What Does Golf Have to Do with It????

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This is a sequel to an earlier blog on baseball and the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals.

As I write this, The Masters Tournament, one of four major tournaments on the Professional Golf circuit, is beginning in Augusta, Georgia.  It’s a GREAT tourney, always; played every year on the same golf course.  There have been many great champions.

Yesterday, one of the greatest champions, Gary Player, from South Africa, three time Masters champion, gave a thirty minute interview to the press. (Of the thumbnail choices, Gary Player is the gent top right, in a green jacket)

He reflected on his professional career highlighted by his long standing competition with Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.  Player is now 76 years old, Palmer 82, and Nicklaus 71.  Player recounted that together they have won over 350 tournaments world wide, and 56 major championships...playing against each other all the time.  Player said, I have such a deep and abiding love and respect for Arnold and Jack.  We’ve been so competitive with each other.  We always want to beat the heck out of each other, and when we’re done with the match, we look whichever of us won in the eye and say WELL PLAYED... and I’ll get you next time.  We’re such great friends.

And then he went on to say,  You know, there’s a famous American football coach who once claimed, Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a non-winner.  I say, that’s nonsense.  You lose way more than you win.

I’ll always remember what my father told me very early on.  He was a miner in South Africa, and he loved to play golf.  He gave that passion to me.  He told me, You’re going to lose more than you win.  Enjoy the success of others because when you have success you want them to enjoy yours.

It’s this attitude that we want to engender in our students.  We want to create collaborative environments in which excellence is the norm, in which children strive together to get better at everything from math to public speaking, writing to movement, reading to throwing pots.  We want children to compare themselves to each other in healthy ways.  We want children to appreciate the success of their peers.  And when a child succeeds at something, anything, we want her/him to feel the joy that comes from the applause of others.

This morning, Arnie, Jack and Gary were the ceremonial starters at the Masters.  They represented years of tradition and good sportsmanship.  Their role was purely ceremonial.  They were each to hit a drive from the 1st tee.  Arnie drove his 210 yards down the middle.  Jack hit a towering ball, 230 yards.  Gary striped one 250 yards.  He “won.”  They all cheered, laughed and shook each others hands looking into each others eyes with pure joy on their faces.                                              Photo by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Spring

It is full blown spring in St. Louis. Everything is blooming at once...my mother's crab apple that we moved 14 years ago to our front yard from her side yard before her house was sold, the wisteria on the post and beam trellis that Ashley built to shelter the brick walk to the back of our house, the pink parrot tulips that we planted last fall, the white lilacs.  All these blooms fill the light, cool spring air with intoxicating fragrance.  Right now, as we wait for our chicken to roast, the pale new leaves of the pear tree tremble in the evening breeze.

I am so happy to be alive and living here in this place, so gratified to be doing the work that we are doing in the world with such inspiring and aspiring educators.  We are glad that we are all part of a positive conspiracy, a revolution in education that seeks to overturn low expectations and low opportunity for a vision of what is really possible and what is truly, clearly and absolutely needed in education now and for the future. That is an education and learning experience in school that is full of meaning and human flourishing and happiness, that prepares informed and educated citizens and cultivates communities that learn together.  We are all in this life together, all connected to one another, to our planet's natural systems and to our shared world.  School must now align with this reality.  We wish you all a beautiful, mindful and joyous spring in your place on earth, wherever you are.

Louise and Ashley

Schools Are Community Centers

Picking up from last week’s entry on my reconnection with Trung Le, principal at Cannon Design, an architecture firm doing paradigm shifting work in school architecture, I’ll focus here on a basic reformation in the thinking behind school: school as community...school as the builder of community....school as the creative force in community...school as the creator of culture. Carlina Rinaldi, president of Reggio Children, in Reggio Emilia, Italy spoke at a conference we hosted in St. Louis in 2001.  Just when the generations ushering in a new century were filled with all the promise a new beginning brings (like this spring filled with new blossoms and new growth), September 11, 2001 brought our fresh optimism crashing down.  Yet, in the face of that, Rinaldi spoke to over 200 educators to describe schools as the hope for the future; because (and I’m paraphrasing here from notes I took then) schools create culture,  she said; and, she went on, that culture can be insulated among the children doing the creating or it can be all that AND offered to the community where the children live.

Rinaldi points to a profound shift in how we can perceive schools.  The predominant view of schools in the 20th Century was, by in large, that they are factories for producing useful workers.  Rinaldi obviously advocates for something much greater, more essentially generative, more organically part of the whole society.  This latter view is that taken by Cannon Design in renovating Stevenson High School.

At Stevenson, Cannon created several spaces that manifest and support the mission of school as community, both internally and externally.  Two spaces, in particular, dramatically represent this point.

The first is the central commons, shown in the photo below.  Note: several levels in the one open space, natural light from the clerestory windows, distinct smaller areas within a much larger whole, easy passageways throughout, dramatic view points from which one can take in the whole, nooks and crannies where one can retreat and still be part of the whole.  The Stevenson Commons is a remarkable space.  And, to top it off, note the quote from a Stevenson student below...we are proud to be environmentalists....

The other space I'd like to feature is an ingenious redesign of an interior connection between the upper floor library and a lower floor common study area.  Rather than restrict the passage from one space to the other in a typical enclosed concrete stairway, Cannon opened and expanded the area to essentially couple the library with the lower area, making it all one space, though separated by floor level...and the separation is actually a visual connector...a stairway...but it is a stairway, stage, meeting place.  Notice how the students are using it!

The photo below is the lower floor common study area, complete with computer stations.  The stairs/stage/gathering area is to the left in the photo.

Rethinking the design of schools with spaces for students and adults to congregate, think and imagine together is to build a container to accomplish the vision that Rinaldi shared: schools create culture.

The Third Teacher, School Design for the 21st Century

Louise and I spent two scintillating days in Denver last week at the Second Annual Green Schools Conference, a convergence of 1,500 educators, architects, engineers, businesspeople, chefs, farmers, and many NGO-er’s...oh, yeah, and Arnie Duncan (who gave a keynote address to all on Wednesday morning). Among the many connections I made, I renewed an acquaintance I’d made with Trung Le several years ago at a school architecture symposium convened by Reggio Children in Reggio Emilia, Italy.  Trung is a principal at Cannon Design.  Since I’d met him he had been a key contributor in the writing of The Third Teacher (Abrams 2010).  I’d read the book immediately upon its release and was taken by the synchronicity with my own experience and thinking.

To begin to explain, I’ll point to a wonderful project Cannon has completed, Booker T. Washington STEM Academy in Champaign, IL.

I’ve scanned the photos above from a brochure Cannon Design composed.  In the photo you see interior classrooms that open to an “hallway” space.  There are many architectural patterns manifest here that reinforce 21st C. pedagogy, including:

• differentiated spaces for differentiated learning
• varied spaces for collaborative, interactive learning
• natural light for improved learning
• low energy lighting for energy savings and sustainability
• flexible walls for flexible group arrangements
• glass walls for transparency and interconnectedness
• soft carpet floors for different learning styles
• carpet floors and acoustical tile ceiling for auditory sensibility

In their book, Trung Le and his partners outline in graphically dynamic and simple, straight forward terms, 79 ways you can use design to transform teaching and learning.   If you are involved in changing the spaces in your school, this is a must read.

Myth: Tests are the Best Measure of Achievement

I have been reading about Stanford Professor, Linda Darling Hammond's research using the results of the PISA, (Program for International Student Assessment) to investigate the consistent low rank of U.S. students on this assessment and the consistent high achievement of students from countries like Japan and Finland.  She points out that the PISA assesses higher order thinking skills and performance tasks which students in high achieving countries practice every day as part of their teaching learning systems.

Performance Assessment is a a way to assess what students understand and what skills they have by actually asking them to use their knowledge and their skills.   Performance assessments involve students in constructing various types of products for diverse audiences.  Through her studies, Linda Darling Hammond found that students in high achieving countries are engaged in inquiry, project based learning, the design of experiments, the analysis of data, collaborative work, and reflection on their own work in order to improve it.  In other words, instead of memorizing facts which can be coughed up for multiple choice tests, students are being challenged to THINK.  She advocates for a teaching learning system that focuses on equipping students to be big thinkers and to apply and adapt their learning so that as they use it...it becomes life long.

Along the way, if we adopt this process, we might rise to the top of the PISA assessment instead of hovering at the bottom.

At both The College School and Maplewood Richmond Heights School District, we are influenced by the work, research and practice of expeditionary learning and particularly Ron Berger who champions beautiful, exemplary student work that is directed toward an authentic audience.

To quote Ron, If you’re going to do something, I believe that you should do it well.  You should sweat over it and make sure that it is strong and accurate and beautiful and you should be proud of it.  There is much evidence of original, beautiful work  designed by students of all ages at both schools.  If you come to our conference in April, you will see it, take it home with you, engage in dialogue about it with students and teachers.  We will all be inspired to take these words of Ron Berger to heart and into our classrooms.

We can ask ourselves how are we assessing for 21^st c skills like innovation, creativity, collaboration, communication, ecoliteracy, citizenship?  When will these crucial skills for the future matter enough to be highly valued and assessed.   Maybe we need to push for measures for the heretofore unmeasured and demonstrate the high achieving results in these domains by students in schools like the Maplewood Richmond Heights District, where stewardship, leadership and citizenship are as important as scholarship.

Ashley and I, and Bob Dillon, middle school principal of Maplewood Richmond Heights Middle School,  just returned from the Green Schools Conference where we met many people who are thinking, researching and practicing all kinds of ways to improve our own teaching learning systems.   I heard Louise Chawla say, We need to stop and think that out of our schools, we don't want to graduate only "good workers," we want to think about human happiness and flourishing and how we can nurture and develop it.

Come to see us in April and experience learning where students achieve success in many ways... on tests, through their beautiful work, through their good works and through their own pride, self-confidence and happiness.