Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Author: Tracy Rosen

  • 6 lessons from the first week of school

    What a week. I’m sure we all say the same after the first week back with students in September! I had a few 14 hour days last week and this is really the first time my head feels clear enough to reflect on my first week with new students and a new organizational structure at Directions Alternative School. I decided to frame this post with the lessons I learned.

    Lesson 1: Though it was fun (ish) don’t plan a huge, physical field trip for the first day of school.
    I say ish because, though it was fun meeting the new students and seeing them interact outside of the classroom, I am a big baby with heights and for some reason agreed to the plan during our pre-schoolyear meeting to spend the day zip-lining at Morin Heights. Yes, I had to be rescued part of the way. I should have known from my panic-ridden chair lift ride up the mountain that perhaps I don’t need to make my way through an obstacle course while attached to a wire by 2 clips some 50 odd feet from the ground.

    We left for the trip at about 8:30 am and returned around 5:30. We then had to meet to separate our students into leadership groups and talk about the following few days of classes. Though a beautiful sunny day in the country, it had been both physically and mentally exhausting. It left me with very little energy for the ensuing 3 days of classes. Great trip for a Friday or the day before a holiday, not for the first day of school!


    Lesson 2: Confident kids don’t make fun of others
    By watching the group dynamics both in my classes and out of them, during lunch or other break times, I am noticing more and more that the students who are the most self-assured do not make fun of others. The students who aren’t do. The lesson in that is for me (us) to create conditions that promote the growth of self-assurance, confidence in my classroom, our schools.

    Lesson 3: Change is hard
    I’m sure that zip-lining was not the only cause for exhaustion this week. New students, new head teacher, new schedules. There have never been schedules in our program before. We always planned things on what was needed at the time. We also always had the same students all day and this year we are subject-specific teachers rather than core teachers. A lot of change at once. It is tiring to get used to. Much more so for some of the returning students. I had one student write, in his welcome day essay, Yesterday was probably the best thing about this whole year. Other ones have made similar noises. The lesson from this is that change is hard and I (we) need to remember that change is even more difficult for students in need (emotionally, academically, socially) and to give them the time and space to adapt.

    Lesson 4: I love spending time with my students
    When I woke up yesterday morning I thought WHY did I offer an art field trip to my students for the first Saturday of the school year? What, am I crazy? We met in Montreal (they live in Chateauguay, I live in Ontario, an hour away) at 1 and had a great day. We made our way to the Meeting Of Styles outdoor painting site at 1825 Cabot (Les Papiers M.P.C), spent some time there, took loads of photos, then walked around my old neighbourhood in St. Henri and visited a few art galleries. Before going home we stopped by the graffiti site again and I am so glad I did! I spotted someone I know writing high up on a wall, called out to him, and may have found the perfect guest teacher for art class :) His writing name is Fluke. I was so excited about it and all the girls who came with me could say about it is – does he have a girlfriend? (He’s a cutie.) All told, we spent 4 1/2 hours walking and looking at art, save for about 30 minutes for lunch. A great day. The lesson here, I plan things because I think they are good ideas. Don’t give up on the plan because you’re tired. In fact, the day energized me in a way that would not have been possible had I stayed at home. I love spending time with my students.

    I’m planning on asking the 3 students who came with me to create a post at our art class blog, with images and commentary on the day. I’ll let you know when it is done. For now, here is a picture from the day. If you are a friend of mine on facebook you can see a few others at MOS art trip 2009.

    MOS MTL 09, Saturday afternoon
    MOS MTL 09, Saturday afternoon. Yes, there ARE female writers!

    Lesson 5: Life doesn’t stop because it is the first week of school
    I was eating corn the other night and my top left front tooth shifted position. I managed to move it somewhat back into place but couldn’t quite close my jaw properly. It’s a crown. I went to my dentist and turns out I bent the post and managed to crack off some of the existing tooth structure. He repaired as much as he could as a short-term solution so I can finally close my mouth BUT I will be needing an implant. Front tooth. Ugh. Surgery, time, money. What a time for it to happen, eh? Lesson learned here is that life does not stop because I am busy. Managing all of the different elements in my life is important so that surprises like this don’t throw me way off track. It helps to have a wonderful dentist who agreed to stay late to see me so that I wouldn’t have to take time off of work during my first week.

    Lesson 6: The more I learn, the more I need to learn.
    Last January I withdrew from the PhD program I had started the previous January. I was a slave to two schools. What a horrible way to live something I love – teaching. So it was important for me to stop. However, I miss learning. I really do. I miss that feeling of excitement as I see things connect, as I feel my new learning integrate with the old, creating new knowledge. I feel it throughout my pores. So I decided to go back to school but in a way that makes more sense for me right now. I am starting with one online course at Seneca College (Toronto) and am working my way toward an Intercultural Relations Certificate. Here is the description from Seneca College:

    Globalization brings the peoples of the world closer together. However, discrimination and other forms of intolerance continue to cause problems. In our increasingly multicultural society these issues can lead to exclusion and inequality, often along racial and ethnic lines.

    This on-line program is a direct response to learning needs identified by a broad range of representatives from human services and justice agencies who recognize that racial inequity and negative stereotyping are significant social problems. In this six course certificate in Intercultural Relations, learners will examine diversity issues in a social context, explore critical differences in cross-cultural communication and identify the sources, causes, forms and manifestations of these issues in our society.

    I chose this program because I find myself working more and more with students who live these realities, in particular my Native students though certainly not only them, and I find myself witness to some adults in the school system – who are meant to care for them – who continue the negative stereotyping and enable the inequities that exist. The more I see and the more I learn, I want to learn more. The lesson here is to learn from my heart. This online Certificate course at a small college is more in line with what my heart needs than the PhD course at the well-known university I decided to leave 9 months ago.

    So, here are some of the lessons I learned this week. What about you?

  • Religion in school – who has the final say?

    Poor Calvin. He would certainly not get that exemption in Quebec.
    Poor Calvin. He would certainly not get that exemption in Quebec.

    According to the Quebec courts it is the government who has the final say, at least in terms of what our children learn in school.

    I heard about this story on cbc news as I was driving to work this morning:
    Parents group to appeal ruling on ethics course: judge rejects bid for exemption. Studying religious culture doesn’t violate children’s right to freedom of religion, he rules

    Though it has been in some schools as a pilot program for a few years, Ethics & Religious Culture has been a mandatory course for all schools, grades 1-11, in Quebec for the past 2 years. All schools. The idea first came out when I was working with the Bronfman Jewish Education Centre in Montreal. In response, our schools were concerned that we were being forced to add a course on diverse religions to an already packed school day – what with 3 and sometimes 4 languages (English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish) and their own Judaic programming. Catholic and Muslim schools had similar concerns, so quite a few of the religious schools opted into the pilot phase of the program to see what they were dealing with.

    Now that the course is in the schools, parents are starting to express their own concerns. Some are bringing the ministry of education to court because they want to opt their children out of the course. Today we found out the Superior court has denied this petition. This course replaces older religion and morals courses, it teaches about diverse religions with an emphasis on the Catholic tradition since that is the historical religious tradition in Quebec. The goal is to open minds to different world views around ethical issues. Specifically, the 3 competencies for the course are:

    Competency 1 – Reflects on ethical questions
    Competency 2 – Demonstrates an understanding of the phenomenon of religion
    Competency 3 – Engages in dialogue

    What I like about it is the focus on dialogue that ethics brings into the course. That being said, I am not religious. I am not sure how I would feel if I were very religious and were trying to raise my children to be the same.

    I’m teaching the course for the first time this year and will be looking at the issue raised with this ruling as part of it. Issues like the role of the state, parent rights, children/student rights, the whole messy issue of multiculturalism and reasonable accommodation. Of course, I teach in a province that already has a precedent of mandating the learning of French in our schools, along with whether or not one has the right to an English education depending on the educational background (linguistic) of your family in the province of Quebec. Complicated, eh? Lucky for us, our own government is offering ample fodder for dialogue within its own practice. Doubly lucky since there are no English language materials – besides ones which were created by teachers involved in the pilot programs and who have taught it since then – being provided to us in order to teach the provincially mandated course. Oops, a little bit of ‘I digress’ going on, sorry.

    What do you think? Should the government or parents have the final say on religious education for children?

  • Should process trump content?

    You know, I used to think this. I used to think that as long as we taught the right tools our kids would be able to use them anywhere. They’d just plug in the right content and be done with it. It was the process that they needed to learn. Who cared about all that stuff we’re learning about, all that content-y stuff. That was irrelevant. As a teacher I thought I could teach just about anything – I was focusing on process so it didn’t matter how well I knew the content.

    But you know what? Experience is shifting that view. I’ve been teaching for 13 years now and am constantly working at different levels, teaching different subjects, mainly to kids who learn in alternative ways. Last year was the first time I taught attempted to teach Grade 10 Math. Ditto for Grade 11 Economics. Math, I gave up on. After the first term I switched with another teacher who was perfectly happy not having to grade the English essays I traded for it.

    The thing is I was so unfamiliar with the content that I could not merge it with process. I know how to teach/model different ways to help kids think, to help them think together and to visualize it both personally and within a community. That’s one of the reasons why I offered to teach this class. Last year was the first year of Quebec reform in Grade 10. Reform is competency-based learning and is very much centered around methodology and student-centered learning processes. My instinct was to focus on process and just plug in the content as I go.

    What a disservice to the students and what a frustration for me. I felt highly incompetent as a teacher. Though I know process, I had almost no idea what to do with it in the face of the content I was teaching myself as I went, just keeping a step or two ahead of the students. How could I possibly challenge the students who already knew the stuff or who got it right away? I spent much more time on classroom management in that class than in others. Even with the same group of students once I started teaching them English.

    Courses like English and Ethics, or History. Those I could do. I know those courses very well. I was able to use collaborative learning methodologies because I could keep a finger on the heart beat of what we were learning as we were going through the process of learning. I could helicopter back and forth from process to content very easily – say, from organization of an analysis (be it on paper or in some kind of a multimedia format) to using appropriate terminology as they analyzed different text.

    That’s from the teaching perspective. I also could feel the confidence of my students in me grow. They know when you don’t know your stuff. It is a disservice to be a teacher and to not know your content intimately. I don’t just mean knowing it, I mean knowing it.

    So – a year ago I never thought I would say this but I am now – we can not allow process to trump content. Ok, it’s a momentous occasion, I’ll say it again.

    We can not allow process to trump content.

    They both need to be there. The problem is that for a long time (and still, in some places, ok, maybe many places) content has been allowed to trump process. Education has a long history of teachers shoveling content down the brains of their students using whatever process worked for them. One.

    I think that in order to counterbalance that history some people are bending too far in the direction of process/methodology (what we call cross-curricular competencies in Quebec) and are forgetting the important role that content does play in the classroom, in teacher education, in teacher placement, in learning.

  • The winding down of summer vacation

    This time of year always seems rather unreal. Logically I know that my vacation is waning – the stark reality is that I head back to work next Wednesday but until I walk into the school, it doesn’t seem real.

    Even though I have definitely been thinking about the school year to come. I started two new blogs this week (I’m a little blog crazy, but I like them) – both to do with art and inspired by the winding down of summer vacation.

    Paint for 30

    paintfor30

     

    One morning I woke up and realized that I had not painted a single thing since moving here. One week of holiday left and not a paint drop to be seen, even with a whole room to dedicate to my studio! So I decided to do something about it. Paint for 30 is a way to remind me to paint for at least 30 minutes each day. Right now I know of one person who has it in her feedreader (my sister, who blogs/podcasts at Within a Quarter Inch. It’s freestyle podcasting on her latest quilty (and sometimes guilty) endeavors as well as commentary on other crafty blogs and living with 2 1/2 yr old twins and her husband in Athens, Ohio.) so just that helps me to paint each day. I’m finding the process helpful so far – both in the ‘just do it already’ area as well as the creative process.

    Tracy’s Art Class: doing. art

    tracysartclass

     

    I’m going to be teaching 3 sections of art this year. If I am not mistaken that might make up a heck of a lot of my teaching time and so I decided to start reaching out to the kids even before school started. A lot of my students are connected to me on facebook so after I made the blog I asked them to read it and start commenting. So far I’ve received a couple of comments and 2 images to add to the page. One of which may even need to become the class logo (yay to Evan for getting excited about art class)

    I’ll need to create spaces for the other 3 courses I’ll be teaching (holy crap. 4 courses, I was down to 3 but now I am back up to 4). Having sites for my courses helps me to keep them organized and alive in my head. Knowing that my students and I can always check in on them is reassuring.

    But for today I plan to set up my easel (I just splurged on an easel, probably paid way too much for it but I was too impatient to wait until I got to Montreal or Ottawa so bought it at the little stationery store in Alexandria), paint for 30 minutes, and then maybe do some gardening, tidy up this here house, putter putter.

  • What I mean by teachers being the only real agents of school reform

    This post is actually a comment in the conversation around school change over at Public School Insights – Casting Call for Teachers. It’s pretty much in the same state, maybe an extra sentence or two. I think it helps to clarify what I mean when I say “Teachers are the only real agents of school reform.” It’s a stark statement but holds truth.

    ——————————————————–

    I think there is a confusion with what I term as passion in teaching and teacher-hero. I absolutely do not believe in the teacher hero, unless it is as a community hero who just does the right thing (there are different understandings of hero – some have capes, like the movie star heroes, but most heroes are privately so and don’t even realize they are.)

    I disagree that retaining a model of passionate teaching will result in failed culture change. Retaining that model as hope for the future can only succeed in creating more instances of it – we see what we ask questions about.

    If it was understood that I thought teachers could/should act completely independently of anyone else I did not explain myself very well and for that I apologize.

    I am a big believer in whole system change initiatives. In particular through theoretical and methodological lenses like appreciative inquiry, open systems theory, and participatory action research. These theories state that all parts of any system have an effect on each other part, even when we don’t realize it. Each part is important, there is a symbiotic relationship through the parts of any system. Therefore all (or as many as we can get in the room) parts of a system need to be involved in any kind of change process for it to become transformational, as Sheryl so wonderfully put it.

    We do, however, have to recognize that the parts play different roles. In the educational system all of the roles are important and depend on each other – admin, teacher, support, children, families, boards (governing and school or district), government, health, social services… the list can go on. Even if all of the parts seem to be running in fabulous order – policy is good, the school is clean, parents are supportive, etc – if the teacher does not translate that policy into practice in her/his classroom, it doesn’t happen for the children.

    That is why I say that teachers are the only REAL agents of school reform – agent as acting agent. We are not the only participants in reform, we are not the only ones who can trigger reform, but we put policy into practice on the front lines. We act on it. In good situations that passion breathes life into the lessons we work on with our students, and the school-based policy we help to create with our colleagues and administration. In difficult situations we need passion to be able to spin bad policy into good practice. That’s a given. Otherwise, the practice will merely reflect the policy upon which it was based.

    We see what we ask questions about. If we continue to ask questions about how to fix a broken system we will see broken systems all around us. If we ask questions about how to generate balanced, participatory learning cultures, we will start to see places where they exist. And where they work.