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Back to School Advice for Educators

So we begin another school year. And, once again I am making a commitment to blogging more!!

After 28 years of doing the beginning of school thing I realize there are many constants this time of year. Some are really good and some things need to change if we are ever going to make this thing called school successful for ALL our students. One of our biggest challenges is to know enough about students to make sure supports and services are in place when they arrive the first day and to not know so much that we already determine they can’t be successful.

Here is what I know for sure…

  • When we know what works with a student we need to provide that starting day one. 

  • We can do a lot of things for students, even those elementary things we don’t traditionally do at the middle school, and the middle school things we don’t usually do at the high school. 

  • There are some things that need to look different as students get older.

  • IEPs from other districts do not always reflect who a student is and what they need.

  • We determine how we think about each and every aspect of our lives, including our students. Choose to think positively. 

Although I believe students attending their home school in a regular classroom is best for most students, I do recognize and appreciate that some students need a different setting than their home school and the general education classroom. I assert we should assume that a student will attend their home school and be in a regular education classroom and work to more restrictive services from there. We should not assume the more restrictive setting and believe that a student must prove her/his way to the regular classroom setting. The decision to pull a student from their home school is a huge one and an even bigger decision is to place a student in a classroom or school setting where typical peers are not present. It is hard to learn appropriate behavior, language, academics, etc. without role models present. Access to the general education curriculum and peers should always be at the forefront of the decision making process.

Here is what I am asking from educators this year.

  • Allow every child to walk into your classroom/school with the adults truly believing that they can be successful.
  • Have high expectations for all students, regardless of what you already know about them.
  • Make contact with parents before there is an issue and, when you do call them with a negative issue, ask for their help before you tell them what you are going to do.
  • Be an advocate for students who have no one, see a future for each and every child that is amazing, and engage parents/guardians as an expert on their child whose input you need. 

I end with this, my favorite quote that has guided every day since I first read it over a decade ago. You are so powerful. You are dream makers and that is the most important career anyone can have. 

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Effective Teaching DOES Equal Engaged Students

After spending the last month reading blogs and responses to blogs about the Marzano quote about engagement, I feel compelled to write my own blog in response.

For those who missed it, here is the tweet from Marzano, or people paid by Marzano to manage his twitter account.

Engagement is obviously a central aspect of effective teaching. If students are not engaged, there is little, if any, chance that they will learn what is being addressed in class. #studentengagement

From the reading and conversations I have had about this tweet, it appears that there are teachers who believe this tweet is an attack on them as teachers. That they are being blamed for the lack of engagement students exhibit and a student’s failure is a reflection on their ability as a teacher. These comments have expanded to include frustration that Marzano is not a teacher and is telling teachers how to teach, the prescriptive nature of implementation of Marzano’s evaluation system, Marzano’s greedy nature, how most administrators were bad teachers,  and, in one long-winded comment chain, arguing about whether or not Elizabeth Warren is part Native American.

This all has me a bit befuddled, which is not a new situation for me, unfortunately.

Are there teachers out there who seriously believe that engagement of students is not directly tied to effective teaching? I have been a teacher and administrator for 28 years and I am here to tell you that teachers most definitely have a direct impact on whether or not students are engaged in the learning in their classrooms. And, ultimately, whether or not those students are able to implement that learning.

Let me tell you what I have seen in my career. I began my career in special education teaching alternative high school students with significant behaviors and then taught middle school behavior disorder in an urban school district and then became the Behavior Interventionist in that building. As a Behavior Interventionist in a building of 800 middle schoolers, I learned a very important lesson about teaching and engagement and behavior. To say one impacts the other is an understatement.

I went from classroom to classroom in this position and saw varying levels of student engagement. A teacher delivering a boring lecture equals behavior issues and a teacher using instructional practices that were highly engaging had very few behavior issues. I’m not saying they never had behavior issues, but I am saying that the number of times I was called to their classrooms was significantly less than the teachers who engaged in ineffective practices. I continued to see this phenomenon when I became a building administrator. Some teachers had very few, if any, behavior problems in their classroom while some sent out multiple students a day, week after week.

Why is this? Because teaching is a PROFESSION! Teaching requires knowledge, and skill, and experience, and reflection, and strategies in order to be effective. There are highly effective teachers all over the place and they are effective because they are excellent at their craft. I am dismayed at the belief that what a teacher does has no impact on the engagement of students. If that is the case, why license teachers? Why not put kids in front of computers to learn with low trained paras as proctors?

How do we expect the teaching profession to be respected and valued if we want to distance teachers from the results of their work? Engaging students is hard work and the many teachers I know who are Rock Stars at engaging students are successful because of the work they put into their learning as an educator. Why would we not provide teachers professional learning and accountability around engagement when we know these are strategies that can be learned?

Effective teachers are amazing and the work they do engaging students is not only critical to the results for students, it is one of many reasons why we need to celebrate and reward teachers at very high levels.

When I think of the many engaging teachers I have had the privilege of working with, I think about the personal efficacy they carry with them at all times. These are the teachers that want the difficult student in their classroom, that don’t want the student to leave their class because they know the learning they are providing is critical, that believe students will be engaged in their classroom because that is the expectation they have for all students. They are effective, they know they are effective, and they want students in their classroom because they know what they do with students matters.

Teachers don’t walk out of college with the ability to engage students at high levels. This takes additional learning, and coaching, and practice, and collaborating with other teachers, and mentoring, and risk-taking, and observing others, and data monitoring, and reflection, and time. Successful teachers are Student Engagement Super Heroes and I refuse to pretend that this is disrespectful to say out loud.

One More Thought: As a person who will need a new liver in the future, I have done some shopping around for the best place to have someone replace my crappy liver with a bright, shiny, healthy liver.  One of the selling points for Mayo is that they have many skilled surgeons who have experience with difficult cases. These challenging patients also suffer from such things as kidney failure, diabetes, obesity, etc. Although it would be easy to blame the patient for his/her complicating factors (as many of these are lifestyle induced) they actually put their very best people on these demanding cases. So, knowing that engaging students who are challenging to engage is an advanced skill for a teacher, one would think that we put our most difficult to engage students with our most experienced and skillful teachers, right? I mean, that is how it is most of the time, right? RIGHT? I think we all know the answer to this one:(

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Thoughts on Orlando Massacre

It has been three days since the massacre in Orlando. I tried to watch and read some of the coverage of the events and one of the first things I saw was a text message chain between a Mother and a man who ended up being killed. Something broke inside me when I read that and I have barely been able to engage in any coverage since then.

Who are the victims? They are my friends, my co-workers, the artists I admire, my students, my family, my children. My children. My beautiful and brilliant boys; one who was birthed by me and one who was a gift of love from my marriage to his Father. Someone hated people I cherish because of who they love, it is beyond what I can grasp right now.

And, who was the perpetrator. He was a former student. Maybe not a direct student of mine, but he was a student, raised in an educational system that I have given my life career to be engaged. My optimistic  self thinks that I can impact a students’ future, that our work in schools will prevent the creation of someone who could inflict such pain.

My realistic self knows that there are a myriad of students who I would not be surprised to hear that they perpetrated some horrible crime on innocent victims. To be totally honest, I have worked with some people that I have the same feeling about. These are students who are so damaged, unable to feel or express empathy, who have been repelled by their families and society, who have a mindset that is paranoid and filled with hate.

It is the belief of many that we just need to find out the characteristics of these perpetrators and stop them from committing crimes. That might make sense if a majority of these folks ended up committing terrible acts, but they don’t. Of all the students I have worked with, only a few have committed a heinous act, the rest learned to live somewhat peacefully in society, at least to the point where I don’t read their names in the paper.

I do know there are things that we can control in the educational setting that will make a difference.

  • We must have mental health support for students as part of the educational setting
  • We must train our staff about trauma informed care
  • We absolutely must refrain from placing students on “home bound instruction” and forgetting that they exist (The Newtown shooter was placed on homebound instruction for years)
  • We must celebrate diversity and address the hatred that lives within some of our students
  • We must address bullying as it happens and ensure that all students are emotionally save at school and at home
  • We must be sure that the adults in the education system in now way engage in bullying behavior with students
  • We need programs and staff that are well trained to meet the needs of students who exhibits aggressive and predatory behaviors

As this is a personal blog, I simply cannot refrain from stating that the laws of our country must keep assault weapons out of the hands of civilians, period and end of sentence. Allowing a damaged and demented person access to a weapon that shoots many, many bullets repeatedly is a critically contributing factor to this entire situation.

(June 14, 2016)

 

 

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Let’s Treat Reading Problems Like we Treat Behavior Problems

What if reading difficulties manifested like behavior problems in the classroom?

What if every time a student struggles to read in a classroom, the result was the student throwing books, screaming, swearing, and disrupting everyone else in the room. What if the student screamed “I can’t read!” all day long until someone helped them to learn how to read.
My guess is that we would meet frequently, call in outside help, involve the parents, write an individualized plan and do everything we can to make sure that child learns to read. Given the number of non-proficient readers in many classrooms, I am going to speculate that we would not be able to put them all into a separate classroom:)
And, I know all too well how many times behavior is the direct result of struggling with academics. Unfortunately, we see the problem as behavior and focus on behavior instead of focusing on the true root of the problem.
(January 13, 2016)
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Strategies for Working with Difficult Parents

First of all, let me be clear that I don’t have a problem with demanding parents. Parents should be demanding of us, it’s their job to insist their child gets what they need. I think we all need to take a minute and really reflect on what it is like to be the parent of a child with special needs. What it must feel like the first time they realize, or are told, that their child has a disability. It is absolutely not okay to shut down a parent who just wants what is reasonable and necessary for their child to receive a free and appropriate public education.

That being said, I have had parents that certainly rise above what anyone would consider reasonable behavior on behalf of their child. Although I only play a psychiatrist on TV, I would venture to say that these most difficult parents were likely dealing with their own personal mental health issues. So, how do you manage an out-of-control parents while continuing to make sure that the parent’s rights are being secured at every turn?

I think the best way to address this in a blog format is to go behavior by behavior (all of which I have experienced at least once) and talk about strategies for managing that particular behavior.

The IEP Meeting Destroyer Parent: I have experience several situations where a parent became very disruptive in an IEP meeting; using profanity, making threats, yelling, etc. When this happens I immediately tell the parent that we will not continue the meeting if they are going to be this disruptive and ask them if they would like to take a break and maybe talk to me in a smaller environment. Be very clear that this behavior will not be tolerated. On a couple of occasions, I did shut the meeting down and we had to reschedule the meeting at a later time.

The Over-Communicating Parent: I have experienced the parent that calls the school mulpitle times a day, sometimes up to 10 times a day or more. This parent would call multiple people at the school and would then yell at the secretary when she couldn’t speak to someone immediately. The staff that worked with her child were extremely upset by all of this as her communication was very negative and demanding. Our first move was to create a communication plan and gave her one point of contact, who was me. When she then moved to calling me obsessively, we moved to a set time to talk two times a week and she could also email me. This is a totally defensible action, but should only be done when you have documented that the excessive communication is disruptive.

The I Change My Mind All The Time Parent: The parents I worked with in this category were parents of students with pretty significant issues and it was necessary for us to meet and change the IEP pretty frequently because the student’s data warranted changes. Meetings with them would take forever and it would be a very arduous process to come to consensus. We would be relieved that we had a good plan in place and then the parent would call the next day and say they don’t agree now and want another meeting. This is a really hard one to deal with because how do you say no to a meeting request? Then we would meet again, come to consensus, and then the parent would decide they didn’t agree again and want another meeting. My suggestion here is one I have learned from the lawyers I have worked with on these cases. Make sure you send the parent a prior written notice that details the decisions the IEP team made ASAP. Then, if the parent disagrees and you have already met at least one additional time to hear the parent’s concerns, tell the parent they need to file due process on the decision made in the PWN. In this way, you can actually implement the plan the IEP team agreed to and you can begin to move through the complaint procedure that is there exactly for this purpose.

The I Disagree with Everything Parent: I have worked with parents who are unhappy with everything we do. The complaints jump from topic to topic and, once you think you have one list resolved, you have another new list to tackle. In my opinion, this is the parent you want to go to due process with because they have to identify what they are complaining about. What issue/decision are you unhappy about?

The I Want My Child to be More Disable Than They Are Parent: This issue is addressed in an earlier blog of mine entitled “Munchausen Syndrom by Proxy, Special Education Style”. The main action you want to take in this situation is to make sure you are an advocate for the child and that you keep the child safe. Do not allow a parent to push you into giving services to a student that are not warranted. Unfortunately, I have had more than one parent that exhibited this kind of behavior.

The Professor Parent: This is the parent who reads everything they can on special education and comes to meetings with lists of curriculums and diagnoses and educational stragegies that they want you to use with their child. Be respectful and listen, but make sure the parent understands that methodology generally doesn’t go into the IEP, that the school determines how to reach the goals and what methodologies will be used to meet those goals. This puts the responsibility, rightfully so, on the school to show that what they are doing is working:)

The It’s All About Me Parent: I have worked with parents who really want the IEP meeting to be about them. This is a strange one, but the best deterrent to this is to continually remind the parent that the meeting is about their child and this really isn’t an appropriate place to talk about what went wrong with their own school experience. I also had a parent who would fake seizures when she came in to see me in my office. After I realized they were fake, I just ignored them and would go about my work and then she would eventually get back in the chair and talk to me again. Seriously, I can’t make this stuff up, I’m not that creative.

The I Come to School and Disrupt Parent: I have had this happen a few times. As the administrator, I asked them to leave the premises because they were disruptive. On two occasions the parent refused to leave and the police were called and the parent was charged with disorderly conduct. A restraining order was issued in one of the cases. This is certainly only done as a last resort and does not absolve a parent of their rights; we still had to involve this parent in the IEP process and we would do that by meeting via a conference call.

The bottom line is that these parents are exhausting and exasperating for school staff. Provide support and relief for the staff that are most impacted by these tough individuals and make every attempt to minimize the amount of disruption that occurs because of the behavior of these adults. Also, be especially empathetic to the children who live with these parents and take extra care to be that student’s advocate. If it is difficult for us to have to deal with these parents, think what it is like for their children.

 

(October 18, 2015)

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Transformation Train

It has recently become clear to me that I believe that the special education system needs to be transformed, not reformed. To reform something means to make it better, to transform something means to change it into something completely different.  Although there are good people working hard in the world of special education, I believe it needs to be changed into something that looks very different from what it looks like today.

As I speak my message of transformation for special education, I am pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm I get from both AEA and LEA folks with this message.  There truly seems to be a consensus that the current state of things is not meeting the needs of students, that this is a system that is terribly flawed at the core.  In some ways, I think it might be easier if I was getting more push-back on this message; I am completely comfortable and articulate when I am engaging in discussion about the many failures of the system we currently have in place.

So, once I have done my dog and pony show to the choir, I am staring into faces asking a common question.  Yeah, the current system sucks.  So, what are we going to do about it?   Well, I know one things for sure we aren’t going to do about it; we aren’t going to keep doing things the same way.

Transforming schools, and particularly special education within a school system, appears to be a nearly impossible task.  I would respectfully argue, that even those that preach the word of transformation, find ourselves participating in a culture that ultimately promotes the status quo.  We can reform, but we don’t allow ourselves to transform.  The beginning is always the best.  As educators, we are brilliant at laying out the problem, brainstorming solutions, and action planning.  I have seen time and time again how the train leaves the station (and we love to say things like, “The train is leaving the station, you either get on this train or you aren’t on the train at all”) and there we are, on the new track with all our believers, traveling down the line we laid ourselves, to a transformed future.

But, then, undoubtedly the conversation on the train becomes horribly bogged down in the minutiae.   We begin to move off course, become frightened that our train is moving too fast, the destination might not be what we thought it should be, the seat covers aren’t really what we wanted, we left someone important behind and we need to go back and get them and listen to what they think we should do, we didn’t pack the right supplies, the letters on the tickets aren’t clear enough.  So, we stop the train and we decided to re-think the plan, focus on the little details, mire ourselves in the barriers.  And, before you know it, we are back at the train station, off the train, and doing pretty much exactly what we were doing before we go on the bus.

To transform the world of special education, we need to get on the train and leave this station even if we don’t know where in the world we are going.  It truly is an “anywhere but here” phenomenon.  We may need to visit other places before we make a decision about where we want to go; we may take several different tracks to get there, and we may pick up and drop folks off along the way.  I am absolutely OK with that, as long as this train leaves and doesn’t come back:)

Posted on this blog are five things you can start doing tomorrow as a teacher, an administrator, or as an AEA support person.  Yes, there are things we can do differently tomorrow; without training, without additional funds, without changes to the law, and without everyone participating.  These are my ideas, and I know you have more, so please post them to share.

 

(August 30, 2013)

 

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Who am I and Why am I Writing this Blog?

First of all, who am I and why am I creating a blog?
        My name is Wendy Parker and I have been the Director of Special Education at Prairie Lakes AEA in Iowa since December of 2012.  In this position, I supervise support services for Special Education for 44 school districts.  Prior to this position I spent 13 years at Newton Community Schools doing everything from Assistant Principal at the MS to PK-12 Special Education Coordinator to Secondary Educational Services Director.  I was also a MS Principal in another Iowa District and spent my teaching career as a BD Teacher and Behavior Interventionist in Des Moines and Burlington, Iowa as well as Columbus, Ohio.  I have a BA in Secondary English Education from the University of Iowa, an MA in Special Education from Western Illinois University, and am ABD for my Ph.D. in Educational Administration from Iowa State University.
        So, I have spent A LOT of my life teaching and supervising Special Education.  As a result of this experience, I have realized all of the many, many things that do not work in the realm of Special Education.  I have historically viewed the work of AEA administration as yet another cog in the wheel of the Special Education bureaucracy; so it was a rather curious thing for me to join the ranks of AEA.  I did this because of my relationship with the Chief Administrator of Prairie Lakes AEA, Jeff Herzberg.  Jeff and I took several courses in Ed Admin at Iowa State together and we have seen each other periodically over the years as we weaved our way through our respective administrative careers.  In each of these conversations, we always ended up at a spot where we were shouting our belief that if only the right people were unleashed, the world of education as we know it would be abolished and a new, innovative, effective, and passionate system would take over.  It is with that emotion of true reform that I accepted the position I have now.
        One of my first challenges was to communicate this new message to around 200 staff members who serve districts in a vast geographic area with nine AEA offices.  I wanted the message to be upbeat, yet challenging enough to let them know that business would not be as usual.  My first attempt was a boring powerpoint with pictures and I knew this was going to motivate no one to think or act differently.  Of the many gifts I have in my life, amazing and talented children are one of the greatest of all of them.  My son, Andrew, works for a small production company in Chicago and he took the words and passion from my bad powerpoint and made it into an amazing video that I believe perfectly captures the message and questions I am trying to convey.
        This is the primary reason for this blog.  To share the message that we need to make Special Education services more effective, that things cannot continue in the current bureaucratic madness where so many of us have resided for so long.  Along with the video are links for you to access to start walking this amazing journey of change.
        I would love to get more ideas from you and to hear your comments, questions, or disputes.  The more we support each other as a community, the stronger we are, and the more incredible things we will accomplish for kids.
        By the way, the blog name of Rapacious Learning is dedicated to my dear friend, Dr. Brad Buck, Superintendent of Saydel Schools in Iowa.  Brad and I took many, many classes together in Ed Admin at ISU and, being the ADHD people that we are, we created many of our own moments of entertainment.  This included an ICN class where we got all of the class members to sing and dance the  hokey pokie, taking turns napping just outside of the camera in the ICN room, and using vocabulary words that we enjoyed as much as possible.  One of our favorites was the word rapacious.  Rapacious means aggressively greedy, ravenous, predatory and we would use it often and with feeling.  I think Brad would agree that rapacious learning is exactly what we are after:)
(August, 2013)
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Promises for my Post 50 Life

Tomorrow is my 50th birthday. This means I have lived half a century and, most likely, have lived longer than I will live in the future. This doesn’t scare me or make me sad, but it does make me incredibly impatient. I have decided that I no longer have time to wait, to bring people along slowly and kindly, to hope that the next people who are in charge will make the right decisions. Although I have seen many great things happen for children in my career, I have more often seen stagnation and back-pedaling and excuses and meandering and blocking. So, I need to change my approach because time is running out for me to see all the things changed that need to be different.

Here are my promises for my post-50 life:

  • I will speak the truth. Even when it is not popular. Even when it hurts the feeling of others.
  • Although I understand we need to honor the past work of others; I am no longer going to take time to pacify others with speeches that honor the flawed history of our work. Yes, you worked really hard and had good intentions; we all did. I am going to make a blanket statement today that I honor all the work that has been done in the past and let’s move on from there. We need to stop grieving our past practices and hard work; we cannot continue to honor past practices simply because it is hard for folks to let go.
  • I am going to push myself, and others, a lot more. “What is going to happen tomorrow as a result of this work?” “I know this is going to be difficult, but we are going to do it anyway because it is what our students need to be successful.” “What specifically will each of be doing to move this forward in the next month?’
  • I am going to be even more particular about how I spend my time. I will not be afraid to get up and walk out of a meeting if it isn’t going anywhere.
  • My focus will be on solutions. I think I have admired our problems sufficiently in my first 50 years. I am keenly aware of the issues we have with poverty, and parents that don’t care, and teachers who aren’t well trained, and paper work that is cumbersome and meaningless, and politicians who don’t support us, and horrible instructional practices, and on and on. I don’t want to talk about our problems unless we take the time to focus and implement real solutions.
  • I am going to invite more people into the process. I have sat at the table with a lot of the same folks for a lot of years and there is a critical need to purposefully solicit new folks to the work.
  • I am going to spend more time with school leaders walking through classrooms. We have to be realistic about what is happening if we want things to get better; mentoring of leaders is the most critical piece of the puzzle, in my opinion, and the best way to mentor leaders is to walk side-by-side observing instruction.
  • I will take more time to tell the awesome people I know that they are awesome.
  • I am going to work to provide services to districts that are desperately needed; particularly services to students who have the most challenging behaviors.
  • I am going to spend more time talking to students. If you really want to know what will work for kids, ask them.
  • I am going to get more proficient with technology. I need to spend less time on the road and more time engaged in meaningful work and technology can make that happen.
  • I will be a better advocate on social media.
  • I will spend more time with people who challenge me, who make me think in a totally new way.
  • I will spend more time with people who say yes and less time with people who say no.
  • I will choose to be around people who are positive.  I no longer have time to listen to people complain and moan when they have no interest in a solution.
  • I will embrace risks and failures. Nothing will change if we tread lightly, afraid to fail. We need to take big risks to make big gains and that means there will be some big failures.
  • I will find time to exercise. My ideas, my motivation, my health, my humor, my ingenuity, and my stamina depend on this.
  • I will wake up every day with optimistic anticipation. I choose the way I feel and I don’t have the time or energy to have a negative perspective.
  • I will have the hard conversations and I will not shy away from conflict. If we are to move forward, we have to by okay with conflict.
  • I will laugh more in the future than I have in the past; be more irreverent, and probably use a little more profanity:)

(December 28, 2013)

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Rant Against the Educational Visionaries

Let me warn you right off, this is a rant. I’ve had a long, long week and I am taking out my frustrations in this blog. So, just be aware and read this at your own risk:

I am completely over the “big picture”, “big vision”, “global thinkers”, and “epic dreamers”. What is it about the world of education that makes us feel like we have solved a problem by telling schools and educators we aren’t doing it right.

I have had, and continue to have, opportunities where I listen to a speaker who tells us our current educational system is not preparing students for the world they will live in the future, or for the world we live in now, for that matter. I’m quite certain that no one in those rooms is unaware of this fact. I don’t think anyone in those rooms is thinking, “Well, goll darn, we’re preparing our students for factory jobs at our school”. I really don’t think any of us are unaware of the problem; what we are unaware is what to do to start fixing the situation.

At another meeting, I took some administrators through an activity where we took each of the items listed in the article “14 Things That Are Obsolete in 21st Century Schools”. The article can be found here http://ingvihrannar.com/14-things-that-are-obsolete-in-21st-century-schools/.  We did an activity similar to the EdCamp “Rocks or Sucks” session where we voted by standing in a certain spot as to whether or not each thing was relevant or obsolete. Most of the people there saw most of these things as obsolete even though they exist in their own schools! Goodness, if you know it’s the wrong thing to do, shouldn’t that be enough to change?

No, it isn’t enough!! We don’t change until we know WHAT TO DO DIFFERENTLY. That’s why having a vision is great, but it is not the big work by a long-shot. The big work is choosing what you are going to do and doing it with fidelity and monitoring what you are doing to make sure what you are doing is actually getting the results you want.

This is the big, hard, boring, tedius, thankless, work that so many of us either don’t know how to do or don’t want to do.

I am an idea person. I have vision up the ying yang. There isn’t an educational shiny object that hasn’t caught my eye. I love to dream big. And I am good at seeing what is wrong in everything around me. I am your best candidate for “Critic of Everything We Currently Do”.

But I’m bored with that and I don’t have time to engage in talking about the way things should be anymore unless it is going to be followed up with some purposeful and specific planning for what to do differently.

So, I’m going to make some giant assumptions for now:

  1. We all know that the world we are preparing students for is drastically different than the world where we grew up.
  2. We all know that what schools currently offer kids is not what they need.
  3. We all have a vision that kids will learn at high levels in an engaging and creative and challenging manner.

Here’s the assumption I don’t think we all have. There are no quick fixes to this problem like handing every student a computer or tablet or adding Genius Hour to every schedule. In fact, these have been some of our most dangerous practices. If we are going to truly change the behavior of schools it will be a long and arduous process with lots of detail work along the way.

One of the biggest hurdles we need to face is answering the question, “what does it look like?”. And, this doesn’t mean we send people to another state to see what that school is doing and think that is enough. What does it look like here? With our staff. And our resources. And our administrator. And our parents. And our School Board.

As change-agents, we have to be willing to get embedded in schools, to know that district’s situation intimately and to plan with them and for them. It needs to include a coaching model, not a “we are the expert” model. We can’t tell people what to do, we have to do it with them.

At Prairie Lakes AEA, we have had a vision of changing the way instruction is delivered to special education students for several years. One of the first things we realized is that we knew what it didn’t look like, but we hadn’t articulated what it DOES look like. So, we went to work with the DE and, after two years of arduous work, we have a rubric for what Specially Designed Instruction looks like.

So, we just do the same thing with everyone to get them to implement this, right? WRONG! Now, we are working on a protocol to determine the unique situation every district is in so we can work with them to create the best plan of action to really impact instruction. We plan to be in six districts this year and it involves spending time side-by-side with district folks to do classroom walk-throughs in every building; focus groups with teachers, students, parents, administrators, and paras; and a comprehensive data review. In the end, we will choose five things we saw to celebrate and five things we saw as priority areas for improvement. The action planning will be what we can do in 10 days, 10 weeks, and 10 months with implementation support and an evaluation component embedded in the plans. It is long, hard work, but I believe it is the right work.

So, keep dreaming, but start doing as well. My mantra with everything I attend at work is, “What am I going to do differently tomorrow as a result of this?”.

So, a few things I think you can do as an administrator or teacher within 10 days to make a difference for kids and their future:

  • Schedule time for yourself to visit a place where your students may work and watch what they do and ask them what they value in their employees.
  • Survey your students about what they would be passionate about learning. Create a passion project that all students are required to complete. More information on this at http://www.rundesroom.com/2013/11/passion-projects-in-classroom.html or http://psolarz.weebly.com/mr-solarz-eportfolio/step-by-step-directions-for-creating-passion-projects-in-our-classroom.
  • Create a peer coaching relationship with another staff member and observe each other looking for the level of instructional complexity in your classroom. As an administrator do walkthroughs of classroom and provide immediate feedback.
  • As a teacher, give your students a real world task with an authentic work task. As an administrator, require this of your teachers and hold them accountable to these expectations.
  • As an administrator, hold your Tech Director to a high standard. So often, this is the person in a school who is a huge barrier and no one will take them on. You need to take them on; the position should work collaboratively with your teachers and administrators, not make decisions in isolation.
  • Spend 30 minutes a week learning on-line about what the classroom of the future looks like. Literally google “What you can do right now to create a classroom for the future” and read the articles and watch the videos that are listed.
  • As a teacher, restructure you classroom in a way that fosters collaboration.
  • As an administrator, restructure your building schedule to foster collaboration. Require that a piece of the collaboration time is spent on building a classroom for the future.

I think we get overwhelmed by how far we have to go so we do nothing. Set small goals that you can reach, plan to do ONE thing in the next 10 days. I promise we can all accomplish that dream.

(May, 2016)

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Reaction to SRO Forcibly Removing Student Video

The video at this link has caused a media uproar in the past 24 hours.

https://youtu.be/i5wLQMzMoJo

The video depicts a School Resource Office forcibly removing a female high school student from a classroom after she refuses to follow his instructions to leave the classroom. I spent three years as a Behavior Interventionist at a Des Moines middle school and 12 years as a building level administrator at the high school and middle school level. I can honestly say I found myself dealing with a student who refused to leave a classroom at least 100 times.

There are some who say a student refusing to leave a classroom is not a danger to themselves or others so nothing should happen. I respectfully disagree with this perspective strongly. It is not okay to allow a student to refuse to leave and then just continue on with class. I have seen administrators make this choice and it is a disaster. This DOES NOT mean you call law enforcement and they drag the student and the desk out the door while slamming the student on the floor as we witnessed in this video.

When I found myself in this situation, it was usually the result of a power struggle with the adult and the student. Once the student was in open defiance and disrespect, the situation had to be handled, but I also managed the adult situation after the fact to make sure the chance of repeating this situation was greatly minimized. Sometimes it wasn’t an adult issue, and just a student that needed to be dealt with in a very antagonistic moment.

I don’t know what happened prior to the filming starting in this video, but I am guessing this was a GIANT verbal power struggle that resulted in a very pissed off officer who reacted while angry. Since no one was in immediate danger there was definitely time to take a step back and make some better choices.

The best choice in this situation would be to remove the audience. When approaching a student who refuses to leave a classroom after repeated requests, I would get down to their level and explain that I was not going to put my hands on them, but I would be calling law enforcement for assistance. I would then tell them that I was going to clear the room of all the other students and adults until help could arrive. In almost every instance that the situation got to this level, the student would get up and leave when I told the class to leave.

If the room clear didn’t work, I would call parents or another relative and see if they could offer assistance. Sometimes talking to their parent or other relative on the phone would diffuse the situation and the student would comply. If that didn’t work, I did go ahead and call law enforcement, usually our School Resource Officer if she/he were available. With no audience, the addition of law enforcement worked for me in all but a few instances.

In the couple of instances where law enforcement did not result in compliance, the office called for back-up. He/she did not try and remove a non-dangerous student from the classroom by him/herself.

Another trick that I used over and over again for a very agitated, “I’m not doing anything you ask me to do” student would be to approach the student in the classroom and tell them I had another situation down the hall and we needed to go there first and then I would deal with their situation after we resolved that other situation. Distraction can be genius at timesJ

The bottom line is that this video exemplifies excessive force at its most alarming and there are must more effective strategies to use in a situation like this one.