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

  • marvels, each and every one.

    Image: from Firehouse 3rd grade 57-58 Mrs Barrett by Clarkstown67 available on flickr through a creative commons license.
    I came across this quote today on Angela Maiers’ blog:


    “When will we teach our children in school what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are
    unique. In all of the world there is no other child exactly like you.
    In the millions of years that have passed there has never been another
    child like you. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a
    Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel.”

    ~ Cellist Pablo Casal~

    It rips my heart out each time I hear a teacher refer to a student as a monster, as unteachable, as not wanting to learn.

    Powered by ScribeFire.

  • remaining curious

    Image: Ghetto Curious George by the Frankfurt School made available on flickr by a creative commons license.

    (crossposted at leadertalk)

    About a week and a half ago, the night before beginning at a new school, I wrote a post called Allowing Curriculum Planning to Remain Curious. I
    wrote about how I needed to remain curious about my students and their
    contexts in order to create meaningful curriculum for them.

    Today
    I am struck with how important it is to remain curious. One of the
    reasons I reminded myself to remain curious, to not fall back on old
    assumptions about learning, is because I am in a new school. With a new
    school comes a whole new culture and different sets of needs and
    expectations. Christian Long helped me towards this reminder when he wrote, in his note to self on the eve of his own first day at a new school, “You have plenty of time to share new ideas,
    but listening, watching, and respecting is the first rule of business.
    Listening and watching is your best trait going forward in this first
    year.”

    My mind keeps returning to that notion of remaining curious. How easy
    it is to be curious now that I am in a new school, but I am already
    noticing that I have created opinions about my students and the school
    that I take for granted after only one week! So, how much easier it is
    to create assumptions and rely on them rather than question and try to
    understand!

    I’m coming to the realization that remaining curious about what I do
    as a teacher, a program planner, a member of a school community is
    precious. By keeping myself open to possibilities, by trying to
    understand the hows and whys of things, I keep education alive for me
    and it remains my passion.

    So my task going forward is remembering to remain curious.

    Powered by ScribeFire.

  • Ethics in the classroom and common ground

    I have been involved in a very stimulating conversation on Durff’s blog around the issue of ethics in the classroom.

    Both Durff and I agree that ethical behaviour must be stressed in the classroom and modeled by teachers. I think you can tell from our comments that we are both quite passionate about this.

    Where our views start to differ is how this is done. You can read about our differing viewpoints in the comments to the original post – what I find interesting is the conversation that has developed.

    Ethics is messy – it really does have to do with our own world-views and it can be messy and difficult to talk about the things that really matter to us, the things that hit us in our gut, that touch our values around what it means to be human. The rub in all of this is that we do not all have the same values nor the same world view.

    Two of my beliefs related to this topic:

    • I strongly believe that we can not assume there to be one ethical plumbline to live by. Furthermore I think that this assumption implies another, that if one does not adhere to this plumbline then one is acting unethically. I think this is problematic in any society that is diverse.
    • I believe that ethical decisions should be contextual and arrived at from within a situation rather than determined from external sources like codes of conduct/ethics. (I have written more on this subject, if you are at all interested I invite you to read this paper, though I warn you it is a bit lengthy :) Conversations for ethical decision-making in secondary schools (Rosen, 2005) )

    I do think it important – indeed necessary – to create a common ground in order to be able to have conversations around ethics, in order to be able to teach about ethics.

    In trying to understand Durff’s insistence on an ethical plumbline, I wonder if perhaps this common ground is something along the lines of what she means.

    Such a common ground for me would have to:

    • acknowledge that there is more than one world-view in the room
    • acknowledge that my world-view is not better or worse than yours, just different
    • be prepared to learn about different beliefs and world-views
    • be prepared to take a considered position when I am involved in decision-making
    • understand that a considered position includes more than one or two considerations

    What would be important for you to have in this common ground?

    Technorati Tags:

    Powered by ScribeFire.

  • Creating new bridges

    bridge and buds

    I’ll be starting a new job on the 27th of August. I’ll be teaching and designing a new program for students in Grades 9-11 at Howard S. Billings High School in Chateauguay, Quebec.

    This morning I published a new blog to accompany this new adventure of mine and to give voice to the stories I am sure will unfold.

    Bridges

    Powered by ScribeFire.

  • The Future of Teaching: Let’s continue the conversation


    Since yesterday, I have been involved in a conversation on Will Richardson‘s post The Future of Teaching.

    The first part of this post was originally posted as a comment to The Future of Teaching.

    I am getting the idea that we, at least those of us involved in this conversation, are ready to act on new ideas. People have asked for priorities, have asked about where we go from here.

    I think that something like this can help us get there. I know that Gervase Bushe has been using Appreciative Inquiry with the Vancouver Public School System. This was published in the Summer 2007 edition of the SFU Business Newsletter, the Executive Edge:


    In the last Executive Edge newsletter we told you about a $150,000 three-year research project to study a change management trend called appreciative inquiry. It’s a new process that works to change the way people think – to get them thinking collectively about how they want their organization to operate.


    Gervase Bushe, SFU Business associate professor of management and organizational change, who is consulting and studying the process and its outcomes at the Vancouver School Board, reported on the results of the first year of study. “Preliminary indications are that the change process has been so successful that the BC Schools Superintendents’ Association is offering appreciative inquiry training and is also planning an appreciative inquiry summit for Kelowna in August,” says Bushe. What’s more, he says, numerous BC School Districts are planning to use appreciative inquiry in their schools next year.


    It’s a powerful change process, based in the very foundations that have been brought up in with Will’s post.

    Here is a recent article that Gervase wrote, which I think does a great job at outlining just what Appreciative Inquiry is:

    G.R. Bushe (2007). Appreciative Inquiry is not about the Positive.

    He talks about the generative nature of AI:

    Generativity occurs when people collectively discover or create new things that they can use to positively alter their collective future. AI is generative in a number of ways. It is the quest for new ideas, images, theories and models that liberate our collective aspirations, alter the social construction of reality and, in the process, make available decisions and actions that weren’t available or didn’t occur to us before. When successful, AI generates spontaneous, unsupervised, individual, group and organizational action toward a better future.


    If we were to design an appreciative change process for our school systems I think we could find our way to get there…together.

    It would begin with a conversation that has already begun not only in Will’s post that I referenced above but in various places across the blogosphere – on LeaderTalk, on Scott Mcleod‘s blog, Kevin Sandridge‘s, Barbara Barreda‘s,  Miguel Ghulin‘s, Justin Medved‘s, Dennis Harter‘s, Stephen Ransom‘s,  and many others.

    Is anyone interested in continuing that conversation? I’d love to be part of the process with you.

    Powered by ScribeFire.