Working Side by Side with Teachers

It has been a good week in Boston.  On Monday Ashley and I worked at Buckingham Browne & Nichols Lower School with early childhood through second grade teachers who are documenting a common project: an exploration of identity.  All of the teachers and students have approached this project in different and wonderful ways. Early this month we worked with them during a professional development day to organize a structured conversation where each teaching team could share their process, their learning, and their challenges along the journey of exploring identity and community with their students.

Each teacher or team is now in the process of writing a reflective introduction, choosing photographs to show the work in progress, choosing a format to share the student portraits and writing, learning to select common and effective fonts and font sizes for titles, student writing and quotes.

On Monday Ashley co-created with Anthony Reppucci, Lower School Assistant director, an overview plan for the whole gallery of this work that will fill the hallways and stairwells of the school building. Louise worked for several hours with Ben Goldhaber, one of the kindergarten teachers, on creating a draft display, all in the service of making the learning visible in the most respectful, effective and dynamic ways.

Yesterday Louise collaborated with teacher and director, Kristen Waters at Belmont Cooperative Nursery School to engage a small group of children age 3-5 in considering their pet guinea pigs closely...What have they noticed about them? What shape are their bodies? their ears? their feet? What color is their fur? What does their fur feel like? What do they like to eat? What do they like to do? Do they play? Are they friends? And then, using soft 8B pencils as well as harder HB pencils for the first time, the students drew guinea pig portraits. We were together for an hour and a half.

This is the kind of work that we have done for years, and it still endlessly captivating for us and for the teachers we work with.  All of the teachers we have worked with are surprised by what their students are able to accomplish, how they are seeing them with new insight, how much they are all learning together.

Rolling up our sleeves and doing the work along side teachers is what we do best and what seems to work best.  It is somewhat like the apprenticeship model.  We are all in it together, not only showing it, talking about it, and imagining it, but actually doing it.  And this seems to be fun, enlightening, practical, sensible and just plain necessary.

Side by side, we are putting inquiry and a strong image of the child at the center of our work.  Side by side, we are making creative materials as well as literacy essential and irresistible and we are making learning visible for the children and the community.

Documentation Panels at The St. Michael School of Clayton

The St. Michael School of Clayton (SMS), 5 miles from the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO, has recently uploaded to their website an impressive array of documentation panels, 21 in all.  Each panel is easily viewed and read as a PDF.   SMS has also printed each of the panels as a 2’x3’ poster to display in the hallways, turning the school into a gallery of student work.

The SMS faculty has been composing documentation panels for over 20 years having adapted this reflective practice from their colleagues/mentors in early childhoods schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy.  The first panels were attempts to tell the stories of student projects through teacher narrative, photos of students working, student dialogue and artifacts of student work.  Some displays would take up entire walls of the hallways…as large as 4 feet high and 15-20 feet long.  Most also included a long and detailed narrative by the guiding teachers…more than you’d want to know…however, each narrative was a concerted attempt to articulate the process that the students went through and to explain the artifacts as evidence of learning.

The current panels are much more succinct and they are composed with a high level of graphic design skill, yet they include all the same elements as the original panels.  As you read through the panels you get a sense of the essence of a project, rather than a detailed explanation of the process.  However, what is more clear than in the older panels, is the connection between spontaneous or planned provocations and the deliberate development of skills and habits of mind.

For instance, in the panel Mapping the Movement of Animals we see that the teachers artfully captured the students’ fascination with a class cat and connected it with the concept and tool of mapping.  The teachers even helped the students transfer this knowledge to the science lab where they were studying millipedes.

From a whole school perspective, including preprimary through eighth grade, when you read through the panels, you develop a strong sense of the ways a strong reflective practice effects the day to day life in the school; and how the daily intentions the teachers support a gradual, profound development of skills and habits of mind within the students.

That SMS has uploaded their panels to their website for easy access to all is a gift to all educators...a generous collaborative action for which all can be thankful.

Indianapolis Public School Butler University Lab School

  A month ago or so, I finished up a long time contract with a favorite school, the Indianapolis Public School Butler University Laboratory School, better known in Indianapolis as the Lab School.  I have worked with Butler University for, let's see, 10 years! and have worked with the Lab School for 5, ever since they became a school.  It has been an inspiration and a privilege to work with such a dedicated and hard working group of teachers, professors and administrators at both Butler University and their Lab School.  The great majority of the teachers employed by the school are Butler University graduates and this creates a unity and loyalty to both institutions, the university and the lab school.  The school is always on the trajectory of learning...undergraduates, graduates, instructors, deans, professors, teachers, pre school and elementary students, everyone is interested in continuous improvement.  By that I mean designing and fully participating in making learning more meaningful, more effective, more relevant, more exciting, more real.

So, I have grown too, alongside them.  Working with the Butler Lab School was my first significant contract as a consultant.  Soon after Ashley and I founded Cadwell Collaborative, I was hired by Ena Shelley who is the Dean of the College of Education at Butler.  Dean Shelley believed that I could be an effective coach and professional development leader for the Lab School and that meant a lot to me.  As it turned out, we have worked closely together and also with Ron Smith, the principal of the school to co-design the shape our learning would take.

I am so grateful for and proud of the work that we have done together.  We are all close colleagues now and will find ways to keep in touch.  Congratulations to all of you at the Butler Lab School for all the good and hard work that you continue to do every day.

My last day there, the teachers and I gathered for a final meeting.  I shared images that I had captured during the week of the beautiful work at the school some of which are featured in this blog post, and they reflected on what they were most proud of and what they celebrated the most about their work. (They had also done this earlier that week with Dean Shelley.) I conclude with some of their comments.

I think our greatest accomplishment as a school is creating the school’s culture. We are now reaping the harvest of that hard work . It is such a joy and a blessing. I would not be the teacher that I am today if not for the staff with whom I get to teach.

Personally, I feel tremendous growth. One way that I have grown is in allowing children to be more and more independent each year.

I love thinking about the deep personal connection that I have made with families over the years.

I feel that I understand how to create a space that welcomes children and offers opportunities that provoke wonder and thinking.

I want to make sure that the tone of my interactions with families comes from a place of caring, mutual understanding, and respect.

I have been especially proud of how my teaching is responding to the needs and thoughts of my students. I feel my strongest Reggio Inspired area of practice has been in my child driven inquiry of multiplication!

One of the things I am most proud of is my own development is the process of writing engaging, inspiring curriculum.

I love our library. We visited other classes and we all decided that we wanted the library to feel like a tree house.

It’s like a family here. Everyone is just a question away.

I’m new and that is true for me too. I could go into any classroom and ask for help.

Those 5th graders…they have made it all this way. They say, “You were a football player and now you are a teacher!”

Some days I think, “Do I really know anything?”

I am a filter. I help mediate so that we can move forward in the best way.

My teammates helped me. Even if I was crying they would say, “You are not going to have a day like this tomorrow. We are going to help you set up your room and your plans for tomorrow.

I love it here every day. I am so proud to be a part of this community.

In our school there is a feeling of warmth, inviting experiences and engagement. A community of parents and children.

There is a genuine, authentic spirit, a joy, and excitement for learning.

We see democracy here …children’s voices, children’s ideas for guidelines and agreements in their hand writing and in their portraits. We hear their voices when we walk the halls.

There is so much life and light in our school…green plants, energy, enthusiasm, freedom and openness and thoughtful, prepared spaces.

I love it here every single day. I am so proud to be a part of this community.

Come Learn With Us In Italy!

International Study Tours LLC and Angela Ferrario asked Ashley and me and our colleague and friend, Lori Geismar Ryan to co-lead a seminar in Italy in June of 2016! We are so pleased and excited about this opportunity. Ours will be a part of a seminar series on leadership that will take place in the charming town of Mercatello sul Metauro in the Marche region near Tuscany and Umbria. The seminars are designed to provide professional development for small groups of educational leaders, complemented by sightseeing excursions and encounters with local artisans, townspeople and village life.

Lori, Ashley and I worked together for 18 years in St. Louis as leaders in the St. Louis Reggio Collaborative hosting conferences and professional development opportunities for educators from around the country and the world. We were each leaders in our three schools, Clayton Schools' Family Center, The St. Michael School, and The College School. We have all moved away from St. Louis though we return to work with clients and schools and to see friends and family. Lori is a Senior Instructor at the University of Colorado Denver, School of Education and Human Development, is faculty in a state-wide early childhood leadership program and coaches in communities of practice both locally and nationally. Ashley and I are based in Boston and Vermont and continue to work and consult with educators and schools in North America and internationally through Cadwell Collaborative.

Our seminar will take place from June 11 - 16, 2016. I have copied the description that you will find in the brochure below. To learn more, to receive a brochure, and to register, click here or contact Angela Ferrario at aferrario@comcast.net. We hope to see you there!

Learning and Leading for the Future

What are the current challenges and opportunities that lead educators who design environments, curricula and learning experiences for communities of learners to dynamic possibilities for the future? What inspires all members of a learning community to embrace their passions and contribute to a healthy, hopeful future for our world? How do leaders invite and sustain such contexts and cultures?

These questions and others will frame the diverse and multi-layered experiences, conversations, and reflections of Learning and Leading for the Future. As an interactive community of learners within a welcoming and beautiful Italian setting, participants will:

- Look back at the field's historical roots and our own unique personal and professional stories

- Study together current neuroscience research, global competencies, 21st century skills and contemporary learning processes

- Re-imagine schooling based on life-worthy, life-long learning

- Leave with a new vision and new possibilities for redesigning their own learning communities with the future in mind

Appreciative Inquiry Stories with guest blogger Lori Ryan

 

Lori Geismar Ryan, our long time colleague and friend, is joining me to co-author this blog post.  Several years ago Lori and I were invited by the Taos Institute to contribute a chapter for a book about Appreciative Inquiry in practice.  Exceeding Expectations: An Anthology of Appreciative Inquiry Stories in Education from Around the World is now published and available as a free download here.  We highly recommend that you take the time to read the beautiful learning stories in this book!

The group that published the book, The Taos Institute, is committed to the belief that social constructivist ideas have powerful and positive implications for human life and well-being.  In the early 1990's, a group of scholars and practitioners including David Cooperrider, came together to found the Taos Institute.  The first few gatherings were held in Taos but now the central office is in Ohio.

David Cooperrider, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University is best known as the co-creator and creative thought leader of Appreciative Inquiry (AI).  His founding work with AI is creating a positive revolution in the leadership of change; it is helping institutions all over the world discover the power of the strength-based approaches to multi-stakeholder innovation and collaborative design.  Cooperrider began as a leader in the business community.  In the early 1990's, educators became intrigued with his approach as a fitting and powerful way to empower and transform any organization or group.

The curators of the new book have this to say...We are starting to realize that the solution to the ‘problems’ in our schools is not to focus only on what is broken, but to discover what is working, lift up the strengths and successes, and build new visions of success from there. This book is about these stories. It aims to showcase for the first time in one collection, the stories of how AI-inspired methodologies are helping to create positive transformations in our educational communities around the globe.

Lori and I are honored to have co-authored "An Appreciative Learning Partnership" that is the final of 26 stories.  Our chapter features our work with several schools and highlights the power of appreciative approaches with stories and practical examples.  As you begin a new school year, please enjoy this free download and share it with your communities of learners.  Another collaboration is coming up soon.  Lori and I will co-lead a seminar with Ashley, Learning and Leading for the Future, in Tuscany in June 2016 as part of a series of seminars on educational leadership organized by Angela Ferrario.  We will keep you posted!