Training Log Archive: barb

Hurt my lower back, probably moving garden pots and whatnot. Doesn't go away with NSAIDs. Staying home Monday to rest.

I am now going to tell you why the picture pictured below is a truly great piece of art.

It is because it is a true capturing of a relationship moment, artfully, speakingly, and it continues to hold true even now we are 16 and 48.

I'd guess he was maybe... 7 or 9 at the time?



Only now, "it's too hard" becomes slamming of doors and lots of swears.

In this drawing, I love the inner sanctum, outside of which other family relationship things are going on.

OK, and I love the ripped, taped-up picture of the guy on the mountain.

Oh yeah, and I love that I'm the hero.

C • I think 16 is about the tim... 2

....and.... we lost - the school committee voted to create the middle schools, immediately, with no good plan for including teachers' input on how to group and organize the staff, just some decision handed down from above.

I guess it's time to start working on making the new plan work.

Dear Superintendent,

I am a Graham and Parks parent.

In the wake of the decision in favor of the Innovation Agenda, and the passionate arguments on both sides leading up to the vote, I am writing to urge you to reach out immediately, both directly and through the principals, to the teachers in the schools who courageously took a stand against the Innovation Agenda. These are excellent teachers, and critical to the implementation of the middle schools. We want them on board. My understanding is that they feel they were not consulted by you in coming up with the Innovation Agenda, and you need to have them feel consulted for the plan to work. The plan explicitly states that you will build on the best practices - THEIR best practices - and the only way to do that is to work with these teachers, and for them to feel empowered. Let these teachers know that their concerns are heard, and that their concerns are valid, and that they did the right thing by speaking out -- speaking out results in better solutions.

My biggest concern about the plan is that these amazing schools were created by teachers who CHOSE to work at the schools because they bought into the PHILOSOPHIES and the TEAMS that formed there. The Innovation Agenda appears to propose that you will select teachers to work at the new schools -- but if you just throw teachers together, they may not share, or be willing to share, a philosophy and approach. You need to involve the teachers and current principals in deciding on these new teaching groups. You can't build on the best practices of the current schools without involving the teachers who are using these practices, and the new teachers have to want to use these approaches. The people are important. You need to respect the teachers -- not by saying that you respect them, but by SHOWING it by giving them appropriate decision-making power over the new teams and curricula.

I don't know if you have any idea how much effort and commitment it has required to develop these touted "best practices". We are talking far more than 40 hours a week. This is another barrier to throwing a random teacher into a group and telling them they need to now use a new philosophy of teaching. They need both to be passionately committed, and willing to put in the time to make it work.

At the last school consolidation, teachers were just assigned to Graham and Parks and it did NOT work out; they did not share the philosophy of Graham and Parks' approach.

(I know I don't need to explain that G&P's approach is not the only one that works. I know I don't need to explain that G&P's approach should not be lost. I think you have already signed on to that idea. Correct me if I'm wrong.)

As a parent volunteer, I have been running a team-building outdoor orienteering exercise for the entire G&P junior high for the past 5 years; we do this during the first few weeks of each school year. (Orienteering is a map navigation sport.) I taught a workshop on this program, and how it was developed together with the teachers, and implemented at Graham and Parks, at the Massachusetts Environmental Education conference on March 2nd. I would love to have a chance to show you this presentation, with the idea that it might be helpful in moving to the new school structure, and also that it is a great example of the process by which these excellent teachers develop new programs for their kids.

Please reach out to all the teachers who spoke up over the past few months. Now!

THANKS!!!!!

Barbara Bryant
Parent of students in 8th grade & 10th grade in CPS.

so tired...

Tonight the Cambridge School Committee will be voting on a plan that has been proposed by the Superintendent to consolidate grades 6-8 into middle schools. I'm not necessarily against the idea, but I am bothered that they haven't at all addressed how to build on what is working so well, where it is working. (The motivation for making the change is that at some schools there is a lot of attrition by 7th grade, so you have really small class sizes that can't support enough teachers for things like art, and so on.)

Here is a letter I wrote my fellow parents today:

This morning I was talking to my daughter about how I think I have a good idea that I want to publish in a scientific journal, but I'm really scared that it might be wrong, or dumb, or obvious. "That's why you need to write it up and show it to people, and get their feedback," she said. "Your saying that shows the difference in our educations," I replied. "Since first grade, you have been practicing giving and receiving peer review, but my work was only ever seen, and evaluated by, my teachers. I always did great on tests, and I got into a really good college. But even in college, I was afraid to share my work for fear that people would laugh at me. But sharing ideas makes them so much better!"

"Oh!" she said, "that reminds me of something that happened yesterday in Humanities. It was amazing! We are studying immigration, and we were told that our class would be visited by immigrants. Kind of like how holocaust survivors have visited the school during the unit on conflict, resistance and rebuilding. So we're sitting there waiting for the visitors, and, in walk eight of our classmates! THEY were the immigrants!! They each had a little flag from their country, and they sat in front and took turns telling their immigration story." These are kids from Trinidad, from China, from Haiti, from England, from Afghanistan. Some experienced poverty; some experienced conflict. What courage and trust they must have to tell their stories in front of their classmates! It is a strong community in our junior high.

The reason my daughter started telling me about her classmates' immigration stories related to the peer-review theme. The students who immigrated from Haiti related how different it was in school in Haiti. Teachers would punish you physically if you did not behave or learn. It was much stricter. But kids really paid attention and learned the material. At first they felt that in America school was easier, and kids weren't learning as much. But they came to realize that the way they were learning now, with groups and projects and lots of thinking and deep conversations about the topics, resulted in them learning the material better. This is what they said.

So, yet another wonderful experience in our junior high Humanities classroom. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. The curriculum, the community-building techniques – those have been developed by generations of great teachers and supported by the wider staff and administration at the school.

I agree that it is critically important to address inequities in our school system. AND, I think we should build on what is working. My biggest concern about the proposed plan is that I don't see how it builds on what is working, and instead, I see a lot of potential to break what is working. How can you have a plan that builds on what is working when you haven't even included the teachers responsible for the great curricula in our city, in figuring out how to expand what they're doing to more kids? The teachers and the teaching communities have not been consulted or included, and there seems to be no specific plan for this. It is in the details??

People often compare the current struggle about the middle school to what happened in the school consolidation a few years ago. To me, it is fundamentally different. Back then, we lost our school building and the problem was to figure out how to keep the learning community intact and functioning. But now, the STARTING point is to tear apart the community. There is no way to figure out how to retain the community when the starting point is to take it apart. I'm not just talking about separating K-5 from 6-8. I'm also talking about not addressing the fact that teachers are working as teams building on curricula and methods developed within that community for decades. Not addressing how the teams will be built, how they'll create time and processes for building the new learning communities.

I often think of Kurt Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron", where people are made equal by handicapping devices. Excellence is not tolerated. Sometimes I worry that the middle school plan, instead of bringing all students up to have a great learning experience, is looking to break what is working because not all students have access to it. It's a lot easier to break things than to build things. We need a plan that explicitly includes great teachers in designing a way to build on the areas of excellence in our schools.

I chose Graham and Parks for my kids because I wanted them to experience the project-based peer-review learning style. This might not be best for every student, but I love how it has worked for the kids I know. I am sure that you can get students to do well on the MCAS testing without teaching them how to nurture each others' work and accept peer review. I'm sure you could get good test results by lots of memorization and punishment for doing things wrong. But I want my kids to do more than know the material on the test; I also want them to have tools to nurture their friends' development and learning, and be unafraid to make collective progress; to learn leadership and teamwork. This kind of learning was created at our school by a community of great teachers – and this staff community was not consulted in developing the new plan. Moreover, we need processes in the plan for how to build on these teaching communities and/or build new ones.

We need a plan that addresses inequities, but focuses above all on knowledge of what the best practices are in our city's schools, and creates processes and mechanisms to truly build on those.

C • as opposed to? 5