Laura K Spencer, Ed.D.

Year: 2018

  • Book Read: Design for Strengths

    “‘You can have all the right answers, but it doesn’t matter if you are answering the wrong question.’ The willingness to circle back and challenge the central question and continue to ask it in a better way – and potentially abandon the current exploration – that is the hallmark of Design Thinking.” – John K. Coyle in Design for Strengths

     

    In education, there is a lot of talk about students discovering their passions, their strengths, their interests, and then building upon those through personalized learning opportunities. What does that truly look like? Although Coyle’s book is not specific to education, there are so many nuggets of wisdom that we can apply to our school culture. 

    “Skill gaps are easy – you work at them until you master them. Gravity problems – you accept them, quit solving for them, and then design around them.”

    “Step Zero: Acceptance. You can’t solve a problem you are not willing to have.”

    “Just because you ‘accept’ something does not mean you agree with it or submit that it is ‘OK.’ It simply means you accept that it is.”

    “Most companies hire for diversity of talent, experience, and background – and then they waste it… more often than not, they ask each team member to do the same set of tasks in the very same way… they ignore the unique capabilities and contributions that individuals bring and, in so doing, waste all that unique talent they recruited in the first place.”

    “The ‘one size fits all’ fair approach to work task distribution is a recipe for an unengaged team.”

    “When all the team members have a reasonably good working knowledge of each other’s strengths, they will – on their own (with a nudge of encouragement from leadership) – start to self-organize for their strengths.”

    In all honesty, I probably have Post-Its on every other page in this book and could have put so many quotes in this post. It’d be a great book study for teacher groups looking to better understand ways in which to develop personalized, strengths-based environments for both students and staff.

    Design for Strengths
    Design for Strengths

  • Exploring Agency & Personalization

    For the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside our county office’s Assessment, Accountability, and Evaluation Unit, as well as some of our teachers, to better understand the principles of agency and personalization. As these are key elements of our district’s vision and mission, it is important to be able to articulate what those principles are, how they manifest in an elementary school classroom, and what impact they have on student learning. 

    To dive deeper in to these principles, I have been meeting with three teacher hubs to further explore the principles of agency and personalization. Hubs consist of a grade level team at a school site that meet weekly around this topic. By participating in a cycle of Plan, Do, Study, Act, teachers dig in to better understand how the principle they are focused on is developed in, and impacts, their students.

    For example, a hub studying student agency might ask:

    What is agency? What impact does it have on DMUSD students? What do we want to accomplish?

    What common activities will we engage students in to increase agency?

    How will we communicate the work, results, and resources to stakeholders?

    How will we measure agency?

    Each teacher hub meets weekly for approximately 6-8 weeks. During these meetings, teachers discuss articles read on the topic, ideate methods to bring these principles to life in the classroom, and after prototyping those ideas with students, time is spent reflecting and refining the idea. This cycle is repeated as many times as needed in order to gain a deeper understanding of the principle.

    Personalization Brainstorming
    This is an example of our initial ideation as to ways we personalize in an elementary classroom.

    In January, the three hubs will convene together to share their findings with each other. Their findings will be documented and passed along to new hubs. The new hubs will then analyze the findings of the group and expand on it within their own time together as a hub cycle. 

    This is part of a developmental evaluation approach, which is much like the R&D process private sector product development teams use. It allows us to provide feedback about how a major systems change is unfolding; generate evidence for how an innovation may need to change or adapt before taken to scale; and then spreading the resulting ideas/knowledge to have a broader impact.

    The idea is that, as the hubs expand, we will reach consensus as to what these principles mean for our students and can then provide districtwide professional learning so that all students, and all teachers, have a common vision and plan moving forward. It’s been an amazing experience to join these teachers on a learning journey. I’m excited to see the results.

  • Agency Through FortNite? Sure. Why not?

    Fortnite, and other games like it, require students to practice “teamwork, collaboration, strategic thinking, spatial understanding, and imagination,”  Stanford Graduate School of Education experts say. 5th graders would agree, although they didn’t realize it at first.

    I’ve been working with small groups of teachers to critically examine student agency, and how it is developed, nurtured, and grown in the learning environment. In one of our meetings, 5th grade teacher Dan Dahl shared with us that he has a group of students that love Fortnite. He asked them, “So what do you do when you get stuck in the game?” Students were quick to share their strategies:

    • Look at YouTube videos to see how others completed the task
    • Ask a friend who may have already beaten that level
    • Practice the skill needed in the online “playground mode”
    • Try other skills to see if the task can be accomplished other ways
    • And of course, keep trying!

    When Dan asked students what strategies they might use when they are stuck with a math problem, it took a moment…

    tenor

    and then…

    Oh snap! GIF

    The connection was made – the strategies students were using to find the path to success in Fortnite are the same strategies they could use to find the path to success in their academic life, too.

    For some, it was a #mindblown moment.

    Thing is, many of our students already exhibit agency, which is the capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative. They just don’t always get the opportunity to do it at school. It’s up to us to connect those dots and provide meaningful ways for students to take their own initiative to learn.

    (Postscript: For those of you who are enraged at the prospect of 5th graders playing Fortnite, deep breath! We are not endorsing violent games in elementary schools… just engaging in conversations to better connect and understand the passions and joys of our students.)
  • Lucid Wonderings

    Lucid Wonderings

    I’ve been overwhelmed lately by life changes – my Navy daughter moved to the East Coast for her first duty assignment; my boyfriend and I bought a house; my work responsibilities have increased; and I have resumed teaching college courses parttime.

    All of these changes had my mind and my heart going in a million different directions and as a result, my blog and my tweets and my readings have gone in a million different directions as well.

    In that journey, i’ve come across some interesting reads. Here they are for you to explore as well:

    “A Thousand Rivers” by Carol Black

    Thanks to Will Richardson for this awesome find. As I grapple with cultural intelligence, a principle our district has called out as integral to student development, this article touched my heart on many levels. Black sets out to explain how we’ve gotten it all wrong in our focus on the science of learning because we have focused on the science of learning in schools, which is like “collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World.” This short, pithy description doesn’t do it justice. Grab some hot cocoa or something, a cozy blanket, and settle in for an eye-opening, or life affirming, read.

    “The Difference Between Fixing and Healing” by Rachel Naomi Remen

    When I attended Deloitte U’s Courageous Principal Institute, they had us all take a business chemistry survey. I was designated a “Driver,” which means I am direct, logical, competitive, goal oriented, and tough minded. To that end, I tend to want to fix situations and move on so that they don’t divert me from my destination. This article reminded me that there is much in life that can not be fixed. Sometimes, the focus needs to be on healing. And it made me think, how often have we looked at our students, our children, as people needing fixing instead of humans needing healing. It’s a move that requires empathy, and time to really understand and connect. Something Drivers like me need to put more conscious effort into to ensure it happens.

    Screen Shot 2018-12-03 at 16.15.43.png

    “She Never Saw A Classroom Until College. Now She Has A Ph.D. And A Lot Of Thoughts About Education” by Catherine Brown

    In this interview, Brown talks to Tara Westover, author of the bestselling memoir Educated. Westover was raised by survivalist, fundamentalist parents, and as a result, did not attend school as a child. It’s a fascinating interview, and I look forward to reading her book. In the article, Westover states, “Become educated but don’t let your education petrify into arrogance. Education should always be an expansion of your mind, a deepening of your empathy, a broadening of your perspective. It should never harden your prejudices. If people become educated, they should become less certain, not more. They should listen more, they should talk less. They should have a passion for difference and a love of ideas that aren’t theirs.”

    That’s my approach these days… to try to listen more and talk less. So now I’d love to listen to you …

    What are you reading and thinking these days? Would love to hear all about what’s resonating with you.

    If you enjoyed this post, share the link to this post with two friends. Learning together is way more fun than learning on my own.

     

  • Book Read: Building a Better Teacher

    I thought I knew the history of American education. After all, I had studied John Dewey in school, and isn’t he the source of all things education? Guess not, according to Building a Better Teacher by Elizabeth Green. Turns out, there was a lot of misguided efforts to create a teacher education program, and a lot of failed initiatives to reform education once there was a teacher education program. It’s an interesting read, as it filled in some knowledge holes for me about math pedagogy, charter schools, and the rise in quality of Japanese education.

    A few segments that stood out:

    “Changing the way you taught was a major undertaking. A teacher had to revise everything from the kinds of questions she asked to her very understanding of the subject she was teaching.” It’s complex work. It’s easier to do a “redesign, but not an overhaul. The same old wine in new bottles… carry out the activities without rebuilding core beliefs.”

    While watching an American videotaped lesson, a Japanese researcher was perplexed by a P.A. announcement that came on during the lesson:
    “Were we implying that it was normal to interrupt a lesson? How could that ever happen? Such interruptions would never happen in Japan because they would ruin the flow of the lesson.” Going through all the videos the research team had, it was discovered that 31% of American lessons contained an interruption, while zero of the Japanese lessons did.

    In Japan, no teacher worked alone. “To solve the puzzles that teaching posed, teachers needed the push and pull of other people’s opinions.” This is the power of jugyokenkyu, which is a Japanese lesson study used to hone their craft.

    I’d recommend this book to anyone who is currently working on school reform, as it puts names and personalities and historical context around some of the practices we engage in today. In doing so, it reminded me why change doesn’t happen overnight, and how important culture and communication are to any sustainable movement.

  • You Have To Find Ways Around Things

    I received this email from a colleague:

    In the mix of conferences…
    What if….
    We completely reimagined what that looked like??? How would we make that change?

    It made me think about IDEO’s blog vignettes called “Thoughtless Acts.”

    Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner’s eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts. – IDEO

    A recent Thoughtless Act called “Going with Gravity” described an old woman leaning over her small wall to pick an herb because it was easier on her body than bending down, and then having to get back up.  The woman, explaining her new moves to her grandson, shared that, “At my age, you have to find ways around things.”

    You have to find ways around things. 

    I would venture to guess that our teachers and students are always finding ways around things. They find ways around internet content filters. They find ways around limited supplies. They find ways around dress codes, outdated textbooks, and high-stakes testing. So many items that could be added to this list!

    Why do so many of the systems, structures, and beliefs of schooling require the users to find ways around them?

    Jose Vilson asks, “Why do we hold so tightly to the rigid ideas of what teaching used to look like and work with the generation of students we currently do, with different, valid values and diverse understandings of the way the world works?”

    If we aren’t constantly tackling educational systems, structures, and beliefs, then the changes schools make will continue to be Thoughtless Acts of working around the system, instead of working on the system.

    ux