I was very blessed early in my career to work with H. Stephen Glenn, and one of the most important things he taught me was the "EIAG Process".  He pointed out that an individual's perception is the key to their attitudes, motivation, and behavior.  Therefore, in order to deal with any behavior, it was important to understand the belief behind any behavior.  Also, if you wanted people to learn and apply, the teaching and learning process needed to tie content to someone's existing perceptions.  To do that, he taught the EIAG Process.

The process works fairly simply.  The first thing that occurs is any experience that has potential for learning.  It can be a lesson in a classroom, or it can be any situation that occurs and is followed by a conversation.  So the E in the EIAG process is Experience.

Once the experience is occurring and/or has occurred, you tie the experience to perception by first asking questions that challenge a listener to "Identify" those aspects of the experience which are important to him or her.  These are "What questions" like:

• What happened?
• What are you feeling?
• What did you see?
• What was important?

These questions help connect with the experience and identify the impact.

After this, the next goal is to help the person "Analyze" the significance of the experiences he or she has just identified.   To to this, you would ask "What" and "Why" questions like:

• Why was that significant?
• What caused that to happen?
• What is meaningful about it?
• What made that important?

These questions further build a perception of meaning in the moment about the experience.  However, people, especially young people often have trouble generalizing and applying learning across contexts.  In order to help with that, we ask "Generalizing questions" like:

• How can you use this?
• How is this valuable to you?
• In what way will this affect what you do in the future?
• What wisdom did you gain from this?
• What did you learn from this whole thing?

So, at the end of the process, we have helped someone identify what happened that might be useful or significant for them, helped them analyze the specific usefulness or significance, and invited them to think about how this learning would be usefule on a more global scale.  I invite you to try this with any of your students, children, or anyone else in your environment.  It does work. 

There was an exciting development in the Indianapolis Star this morning.  The Lilly Foundation donated 2.5 million dollars to Mind Trust, an organization dedicated to educational reform in Indianapolis.  Indiana has become a very reform minded state, with Mind Trust, and the Indianapolis Mayor's Office, having paved the way for innovative change.

This year, the Governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction led the way in getting a number of controversial education reforms passed which gives the state the ability to charter schools, allows for vouchers for private schools, and both makes it possible to give performance increases to good teachers, and to terminate underperforming teachers.  

While teachers' unions and others might be uncomfortable with the new legislation, changes are necessary in the Indiana educational system, especially in Indianapolis Public Schools.  As someone who has worked with this system and other systems since the 1970s, I am much more interested in looking through the lense of improvement rather than that of change.  

For example, Mind Trust is very supportive of Teach for America, which recruits top college graduates and brings them to Indianapolis to teach.  The New Teacher project is another organization with which they are involved.  The only downside here is that the most intelligent people don't necessarily make the best teachers.  Sometimes they are the worst.  I graduated from the Indiana University School of Education several years ago, and several of my classmates went on to be classroom teachers.  Of the ones who stayed in education and became outstanding teachers, only one was a top graduate and obviously smarter than the rest of us.  I have always been in awe of him, but most of my smartest classmates left education after a few years.  Two of the best three of my peers graduated towards the middle of our class and became awesome teachers with long careers and a number of accolades.  

The traits of good teachers are often more relational than content centered.  Anyone who has taught or been around teaching knows that the abilities to control a classroom in ways that young people like and accept, develop relationships with your most motivated, least motivated and all the students in the middle, and facilitate learning for everyone in the room are the traits of good teachers. It is far more about quality of heart and love than about degree of intelligence.

Unfortunately, in the current environment, the teachers who work the hardest and do the best jobs will frequently be the ones we leave.  One friend of mine, an excellent educator, is taking an early buyout from her school system because it is a good financial deal and she knows she can do other things.  A more critical factor in this case is the loss of wisdom.  My friend is an excellent mentor to young teachers and the system is losing this asset.  Current teacher evaluation methodologies often leave too much room for political bias and result in good teachers receiving bad evaluations.  Excellent teachers are youth advocates and that isn't always popular with administrators.

Two other people I know in the system who aren't so excellent, are staying because they are in a secure job and lack the confidence to do other things.  This isn't the intent of the system, but early buyouts usually cull the best older workers rather then the worst.  

I point this out, because it is a change, but it isn't an improvement.  Developing new and less political ways of evaluating teacher performance, improving the performance of those who can improve and moving the ones out of the system who can't is not just a change, it is an improvement.  Bringing in people who want to teach, love to teach and can teach is an improvement.  Bringing in people because they are smart is a change, but not necessarily an improvement.  We need to be very deliberate an thoughtful about this difference and not cause more harm than good in our strategies.

Lilly, Mind Trust, and all those pushing these reforms are to be commended.  I only hope that the mantra of change is tempered with the wisdom necessary to actually produce improvements.  If so, our city and state will benefit greatly.

Through my association with Child S.H.A.R.E. Indiana I have recently started researching the possibility of developing a charter school. Indianapolis is an exciting place for those who believe in charters, in that our Mayor can charter five schools a year.

It has been exciting for me to see the positive developments in education that are showing up, not just in charter schools, but in public schools around the country.  Schools around the world are actually starting to teach in ways that make sense to me, and seem to be exciting for children.  More importantly, there are schools that seem to really work.

This is a significant development for me because I never liked school very much while I was in it.  Much of my time was spent being bored out of my mind, even though I was exposed to some excellent human beings who were my teachers.

In spite of that, I went to college, received a teacher's degree, learned some really fun ways to teach, and then did my student teaching.  At that point, it became clear that none of those fun ways to teach would be accepted in the actual schools in the city.  That led to a career of teaching, coaching and consulting in other forums.

Many of the "new" methods being touted and implemented aren't really that new, but the fact that the current focus is on facilitating learning rather than teaching is exciting.  Singapore even has the model of "Teach Less, Learn More" to signify that it is learning not teaching that is important.  

We still have many issues to address.  For example, there are so many hours in a week, and children need to spend time with families.  This means that we can't just keep expanding content as the world produces more information.  We have to start doing like other countries who are outperforming us.  We have to help students learn a few subjects deeply and thoroughly, while helping them learn how to be capable, independent learners who can learn anything they need to learn.  

Education is important, and so is family time, play time, and other needs of child development.  As I explore these issues, I hope I remember to be a youth advocate first and educator second.  It is already showing itself to be quite a challenge.

We are in the middle of yet another political season, and there is a great deal of rhetoric flowing through our culture.  By rhetoric, I refer to the first in a list of definitions at dictionary.com "(in writing or speech) the undue use of exaggeration ordisplay; bombast".  Everything is dramatic, the opponent, is evil, and our country is going to hades if we don't do whatever the speaker or commercial says we should.

In the midst of all this, is the renewed focus and debate on educational reform.  As a nation, we have finally started being honest with ourselves about our national dropout rates, and other issues with our educational system.  For many years, we had very similar rates as we do now, but since we have stopped being lied to about them, we are up in arms.  

On balance, this is a good thing.  We seem to be getting to the point where we will try almost anything reasonable to improve the educational success of our young people. 

Of course, since education is a political issue, and many people having to do with educational leadership are elected, there is a great deal of rhetoric.  One of my favorites is, "Our children have to be ready to compete in a global economy."  This is a very powerful statement, the kind that strikes fear into people.  

As I see it, our children have to be ready to work and succeed in organizations that can compete in a global economy.  Very few of our children will be sending in job resumes to compete directly with people from Europe, Japan, China, and/or India.  This, while challenging enough, doesn't scare me as much as the first statement.

We need to watch our rhetoric for several reasons.  As a nation, we are in a recession, and, for many, this is overwhelming.  It is scary.  For at least one tenth of us, it means we don't have jobs, and that is even more scary.  Instead of leaders like Roosevelt saying "We have nothing to fear but fear itself", we have people running for office on the theme of "be very afraid if I am not elected."  Dishonesty is rampant, and winning at all costs the goal.

In education, we want to motivate teachers, parents and everyone else to work together to help our young people succeed.  Using fear-based rhetoric, especially that which primarily attacks, divides us, and causes the very partners we need to withdraw from the process. We need our leadership to be very specific about what might work in education reform and to pull us together to make the improvements we need. 

I am going back through a really good book by a cognitive researcher, Daniel Willingham, titled Why Students Don't Like School.  I have read it before and am really impressed with the issues he points out about findings in cognitive science and the applications of those findings to education.  I recommend it for anyone interested in understanding learning, and perhaps how we need to rethink our over one hundred year old model of school.  Here is the first of nine points that guide his chapters:

"People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking."

So, unless there is a high likelihood that we will succeed in thinking, and get the rush from that, we will avoid thinking at all.  Given the hours I have spent coaching and teaching both adults and young people, this actually matches my experience more than the idea that people enjoy thinking.  

I was really pleased this week to see the Obama administration talking about reworking No Child Left Behind and working with states to set outcomes and measures which can replace the short-sighted testing which is currently the practice in most states.  By tying our teaching to outcomes which reflect international economic needs, we will move towards being more competitive in the world.

I have been following, working with, wondering about, impressed by, and confounded by what happens in our educational systems for about forty years.  The confounded by response has never been greater than in the past ten years or so.  We have put a system in place, in most states, where young people have to be tested frequently, and the quality of our educational system is based on those tests.  This has been our national answer to quality improvement, and the primary metric we use to assess whether or not our children are doing well.  I have never talked to one teacher during the time this has been in place who believes this is a good and valid metric, but all teachers are stuck trying to make all children (except for a very few who are exempted) fit into one testing model.

Click here to download:

schott-2010-black-male-report.pdf (2.48 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

schott-2010-black-male-report.pdf (2.48 MB)

Given my two previous posts, I thought I should upload the schott report for your access.

A few days ago I posted about an article referencing the Schott Foundation Yes We Can report, which outlined the horrible high school graduation rates for black males in the country.  Since that post, I have downloaded the report, and have continued to be saddened by our failure with the graduation of black males.  Also, as I reviewed the report, it became obvious that Indianapolis Public Schools is second to Detroit Public Schools in having the overall lowest rate of male, (black and white) high school graduations.  Detroit graduates 27% of black male students and 19% of white male students.  Indianapolis graduates 36% of black males and 26% of white males.  In fact, while states have much higher rates of graduation for white males than black males, the urban picture is one of schools that can't graduate males of either race.

Yesterday, there was an article in the Indianapolis Star about graduation rates for young men in Indiana and, more specifically in Indianapolis Schools.  It was really sad to read.  I wasn't surprised to find that young black men had a 36% on time graduation rate.  I was surprised to find that young white men had a 26% on time graduation rate.  That means that 64% of young black men and 74% of young white men in this urban school system will be looking for jobs with no high school diploma.