Embrace Courage and Innovation in Education Leadership

1. What We Can Do Indiana Principal Leadership Institute 2014 When We are Brave

2. Adams, William Cavaletti, Anthony Duch,

3. www.rickwormeli.net @rickwormeli rwormeli@cox.net

4. The best teachers of my own children have been the ones who respect the school’s system, but parted from it as necessary in order to teach my child.

5. Picture of gang members

6. Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

7. Our greatest Compass Rose: Doubt

8. “Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s the judgment that something else is more important than that fear.” -- Ambrose Redmoon, rock band manager in the 1960’s. Oh yeah, he was a quadriplegic as well. What do we judge as so important, it trumps our fear of rejection, failure, and questioning from colleagues, parents, administration?

9. Ask what a respected colleague or leader would do.

10. Courage is 90% mindset, only 10% craft and mechanics of pulling it off.

11. Principles create moral imperative.

12. Picture of window washers outside a children’s hospital in Pittsburg

13. “4/5 of my students keep failing their tests!”

14. M I N D S E T ‘Forged by the operating tenets with which we perceive the world and conduct our actions. Effective educators regularly assess these principles for validity and revise them in light of new evidence/perspective. In teaching and leadership, we seek integrity: Our actions reflect our principles. Put another way: We minimize our hypocrisies.

16. Formative vs Summative in Focus: Lab Reports in a Science Class

17. What Were We Thinking? • Everyone in the same subject in this grade level is on the same page on the same day of the week • Plan accordingly because there is no more paper supply after January • The master schedule cannot be changed to accommodate a compelling guest speaker. • Students cannot re-do final exams. • Sacrifice good pedagogy because people who are untrained are telling you what to do.

18. What Were We Thinking? • We can’t incorporate a new “app” in our lessons because it promotes the use of personal technology that school hasn’t sanctioned. • Our new students are three grade levels below grade level proficiencies but they have to do well on the final exam anyway. • We can’t take that field trip with the class because that would be too much time away from preparing for the annual state or provincial exam. • “Stop being so creative,” a colleague comments. “You’re making me look bad.”

19. [Artist Unknown

20. “Nobody knows ahead of time how long it takes anyone to learn anything.” Dr. Yung Tae Kim, “Dr. Tae,” Physics Professor, Skateboarding Champion

21. It’s what students carry forward, not what they demonstrated during the unit of learning, that is most indicative of true proficiency.

22. ‘You want a courageous act? Stop hiding behind the factory model of schooling.

24. Consider how personal technology is changing the way our students do things. We’ve entered a 24-7 work cycle. Official homework as we know it will soon fade.

25. Information Age is old school. We’re in the High Concept Age, and we have the tech to pursue it: • Twitter and other social media • Daily newspapers downloaded for analysis • Museum school partnerships and Virtual Tours • QR codes attached to classroom activities • Student-designed apps • Khan Academy and similar on-line tutorials • Graduation in four states now requires one course taken completely on-line • Google Docs • Google Glass/Eyes – wearables, implantables, augments

26. MOOCS – Massive Open On-line Course • Crowd-Sourcing • MIT Open Courseware • TED talks and ed.Ted.com • Screencasts (ex. Camtasia Studio) • Voicethread • Moodle • PBL’s • Prezi • iMovie • Edmodo

27. Just because we can’t fathom the logistics doesn’t mean we abandon the principle.

28. #1 Most Common Characteristic among the state Teachers of the year: They broke the rules.

29. Our future depends on this one here.

30. Transcend formulaic responses.

31. It’s notan answer chase.

32. It’s a question journey.

33. “We went to school. We were not taught how to think; we were taught to reproduce what past thinkers thought…. …Instead of being taught to look for possibilities, we were taught to exclude them. It’s as if we entered school as a question mark… …and graduated as a period.” -- Michael Michalko, Creative Thinkering, 2011, p. 3

34. “Do they know how to ask good questions?” -- Tony Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap, 2008

35. What should a lawyer never do in a court trial? Ask a question to which he doesn’t already know the answer. Get students to ask more questions than we do

36. Being good at taking standardized tests doesn’t qualify students for creative contribution to society or successful citizenship.

37. Could you teach the differences between architecture in the Middle Ages and architecture in the Renaissance period in such a classroom?

38. How about the principles of algebra here?

39. (Sampling from Innocentive.com, page 1, downloaded June 24, 2012) • Seeking Orthogonally Functionalized Cyclobutanes • Navigating the Inside of an Egg Without Damaging It • Cleveland Clinic: Method to Reconnect Two Tissues Without Using Sutures • Seeking 1H-pyrazolo[3,4-b]pyridin-3-amides • Synthetic Route to a Benzazepinone • My Air, My Health: An HHS/EPA Challenge • Mechanistic Proposals for a Vanadium-Catalyzed Addition of NMO to Imidazopyridazines • Seeking Highest and Best Commercial Application for Breakthrough Innovation in Building Technology/Structural Optimization • Desafio da Educação: Como atrairpessoastalentosaspara se tornar professor naredepúblicabrasileira

40. “The problem solvers...were most effective when working at the margins of their fields….While these people were close enough to understand the challenges, they weren’t so close that their knowledge held them back and cause them to run into the same stumbling blocks as the corporate scientists.” (p. 121, Lehrer) Check out InnoCentive at www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse What would this look like in education?

41. Writer and educator, Margaret Wheatley, is correct: “We can’t be creative unless we’re willing to be confused.”

42. Cultivate Teacher Creativity. Seriously, it’s just as vital as content expertise, professional behavior, and maintaining proper records. Professional fortitude builds with every addition to our creative repertoire.

43. Do teachers have the creativity to solve their own problems? • My whole lesson today is based on accessing those three Websites, but the school’s Internet is down, so what can we do instead? • Small groups are not working in my class, yet I know they’re important for many students’ learning. How do I get these students to stay focused on their group tasks? • I’ve backed myself into a corner explaining an advanced science concept, and it’s not making sense to me, let alone to my students. What should I do? • Angelica is far beyond where I’m comfortable teaching, but we have two more weeks in this unit for the rest of the class. What will I do with her that honors her readiness level?

44. I’m supposed to differentiate for some of my students, but I don’t see any time to do it. • My school’s current electronic gradebook system doesn’t allow me to post anything but norm-referenced scores, and I want to be more criterion-referenced in my grades. What can I do? • Because I’m a veteran teacher, I’ve been asked to be the rotating teacher using a cart and moving from classroom to classroom each period so the new teacher can have his own room and not have so much to deal with his first year. How will I handle this?

45. Students should be allowed to re-do assessments until they achieve acceptable mastery, and they should be given full credit for having achieved such.

46. F.A.I.L. First Attempt in Learning

47. If an “F” on a project really motivated students to work harder and achieve, retention rates would have dropped by now. They haven’t; they’ve increased. We need to do something more than repeatedly document failure.

48. More than “okay!” After 10,000 tries, here’s a working light bulb. ‘Any questions? Re-Do’s & Re-Takes with students and their teachers: Are They Okay? Thomas Edison

49. A Perspective that Changes our Thinking: “A ‘D’ is a coward’s ‘F.’ The student failed, but you didn’t have enough guts to tell him.” -- Doug Reeves

50. If we do not allow students to re-do work, we deny the growth mindset so vital to student maturation, and we are declaring to the student: • This assignment had no legitimate educational value. • It’s okay if you don’t do this work. • It’s okay if you don’t learn this content or skill. None of these is acceptable to the highly accomplished, professional educator.