#SOL16: Design

(M.A. Reilly, iPhone, hipstamatic app)

I've been planting. A lot. Filling clay pots with geraniums, petunias, fuchsia, lavender, lobelia, vinca, Dracaena spikes, rosemary, spearmint, tarragon, larkspur, snapdragons, and heliotrope. Inside, I have potted plants from last year and as soon as the weather warms a bit more I will be putting the parsley, basil, aloe, and cactus outside. In gardens I have planted over the years I notice that the peonies are up and the Hosta has broken through the ground and is unfurling. Azaleas and lilacs are beginning to bloom, rhododendrons are budding, day lilies are growing and the hydrangeas are beginning to reclaim their spaces. The butterfly bushes are greening and finally the birch trees are leafing. There's something so satisfying about growing plants and bushes; trees and shrubs.

Spring gardening reminds me that something bigger than my immediate sense of life is at work here. This morning find me thinking about Robert Frost who in the poem, Design, asked if design governs in a thing so small as the interaction among a spider, moth, and heal-all. Frost lodges such an important question of faith in a few lines. I remember Rob and I discussing this poem once and Frost's question during an English class. We were impossibly young at the time and matters of faith, of God, of mortality were distant marks we mostly ignored. We were so busy living, loving.

(M.A. Reilly, iPhone, hipstamatic app)

Now, matters of faith, of God, of mortality and afterlife are more immediate. I never expected Rob to die so young, to become a widow while still in my 50s. I didn't expect that my husband who never professed much belief in God would be the one to help me know that design does govern. In the last few weeks of Rob's life he shared with me what he was experiencing as he readied to leave this life. He told me he knew how to leave, how to cross over. He told our friend Jane one night as she sat up with him. As Jane tells me, Rob said, "I am seeing the most glorious things. Things you cannot see." 40 hours before he died, before he slipped into a coma, my brother, Jack and I stood next to Rob's bed and marveled at the look of ecstasy that lit his face as he stared at the ceiling of the room. We knew he was seeing well beyond what each of our eyes could see; he was seeing beyond our mortal limits. Rob told me he knew how to get to the next life and when it was my time he would be there to help me cross over. And he will.

Spring reminds me that life beats on infused with designs I sometimes understand and ones I am graced sometimes to sense.

Thinking About Line, Shape, and Tone

Swing  (Reilly, 2013)

Repose (Reilly, 2013)

Earlier in the week Anna Smith (@writerswriting) and Joseph McCaleb (@DocHorseTales) shared a video, Inge Druckery: Learning to See. It is such an inspirational film about how art education can alter how we see.

I was moved to try some of the ideas that Igne and her students created.

Here are a few.

Two Squares (Reilly, 2013)

5 Lines (Reilly, 2013)

The Sea (Reilly, 2013)

Network Improvement Communities: Teaching, Researching, and Designing Learning in Newark

Making Meaning with Paint (Robert Treat Academy Central, 2013)

I. Entering

It has been a most amazing year.  I am finally catching my breath and wanted to take some time here to discuss the work my company, Blueprints for Learning, has done with teachers, administrators, students and parents in Newark, NJ and what that work means.

This year we partnered with 7 schools in Newark focusing on K-2 literacy at four of the schools, K-8 mathematics and K-8 literacy at two of the schools, and 6-8 literacy at one school.  On every measure schools used, children at our partner school sites were able to demonstrate very significant gains in literacy and mathematics.  The vast majority of children at all of our sites will enter the next school year having met or exceeded all school and district benchmarks.

So what went right?



II. Working in Network Learning Communities

A principal and teachers from different schools work together to dramatize a scene from
a Barry Lopez essay. (Newark, 2013)

First, we have no set program, but we did create relationships with our clients.  It is in the context of these relationships that community knowledge was made. Making community knowledge allowed us to understand our work as flawed, flexible and (in)formed by emerging situations.  We revised our work so often that we understood this behavior as essential to creating conditions where effective learning most often happens. Alongside community knowledge, commitment arose. (I suspect community knowledge and commitment are co-specifying).

Administrators and third grade teachers from different
sites working together. (Newark, 2013)

One observation an assistant superintendent in the city made that I most prized was that everyone from Blueprints spoke with teachers and children with great respect and clarity.  I imagine this occurred a a norm because we experienced teachers, administrators and children as partners.  These partnerships allowed us to frame and respond to emerging situations.  Because we worked across 7 sites within a city, we also were able to leverage the power of that network, which formed and remade itself as different alliances and commitments grew.  The dynamic nature of network improvement communities allowed us to situate our work in the middle of learning spaces as teachers, researchers, learners, and designers.  I think here David Weinberger's observation that "...in a networked world, knowledge lives not in books or in heads but in the network itself" (p. 45).

Jal Mehta (2013) in The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling writes about network improvement communities (Bryk & Gomez, 2008) as promising practices in education improvement.  He says:

Here the idea is to bring together local practitioners, researchers, and commercial designers around a set of shared objectives and across a number of networked schools. Rather than stage the process in the usual way (first research, then policy, then implementation), researchers, practitioners, and designers work together in real time to develop, adapt, and revise knowledge to solve a problem of practice across a variety of institutions. Learning takes place at three levels: the classroom, the school, and across the network. This model is particularly promising because it expands upon the more familiar idea of individual “learning organizations” and provides a process by which we could capture and adapt knowledge across a diverse network of schools" (5342-5343). 

Teachers observe as a kindergarten teacher teaches
a high intensity literacy lesson to her students.
(McKinley Elementary School, Newark, 2013)

Rather than understand emerging conditions as being uni-dimensional (i.e., a reading problem, teacher x's problem) and solely the 'problem' or 'practice' of a school, classroom, teacher, or child--we were able to understand these situations through a variety of lenses as networked intelligence informed our understanding. This led us to routinely create occasions that situated consultants, administrators, researchers, authors, and teachers from different places alongside one another. This juxtaposition allowed all of us to better learn and problem frame and solve.

III. Looking Toward

As we think about next year, we will privilege designing ongoing occasions where learners (that would be all of us) connect, contextualize, collaborate and create in more idiosyncratic ways with one another, as well as with others beyond the city.  At a workshop I conducted during the last week of school, I was so pleased to hear teachers and administrators in attendance getting one another's email so that they could stay in touch and work together during the summer and next year.  They valued one another's work.  For next year I have tentatively designed the opportunity for 300+ educators to learn in cross-school PLCs focusing on mathematics and literacy instruction.

I'll let you know what emerges from that invitation...



Work Cited
Mehta, Jal (2013-04-02). The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (Studies in Postwar American Political Development). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

Weinberger, David (2012-01-03). Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest People. Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

Understanding Reform As A Design Challenge

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking. - Ellen Lupton

I. 

The importance of design can not be understated, especially when contemplating the current iterations of public education (re)form that situates people as problems to be fixed. For the last year I have been involved in designing↔implementing (think möbius strip) early literacy education across more than a dozen schools in a city. It has been and continues to be a time for enormous learning. Several understandings are emerging, not with great clarity, but with an odd sense of urgency.  There is something I am learning abut schooling, reform and learning that needs to be voiced even though I am unsure of its dimension and implications.

Much of what gets situated as teacher and pupil issues appear to be surface symptoms for larger design problems. I say this as I am observing that teachers are often more than willing, even eager, to refine practices when specific conditions are created.  For example, at one site where we are working the quickness of change among teachers as they add to and refine practices has been nothing less than stunning. Likewise, children who had been largely stalled as readers and writers at school, are making critical gains in the repertoire of skills, dispositions, and strategies they use while composing--be  it as readers or writers.

At this Pre K - 8 site, there are seven consultants from my company, including myself, working with the administrators, teachers, parents, and of course the children since the end of January. Whereas most of our efforts have been aimed at K-3 literacies, we also have been collaborating to staff who teach at grades 4-8 through special education, mathematics, and literacies work which will be emphasized next school year as we continue the project.

I feel very certain that within the space of five months, the K-1 teachers at this site will prevent reading difficulties--something that has not been done to date before here. This is as school where less than 30% of the children pass the state assessments and where we first saw that the majority of primary grade children were not making progress as readers.  We highlighted just two instructional changes and have modeled, directly taught, and coached teachers as they learn these practices.  And I think it would be fair to say that the use of these practices, in part, account for increased performance at the K-2 levels.  

So often, though, this is where we stop when telling stories about reform.  But I am coming to understand that this slice of the story is at best a topping.  Beneath it is a more compelling tale.

************

II. 

Contrast these two recollections.

It's December when I ask second grade teachers to identify the children in their classes who they are most concerned about as readers.  They name names and when I ask them what is it that makes them concerned, they all cite DRA levels--and the levels are shockingly low.  An issue though is that the data they cite is four months old, gleaned during the opening weeks of school.  The teachers say that that have not done any additional reading assessments such as a text level reading with these children, nor have they discussed the children as a group before. The teachers exists in what Dan Lortie (1975) in his seminal study of schools (Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study) characterized as egg-carton. He wrote:

Throughout the long, formative decades of the modern school system, schools were organized around teacher separation, rather than teacher interdependence (1975, 14).

So contrast that one recollection with this more recent one: It's early morning when I arrive at the school and a colleague of mine greets me and says, "It's wonderful to see the primary grade teachers all out in the hallways taking about their children to each other.  They're talking about how the kids are progressing. There's such energy in that." 

III.

A week or two later, the mathematics consultant who works with us is on site and I ask her to meet with my lead literacy consultant, the administrators from the school and a writer who is has come to see what is happening at the school for a book she is writing and myself.  I thought it particularly valuable to have the writer with us as we are at the beginning of something and having an outside set of eyes might prove helpful. We sit around one table and the discussion takes on rhizomatic dimension as ideas lead into ideas and the paths between and among become decidedly emergent and often co-specifying. 

One of the compelling questions we have been wrestling with is what is it that keeps children from advancing as readers and mathematicians.  This is a conversation that often ends with a discussion about teachers, parents, and children. Rarely though does the discussion extend beyond these factors and also attend about to how these factors are (in)formed by the design of the school and school system.  As we speak, I am sensing that we are in the middle of something and we are naming as a group more than we know as individuals. 

Later, I receive an email from the writer who shares these observations: 

XXX School and its whole leadership team were truly impressive. An unsung example of real excellence.  I learned a great deal from your discussion about redesigning instruction in math and ela--and was struck by the (principal's) commitment to "renew" XXX School on her own.  

The "on her own" comment is in relationship to other or program reform methods this writer has been chronicling in this city for the last year. I'm pleased as I realize that what we do with the principal and her staff has not been situated or understood as an external reform method. Working alongside, being in the middle of things, requires the agency of all.


IV.

Learner achievement is influenced by what teachers and students know and do, by the manner in which leadership occurs, as well as what each fails to know, act upon, and avoids. It resembles a tangled mess when attempting to sort this effect from that effect. But learner achievement is not only a people matter, it is a structural and environmental matter as well.  Last week I was teaching Pre-K and kindergarten teachers during a full day workshop and the conversation around the table was animated as teachers discussed their new or refined practices for independent reading and then studied video examples of vocabulary, phonics, guided writing and reading instruction.  

Almost all of what we studied is already occurring in their classrooms and the teachers were willing and able to compare their own practice with the video examples which featured not idealized practices, but actual practices recorded in classrooms.  Further, all of us who have modeled teaching--including some of the teachers--have made errors while teaching and we have been keen to note that in spite of our errors children continued to learn. The willingness to fail and learn is essential.

V.

I am driving home form the city and think that during workshops and out in the hallways--it is the teachers' lateral conversations--to each other--that most interest me. These forged spaces act as conduits that fuel better outcomes for children. What gets marked in these spaces is changing as we (teachers and administrators and consultants) focus on what children are doing, saying, and showing and the confusions and clarity that arise alongside these noticings.  All of this produces an energy that is greater than the energy used.  It is  this shift from potential to kinetic energy that I want to lean in and better understand.

Our time at this site will extend through next school year.  We recognize that external coaching is a temporary design fix, not a permanent solution.  As such, our work with those at the sxhool is to help craft the possibility of new spaces and markings. 

What Rests in Our Hands Is Simply That: Be a Learner

In light of Tom Whitby's "modest proposal" to post a blog  about positive educational reform on 10.17.10, I found myself thinking about reform and redesign. Now, I am not much for reform as I think the word, the process, and what it has come to mean is at best, tired—and for the last 40 years, increasingly divisive.  I do believe though that redesign is needed in public education and I offer here a simple way to revolutionize public and private education. Be a learner (your choice of passions and interests), study how you and others learn, and bring all of it with you to your classroom, school or district, and show it off via public exhibitions. Personal learning passions and public exhibitions of learner's work are more important than national and state standards movements, national and state testing, national and state curriculum maps, and the like.

Having worked for 29 years as an educator, most of those years in K-12 public education in urban, suburban, and rural locations, I have been privileged to work alongside great teachers, principals, and administrators.  Their greatness has been neither static, nor superhuman. Rather, they are learners who always have a project going, a passion they are following, an idea they are tugging at--in short it is simply a stance they embody.  These are gregarious learners, quiet learners, deep and thoughtful rivers that are both purposeful and nomadic.  They wander and reorganize.  They are largely contradictory in their thinking, believing, and (re)actions as they are often in the present moment. They resist and theorize.  Memory of these learners reminds me that all of the plans and schemes and reforming in the world cannot and will not achieve a sustained learning environment for the practice  of doing to others is so seriously flawed.  Reform is always an epic design and couldn't recognize a rhizomatic moment if it tripped over a mass of roots. 

Listen to Whitman, who in Song of Myself , wrote:

The past and present wilt - I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.  

Reform measures--progressive and not have often been largely about filling others with something the reformers privileged: workshop, direct instruction, rigor, process, mapping, cross walking, and on and on. It is not that anything is actually wrong with these approaches at their core. Rather, by attending to something else, something other—the more personal and I would urge, empowered learning is suppressed.  When this happens over and over again—perhaps for whole careers—the learner (student, teacher, administrator, parent) internalizes that his/her job is to attend to things that may or may not make sense and to suppress and not trust what does make sense.  This is what kills education. A direct shot to the heart.

So what am I advocating? I am interested in redesigning schools to focus on learning for all who step through the door (real and virtual) and to have learning direct our attention, resources, staffing and time.  Instead of asking: Will this technique do x, I want to occasion learning passions. Instead of the old input-output algorithm, imagine if passion was x and we asked: What do we need to set into play in order for the possibility of x to be realized?

In the school system where I work we are redesigning the high school and by extension the district.  As the director of curriculum, my goals are two-fold: privilege learning and learners and organize in such a manner that idiosyncratic methods, content, and beings can flourish.  Nothing more. Nothing less.  I tell you here though, it takes extraordinary design as the teaching world has been largely organized to resist such overtures. Nonetheless, we beat on. In the last four weeks, high school faculty have forwarded courses they would like to teach--beautiful, idiosyncratic works that are embedded with who they are.  They make my heart sing.  Next, I would like students to have the same opportunity and responsibility to design personal and public learning.  A  simple redesign plan might be: Let's plan, learn, redesign,  and exhibit our learning to the public.

We have some early trailblazers already out and about: this year we opened a small academy (Classics Academy) that are comprised of five courses taught by four teachers, and three other team-taught courses.  We are in the process of issuing  iPads, 24/7, to all.  Just last week, two of the teachers and their students, along with the students' parents and siblings, neighbors and other educators from the school found themselves in a field at night holding up their iPads loaded with the interactive astronomy app, Star Walk. The students had been studying astronomy as part of a Classics History and Classics Mathematics course that the two teachers (Dawn DeMartino and Harry Sugar) teach.  As one of our Board of Education members told me (I paraphrase): It was cold and late and I knew those teachers had been teaching all day and still there they were. We were on blankets and looking up at the sky looking at the iPad to better know what we were seeing.  And there was Mr. Sugar who had set up his telescope so we could see better--see the indentations of moon craters. My one child was fascinated by the Hercules constellation and my daughter was explaining that the North star did not remain constant over time.  It was beautiful and powerful. 

Beautiful work. Empowered learners and learning. That is the revolution.

We must stop doing unto others and instead take mark of where we are.  It is more challenging than one might think. For example, I fell pray to my own worst moment when I decided we would move forward with a physics in ninth grade initiative. Some of the teachers voiced resistance as they worried that they would need to suppress their leaning in order to enact a program. I offered assurances (ones I actually believed) and yet their commentary gave me pause.  I realized a bit later (a day) that I had lost sight of the real goal: not to have physics in ninth grade at all cost, but to engender a place of learning.  These teachers were not objecting to redesigning the science courses, but the means by which we did it.  Ah, time to listen and seek a third space. As Ruth Vinz writes: "The bulk of teacher knowledge is socially derived and hybrid" (1996, p. 168).  She then quotes Homi Bhabha (1990) who explains hybridity:  'For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge' [p.211] (as quoted in Vinz, 1996, p. 168).  Ruth concludes by asserting: "The act of teaching engenders a continual contestation beyond teachers' present and future knowledge—challenging, mixing, testing, and ultimately transgressing what the teacher knows 'how to do' or has ever done before" (p. 168).  The teachers and I need a third space, not a directive.

I love Ruth's book, Composing a Teaching Life.  She has been both my finest teacher and friend these last 17 years.  In one of the chapters in the text she discusses what rests in teachers' hands. She concludes: "We must keep the learning and the imagining. That's what rests in our hands—the responsibility to do just that" (p. 164).  I have read those words for years and it is the pronoun, that, I want to emphasize.  Our responsibility rests not in enacting other schemes.  We are responsible to keep the learning and imagining.  Just that.

If we want to (in)form the conversation about learning at local, state, national and international forums, we need to ensure that what we are learning is not insubstantial, but rather worthy of our time and attention.  I grow weary of the books and websites that offer 15 ways to do this, 30 ways to do that.  Fodder mostly.  I have given some thought to works that have influenced me and have helped me to better understand and appreciate the complexity of learning, that have encouraged me to consider multiple and often contradictory perspectives and the importance of resistance, that have shown me slices of worlds I simply had not known existed, and have inspired me to be brave in light of politics and manufactured fear.  Here is my list:

1. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
2. Bakhtin, M.M. (1990).  Art and Answerability: Early philosophical essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
3. Barthes, Roland. (1982/2010). Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography. NY: Hill and Wang.
4. Bateson, Mary Catherine. (2000). Full circles, overlapping lives: Culture and generation in transition. NY: Random House.
5. Baudrillard, Jean. (1995). Simulacra and simulation (the Body, in theory: History of cultural materialism).  Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
6. Berger, John & Jean Mohr. (1982/1995). Another way of telling. NY: Vintage.
7. Berger, Ron. (2003). An ethics of excellence: Building a culture of craftsmanship with students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
8. Bhabha, Homi K. (2004). The location of culture, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
9. Cochran-Smith, Marilyn and Susan L. Lytle. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research in the next generation. NY: Teachers College Press.
10. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
11. Dewey, John. (1916/1944). Democracy and education: An introduction to philosophy of education. NY: The Free Press.
12. Du Bois, W.E. B. (1994). The souls of Black folks. NY: Barnes & Noble Classics.
13. Eisner, Elliot (Ed). (1985). Learning and teaching the ways of knowing: Eighty-fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
14. Gee, James Paul. (2008). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology and Discourses, 3rd edition. London: Routledge.
15. Gonzalez, Norma, Moll, Luis C., and Cathy Amanti. (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 
16. Graves, Donald. (1983/2003). Writing: Teachers & children at work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
17. Greene, Maxine. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. NY: Teachers College Press.
18. Heath, Shirley Brice. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: UK: Cambridge University Press. 
19. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962/1970). The structure of scientific revolutions, second edition.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.  
20. Leander, Kevin M. & Margaret Sheehy (Eds,) (2004). Spatializing literacy research and practice. NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
21. Morrison, Toni. (1987). Beloved. NY: Alfred Knopf.
22. Pinar, William. (2009). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 
23. Rosenblatt, Lousie. (1978/1994). The reader, the text, the poem: transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
24. Schank, Roger. C. (1995). Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwetsern Universty Press.
25. Said, Edward. (1983).  The World, the text, and the critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
26. Soja, Edward W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Cambridge. MA: Blackwell Publisher, Inc. 
27. Vinz, Ruth. (1996). Composing a teaching life. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook.
28. Vygotsky, Lev. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
29. West, Cornel. (2005). Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism. NY: Penguin.
30. Whitman, Walt. (1855/2008). Leaves of grass. Kindle edition.
31. Williams, William Carlos. (1967). Pictures from Brueghel and other poems. NY: New Directions.
32. Woolf, Virginia. (1991). A room of one's own. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.