Last term, in the process of pulling together the 'Effectiveness' training day, I decided that thriving as a teacher boils down to these five elements, and in each of the five we face dilemmas and contradictions. In each of the five there is insight and clarity to be had: a path forward through the forest.
Below is a brain dump on them. I hope it sparks your own thinking. You might use the 5 headings as a way of gathering your own observations, insights and curiosity.
Oh and please if you're local to Sydney, come hang out with me on June 9 and we can explore them together!
Self
Almost every challenge is a self-challenge. Our biggest limitations are our self limitations. Our self-conceptions, self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-love, and so on, set the upper limit on all other development. For instance if a colleague or student really gets under your skin, the problem isn't with them, but with you. It simply gets projected outward onto what you perceive as reality.
I remember going pale with shock at a certain moment when I realised how much my 'self' was constructed by concepts of who I was that OTHER people had, and that I had then internalised and taken at face value. Rewrite the script!
Work
You have reports due Thursday, parent-teacher night tonight, three students you have to catch in the playground, a cheque requisition form to drop off at the office, two unplanned lessons, a conversation you have to have to with a colleague, a phone call to see a dentist, a stack of marking, and then when you glance up you realise there are 30 new unread emails! This is no caricature or hyperbole, is it? In fact I could go much further without exaggeration.
How can we thrive in the complexity and chaos of school? How can we be creative when we only get the top 5% of our 'to do list' done?
I have felt so much better since I cracked this one with the GTD methodology. Once again I recommend How to Get Things Done by David Allen. It is a life saver. Or... come to my next workshop!
People
All work is people-work, especially at school. Students are people. Colleagues are people. We convince, inspire, neglect, insult, deride, undermine, praise, negotiate with, get permission from, give permission to, equip, resource, empower, assist, mentor, damage, save and enable each other.
Picture a school as a network, focal points around optimists, pessimists, leaders, and gate keepers. Where do you fit on this map? What are you broadcasting? What are you known for?
A helpful tool I find is the notion of 'social currency'. What is your currency? Is it high or low?
How can you improve your currency? How can you use it to better shape your responsibilities? How can you use it to benefit others?
Change
Well everything is changing. Society is changing. Traditional schooling is a dead duck, plain and simple. The model we grew up with, and see in films and in soap operas, is bankrupt. Schools that don't come to terms with this will not survive another 10 years. I suspect many schools will indeed go under, while new schools will be seeded with a much different charter and radically different structures.
Much resistance to change comes from the reality that we are confident experts of the old model, whereas much of the new model is still to be worked out. If a teacher has spent 5 or 10 years of their career perfecting techniques for 'getting control' of their class, they may be reluctant to embrace a model where 'control' is not even sought.
It's not only starting from scratch, but it's going where no man has gone before. Yikes!
But then, who said we had a choice?
Space
I repeat this like an automaton now. I think these words are original, so yes you can quote me:
"Technology mediates relationships. Space mediates relationships. Technology is space."
Gettit? Two people in a meadow. Their proximity allows them to hear each other and have a conversation. The space mediates the relationship. If they stand further away they can't hear each other, so no conversation, so no relationship.
Ah, but if they use technology... such as smoke signals, or a telephone, then although they are not in the same physical space they are in the same virtual space. Technology is space. Technology creates space.
Furniture is technology and is also therefore space.
How does your classroom mediate relationships? The shape of your room is technology. The furniture is technology. The layout, centres of gravity, signs and decorations, doors and windows, are technology.
And yes of course the computers and internet are also technology, and are also therefore space. Does your class move through virtual space as well as physical? Do you help your students nurture a virtual persona? Do they publish online? Do they tweet? Do they Skype? Does each have a profile page representing their current learning? Do they answer questions from other students in other schools, and ask their own questions in turn?
Very tricky one, space. Whatever we do we mustn't take it at face value, or ignore it. Every decision about the physical space of the learning environment, from chairs to the internet, is laden with meaning and implications.
In this post: the wonderful TED talks movement. Scroll to the bottom of my post to hear how we bit the bullet and booked up a TED speaker and are inviting you to come hear him too.
"What on earth is happening?
Someone took my map away from me!
I spent 13 years of my life AT SCHOOL learning what SCHOOL WAS. I still see that old school on the tele and in films. But I know in my bones it is cracking at the seams."
Not just education, of course, but all society. Industrial era schooling is irrelevant now because we are no longer in the industrial era.
We need maps to navigate life. Who am I, where am I going, and am I doing well? What are the rules of the game here (I have a feeling they're changing)? Now if we equate calm orderliness in your classroom as a great sign, we may have an out-of-date map. If feeling 'in control' is our litmus test, then I propose we venture out of this comfort zone.
The 'map' for what school is and for what society is (the former is measured by relevance to the latter) is going through a revolution. So what will the new map look like?
My way of finding meaning in the chaos begins with deciding who to listen to. Who is making sense? Obviously my group of guides spans my school, family, friends, TV shows, blog sites, tweeters, videos, and without doubt books, books, books. The voices I reject are as important as the ones I embrace.
One of the best sources of intelligent, innovative, creative, perceptive, revolutonary thinking I have encountered is the 'TED Talks' videos website.
If ideas are food, these are my daily bread.
Originally, 'TED' was an elite conference held in California. It was invitation only, but if you were invited you had to pay a packet to attend. The speakers were heroes, outliers, game-changers - thinkers and actors who had already changed the world, or whose ideas had found that special traction which emerges when an elegant path forward is perceived in a pathless forest.
This was back in the 1980s!
After 2000, TED took what proved to be a critical new direction: they started freely and openly publishing the conference talks online.
Some of these videos are so famous that, even if you haven't heard of TED, I wonder if you have heard of the videos:
Possible the presentaton with the highest impact, for me, was this one; show-stopping, jaw-breaking:
The speaker Hans Rosling, has developed a poweful visualisation tool for the development of countries. The world is getting better and better: People are living longer, are better educated, and wars are fewer, and health care is improving. People in Vietnam, for instance, have a life expectancy now that equals the life expectancy of people born in America in 1974. Over 40 years the improvement has been phenomenal.
I'm not saying it won't all come crashing down - but I am a different person since seeing the raw data on this stuff.
In the 'noise' of information overload, endless bloggers (like me!), the idea-soup of the web is too much to stomache; it just makes you sick and disorientated. I have found TED, in comparison, to provide insight and clarity. For me, insight and clarity are two of my most sought-after prizes. Our world is nothing if not confusing.
Let me mention a final TED speaker who has gone down in history: Charles Leadbeater. I associate his TED talk in 2007 on 'Innovation' with a series of related presentations that managed to capture for me, in essence, the value of 'bottom-up' analysis of social movements, education and the economy. I think my distrust of 'top-down' control mechanisms crystalised from that point.
(A case in point: Twitter... all of these educators passionately looking for improvements to learning without anyone telling them to, measuring them, getting them to sign-off, filling in forms etc - much of the time there is one lone tweeter at a school, starting a mini-revolution in their own backyard, answerable to no one but the hive mind of the REAL education revolution. OR the old cliché: a bunch of buzzing bees being the change they want to see in the world!)
Leadbeater has more recently spoken at TED on 'Education Innovation in the Slums', a crucial topic, because it would break your heart to see the approach of poorer nations like Rwanda or Cambodia who are embracing a cliché of 1960s English Boarding School class control & rote learning that is ill-fitted to economies needing not factory workers but entrepreneurs.
***** We have booked Charles Leadbeater to come to our school and we're inviting you too! ****
At my school (NBCS, in Sydney) we have been so taken by Leadbeater's insight and original thinking that we booked him up to come and speak! We're running our own one-day Leadbeater conference!
We figured we'd go ahead and book him in and then get the word out so people can come and join us!
He is presenting on "Learning from the Extremes" on June 14, 2011. You can book up a spot right now, while we have spaces free: http://charlesleadbeater.eventbrite.com/
Please post comments with your own top 5 recommended TED talks!
A colleague threw a question at me via Twitter about interactive whiteboards (known as IWBs) today, and I thought I’d respond via my blog.
Let me be very clear on one thing: I have nothing against IWBs. If I was running a school with infinite funds, I’d equip every space with one. (Er… actually I’d equip every space with 10 of them, or pay for every wall to BE an IWB…).
However, I’m also not terribly excited by them, and have never felt any ‘buzz’ about them. I know there has been a lot of buzz about them, and I think that buzz, in itself, is great. Give me a energised, enthusiastic teacher any day. I think half the benefit of Twitter, Vokis, Voicethreads, Glogsters, and yes IWBs, and yes any other shiny new technology is the infusion of energy and, well, newness. The human experience, including students and teachers, is fundamentally a rhythm of energy states.
School, unfortunately, can correlate with low energy states for students and teachers. This is the equivalent of a balloon that has the capacity to be blown up to the size of a house, being left all shrivelled and flat. Incidentally, I consider the HSC and other important exams in the same way as IWBs. If they have a kind of propaganda value that can inject ‘importance’ and a sense that ‘this matters’ then I see value.
Let us put IWBs to the side for a moment and consider the core problem of schooling at the moment:
- Fundamentally, we have institutions called ‘schools’ with spaces called ‘classrooms’ lead by a kind of chief called a ‘teacher’ who dictates activities called ‘lessons’.
- Over time (we’re talking age 5 to age 18, i.e. 13 years… you can get less for murder) students adapt to this situation and turn passive. They are much too young to have an insightful perspective on the value of education. The situation is bizarrely artificial.
- (So why did it get this way? Because the system is excellent at embedding authority structures and a familiarity with repetition, key ingredients in an industrial society. Compare schools to factories, and imagine it is the early 1900s.)
I am not damning this sort of schooling. Consider the film ‘Dead Poets Society’ where the central figure of the classroom is highly inspiring and deliberately creates space for the students to follow their own path and make their own discoveries.
However it has an intrinsic centre of gravity that tends to become a veritable black hole: a veritable centre of attention into which falls all creativity, independence, initiative and… boat-rocking. I use the last word very deliberately because young people, with powerful characters, who will go on to impact the world in powerful ways, may find themselves censored and chastised by the school system that values conformity and submission.
What has all this to do with IWBs? Only this: they create a centre of gravity in the classroom.
Attention will fall into it, never to escape! The same is true of the blackboard, or whiteboard, or teacher.
I don’t care what multimedia acrobatics an IWB can accomplish.
And the ‘interactive’ bit is a nod in the right direction, but it has exactly the same problem of a teacher asking students a question, or for any type of input: only one student can contribute at a time.
There is a time and a place for one big centre of gravity, but in our current context where this is the quintessential fatal flaw of schooling, it is the last thing we need.
I see multiple paths to lead us forward, and they all involve multiplying the centres of gravity in a school. Think: chaotic, highly organic, local, student-driven, and documented only in retrospect.
An energised teacher and a rich multi-media projection tool is a big improvement on a bored teacher with chalk, but it’s hardly a game-changer. That’s why I’ve never been bowled over by IWBs.
Well, well, well Mr Collis, then what does impress you? Well lots of things impress me, including an old-school classroom with a brilliant inspiring teacher. In terms of technology, some paths that appeal:
- 'ideapaint' which turns every wall into a whiteboard. Dispersed centre of gravity!
- 1:1 computers. Every student has a computer, and the teacher almost entirely loses the lecture role.
- peer tutoring. Groups of students should have 'super-node' students who play the role of surrogate teacher. This can change from moment to moment, as key figures in the learning community step up to the mark. Think: spontaneous workshops, troubleshooting, exploration.
- 10 IWBs in a classroom: 10 * better than 1 IWB in a classroom!
Tweet me @steve_collis and let me know your reaction to this:
Since day 1 of my teaching career I found the workload simply overwhelming. I had a gazillion things to get done and tiny amounts of time to do them. Time was soaked up by playground duties, meetings, paperwork, and an avalanche of emails. I had emails coming out of my ears!
In my early years, somehow I found a way to create time to work on passion projects. 2006, in hindsight, was the most intense: on top of a full teaching load, I pioneered the Beyond Borders website (online collaborative student communities), running a dozen projects with 1,000 students, while simultaneously setting up the 4 years of online French courses that launched in 2007 under our new 'HSCOnline' brand.
Back in those days my motto was "Work smart, and work hard." It was rewarded - I won teacher awards, was invited to speak at conferences, and found myself on the Senior Exec at school. (Picture me, blinking widely, like a possum in headlights).
But this approach to getting work done was not sustainable. Back in those days, my mind was firing on overdrive. There was no method to the madness, and this fostered a sense of panic. As I hit 30 I recognised this and identified an ambition: to sustain work effectiveness but dump the stress and anxiety. I needed to find an 'off' switch. You might find this obvious but I ain't never turned 'off' in my life.
I made the breakthrough in January 2010, idly picking up the book 'Getting Things Done' by David Allen. He talked so much sense, in such simple terms, and I had one of those epiphanies.
Before I go further - here is a sped-up video of me using his techniques to clear my email inbox from 100 down to ZERO in about 18 minutes. Press play but then read ahead as it plays.
Over a year later, I am still astonished at how many of his suggestions are strongly (very strongly) counter-instinctive, but transform your workflow when applied. I spent the rest of 2010 getting the hang of them.
He addresses all the 'stuff' we have in our life:
- petty jobs we have to do (ring so and so, pick up the milk, get the car registered)
- fiddly work (gathering student data, report-writing, programming)
- broad aims for our life (spend more time with the family, save for a holiday, renovate the house... become a more loving person)
- policy, procedures, how-to guides, and other mountains of information we need to know or adhere too
Every work obligation, appointment, hope, desire, dream, mundane chore, passion project, deadline, at work and at home... we are mentally invested in these things, and it all mushes together in our minds like porridge. Each day we have to wade through this porridge.
Hence my high level of stress and anxiety. Hence my 'work like crazy' panic.
Allen proposes a strategy that is entirely realistic and workable, and makes utter sense out of everything.
Now I won't rewrite his book right here. I recommend it, and I'd love you to come to my training day where we'll work on implementing the principles.
However, here is a sneak peak of what my workflow now looks like:
I have a complete inventory of every single mental commitment or job or project or event or ambition. Everything is catalogued and organised and is easy to process and action. I maintain this catalogue daily, just like I clean my house and tidy my room. There is no difference. My physical life is tidy, so why should my mental life be a pigsty?
Here are some glances at the system as I personally have implemented it, and I'll say something to conclude:
I use my Outlook Calendar for all events and reminders. My calendar is on my iPhone too. If I have to buy a birthday card this arvo, I set up a reminder to beep on the way home. Each day I can see what time is booked up, and what is free.
I have a reference system for all incoming 'information'. This is my knowledge base, with everything from bus duty procedure to excursion policies, from timetable information to 'history files' on students and colleagues. The biggest two spaces for this information is: my nested email folders (I just drag emails over) and 'One Note', a brilliant application that functions like a paper notebook with reorganisable tabs and subtabs.
This is what my One Note system looks like:
I have big tabs on the left, sub tabs along the top, and sub-sub tabs on the right.
Every single job that I have to do goes into my Outlook task list.
Note, when I say job only mean simple, single step items. If it's fiddly or requires multiple steps then it's a project.
Now, I give every task on my task list a due date, or more likely NO DUE DATE and a category. The category is the sort of task it is rather than what area of responsibility it falls under.
I print out my task list daily:
Each day I sort my task list by DATE (left hand photo) to get an idea of today's and upcoming deadlines - my URGENT stuff.
Then I sort by 'category' (right hand photo) and highlight tasks that suit the shape of my day - depending on my mood, schedule, and what seems important as I scan the entire list.
Do you see the brilliance of this? One of my categories is 'errands'. I go get a coffee, and on the way check to see if a colleague is at their desk because I want a word, pick up my post from my pigeon hole, drop off three cheque requisition forms to accounts, and count how many Year 9 textbooks are left. I've been accumulating these errands and here they are, at my finger tips, in my task list, nicely ordered.
There is nothing that I have to do in my entire life that does not appear on this list! It is comprehensive. As such, I can trust it. As such, I don't have to make 'mental' notes to do things anymore: I don't _brood_.
I establish project spaces in One Note for any fiddly ambition: rewriting the Year 8 programs, getting fit, establishing a 'lulu' student-published bookstore at my school, writing reports (requires a space for data gathering), broadening the SCIL Associates team, and so on.
These ambitions are too complicated to be jobs. I need space to brainstorm, create a plan, and bring together information and resources relevant to the ambition. This space may need to be large and well categorised if there are multiple people, meetings and documents involved.
I feed specific step by step jobs from my project spaces in One Note, to my tasks list in Outlook.
I am constantly realising that items in my jobs list are actually too complicated and need their own project space.
I review my project spaces regularly. I chip away at them. They are all steadily moving forward.
Finally, I have a 'One Day/Maybe' space, also in One Note for any brainstorming, dreaming, goal setting, or project consideration that I know I cannot realistically act on RIGHT NOW!
It is wonderful to have a space where I can pour out far out dreams and "I wish I could..." notions, in such a way that they are recorded, and catalogued, and I can return to them later, but without them clogging up my system.
I am constantly moving projects and jobs from my task list and project space to my ONE DAY space. I never realised just how much stuff I had made mentally commitments to. Now I have a much better sense of what I should put on my plate and what needs to go into storage for now.
Throughout 2010 faced up to dilemma after dilemma:
Is this a task or a project?
Can I realistically fit this in or is it a 'someday' item?
Does this really have a set-in-concrete deadline or is it just that I really really WANT to get it done this month?
This email to me seems to have reference information, three jobs, and the suggestion I take on a whole new project. WHERE DO I PUT IT?
Uh oh, I just realised there are 5 items in my head that I didn't put into 'the system'. I had better put them in NOW or it will fall apart.
Uh oh, I have 100 emails and zero time to process! I CAN'T GO BACK TO THE BAD OLD DAYS! I will wake up 30 minutes earlier, process them, and be tired but happy rather than well slept and anxious.
Ooooo that's why I've made no progress on project X - the next step is to recruit so and so, and so and so is busy and I'm reluctant to approach them. Ok decision time - do I approach them or dump the project?
As I have faced these dilemmas I've gained skills in mental processing. I have slowly developed a much more confident, intuitive, clear sense of the landscape of my workflow - a sense of what is optional, what is doable, what is urgent, what is important, what strategies are effective, and what strategies are all talk.
I've realised that most of the time when we send email we don't have the faintest clue what we really want to result from it. Meantime, 20 people have to read our chit-chat, wondering "Where do I put this thing? What am I supposed to do with it?"
Email becomes a mix between a party-line, a to-do list, a thinking-out-loud bin, and most tellingly, a deferral/outsourcing of clarity. i.e. "I don't know what to do, so I'll send an email discussing the issue."
It makes me feel like I've DONE SOMETHING! Really, all I've done is dumped my porridge on someone else's plate.
As 2011 launches, I am more certain than ever that if I really want to make things happen at my school, I need to form a collaborative alliance, face to face. I need to get off my chair and go and present a concrete proposal to the person in a position to resource me, or approve the idea, or publish the concept, or sign off on the budget, or give me physical space to work in.
Thanks to the system, my inbox is at zero, my anxiety has all but disappeared, and my creativity is flourishing. Since I have an inventory and tools to measure progress, I am more and more aware of actions that waste time and actions that bring about real concrete progress.
If you're intrigued, get the book, and let me know how you go. And of course if you can travel to the northern beaches of Sydney, come spend the day with me and we'll explore this and other key skills for thriving rather than surviving at school - http://scil.com.au/workshop/a-day-with-steve-collis
Since day 1 of my teaching career I found the workload simply overwhelming. I had a gazillion things to get done and tiny amounts of time to do them. Time was soaked up by playground duties, meetings, paperwork, and an avalanche of emails. Emails coming out of my ears!
Well, somehow I found a way to create time to work on passion projects. 2006, in hindsight, was the most intense: on top of a full teaching load, I pioneered the Beyond Borders website (online collaborative student communities), running a dozen projects with 1,000 students, while simultaneously setting up the 4 years of online French courses that launched in 2007 under our new 'HSCOnline' brand.
Back in those days my motto was "Work smart, and work hard." It was rewarded - I won teacher awards, was invited to speak at conferences, and found myself on the Senior Exec at school.
But this was not sustainable. Back in those days, I made things happen through pure pigheaded stubborness. My mind was firing on overdrive. There was no method to the madness, and this fostered a sense of panic. As I hit 30 I recognised this and identified an ambition: to sustain work effectiveness but dump the stress and anxiety. I needed to find an 'off' switch. You might find this obvious but I ain't never turned 'off' in my life. And now I'm managing the languages faculty
I made the breakthrough in January 2010, idly picking up the book 'Getting Things Done' by David Allen. He talked so much sense, in such simple terms, and I had one of those epiphanies.
Before I go further - here is a sped-up video of me using his techniques to clear my email inbox from 100 down to ZERO in about 18 minutes:
Over a year later, I am still astonished at how many of his suggestions are strongly (very strongly) counter-instinctive, but transform your workflow when applied. I spent the rest of 2010 getting the hang of them.
He addresses all the 'stuff' we have in our life:
- petty jobs we have to do (ring so and so, pick up the milk, get the car registered)
- fiddly work (gathering student data, report-writing, programming)
- broad aims for our life (spend more time with the family, save for a holiday, renovate the house... become a more loving person)
- policy, procedures, how-to guides, and other mountains of information we need to know or adhere too
Every work obligation, appointment, hope, desire, dream, mundane chore, passion project, deadline, at work and at home... we are mentally invested in these things, and it all mushes together in our minds like porridge. Each day we have to wade through this porridge.
Hence my high level of stress and anxiety. Hence my 'work like crazy' panic.
Allen proposes a strategy that is entirely realistic and workable, and makes utter sense out of everything.
Now I won't rewrite his book right here. I recommend it, and I'd love you to come to my training day where we'll work on implementing the principles.
However, here is a sneak peak of what my workflow now looks like:
I have a complete inventory of every single mental commitment or job or project or event or ambition. Everything is catalogued and organised and is easy to process and action. I maintain this catalogue daily, just like I clean my house and tidy my room. There is no difference. My physical life is tidy, so why should my mental life be a pigsty?
Some glances at the catalogue:
I use my Outlook Calendar for all events and reminders. My calendar is on my iPhone too. If I have to buy a birthday card this arvo, I set up a reminder to beep on the way home. Each day I can see what time is booked up, and what is free.
