My intuitive voice within said, “For most of our young people, there is a very thin space between their inner light and the dimming of it.”

Perhaps more than ever – in watching that wonderful film – I realized that today the greatest gift we can give our young people is to create a larger space between their inner light and the dimming of it. Not just a larger space, but the largest space our hearts can possibly conceive.

This, to me, is why the transformation of education is so important. There is no greater gift we can give our future generations, than to co-create – with our young people today, a learning journey that turns their light into a bonfire.  As I watched that film and saw the glowing light in their eyes, as they spoke about their visions for changing education and about the empowerment they felt, I got, at an even deeper level, the power of listening as a way to begin.

Asking young people to step into a circle of trust and authenticity and share their inner wisdom, a wisdom they often don’t know they actually have sometimes, is a beautiful experience. But as you might imagine, young people today are so wary of adults and their methods of manipulation, coercion, pushing their own agenda, etc., that it requires an absolutely pure environment for them to decide they will open up.

But this is what we strive for in the three hour Listening Sessions with teens that we lead all across the country. Through listening, we are working with them to build a national collective voice on the wisdom of young people about how they would transform education, if it were left completely up to them. In the space we create and hold for them to emerge within, they share their ideas, tell stories and ultimately paint a co-created vision of a learning journey they would love to experience.

These paintings are visual stories of their wisdom, creativity and passion for life – of their inner light. By repeating Listening Sessions with young people from all walks of life, all over the country, a series of themes begin to synthesize and ultimately, will become their collective voice

To date, we have led 20 Listening Sessions in 7 states, predominantly on the west coast and in the south. Most recently we conducted 6 Listening Sessions in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Student responses during the tour were overwhelmingly positive with us twice being asked, “Can you come back tomorrow?”

I think young people are saying this for two reasons: the first is that while the debate about changing education goes on feverishly across the country, young people are not being invited into the process. They have so many ideas, feelings and insights into how to change school, yet are noticeably missing from the conversation. This is a very disempowering place for them – a place of dimming.

The other reason they are so excited about being in the listening sessions, is that through our act of trusting and believing in them to be able to offer meaningful content into the educational conversation, they feel seen and heard – by us and by each other. The first thing we usually hear at the end of the Listening Session, is, “Thank you for listening, no one ever asks us what we think.” Our hosts have said they have literally seen a transformation occur within them, right before their eyes.

Listening seems a simple act, but it requires a deep caring, a complete absence of agenda and ego and a delight to hear from them. Creating a space for the purity of their voices to emerge is a sacred act, and it is one that leads to a brightening that is almost blinding.

In working to keep the Listening Sessions as pure as possible, I have always shied away from asking any organizations or people to contribute to our effort. I realize now, that instinctively, I have been trying to protect that distance between young people’s light and the dimming of it and let them fill it with their own beauty. I have not wanted anyone else’s agenda or beliefs to shift us from our purpose to just listen without any attachment to outcome.

But due to an unexpected outpouring of requests to do Listening Sessions, we can no longer continue to self fund Imagining Learning. I am delighted to say that the word has gotten around about what we are doing and we now have more than 35 communities requesting we come and lead at least one Listening Session!

So for the first time, we are asking others to support our work through a national campaign in partnership with IncitEd, a new crowdsourcing site (www.incited.org), solely committed to helping educational efforts receive funding. I love the idea of crowdsourcing because the giving, without attachments, will enable us to continue our purposeful way of Listening.

Being Stewards of an effort to bring the voices of young people forward, holding the space between their light and the dimming of it, is a gift to those of us involved. May we, as well as you who also hold them, grow in sensitivity and ability to do so.

Suppose we looked at teacher accountability in a new way? I propose we trust teachers—a little laissez-faire education if you will. This might require higher pay and a serious look at teacher education and quality, but it’ll balance itself out. With less money thrown at testing and corporate remediation materials plus the slew of highway robbers and scripted consultants there would be billions leftover for real improvement.

Let’s start by looking at real professional learning communities like tumblr education or Cooperative Catalyst (http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/). These are communities of educators who engage in constant self-assessment and community growth. They are teachers who challenge each other to be better teachers. There is constant debate and discourse. The collective knowledge and understanding of the teaching practice is ever growing and changing—it’s a lovely organism.

Teachers can be professionals. We are. Put it in our laps. We’ll make the changes. Hell, give us a politician to answer to, just see to it that we’re making the decisions. Many of us do anyway. The education revolution begins with us. It’s our ability to engage and organize—not politically, but intellectually, dialectically, and professionally?— that enables us to make tremendous changes with or without the support of our beloved bureaucrats.

Change occurs in our classrooms. It is spawned from our learning communities. Let’s keep pulling others in. You have made all the difference in my career.

When students feel powerless, learning becomes a tug of war between the teacher and the learner. This doesn’t have to happen.

The student/teacher relationship where the teacher’s job is to maintain control and the student’s job is to submit to control is a pervasive characteristic of the traditional school paradigm, and I’d bet all of us have experienced it. Sometimes the exchange is subtle and involves the student feeling at fault for an unfair situation. One episode from my own life that stands out is when I stayed after school with a few other students to get extra help from our trigonometry teacher. It’s important to note that by this time in high school I’d been trained in a hundred different ways to believe that I wasn’t very good at math. Today, this belief has probably become a reality, because at some point I gave up on trying to be good at it, but this wasn’t always true. I was in advanced math classes in elementary school and loved to help my mom figure out the grocery bill before we got up to the register. But by my junior year, I’d gone home crying in frustration enough times to feel like there was definitely something wrong with me, that it wasn’t the teacher’s fault; it was my inability to “get it.” So the fact that I was spending extra time on this class that I believed I was bound to fail was commendable.

1. Heal for America — The healthcare system in America is crumbling, and what we really need to solve it are quality doctors. Give aspiring doctors 6 weeks of training, then put them in the most overcrowded hospitals around the country. If successful, we can send them abroad!

2. Police for America — Let’s solve the problem of gun violence on our streets once and for all by getting rid of corrupt and inept police officers. We will give aspiring police officers 6 weeks of training and then put them in neighborhoods with the highest rates of violent crime.

3. Experiment for America — If we want to cure cancer, we need fresh voices in the scientific community. Obviously, the scientists who’ve been working on a cure for the past decades aren’t doing their job very well, as cancer rates are skyrocketing with no cure in sight. Aspiring chemists will get six weeks of training, and then be put in charge of experiments testing cancer-curing drugs.

4. Defend America — The war in Afghanistan has been draining resources from the American people. We need better soldiers on the ground, or this conflict will never be resolved. What we need are bright young soldiers to shake things up a little bit. We will give aspiring army officers 6 weeks of training, and then put them in charge of units in the most complex arenas of war.

…

I don’t think I have to point out to anyone how ridiculous these proposals sound. Would you trust a doctor with six weeks of training to operate on your child? Would you want that police officer on your block? Would you want to send those soldiers into conflict? Would you take a drug developed by that chemist?

Who do progressives blame for the crumbling healthcare system? for gun violence? for failed wars? Not the individual police, doctors, soldiers — but the people at the top with the privilege, money, and power, the systems of oppression at work in our society. We talk about holistic approaches to solving all of the policy problems we face in this country today.

Take teen pregnancy. We talk about better sex education, access to contraceptives and the morning-after pill, funding for Planned Parenthood and women’s health programs, empowering young women, and advocating for pro-choice legislation. Imagine how discredited a progressive voice would be if they suggested that unwanted pregnancies were in fact only the fault of the woman, that the best solution to this problem would be to teach women not to have sex. (That progressive would probably be easily confused as a conservative right-winger.)

And yet, most education reform policies — with wide support by organizations such as Stand for Children, Leadership for Educational Equity, the American Legislative Exchange Council, etc. — focus on teacher responsibility for student learning, only one factor, instead of looking at holistic approaches to making public education more equitable.

Are there bad teachers? Sure. Are there bad cops, doctors, soldiers, scientists? Of course. But putting all of the responsibility on individual teachers to solve the education crisis is no more ridiculous than putting all of the responsibility on individual police to solve gun violence, on soldiers to put an end to war, on scientists to freeze cancer.

Instead, let’s look at community models of education, provide wrap-around services in schools, advocate for smaller class sizes and quality professional development, give teachers more planning periods throughout the day and invest in professional learning communities, implement teacher evaluations that include more than just test scores as measures, examine unequal funding methodologies of school districts… you catch my drift.

And, as progressives, we must demand policy leaders and business-people, Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee and the Broad Foundation and Pearson, who invest so much money and energy developing accountability measures and finding more ways to attack the teaching profession, to invest in community health and job creation and libraries and environmental justice and workers’ rights and immigration reform. Only when we begin looking at education policy with the same intersectionality that we use to look at other policy issues will we truly develop a public school system that offers every child a quality education.

I’m angry because, after a weekend of careful planning, after differentiating an assignment for students who have mastered skills at different levels, after catching up on all of my grading, after getting my lesson plans in on time with the TEKS and the Reading Comprehension standards and the ELPS, I couldn’t print anything I needed for class because our copy machine is broken. Again. I’m angry because I had to make something up on the fly, putting my students further behind from where we should be right now. I’m angry that this roadblock put me in such a foul mood that I snapped at one of my students when he asked to show me his medal from the 10K he ran this weekend.

I’m angry because my 7th graders are taking their reading STAAR in a few weeks, and I am mandated to use Pearson’s test prep books at least two periods a week. I’m angry because this is disrupting their amazing theatre projects. I’m angry because Pearson is making money off of my students’ wasted learning time.

I’m angry because my 8th graders are being pulled daily from DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) to receive STAAR test prep for their science test in a few weeks. I’m angry because the school is telling them that bubbling in answers is more important than reading books they care about.

I’m angry because my school does not offer membership in a union, because Texas is an at-will employment state, and I could literally be let go for no reason and have no legal redress. I’m angry about teachers in other states who’ve gotten fired for being LGBT, for discussing Trayvon Martin, and any number of political “controversies.”

I’m angry because one of my students complained about not having enough time to do his homework — an assignment individualized to him that he is allowed to work on during class — and then chose to use his independent working time to talk to his neighbors and roll his eyes at me. I’m angry that I haven’t yet figured out how to gain this student’s respect.

I’m angry that parents, students, and administrators expect me to respond immediately to emails, even when sent after working hours and on weekends.  I’m angry that I’m angry at myself for practicing self-care this weekend and spending long days reading over coffee, instead of responding to emails. I’m angry that teachers are considered lazy for taking time for themselves, ridiculed by the media, by politicians — and that celebrities or millionaires or CEOs don’t earn the same scorn.

I’m angry because, as a teacher, I am doing a job that is essential to the functioning of democracy, to the future of our society, and still barely getting by financially. I’m angry that my student loan payment is over $350 a month. I’m angry that I owe $500 in taxes next week and still have no idea how I’m going to pay it. I’m angry that teachers can only claim a $250 deduction for spending their own money on school supplies. I’m angry that I spent more than $250 last year… much more. I’m angry that teachers have to spend their own money in the first place. I’m angry that, despite my best efforts to go green, to go vegan, and to shop organically, I keep getting stymied because shelling out the extra dollar a pound for organic produce and non-GMO processed foods is scary when I’m so far behind on my bills. I’m angry that I will never be able to support my parents the way I would like to, because I will always be struggling to support myself. I’m angry that there are people working ten times as hard as I am, at jobs more dangerous and less rewarding than mine, in order to make ends meet and to take care of their families. 

I’m angry that my job isn’t the only thing I’m angry about. I’m angry that President Obama signed the Monsanto Protection Act. I’m angry that Governor Perry continues to support racist and sexist legislation. I’m angry that the Texas House is trying to pass legislation that would cut funding to school districts that offer benefits to same-sex partners. I’m angry that only 20 of 100 U.S. Senators are women, and only one is a woman of color. I’m angry that my newly engaged baby sister is barred from getting married in 41 of the 50 states. I’m angry that people still insist on using the phrase “illegal immigrants.” I’m angry that when asked to list their biggest concerns, my students list unemployment, climate change, and gun violence. 

Today, I’m angry. Tomorrow I will still be angry. But in my anger I’m reminded of this quote:

“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” — St. Augustine

Today, I’m not ignoring what is making me angry. I’m refusing to keep that anger within the confines of the teachers’ lounge, or the happy hour, or the tears in the car on the ride home.  I will transform that anger into the courage to speak the truth about my experiences, and to challenge the forces that seek to destroy the voices of teachers and students across the country. 

Douglas Rushkoff at WebVisions 2011 by webvisionsevent

[This post originally appeared at Classroots.org.]

In the first part of his new book Present Shock, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff explains how we have come to a “now-ist” “presentism” resulting in “narrative collapse.” If I understand him correctly, Rushkoff argues that new media, social change, and technologies make traditional story-telling untenable. While we are accustomed to stories that fit the mold of Campbell’s hero, we are no longer able to use or enjoy them (or any new Star Wars movie?) because

1. We have become too self-conscious to consume narratives uncritically (see everything from Beavis and Butthead to MSTK3000 to Community). [These references and the following are Rushkoff's.]
2. We have become more interested in current individual performance (see the itinerant NBA star) than collective group history (see baseball rivalries).
3. Our pop storytellers in news and entertainment have reduced (betrayed?) storytelling to the serial exploitation and humiliation of others, requiring us to consume many, many exploitative and humiliating moments to maintain emotional investment in current programming and to norm ourselves to believing such entertainment is okay.
4. Surviving long-form narratives (such as the first Obama campaign) have failed to deliver the ends that they promised.
5. We have become producers of our own fleeting and episodic narratives – participants in our own stories – that we do not want to end (we want more hits on our next YouTube video; we want to skate or snowboard one more line; we want to play one more round of multi-player deathwatch; we want to play more D&D; we want to keep on Occupying).
6. How we create and experience new, collapsed narratives is not always without reward or real benefit (Rushkoff shares a beautiful, sad story of VR therapy tweaked in real-time response to his recall).

I’m sure I’m missing something. I hope other readers will chime in below. I’ll come back after I read more and make any corrections.

I’m especially interested in how Rushkoff’s notion of “narrative collapse” relates to schools.

Schools epitomize authoritarian narrative.

Think of the lesson plans teachers write, despite knowing that no plan survives contact with students.

Think of each unit, pacing guide, or curriculum as a narrative waiting either to collapse or to capture students inside of it as the narrative of that content.

Think of the stories teachers and students want to tell as defense mechanisms when classes, lessons, units, curricula, and policies go awry.

Think of each academic year for a kid as one chapter in a thirteen-year-long, long-form narrative. Think of the kids cast in stories in which they are considered the villains of everyone else’s stories.

Think of each academic year for a teacher as either the same repeated, long-form narrative or as another failure to satisfactorily achieve the “good teacher” narrative.

Think of each new policy initiative as a chapter in a longer narrative about the perfect or globally dominant American school system and about how that narrative is patently unachievable and perhaps even undesirable in certain ways.

Think of the decaying narrative that goes like this: “Do what you’re supposed to do and you’ll get a job and make a living.”

Of course, narrative sometimes works, and narratives that privilege the privileged often work for them. I think exceptional narratives still help people.

But school does not provide exceptional narratives. Sometimes the people in it do, but the System is suffering narrative collapse. The System wants us to norm one another to a society that rewards the school-compliant.

Is that society still ours? If so, for how long?

Is it possible to conceive of a curriculum- or narrative-less space inside a school? A space that is a pause from school’s grinding narrative? A space that is for episodic and rhizomatic learning that builds over time from the connections made between micro-narratives, rather than from connections inside one macro-narrative? Can we imagine student occupied, produced, collected, and connected works as evidence of learning if we do not guide the kids or dictate the parameters of their work? Can we imagine and value teachers who hone and hold to inquiry, improvisation, and intent?

Could it be that the duress we feel under standardized testing is resistance to narrative? That the reason our kids struggle to trust us and play the game of school is that at some deeply felt, culturally subconscious (or keenly aware) level, they know that we are all inside a collapsing narrative that we teachers disingenuously prop up with their young, desperately curious lives? That they are searching for what comes next, and we are saying paradoxically, hypocritically, inaccurately, “nothing but this?”

I have been hesistant to blog about the Common Core Standards, after all, this is my first year truly dealing with them and the prescribed curriculum that seems to come with them.  And yet, something keeps nagging me whenever I stumble upon them.  Something keeps bugging me at a deeper level than just the “Oh, it’s another change in education…” type of way.

Perhaps it is the curriculum that is now promising us to be even more rigorous in all of its alignment.  It seems to say that I wasn’t rigorous before or that we just dallied around in previous years, not to be trusted when left to our own devices as teacher.

Perhaps it is the illusion that all schooling in the 45 states that have adopted them will now be an equal education.  Never mind that the educational inequity continues to grow with less and less funding from states and that students are now poorer than they have even been.

Perhaps it is the illusion that my students are actually developmentally ready for the things I am  now expected to have them do.  Yes we infer in 5th grade, but to infer themes between two types of stories based on their text features and perspective is pretty crazy stuff. And indeed, as expressed by my mother, college level.

Perhaps it is not the standards that are to blame for my hesitance but rather the interpretation of them from textbook companies who have been so very quick in creating common core aligned curricula.  More script, less creative thinking seems to be the standard.  And districts are buying it, literally, hand over foot.

Whatever it is that is nagging me, I know it deserves more think time, more deep analysis, much like the standards themselves.  I have yet to pass my full judgment, but I stand here hesitant  wondering how this now will effect my students in the coming years.  Will they continue to dislike writing in a more scripted curriculum or will they all of a sudden have such brain growth brought on by the right standards that I wont believe my own eyes?  I don’t know but I wonder.  Do you?

Teacher with authority from Nationaal Archief

[This post originally appeared on Classroots.org.]

Despite school, some of the kids and adults inside it are able to hack classroom- and school-sized nodes into relevancy.

I think subverting the status quo in public schools is – at some scale – an overt political act. While some subversive teachers keep low profiles, their students know the score: together, those teachers and their kids are daring something different, something more meaningful than dutifully donning whatever costume-jewelry curricula is de la mode.

Teaching is an intensely political act, but the tension between teaching as cultural reproduction and teaching as production of a new culture defies convenient political shorthand. For example, the decision to “plan” a classroom around inquiry instead of state standards isn’t a particularly democratic or republican one. Depending on community standards, it may not be a conservative decision or a liberal one. Maybe it’s both – or maybe its libertarian-socialism which is decidedly inconvenient for our system of public education.

I think the question, “How do we teach?”, is becoming as important as the question, “Whom do we teach?” If we are teaching everyone the same thing in the same way, and that way is biased and privileges the privileged, how we teach must be unpacked and countered constantly and urgently. School as a “common cultural experience” is indefensible when it defends a culture of inequality.

I’m thinking about how I teach a lot this week – moreso than usual – because of Ethan Zuckerman’s DML 2013 keynote, “Beyond ‘The Crisis in Civics.’” In his talk, Zuckerman shares a “matrix” of political tactics with both a “thick and thin” axis and a “symbolic to impactful” axis.

Sumamrizing from Erhardt Graeff’s excellent liveblog of the keynote: Thin acts require little participation, while thick acts require individuals to invest a significant amount of time in them. Symbolic acts bring attention to an issue, while impactful ones use political levers to cause change. Those political levers are legislative, authority-based, public-opinion oriented, and do-it-yourself. [Misinterpretations are mine - please correct them in the comments!]

How do I teach? Where does my teaching fall on that matrix? What levers does my teaching employ? How does my work align with – or deviate from – school? When do I take the “thin” out while there is “thick” work to be done? Do I stick with the “symbolic” because I am too afraid to risk the “impactful?”

The real crisis in education isn’t the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) or even the standardization of education in the United States. The real crisis is that we teachers have not yet countered the thick, impactful, legislative, authority-based, and public-opinion oriented work of pop ed reform with enough DIY work of our own in any quadrant of Zuckerman’s matrix. We are modeling teaching – a civic act – as a conformist one. Collectively, we are doing the system’s thick, impactful work in communicating to our kids what society thinks of them and expects of them according to the biases in the system.

The people driving the standardization of education in our schools and classrooms have no place in them. We bring their agenda to our kids, or we don’t. It’s as simple and difficult as that. We’re teaching against the clock while even every thin and symbolic act counts. Can we even manage some “slacktivist” teaching by dragging our feet on delivering our kids to the curriculum? Can we give up reconciling what we know is right with what we’re told is correct, and stick with the former?

For all my failures, I will try to succeed in being different, and if my tiny work – the work I’ve chosen – will only ever be symbolic, I believe in my kids. I believe in their community-, inquiry-, maker-, and technology-infused power to participate meaningfully in shaping a culture better than the one that produced me and from which I can only imagine saving them.

In my dreams, they begin to understand the CSS we have deployed against them.

Now, when I wrote the first post, I said that 23 cases of rape and sexual abuse had relations to taxpayer-funded schools. Since, that number has risen to 105 cases documented in mainstream media, with the U.S Dept. of Education giving a more sobering figure of 83.33% of RAPES going unreported to law enforcement by schools and school districts while 73.43% of SEXUAL ASSAULTS going unreported to law enforcement by schools and school districts. However, the fact that of those 105 media documented cases, 25 were “gang rapes” and 26 were rapes committed at the behest of a high school athlete, which raises the highest amount of concern. Not because these males were “promising” or because they had “bright futures,” but because somewhere there is an expectation of acceptance for high school aged boys to gang up and “be boys” because of their position or for whatever untold reason.

With figures like those, it’s no wonder why 2 in 10 girls fear being sexually abused or raped at school by another student or why 6 in 10 girls are victims of rape while at school at the behest of another student. Yet, instead of taking these figures and addressing the issue for what it is,  we are teaching young girls how not to become victims, which is basically teaching them how to survive in a scenario where they are defenseless and are always at fault for the actions of the uncontrollable. This in its own is nothing more than a state sponsored form of educational neglect and neglect to humanity that dangerously resembles a form of hate crime against females who have promising, bright futures.

However, another issue that often gets left out of sexual education because the majority favoring of abstinence only sexual education, is that too many young girls don’t know what rape is, who to turn to in the event of an rape, and what exactly to do after they become victims of rape. Moreover, for some reason, there is no large emphasis of “see something, say something, do something” when it comes to these types of crimes. Further, in too many cases, do youth stand around or walk by when they witness these types of heinous acts because of the lack of empathy that youth possess today.

Conclusively, our schools are becoming breeding grounds for a sense of excusing for rapes and sexual assaults. Too many youth carry an apathetic sense when it comes to these types of crimes and too many youth do not know what to do in the event of these crimes. This large disconnect in empathy and knowledge is detrimental because it will perpetuate rape culture within global society. There is no reason with numbers like these, for an inadequate response from schools, governments, and from society as a whole. These numbers reflect a sobering reality that there are millions of youth out there who think that rape and sexual assault is acceptable to commit, and for 180 days they all spend hours together in an enclosed setting with increasingly less adults to keep a watchful eye.

No longer can we rely on the apathetic blame game known as victim shaming in response to rape culture…as it will only allow rape culture to consume American culture. No longer can this happen, because that consumption will mark the beginning of a perpetual war against this nation’s young girls and women. 

*School= any facility or event sponsored by schools or their districts including bus stops and buses 

Maker @timmmyboy With More Pompadour Cc @drgarcia @leelzebub by giulia.forsythe

I am keenly missing the #dml2013 fellowship this week. While I’m not quite writing Ignite talks that will never be heard (or drawing sad-face slides), sniffle, I am thinking a lot about how public school teachers, in particular, can make it safe for kids to participate meaningfully in their own educations. As I look forward to the videos of this year’s Ignite talks, I am also thinking back to last year’s talks. Specifically, I’m thinking of Nishant Shah’s fantastic talk on remix. (Harlem Shake = aura remix?)

As #DML2013 looks toward democratic futures, I look for democratic education and a remix of what it means to be a teacher – a remix that is a return (as Nishant might say) to the essence of teaching and learning both at once, all of us together.

I look forward to a time when we teachers remix ourselves

…from answers to questions.

Another way to put it: we should help kids find the answers to their answers. Our questions should be meant to elicit kids’ questions, not to cue “correct” answers, reward “proper” behavior, or trigger deflective behaviors that “justify” the punishments we dole out to kids. Inquiry should be our foundational pedagogy, but not our only one. Questioning our own beliefs and behaviors should come before questioning our kids. We should ask and learn to discover, not to confirm.

…from compliance to weirdness.

We should be norming classroom communities that help kids relate healthily, positively, and constructively to one another and their interests. Compliance should not be normed by consequence; engagement with learning should happen naturally when something is worth doing, and it should be creative, not coerced or conformist. We need to unpack our anxieties about how others judge us because they absolutely determine how we judge and attempt to coerce kids if we leave them unexamined. A favorite quote of mine reads, “A good teacher doesn’t have disciples, has dissidents.” I say great teachers, despite their own identity crises, let students be themselves.

…from work to play.

Asking students to complete traditional academic work is an exercise in confirmation bias. It is what the system does best to perpetuate itself. Differentiating by offering a menu of print-monopolized tasks doesn’t reflect a teacher’s regard for how kids learn. Instead, it reflects a teacher’s will to gatekeep status in the classroom. From time to time, however necessary any traditional assessment may be to us financially, we teachers need to let kids play. We need to let them organize the world through self-talk and the evolving rule-set that very nearly always emerges from play. Play is not so chaotic or unproductive as education profiteers would have us believe. In fact, we may not ever understand how a particular student processes the world, tests hypotheses, or creates meaning from learning without watching her play. Within the bounds of safety, we need to keep from managing or judging play, as well, and take it as information that teaches us to teach. If there is no safe place for open creativity in our classrooms, it is a mistake to take it for granted that students should or will take creative risks with academic work.

…from classrooms to makerspaces.

The best way to see the most kids play is to help them build a resource-rich environment. This doesn’t mean that kids need to be surrounded by expensive stuff; it just means that there needs to be a variety of media and tools for kids to use in – quite literally – constructing play, meaning, and learning. Cardboard and code. Markers and paper. Pipe-cleaners and pom-pons. Guitars and gears. Hot and cold glue. Kids understand their own play. Moreover, they understand what they make. If kids think it’s safe to play and make stuff in our classrooms, they will begin to feel safe talking about what they do. If kids talk about how and why they play, we can find entry points into asking them how they might connect play and making to the learning that we hold between us as valuable. We can make the work we share with kids more valuable to them by letting them play and make to learn. (I’m thinking of toy-hacking here and which might be more meaningful to a kid: a teacher-assigned essay explaining symbolism in a book or a teacher-invited action-figure-stuffed-animal hybrid-hack that represents the symbol and the book to the kid?)

…from scarcity to abundance.

This is so hard. When I am at my shortest with students – when I am diminished by my own knee-jerk reactions to events and behaviors that fail to meet my expectations (which are sometimes what I think others expect of me) – I go to a place of scarcity. Class has started! Get to work! Deadline this Friday! Put up the phone! We should at least know what a subordinating conjunction is! Really? Is the most powerful learning I can imagine shaped by class periods, telecom black-outs, and jargon? Of course not. But when confronted by the unexpected or even sub-optimal, my limbic system goes into fight or flight like anyone else’s. It’s just that I’ve been in school so long that my survival instincts come out as rhetorical questions about kids’ use of time. Really, though, for me, every issue and opportunity in the classroom is about my – and our – teacherly use and perception of time. It is not true that because we only have X amount of time it must be spent on purchased curricula; it is not true that kids will never get anything done at this rate; it is not true that a vision can only be achieved by first naming and quantifying its results. If we stop teaching and enacting the false scarcities of standardized schooling (and stop using the cognitive dead-end shortcuts of rote work to deliver and “cover” content), we can make class abundant with learning, possibility, community, and wonder. Once we stop saying that there isn’t time, there will be. It might fly, but it will be full of inspiring and inspired resources, work, and relationships.

Schooling isn’t sacrosanct; neither are we. What becomes sacred in the classroom is what we make to learn together with the time we have with just and due regard for who we are, who we want to be, and the communities in which we want to live.

We will only ever be initiates in our own learning, but that is better than being a master of content or kids.