"I am what I am not yet".

un·pop·u·lar [uhn-pop-yuh-ler]-adjective

1. not popular; disliked or ignored by the public or by persons generally.
2. in disfavor with a particular person or group of persons.

—Related forms

un·pop·u·lar·i·ty, noun

un·pop·u·lar·ly, adverb

 

Dictionary.com Unabridged  Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2011
 This weekend I was reading with my four year old niece. We were talking about different jobs people have and what those people do. I asked her what a doctor does and she said "They give me shots in my legs". I asked her what the police do and she said "Be mean". Her perspective on the world is always intriguing to me because it's just so pure. To her, doctors don't make you better and the police do not protect you. She only knows how these people have directly impacted her small, short life.
Lately, I've felt a bit isolated at my school. My ideas have not always been well-received by my colleagues and I've been feeling kind of, well... unpopular. Most times, when I push a certain initiative in my school it's because I have a certain long-range "vision". Sometimes it's for my students in my school, but sometimes it's for public education in general. Regardless, my co-workers, like my niece, only see how these ideas and projects impact their own small, short lives. Another deadline, another item on a to-do list, another person who doesn't "get" how much work they have. They don't like me pushing their boundaries and expecting more for a higher purpose. They want me to leave them alone in their little bubbles.  This has happened to me before. It happened as an undergrad during group projects when I refused to use an Internet-ready project as-is instead of creating something that came from my heart. It happened when I was a classroom teacher, young and green among more experienced teachers. It's happening now, as I work as a resource teacher in a school where most of the staff have worked since it opened its doors in 1984. I'm a generally likable person in my personal life. I have a decent sense of humor. I'm knowledgeable enough about the things I have to be and humble enough to learn the things I don't know. I care deeply about my students and the success of my school. So why am I the outcast? The truth is, I don't know exactly. I have my suspicions, but I can't pinpoint the exact issue. If my co-workers and I were listed as "in a relationship" on Facebook, we would be described "It's complicated". It wasn't until I took an educational philosophy course a few years ago that Maxine Greene put a name to my lack of popularity. As a poet and an admirer of the arts, she articulates the idea much better, calling it "wide-awakeness". As Greene says, 

"I'm very influenced by existentialism and the thought that you can be submerged in the crowd, and if you're submerged in the crowd and have no opportunity to think for yourself, to look through your own eyes, life is dull and flat and boring. The only way to really awaken to life, awaken to the possibilities, is to be self-aware... I use the term wide-awakeness.Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there's really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn't come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious." 

Maybe there's nothing more scary than encountering someone who is already wide-awake (or at least attempting to become wide-awake). It makes a person realize they have blindly wandered through life and missed the point completely and it terrifies the person who'd prefer to hit the snooze button for the rest of their career and lifetime. 

I strive to be "wide-awake" everyday. I choose to acknowledge the deficits in our system and my own school. I question my own abilities and choices. I challenge my own conceptions of what my students can do and what the role of public education can be for society. I make a lot of mistakes and hold myself accountable. I hold myself and my colleagues to the highest possible standard and always wonder if we are doing enough, trying hard enough, asking enough of ourselves. 

I refuse not to be wide-awake. I will not apologize for expecting more. It may make me unpopular, but I accept that. I hope that my niece realizes someday that doctors cure diseases and help the healthy stay healthy. I hope she figures out that the police put themselves in harm's way to protect others. I hope  my colleagues realize that I push them because I know they (and I) can be better than we are right now.

Maxine Greene famously said "I am what I am not  yet." This is a hopeful statement. I hope what I am not yet is better than what I am. I hope what WE are not yet is better than what we are.

Mis-Understanding By Design

I first heard of Understanding by Design when I got a crash course in the "Learning-Focused Schools" initiative. (See http://www.learningfocused.com/) My principal at the time time taught a 2-hour professional development session to myself and 2 other new teachers as part of our induction process. We were brand-new teachers, fresh out of college, no teaching experience beyond day-to-day subbing and student teaching. Those 2 hours were more beneficial to me than 4 years in college.

My love affair with Learning-Focused was short-lived, however. I began to realize that this Max Thompson fellow had marketed a bunch of basic teaching principles and was making millions off of administrators eager to try the next best thing. Essential Questions? They're just objectives. "Beginning with the end in mind"? Well, duh! The teachers I worked with acted like these were novel concepts, but to me, they were just what I like to call "simple logic".

So I decided to dig a little deeper and find out where ol' Max Thompson got his ideas. It was then that I discovered my holy grail as an educator: Understanding By Design. It was everything Learning-Focused Schools had promised, but never fulfilled on. It made perfect sense and it changed me as a teacher.

Now, years later, I am still uncovering pieces of UBD. I learn a little more about it every time I design a unit and wish I could go back and change my first years of teaching every time I discover a new layer that didn't occur to me, but should have.

I spent part of last week out of my building working with colleagues from across my school division on revising our Social Studies curriculum for grade 5. As we went through the painful process of designing Stages 1 & 2 with more than 16 people, I became frustrated with my colleagues' lack of understanding. Later that week, however, during a class that required me to write curriculum for gifted students, I realized that some UBD principles make sense to me on paper, but are much more complex when used in the context of actually creating a unit.

In short, I was disgusted with my colleagues for their lack of knowledge, but was humbled by my own misunderstandings only a few days later. Our entry points may have been different, but neither were closer to putting the entire puzzle together.

I consulted my Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, a favorite among my students, and discovered that the word "understandan" comes to us from before 899AD as an Old English word which meaning (literally) to "stand in the midst of".

 As I "stand in the midst" of several curriculum units in various stages of revision, here are some things I KNOW, but still struggle to UNDERSTAND.

1. Stage 1 is the most difficult, stickiest, time-consuming, and VITAL stage of the unit-design process. Weak Enduring Understandings lead to weak Essential Questions which lead to weak rubrics and performance tasks supported by weak lessons. A good Enduring Understanding can MAKE a unit while a bad one can DESTROY it.
2. Creating a concept map is one of the most arduous and necessary tasks for designers of curriculum. When conceptual understanding reaches graphic form, it creates clarity for the designer, the implementer, and the student who will stand "in the midst" of the unit.
3. While it may be tempting to create a unit independently, teamwork is the best policy when designing a unit. Even if it is just for feedback, a second (or third, fourth, fifth) pair of eyes makes a unit richer, more universally understand, more complex, and more streamlined. This idea is the one that is most difficult for me, as I prefer to work alone and initially do not think a single one of my ideas isn't perfect!
4. There is always someone smarter than you. Elementary teachers, in particular, are trained to be expert generalists. We are rarely content experts and are certainly not working in the disciplines we train students to understand. Tapping into the mind of an expert, even if just by researching, is key.
5. True performance must be measured by action. Performance tasks, while difficult to design and time-consuming to score, are the best way to show transfer of information in students. Pitched high enough (but with support), performance tasks can uncover a depth of understanding in students we never thought possible. The tasks should aim for authenticity, in whatever form that can take, whenever possible so students see the value of the task.

This is only the beginning of my list. I'm no where close to designing Stage 3 in my units so my generalizations stop short of actual learning plans and revision. As arrogant as I was at the beginning of the week, I was reminded how important it is to withhold judgment of others when designing curriculum. As a wise woman once said of me, "She has a lot to learn."

I do.