This book might seem out of my general topic area, but after hearing Hahrie Han speak at the Carnegie Summit last year (in which she mentioned this book) and reading her book about organizing social movements, I wanted to dig a little deeper into how social movements mobilize and sustain their work.

Bryk, Gomez, & Grunow’s 2011 paper Getting Ideas into Action is probably THE foundational piece of my graduate school inquiries (and likely the rest of my career). They describe improvement science in networked improvement communities as sustained, collective action. This is a phrase that I continue to circle and turn over. I like the pragmatic focus of understanding why people to do what they do, particularly things that have collective momentum and/or impact, but I also see how difficult this is. We have such a deeply held belief that “the more you know” will make change, but over and over again, we find that people have their own minds and act in unpredictable ways.

Continue reading “Book Notes & Thoughts: The Making of Pro-Life Activists, by Ziad Munson” →

This is my favorite week of the year. For the third time, I’m excited to attend the Carnegie Summit. This is a place where people are talking about things the same way I want to. I’m inspired by the work people do and the amazing results they have improving the lives of their students and teachers.

For the first time I’ll be attending a pre-conference session on “Using Data for Improvement”. With our work this spring, I’ve found that the hardest thing is for teachers to use measurements! It’s been tough to find practical measures that teachers feel is a good enough responder to what they are trying to accomplish. For example, I suggested using the amount of time a student talks in response to a question. This was dismissed as misleading: students could be concise and clear or longwinded and obtuse, but the amount of time did not for sure reflect quality. I’m hoping to get lots of examples of what schools have used and perhaps some principles or logic about how to come up with them.

The keynotes this year are Tony Bryk, Becky Margiotta & Joe McCannon, Peter Senge, and Jeff Duncan-Andrade.

Other sessions I’m interested to attend:

• How do we improve? A comparison between three approaches to improving quality
• Building a science of improvement
• Tracking networks through social network analysis
• Developing ideas for change: Where do good ideas come from?
• How improvement science advances outcomes and opportunity
• Seeing the system from the user’s point of view through journey maps

Of course in the middle of all of this I am also midway through a first draft of my dissertation proposal. Hopefully this will be inspiration for some evening productivity!

The first Carnegie paper I read was Getting Ideas into Action (2011). This led to reading on the Carnegie website, reading Organizing Schools for Improvement and Learning to Improve, eventually getting into Engelbart’s original address to Bootstrap, and attending the Carnegie Summit in 2015… which is all to say that I did not come at this from a social justice perspective. I thought the networks were cool and the results were compelling. But as I was sitting in the closing keynote by Marshall Ganz, surrounded by an audience of mostly white people concerned with practical measurements and driver diagrams, I thought to myself, “Why is a civil rights community organizer giving the closing keynote at this summit?”

Over the past year, I’ve taken two classes which have dramatically shifted my graduate school path: Legal Issues of School Choice with Julie Mead and Ideology and Curriculum with Michael Apple. Both have challenged me to ask questions about power, equity, justice, and race as it relates to the public educational system. Though my awareness of white privilege and race traces back to the Klingenstein Summer Institute and the Intercultural Competencies work as OES, a year ago I still saw it as something auxiliary to my core work. Now, while I may not convert to being a critical theorist, my view of the world has been challenged and perhaps reoriented to more complex understanding of the systems we live and act within.

This year, the theme of social justice was even stronger:

• A quote from Kim Gomez (which I saw on Twitter): “It is a social justice issue to teach with curriculum that doesn’t give all students access.”
• Keynote speaker, Hahrie Han: building the power for change is about engaging people that recognizes their humanity; instantiate networks that recognizes our humanity and keeps the child at the center; peace and justice are a struggle
• Louis Gomez introduced the final keynote with the line, “The quest for equity takes many paths.”
• Closing Keynote speaker, Bryan Stevenson: Get proximate with the people who are excluded, change the narratives that sustain the problems, stay hopeful, be willing to do uncomfortable things.

This has all led me to be skeptical of improvement science and its promises. Is it an interruption or perpetuation?

Here I am, my second year attending the Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education! I’m presenting a poster of my research: A Cross-Case Analysis of Three Networked Approaches to Educational Change.

Every time I attend a conference, I try to write out my goals for attending or questions I have. I try to do this before the conference, but this year it’s happening on day two.

My experience with the conference this year is a bit different because over the past year I’ve immersed myself in the work of Improvement Science and Networked Improvement Communities, Design-Based Implementation Research, and the Theory of Action of the Institute for Personalized Learning (see poster above).

My focus this year will be to look for strategies for starting a Networked Improvement Community. I’m also keeping my ears open for opportunities for my own research inquiry/dissertation. To do this, I’m looking for what people talk about, how people talk about it, what people don’t understand or struggle with, and contradictions in what people say. One of the most interesting threads is Improvement Science and NICs for social justice. I wonder how critical theorists might think about this work.

Sessions I’m interested in attending:

• Launching a NIC
• Crafting the narrative of your NIC
• Building a measurement system for improvement
• Network Development Evaluation (meta-analysis of the network)
• Understanding the Problem you are trying to solve: Causal system analysis OR Leveraging content expertise to build change packages in networks

Keynotes:

• Tony Bryk – Narrative of the Pathways program
• Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland – digital media and data scientist
• Hahrie Han – how organizations “engage, mobilize, and organize activists and leaders”
• Bryan Stevenson – Equal Justice Initiative, author of Just Mercy

Today, I shared a short reflection of my experience at POCC with the middle school during our weekly chapel service. I usually shy away from this sort of thing, but if I want to be engage more with this, I need to speak up when I have the chance. So here goes:

I had the privilege of attending the People of Color Conference last December. There, I attended a session about how white children are (or usually are not) socialized to talk about race. It made me realized that when I was a child, my parents and teachers never talked to me directly about race or privilege, though that in no way is meant to blame them. Although I knew people were different, I didn’t develop the language or skills to talk about my experiences. And learning to talk about race and privilege is a skill that you can learn.

At the Conference, I questioned why, as someone who identifies as white, I would be allowed or even invited to attend. I came away understanding that my role, as a person of privilege, is to be an ally to those with fewer privileges. In order to do that, I need to develop my own racial identity.

One of the concrete goals that I made after leaving the conference is to talk to my son about race and privilege so that he will grow up with the awareness and skills for understanding his privileges in a world that treats people differently.

I’ve been thinking about innovation in education recently. Actually, I pretty much always thinking and reading about it. Yet somehow the SAMR model for technology integration had never come across my screen. I was scrolling through Feedly and up popped this blog post by Jeff Utecht about using iPads to replace textbooks. His point was essentially, “Really? That’s the best we can think of?”

It got me to thinking about where my teachers are on the continuum of integrating technology. Are their “projects” innovative or just tied with the shiny bow of new technology? Continue reading “Would your students have been able to do your assignments 20 years ago?” →

OES Bell Tower, Flikr photo credit to Day Tooley

Fall is here, hear the yell

This song by The White Stripes has become a tradition to sing at our first middle school gathering. I got a little choked up singing with everyone on Wednesday, counting my blessings to be part of this community. Although I’ve really been back at work for the last few weeks, it didn’t truly begin until this. Honestly, it feels more like a family reunion than going to work.

Our head of school began last Tuesday with an address to the entire faculty and staff. She referred back to her charge last June to be open to change and wove it into a story about Taliesin House, built by Frank Lloyd Wright. As she describes it, Taliesin is beautiful from a distance, with horizontal and vertical lines that nestle it into the hillside, yet as you get closer, you see that every space in the house is under constant redesign. This makes the building itself feel alive with change as the designers perpetually seek improvement. The metaphor was perfect, even if obvious, in capturing the essence of the constant growth that should take place in a school. While striving for vertical and horizontal coordination, we should all be fundamentally engaged in improving in our individual practice. Furthermore, this metaphor gives us the twofold direction she has chartered for this year: (1) coherent school identity, facilities, and program and (2) curriculum changes to align with PreK-12 curriculum and the Essential Competencies and support system upgrades. Continue reading “Fall is here, ring the bell” →