Daily Innovations

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind.  They've included:
• Grade level meetings about kindness and empathy
• PBIS and RtI team training days
• Some difficult student behavior issues
• Some great Educator Effectiveness meetings
• The first home football playoff game in two decades
• An engaging PD data about data
• A visit from former-NFL player LeRoy Butler about bullying
• Our first student dance of the year

But let me talk about something completely different for a moment.
In-between other craziness right now, I am a reviewer for proposals for a high-profile national conference taking place next Summer.  40 different highly innovative workshop proposals that each required close investigation and rating.  Proposals that other educators and leaders had poured their professional careers into, waiting for coveted spots based on the reviews of people they have never met.  These educators have made innovation their life's work. 

Innovation itself is an interesting concept.  In medieval times, if you were an "innovator," it meant you were a heretic because you were adding something "new" to a concept (i.e., a religious tenet).  "Innovation" meant prison or worse for the accused.  Today, we honor innovators.  Steve Jobs & Jony Ive (Apple) ~ Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt (Google) ~ Jeff Bezos (Amazon) ~ and so many more.

Two thoughts about innovation:

1.  My favorite book about innovation is entitled Better by Atul Gawande.  Mr. Gawande is a surgeon, and the main point of his book is that everyone thinks innovation is waiting for some disruptor to step in and solve our problems.  99% of the time, that's not how it happens.  Most of the time, innovation means improving daily practice, one step at a time, until our skills are just ... better.  The book is filled with examples over the past centuries that detail how small, consistent innovations have made life better.   

2.  Once, I was asked the following question:  "What does full implementation of innovation mean to you?"  This question haunts me in a good way.  This means a school where every educator is committed to trying something new and improving practice every day because our students need us to be ... better. 

Last week, LeRoy Butler told our students to work hard for their teachers because their teachers love them, are the smartest people around, and give all this knowledge and love for free.  The good news is that our students do the same for us!  Our students help us improve our practice on a daily basis (and they give us this gift for free as well).  Every time we improve our game, they grow in achievement, which in turn begs us to up our game again.  None of us can be the same educator we were yesterday.  We have to be ... better.

My Two Favorite Questions

My previous blog post was about answers to leadership questions.  This blog post will be about questions - two of my favorite questions, actually.  But first, a digression about questions in general.

A mentor of mine always said, "The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning."
The older I get, the more I find this to be true.  The student that is talking is the person most engaged.  This is true when dealing with academic issues as well as behavior issues.  Whoever talks the most owns it.  This is why technology has evened the playing field in classrooms because everyone can be "talking" at once using various tech tools.

Questions are an engaged form of talking.
One year of teaching, I focused on student-generated questions.  To encourage and celebrate quality questions, I covered my entire chalkboard (yes, a chalkboard ...) with paper and wrote student questions on it all year long.  Students were elated to get their questions on the board, and it created an environment that celebrated inquiry.  And Danielson recognizes teachers who create classrooms where students generate the questions.

End of digression.  Now to my two favorite questions.

My daughters are very used to me asking them these two questions many nights after school.  It's become somewhat of a routine over the years:
• What questions did you ask today?
• What did your teacher do or say that was funny today?

The first question, "What questions did you ask today?" tells me if my own child is engaged in the thinking that is happening in her classroom, and by extension, if the teacher is creating an environment of inquiry.  Remember - the person asking the questions is doing the learning.  Believe me, the questions they asked when they were younger were very simple (i.e., "Can I go to the bathroom?")  Did I celebrate those questions?  Absolutely!  Then we talked about what other kinds of questions they could ask.

The second question, "What did your teacher do or say that was funny today?" gets at relationship building.  Is my chid in a environment that celebrates the the joy of learning?  I tell my kids that teachers do and say funny things constantly if they pay attention to it.  But that happens because the teacher uses his/her personality to create a purposefully engaging classroom.

Any questions?