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Cooperative CatalystTue, Nov 8th, 2011 I'm doing a lot of my talking out loud over at Cooperative Catalyst, a group blog started by Chad Sansing, Adam Burk and Paula White. We're eager for lots of folks to get in here. Come join us.
The holiday season can be a time for pause and reflection. This winter I am making an effort to reconnect with some old friends. In particular, I have been meeting with and talking to a small group of parents with whom I founded a school. Back in 2001, these parents entrusted the care and education … Continue reading This year I agreed to teach social studies instead of language arts. In return, I asked to teach civics and economics in multiage classrooms rather than to split preps – or plan lessons – for multiple social studies courses. As a result, I’m re-learning familiar lessons in an unfamiliar place – the “content” classroom. In … Continue reading Please join us by making your voice heard! The Occupy Education blogger marches in solidarity with the direct action around the world is meant to help amplify our voice and those of other teachers, parents and students. From Portland to Wall St to Munich to Madrid, students, parents and teachers are marching for a better …Continue reading It’s Blog for IDEC 2012 Week, and each day you’re invited to submit a post on one of the defining values of the conference and what it means to you. Leave a link to your URL in the comments section, and we’ll add it to this post. Check back throughout this week as we update … Continue reading A simple truth lurks behind our schools: we built them to keep our kids apart. But we can do better. Join #occupyedu to share the countless, unique ways you challenge the status quo in public education. Children, parents, educators, community members – all are invited. We cannot re-imagine or recapture schools without the stakeholders they … Continue reading Wounded by School Nominated for 2009 Book of the YearWed, Mar 17th, 2010 Wounded by School has been nominated for the 2009 Book of the Year Award by ForeWord. click here to see the Wounded by School entry click here to see all the entries in all categories About the Award
ForeWord Reviews is pleased to announce the finalists in the 2009 Book of the Year Awards. The finalists, representing 360 publishers, were selected from 1,400 entries in 60 categories. These books are examples of independent publishing at its best. The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers selected from our readership. Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor's Choice Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America in New York City on May 25. The winners of the two Editor's Choice Prizes will be awarded $1,500 each. The ceremony is open to all BEA attendees. ForeWord's Book of the Year Awards program was designed to discover distinctive books from independent publishers across a number of genres.
Book award from American School Board JournalThu, Jan 28th, 2010
Book review in Education Review, January 2010Fri, Jan 15th, 2010
January 2010
http://edrev.asu.edu/brief/jan10.html#6 Many professional educators will be stunned when they read Olson's new book Wounded by School. While the ideas presented are intellectually stimulating, many results of her hundreds of interviews detailing people's school experiences are painful to read. Olson, an educational consultant who holds a doctorate from Harvard Graduate School, discusses school "wounds" ranging from those that stem from the institution of school itself to those that are more concrete and experienced by students, parents and even teachers. The wounds that Olson describes are far reaching and include everyday losses of pleasure in learning, school ingrained beliefs that we are not smart or competent, painful and burning memories of shaming experiences in school that produce anxiety and as result, shut down the learning process, as well as chronic anger at teachers or other authority figures for not being "seen" in school (p. 19). Olson maintains that the most under-identified wounded children in our schools are those frequently labeled "average," and as a result receive no special attention or instruction in schools, but rather just blend in and demand little of educators.
Remembering Ted SizerMon, Oct 26th, 2009 This is a wonderful remembrance by Alexander Hoffman posted up on GothamSchools of Ted Sizer, the superbly modest and engaging radical educator. I remember Ted from my first year at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1996, when he was speaking to a standing-room-only crowd about a new book The Students Are Watching in which he said, "Schools are like coral reefs." He was meaning to suggest, I think, how ecologically interconnected all parts of the structure are, and ultimately, how fragile. We all depend on each other, and "swim" in the same water. This post contains links to lots of other good stuff about Ted.
Who the Heck Is Ted Sizer? http://gothamschools.org/2009/10/23/who-the-hell-is-ted-szer/
He didn't mean the bad schools. And he didn't mean achievement gaps. He meant all schools. He meant the good schools too, even the best schools. So, who the hell was Ted Sizer? He was a visionary educator and critic of our schools, a real giant who was influential enough to get a 1000+ word obituary in yesterday's New York Times and numerous other tributes and articles this week. His doctorate was in the history of education, and I believe his disseration was about how the high school credits thing evolved. Forty years ago he was the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After that he was the Headmaster at Philips Academy in Andover, Massachuetts. Then a professor of education at Brown. He also helped found a charter school in the middle of Massachusetts, and late in his life was co-principal of it with his wife Nancy. He had credibility in the most powerful of circles. In 1983, the famous report A Nation at Risk was released by the Reagan administration. It warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people and declared that "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." You see these quotes all over the place, and it is easy to say that this report marked the beginning of the standards and reform movement. Ted's Horace's Compromise was published the next year. He neither defended the status quo nor focused on our obviously failing schools. His critique was nothing like that of A Nation at Risk. Rather, he attacked the very foundation of how our high school works, looking at the basic compromise between teachers and students, an agreement that if students do not create trouble for teachers that teachers will not create trouble for students. This compromise infects what is taught, how it is taught, and the expectations for what learning really is. What is education? "The worthy residue that remains after the lessons have been forgotten." When the students forget the explicit contents of today's lesson - and we know that they will - what is left? Anything? What happens after they forget the difference between atomic number and atomic mass? What is left after they forget the difference between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? After they forget the rhyme scheme and meter of a Shakespearean Sonnet or the relationship between sin, cos and tan? I read this stuff and was amazed. Someone else out there saw what I saw, the essential hypocrisy in "schooling" in America! Even at our allegedly best schools (e.g. The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Stuyvesant, Andover) we were not doing the right thing, and yet people wanted the other schools to be more like the "best" schools. But how to provide an education that remains meaningful beyond graduation? Twenty-five years ago, Ted Sizer founded the Coalition of Essential Schools, a voluntary association open to any school that wanted to be a member. CES was built around these link: www.essentialschools.org/pub/ces_docs/about/phil/10cps/10cps.html ten principles, though there was no exam or inspective for Coalition schools. Learning to use one's mind well
I was enormously lucky. I got to study with Ted. I got to talk with him for dozens hours about the design, aims and goals of the American high school. (He once called something I said "Quotable!" and I cannot begin to tell you how great that made me feel.) I already knew about Deb Meier's work, but he gave me enormous new insights and understandings. Though Ted, I learned so much about the idea of teaching Habits of Mind rather than skills or knowledge. I do not think that most members of the Coalition even come close to Ted's vision, and I know nothing about Ted's school, the Parker Essential Charter School. But I recognize that it is amazingly difficult to overturn decades or centuries of understanding about what school should look like and aim towards, and that even falling short of his vision can constitute a huge step forward for our students. And so, Ted Sizer gave us all an ideal of what meaningful schooling could mean, something to work towards, even while the forces around us push us to schooling as the most structured, reductive, temporary value, baby-sitting and crowd control. I know that I've been known to be critical of aspirational goals, but every step towards his vision constitutes real improvement and additional life long value for students.
COMMENTS Filed under: Community teach11372 My condolences to Nancy and their family, we've lost one of the good ones. Best, Nicholas Tishuk
And I've had some disagreements with them, too. Ted and I agree that for schools to succeed, every child must be known well by at least one adult. This is why reducing student load is so important to both of us. (Note that the CES explanation of principles that Mr. Hoffman links to does not address class size, per se. Rather, it addresses "direct responsibility" and clearly refers to total number of students, without saying anything how how they are distributed though the day or week.) He, however, thought that small schools lead to that kind of reduced loads, without ever explaining his logic. Sometimes, I almost felt like I had him convinced that it is not a school size thing, but I never quite got there. And he never convinced me, either. We also disagreed about charter schools, at least on the surface. He worried about a lack of choice for students and their families. However, he also worried about how choice might work away from major cities with the kind of public transit coverage that we have in NYC and Boston. As Mr. Hoffman mentions, he was worried about suburban & rural schools, too. He didn't know how charter schools in those areas could be as accessible to the entire population as traditional public schools, with their fleets of school buses. That was something that I had not even considered. Unfortunately, some of his students - though they respected him greatly - did not think as highly of his class on Redesigning the American High School. He was asking a great deal of them, to rethink fundamental aspects how secondary schools are structured and their goals, and those who have grown up in our system - and especially those who have done well in it - might not even understand the depth of rethinking he was pushing for.
"It is the supreme art of the teacher..."Sat, Oct 17th, 2009 This quote was just sent to me by Samuel Feeney, a teacher in a Philadelphia-area school. Inspiring. Thanks so much Sam. "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -Albert Einstein
My Staff: Reflections from Parker PalmerThu, Jul 16th, 2009
"I need some help in my own workplace. As you know, I work solo. For years I've been troubled by the fact that I have no staff to blame my problems on, only myself. So a few years ago I purchased a handsome oak walking stick, which I call "my staff." I keep it in a supply closet in my office, and when I have a problem, like getting overbooked and exhausted, I haul my staff out and threaten to fire its _ _ _ if it ever puts me in a pickle like this again. That worked for a while. But it seems less and less like a satisfying solution as time goes on, since my staff does not defend/explain itself to me or change its behavior. Like I said, I need help..."
Manga High by Michel BlitzThu, Aug 20th, 2009
Good Stuff (Book Review in Rethinking Schools, August 2009) "Wounding and Healing" by Herbert Kohl Blitz, Michael Manga High (Harvard Education Press, Kirsten Olson's Wounded by School brought back painful memories of the time I hid behind my textbook in the fifth grade, hoping not to be called on, and the day, in high school, I discovered I failed to make the National Honor Society and ran into the bathroom to hide my tears. These are some of the wounds of school that Olson writes about. In the book (p. 19) she provides a list of wounds, which, in condensed form, give the flavor of her argument against current practices: "Everyday" loss of pleasure in learning Olson rightly places responsibility for these and other humiliations and blows to self-esteem on the nature of school in our society and brilliantly analyzes the way in which these wounds affect and damage teachers and parents as well as students. She provides dozens of specific examples of the wounding. This litany of sorrows, however is jut a small part of her book, which is as much about healing wounds as about experiencing them. This is what makes the book valuable. Olson's suggestions about ways parents can support their children, teachers can help change their schools and support their students, and, especially, how students can develop support groups for each other as they develop survival strategies and advocate change, are valuable and workable, and also provide a vision of transition to democratic schooling. Just about every teacher, parent, and student should benefit from reading this book. Michael Blitz describes a Manga after-school writing class at Martin Luther King High School in New York City. Most comic book writing programs are done with K-8 students using American comics as models. However these comics don't have the appeal to older students that Manga do with their complex psycho-social tales of the lives of contemporary adolescent heroes and villains with special, usually limited and somewhat vulnerable, superpowers. The students at King are overwhelmingly African American and Latino. The goals of the program are to help students increase their literacy skills and decrease their alienation from school and society. This lively book is full of students Manga illustration, plot summaries, and portraits of individual students that illustrates dramatically how creating a Manga can lead to personal insight and even transformation. I came away from reading this book refreshed, delighted, and, going on line, buying some Manga myself, and planning to set up a similar program. I suspect other teachers will also want to do the same thing.
Are Schools Wounding Kids?Thu, Jul 30th, 2009 Published in Teacher Magazine by Kathie Marshall...
July 29, 2009
• Suffering a loss of ambition, self-discipline, and persistence when faced with obstacles.
NEW BOOK! 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own StoriesMon, Jun 22nd, 2009
Contributors Include: The common theme of contributors' stories is that mainstream schooling needs to be transformed--how we think about and implement education, learning, and teaching needs to change dramatically. It describes some ways contributors think this might happen. The book is a call for social change, a call to help us move toward hope and history and away from determinism. We trust that the conversation will continue, and see the book as a jumping off place, perhaps a good way to seed change in your community. The book can be ordered here: http://www.educationrevolution.org/turningpoints.html "The teacher would often lock me in the shed, as punishment for my behavior . . . I felt that there surely must be a better way to educate children. A way without dark sheds, without arbitrary punishment, and with respect. I didn't know then, that I would devote most of my adult life to the search for this way."
Todd Rose in the Improper Bostonian!Wed, May 13th, 2009 Todd Rose, worldwide expert in Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, who opens Chapter 4 of Wounded By School, has been featured in the May 12th Improper Bostonian as one of "Boston's 11 brightest young scientists, artists and thinkers!"
Go Todd! The Global Achievement GapThu, Feb 26th, 2009
Check out his book here....
Interview with KirstenSat, May 9th, 2009
Wounded By School is based on over 100 interviews with "ordinary" learners. A school consultant, researcher, and writer, Olson talked to students of all different ages, races, and cultural backgrounds. She found that while many people in school knew that education was critical economic security and personal advancement, too many had experiences in school that made them doubt their ability or intelligence, and feel not very excited about learning. They disengaged from school and become "learning reluctant." This was true even for students in schools that were well-funded and resourced. In very competitive, achievement-oriented educational environments, kids felt that school was an aggressive "game" they had to play. Underneath their success they were often cynical and alienated. Olson came to believe that "wounded" learners, teachers, and parents should be much more vocal in talking about ineffective school practices, to put pressure on our system to change. Olson sat down recently with Antonia Rudenstine, of Rudenstine and Associates (www.rudenstine-associates.com) for a conversation about her new book and findings.
What got you started writing this book? "I was out working in schools as an educational consultant, in classrooms and walking around elementary, middle and high schools. I kept seeing so many kids who were checked out, legions of them, bored, angry, deliberately ‘not learning.' They seemed to take so little pleasure in learning as it was defined by school. Yet these were children and young adults who the instant they left the school building were so animated and alive-using technology in innovative ways to communicate with friends and networks, good at finding information, vital, engaged, talking! I kept seeing kids who were almost in shadow, in a trance, when they were in school, and I thought, we've got to find ways to talk about this, to name it, to change it. These old fashioned ways of educating children just aren't working anymore. Then I started formally interviewing people, sitting down with them and talking with them about their ‘learning biographies.' Students and adults started describing experiences of being wounded by things that had happened to them in school. (This even included people who were very successful or who went to well-funded schools.) I found that we didn't really have language for talking about school wounds-losses of self-esteem, disconnection from pleasure in learning, or a lowered work ethic. My interviewees felt at a loss to explain their wounding educational experiences. This made it harder to heal from them and become more productive people." Where did the word "wounded" come from? "It came right out of the interview data, out of a transcript of an interview. Someone I was interviewing talked about something a teacher had said to them in second grade. (This person was now an adult.) They said, ‘It was like I was hurt. I couldn't get over it. I was always trying to protect that wound.' I think many teachers radically underestimate the effect of their words and attitudes on learners in their classes. Students, no matter what age, are much more vulnerable and sensitive to feedback than many teachers imagine, and have amazingly accurate memories for painful negative feedback. That was a very strong finding in my research, even among learners who are considered highly successful."
"Not at all. On the contrary, I think an overabundance of niceness, misplaced compassion, actually harms lots of kids because they are not asked to do very challenging things in school. For learning to be more engaging it has to be more challenging, but we also have to tell kids that learning involves making lots of mistakes and screwing up a lot. Self-discipline, persistence and your ambition as a learner are what really matter in achievement--that you keep trying again and again. You figure out what you've been doing wrong and keep working on it. But in school we often think learning should be simple, quick, error free, and ‘easy.' I know in my own life hard, challenging learning involves lots of wrong turns and lots of errors. That is part of it. Maybe the most valuable part."
Everyone seems to have such strong opinions about education and what is wrong with it. What did your research tell you that is different from other people's? "My research put the experiences of students in school at the center. That often isn't the way school is looked at, from a policy point of view or even in terms of how we train and evaluate teachers. I think we have to focus more and more on what the student's actual experience of learning in the classroom is. That is the only way we are going to find ways to transform the old-fashioned, outmoded system of education we have now. The system we have now doesn't serve anyone very well, not teachers, students, parents, or potential employees."
"I focus most on three big problems. In many schools we still define learning as "product." Learning is something that you "get," and most educational tasks are still about following the rules, compliance, memorization. This doesn't prepare kids well for the world of work they are about to enter. (And it bores and underchallenges them!) We also have overly simple ideas about ability in school: we tend to think kids are born with a certain amount of smarts, and school somehow detects that and provides learning based on that. But we know now is that human ability grows over the lifespan, in many different ways. The idea of fixed ability is a huge waste a huge about of talent." Finally, most teachers are not trained for the work they have to do now, educating all students to high levels. Many simply don't know how to do this. But we're still not very good at admitting this within the profession. There is an absence of candor that hurts us professionally."
Although many people are unhappy with the system, answers about what is wrong, and what to do about it, still tend to be personalized, fragmented, and scattered. I also think we are really struggling with the question at the center, about what we think education should do, what its purpose is. We wrestle with the complexity and depth of these questions-in some ways resist this complexity-and long for simple solutions. I think No Child Left Behind is an example of a simple solution to a much more complex problem, one that in general has not worked well. What surprised you most about writing this book and doing the interviews for it? "The lifelong impact of early schooling experiences on adults. One person I interviewed, a man in his late sixties, could recall his spelling scores from third grade. They weren't good. He decided to become an accountant because he thought he wasn't good with words, but accounting was a profession he never really liked. Another woman was told she was a ‘bad' artist in first grade and never picked up a paintbrush again until after she turned fifty. I felt like that was a whole area that needed more exploration, more holding up to the light." Do you see examples of schools that are positively educating children and young adults? "I do! Several years ago I was hired to go out and write about ‘breakthough' school models for a national foundation. Those schools I profiled were amazing. Although they were all very different, with differing philosophies and structures, the thing that was consistent about them was that everyone associated with them was asked to be a learner all the time: teachers, administrators, and students. Even the secretarial and janitorial staff. That was the central mission of these schools-making it possible for everyone to be learning the time. I have a great deal of hope about the new kinds of learning organizations-schools-that are going to emerge over the next several decades. But I very much doubt these places, if they are even physical sites, will look much like schools as we know them today. I also think students have to be much more active in creating the next generation of schools. High school students seem to know a lot more about the problems of high school than most of the adults teaching them or working in the buildings." Are you a wounded learner? "Very much so. A real truism in social science is that you always choose projects that relate to your own biography, whether you consciously know it or not. One of the wonderful things about writing this book has been understanding my own learning wounds, and beginning to heal them. That's one of the things I say in my book-that we can use our own woundedness to heal others."
"One of the most powerful and disturbing books of the century."Mon, Sep 14th, 2009 Suite 101 Review Kirsten Olson`s Wounded by School
One of the most powerful and disturbing books of this century, Kirsten Olson`s Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture should be placed on the required reading list for all educators, as well as all those who are in, or want to be in, a place of learning (especially students). And if President Obama really wants America's educational system to truly become a source of success for all through responsibility of educators, government and students as indicated in his "back to school speech 2009" [1] , then it is highly suggested he read this book too. This is not your ordinary soul inspiring tales of "how-I-made-it-despite-all-odds." These are the stories of the wounded, still haunted by their experiences within the school system. It is the saga of what happens when the old school culture prevails; when differences are disregarded; when it is one way of learning for all, even if that way does not aid the majority of learners. And it is not about taking the easy way either. Nor does it offer quick, ready-made solutions.
Read more: http://techjobstraining.suite101.com/article.cfm/kirsten_olsons_wounded_by_school#ixzz0R5G7ovPn |
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Turning Points: 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories, just published by the Alternative Educators Resource Organization in advance of the national meeting in Albany, NY June 24-29th, 2009 (
Tony Wagner, Co-Director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard, recently published a wonderful book called 