide students in determining their level of understanding and focuses on demonstrating mastery rather than just obtaining a grade and moving on. Students are making decisions about how and when to study based on this knowledge and are better prepared to guide their own learning. Alternately, the teacher continuously engages students in the process of learning from design to assessment, helping them better understand how everything fits together and their role in both teaching and learning. 

A core component of the structure for this chemistry class is having students work in groups that stay the same throughout each unit. Groups are encouraged to apply critical thinking in labs and class assignments by altering variables and designing their own labs to produce desired results. In ensuring all students are contributing team members, everyone in the group is responsible for teaching as well as learning from others in the process.

The result? Creative tension between the students and teacher in working toward shared goals has substantially increased learning, engagement, and ownership of the teaching and learning process by both the teacher and students.


Basic Lesson Planning

We were reading “A More Beautiful Question” by Warren Berger recently and he shared an example of a teacher who recognized the challenge of engaging students when teachers ask all the questions (and hold all the answers). He wanted students to ask the questions in class, so they would own the process of finding the answer. So, for one lesson, instead of asking “how long will it take to fill that bucket with water” and having the students complete a worksheet with prompts and places for calculations and so forth, the teacher took a video, a long video, of water dripping into a bucket and showed it to his students. It was mundane and redundant and monotonous and felt weird, like nothing was happening. Finally, almost exasperated, the students asked for themselves: “how long is it going to take to fill that bucket!?” Now that the students had asked, they also actually were intrigued and interested in finding out. As a result, the students built their solution not only from their own question, but from the shared experience of watching that water drip into the bucket. They wanted an answer, so they worked to find it.


Parent Engagement

One high school we worked with, like many around the country, was experiencing significant demographic shifts with a huge influx of students and families from Latin America. They knew many of their parents did not speak English, but also knew that they were sending home important information about the school, about their students, and so forth that the parents could not read. For starters, they knew they needed to translate their materials into Spanish.

They contacted a nearby university and through their Multicultural Center found college students eager to assist. However, the university students requested that high school students in Spanish classes also be engaged in translating the various communications to parents.  As a result, the school, Spanish teachers, high school students, and college students all worked together, sharing and enhancing each others’ skills and awareness of the issue. To do so required some changes in process for each and required creative tension among all to make it successful.

Ultimately, the university students working with a countywide nonprofit established English classes for Latino families.


School Governance

A high school leadership class was designed to provide students an opportunity to learn and practice valuable leadership skills by addressing issues in their school and community. One group of students in the class decided they were concerned about students’ ability to transition from the overly structured high school environment to the unstructured college environment. They had never experienced or practiced the decision-making that comes with such freedom.

To address this issue, they decided seniors should be able to have open campus lunch, to practice some additional independence. The group worked with their teacher to review board policy and school rules, surveyed local businesses, and developed an open campus proposal. (This process in and of itself was also an exercise in independence.) The principal gave permission to work on the project and provided a set of criteria that would need to be met. Additional provisions were made to address concerns raised by teachers, community members, and local businesses. Based on this work, the students developed a district policy and succeeded in getting the policy passed by the school board, allowing seniors to leave campus during lunch. 

Working across systems is inherent to working intergenerationally and requires the ability to generate creative tension rather than destructive. Complaints or protests or otherwise by the students could have just as easily shut down the opportunity and the solution they sought. Working together allowed it to come to fruition. Additionally, this process and the additional trust and responsibility provided to seniors generated improvements in school climate more broadly.


School Leadership

A group of high school students working with a community based organization began to research and ask questions about why only a handful of students at their school went to college each year, when they knew the numbers were vastly greater at other public schools across town. When they first raised the subject with their principal, she was immediately defensive and tried to shut down any avenues for continued research and organizing. In response, the youth requested a series of meetings with her to discuss the issue, their research, and their concerns; just with her, no pressure and no real need to be defensive in front of teachers, colleagues, etc. Ultimately, the principal became the schools’ biggest advocate for college access and, working with her students and her counseling staff, doubled the number of students who made it to college in one year. Their work together was highlighted in a documentary called “College on the Brain.” With their initial questions, the students had accidentally created a destructive tension scenario, because the principal did not feel safe to have the discussion without going on the defensive. Reaching out and clarifying their desire to work together and articulating how improving college access could be a shared goal for students, counselors and the principal, the students moved toward creative tension and enabled a powerful example of intergenerational work.


School Climate

Students, parents and schools around the country have created and implemented R-Word campaigns to eradicate the derogatory use of the word “retard” in their schools. With the goal of making schools safer and more equitable for all students, an R-Word campaign sends a powerful message, but one that is only made powerful by the commitment of students, teachers, school leaders, and parents. In other words, it is a community effort. Typically, these campaigns begin as a conversation between students and teachers who then get commitment from school administrators. In developing a plan and a kickoff on Spread the Word to End the Word Day, the school community works together to create banners and posters, to get food, to get commitment signatures and so forth. As a result, schools that have gone through this process of working together and worked toward a more inclusive school environment have seen dramatic improvements in school climate and reduction in bullying.

There are clearly many ways each school can begin to incorporate creative tension to enhance intergenerational work. And, they all begin with a shared goal among young people and adults around a creating an engaging teaching and learning environment where all students and adults have opportunities to contribute meaningfully. The key is to begin. Start from where you are, start small, and seek continuous improvement.
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