The story behind the story...

A Chinese hanzi is often made up of multiple characters to create a unique meaning. The hanzi above is constructed of different characters that individually represent ears, eyes, undivided attention and heart. A beautiful alternative definition of the verb to listen is created... to listen means to hear with your heart; to be totally engaged and focused on understanding deeper meanings behind what we hear.

Every day I am reminded of how important it is to listen to student`s stories. I am fortunate to have time during the school day to hear with my heart as I listen to the real reasons why kids end up in the office talking to me. Like the young man in this clip, sometimes kids just need an opportunity to be honest and real so we can understand their struggle better.

In my school, we don`t think of a trip to the office as a punitive thing. We think of it as a resiliency building thing. An office referral is one of four resiliency pathways (as we call them) within our school that kids travel down depending on the nature of their challenge on any given day. An office visit more often than not means some adverse behavior would have been displayed.

Empathy Re-Boot Project

 flickr image via Allen McGregor

My colleagues and I along with our students at Glendale Sciences and Technology School are embarking on an exciting and challenging journey. We are calling it our Empathy Re-Boot Project.

I have returned to Glendale as its vice-principal three years after a one year stint as its counselor. I loved my time at Glendale before, and always felt like there was unfinished business there. The first time around in my role as counselor, I spent a good deal of time helping kids, and staff members too, develop their empathetic lens; the one that allowed them to walk a mile in the shoes of others toward a deeper understanding of their learning stories. We all have a learning story... the part already written; the part we are writing in the present and the hopeful part we intend to write toward the happy endings of the future. In my second term at Glendale I am thrilled to continue this work with the staff and students of my reunited Glendale family.

In Alberta, all schools are in the midst of an important and necessary paradigm shift toward inclusive learning environments. At Glendale, we have been working hard to re-frame our educational perspectives towards the diverse population of students at our school. We don't have segregated programming at our school. We don't pull students out of class anymore; we hold their hands as we walk alongside them. As we walk alongside them we talk to them. We talk to them about their learning story... what's happened in the past; what's happening in the present and what they want to happen in the future. Our goal is to learn their story behind the story, the one that enlightens us toward deeper understanding of what may be challenging students, and ever more importantly, what they need from us to help work toward mitigating the challenges. We're focusing on students' strengths in as asset-based model of intervention. We're downplaying student weakness and focusing our empathy lenses on solutions.

We are re-booting empathy.

Thinking deeply about virtues and character development, we have concluded that true inclusion in our school requires an intense understanding of others, and in particular, their stories. We are taking a phenomenological-post modernist perspective. We believe that individual circumstances can distract from the learning process, but also that striving to know these circumstances, and focusing on supporting strategies that mitigate them at school will lead us down solution focused paths toward optimized teaching and learning. There is always a better path to take. We must honor the perspectives of those we work with when helping divine the best paths.

We are using our empathic lenses to focus on the resiliency of our students, and we are tapping into that resiliency with intent to nurture its growth. We are recognizing resiliency in ourselves, and  we are using it to support kids who are vulnerable. We are teaching them to be more resilient over time by making sure they know we care, and that we want to help them write personal learning stories with happy endings.

In all sincerity...

flickr image via Sam Howzit

I believe that sincerity is paramount to nurturing trust and commitment in people, and critical to effective communication.

In Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the absence of trust is listed as dysfunction number one for good reason. Trust is obviously critical to team function and team success. Without it we can't be truly committed (lack of commitment is the number three dysfunction) to anyone but ourselves; that is to say if we even trust ourselves... I'm not sure we all do. Trust requires sincerity. We have to be honest with ourselves, and honest with others before we can trust, otherwise our function and purpose is a facade based on insincere and false (or perhaps not entirely true,) premises.

Commitment is not a half-way thing. It's what makes us accountable in the truest sense of the word. To be truly committed to another person, a process or an organization is a selfless act that makes us accountable and requires a sincere and unwavering honesty... even if the act of being committed isn't associated with any form of personal gain or enrichment. In reference to Peter Block's work, my friend Paul Shamlet articulated this very well in a recent post at the #ECOSYS blog...

In his book Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block defines accountability in a novel and compelling way:  “Accountability is the willingness to care for the whole, and it flows out of the kind of conversations we have about the new story we want to take our identity from.  It means we have conversations of what we can do to create the future.  Entitlement is a conversation about what others can or need to do to create the future for us.  Restoration begins when we think of community as a possibility, a declaration of the future that we choose to live into.” (48)  

 Peter Block talks about the new story... but I don't think it's new at all. Our story has always been there waiting to be told in different contexts for different purposes. Perhaps the new story Block refers to really means the new way to tell our story; to give it purpose and authenticity. Through stories it is often said that we can learn from our mistakes, and from our successes. When we tell our stories of failure and success, we are creating vessels for these teachings that benefit all who have an ear for them. This is what makes stories so powerful and important. If we could just get better at telling stories, and in turn listening to them, infinite possibilities emerge.

Our stories are the basis of all the good, and bad, that have befallen humankind since the beginning of time. We all have stories to tell; stories already written (past), stories we're writing now (present) and stories we have yet to write (future.) We obviously have the most control over the story we're writing in the present, but how long is the present? Is it a fleeting moment, an hour, a week, a year or even longer?  I think the point of the long-now present is that we should try to make it as long as possible. In order to connect our past and future to each end of our present, the present has to have a length... this is the long-now, but I think how we determine that length is entirely up to us. Our long-now history extends toward our past and our future. We need to connect with our long-now history in a more meaningful and purposeful way. The longer we can make our long-now history, the more we are able to connect with stories already written, and the stories we have yet to write. Our past helps to show us the way to our future.

Sadly, in the midst of our fast-paced lives these days, our long-now histories have become much shorter. Our hectic lives are spent scrambling to 'get ahead and we've lost our connection with the powerful stories already written; our own and those of others. We are living in very short long now's, and when this happens our ability to connect in useful and purposeful ways is hindered. We have lost a sincere connection to the teachings of our past, and we've lost a sincere connection to our goals for the future. We are alas, living in the moment... not necessarily a bad thing if we could just make that moment a much longer one. We have to be more accountable for our stories; we need to be committed to sharing them in purposeful ways, and we have to listen to the stories of others trusting that there is always something to learn from them.

Using our long-now stories like this will draw us closer to each other as we seek interdependent networks of support in others, our processes and our organizations. The long-now narratives we share with each other illuminate the imperative that we be committed to our collective well-being; they expose our individual vulnerability, but they make us stronger as a team or group at the same time when we realize we are not alone in our story. Being sincere and honest with each other allows trust to grow and all of a sudden our long-now histories start to overlap and we communicate more effectively; we move from independence to interdependence. Not a bad place to be.

Living in the world of possibilities- becoming powerful beyond measure.

I've been looking for inspiration as a new school year begins.  Every year my school district holds its annual kick-off event, and this year along with about a thousand other people, I had the tremendous fortune of listening to the story of Ben McConnell.

Ben spoke about the power every teacher possesses to positively affect the lives of their students, and he knows of what he speaks. Ben has dealt with a litany of health issues that have made his life so much more challenging than most, but he hasn't complained. The journey he has taken, and the attitude he possesses are nothing short of remarkable. Ben provides a humbling example of resilience and strength; primary elements that inclusive teaching and learning environments should be designed to nurture. Ben described teachers who found ways to access his unique motivation to be involved in school beyond measure.

Seek First to Understand...

Behavior isn't something to manipulate, it's something to understand.

flickr photo via kokichuelo

I have spent the better part of my teaching career to date working with kids who manifest very adverse behavior. I have received hundreds of hours of professional development related to helping these kids improve their behaviour, some of which was considered to be severe. I've been trained in behaviour management techniques designed to manage behavior, corrective techniques to correct behaviour and modification techniques to modify behaviour. What nobody ever trained me to do however, was understand behaviour.

Behaviourism is a well known school of thought relative to working with kids who display challenging behavioural tendencies. According to Wikipedia, behaviourism, sometimes referred to as the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behaviour), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviours. Applied Behaviour Analysis  is a term used commonly in education to describe how we analyse the behaviours we see in schools. In my role as an educator working exclusively with severely behaviourally challenged kids I have participated in many functional behaviour analysis (FBA) that are designed to provide hypotheses about the relationships between specific environmental events and observed behaviours in students. I must admit, the FBA process is as close as I've ever been to actually understanding behaviour, but even this process has left me wondering, "do I really know the story behind what I'm observing when I witness adverse behavior?"

Virtual tribes...

I had a brief Twitter conversation awhile back with George Couros (@gcouros) about the complex interaction between people and the technology we create. George commented that he was reading tweet archives from the International Society for Technology in Education 2010 (ISTE10) Conference, and noticed that very few were about technology.  Instead, many delegates at the conference commented about the human relationships they initiated or renewed. Interesting considering this conference is a massive education technology event.

My contribution to the conversation ended with the comment... "synergy between people and the technology they use creates ideas, collaboration... possibility otherwise unlikely." I have met many who assert that the use of technology in teaching and learning 'depersonalizes' the experience. I am compelled to disagree. As I grow with technology in my teaching and learning, I am finding that the opposite is true. The tribe I call my PLN (personal learning network) has grown exponentially since I started using Twitter a short seven months ago. I have had my mind stretched further than ever, including my time in graduate school. My network of passionate educators hails from all over the globe, and I am collaborating with them in ways never before possible without this simple tech tool.

Shortly after I began using Twitter, I started blogging here at KARE Givers. I have always kept a paper journal of reflections and ideas that cross my mind anyway, and I thought blogging would be a good way to collaborate with those who perhaps share my interest in teaching and learning. I had no idea how beneficial this would become, and I've barely gotten started.

My point is rather simple. Adults do well when they understand the power of inter-dependency. We have passed through the stages of dependence and independence in our lives, and hopefully learned that it's infinitely easier to handle the stresses and responsibilities of adulthood when we have others to count on, (and more enjoyable too.) We are social beings; we appreciate the value and benefits of tribes... it's a very basic element of human nature. Micro-blogging (Twitter) and blogging, two relatively simple technologies, have made it incrementally easier for me to connect with my virtual tribe, and I don't plan on looking back.

Using technology in my professional practise has done the exact opposite of depersonalizing my job; on the contrary, it's brought me closer to other teachers who share my passion for teaching and learning, and allowed me to belong to something so much bigger than myself- a global education reform movement dedicated to the perpetual improvement of the teaching and learning process.

I fail to see any downside to this.

Unconditional teaching- be ready when a student chooses you...

flickr CC image via RachelLovesToLaugh

 "The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for." - Bob Marley

I've spent a considerable amount of time during my career working with kids from at-risk environments. I say from at-risk environments purposely as opposed to kids at-risk because in the vast majority of cases, these children have had absolutely no part in putting themselves at-risk... they haven't chosen to be that way. Risk in the social-emotional, behavioral, economic, mental or any other all fall in the domain of the adult. Sadly, but undeniably, when adults are experiencing risk, the environment that results will affect the kids exposed to it.

I have met and worked with hundreds of resilient kids who have found ways to endure, and overcome these risk environments. The overwhelming majority have done this by seeking and depending on responsible adults to support their effort. Regarding the most overwhelming problems facing kids today, I would go out on a limb and say that it would take the rarest of individuals who could overcome them alone. We have to be ready when a child chooses one of us as the responsible adult he thinks will be able to help.

Often, the at-risk environments these kids experience include situational violence that can be hard to displace; even when they aren't directly threatened by it. In school, whether through their actions, feelings or words, these kids will typically be perceived as the more violent variety, and this is off-putting to many who work with them. However, besides the generalized violence we see in these kids, what if there was a deliberate purpose to their presentation?

I believe that many of the most adversarial kids in school are the ones that need our help the most, and they're also the ones who have developed an ingenious strategy to filter the proverbial wheat from the chafe, so to speak. Kids who know pain, know how to wield pain... so that's what they do. They do this because they want to determine, very simply, who will take it and still be there the next day to do it all over again- they do it to find out which teachers believe they are worth suffering for.

We are always hardest on those who we're closest to because we feel safe that they will stick with us. We know that their unconditional love is displayed through a lack of judgment, acceptance of our faults and through a willingness to share our pain holding hands together toward a better future.

Next time a student is making your day miserable, ask yourself why because it just may be that you're the one he wants to believe he's worth suffering for.

"I need another note..."

Those of us who are privileged to work in schools need to be aware of  how the slightest act can lead to a massive realization on behalf of one of our disciples... we need to take this element very seriously. I have many stories of exceptional teachers who knew this implicitly.

My career has provided the opportunity to witness some pretty incredible people working very effectively with kids that not too many would be successful with. During my eight years working exclusively with kids from at-risk environments in a congregated special education context, (in Alberta the Department of Education designates these kids under code 42- those manifesting severe emotional/behavioral difficulties... I just coded them as needing someone to believe in them,) I was dumbfounded at the levels of resiliency these kids displayed, and profoundly saddened at the same time as a result of being forced to know what they were overcoming on some days just to make it to school at all. I took the long way home many days during those eight years. At the same time, I was repeatedly encouraged by my exposure to levels of with-it-ness in my colleagues that were off the charts when dealing with these kids' stories.

One such story popped into my thoughts today as I was writing about a colleague in another post- We need schools where "everybody knows your name." Dan McDonald taught in our Behavior Program for ninth and tenth grade kids. One day as Dan tells the story, a young girl arrived at school in a particular state of anxiety. She was pregnant, and the world was weighing heavily on her... that much was obvious. Never judgemental, Dan and his support staff watched her closely that afternoon, looking for any clue that may help tell her story that day. In the gentle conversations that ensued it became apparent that the girl was at her wits end with life in general, and she was planning to get loaded that Friday night... to drink and smoke her sorrows away. As the day wore on, and the staff became increasingly convinced that this young girl was serious, Dan came up with the best 'think-on-your-feet' plan he could; he told the girl she wasn't going to do that.

The response was painfully predictable... "yes I am!", the girl said. Dan reiterated, "no you're not," and she responded, "what the hell are you going to do about it?" Without really knowing what he was going to do if he was being totally honest, Dan blurted out the first thing that came to his mind; he said to one of the support staff members, "Ethel, what are we going to do about it?" Her response was equally off-the-cuff... "write her a note," she said. So Dan did just that; he wrote her a note indicating all of those reasons why she should not go get loaded as she seemed so intent to do that particular Friday night. She took the note, left for the weekend, and they didn't give it another thought beyond adding it to the generalized concern they felt for their students every Friday night.

Flash-forward about a year...
The girl in question had left the school to care for her newborn baby, and as often happened, one day she came back to the school to visit with her child. Dan and his staff never turned these kids away when this happened; it was as if they had a homing instinct that brought them back, and it was important that they were accepted and welcomed. This visit was a bit different, however. They were talking and holding the baby, getting caught-up with the goings-on of the last year or so in the young girl's life, but the conversation went on for much longer than was usually the case. An hour or so after she arrived, when most of what was usually talked about had already been talked about, Dan sensed there may be something else this girl needed, so he asked exactly that... "not that we are rushing you away or anything, but is there something else you need today, because we really should get back to our lessons for the day." The girl started crying and simply said, "yes, I need another note."

Never underestimate the power of small, seemingly insignificant acts of caring... you might be the only one in a young person's life who took the time to perform them.

The Brilliant Words of Prof. Herbert W. Vilakazi

flickr CC image via Dave_B_

Unifying values and practice in child and youth care programmes:

"The problems of children and of youth, giving rise to child and youth care programs, can only begin to be solved in that society of humankind’s dream; a more collective-oriented society than at present, when the father of the child shall be every man as old as the child’s father; when the mother of the child shall be every woman as old as the child’s mother; a society of responsibility of the entire community; a society without poverty; without the inequalities of society members, based upon race, class, or sex; a society without the use of violence against other members of society; a society without any exploitation and oppression of any group by any other group; a society of equals; a thoroughly democratic society; last, but not least a society that shall have, once more, incorporated productive labour into the educational process."

The notion that children are our future is undeniable. It is from the minds and souls of children that every future discovery, every idea, every solution and all hope will come. Herbert Vilakazi's opening address to the National Association of Child Care Workers 1991 Biennial Conference (http://tinyurl.com/yfxzdwn) in South Africa provides brilliant insight to how we need to think and act if we are to support today's children as our gifts to the future.

We cannot know where the next Beethoven, Einstein or Mother Teresa will come from. Great things are possible, and probable as human history has proven. Educators today need to support children's natural curiosity and spirit to learn in ways that don't stifle or restrict their potential to do these great things. The world we know is changing, and it always has, but not at the rate or in the manner we are witnessing today. Today, in the midst of what amounts to a perfect storm within the social, political, geographical, technological and economic realms of the new global society, transformational change is inevitable. To deny this would be ridiculous. To deny that we as citizens of the emerging global society must be proactive to ensure the transformation is managed effectively, and results in an improved society, would be even more ridiculous. 

Within his 1991 address, Professor Vilakazi touches on what I believe to be the key to managing the transformation of our world. With respect to the issue of caring for children he states that,

We are not further along, than peasant culture, in our knowledge of child psychology. What we should do, in our efforts to increase and improve our knowledge of child psychology, is not only to study what our specialists child psychologists have written, but also to go out to learn, and collect, and record, and collate carefully, the psychological and psychoanalytic theory of childhood contained in peasant cultures, and to integrate or synthesize the two. This applies to all spheres of knowledge.

I believe Vilakazi is saying that there is contemporary wisdom to be gained through modern scientific processes that will help us continue to learn and develop insight into how to maximize our support for children, but also that there exists timeless wisdom yet to be acknowledged by contemporaries about how caregivers have effectively supported children since the beginning of mankind. It is the integrative nature of combining the two spheres of wisdom that would allow us the largest capacity to package our 'gifts to the future' so the promises we intend them to offer will be fully realized.

Our human tendency to debate opposing ideologies without apology until one is accepted by a majority resulting in a "winning" idea or concept is counter-intuitive to progress. On the contrary, the integrative mind understands that within the current change climate we find ourselves immersed in, our viability as a global society will depend on a synthesis of ideas that should not be considered dichotomous, but rather complementary to one another. By taking two or more perspectives on effective and positive child development and combining their best elements into a synthesized hybrid of all of them, a new paradigm is born, and those who brought each perspective to the process no longer operate independently and in defense of their point of view, but rather interdependently in support of each other and the best possible course of action.

I believe that our children will be best prepared for the future when we as KARE-givers are able to move to an interdependent and proactive paradigm of child development that acknowledges and celebrates diverse thoughts and theories no matter where, and from what point in history they originate.

Resiliency- What is it really?

As a young teacher who really didn't know much about how to teach kids, despite what my crisp diploma indicated, I knew in very short order that there was more to the game than I had bargained for. The variables that affect a child's ability to achieve in school are overwhelming for teachers; genetic variables, social variables, cognitive variables... and we're not even the ones suffering the effects personally. Knowing how much these variables affect our disposition and state of balance, imagine how much they affect the kids who manifest them.

I'm not sure, to be honest, if most kids who are born knowing nothing different than the environment that these variables shape and form really are affected all that much. The environment kids are born into is all they know, and therefore becomes their default "normal." In my experience, it's not until children get older, usually around the middle school age, that they begin to realize that the other kids don't necessarily live the same sort of life they do. This is when a different perspective begins to take shape. The child's private logic becomes altered. I believe it's at this time in a young persons' life that supports are most critical, and they need to be maintained through to adulthood.

The question is, really, where are these supports supposed to come from? There are differences of opinion on this, but the research reality is that in an overwhelming large number of cases, this support comes from a teacher. For this reason it is massively important that all teachers are ready to respond positively when a student decides to seek their support. How can we be ready to face this challenge? To me the answer is simple... we need to understand resilience; we need to be resilient ourselves and we need to know how to foster resilience in others. Resilience is nothing new, but the formal study of risk, resilience and recovery has been altering the perspective of conventional wisdom in contemporary fields of psychology, social work, education and other social sciences lately, and I'm happy about that.

Whether we understand why a child chooses one of us to be the person he reaches out to for care and support doesn't matter; we just need to be ready to respond appropriately and effectively. Teachers need to consider ourselves as process advocates in a wrap-a-round system that can be daunting for those most vulnerable and disengaged. In lieu of judgment and deficit-based thinking, we need to adopt a strengths-based focus that divines the good in young people experiencing distress and hardship. There is no other way.

I'm interested to hear how teachers do this... how have you supported a young person in distress, and more importantly, how did your support help? Often we may never know years later after our connection is lost, but it validates everything we do when we are privileged to know. There is nothing better and more uplifting for teachers to hear a story of success about one of their more challenged kids.

I would like to hear your success stories. We don't tell them often enough.