Week 3 - Principals and Leadership

The Wallace Foundation article this week dealt a great deal with leadership.  In the educational setting the leader that we are typically talking about is the principal.  They are the ones that come in and set the tone for the entire school.  The article gave a great example of that in Dewey Hensley.  He came into an “impossible situation” and turned around one of the worst schools in Kentucky.  The characteristics and tactics he brought to the school really struck a chord with me because they rang true with much of the training I received and leadership I saw in the service.  L. David Marquet, a former Captain on the USS Santa Fe, wrote a book called “Turn the Ship Around!”  In it he tells a story, much like Dewey’s, about taking command of one of the lowest achieving ships in the fleet and turning it into one of the highest performing by empowering his crew and turning followers into leaders.  That crew went on to receive a disproportionately high number of promotions to upper ranks and leadership positions throughout the fleet.  My fellow business teachers out there may want to give this one a read, I have seen it listed on several “best” empowerment and leadership in business lists over the years.  It also has a companion workbook I was looking into to see if it might have some exercises that can be translated to the classroom.  Admittedly, I have a bias towards military sources of leadership because of my past experience, but I also believe that those methods and modalities are created with much slimmer margins of error.  Take Jocko Willinik for example.  He was a Navy SEAL and later a Navy SEAL instructor.  In that time he learned and embodied a particular set of leadership characteristics that allowed him to handle strong personalities, foster unity, and empower leaders at every level because in that environment a failure to do so could lead to the loss of life.  While the classroom is not that extreme, I believe that we have the same narrow margin for error if we want our students to be successful.  Jocko has also written several books on leadership (some, I believe, are focused on younger children), founded a leadership contractor called Echelon Front, and hosts a leadership podcast(The Jocko Podcast).  Luis and I had talked about using podcasts in the classroom and this one might be one to ponder.  The episodes are around 20 minutes so they might be a little long but I do think they have content that can be used in clips or even to pull out some quotes to reflect on.  One quote that comes from his partner Leif Babin, also a SEAL, is “it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.”  I liken it to Dewey’s “tolerance for truth board.”  On the truth board he posted the teacher’s faces with the progress of their students, displayed for every one to see.  It ultimately lead to a high level of turnover in his first few years but I think it helped him find the right kind of teachers.

I know I went on a slight tangent beyond the importance of leadership in principals to some sources and applications for the classroom, but I am hoping that maybe some of these are new and can provide some further insight to you readers out there.  I’d also like to touch on the teacher quote near the end of the article which said: “Principal’s have found talents in me that I didn’t know I had.”  This reminded me of some words I heard from David Foster Wallace, and have adopted in a fashion as my definition of leadership: “Real leaders are people who help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”

Week 2 – Essential Characteristics of Middle School

This weeks readings revolved around what the students need to effectively transfer to middle school as well as what characteristics make a good middle school.  The most memorable part of this reading for me was the student comments from the Scholastic article by Caralee Adams.  Going through the process of preparing to become a teacher and learning about the evolution of education along with the theory behind the methodologies is interesting.  There is something about hearing the words from the students themselves though, that is infinitely more powerful to me.  As I read through them I thought of another project from Trinity’s program that involved us interviewing a middle grade student.  We asked them 20 or so questions ranging from school favorites to their thoughts on academic honesty.  I thought it was very interesting to hear that perspective on what they were seeing in school and the things that really put them at ease.  One student for instance, not a fan of history, developed a love for the class and the subject all because of an excellent teaching experience.

 

Those kinds of experiences are part of why I want to be a teacher.  Specifically the concept of the “hidden curriculum” as presented by the AMLE text.  In the Navy I had several students reach out to me after they had progressed in their careers to talk about their journey and ask for advice.  I was very taken aback by some of the things they had to say and the interactions we had which stuck with them the most.  One of my students was highly intelligent but always beat himself up about small mistakes and didn’t think he was “good enough.”  As much as I had tried throughout the training cycle I couldn’t get him to see that worth within himself and understand how much potential he had.  After graduation however we sat and had a discussion.  It was less about the content and more about life, but that was what finally brought it all together for him.  Now I don’t remember exactly what I had said and I was surprised that it meant so much to him.  What he remembered though was that I had opened up to him on a personal level, and I shared my hopes, fears, and failures.  We talked about what I had done and things I wish I had learned.  That was when the way I had tried to teach him things finally clicked for him and he realized how much I cared.  So when I read the text talking about small actions having a profound and lasting impact on a students education I think of him.  He went on to advance incredibly quickly in the program and received many commendations along the way.  I had a female student in the same class who was very quiet.  I think our first meaningful interaction came when I was having a conversation with a coworker about I concert I had been to over the weekend.  Now I think it is important to note that the program is not like traditional schooling and it is very possible to have a student in my class that I don’t have much interaction with.  They have a computer based component, some traditional class work, oral and written exams, and small group events.  Who the students interact with and learn from is largely up to them.  They were allowed to form their own small groups and seek out the instructors they wanted to learn from.  So that concert ended up being the thing that provided our initial interaction and we built trust from there.  What stuck with me about that relationship was that she wrote herself a letter about how I treated everyone and gave it to her mother to hold onto and give back to her to read when she was older.  In it she wrote about how I treated my peers and students.  She admired my calm, fairness, and patience.  But again as the text stated it was a small action outside of the planned curriculum that modeled a mindset and way to act for her, which in turn built our relationship and helped her feel more comfortable asking questions as well as being more receptive to the content.

Week 1 - Major Goals of Middle Level Education

In going through the reading this week I couldn’t help but get caught up in the Major Goals of Middle Level Education from the textbook.  With the state of our country right now, “Become actively aware of the larger world, asking significant and relevant questions about the world and wrestling with big ideas and questions for which their may not be one right answer,” feels particularly relevant.  Throughout various news and social media outlets I have seen brutal acts of violence and incredibly moving moments of kindness as cries for change sweep across our nation.  Now my experience with children in the middle grades is limited to the time I spent in that environment for field experience hours, but the students I interacted with seemed to be pretty in tune with current events and they questioned everything.  So I can’t help but think to myself how do I address this in my classroom?  Or do I avoid it?  Is there even a “right” answer?  I know that my views may differ from yours which may differ from the next person’s but right now those slight differences seem to hold much more volatility than at any time I have ever known.  I believe that the classroom should be a place where we can hold open discussions and respectfully deliberate the multiple viewpoints of any argument, and that it should indeed be a place where students start to develop these skills.  But recently I have been taken aback as I read comments in social media which have received an incredible amount of backlash when from my perspective they didn’t appear to be that inflammatory, leading me to question the effectiveness of my own filter.  And I have seen words of hate breed even more hate, making me wonder how as a nation we can temper our emotions and find a way to peacefully plot a path forward.  It is my belief that at this young and still very impressionable age we have great influence in molding the way our students process these types of situations and it is incumbent upon us to do so in a way that allows them to reconcile themselves with the other, moving past preconceived notions to find the heart and the truth of the matter.  I know I am still wrestling with these ideas in my head, but maybe a few of you out there can share what this would look like in your classroom?