What if We Taught Happiness in Elementary?

Happiness by Nick Youngson
 CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

This morning I was listening to the CBC radio show The Current. Anna Maria Tremonti was interviewing a Yale professor who was offering a widely popular course about happiness. With all the stressors of these times it makes sense that high-achieving youth want to know more about happiness and how to achieve it. It's fantastic that Yale is offering credit to students to learn how to live a better life rather than solely focus on a successful life. A bit of poking around led me to find Berkley's version called "The Science of Happiness". Happiness is what I felt when I learned both of these are offered to all of us for free - just follow the links to learn more.

Also this morning, and for the last two months, I have been struggling with how to help my school overcome some of the bullying issues it currently faces. Being new at the school makes it hard to know what has been tried or even make a guess at what didn't work with what has been tried. There are resources on numerous websites aimed at educating students and teachers in how to end bullying. A person can get lost in all the information!  And I did. But a couple things were repeated: bullies lack empathy and victims are or become insecure. Our students are struggling with unknown issues and where some seek power, others feel insecure and are therefore vulnerable -  and some are both.

All this thinking led to more questions, as it so often does. What if we taught a course about happiness? Would this help bullies gain empathy? Would it help students overcome insecurities? Would it empower bystanders to become upstanders? What if ...

Perspective

Aren't you seeing what I am looking at?

Donald Trump said he was with the people. Gloria Steinhem responded, "I've met the people and you are not them." She isn't any more one of his people than he is hers.

When he talks about women and immigrants, his people hear something different than I do. It gives them hope. I feel dread. How can we see this so very differently?

If you've ever read Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray, you know that what we see or hear is based on our personal bubble of belief. That bubble is built upon the theories you have judged to hold value; those theories are based on what you were focused on while experiencing life (your portion of reality). It's a complex structure that I am still getting a handle on. I've read the book twice and will return to it again, just to understand it more fully.

Anyway, the main idea is that all of reality is unknowable. There is so much going on all over the world that no one person could know it all. So we are limited by what we experience in life. Those experiences are further limited by the things we happen to be focused on during those experiences. If we are hungry, we notice food. If we are worried about the environment, we notice all the pollution. If you ever watched a selective attention video of people passing a ball around - the one where you are asked to count how many times someone wearing white handles the ball - you are likely one of the people who realizes that a gorilla could dance in front of you completely unnoticed. In fact you are likely one of the people who were in complete disbelief that there was a gorilla in the video at all. But when you watched it again your limited perspective was revealed. In your defense, you knew exactly how many times a person in white handled the ball.

That's what we build our version of reality on. That's what everyone has built their version of reality on. They know to be true only what they have focused on while experiencing what they have experienced. And they will reject anything that does not fit the truth of their reality. Even when faced with facts that show a different reality, they will defend their bubble. They will get angry. They will claim a conspiracy is going on.

They were seeing a 6. You are seeing a 9. They are seeing a hero. I am seeing a villain.

I Believe ...

I recently applied for an administrative position. *YIKES* The application process involved the requirement of "a one or two-page description of their philosophy as an educational leader, including a vision statement describing the priorities they wish to establish as Principal." Please note that I applied for an associate principalship, but there is an expectation that as an applicant, I would be "[s]upportive of direction from principal and desire to advance to this role". 

This is tough stuff! I sweated. I Googled. I reviewed tweets. I posted to Facebook. Then I wrote the following. Then I rewrote, revised, shared, tweaked ... any feedback is appreciated! 

Vision Statement:

To foster continuous growth in a thinking community.

I believe …

This belief statement uses community for all environments, as the most supportive learning environment is a community, and learners for all participants within the community.

Every individual can experience growth given the right environment. Humans are curious by nature; igniting thinking is the goal of learning and the core of educating. The leadership team (principal and associate principals) work together to set direction and model behaviour for the community.  An effective collaborative team gives voice to all members when making decisions and are united in their message to the community.

School environments can foster growth for every individual (teacher, student, leader and parent) through a sense of community. Leaders develop strong relationships through acceptance and respect, and providing everyone with voice. In a healthy community, learners feel safe taking risks, and gain a deeper understanding of curriculum, each other and themselves. People thrive when they know they belong and are useful, when they feel valued for who they are. Recognizing strengths permits everyone to contribute to the community by using strengths to collaboratively reach goals.

A leadership team guides a community through change. Change is difficult for many and may seem daunting if presented as an endless series of goals; participants may become discouraged with the sheer immensity of the vision. Leadership can avoid this by clearly defining the vision in obtainable steps which are celebrated at every accomplishment. To foster risk-taking, disappointments need to be acknowledged for the growth they represent. Participants need to see that although change takes time, time passes either way, and growth is more worthwhile than stagnation. Furthermore, leaders cannot disregard the value of the naysayer. Those who oppose the vision can often help refine the goals and may reveal overlooked roadblocks. By acknowledging the contributions of opposition, relationships and community are strengthened. However, honesty and true acceptance of each individual may lead to moving forward without everyone on board. Hopefully the perceptions of stalwart resistors are changed by evidence of success, but leaders must be prepared to prioritize the health of the community over any individual.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14279306964

Measuring growth comes from asking meaningful and revealing questions about progress. Frequent and cyclic reflections provide checkpoints for growth measurement. Reflecting honestly on evidence gathered will reveal successes as well as problems and possible solutions. To help ensure success and improvement, leaders need to model the behavior they want to see. Leaders support risk taking by being honest about weaknesses and strengths, and disclosing struggles during goal attainment. An associate principal welcomes the feedback and direction from the principal. By seeking feedback from self, peers, teachers, and students, they model for teachers how feedback can be gathered and processed in an assessment cycle, enabling teachers to effectively reflect on their own progress, so they are better prepared to guide students in the cycle of feedback for growth.

Life-Long Learning

The term life-long learner is probably overused and under-defined. I can't imagine anyone not learning something new as they age. Even if it is how to better remember things as our minds slow or what to do about body aches. Basically, everyone has to come to terms with aging, and in that everyone has to learn.

However, most of us in education think of something deeper when we think of life-long learning. We think of advancing and enhancing and building on what we already know. And often it is through this gaining and building of knowledge we start to see how much more there is to learn. And if done correctly, we WANT to learn it!

Not a new idea.

Of course, we recognize that we are not going backwards when we realize there is more to learn. We are developing. Growing. Advancing. We see the faults in past beliefs and assumptions and connect new illuminations to those old beliefs. Our intellectual selves seek the interconnectedness of everything.

Every once in a while a new realization occurs. We mull it over, look at it from many sides, and refine it until it is acceptable. Often we need to offer these ideas to others who help us to see flaws or missing pieces. They will connect your new gem to their understandings and quite likely end somewhere different than you did. But it is all okay. We walk our own paths. These steps, or leaps, bring about a feeling of accomplishment and becomes the incentive to learn more. It is this that we want students to feel in our classrooms.

This process of thought growth indicates that we must honour every idea brought forward. As educators who are mentoring growth, we must be the safe place to bring fledgling thoughts, respect and nurture them in order to get them to fly. We must model this process for our students and colleagues. It's important that we foster the enjoyment of learning, even when we see the wrong turn being made. We help the student see where the path diverted, an incorrect assumption developed, and return to that spot so a correction in thinking can be made. The ownership of the process needs to be the student's. 

Is this easy? No. It is much easier to just give the answers. Point out the mistakes. It is always easier to do it ourselves because we feel that we simply know more. We know more because we learned along the way. No one robbed us of that learning! 

Be patient. Be supportive. Be resilient. Model who we want our students to be.

And if you want to learn something new each day, check out Highbrow. Choose one fascinating topic from a vast array and have mini-lessons emailed daily over two weeks. I've recently gained knowledge about ten superfoods and will soon start learning those ten science questions to which we should all know the answers. go ahead and ask me! :) 

Update - It's About Time!

Blogs are funny things. I created this because it was required for my Masters course. I used it when we learned about managing and building computer networks, used it to reflect on learning from leaders in education, and I used it to document and reflect on my experiences in Dominica where I completed a capstone project for the masters program.

By Karmafist,GeorgeMoney (en:Image:Missing_barnstar.JPG) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

After that, outside a handful of posts, I fell of the face of the world. Even though I had the best intentions to regularly post!

Yet I feel blogging is a wonderful way to reflect on our lives, both professionally and privately.

So here I am, once again, committing myself to blog once a week. I want to share all the things. The trials and celebrations of being a mother, of being an instructional coach, of being a member of society.

Stick with me, those who are still here, I still have stories to tell and experiences to share. And I intend to share them regularly! 

Task Force for Teaching Excellence; Where is the Student?

By now, a week after it's release, if you teach in Alberta, you have heard about the Task Force for Teaching Excellence. If you heard the task force was headed by a 'blue ribbon' panel, you have heard the ministry's take on it. If you have heard that teachers were not included, you have heard the Alberta Teachers' Association's take. Not surprisingly, this has quickly turned into a political battle. And there is plenty of fodder in the report to continue the conflict.

As a critical thinker myself, I have taken on the task of reading the entire report. I think every teacher, student, parent, and Albertan should read this for him or herself. But I warn you, it is daunting. Frustrated by the repetitiveness of the summaries of summaries, the vague references implying content that will be presented later on, I have taken a break to write this post. Truthfully, if a student submitted this report as an assignment, I would focus a mini-lesson on conciseness and clarity. I can't help but think the authors intended to lose their audience before they offered the evidence for their findings. But I will return to it.

I want to point out the mistakes the Minister of Education made in this whole process. Before we get into that, take a look at this word cloud I created using the words of the report. For those of you who don't know, a word cloud (this one made on the Wordle.net site) increases word size based on the repeated occurrence of that word. The bigger the word, the more often it appears in the document.

First and foremost, the minister built anticipation by keeping the findings a secret. Teachers were uncertain of what was coming, although many predictions proved sadly true. The mistake was in not being transparent - the very thing the task force suggests for investigations of misconduct of teachers - and in keeping things behind the curtain, he allowed imaginations to reign. That set a tone of uneasiness, a sense of foreboding. The foreshadowing created an expectation of bad news.

Once the report was revealed, it came across as a report card. Any seasoned teacher will tell you what is needed in the reporting process in order to improve a student's progress. Those teachers can easily point out that the report failed to deliver:

• Direct consultation with the stakeholders. This report card was compiled by people outside of the situation. 
• A mutual agreement of what is in the best interest of the student to foster a desire to work together to improve the situation. This report reads as an attack. Although our current standing as a world leader in education gets a hat-tip, the real kudos are nonexistent. Add to that the threats that "if these changes cannot be made within the existing model, the Task Force recommends the Minister of Education ..." force the changes, and you have yourself an attack. We are still simmering over the legislated agreement that most of us signed willingly in an effort to avoid legislation. 
• A clear identification of the problems and a plan to address them. This report misses many of the problems in classrooms that interfere with learning. In this, it misses the target of the student, although the student was reportedly the only focus. There is no mention of cultural diversity, varied composition of classes, large class sizes, language barriers, inclusion difficulties, and the lack of mental health supports. The report insinuates the problem is mainly the teachers. The very teachers who are implementing the world-renown education system. The equivalent would be if a teacher stated, "I think the problem lies in parenting" during a parent/teacher interview. 

And now we are entering a heated political situation. The ATA is challenging the minister's competence. The minister is questioning the ATA's ability to regulate its members. Teachers know there is room for improvement in the education system. We want to improve both our teaching practices and the learning environments of students.

Now take another look at that word cloud. See how big the word student or students is? That is our concern, too. 

Friday, July 19th: The last day ...

The day was very relaxed. We only had from 8:30 to 10:15, so there was little point in starting anything new. Instead we took the time to reflect. Our teachers shared one thing they felt was the most meaningful, one thing that was the most frustrating and one thing they wish for. They were lovely and concise and touching. I have been honoured to work with them. Despite the real situations of limited access, they are determined to learn these skills every year. One lovely lady shared how initially she intended to only come every second day, so she could have her break as well, but instead came faithfully each day once she knew what she could learn. Although she expressed happiness that the course is now over and she can begin sleeping in, she is also sad that our time is up. I know exactly what she means! It has been another rewarding experience.

Presentations were made at the Grammar School, and they ran a little long as usual. It is hard to take that last step out the door. The participating teachers received certificates and then presented us with thank you gifts. 

As an added bonus, the teachers Darlene and I worked with wrote a poem and presented it to us. They are so creative and appreciative. Here it is for you to enjoy:

When it came time to decide, 

it was to Moodle and Make Changes!

Thanks to Shelly and Darlene our bellies are full and our b ... brain is glad!

Ensconced in our small but adequate room,

Ideas were exchanged as we all became 'tutors' in our own way.

Lending our expertise where needed.

Guided and supervised by tutors who allowed a

go-at-your-pace

and 

share-if-you-will ideal.

The more we learned the greater the need to keep up;

And that's where symbaloo my dear you came in.

We dare to dream that someday soon our symbaloo will resemble our dear Moodleista's!

On the other end of the way

you heard the excitement in the voices as they grew.

Making changes seemed to be encouraging just that .....

change and discovery!

At times I think we future moodleistas wanted to know what was so exciting.

Times of silence would pass by and then you knew-----the focus was on especially during lesson 

planning.

Often times the room was a buzz as each one would sing out,

"Shelly or Miss Shelly'.

And of course...she would magically appear!

A world of teacher tools was opened to us

there in that oh short course!

Tagxedo, Edmodo, Superteachertools...

If you want to know them all just sync with us on symbaloo.

Darlene and Shelly how awesome you are,

thoughtful to give your time and effort,

generous and charitable for all the tokens....

our sweet tooth sated and our purses absolved some valuable teaching aids.

Blessed for being patient and understanding for allowing us to teach each other and even you.

Your efforts may just have rekindled a fire that died

Or

Set ablaze one that's slowly dying.....

THANKS.

These are great people, who despite several limitations in internet reliability and computer access are ready to make great leaps in educating their youth when the conditions come up to meet their abilities. Darlene sagely noted that in Alberta, there is plentiful technology and access and too many teachers unprepared or unwilling to use it. Maybe in time the conditions of Dominica and Alberta will get to the point where student learning is optimized. 

We have a dream.