Category Archives: Authentic Engagement

Authentic Engagement

Authentic Engagement, General, Strong Connections

Own your learning

August 25, 2015 Mike Ehrhardt, Head of School

As I eased myself into the teak rocking chair, I heard a creak. I think it was the chair, but it could have easily been by knees, or my back, or my neck. I lifted the glass lemonade to my lips as I rocked gently back and forth. I was sitting outside the Cary Academy library, looking down the Quad. Beautiful. The smell of newly trimmed grass and the peacefulness of the scene made me happy. A butterfly floated past, the nearest thing to an interruption of the bliss.

It was the evening before school started. And it was calm, and peaceful, and quiet.

By the next morning it could have been another lifetime. The first day of school brought kids, and booming voices, and kids, and muddy shoes, and more kids. Each one tracking dirt into the buildings … and walking … All. Over. Our. Lawn.

Let me start over.

I haven’t been myself over the past few weeks. I’m feeling a bit grumpy as we start the 2015-2016 school year. Some recent headlines have me acutely feeling the passage of time.

You may have heard the news, too. LOL is dead.

After analyzing posts for a seven-day period, Facebook said that the most common form of online laughter during my youth, LOL (Laugh Out Loud), was dead. It has been replaced by haha or hehe (50% + of users) or an emoji (35%). Fewer than 2% of us still use LOL.

I was in high school in the mid-1980s when LOL first came into existence, part of the first online chat rooms. When texting began, pre-smartphone era, I remember the fun that was had when parents, wanting to be hip but demonstrating their cluelessness, tried to use LOL as a stand in for Lots Of Love. This lead to wonderful texts like: “Dear son, you are kind, and good, and talented. LOL. Mom.”

After almost 20 years working its way from chatrooms to text messages, LOL finally hit the big time in 2011 when it made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Four years later, gone.

That’s got me feeling my age. And I’m not the only one.

Earlier this summer, I came up to the quad to celebrate with the class of 2005 at their 10-year reunion. They wanted to know what had changed at CA. I talked about how classroom and collaboration work has evolved with the use of laptops, the cloud, Haiku, Veracross, and OneNote. Whoa, whoa, they said. Laptops? Seems like a whole lot has changed since they worked on desktops tethered to tables by lots and lots of wires.

When I shared these observations with our upper school students during convocation, I suspect that many of them put them down to the rantings of a typical out-of-touch old person, somebody who still doesn’t get Snapchat. Like really doesn’t get it.

I guess that’s the point, I told them. My mom didn’t get LOL. She just got her first smartphone this summer. Now LOL is gone, a word lost before its time. Will our current students look back in 10 years and laugh at the way they used to communicate by sending pictures, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures. All. Day. Long.

Like I said, I don’t get Snapchat.

Change is really the point, though.

According to the most recent Shift Happens video originally created by Karl Fisch and updated by Scott McLeod (and seen more than 10 million times online), the Department of Labor says that an average adolescent today will have 38 jobs in his or her lifetime. For those in elementary school, 65% could have jobs that don’t even exist yet.

How do schools that were conceived to prepare students for an industrial age cope?

Well, we hope that we prepare students to think.

During the convocation, Upper School Principal Heather Clarkson shared some very important perspectives about how we go about this task. Stanford professor Carol Dweck argues the crucial starting point is believing that we can constantly learn and grow.

During a powerful moment of her talk, Ms. Clarkson asked students to close their eyes and reflect on a personal goal for the year. She asked them, eyes still closed, to raise their hands if their goal was about good grades or doing well on a test. She then asked for hands up if a main goal was about a personal challenge to learn or do something new.

I don’t have to tell you what it looked like in the auditorium during that exchange.

Ms. Clarkson then challenged students to consider that the purpose of school is more than just passing somebody else’s test of their worth. We cannot avoid assessments, but we should not be driven or defined by them. We must embrace our capacity to learn and grow throughout life. As Ms. Clarkson aptly tells students: “Own your learning.”

Several others have been challenging us to see things differently for quite a while. Educator Grant Wiggins, writing in Education Leadership more than 20 years ago, said “the aim of curriculum is to ‘awaken’ not ‘stock’ or ‘train’ the mind.” Just this past week, the New York Times op-ed section ran a provocative piece on the importance of teaching ignorance.

The recently approved Cary Academy Strategic Plan contains language that challenges us to think about the ways in which education is changing. It challenges us to think about how we use space, how we organize curriculum, and how we help prepare students for an uncertain future.

If Google, a company seemingly on top of the world, feels a need to change — announcing recently the creation of a new organizational structure and parent company called Alphabet — I suspect that change is coming for us all.

Hey, maybe Alphabet can help bring back my beloved LOL.

Authentic Engagement, General, Institutional Flexibility

Creating Innovators

January 4, 2015 Mike Ehrhardt, Head of School

Cary Academy hosted one of the country’s leading voices in educational innovation, Dr. Tony Wagner, on December 15, 2014, for a talk on his most recent book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

In his presentation and subsequent question and answer session, Dr. Wagner, who is an Expert in Residence at Harvard University’s new Innovation Lab, highlighted the three big elements necessary for schools and parents to create an environment ripe for innovation:

Play
Passion
Purpose

Innovation, Dr. Wagner said, rarely happens from a single lightening bolt of inspiration. Collaboration between individuals and disciplines should be at the core of the work happening in schools — for both teachers and students.

An innovative environment promotes risk taking and the discovery of new connections between ideas. Schools should continue to look for ways to take advantage of students’ intrinsic motivation by giving them some flexibility in their learning and creating a failure-friendly atmosphere. Learning is an iterative process that is sparked when students understand their own abilities and can build upon skills in future work. Wagner’s thinking on the importance of iteration dovetails very nicely with the work of John Hattie on educational achievement that I wrote about earlier this year. Hattie says that one of the biggest factors impacting achievement is when students understand their own learning and give that feedback to their teachers, who can then adjust the next steps in the course.

State of the School and Strategic Planning — AN INVITE

Dr. Wagner’s talk fits in nicely with many of the themes being discussed in our strategic planning process.

On January 21st at 7 PM in the Dining Hall, I invite all parents to come and hear the annual State of the School address and to participate in the mid-process feedback session regarding our strategic plan.

The State of the School is part of the PTAA Annual Meeting. It is an address by the Head of School containing all sorts of interesting information about Cary Academy. In my talk this year, I’ll share some highlights from the past 18 months and benchmarking data relative to admissions, financials, and student outcomes. In addition, I will talk about the school’s financial picture moving forward, including the tuition for the 2015-2016 school year. There will be a chance after the presentation to ask questions.

Following the State of School presentation, we will give an update on our strategic planning process. In October, I shared the four main goal areas for the plan:

Creating institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.
Fostering the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to thrive in an interdependent world.
Strengthening existing relationships and forging new connections to embrace fresh perspectives and opportunities.
Building the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our dreams.

On January 21st, we will share some of the strategies being developed to address these goals and give participants a chance to provide feedback and ideas that could be incorporated into the action items. The final plan will be put forward to the Board in April.

I hope to see many of you there.

Authentic Engagement, General, Institutional Flexibility

Learning outcomes

September 4, 2014 Mike Ehrhardt, Head of School

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We’ve all been there: deep in a conversation, when you or somebody else drops the bomb meant to underscore your point and send everybody else nodding in agreement, “Well, according to a study…”

In fact, just a few weeks ago The Onion newspaper reported: “Study finds 79% of statistics now sobering.”

Thankfully, armed with our smartphones we are only a few clicks away from a counter-study to disarm any argumentative opponent. Any day, in fact, I expect The Onion to report “Study: Study contradicts even the idea of this study.”

It is with this fully in mind that I share some information about educational research.

Truth is, while we do our best to use evidence to guide our practice, it can be overwhelming to separate the real science from pop science. And real science can be hard in some areas, where studies can’t keep up with the changes in technology or practice.

At our opening employee meeting this fall, I shared some of the work of the Australian researcher John Hattie. What caught my attention is the scope of what Hattie has accomplished. Over the past 15 years, he evaluated more than 1,000 meta-studies on educational achievement involving more than 240 million students. (A meta-study is a study involving other studies.)

Many more of you will have much more to say on the relative merits or limitations of meta-studies, and there will no doubt be some stinkers among the studies that went into the meta-studies Hattie reviewed. What strikes me about Hattie’s work, though, is that due to its sheer size it is more difficult for a single study to throw the conclusions out of whack.

(Shocking report says even the smallest horse bite can be harmful to human babies.)

Hattie then created a level-playing field (the effect size) for reporting the impact of a variety of educational practices on student achievement. He has done his best to try and make some sense of the results by grouping them into themes and striving for an overarching takaway, which he describes as Visible Learning.

This summer a group of Cary Academy faculty traveled together to hear Hattie speak about his work. I described the overarching message from the research in two phrases to our faculty and staff.

“I see the learning through the eyes of my students.”

“I help my students become their own teachers.”

These phrases are an effort to connect and describe the highest impacting educational practices as uncovered by Hattie. They are:

Students’ ability to self-assess their performance
Teacher credibility in the eyes of the students
Students providing formative evaluation to teachers on how the teachers are doing
Feedback about task performance, especially: where to next.

Each one of these areas could fill a book, and I do hope to spend some more time unpacking them in future blog posts.

Hattie uses the phrase Visible Learning to describe the overarching message of his work because all of the top performing practices above require making learning visible: to students and to teachers.

Sure enough, Hattie is already at work on analyzing new meta-studies. The educational research is particularly light on technology and brain science right now. Things may (will) indeed change. But in the meantime, we do have some good things to discuss.

(Study: Most High School Graduates Woefully Unprepared for High School.)

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