Stimulating Reflection by Richard Jones

We often refer to the 3R’s of school improvement as rigor, relevance, and relationships. These are very important and powerful in improving teaching and learning. However, a fourth R that is crucial for professionals raising their expertise is Reflection. I like the quote from John Dewey, “we do not learn from experience: we learn from reflecting on experience.”

One of the key elements of instructional leadership is to have a clear focused target on which instruction needs to be directed. This is important but the process of getting staff to move toward that target requires reflection. Reflection does not result from a memo or a mandate, it is initiated by the individual. However, there are conditions leaders can address to stimulate reflection.

The several conditions  on which leaders must focus in order to create an environment that stimulates reflection are; emotional engagement, quiet time, recognized gaps, thoughtful prompts, and experience.

Emotional Engagement

Individuals will not reflect on something that they do not feel an emotional connection with. We think about the things that we care about. In order to create a higher level of reflection in education, it is important for teachers and administrators to feel a personal, emotional connection to the issue at hand. For example, when discussing school performance data, this often leaves a very distant emotional connection. Translating data into student faces and names regarding achievement can help to build an emotional connection. iConsequently teachers feel an emotional connection and a greater sense of urgency to reflect around the issues of poor student achievement.

Quiet Time

Reflection is about thinking on the work. It is very difficult to think on the work when we are engaged in the work. It is important to have quiet time away from the demands of the job in order to truly reflect. This does not have to be extended periods of time, however it needs to be free of distractions. Leaders need to provide opportunities for quiet time and personally we need to provide our own quiet time in order to increase reflection.

Visible Gaps

The usefulness of data-driven instruction is that it provides a quantifiable gap between our present performance and our desired performance. Reflection usually doesn’t occur unless we see and can visualize a gap between where we currently are where we want to be. Visible gaps can be  between past performance and current performance. It is those visual gaps that lead to reflection. We reflect about things that were not satisfied with and the more that we can visualize and quantify gaps, the more we can stimulate reflection.

Thoughtful Prompt

Events trigger reflection! We spend most of our day putting the observations around us into the categories and patterns of normal conditions. When we see something out of the ordinary we think about it. When we see a student with a remarkable achievement or on the other end a student with very poor achievement we tend to analyze and reflect why that situation occurred. In order to stimulate more reflection, it is often useful to create these unique events. This might be in the form of a story. It might be in the form of a video, or it might be in the form of an unusual or provocative question. When we go about our normal routines we rarely take time to redirect our brain to thinking and reflecting. We concentrate on doing and handling the events around us that require our attention. By identifying and creating some thoughtful prompt we can stimulate more reflection. 

Experience

The process of reflection is analyzing prior experiences in order to determine a new course of action. When our previous experiences are very limited, we have very limited ideas upon which to reflect. Even if we are excited about the opportunity to reflect, if our experiences are limited, we will not be very successful. Sometimes in order to improve reflection we need to provide more experiences. More experienced teachers have greater opportunity to reflect and likewise creating new experiences such as having teachers observe other classrooms or other schools gives them a richer set of experiences upon which to reflect.

Summary 

Reflection is not an accidental event. Leaders and facilitators can increase the level of reflection by paying attention to these necessary conditions in order to enrich reflective experiences.  Reflection is that essential ingredient that enhances personal development and ultimately improvement in teaching and learning.

How We Think About Our Business is How We Do Our Business - Annual Conference Preview

by Robert Harris, Director of School Improvement Initiatives,  Performance Learning Systems
Roundtable Session RT2 Tuesday December 4, 2012 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

“… We don’t see things as they are – we see them as we are”…Anais Nin

How We Think About Our Business Is How We Do Our Business

• How DO we think about our business?
• What are our goals as an organization?
• What are the core competencies of this organization?
• How does it present itself to its many constituencies?
• How does its leadership present its vision for the future so that it can move towards it and bring it about?
• How does it establish, track, maintain and predict its’ processes so that it can continuously improve and develop in all of it’ major areas of focus?
• How does it plan to build an adaptive organization with a clear identity – without which a vision and the ability to reach it are jeopardized?
• NOTE: How we think influences the ways that we work together- How we work together influences the ways that we think about that work

…moving from a singular WE to a collective WE- a community of learners

The Potential to Revolutionize K–12 Education - Annual Conference Preview

 by Robert Harris,Director of School Improvement Initiatives

 VSCHOOLZ

 Roundtable Discussion RT1 Monday December 3, 2012 10:10 to 12:00 PM

Blended learning has the potential to revolutionize K–12 education in terms of quality and cost, as it allows for a fundamental redesign of the educational model around the following:

•  A more consistent and personalized pedagogy that allows each student to work at her own pace and helps each child feel and be successful at school. Leveraging technology, blended-learning programs can let students learn at their own pace, use preferred learning modalities, and receive frequent and timely feedback on their performance for a far higher quality learning experience. As online programs capture student achievement data in real-time across the school, teachers can spend more time helping personalize learning for students.
• Productive new school models that require fewer, more specialized teachers and use space more efficiently. Schools can leverage technology to create radically different staffing structures that increase school-wide student-teacher ratios, even as students experience more personalized learning from more effective teachers. Leveraging technology in this way changes the assumptions of the traditional school model, where labor has accounted for 70 to 85 percent of costs and where only a fraction of students have access to great teachers. Teachers shifting to blended-learning models are finding that they have more time to focus on high-value activities like critical thinking, writing, and project- based learning as they spend less time on low-value, manual tasks.

These opportunities to innovate can occur even as providers take advantage of the things that leading brick-and-mortar schools do well, such as creating a strong, supportive culture that promotes rigor and high expectations for all students, as well as providing healthy, supportive relationships and mentorship.   

Birds, Bees, & Benchmarks: National Sexuality Education Standards - Annual Conference Preview

By Kurt Conklin, MPH, MCHES (SIECUS) and Nora Gelperin, M.Ed (Answer)

While the nation was busy enduring months of election-year primary campaign stumping and two major party conventions throughout 2012, a small announcement in Education Week this past January quietly shifted America’s sexuality education landscape.

For the first time ever, curriculum planners, teachers, local and state school board members, and parents have a set of uniform, national sexuality education standards to measure the content of their schools’ programs: The National Sexuality Education Standards. The goal of the Standards is “to provide clear, consistent, and straightforward guidance on the essential minimum, core content for sexuality education that is age-appropriate for students in grades K-12.”

The Standards are the result of a two-year effort spearheaded by five national organizations: The American Association of Health Education, The American School Health Association, The National Education Association Health Information Network, The Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education and The Future of Sex Education (FoSE) Initiative. (FoSE includes three national sexuality education organizations, including two of our own: Answer, SIECUS, and Advocates for Youth.)

The National Sexuality Education Standards join a growing body of national standards for other academic subjects, such as math, reading and health, which only benefit our national education system. The Standards are based on research-driven evidence and developmental- and age-appropriate norms. Yet we’ve heard some school stakeholders express concern that the Standards could generate controversy.

We’ve heard some educators, parents, and politicians argue that school sexuality education programs should teach only abstinence until marriage, and remain silent about topics such as contraception, sexual orientation, and relationships outside of marriage. In their view, the sole purpose of school-based sexuality education is marriage promotion, not intellectual growth or skills development.
As a mom (Nora) and an uncle (Kurt), we respectfully disagree. The education and health professionals who helped to develop the Standards took a comprehensive view based on their real-life experiences with parents, students, and school personnel from myriad walks of life in diverse communities around the U.S. Given the median age of first marriage as 26.9 for U.S. females and 28.9 for U.S. males, and the fact that 63% of U.S. 12^th-graders have already had sexual intercourse, school-age youth need more information than ever to make informed decisions about healthy relationships that have the potential to involve sexual activity. Sound sexuality education includes information on why (and how) young people can benefit from postponing sexual involvement until they are mature and ready, and the Standards account for this—without neglecting many other skills that parents say their children want and need.

The new National Sexuality Education Standards can help you respond to students’ informational needs with age- and developmentally-appropriate instruction that is relevant to young people’s lives. The Standards are voluntary and no school district should be expected to swallow them whole. You can make the most of them by inviting your school stakeholders to explore them and discuss them in community meetings where parents, teachers, curriculum planners, and the students themselves can ask hard questions and seek common ground to make the Standards work for everyone. Implementation can begin with elements that find the widest buy-in. The more difficult and potentially controversial topics can be placed on the sidelines for further study and adopted at a later date.

The Standards are a major step forward in standardizing, normalizing, and improving sexuality education throughout the nation. If widely implemented, our youths’ well-being, health and academic achievement can dramatically improve. Programs modeled after the Standards could lower the nation’s unacceptably high rate of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (especially in states hostile to sexuality education, where those rates are highest). Emphasis, of course, is on the “if”—improvement is achievable if curriculum planners, staff development specialists, teachers, parents and school board members make the most of this new resource.

In an election year when the course of history may well be changed at the polls, we hope the course of history in your local school districts will change for the better when you take the National Sexuality Education Standards and make them yours. Are you ready?

Attend this session at the Learning Forward 2012 Annual Conference in Boston

G15 – Birds, Bees, & Benchmarks: National Sexuality Education Standards

Tuesday December 14, 9am-12pm.