Archive for the ‘ Education ’ Category

When Mathematicians play Football

I am currently helping Weldon City Schools with their strategic plan. One student we surveyed said he wanted to play in the NFL. My first reaction upon reading his comment was that I wasn’t sure that was a reasonable goal.

But researchers tell us that most of our current K-12 students will work at jobs that currently do not exist. I think there is a place for everyone and and every talent in today’s marketplace. It’s about finding or developing your niche based upon your strengths.

There was a noon press conference in Charlotte NC today with Ron Rivera, head coach of the (now) NFC champion Carolina Panthers. During the press conference he was asked why in Sunday’s game against the Phoenix Cardinals he had decided to go for a two-point conversion even though his team led by 19 points. His answer was very straightforward and to the point. His statistician told him it was the right thing to do, and he listened.

Maybe that student will get to the NFL …one way or the other.

2016
01/25
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Education
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Little Steps

This series is going to be great. I have seen some of the work in progress.

Patricia Steele Raible

“What We Carry,” detail, 18″ x 24″

This first finished (or is it?) piece from Storycatcher is called What We Carry. If you looked carefully at the journal photo from the last posting, I was already writing about this one.

I was inspired by a photograph of my grandson taken a couple years ago. He is walking away, concentrating on ….well who knows. It caught him in mid-swing with a plastic bucket. The photo is a detail.

For those of you that love mixed media this painting includes collage (fabric and paper), transfers, and white charcoal on a substrate of limestone paste

.

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2015
06/15
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Education
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Graduation Question

This is obviously graduation season. The latest commencement addresses are on the news. Families and happy college and high school graduates are out celebrating with their families and friends at local restaurants. Groups of young men and women with gowns and tasseled mortar boards seem to be at every arena in town.

Since I regularly work with superintendents and their staffs all over the United States, I have to ask…

Do you know how many of your former high school graduates obtained a post-secondary degree this year?

2015
05/17
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Education
Leadership
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Questions, not many answers.

Here is an example in The Atlantic of how data is used for analysis that changes strategy. Sabermetrics correlates statistical data to outcomes and has been used for strategy in baseball since Billy Beane began using them in Oakland (Moneyball). It is now as unthinkable in baseball to build a strategy without using this tool as fielding a team without a pitcher. The current controversy is about who should really get credit for the win. What if the pitcher didn’t have a single strike out for the entire game? What if the catcher made every close pitch look like a strike? Does it matter? Only if you are responsible for outcomes.

How do we develop sabermetrics for education? Do we measure outcomes for teachers or students? What’s the educational equivalent of winning the World Series? What’s the equivalent of winning a division title? How about the equivalent of winning one of the 162 games in a season? How about the outcome for each inning of each of those games?

I love baseball, the great American pastime, and the correlation of data to outcomes that sabermetrics has brought to the game make all the more effective and exciting.

More importantly I also love education, the great American ask time. A time of inquiry and discovery. The current correlation of data to outcomes is that a child’s family income is a good predictor of their test scores. Is that as deep as we can go? And once we have the data, can we use the information to change outcomes?

2014
07/21
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Education
Leadership
Problem Solving
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The Stigma of Asking for Help

Asking for help requires a healthy dose of maturity and emotional intelligence. In her article in the New York Times seven years ago, Alina Tugend, award-winning columnist and author of the book Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, wrote about why it is so difficult to ask for help. I can hear many of you in leadership positions saying, “Oh that’s not hard, after all I ask for help from my direct reports all the time.” But there is a difference between asking for help and delegating tasks to your direct reports. The difference is your vulnerability. If the person you ask to help is in your chain of command, there is little or no likelihood of a refusal and therefore no vulnerability on your part.  No one expects a leader to know everything, least of all do everything, but the stigma of seeking expertise from outside your organization may cause some to stick with the usual suspects.

What is worse, the stigma or a bad decision?

 

2014
06/28
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Education
Leadership
Problem Solving
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“Not My Department!”

I am a strategic planner. If you tell me what you intend to accomplish, then you need to tell me how you are measuring your progress toward that goal. If your vision and mission statements talk about a goal of student “success”, shouldn’t you measure how many of your graduates acquire post-secondary degrees? A high school degree alone, unless accompanied by skills training for a trade, is not a guarantee of a living wage – clearly a threshold measure of “success”.

In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education Beckie Supiano analyses a report from the Pew Research Center on “The Rising Cost of Not Going to College”. The economic disparity between younger workers with a college degree and those without is growing. The number of college graduates with career building jobs is also much higher than for those with a high school diploma.

I know that as a superintendent with less than five years in the job, you are measuring the success (or lack thereof) of your predecessor. Nonetheless, if your vision is the success of all of your students, one measure must surely be how many of those students graduate from college. If your graduates are not making a living wage, how can you claim they are successful?

Remember the 1965 Tom Lehrer satire?

Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?

That’s not my department, says Wernher Von Braun.

Aren’t we subject to a similar satirical criticism by claiming success is just high school graduation?

 

2014
02/13
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Education
Leadership
Problem Solving
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It’s Only Make-Believe

Ever thought about designating a specific make-believe activity for recess at your school? Jerome and Dorothy Singer have. In this blog in Scientific American they talk about the need for pretend play to promote child development. They also mention the Root-Bernstein research indicating that Nobel prize winners and MacArthur geniuses participated more frequently in childhood games about make-believe worlds than a control group.

Perhaps the idea of a built-in ‘pretend play recess’  during the regular school day—where children can get together and explore an infinite amount of possible combinations of ideas, emotions, and perspectives—will one day be just as acceptable as traditional, but no less important, forms for recess and play.

Indeed if creativity and innovation are critical to our world, then we must create opportunities for our students to use their imaginations.

 

Thanks to Barbra Esham for making me aware of this piece in SA!

2014
02/06
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CATEGORY
Education
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Ten for Ten?

Lots of talk recently in the Ed Press decrying the high turnover rates among education professionals. If you add the number of teachers who leave the classroom for administration, the numbers are horrific.

Liz Ryan in her recent post in Forbes talks about the ten ways companies drive away talent. Is your district ten for ten?

2014
02/04
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Education
Leadership
Problem Solving
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Matthew May’s Three Hour Vision

Matthew May has it right. We no longer can afford to wait until the annual offsite retreat to react to the latest innovation in the education business. His three hour vision meeting is a good alternative. Perfect? No. But if you build some flexibility and interim decision points into the key projects in the last step, you will be miles ahead.

Educational institutions are notoriously risk averse. What if you get it wrong???

You have still learned much more about the problem than if you did nothing. Still worried? Don’t bet the house, use Peter Sims tactic of Little Bets.

2014
02/02
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Education
Leadership
Problem Solving
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Family friendly: If not our schools, then who?

Okay, we are in the kid business. Who better to take care of our fellow educators’ young children than us? Yes, I understand that budgets are already strained and daycare is not part of public education’s charter…So let me ask you this. How do you feel about as associate whose answer to your very reasonable request is, “That’s not in my job description”? Shouldn’t we feel the same way about an organization that says, “That’s not my job”?

The latest business publications have run stories on  accommodating children at work. Here are two:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3025741/work-smart/what-if-you-combined-co-working-and-daycare?partner=newsletter

http://www.strategy-business.com/article/ac00056?gko=3e017&cid=BL20140130&utm_campaign=BL20140130

As a design professional with many years working in education I believe if we really worked at it, we could find a hundred different ways that childcare could be offered at little cost to staff in a public education setting. Who better to nurture the younger generation than education professionals?

Wouldn’t childcare differentiate your value proposition from you competitors? Wouldn’t childcare reduce teacher turnover and keep you from losing your irreplaceables?

Shouldn’t we at least be as family friendly as the for profit business down the street?

2014
01/31
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Education
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