Woodside Priory School

Last Friday, our campus minister asked me to pinch-hit as the chapel speaker this week. A chapel talk here at the Priory is short—about five to seven minutes in length—and may address any topic the speaker feels inspired to share with the community. In spite of my almost thirty years in education and literally hundreds of public presentations, giving the chapel talk at our school still makes my knees knock.

There is something about our chapel experience that affects people.  Maybe it’s the beauty and intimacy of the space, or the presence of the monks, or the captive audience of students, faculty, and staff, or the long history of teachers, administrators and kids sharing their most personal truths there.  In any case, there is an ineffable quality to the experience, an elevation of sorts, that makes our chapel the spiritual heart of our community.

Giving a chapel talk inspires speakers to quake a bit and, more often than you might expect, to transcend themselves and rise above the commonplace. Our Senior Exit Surveys have shown that Chapel is one of the most memorable parts of the student experience here. The talks tend to be instructive, insightful and inspiring.

With only three days notice, I approached this week’s talk with some trepidation. People spend hours working on these presentations. In years gone by I have spent that much time myself. In the end, I decided to compile a list of ideas that I wish I’d had access to earlier in my life. Teenagers are notorious for their unapologetic disregard of adult advice. I chose to share these with them anyway.

Here’s my list. I hope you find something helpful here.

1. Try not to hold back. Love the people that you love ferociously and unapologetically. When the impulse to tell someone you love them strikes, do it, even if it might embarrass you. Tell people when you have warm feelings for them or when you are proud of what they are doing. Say thank you to the people you are grateful to. You never know what other people may need to hear and it feels marvelous to do.

2. Pay attention to your moments of grace. There are times when the world feels magical, mysterious and brilliantly lit. That is the most extraordinary gift of God or whatever you happen to believe in. Whether it happens to you out in nature, reading a book or kissing the person you love, relish those moments of grace.

3. Give yourself a break. We are here to make mistakes and screw things up periodically. When you blow it, allow yourself a bemused smile and a shake of the head. No one does this complicated journey perfectly. Trying to do everything perfectly will drive you crazy, and in the end, cause more harm than good.  Instead, try to show up, do the best you can, and let go of the outcome.

4. Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides. As confident and invulnerable as others may appear, there is no way to determine how they are actually feeling. All of us are insecure. While you are worrying about how you are being perceived, chances are good that everyone else in the room is worrying about the same thing.

5. Show up as yourself.  When you give yourself permission to be the quirky person that you are, you give other people permission to do the same. You never know what you’re giving to others just by living your own life as authentically as you can.

6. Life can be paradoxical. While I spent much of my young adulthood wandering the globe and seeking various forms of adventure, getting married and having a family ended up being the most freeing thing that I have ever chosen to do. There will be times in life when surrender will bring an unexpected blessing.

7. The only choices I regret in my life are the times when I was cruel.

8. It’s a cliché, but the best things in life probably aren’t things.

9. Being an adult is much more fun than it looks.  For some of you, high school will stand out as a wonderful time in your life, but for all of you, there is so much more to look forward to.

10. Life is both a beautiful and terrible gift. It is yours. It is not your parents’ or society’s. Your life is yours. Throw yourself into it with abandon and faith.

I have a friend who is on the science faculty at one of our reputable local universities. Among an array of other duties, she teaches an undergraduate Biology course every year. The class is heavily populated by understandably intense pre-med students. My friend mentioned how concerned she was about her students’ desperation to always have the correct answer in the interest of maintaining their requisite near perfect grades. Her concern stemmed primarily from the fact that scientific exploration is, by definition, trial and error. Scientists need to be tenacious and resilient in the face of long efforts that often yield incremental if any results. Going repeatedly back to the drawing board is the nature of the work. Clear, unambiguous “right” answers are very, very rare.

In an effort to combat this tendency, my friend designed a lab in which it was impossible to come to a defined correct answer. The actual honest response had to be, “I don’t know.”  She broke her students into working groups and sent them about their business. On the day of the students’ presentation of their results, not one group was able to say, “I don’t know.” Each group gathered the circumstantial evidence that they were able to piece together and leapt to a conclusion.

This outcome is not the fault of the students involved. They are the most successful products of a system that has conditioned them to think that they are not permitted to say that they do not know. The profound irony for those of us who have lived for while, is that most decisions in life are complex and nuanced. Objectively defined “right” answers are unusual.

Fail Forward Friday is a response to that trend. Three years ago, we worked with some talented folks from the Stanford Design School to help us think more creatively about our teaching techniques, curricular choices and assessment designs. We knew that our kids tended toward right answer addiction and adult dependency in the academic experience at the school. As we heatedly discussed how best to put these design concepts into practice, one of the teachers asked, “How much risk taking do we model for them in a teaching context? If we want them to take intellectual risks, shouldn’t we be modeling that willingness to try and fail for them?” From that very insightful question, Fail Forward Friday was born.

This Friday is our third annual Fail Forward day at the Priory. During the course of the day, every teacher in every class will model this intellectual risk taking for their students by trying a technique, an assessment, an activity or a content exploration that is well outside of their teaching comfort zone. Some of the undertakings will soar and some will plop and we will celebrate them all. We have set up a Fail Forward Friday Facebook page, an anonymous drop box in Benedictine Square, as well as an email address for students to share their impressions of the day with us. We are allowing them fairly free access to their devices to facilitate the sharing of that feedback. We are excited here and hope that Friday’s experience helps our students to think about their learning in a different way.

Welcome to the first of many articles about all things relating to Priory academics. Come back from week to week or subscribe to my blog to receive updates when I post them. We’ll also be cross-posting these articles via our Facebook wall.

2013 is a fascinating time to be working in education.  We must, as educators, hang on firmly to the core ethos of our schools while also accepting that the mechanics of education are undergoing a radical shift.

Our country’s 100-year-old tradition for educating kids is slowly but surely coming apart at the seams. We are witnessing the death throes of an educational system modeled on Henry Ford’s efficiency-minded factory and put into place on a grand scale over the last century.  In that construct, students were almost seen as widgets moving down an assembly line, with various content specialists stamping their own, often unrelated, pieces onto the finished product.  The unspoken hope was that the students would somehow be able to synthesize many years of information into some coherent whole.

Now that system is dissolving and the timing is perfect.  We’ve begun to acknowledge that, through the old way of doing things, we’ve inculturated traits in our students that do not serve them well: right answer addiction, intellectual risk aversion, compulsive busyness, and lack of real resilience in the face of sticky problems. It’s time for a change.

Pat Bassett, the very talented former President of the National Association of Independent Schools, took a pretty good shot at articulating what children need from schools in the 21^st century. Part of his thinking is encapsulated here below. The ideas provide a starting place for a substantive conversation. I hope you find them as thought provoking as I did.  His premise is that schools need to move from:

*      Knowing to Doing
*      Teacher Centered Pedagogy to Student Centered Learning
*      The Individual to The Team
*      Consumption of Information to Construction of Meaning
*      Schools to Networks
*      Single Sourcing to Crowd Sourcing
*      High Stakes Testing to High Value Demonstrations/Digital Portfolios
*      From simple content outcomes to backwards planning for character, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity, cosmopolitanism

In the coming months, I look forward to exploring and reflecting upon this heartening evolution with you.

Sincerely,

Brian