Gratitude

It seems many of our friends have died this year, and even this month.  With tragedies in Paris and everywhere far and near, the world seems heavy with sadness.  This becomes all the more poignant during this time of gratitude for family and love, for daylight and moon light.

We especially appreciate the bare trees and blue sky, the bittersweet and golden colors that we bring inside during the Thanksgiving season.  Tomorrow our tribe arrives and for that we are so grateful.  We are surely blessed to be alive in this beautiful world.

We wish all of you a wonderful holiday, warm hearts and a spirit of optimism and hope.

Louise and Ashley

Indianapolis Public School Butler University Lab School

  A month ago or so, I finished up a long time contract with a favorite school, the Indianapolis Public School Butler University Laboratory School, better known in Indianapolis as the Lab School.  I have worked with Butler University for, let's see, 10 years! and have worked with the Lab School for 5, ever since they became a school.  It has been an inspiration and a privilege to work with such a dedicated and hard working group of teachers, professors and administrators at both Butler University and their Lab School.  The great majority of the teachers employed by the school are Butler University graduates and this creates a unity and loyalty to both institutions, the university and the lab school.  The school is always on the trajectory of learning...undergraduates, graduates, instructors, deans, professors, teachers, pre school and elementary students, everyone is interested in continuous improvement.  By that I mean designing and fully participating in making learning more meaningful, more effective, more relevant, more exciting, more real.

So, I have grown too, alongside them.  Working with the Butler Lab School was my first significant contract as a consultant.  Soon after Ashley and I founded Cadwell Collaborative, I was hired by Ena Shelley who is the Dean of the College of Education at Butler.  Dean Shelley believed that I could be an effective coach and professional development leader for the Lab School and that meant a lot to me.  As it turned out, we have worked closely together and also with Ron Smith, the principal of the school to co-design the shape our learning would take.

I am so grateful for and proud of the work that we have done together.  We are all close colleagues now and will find ways to keep in touch.  Congratulations to all of you at the Butler Lab School for all the good and hard work that you continue to do every day.

My last day there, the teachers and I gathered for a final meeting.  I shared images that I had captured during the week of the beautiful work at the school some of which are featured in this blog post, and they reflected on what they were most proud of and what they celebrated the most about their work. (They had also done this earlier that week with Dean Shelley.) I conclude with some of their comments.

I think our greatest accomplishment as a school is creating the school’s culture. We are now reaping the harvest of that hard work . It is such a joy and a blessing. I would not be the teacher that I am today if not for the staff with whom I get to teach.

Personally, I feel tremendous growth. One way that I have grown is in allowing children to be more and more independent each year.

I love thinking about the deep personal connection that I have made with families over the years.

I feel that I understand how to create a space that welcomes children and offers opportunities that provoke wonder and thinking.

I want to make sure that the tone of my interactions with families comes from a place of caring, mutual understanding, and respect.

I have been especially proud of how my teaching is responding to the needs and thoughts of my students. I feel my strongest Reggio Inspired area of practice has been in my child driven inquiry of multiplication!

One of the things I am most proud of is my own development is the process of writing engaging, inspiring curriculum.

I love our library. We visited other classes and we all decided that we wanted the library to feel like a tree house.

It’s like a family here. Everyone is just a question away.

I’m new and that is true for me too. I could go into any classroom and ask for help.

Those 5th graders…they have made it all this way. They say, “You were a football player and now you are a teacher!”

Some days I think, “Do I really know anything?”

I am a filter. I help mediate so that we can move forward in the best way.

My teammates helped me. Even if I was crying they would say, “You are not going to have a day like this tomorrow. We are going to help you set up your room and your plans for tomorrow.

I love it here every day. I am so proud to be a part of this community.

In our school there is a feeling of warmth, inviting experiences and engagement. A community of parents and children.

There is a genuine, authentic spirit, a joy, and excitement for learning.

We see democracy here …children’s voices, children’s ideas for guidelines and agreements in their hand writing and in their portraits. We hear their voices when we walk the halls.

There is so much life and light in our school…green plants, energy, enthusiasm, freedom and openness and thoughtful, prepared spaces.

I love it here every single day. I am so proud to be a part of this community.

Why What You Learned in Preschool is Crucial...

Compare this New York Times Op Ed by Claire Cain Miller with the David Brooks column from the NYT on October 16 and you have a good spectrum on the importance of BOTH cognitive learning and social skills development.

Miller quotes Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, where he studies education: “Machines are automating a whole bunch of these things, so having the softer skills, knowing the human touch and how to complement technology, is critical, and our education system is not set up for that.”

Miller goes on to cite David Deming, associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University and author of a new study

Preschool classrooms look a lot like the modern work world. Children move from art projects to science experiments to the playground in small groups, and their most important skills are sharing and negotiating with others. But that soon ends, replaced by lecture-style teaching of hard skills, with less peer interaction.

Work, meanwhile, has become more like preschool.

Jobs that require both socializing and thinking, especially mathematically, have fared best in employment and pay.

Miller's article includes a fascinating interactive graphic grid that shows the jobs that have grown most consistently in the last two decades have been those that require high math skills and high social skills.

Again, I come to the same point I made in my comments on Mr. Brooks column, we need to create schools that extend what most pre-schools do well into the realm of cognitive learning; to impart knowledge AND to develop life skills.

* The image included was taken at Indianapolis Public School Butler University Laboratory School in September, 2015.

Schools for Wisdom...a critique of High Tech High by David Brooks

David Brooks wrote a critique of High Tech High in The New York Times on October 16, 2015.  Mr. Brooks gets a lot right, however, he cleaves so tightly to his own well constructed perspective of "intellectual virtues" that ironically, he misses the point he hints at, "a partial response." High Tech High may be going too far in emphasizing relational skills over content.  I've only read about the school, I've not been there.  And, I've seen lots of photos of the building design, that is far and away among the best school designs I've seen.

However, from my reading of Mr. Brooks, he doesn't see the possibility that the approach at High Tech High can embrace BOTH life skills (21st C. skills) AND his intellectual virtues (basic factual acquisition, pattern formation, mental formation that combined, create wisdom, the "hard earned intuitive awareness of how things will flow").

The point of the approach at High Tech High, and other schools striving to evolve a more generative methodology, is to impart knowledge AND to develop life skills; and to do so in ways that engage students, that include them in the compelling issues of their time, that empower them to be essential contributors to their immediate communities, and that prepare them to become productive citizens who lead fulfilling lives.

As I think through Mr. Brooks' critique of High Tech High, I imagine a new school, High Brooks High.

Nothing Gold Can Stay-Part II

In the spring of 2014, I posted a piece entitled Nothing Gold Can Stay about a May walk that I took on the Trail Around Middlebury, about Robert Frost's poem of this title, and about the most wonderful book of Ann Pelo's, The Goodness of Rain. This time, on October 14, 2015, I am posting a second time with the same title after an autumn walk on the National Forest Service Robert Frost Trail near Bread Loaf Mountain and Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont.

The colors were predicted to be late and not so vibrant this year because of our late summer. Not true! They are breathtaking and all I want to do is to be out in them, swept away by each vista, each landscape of new palettes of crimson, deep red, rose, gold, pale yellow and rust. There is wisdom in Leo Lionni's story of Frederick who gathers colors and words while his fellow mice gather grain. Frederick's supplies "warm the hearts of his companions and feed their spirits on the darkest of winter days," the review on Amazon tells us. Something about these days that we know will be gone soon wakes us up! What will be left when the leaves all fall is what in Vermont is called "stick season"...a world without vibrant color, rather every shade of gray. Before the snow falls and the frost turns the world into magic again, the days can seem very dark and even grim. If we let them! This year, I am preparing myself as did Frederick. I am drinking in these colors and the autumn air hoping that they will warm and inspire me until the spring. The fleeting colors are a reminder that nothing lasts really and that life is short! They call us to live in each moment fully.

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost