MCCSC Summer Seminar

Wow. It's been another long space of time since I posted. What are we doing now? Yesterday we wrapped up the recent round of CFG Coaches Training in the Monroe County (Indiana) Community School Corporation - our local, Bloomington, school district. It is great to be able to work in our own district as opposed to always working far away. In the last few years I've worked as a CFG facilitator and coaches trainer in Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Greensboro, NC, and have served schools and districts in West Lafayette and the Indianapolis metro area. It's a joy to work in my own backyard, and all of us Indiana Center folks feel this way. Many of us have worked in lots of places all over the country, but we are all really happy to be working in Bloomington.

Our latest round of training is important for the sustained development of the local center. We are going to be looking for and developing new coaches and facilitators to spread the work - learning communities and their routines. We have no budget and no concrete projects, but the people involved have great passion and from that I'm sure we can generate lots of value that will eventually turn into both projects and grants.

Our local district has become an engine for the development of coaches and facilitators, and we are hoping to be able to offer a lot of stuff to people this year. Our streched out coaches training this year, though, has stalled us out in terms of Center development and we are going to be playing catch-up if we want anything to happen. We meet next month the weekend before Thanksgiving and we'll see what happens. We had hoped for a fall program and a spring symposium, but I'm not sure what we'll do. We need to generate content for publications and routines for events. These are exciting times.

Indiana Center Development

These last few months have been all about the Indiana Center's development. We have been working as a team of national facilitators and coaches to decide what we will be doing in our area and our state. The good work has been accompanied by good times and good meetings. Today we had a retreat in the woods. The meeting provided us with space and time to get to know each other in a way that we have not had a chance to as yet. One participant's reflection mentioned that we were not "retreating" as in going backwards, but actually making space to do the necessary work of thinking now about how to advance.

I thought of it as filling in the spaces we had not been able or had time to fill in before now. It was critical work for our decision-making. We have been able to really look at what our hearts tell us is our work, and it has been very good. We are about a social justice agenda, a commitment to broad influence, a focus on the work of kids as a driver for change in the culture of schools and in the culture of our communities, and an attention to building courageous communities where we can challenge each other even as we comfort each other. I'm missing a few important things that we are about, but those are enough for now. It seemed right to end where we ended and to commit to meeting monthly for deciding the way forward together. I can feel excitement building and am ready to commit to the group. Our energy will eventually attract partners and invite alliances, and I can see already how we might have an impact on the lives of people here in our area and our state.

It was a good meeting.

Update from the Bench

It has been almost 7 months since I posted the piece I wrote that named this Blog. What's interesting to me now about the image of the piano bench is how it has become a kind of metaphor for my entire professional life.

I'm seeing my work as change management much more than anything else. Plus there is the conversation I've been having with myself since I went to a gathering of consultants at which we did this "continuum dialogue" based on two "opposing" principles of our work: service on the one hand, and advocacy on the other.

My former colleague Doug Karpa-Wilson set this activity up - I can't remember if he got if from me or from my other colleague Eric Metzler, but since we steal freely from each other, it doesn't much matter. Anyway, Doug put these signs on the wall - on one wall the sign read "SERVICE" on the other it read "ADVOCACY". He asked us to congregate around the spot in between where we feel we do most of our work as instructional consultants. I gravitated toward the advocacy end. Mostly because I think it's not all that possible to deliver services to people without advocating for something. If I'm considered an expert in "best practices" of teaching in the classroom, then at least some of why people are coming to my office is to learn what those best practices are, and they expect me to advocate for those.

On the other hand, I know change is about learning and learning is about change, so built into that is the fact that people need time to learn and time to change. I can't start at the "end" with someone who doesn't even know about the basic theories of learning and the basic models of how people learn. I have to start in very practical places and in places that begin to solve problems for them immediately. There is always a bit of room for wiggle on the service-advocacy continuum - and some folks need more service than advocacy - but it's not really possible to operate in a position where I feel like I do only one of those things (i.e. serve or advocate).

Small Schools is harrrrd

Just got back from meetings with some small schools. Tough days. Went in, lost my train of thought, got mentally sidetracked and sat on my tail while other people duked it out for what they believe in. I was like a bump on a log.

Tough day. I have this picture of myself as a crusader - a person who makes choices based on moral principles and does what it takes to do what's right. The reality is that I convince myself of that only until I get resistance from people who don't want to approach things in the way I'm asking them to. Then, I back up. I've got some demons to overcome when it comes to having people out there who are upset with me. I need to let go of that.

In places where stakes are high and risk is everywhere, I'm just starting to feel pulled into the middle of things. I seek the margin - I'm good on the outside of things. I'm not that great in the ring, but I'm going to have to step into it and take on some of the issues I see as being especially problematic - discipline, school culture, student voice, etc.

Sitting Together at the Piano Bench

To explain the title of this blog, I could go all mushy, or I could get high-falutin'. I guess I'm going with the latter.

Below is the final draft of a piece I wrote for an educational journal. It doesn't have much heart (since the "word count cops" got hold of it), but I think the message comes through pretty clearly. It began with a letter I wrote in the Boston airport to my CFG from the Winter Meeting of 2005. It ended up like this and will appear in educationalHorizons this fall:

Sitting Together at the Piano Bench

It’s not how you change others, but how you represent the possibility of change
by Ross Peterson-Veatch

Enthusiastic but Anxious
Each January, the annual Winter Meeting of the National School Reform Faculty (NSRF) enables educators to hone skills and deepen conversations they have experienced in coaches’ seminars sponsored by NSRF. Working in small groups that mirror the Critical Friends Groups (CFGs) we coach in our own contexts, we use highly structured conversations called protocols to examine examples of our students’ work, e.g., papers, exams, etc., and our own “teacher” work, e.g., lesson plans, assignments, and assessments. We discuss how all members of a CFG must commit themselves to other members’ success as much as to their own; how their commitment cannot be the responsibility of the coach alone; and how the process creates a model of a functioning learning community.

At the end of a recent meeting, the members of our group were enthusiastic, but also anxious. We wanted to bottle the great seminar feeling and take it home, but even after nearly twelve hours of discussing our work, many questions remained: How could we earn the confidence of teachers in our buildings? How could we get them to engage in real collaboration? Could we curb the impact of resistance and negativity? Could we foster critical and reflective practice in our buildings? How, in effect, could we change things for the better?

Lessons from Learning to Play the Piano
As I listened to our conversations, I recalled sitting on the piano bench in my living room and helping my six-year-old with his piano exercises. By breaking down his assigned songs into phrases, the exercises help him recognize how patterns progress in the songs. Practicing the phrases was not proving difficult for him, but playing each song as a whole was.

To demonstrate what was involved, I played the simple arrangement of “Ode to Joy” in his book. He asked, “How do you do that?” and I showed him the relationship between the exercises and the song as a whole. I remained next to him on the bench while he tried to play the phrases together straight to the end of the song.

He couldn’t play the entire piece perfectly right away. He kicked and screamed and told me over and over, “I can’t do it”—even though he was making progress. Still, I remained on the bench with him. I had seen him play the exercises without frustration (and after all, he had volunteered for lessons in the first place). The issue, thus, was that he did not believe he could play the song. Soon he was close enough to “see” that he could put it all together, and he began to believe it. After another week of practice, he could play the song perfectly.

Hearing me play the song had not been enough for my son. He had to dispel his doubts and believe that he could play the song. As uncomfortable as our time on the bench had been, in the end he seemed transformed: confident, proud, and secure in the knowledge that he could move on to more complicated pieces. He had felt supported because someone committed to his success sat with him while he struggled through the challenge.

For me, the episode on the piano bench symbolizes the hard work undertaken in our seminar groups. Much as my son accepted the challenges of piano lessons and my coaching, similar challenges had transformed us: the possibility of transformation proved to be the key to addressing our anxieties about taking the new learning home. We moved from “How can I take this back to others?” or “How can I hold on to it?” to a frame of mind and of spirit in which we could ask, “How can I show others in concrete ways that it is possible to be different?” and “Whose help do I need to figure that out?”

Understanding CFGs in the Context of Transformation
The work of Jack Mezirow, an adult-learning theorist, provides a theoretical structure for my understanding of CFGs’ transformative effects. Mezirow presents successful adult learning—“transformative learning”—as a transformation of perspective that leads to a change in action.

Perspective transformation is the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our assumptions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand, and feel about our world; changing these structures of habitual expectation to make possible a more inclusive, discriminating, and integrating perspective; and, finally, making choices or otherwise acting upon these new understandings. (Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning [Jossey-Bass, 1991], p. 167)

In the context of professional development for educators, Mezirow’s theory suggests that substantive or lasting changes in professional practice depend on some means of becoming “critically aware” of our assumptions and how they affect our choices, some means of changing our habits and expectations, and some forum for exploring how to act on new understandings. Mezirow’s theory supports my idea of how transformation works and helps me structure my work as a CFG coach. His theory also suggests that transformative learning possesses a logic that informs my understanding of how to focus on supporting others’ transformations. As a CFG coach, I see this work in the following sequence: perceiving, imagining, believing, knowing, seeing, and then engaging in considered action.

Thus, successful CFG work supports me in changing the way I do my job by carefully examining the “place where I live”: that is, I must perceive the world I live in—the possibilities and limits of my professional environment—before I can imagine that world transformed. I first must get a real sense of my own experience at the piano bench, so to speak. What are the patterns in the songs I’m trying to play? What are the patterns in the songs I expect my students to play? Do I say “I can’t” if I don’t play perfectly? Who is to blame when my playing sounds terrible?

Only then can I imagine how that environment can be different. To transform my own teaching and support my colleagues in transforming theirs, then—like my son practicing his exercises in order to believe he can play the song—I must imagine a “new world” in my classroom and believe I can bring it into being before I know it can be done and see how it is to be done.

The challenge is that I must do it for myself—yet I cannot do it by myself. I need critical friends to help me reach that point. They can help me answer difficult questions and hold me accountable for truthful answers. I need their reassurance that my performance was not off the mark because of who I am, only because of choices I made, and they must not let me off the hook when I’m not truthful with myself. Critical friends remain on the piano bench with me until I can play the song all the way through. They are “critical” not only in the sense of offering constructive criticism, but also in the sense that they are essential for my growth as an educator.

Bringing Home the New Learning
In our CFG, away from the distractions of our daily lives, we created a space in which truth could be spoken and heard, real consideration for one another shown and seen, and real connections to one another born and fostered. In the end we all felt a desire to change our worlds for the better, a sense of urgency for change in others: “If only I could convince my colleagues at home” or “Maybe if we try this new protocol I learned. . . .”

Bringing the new learning home, though, is not so much about making others better teachers or persuading them to change: it is, instead, about showing them that the world they have been experiencing is not the only one in existence. I could not give my son the ability to play a song merely by showing him that it is possible; likewise, I cannot give my colleagues the “how-to’s” of self-transformation simply by sharing a few new protocols. To arrive at considered actions, I must begin by paying close attention to how protocols support me in being different—how they change my perspective. As we experience these transformative professional interactions, reflecting critically on them with each other is crucial; not so we can transform others, but rather in order that we might hear the patterns of our own songs, and the decide for ourselves the order in which we should play them.

Understanding and applying the elements of transformation are, for me, the keys to reaching my goals as a CFG coach. A clear sense of our own power to foster change by changing ourselves will help us imagine a new professional world; believe that it could be; know that it can be; see how it will be; and then act to make it happen for our students.