Principally Yours

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October is unlike any other month – at least, it is in my life as a school principal. October, that month when leaves fill our horizons with the hues of day-long sunsets, and when peaches and watermelons give way to apples and pumpkins; October is, for me, a month of dressing up. Every October, I spend an evening as the Master of Ceremonies at our annual staff and parent Cabaret. For a week in advance I slough off my serious principal’s skin. I busily prepare ridiculous lyrics – doggerel, to be sure – to accompany an old, but familiar tune with which I open the evening. One year, I donned a toga in honour of our school’s pending production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, and sang “A Cabaret Tonight”. But no sooner has the Cabaret become a faded smile, when I am asked by the student council to appear, once again, as the referee in the annual York Wrestling Federation, an event to raise money for our local United Way, in which teachers take on hilarious personalities and fight in the ring before a gym full of screaming children. On occasion, I too become an unsuspecting combatant in the feigned fights, and have to defend myself against such perilous weapons as “Silly String”. And then, as I help the students and other staff members to tear down the ring, I realize that October isn’t over until the 31^st.

And so, once again, I dress up – this year as my version of my worst-dressed students, last year as a cross-dressing pirate – and at about 2:30, join with other long-time staff members to perform the annual humourous rendering of a classic fairy tale on stage for the Lower School children. (Yes, that’s me in the pink wig!)

Some might ask what all of this has to do with running a school, to which I would respond, everything. For a school is not a factory – a school is a community. And only in a community would I dare to reveal the self that stretches far beyond my job description.

If school were a factory, I could probably get through each month with one gray suit, and one inoffensive tie. I could focus on teaching and learning, poking my head into classrooms to make sure teachers are teaching and children are learning, disciplining errant children so that they can remain in the classroom, chairing teacher meetings to keep everyone focused on getting students through the system and out the other end, dealing with parents who threaten to get in the way of production. Thus would be the sum of my job, were school but a factory.

But schools are not factories – or at least, they shouldn’t be. Children are not widgets, and graduates are not products – churned out with the same cut, styling, colour scheme, or standard features. And yet, we are often lulled into believing that schools are factories. “Schools should get our children into university”, we are told. “Schools should prepare our children to join the workforce of the 21^st century,” others will claim. All worthy goals, but in themselves, not sufficient to claim the entirety of over 17,000 hours of time we spend with each child. For were a school to aspire merely to get children into university, it would, on the one hand, be at the mercy of the university’s definition of all that is valuable, and, on the other, would deny its children their full potential. There is more to life than either university or the workplace can offer.

To nurture a child, a school must see itself first as a community, and must act on the promise that every community holds. For it is so often the case that children learn best the lessons that we have not written down on paper and linked to a government curriculum document. When you ask adults what they remember of school, it is startling how little they speak of the classroom. And when they do, it is often a teacher whose personality captured their imagination, not a lesson, or concept learned. We most frequently recollect the life outside the classroom – the school trips, winning a basketball championship, playing euchre in the cafeteria, or being sent to the principal’s office (!). If we focus upon our schools as communities, we begin to imagine the myriad ways in which we can touch and influence our children, and how we can do so for the better. For if we embrace our children as members of a community, we care about the personal goals they hold, relationships they have with us and with others, and their future lives as spouses, parents, creative agents, productive team members, citizens, and humans in search of meaning.

But to say we will build schools into communities begs the question, “what sort of community shall we build?” A community may be defined as a group of people united by a shared purpose and shared values. Some of the early “community-like schools” fit well under this definition. Take, for example, the monasteries of Europe, in which monks set about the task of dedicating themselves to learning and living out the dictates of the Christian religion. The purpose and values were, for those who entered the monastic centres, crystal clear. In contrast, the 21^st century Western non-denominational independent school must articulate a purpose and set of values that have deep meaning, without the guidance of a 1000 year-old tradition. Given the multicultural, post-modern, relativistic temperament of the times, this is a serious challenge. At the same time, we have all read stories of old, largely English, boarding schools where traditions and values have served to preserve outdated values of discipline, authority, and social outlook. Here, purpose and value become narrow, stifling, and out of touch. The other difficulty, then, is how to create a set of enduring practices, rituals and traditions to carry forward the agreed upon values without forming a closed society – a box or fortress, if you will. For in “shared purpose and shared values” there is the danger of mindless obedience replacing critical reflection, loyalty trumping openness and kindness, and the general closing of ranks.

Walking the thin line that keeps a community a centre of meaningful endeavour, without creating a rigid relic of the past, is a balancing act, but I have come to find some guiding principles in seeing the task through, and it isn’t without its benefits.

In being part of the building of one independent school community, and having observed others, I have come to value, in no particular order, the following: critical self-examination, open discussion with all stakeholders, keeping your eye on the mission, not the market, and continually working to infuse your mission with enduring and global meanings. I’m sure most people couldn’t begin to imagine the number of hours that have been spent in our school discussing the vision and direction of the school. From Strategic Plans and their many attendant committees to administrative retreats, from email debates to long, drawn-out meetings with parents and teachers, I have found that our school benefits most when hard questions are asked, every voice is listened to, and where we keep coming back to what we have agreed is deeply important, inspiring, and worth so much of our daily life. I have also recently found it helpful to read and reflect as a means of more clearly perceiving the wider implications of our conversations and decisions, and raising new and important questions.

So, what kind of community emerges from such critical, open, forward-thinking, meaningful discussions? My sense is that we are in the process of becoming a community in which the four principles that have driven our development are found in abundance. Teachers and students have come to value critical thought, are more open to different ideas and different peoples, are increasingly hopeful and constructive in considering the future, and are becoming more engaged in their learning, whether in or outside the classroom. In such a community, students will feel free to bring all they have to the table – their questions and ideas, their passions and playfulness, their hopes and dreams – and find that they are fed on a diet of more questions, greater passions, and global aspirations. In such a community, it is our hope that students will come to know themselves most fully and be prepared to take on the responsibility of acting on all the potential that they have found within.

Who knows, they might even find the courage to sport a costume once in a while!

One would have thought that teaching was the simplest task in the world.  Everyone does it, and everyone has been at the receiving end of it.  From the moment we emerge from the womb, parents are manipulating their voices, manoeuvering  their heads, widening their eyes, and raising their eyebrows, all in the hope that their newborn creature will respond, and that these responses may, bit by bit, be shaped into  responses that the parents, in turn, can understand.  If a constant dose of parenting in the early years doesn’t clue us into what teaching is all about, surely the 18 years spent observing teachers of all persuasions and temperaments (I estimate you are exposed to as many as 70 teachers by the time you graduate with an undergraduate degree) would makes us all experts at the craft. But for all that teaching may appear to be natural, it is amazing how difficult and complex it really can be.

As a principal, I am blessed with the opportunity to teach 21 wonderful 16 year olds for 80 minutes, every four days.  The course, Theory of Knowledge, is a dream for pondering souls such as me, but can be a nightmare for a good number of teenagers.  Fully immersed in the reality of their own world – coping with their daily “360 review” of parental, teacher, and peer expectations – they might be forgiven for not sensing the urgency of such questions as “What is reality, and how do we know it?”  But this year was to be different.  For The York School had dedicated itself to differentiated instruction in all disciplines, and I, as the “principal” teacher, was confident that I would get on board, and reach all my students, kinesthetic learners and linguistic reasoners alike.  If I had only known what lay ahead.

On the first day, I came with diagnostic tools in hand.  I asked each student to rank order eight different methods of learning according to their preference and to indicate their favourite subject and favourite pastime.  Needless to say, philosophy did not figure in either of the latter two categories. But that wasn’t the biggest problem.  Of the eight learning approaches – teacher explanation, reading, discussion with peers, experience, visuals, asking questions, viewing experts on video, and relating content to their own lives – by far the most popular choice was “experience”.  How would I have my students experience the most abstract of all possible subjects?  Most alarming was the unpopularity of reading.  Only three students included it in their top four methods of learning.  A layer of sweat became noticeable between my palms and laptop computer. 

If you think that by sending your child to a top-notch independent school you are ensured of a homogenous group of learners, you are dead wrong.  If you thought by the fact that all teenagers seem to be able to listen to the same – sometimes dreary and monotonous – music, and wear the same basic outfit of tops and jeans, that they are all the same, you don’t know teenagers.  And if you want to teach teenagers, you have to know teenagers, not their conforming patterns of behaviour, but their individualities that make conforming so difficult for so many of them.  And if it is difficult for a teenager to conform to clothing and music, imagine how difficult it is to conform to Mr. Hamilton’s preferred way of teaching.   After all, they have available to them umpteen different channels on their televisions, enough Youtube videos to fill any one of the earth’s oceans, games to keep their fingers tapping into eternity, and countless internet sites to suit every fancy imaginable.

My options were fairly clear.  I could take comfort in the fact that they have to take and succeed in my course in order to obtain an IB diploma; I could stand at the gate and only let through those who hearken to my voice – OR – I could take a risk; I could try to take account of all the individuals in the classroom.  It suddenly seemed like a cocktail party.  Over in the corner are the people I know.  The rest of the room is full of the people I don’t know.  Do I make a beeline to the corner, or do I take a risk and try to communicate with everyone?  Is this party about me, or is it about them? 

It just so happens that risk taking is, like reflection, one of the ten attributes of the IB learner profile.  And so, again, I was faced with the realization that what we ask of our students, must also be asked of ourselves as teachers.  Like our students, we must do the uncomfortable thing, the thing that doesn’t come easily. We must teach in ways that we ourselves might not find helpful.  We must dare to imagine what each of our students needs in order to learn, and we must find ways of meeting those needs, whether or not it suits our style.  We must take an interest in everyone at the party.  And do teachers want to do that?  Surprisingly, yes.

On Monday last, our entire academic staff stopped what they were doing to sit down in small groups to discuss readings on the subject of differentiated instruction, in anticipation of a full-day professional development session to be held in January.  I couldn’t be in all the small groups, but in the meeting I joined, it was abundantly clear that teachers were keen to develop strategies that could help them reach everyone in their classes.  Despite the fact that differentiated instruction was going to mean more work, teachers were all for it.  At first I was (pleasantly) surprised.  And then I thought back to my experience of trying to prevent my dream course from becoming everyone’s nightmare, and why I and others got into teaching – like every parent, all we really want is that smile, a response that tells us that our passion has become their passion.  The torch has been passed.  A candle has been lit – for everyone.

I can’t claim to have created a raging firestorm in my Theory of Knowledge class, but a small incident in Friday’s class taught me one more thing about taking risks with differentiation.  I had just subjected the class to Descartes’ first two Meditations, in which Descartes famously concludes that even were there a demon responsible for all our thoughts, perceptions and imaginings, it must surely be true that if I think, I must exist, or in Latin, “cogito ergo sum”.  Picking up the notion of a demon being responsible for creating our reality, we viewed a segment of the “Matrix”, a movie in which reality is simulated for humans by computers.  I could tell that despite the clarity of Descartes’ argument and the dramatic impact of Keanu Reeves emerging unclothed from a vat, the abstract notion that reality might not actually be as reality seemed, and that the relation between the thinker and reality might not be so straightforward, was being lost on some (most?) of my students.  We needed an image to capture this notion. 

And that is when I took a risk.  Only having a rough sense as to how I might capture the idea in a drawing, I turned to the class and offered the white board marker to any willing soul.  Tentatively, a single hand went up at the back of the class.  With hesitation, Jeremy, my differentiation saviour, approached the front, took the marker from my hand, and began to draw.  What resulted, a stick figure imposed upon a simple venn diagram, not only assisted the visual learners in the class, but to my surprise, ended up helping me.  Although I knew that I liked to draw arrows and rough representations of concepts on the board, it later struck me how intertwined different ways of learning are.  For Jeremy’s diagram led to a flurry of words and arrows and suddenly the topic seemed so much clearer – words and visuals combined. 

In the end, my little taste of differentiated instruction taught me that not only is teaching not so simple, neither is learning.  On the page and in the classroom, words, gestures, sounds, movements, and pictures can all work their magic, supporting one another in metaphor and symbol, leading to a multi-layered depth of understanding.  And so, differentiation isn’t merely there to help visual learners learn on Mondays and linguistic learners learn on Wednesdays.  Differentiated instruction offers the hope of building complex and enduring understandings for everyone, full of colour, sounding like poetry, and moving like a well-trained athlete. 

And that kind of learning is well worth the risk.

In one of the comments to my last entry, one of my former students asked for examples of ‘experiential education’. The York School has, since its beginnings, had the motto, “Experientia Docet”, or “Experience Teaches”. In our most recent Strategic Plan (2007), one of the major planks was to be a renewed push in the area of experiential education. Based on that commitment, we had our faculty begin this year with a half day focused on experiential education as an ongoing area for professional development. To set the context for the direction the school had adopted, I gave an address in which I outlined the philosophical underpinnings of experiential education, and the rationale for this strategic direction.  You can access the address at the following link. Click here