Mitzvot Gone Viral

There is a new virus that is spreading through our school.  This one is a good one.  Chapter 1: The story begins with a Monday morning school-wide presentation a couple of weeks ago about our Joey (a Wornick eighth grader) - about her ever expanding mitzvah project that she began last year with a friend.  The girls have created a venue for collecting beautiful outgrown Bat Mitzvah party dresses from friends and distributing them to less fortunate girls.  Additionally, Joey and her friend Samantha arrange a party complete with donated food and a DJ so that the girls get to dress up and party.  Their website http://www.dressitup4girls.org/dressitupca/Welcome.html  tells it all. 

Chapter 2:  A week ago, I received an email from a fourth grader, Reid, saying that he has shared a google document with me.  I opened it to find that Reid had set up another mitzvah project – to collect gently used clothing (he specified not ripped and not stained) to distribute to a local shelter. He put together a collection box for the front office and he prepared a speech for our Monday morning gathering.  He presented this past Monday and charged the students to bring in at least one item of clothing this week. I need to add here that Reid heretofore has been a very shy, contemplative child.  He held that microphone on Monday morning and gave his carefully prepared speech in front of about 230 children and adults.   

Chapter 3:  I have a weekly practice on Monday mornings of sharing a “kol hakavod” (shout out) for a student or a teacher in our community who has done something “above and beyond” to help someone.  Some weeks we have one kol hakavod and some weeks none.  Students or teachers can come up to me during the week to explain why someone deserves this honor and the recommending person gets to make that announcement on Monday morning.

This week, another fourth grader asked me if next week he could give a kol hakavod to one of his classmates.  The kol hakavod is to a student who worked with other students and created an amazing video in scratch club.  What is so remarkable about this one is that the subject of the kol hakavod is usually a very, very shy child, and his buddy was pushing him to glow about his success, and was sending me copies of his friend’s video.  When I asked the boy who would be receiving the kol hakavod if he were okay with this announcement on Monday, his face lit up, he looked me in the eye (which he didn’t always do so easily) and said a hearty “yes”.  

Chapter 4 & beyond:  I received an email from a fifth grade girl yesterday who is thinking of a new mitzvah project – she has some ideas that are marinating and we are writing back and forth as she refines her thinking and planning……so it has been spreading from 8^th grade to 4^th grade and now making inroads into fifth grade. 

All of this is happening organically – above and beyond the grade level mitzvah projects that we have been adopting this year.  These stories are wonderful examples of a what a Wornick education is all about – an innovative (can-do) attitude, a heart that cares and understands obligations to improve the world, the power of project-based learning that integrates different disciplines and a strong community spirit. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. G.

Purim: A lesson in separating the Serious from the Trivial

About two weeks ago, some lively emails flew among the staff about costume choices for this coming Friday. Today, I happened to walk into a middle school Purim play rehearsal and learned that I and a few other staff people will make appearances in it.  Seasoned Wornick students know that Friday will be so totally different from any other day of the year.  We will all be playing – adults and children - in costume, singing silly songs, shouting during the reading of the Scroll of Esther. And there will be the Purim spiels – plays that evoke deep belly laughs from everyone. 

While all this is going on, there are reports to write, budgets to juggle, staff evaluations to be completed and many, many planning meetings to attend.  There are teachers who worry that some of their students appear to be more “ebullient” than usual.  Seasoned staff all nod knowingly and smile.  It’s sometimes difficult to hunker down and do serious work with all the Purim fun swirling around.  But that is the point of Purim (and Mardi Gras and the Hindu holiday of Holi). 

These holidays serve to help us deal with the ambiguity of an in-between season.  We emerge from the dark days of winter, but the weather is still unpredictable and lazy summer days are still on a distant horizon.  Ski season is ending, but swimming season isn’t here yet. Tax season is in front of us, and high school seniors and prospective independent school students are waiting to hear if they got into the schools of their choice.

Ambiguity of this sort often leads to anxiety and unrest.  This is the time of year when complaints rise in schools, when children get into more arguments with one another, when parents become weary of dizzy schedules, when teachers wonder whether or not they will be able to teach all that they must.

Purim, Mardi Gras and Holi are colorful, joyful holidays meant to reset our compasses.  Just as a well-timed joke or a silly comment can diffuse a particularly tense moment or reframe a difficult situation, so too these holidays ask us to recalculate.  They ask us to stop taking ourselves so very seriously - to sift the chaff from the wheat.  In the process, we learn to laugh at our own foibles becoming more accessible and humble.

Purim has some other important features – like connecting community through mishloach manot and giving gifts to the poor.  A close, serious reading of the Book of Esther, the text upon which the holiday is based, reveals themes about civil disobedience, the treatment of minorities, stereotyping and identities hidden and revealed.  In practice, the sense of outrageous silliness really distinguishes this holiday.  So when a particular tense moment emerges in the future, try to channel your Purim spirit.  If you see me sitting at my desk in a very silly costume on Friday (or any other day for that matter), you’ll know that I’m working on sorting out what really matters.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Purim Sameach (Happy Purim)

Dr. G.

Learning without Borders

Could K-8 classroom spaces look like the work setting at IDEO, the Palo Alto Design and Innovation Firm?  At IDEO, there are spaces for small quiet meetings on the periphery of a large room, a wide open space in the middle for creating, computer stations scattered around the room accessible to anyone on the work team and a food bar at one end of the room for people to gather and chat informally. 

This question has haunted me since seeing this setting a few months ago.  As our staff has been exploring what a 21^st Century school embracing best practices in STEM education looks like, we’re mostly thinking about “the what” that we teach.  But some of us have started thinking about the environment as well.  This Friday, the staff is studying “Design Thinking” as it applies to an education setting.  In many classes where you see students engaged in problem solving and authentic projects, you can see obvious manifestations of our thinking in this area.

If you walk along our upstairs hall on any given day, you are bound to see students sitting in clusters – some on laptops, some chatting in pairs, some with a teacher guiding or questioning, some with headsets working on a language program, and some teachers sitting together discussing pedagogy.  There is usually a small group of students – usually middle school aged - sitting on the comfy chairs around a coffee table at the end of the hall as well. The two most remarkable things about this phenomenon is that the students are always “on task” (focused on a particular task), and the groups of children in the hall range in age from nine years old to fourteen and the staff from millennials to boomers.

I’ve begun to think about this phenomenon as “learning without borders”.  It is about opening up possibilities, and about not limiting learning to the four walls of a particular grade level classroom. I’m not advocating ridding ourselves of our classroom bases (just yet), but I do think that this use of our space is leading to several “best practices”.  Our students and teachers are engaged, they are collaborative, and focused on learning anywhere they happen to find themselves. 

This past week, our students created some pretty impressive items.  And I do think that the products are a result of this innovative energy that permeates our building.  Fourth graders and their teachers created an electric turbo engine to light up the houses that they designed using their researched knowledge about circuitry and power.  Disappointed in the electric output of their engine, they have re-engaged in research, called upon some experts and are redesigning their engine. A few weeks ago, kindergarteners were given the problem of designing a prototype of a city.  They researched “city”, walked around Foster City – under bridges, over to City Hall, to the police and fire station and the library.  They spent a lot of time thinking about what needs to be in a city and they created their prototypes.  I’d like to live in their city – I especially liked the hospital named “Share and Care Hospital”.

We’ve extended our learning without borders to our adult population of parents and community members through the implementation of Feast Your Mind – an evening of learning and sharing outside the boundaries of our school.  The learning takes place in homes and it is truly a learning without borders as community members, parents, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, entertainers come together for one night to pause, to learn, to share, and to sustain and grow our very compelling and unique vision at R. C. Wornick JDS.  Please join us for this amazing adult adventure in learning this March 3^rd.  If you’ve already purchased tickets, consider inviting your friends (non Wornick friends perhaps) to partake in our innovative community.  Click on this link to sign up at http://www.feastyourmind.com or contact Lindsay Kopecky at lkopecky@wornickjds.org. 

Next week we’ll talk about what “homework” should mean in a school that endorses learning without borders.  

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr.G.    

Successful Failure

We started our week mourning the 49ers Super Bowl loss. “What do you think the players were thinking on Monday morning?”  I asked our assembled students at Havdallah.  Their answers ranged from sad (because they lost) to proud (for making it to the Super Bowl).  “Did they fail?”  The answer was “yes, they failed to reach their goal of winning.” 

Was that failure a bad thing?  There were ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers to that question. There were children who wanted to “guess” my answer, and, thankfully, there were many more who earnestly tried to grapple with this conundrum.  Slowly, we started to unpack the idea of the benefits of failure.  Students noted that following the game, the players were probably reviewing their plays to figure out what they needed to do better so that they could succeed next year. We talked about our feelings when we received a poor grade, and about how we felt when we failed to win a game.

Last weekend at a CAIS (California Association of Independent Schools) conference that I attended, Paul Tough presented the keynote address.  A couple of years ago, I cited his article that had appeared in the New York Times entitled the “Secret to Success is Failure”.  His new book, entitled How Children Succeed, maintains the idea that the best predictor of future success is not SAT scores, not college nor graduate school.  Instead, it is the ability to persist in light of adversity. 

Educators call this quality, grit.  Mr. Tough and others are calling “grit” a character trait that we must nurture in our students.  A psychologist, Angela Duckworth, has studied grit, and her research shows that this quality alone is most salient in predicting future adult success (where success is defined as leading a meaningful, productive life).  

This idea of teaching “grit” or perseverance is necessary, but tricky, to promote in an independent school.  Paul Tough notes that our parents who are personally and professionally successful and who naturally want to protect their children from discomfort, often unwittingly shield them from developing this trait.

I would argue that this argument is too reductionist.  Success is not a direct result of failure.  It is the result of failure followed by effective feedback.  And it is that trait that includes a reflective stance – one that looks as much to inner resources for guidance as well as to others.   Blaming others and an unwillingness to dig deep into oneself to solve a problem works against this quality. 

Our ethic of excellence (based on the work of Ron Berger) teaches children that work goes through different iterations, that there are standards to be met, that the goal is quality work, and that there is a protocol for feedback with an expectation that the feedback serves to improve the work until a particular standard is met.  The very process models “grit”.  It is not “failure” alone that is the source of “grit” but rather the allowance for failed attempts and the feedback that accompanies it. As a foremost educational thinker states, “a failure experience becomes an especially good teacher when accompanied by observation, reflection, conversation, and efforts to make sense of the failure.” (Roland Barth, 2002, p. 188) This is exactly what our school is doing and that is what our students understood about the Super Bowl as well. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. G.

School Home Behavioral Alignment

Last week, I wrote about the possibility that the school’s role of “in locos parentis” sometimes creates situations where a particular value informing a policy might be in conflict with a particular family value.  The school admissions process provides an opportunity to make sure school and family core values are aligned – yet, it is virtually impossible to align all values.  One area of nonalignment can be discipline or behavior management.

The core value of the primacy of an inner sense of control informs our behavior policies.  It is built on solid research about how best to help children be the best they can be.  Inner control sounds like something we all want – yet it rubs up against how most of us were reared and against an American culture that largely operates in the opposite direction. 

How nice it would be if there were a GPS for childrearing.

The first time your child misbehaves, how do you decide how to redirect - or recalculate in GPS lingo.  Most of us learned our parenting skills from our own parents – either following their lead or reacting to it and doing the opposite.  Many of us have read whatever the “Dr. Spock” of our generation is hoping to gain insight from these wise psychologists.  We’ve all been in settings where we are horrified by how another parent ignored what appears to us to be outrageous behavior.  The challenge of a pluralistic community like ours is that the standards and methods among families can be widely variable, and consequently, the expectations for what the school should or shouldn’t do can also vary widely.

Educators and psychologists who study childhood behavior and the methods for shaping it note that there are broadly three different approaches to behavior that have dominated schools and homes in the United States: autocratic, permissive and positive (the latter sometimes referred to as “cooperative”).  Generally, society swings between the two poles – autocratic and positive.  Permissive grew in prominence in the sixties and is still found in various subcommunities. 

Many of us were reared with autocratic methods.  The statement, “I expect you to do this because I’m your parent (or teacher)” belongs to the lexicon of autocratic parenting.  So does the idea of punishment for poor behavior. While honoring one’s parents is a virtue, behaving solely in response to someone in authority fosters blind obedience.  Research has shown too that punishment that is unconnected to the misbehavior teaches some to avoid the behavior and many others to sneak, cheat and hide to avoid punishment. 

The idea of “let the child decide what s/he wants to do when s/he wants to belongs to permissive methods, as does the idea that we just need to talk out our issues with adults and children on equal footing in the discussion. Many children reared in permissive homes struggle with commitment and decision-making, for it can become immobilizing to make any decision when all sides of a story are equally compelling.

The positive discipline model which has been around since the 1930’s has grown in prominence among most educators and it is the one that is in effect at Wornick. Central tenants of positive discipline is that all children want “to belong” to their community, misbehavior is the result of a mistaken goal about how “to belong”, discipline teaches through logical consequences. The entire system claims to develop an inner locus of control. One of the main proponents of this method, Jane Nelson, writes that there are five criteria for effective discipline that teaches:

1. Helps children feel a sense of connection. (Belonging and significance)
2. Is mutually respectful and encouraging. (Kind and firm at the same time.)
3. Is effective long - term. (Considers what the child is thinking, feeling, learning, and deciding about himself and his world – and what to do in the future to survive or to thrive = inner control)
4. Teaches important social and life skills. (Respect, concern for others, problem solving, and cooperation as well as the skills to contribute to the home, school or larger community.)
5. Invites children to discover how capable they are. (Encourages the constructive use of personal power and autonomy.)

There are many other distinctions between the two methods – distinctions between what is understood to be the source of misbehavior and the difference between the treatment of misbehaviors that effect others versus those that only effect the offender.  Autocratic discipline belongs in settings where the educational goal is compliance; positive discipline belongs to schools that promote critical thinking.  This topic is far too broad to cover in one short essay. I welcome future opportunities for us to engage in thoughtful, respectful dialogue so that we can be sure that we are speaking the same language and that our values are aligned.  In the meantime, use our staff as your GPS when you have a question about behavior.  We’re happy “to recalculate” for you.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. G.