Happy Thanksgiving

Right now, I am thankful for many people and places mostly, and feeling abundantly blessed.  Among the amazing miracles that I am also thankful for is our lemon tree.  That's right, in St. Louis, MO, on a gray, wet, dark day, we have, in our porch room, a blooming lemon tree with about 30 lemons on it in various stages of ripening!  

People are amazed when they see it, like a perfect manifestation of the goodness of the planet, offering lemons in a cold climate all winter long.  We give lemons to friends when they visit.  They exclaim, cup the lemon in their hands, close their eyes and bring the lemon to their noses and sigh as they take in a long whiff.

Today, as I often encourage others to do, I sat down to draw a lemon.  To notice the beautiful curve and the tiny, bumpy texture, and the shiny, dark, dark green leaves of all sizes brings me happiness.  Taking the time to draw as adults, and especially with children, with soft colored pencils of many hues and satisfying pens, is such an important and lovely way to be present, to be awake, to be thankful and to make something that you will remember.

So, this Thanksgiving season, pull up your chair, get out some pens, and draw with the children you are with.  Draw the pies, the apples, the flowers, the people, the joy and the gratefulness that we share this time of year.  Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Louise and Ashley

Designing a New School for the 21st. Century

Designing a New School for the 21st Century

To an educator is there anything more exciting (or daunting) than starting a new school?  I don’t think so.  I’ve done it twice (if you count the complete renovation of The St. Michael School, both the building and the curricula).  And now, I’m privileged to be a consultant to another new school in the making, Bennett Day School in Chicago.

After six months of working with the creators of Bennett, I realize that, in their process they are using the very 21st Century skills that they plan to engender at Bennett.  In brief, here are a few.

The excitement is palpable in the innovators who are designing Bennett, Shuchi Sharma and Kate Cicchelli.  They are a great team, working in a collaborative way from the start, modeling a practice essential to their objective: to create an innovative school for the 21st Century.

Shuchi and Kate are also a bit of an odd couple, in a really good way, sort of yin and yang.  Shuchi, the Director of Operations, comes from the business world and she picked up the gauntlet on this project thrown down by Cameron Smith, a Chicago financier.  Kate, the Head of School, is a veteran educator, presently a fourth grade teacher.  They model another key to 21st Century education, understanding multiple perspectives.  They are open to each other and to many new ideas.

In their research phase, Shuchi and Kate have discovered several innovative sources for inspiration, including: the Reggio Emilia Approach, Peter Senge, Grant Wiggins, Ron Berger, and Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound.  In addition to adapting the big ideas from these sources, Kate is completing the puzzle of fundamental skills curricula.  This is problem solving and systems thinking in action.

They have also begun to grapple with the more intangible aspects of school design, for example, creating school culture.  Kate spent a couple of days with me in St. Louis, visiting four schools where Louise and I consult: The College School; Maplewood Richmond Heights School District; The St. Michael School; and Clayton School District.   She reflected later, Understanding school climate, and more, the development of school climate, is difficult work.  It's like trying to grasp air.  Having the chance to observe four different examples of creative and collaborative school cultures was powerful.  Creating a vibrant school culture can be like trying to grasp air and yet, there are many fundamental ways to ground and build successful school cultures.  And, creating school as a community is an essential ingredient for the 21st Century school...like the air we breathe.

What's Baseball Got to Do with It?

What’s Baseball Got to Do with It? How about those Cardinals! (Remember, this is coming to you from St. Louis, MO.)

On August 24th the Cardinals were 10 1/2 games behind in the Wild Card race to make the playoffs for the World Series. From that date to the last day of the season, over the month of September, they won 20 games and lost only 7.  They won the last game of the season to win the Wild Card berth.

Then, in the playoffs, in a best of five games series with the Philadelphia Phillies (the team with the best record in baseball over the season) down two games to one, the Cards beat the Phillies first in St. Louis, then in the clincher, game five, back in Philly.  That fifth game was a 1-0 squeaker pitching duel, with Chris Carpenter throwing an almost perfect game for the Cards.

Then, in the League Championship Series against the Milwaukee Brewers, again the Cards prevailed against a team that finished six games ahead of them in the regular season.

And, finally, in the World Series, against the Texas Rangers, a team like the Brewers that had won six more games than the Cards in the regular season, with a power packed offensive line up, the Cards won the decisive sixth and seventh games.  It was Game 6 that defined the Series and the Cardinals.  TWO  times they were down to their LAST STRIKE...when TWO runs behind.  Each time a player (Lance Berkman and David Freese) came through with a run scoring hit.

These players just never gave up.  They were truly inspiring to watch.  The players and the team were models of individual perseverance, positive teamwork, and just plain fun.  If you followed the team over the two months you were treated to a daily dose of each of these traits; traits essential to the success of any individual or organization.

I had a recurring thought watching these Cardinal Boys of Summer, if every faculty could manifest these behaviors, what success they would find!!!

I know, a school is not a sports team.  However, a school is an organization, a team gathered around a common pursuit: to educate children.  A school isn’t in an organized competition to beat other schools.  However, a school can be a place which strives to manifest excellence.  The faculty and students are not highly paid athletes.  However, both faculty and students can work hard, encourage each other to persevere, and celebrate achievements.

And, yes, school is not a game; it is serious business with outcomes critical to our society.  However, at the center of that mission is one thing parallel with the fun of baseball: the joy of learning.  Every educator knows the thrill of witnessing a child’s pure delight in learning something new.  And, to see that joy day in and day out, culminating in the graduation of skilled and motivated 21st C. Learners, is like a annual baseball season, culminating in a World Series.  Go Educators!

Coaching, the Most Effective Way to Teach

I (Ashley) have been reflecting on my work with teachers and administrators over the past 40 years and have discovered that I have been and am, not so much a teacher, advisor or consultant, as a coach.  A recent article, Personal Best, in the New Yorker Magazine by Atul Gawande stimulated this "ahah" for me. It was useful to me to hear Gawande’s description of what a coach does and why so many of us need one...regularly.

Apparently coaching is indigenous to the U.S.  (Yale University is the first institution to use a coach for its football team.)  And, perhaps like many other things peculiar to the U.S., the concept of coach is “slippery.”  As Gawande writes:

Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.  They’re not your boss––in professional tennis, golf and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach––but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport [or profession]...Mainly, they observe and they guide.

I relate to this because of my early experience at the Green Mountain Valley School, where I wore many hats: English and Humanities teacher, Director of Academics, Headmaster, and, sometimes, ski coach.  I can see now that it was my experience on the hill with the racers and the other coaches led me to develope my skills as observer and guide.  I learned that I couldn’t tell a racer to perform faster any more than I could tell a student to understand iambic pentameter, or than I could tell a colleague how to conduct classes a certain way.  In each case, I could tell them, but the results would be marginal at best.

On the other hand, through careful observation of the racer, I could reflect for him or her what I saw, and guide the racer to wonder about a change in position, then encourage experimentation...a process when repeated over and over, with diligence, tenacity and whole-hearted engagement (and a liberal dose of light-hearted joy), can lead the individual being coached to reach a new level of achievement and pride that is unique for each person.

I have found that the same approach applies to working with teachers.  So has Jim Knight, the director of Kansas Coaching Project, at the University of Kansas.  Gawande reports that:

California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting.  Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time...But when coaching was introduced––when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions––adoption rates passed ninety per cent.

After writing his dissertation on measures to improve pedagogy, Knight received funding to train coaches for every school in Topeka.

I find our work at Cadwell Collaborative exciting and stimulating.  I know that my favorite work is in the classroom, in the school, with the teachers and administrators, when I am Coach Cadwell.

Steve Jobs Aesthetics, An Inspiration to Educators

Reading about Steve Jobs this past week has been strangely affirming for me, Ashley.  Strange, because I’ve always LOVED every Apple product I’ve owned (since 1984), and yet I’m a bit intimidated by someone so creative that he could actually produce things so useful AND elegant.  Affirming, because the articulated tenets of Job’s aesthetics and creations are provocative and inspiring to the core values of innovative education. Job’s was primarily concerned about culture and aesthetics.  Business was a by-product of creating dynamic culture and inspiring aesthetics.   His burning questions included: How would this “thing” improve our culture?  How would this “thing” actually create culture?  How can this “thing” be beautiful, to look at, to touch, to manipulate?

These are the same questions that are compelling to education.  In striving to answer these same questions we are inspired by Steve Jobs, Grant Wiggins, Reggio Children and Carlina Rinaldi and Vea Vecchi, Ron Berger, Christopher Alexander, Peter Senge, Fritjof Capra, and many others.

Below are excerpts from two different articles from the New York Times that highlight this point.  As I read them I found myself drawing direct parallels to our work in schools.  I found myself asking, could we create schools as highly functional and beautiful as an iMac, iPhone or iPad?

Mr. Jobs made no secret of his focus on design; in a Jan. 24, 2000, interview, Fortune magazine asked if it was an “obsession” and whether it was “an inborn instinct or what?”

“We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing,” Mr. Jobs replied. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service....”

For all his accolades, this aspect of Mr. Jobs was hard for many business people to understand, or to copy. Go into a computer store today, and there’s a bland array of mostly indistinguishable keyboards and monitors — and then there’s Apple. Ditto the cellphone stores.

[Substitute here, schools for computer stores.  Go into a school today, and there’s a bland array of mostly indistinguishable hallways and rooms -- and then there are the early childhood schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, and many others around the world inspired by Reggio Emilia.]

“Most people underestimate his grandeur and his greatness,” Gadi Amit, founder and principal designer of New Deal Design in San Francisco, told me. “They think it’s about design. It’s beyond design. It’s completely holistic, and it’s dogmatic. Things need to be high quality; they have to have poetry and culture in each step... Steve was a cultural leader, and he drove Apple from that perspective. He started with culture; then followed with technology and design. No one seems to get that.” Insert this same perspective into education.  Educators are cultural leaders and they drive schools from that perspective.  They start with culture, then follow with curriculum and school building design. James Stewart, NYT, 10.7.11

Jobs...played a decisive role in restoring a kind of defiant aestheticism to American life.

Like the glories of Art Deco and the allure of the “Mad Men” era, his products were a rebuke to the idea that the aesthetics of modern life needed to be utilitarian and blah....

If [tomorrow’s innovators] learn anything from Steve Jobs, it should be that their vocation isn’t just about uniting commerce and technology. It’s about making the modern world more beautiful as well. Ross Douthat, NYT, 10.8.11

In my opinion, educators must play the same role, “a decisive role in restoring a defiant aestheticism to American life.”  It won’t be with a Steve Jobs in the lead; however, drawing from his model of excellence, it could be, in time, that together, we can “make the modern world more beautiful as well.”