A Little About A Lot

A Little About A Lot

When are we going to get serious about giving learning leaders the power to do what’s right for their learners?

An article this week in EducationWeek online listed the following demands from classroom teachers for a better professional life, beyond the professional pay due but sadly absent all these years:

Having more say in the curriculum

Smaller class sizes and reduced workloads

Reducing classroom hours

Providing better professional development

Our learning coaches, who worked for us in the personalized learning lab school, located in the Houston Museum District several years ago, decided along with their young learners what curriculum was going to be used, they had 25 learners and a learning day spread out beyond 8 hours with multiple breaks scheduled, the young learners might have spent 2-3 hours inside their production studio (classroom), and the learning coaches told us what they needed for professional development and we went and found it.

Oh, and each learning coach was paid $100,000 each for their services.

The current public school system is just the wrong model to arrive at the goals we want to see in our best adult learning leaders.

When are we going to get serious about learner agency?

I read an article this week in EducationWeek online asking how we can give students more agency in class without losing control? I think the question should have stopped after “agency.”

Here’s what the author opined as ways to give young learners more control in their learning:

Set clear expectations

Explain the why.

Build community.

Utilize formative conversations.

Assign problem-based learning projects.

Skip grading every now and then.

And I would add one more.

Work hard so that one day each of your young learners can define, plan, executive, and evaluate their own learning, and don’t worry about losing control. That’s the point.

Why is Iowa celebrating so much?

Kim Reynolds, the current Iowa governor, and her fellow Republicans are giddy this week after The Des Moines Register reported more than 29,000 had applied for an education savings account. An education savings account can be used by an Iowa family currently enrolled in either a public or private Iowa school for private school tuition somewhere in the state.

According to the article, most of the 29,000 applications came from families already enrolled in an Iowa private school. Yes, you read that correctly.

So instead of Iowa creating a system whereby a family could use state money to draft a learning plan that best suited their young learner, utilizing public, private, and community resources, Kim Reynolds and her Republicans gave money to private school parents to help them pay for an education they were already paying for.

Nice work Kim.

So let’s go back to the control question, as in “who should control a young person’s learning? The learner themselves or the adults around them?”

This week NPR interviewed a psychologist and author named Shefali Tsabary.

Tsabary suggested the following If adults wanted to start building capacity inside their kids to own their own learning:

Move away from shame and blame.

Act from a place of humility.

Reframe disrespect.

Manage your expectations.

Be in charge, not in control.

Hey, it’s summer, a low-risk time for parents to try some of this out before school starts in the fall.

Why don’t you do this? Using Tsabary’s suggestions, help your child build a simple learning plan for something they want to learn this summer. Remember, no shame and blame, be humble, come up with a common definition of disrespect, manage your expectations (in fact, initially lower them), and press the “in charge” button instead of the “control” one.

Let’s see what happens.

When will microschools stop being so damned vulnerable to closing up?

Today I heard from a friend that her daughter’s microschool was closing up due to financial difficulties. Kelly’s daughter, Olivia, was devastated that a favorite place to learn for her was no longer going to be an option. Luckily, because they could, Olivia’s family found another school for her to attend in the fall.

But what about those families that can’t find another school to attend? What about those families whose perfect learning place has been taken away because we can’t figure out a way for young learners to learn in places they feel comfortable in, whether they be public, private, afterschool, community-based, learning pod, or microschool?

After 50+ years of trying to get this learning stuff better, all of the decision-makers and reformers should be better than this.

My apologies to Olivia that we aren’t.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB