Joel Zehring » mission

The Cost of Free Public Education

Joel Zehring — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:45:09 +0000

Free public education doesn’t come without cost to families.

I’m not talking about tuition or tax dollars.

Students and families only have so much time and energy. Why should they spend these precious resources at your school? What explicit or implicit outcomes does your school promise?

If I send my son to your school for the first seven years of his education, I am investing in your school. Every year that my son attends your school is another year that he can’t attend a better school, presuming that one exists close by. What are you willing to promise us to offset our opportunity cost? Are you willing to put it in writing?

If you’re not able to put a promise in writing, why should I consider your school?

What would it take to get every employee in your organization to buy in to such a promise to the point that they will do everything in their power to deliver?

Moving Toward PLC: 100 People, One Vision

Joel Zehring — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:57:59 +0000

For a school to become a professional learning community, the employees of that building must develop shared mission, vision, values and goals. To do this, leaders must productively engage every employee in brutally honest discussion. If every single person doesn’t have a chance to chime in freely with suggestions, agreement, and disagreement, then the leaders fail.

Leaders must overcome two key hurdles: logistics and agreement.

Logistics

How do you listen to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people and consider all their viewpoints? How do you sustain large scale conversation? This is where computer-based tools for communication and aggregation can be especially helpful. If we’ve learned anything from the phenomena of Facebook and Twitter, we’ve learned that people are longing to participate in open discussion over topics that they care about.

Agreement

Everyone participating doesn’t mean that everyone has to spout out the same catch phrases right away (or at all). It means that through open, honest, sustained discourse, colleagues throughout the building or organization express, compare, and refine their beliefs and assumptions about learning and education.

One ultimate outcome of this discussion is the development of shared mission, vision, values, and goals. These elements become the foundation for the culture of the organization, guiding all the activities and actions and discussions that occur on campus. The nitty-gritty, day-to-day policies and procedures of the school flow out of this set of shared and stated beliefs.

I say “ultimate outcome,” but what I really mean is “first draft.” For an organization to really thrive, all the employees must continually re-examine and refine their assumptions and beliefs about learning and education. Employees must remind each other of their shared beliefs all the time and question their own thoughts, words, and actions.

Here are two practical suggestions to facilitate the proces:

Make sure to set up some simple conflict-resolution practices. When people talk about their deeply held beliefs, things can get heated.
Ask really good questions. Jim Collins’s Hedgehog Concept is an invaluable framework for helping people to articulate their deeply held values and beliefs.

What is world-class education?

Joel Zehring — Sun, 24 May 2009 06:04:30 +0000

The title of this post refers to the vision statement for my district. I recently applied for a district committee position (unsuccessfully). In the application, I expounded on the meaning of our district vision moving forward:

World-class education in 2009 and beyond will involve three key factors: customization, collaboration, and ownership.

Increasingly, students and families will expect a customized learning experience for each learner. We know that every student in our district has a unique mix of learning strengths and styles. As we move forward, we will need to develop resources, tools, practices, and assessments that allow educators to harness the strengths of each student to maximize academic achievement.

Collaboration will be the life-blood of this movement toward customized learning. Educators throughout our district will need to combine their bags of tricks, and they’ll need the tools to sort through and catalog those resources for easy modification and implementation. To realize world-class results, we will need to collaborate and share with educators world-wide.

We must empower our students to take ownership of their learning and performance. By developing assessments that are timely and informative, students can assume a more active roll in their own achievement. For students, assessment data should provide logical and immediate feedback regarding mastery of skills and concept. For teachers, data tools should allow easy slicing and dicing of assessment data to inform instructional decisions. We must also cast a wider net to collect student-centric evidence of mastery. Students express mastery in many different ways, and our data collection should acknowledge and leverage this diversity.

Casting the vision in a small way

Joel Zehring — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:57:27 +0000

I’m serving as a coordinator for our site student assistance program next year. My partner and I are making plans and brainstorming options for the processes that will support at-risk students on their way to mainstream interventions or special education services.

As we dream and discuss and collaborate, it strikes me that a solid, engaging mission is critical for this kind of work. We’re toying with this statement: Collaborate with teachers to individualize instruction.

To preload this goal into our work next year, I incorporated the mission statement into an online feedback survey.

In this screenshot of the survey, “ES” represents “Excels in the standard”, “MS” means “Meets the standard”, AS means “Approaches the standard”, “FS” means “Falls below the standard”, and “FFS” means “Falls far below the standard”.

We don’t know who will serve on the team next year. We’re inviting teachers this week to consider return/joining. I’m hoping that as they share their opinions and observation from this year, they’ll catch the mission statement and show up to school in August with a clearer idea of what we’re about.

Seth Godin’s quality control self-check

Joel Zehring — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:26:28 +0000

In a recent post, Seth Godin asks his readers to examine their potential output with their real output with the question “is it worthy?”. Especially applicable in education, where students deserve our very best and teacher consistently rationalize mediocre work.

For the teacher, I would add “I’ve spent countless hours in college classes and professional development, read websites and books, talked with other teachers, and poured over the curriculum. Is this the best lesson I can deliver?”

Seth Godin > “Is it worthy?”