The Way it Ought to Be

Dean Shareski — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:34:59 +0000

I'm at Educon.
If you're not familiar with Educon, it's a conference/conversation hosted by Chris Lehmann and the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA.

I was fortunate to be able to spend Thursday and Friday hanging around the school. Here's what I saw:

Lots of smiles.
Loud classrooms
A principal's office that looked more like grand central with equal numbers of staff and students talking and working, coming and going
Teachers who discussed personal issues with students
A brief power outage that didn't paralyze learning despite them being a 1:1 school
A lack of emphasis on technology
Students occasionally off task
Students excited to talk with adults

None of these things are particularly amazing and are all things you could find in many, if not all schools in North America. I didn't see one thing that couldn't be done almost anywhere. The teachers are good teachers but they aren't doing anything I haven't seen before. So what's the big deal?

There are many more observations and insights that one would make beyond the few I've listed but I'm not sure that any additions would tell us that "one thing". It's obvious that leadership plays a significant role and that grows culture over time which is undeniably palpable. While many will continue to deconstruct and analyze how, and if this type of place is replicable, Good teaching and caring adults can lead to a really wonderful place which Science Leadership Academy truly is. But maybe SLA isn't so unique after all? Maybe there are more schools and classrooms like this but we just aren't telling anyone? The level of connectedness among staff doesn't hurt their image but indeed follows closely with one of their guiding principles: Learning can – and must – be networked. But behind that networked learning lurks teachers who know how to teach just like many of the teachers you work with or you already are.

I didn't see any one thing that blew me away at SLA . They just seem to embody the things we think schools should be.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by shareski

Rules aren’t the answer

Dean Shareski — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:21:13 +0000

Thanks to a comment from Bill Ferriter, I finally took the time to watch Barry Schwartz’ recent TED talk. Schwartz talk on the Paradox of Choice remains one of my favourites but this one might surpass it.

For a great synopsis of the talk check out Rob Jacob’s post.

As Bill connected my post on worthless pursuits to this talk, I continue to believe how important it is for us to devise organizations that are focused on responsibility rather than accountability. Accountability infers rules. Responsibility infers caring.

I’m reminded of friends of ours who are a few years older than us and when we were young parents, they talked to us about their approach to parenting. They told us they had very few rules. They preferred to invest time in developing guidelines and developed understandings with their kids that made sense to everyone. It didn’t mean their kids always did the right things but the discussions and time spent was on values and relationships, not maintaining or rewriting rules. Reminds me of SLA. I understand that many view this approach as idealistic but not realistic in every situation. I would argue, that rules often make us lazy. We would love if we could simply develop a bunch of rules and know that they will be followed. Rules, on their own are never enough.

I pulled a great quote from the talk and created another image for my collection.

Ideas and Thoughts» sla

The Way it Ought to Be

Rules aren’t the answer