There’s a huge difference between a person who wants to be in good shape and a person who wants to run every morning before work, regardless of the weather.
Just like there’s a huge difference between a person who wants to write a book and a person who wants to write every day, regardless of the weather . . .
and a huge difference between a person who understands the difference between these two types of people and a person who does not.
Here’s a PDF of an interview I did with Dr. Reshan Richards (from Explain Everything and Constructivist Toolkit) and Leah Thayer (from the National Business Officers Association):
From a quick read on Slate offering career and productivity advice from Dave Giboa:
[At] the end of each week I try to look at my calendar and review all the meetings that I had that week and rate them zero, one, or two. Zero means it was a really bad use of time and, if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have attended that meeting at all. Two is a great use of time—I wanna spend more of my time in those types of meetings. And one is somewhere in-between. And then I’ll connect with my assistant and make sure she understands which of those meetings I want more of and which ones could be filtered out so that hopefully over time my schedule becomes more and more productive.
I wonder what would happen if we asked students to do a version of this exercise each week.
I just got word that my latest book with Dr. Reshan Richards is on its way to the typesetter. The Brad Overall-Carter designed cover is here:
And you can connect with us here:
http://www.blendingleadership.com/contact-us.html
I just read an essay by Zach Whalen, Associate Professor at the University of Mary Washington. It’s called Notes on Teaching with Slack and I recommend it to teachers who aspire to be thoughtful about the ways they use online tools to organize and enrich their offline, face-to-face classes.
First off, I like the fact that Whalen is modeling reflection and doing some of his thinking right in the middle of his experiment with Slack. He’s not saying that he’s completely sold on the platform, and he’s not claiming that his text offers all the answers for teachers considering Slack for their classes. He’s airing his thinking in a productive way. And, beyond this, he makes a very important statement that should guide all online practice in schools.
As I replace things I did elsewhere with things I can do in Slack, I must consider now whether those things were worth doing in the first place. Just like any other platform or tool that becomes part of my teaching, any incidental design choices can become accidental pedagogy, and the reverse may be true too.
I’m now thinking about my use of online tools and wondering how often choices that I have made — or that others have made for me when they established default settings for the tools I use — have led to “accidental pedagogy.” I’m wondering how much an “accidental pedagogy” sends signals to students about what I value, about success in my class, about learning, about what it looks like to be engaged in my class, about what writing is or isn’t, about what it means to be a student in my class.
Incidentally, I also like that Whalen admits that part of the reason he likes Slack is because it’s fun. This fun causes him to be excited to log into the system in the morning . . . and sometimes inspires him to work into the night. This makes me think about how often we adopt platforms or tools in school that are neither fun nor easy to use. Thoughtful pedagogy matters; joyful work matters; maybe Slack should matter in our schools.
I’ve got a lot to think about thanks to Whalen’s eloquent, honest essay.
Many good leaders that I know excel in upholding process year in and year out. This requires discipline and stamina . . . and even grace. They make sure past precedence is upheld, and they never lose sight of the people involved in decisions and their consequences.
On the other hand, the top one or two leaders that I know are the ones who are brave enough — and awake at the wheel enough — to break with precedence and tradition from time to time. They have seen a certain model worked through enough times to recognize when it simply will not do.
One thing I love about the world I live in is this:
On a Sunday morning, I can sit down with my son and daughter to talk about music. A few minutes later, we can pull out our family iPad, open the Garage Band app, and play around until we make a few songs. Then we can send those songs to my phone right before we need to leave for a trip.
In the car, instead of listening to the radio (like I used to with my parents), we can connect my phone to the car’s stereo and enjoy the songs that we made — together, after breakfast — earlier that day.
And when we do turn on the radio a little later, my kids say, “we could make that song” or “we could do better than that” or, best of all, “I wonder how they made that sound . . . let’s figure it out when we get home.”
Such simple magic, unavailable for much of my own life, makes me happy.
A few summers ago during a session run by Damien Barrett at one of my school’s professional development programs, I was introduced to computer coding. I don’t remember anything about the finer details of what we did that day. I don’t remember the language we learned or the keys we pressed to make websites work. But I do remember something about one of the habits of programmers. Coders, according to a video we watched at the outset of our training, are the kinds of people who will spend 25 hours building a program to complete a task that takes only 2.5 seconds to complete.
Initially, this idea made me laugh. It sounded absurd and extreme. But humor is often, as George Saunders said, “what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.”
What I learned, quickly and directly that day, is that programming is at least in part about slowness. It’s about the long-view — if a task takes 2.5 seconds but you have to complete it 10 times a day, 5 days a week, for many years, it makes sense to invest some time upfront to save that time on the backend. This approach only fails to make sense if you feel that you couldn’t possibly find the time right now to design a system that could save you time in the future. After all, 2.5 seconds right now doesn’t feel like much. So you keep writing the grocery list from memory; you keep rushing out the door in the morning and hoping your various family members have everything they need for the day; you keep grading the stacks of quizzes and turning them back in the hopes that such transactions will somehow improve student learning. We move faster to move faster. But maybe we’re doing it wrong. If we’re not very good at something, doing it faster doesn’t seem like a sound plan. Maybe we should focus on doing it right first.
To work towards a rule of thumb:
It takes time to slow down, initially, to go faster, eventually.
Said more economically, slow down to go faster.
Or, as my friend and colleague Reshan Richards said when I told him about this post, even more economically and eloquently, slow faster.
From the moment I grasped the “25 hours < 2.5 seconds” idea, I have seen possible applications for it almost everywhere I turn. It’s only slighlty tongue-in-cheek to say that wasted motion, duplicated effort, and the reinvention of wheels are among the chief activities of many people in schools. But like the drips of leaky faucets, such daily non-efficiencies can begin to wear on one’s nerves. What are you doing to stop the leaky faucets in your school?
When you grade a stack of essays, do you keep a running tab of common errors or do you rush through the pile in order to return the papers and move on? The latter is a short game; the former is a long game. Certainly it takes extra time to perform a meta-analysis of your grading as you grade, but such attention to detail will help you to prioritize your instructional time, and therefore help your students to improve in those areas where they most need attention. As my colleague Erica Budd pointed out — just a few days ago — at a workshop she was running for teachers at my school, there’s a big difference between “looking for answers” and “looking for assessment data.” Looking for answers is helpful in producing a grade right now; looking at assessment data is helpful in producing the next lesson plan, the next unit sequence, the next fully formed student understanding…
Another way of posing the question is to frame it for school leaders. When something goes wrong in your area of school life, do you take the time to examine the conditions that led to the problem in the first place, or do you just put out the fire and rush to the next one? Do you update policies and checklists to ensure that the small, non visionary work of school functions efficiently?
A final, and I think most important, way of posing the question is to frame it for students. How do we model the concept of slowing faster for students who are up against daily deadlines, whose days are arranged like a gauntlet of tiny hourglasses they slide through whether they want to or not?
Citations:
The leaky faucets comment comes from Dan Saffer (who was paraphrasing Charles Bukowski).
Refreshing Wednesday, LLC 