School Reform and Balance

This month I became the aunty to the two most amazing identical twin baby girls. There are so many things that I can not wait to do with the little ladies, teach them, and see who they become. As we sat in the hospital shortly after they were born on Valentines day, my mom and the girl's other grandparents wondered about the world they would grow up in and how different it would be. The world today is so much more complex for our students and it continues to change every day. My mom started talking about the impact of social media and wondering if the girls would ever drive a car. I found myself wondering about when the education world would finally wake-up and start seriously making some changes to this outdated model that we continue to try and patch new initiatives into rather than rebuilding from scratch. I spend countless hours reading and engaging with other educators across the globe who know that the system is broken, yet year after year, I go back to the same system with the four or five "core" area's of English, Social Studies, Math, Science, and some would include Wolrd Langauge (I know, I certainly would include that and MUCH more in an integrated system).

For the past year or so we have been engaged with work around the portrait of the graduate (POG) which ties into our high school capstone requirement that our current freshman class has for the first time. What I find beyond puzzling is that we actually started this work over five years ago when I was still in the classroom, and yes it has evolved immensely (or iterated as I prefer to call it now, in line with design thinking) but still we have not changed the fundamental "core" academics. When are we going to finally take the leap and change the outdated system that is not working for today's learners? I see signs of it everywhere, every day whether it be in visits to classrooms where students are challenging teachers with why they need to know the Pythagorean theory or write yet another English essay or read Lord of the Flies, sitting in IEP meetings where we are identifying students with disabilities at an alarming rate (students that actually make me question if the issue is our system is disabled not them), with our increasing rate of discipline referrals because students are not engaged or compliant with outdated systems and structures, research from the progressives in education and in our very own draft of the POG yet we continue to keep this system because we say it is what universities demand of our students. Are you telling me the universities aren't reading and seeing the same things we are? I find that hard, if not impossible to believe. Students don't go to college and suddenly they are engaged by listening to professors lecture at them for 3-hour stints and take midterms and finals as the sole determination of semester grades. They too are changing...the work world and the world beyond K-12 schools has changed, so when will we really actualize the POG?

How will we actualize the POG or better yet in an article written by Education Reimagined they recently explored the idea of "how would you design school if you started from scratch?". I would love to design think through this with some students and truly cutting edge and dedicated educators, particularly classroom teachers. I would love to design meetings and processes moving forward around a design thinking approach as opposed to business meetings of the past. We have revamped most of our professional development model and staff meetings at this point based on feedback to ensure that staff are engaged with EdCamps, spark sessions, book clubs, etc. In an article I read by the Future Design School who ran our Google Innovator Institute, they talked about the 8 things every school must do to prepare for the 4th industrial revolution and shared that the "illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."  I would love to spend a day in a student's shoes today and see what school is really like for them, and further, I would love for parents to come be teachers or administrators for a day and I would love for our central office administrators to come be high school administrators for a week. Change is needed to realize the POG on all levels of our system, we need to find a new balance because currently we are on a hamster wheel which just makes me sad because I probably work in the most wonderful school and district you could ever work in, so I can only imagine what it must be like in other places.

I was blessed this month with my two beautiful nieces, Dani and Marley. Marley was named after my grandmother, who is the strongest and most courageous woman I know (pictured above with them). I feel it is my calling as a female educational leader to make a difference for future generations. In future blog posts, I will talk about how I have consistently sought to find balance in this role (and still do this daily by staying on top of myself). My word of the year, I have finally identified if anything for these two young ladies, will be to find balance and I believe that our education system is in desperate need of a new balance.

In future posts and throughout the year, I plan to explore finding balance by exploring some of these areas:

• Work/life balance 
• The shift towards restorative discipline 
• Women in leadership and bias 
• Inclusion supports
• Universal design
• Building mental health supports into schools 
• Transdisciplinary learning 
• Compliance versus growth mindset versus empowerment 
• Initiatives versus staff development