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The Science Leadership Academy lost one of its founding members as our librarian, Paul Scaer, lost his battle with cancer and passed away at 3:30 am on Tuesday morning. Paul was a truly outstanding and caring educator, and his vision for the role of a library in an inquiry-driven and project-based school will guide us in the Scaer Library for years to come.

Paul took great joy in being a part of the SLA community, and he felt deep regret that he had to leave SLA before the work he set out to do was finished. As SLA continues to grow and evolve, we will honor Paul and his ideals by continuing to create a library that is both a place of great learning and of great joy.

That was what I wrote on the front of SLA’s web site today. And that was the sentiment of what I said to the students who knew Paul — our sophomores and juniors — this afternoon. But there’s much more to say…

Paul was an extraordinary educator. He embodied the ethic of care in the way that he treated students and teachers alike. As another one of our founding teachers said today — it was when Paul signed on to join us that we all really knew that something very special could happen at Science Leadership Academy. He left Masterman — one of the most prestigious magnet schools in the country — to build the library at SLA. He was well-respected state-wide for his leadership in school libraries. And, in fact, when I first called him, it was to see if he knew anyone to recommend as librarian, because it never even crossed my mind that he’d be willing to leave Masterman and join us.

Bringing Paul to SLA was one of the great stories of the birth of the school. I called Joyce Valenza, who I knew a bit from blogging and such, to see where I should look to recruit a tech-saavy “blended” librarian, and she told me that while she didn’t know the Philly scene that well, I should talk to Paul Scaer because he was a great resource in the city. Paul and I traded a few emails, and arranged to talk on the phone. We talked for a while, and I laid out my vision of the school and of the role of the library and of tech and of open source and asked Paul who he could recommend. Paul’s response was, “Well, I’d be really interested in doing that.” I don’t think I can accurately describe the stuttering response from me that followed, because I was so caught off-guard. With all of the due-diligence we did around the first cohort of teachers, I can say — we only interviewed one person for the librarian position.

There are few librarians who see their job as encompassing information specialist, music teacher, head of the second lunch-room, open-source advocate, union chapter chair and sounding board for the adults. Paul was all of those things and more. The library under Paul was a safe haven for so many kids. It was packed at lunch every day with students reading and playing music and talking. It was open every day after school, and there were always students at Paul’s desk with him. And he was a magnificient collaborator as well, bringing the ethos of research — such an important part of our school — into classes as he worked with other teachers to do information and research literacy classes so that kids saw the value and need for those skills as a part of every class, not just when students made a special trip to the library.

And on a personal note, Paul was an amazing colleague. Being a thirty-five year old founding principal wasn’t easy, and there were (are) many moments of a crisis of confidence for me along the way. One of the most humbling and comforting and emboldening things about that first year (and onward) was that educators like Paul — career teachers with many more years of experience (teaching and life) than me — believed both in our vision and in my ability to lead us there. As a young principal who occasionally wondered what I was doing even attempting what we were doing, Paul’s support and belief in me and willingness to dive into the work in front of us was so important to me.

Paul’s goal was to spend five years at SLA before retiring. He wanted to get the library to a point where a younger person could take the work he had done and build on it. We only had Paul for a year and a half, and he really did view his work at SLA as unfinished. We are very lucky in that we have hired the person this spring who has the energy and vision and passion to continue what he started. Last week, while sitting in on a meeting with our new librarian and various faculty members and library science experts in the area, I sent Paul an email to let him know that his vision was safe in her hands, and that his work would be continued. His family was, as we found out this week, reading him all the notes and letters and emails that people were sending him, and I hope that he heard what I wrote and could feel peace that his work would be continued, and that he could see his work at SLA as a job well-done for the leadership he gave the space that will forever bear his name.

While Paul was there, the library was my first stop every morning. Cup of coffee in hand, I would come into the library every day at the start of school to catch up with Paul… get his read on what was going on at school… bounce ideas around… or listen to his latest ideas for the space and the school. I looked forward to that every day. Our school lost a founding member today, but for me, I also lost a friend.

Paul Scaer was as kind and decent and passionate an educator and colleague as I will ever meet. Our world is better for his having lived in it, and he was taken from us far too soon

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Tom Hoffman, in his post Social Work and School Reform, cites an article from January’s Washington Post – DC School a Test of Teachers’ Grit:

And this:

Two of my personal goals for my own life is this — I want to be a great father and I want to be a great husband. I want to be powerfully involved in my childrens’ lives. I want to be the husband my wife deserves. If the only way I can be a great principal is to sacrifice those goals, then it’s not interesting to me. If I’m not home for dinner with my family (and dinner is often at 7:00 pm) at least three nights a week, it’s a bad week. I don’t want to miss a Saturday T-ball game because I’m at school. I’m in school from 8 am until 6 – 6:30 almost every day. After my wife goes to be at 10:00 pm, I sit down at the computer and work until about 1 am almost every night. I put in between 60-70 hours every week, and if that is not enough, then I am not interested in the job anymore.

We have to come up with a better model of urban school reform than the messianic workaholic model. It is unsustainable and it requires Faustian bargains that no one should have to make. The danger of KIPP… the danger of Dangerous Minds and Stand And Deliver and all the newspaper articles that talk about the unmarried / childless teacher / principal who makes their school their entire life is that it excuses us — as a society — from envisioning a healthier model of school.

If we expect teachers to have an ethic of care about our students, we have to have an ethic of care about toward our educators. Asking them to sacrifice their lives to teach doesn’t get us there. And it certainly doesn’t get us toward systemic reform.

Let’s start having that discussion… and every time someone talks about / writes about / makes a movie about some teacher who sacrifices everything to be a great teacher, let’s demand that the authors answer one question — Why can’t we imagine successful schools in our cities that don’t require Herculean effort to succeed? And what does it say about us — and the underlying assumptions we make about teachers, schools and cities — that we cannot.

Tags: urbaned

Tom VanderArk has a very interesting / provocative post about the teacher effectiveness debate and there are plenty of controversial and challenging in a very short post, but there’s one in particular that I take issue with (tonight.)

Now… I complained about my grad school classes when I was in them, but I’m not sure “worthless university certification that has little to do with the job” is accurate or fair.

I’ve studied under some truly brilliant folks in grad school, from Tom Sobol to Ruth Vinz to David Schaafsma. They were career educators who made me think about teaching differently. Sometimes, they forced me to confront the assumptions that I came into teaching with because of my experiences as a students, sometimes, they gave me language for things I thought but could not express. (And in the case of Tom Sobol, I just sat there trying to soak up as much of his wisdom as I could.)

It’s interesting because, two years out of my English Ed masters, I went back and re-read a lot of my notes and books and papers from grad school and I found that I was in a much better place in my own teaching to try to do the stuff we were talking about then. Sometimes, I think we waste pre-service teacher programs on pre-service teachers who aren’t yet at a point to fully get what they are learning. So much of what the first two or three years of teaching is about is about figuring out who you are and how that “you” relates to the stuff you learned in grad school (or undergrad) and how any of that relates to the kids in front of you in the classroom.

And while, yes, I think Mr. Vander Ark is correct that we need do to a much better job of coaching / mentoring our new teachers, I disagree that it follows that just because we don’t do that, that means that our current pre-service program is invalid. In fact, I’d argue that, in the best of all worlds, better mentoring of new teachers would allow them to more quickly and more effectively access the skills they learned in graduate school.

I’d hate to think that we’d do away with the notion of teaching teachers how to teach because we don’t do a good enough job of supporting young teachers. Our profession needs more thoughtful practice, not less. A summer of quick and dirty “here’s how to teach” lessons will not create thoughtful pedagoges, but rather, mostly, it will create a generation of teachers who teach the way they’ve been taught — at best.

(By the way… One of my biggest frustrations about our profession is how little we know about the history of our profession. One thing I think our teacher education programs could do better is to teach the history of our profession. We need to be a less a-historical profession, and we can use our teacher education programs to do that. But I digress.)

So yes, let’s look at how we support our young teachers. Let’s build in apprenticeships into teaching. Let’s mentor and coach much better than we do. But let’s also help young teachers become scholars of their fields. Let’s give them the time to learn about teaching, not just in the middle of it all, but in study because we stand on the shoulders of giants… and our teachers should have the time to learn who they were, what we’ve learned, and how that can transform what we think our classrooms can be.

And one last thought — if our teacher-ed programs don’t always get there… that’s reason to push to make them better, not get rid of them.

Tags: teachereducation

SLA (and I) are featured as the Video of the Week on ScholasticAdministrator.com. They really did a nice job of capturing a sense of the school in a four minute video!

Tags: SLA, ScholasticAdministrator

I’ve been thinking a lot about coaching lately. Partially, I’m sure, because I’m reading Making Learning Whole by David Perkins (thanks, Gary!) but also because I think so much of the way we learn and the way we set up smart systems can be seen in smart coaching.

When I first became an Ultimate Frisbee captain in college, one of the former captains of the team told me, “Don’t try to do everything in a time out. Give everyone three things to think about and nothing more.” It was great advice because it was always very tempting to go over EVERYTHING I saw on the field in every time out. But whenever I did that, folks never retained everything, and now everyone walked away with a different piece of what they thought was important.

This became great advice as a high school coach as well… and not just for timeouts. One of things I learned as a coach was not to try to do everything at once. Before every season, I laid out all the skills and concepts I wanted them to master, and then I laid them out across the season — how I would introduce ideas and then constantly spiral back to them… so that we could build slowly and smartly together. But I also learned how to focus on certain ideas, certain concepts, player by player, skill by skill. And I learned that, whenever possible, connecting ideas together, so that players could see how what they did related back to the whole was incredibly important.

But I also realized that I couldn’t teach everything. I know coaches whose teams had twenty plays with multiple offensive and defensive sets, and more often than not, those teams could be beat just by out-executing them. Our teams did what we did very well, and what we did was rarely scripted, but rather we put in systems that relied on players to know what they were doing very well and then make smart choices based on what they saw in front of them.

Yeah… allegory, right?

But what made me think about this was not about teachers teaching kids, but how too many places deal with teacher learning and school improvement. So much about the current school improvement ideas are about trying to improve twenty different things at once, and I don’t think that works. It sounds good — especially because we can all see that there are often many, many problems in schools — but it rings hollow, because the sum of all those parts rarely add up to a whole.

What amazes me, more and more, is how few schools have a clearly defined pedagogical practice that can be articulated simply and powerfully, and are therefore, even more susceptible to this kind of problem.

Let us think about how we build smart teams and build smart schools. Let us realize that we’re better off picking the things we want to do well and then work tirelessly to do those things well. Let’s be smart about what we want to be, how we want to get there, and how we get there collectively and individually, and then let’s stop trying to go over all the ways we want to get better in a 30 second time out.

Today, President Obama nominated a very experienced center-left jurist for the Supreme Court. The nominee is a Hispanic woman. If confirmed, she will be the first Justice of Hispanic descent to serve on the Supreme Court.

Today, the Supreme Court of California ruled that Proposition 8 — the ballot initiative that outlaws gay marriage — was legal under the California Constitution.

Today when White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about President Obama’s reaction to the California decision, he responded with a very politic non-answer:

Tags: politics, proposition 8, SCOTUS

Clarence Fisher (@glassbeed) tweeted out the other day:

I replied:

And several folks asked me to elaborate on that second part –

That’s more than a 140 character response… so here goes.

At its most basic, the skill sets that allow you to be successful as a teacher are not necessarily the skill sets that set you up to succeed as a teacher. For example, any photographic evidence of my desk and office back when I was a teacher / tech coordinator would show a cluttered mess. It was o.k., I have a really good memory and I could put my hands on just about anything when I really needed to. I enjoyed that mess, honestly. I felt comfortable in it, and I was pretty effective in it. However, when I became a principal, I found that methodology didn’t work for me anymore. I had to change a fundamental part of the way I worked. There was too much to keep in my head so that a major part of how I worked had to change. I had to become more organized. I had to develop new systems if I was going to be successful as a principal.

That may not sound that much, but for a lot of us (and I include myself in this), how we work often is part of who we are. I loved being that messy teacher. And it wasn’t enough for me to say, “I need to be more organized.” I had to say, “I have to be a more organized person.” Now, I don’t leave most days unless I go through the pile of papers on my desk. And moreover, I’ve noticed that I’ve changed the way I think about a messy desk. It actively bothers me now, which I never would have thought.

That’s a somewhat easy answer, but there’s a deeper level of this as well. One of my mentors pulled me aside as I was taking on more administrative roles back at Beacon and said, “Up until now, you’ve had a lot of success on the faculty being a passionate advocate for your own ideas. Now, your job is to support other people’s ideas.” That was a shift. There’s no question that being a principal — especially a founding principal — means having a vision and being able to articulate it passionately and powerfully, but after that, unless you want every idea to come out of your office, you really do need to be able to step back and let others inhabit that vision — sometimes (even often) in ways you have never thought of.

Those are two examples that are specific to me, but I’d posit that everyone needs to go through this process when they become a principal. Many of us who are teachers have made being a teacher a fundamental part of our identity. And while I don’t think administrators should ever stop thinking of themselves as teachers, there is a shift that must happen in the way we see ourselves. It requires different strengths, different skills, to be a successful principal than the skills that allowed us to be successful in our career up to that point. Going through that process can involve a bit of a sense of loss, but it is a necessary thing to do.

So now I’m wondering… for any admins who read this — do you agree? What did you have to give up or change in self-examination when becoming an admin? And for other folks… what skill or trait or tendency that serves you very well as a teacher could you see being less of a positive thing as an administrator?

Tags: admininstration

… but first we have to ask ISTE to include him.

ISTE will be having a moderated debate as a Keynote Panel on June 30th. The six panelists have not been announced yet, and this is a perfect chance to lobby for one of the best voices we have to advocate for the intersection of progressive pedagogy and technology. I have known Gary for several years now, and I’ve even been lucky enough to be on a panel with him at EduCon 2.1. Gary speaks passionately and eloquently about the schools we need, and his debates at EduCon and with Will Richardson have sparked dialogue long after the events are over.

So sign the petition, and ask (dare I say urge) ISTE to include Gary on the NECC Keynote Panel.

Tags: NECC

So I was at the Penn State 1:1 Conference this week. Sunday night and Monday, I was working with administrators from all over the state — mostly from smaller districts. I was struck by the way they talked about their schools and districts. Principals talked directly to superintendents, priorities were set by administrators who had been there for a dozen years. I spoke to one superintendent about what it was like to be in his job long enough to see the kids who were affected by a kindergarten initiative graduate… and talking about building support for initiatives over a number of years to get the kind of buy-in necessary to do it right. In short, it was the complete opposite of the experience so many of us in urban education have.

In the three years that SLA has been open, we have had three CEO / Superintendents of the school district, four regional superintendents, multiple changes to our School Reform Commission (a school board of sorts) and even the regional structures have been changed several times. We have seen initiatives come and go, and we have spent a ton of time and energy teaching the new administrations about SLA and what we do that is different than many other schools.

I’d assert that one of the keys to true sustainable innovation is sustainable leadership. We haven’t had a superintendent for more than five years since (I think) Constance Clayton in the early 90s. I wonder what that does to the ability to cautiously and wisely affect change. I wonder what that does to teachers and parents and school-level administrators who live through change without innovation.

I have no doubt that there are plenty of days when the problems that the smaller districts face feel as frustrating as the problems we face in urban structures do. However, I admit that talking to the leaders I met at Penn State made me wonder what it would be like to run a school in a smaller district. I’m not leaving SLA or anything, and I’m an urban educator at heart, but I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a touch of envy when I thought about how much easier it’d to be to sustain innovation if the support and leadership structures weren’t changing all the time.

Tags: life, education

Science Leadership Academy is featured (along with High Tech High and New Tech High and Gary Stager and Jane Krauss, nice company!) in this month’s Scholastic Administrator Magazine in The Power of Project Learning — an article about project-based learning. In addition to some cool shots of Gamal Sherif and Matt VanKouwenberg (and a nifty one of me, I admit), there are some great quotes such as:

Sometimes the results surprise both the teacher and learner, says Zachary Chase, an English teacher at SLA. To learn about the oral tradition associated with Homer’s The Odyssey, students were charged with finding a family story, getting a first-person recording of the story, and preserving it to pass onto their children. When one student found a bunch of letters from an uncle who had left his family to go to California during the Gold Rush, he used GarageBand to record himself reading the letters. He altered the voice to make it sound like that of an older man, Chase says. This project not only outstripped the teacher’s demands, but the success of the final project even surprised the student, he adds.

But be sure to read the whole article.