A Page from Chip Kelly's Playbook

Watching the Oregon - USC game tonight, I couldn't help but draw some analogies between Coach Chip Kelly's novel approach to the game and what we do as teachers every day.

How many plays do this guy, his staff, and his team employ? Lots. Lots and lots. Kelly tries everything to move the ball, to make the next down, to win a ballgame. We do the same as we alter lesson plans, improve our methodology, increase our use of technology, engage our parents in more and different ways, and employ interventions that assist our students, all in the name of achievement of goals, of student success.

Want to see exciting football? Watch the up-tempo pace of the Ducks; marvel at their no-huddle offense  and see the speed with which they move the ball upfield. And upfield and upfield and into the endzone.   Likewise, we must find new and exciting ways to draw our students in. Old-school doesn't cut it anymore. To keep them engaged, we must be engaged, too, in the ways in which they are learning. Soon enough, we will all be paperless and textbookless. All of our classrooms will be flipped. We need to release our fears of the new and different and embrace the opportunities for these new ways to learn. To refuse to do so is to welcome a swift defeat.

And in Chip Kelly we find a coach who's got it right when it comes to mistakes, too. His "Next Play" philosophy allows his players to not necessarily ignore their missteps, but rather to move beyond them to the next play, the better play, the winning play. And that's exactly what we do with our kids, every period, every day, every week. We offer them ways to recover from their mistakes and to find real success, for it is in the knowing and growing that real success occurs. When we do this part right - no grudges, no expectations of failure, no pre-conceived notions - kids know they have the opportunity to get it right, too.

Chip Kelly and his Ducks are changing the game. Education is changing, too. Let's make it just as much fun to watch as Oregon football.

Dreaming and Scheming

I've been lucky this summer. The month of July seemed to pass, if not slowly, at least not quickly. The good news is that I feel as though I used every day well, and on a good chunk of those days, I spent time refueling, mostly. The "bad" news (but really, how dare I say "bad" when we have this much time away from the classroom) is that now, sufficiently refueled, it is time to put it in overdrive as August speeds by. And it will. This I know. The month is booked already.

I spent yesterday and today organizing. Listing. Emailing. Prioritizing. Phone-calling. Calendar-ing. Anyone who knows me can confirm that the color-coding of calendars and the listing of to-dos and tasks are some of my favorite things. Give me some lined paper and fine-tipped Crayola markers and my multiple calendars (Google, Outlook, wall, and planner) and I am an organizing machine. But I also quite enjoy the more abstract parts of preparing for the school year: dreaming and scheming.

So this is what I'm thinking about and these are the questions I'm asking as August looms, as the school year beckons, as I shift into high gear:

A new advisement component for new teachers in the union
Engaging 14-year-old boys in reading literature
My role as a leader within the parent group at my younger daughter's college
Using Twitter as a resource for students and parents
My professional goal(s) for the year
How do we build capacity within our local Association?
Changes to my classroom expectations and grading policies
Student interventions
Building relationships in Advisory
Parent involvement in the classroom and beyond
Goals and topics for this blog
Collegial outreach
What is exciting about English?
Collaborative work in my gradel level for the first time in 3 years
How can I bring more of the union membership together for service or social events?
Piloting the new state evaluation document
How will our curriculum revisions work?
What do I do well?
What do I need to work on?
What should I stop doing?

These are not simple ideas or easily-answered questions; there's no check-off box for this list. But I hope to address each and every one of these items as I spend August preparing for another school year.

First, though, I think I'll go to the parent-teacher store. I feel a new lesson plan book, bulletin board borders, and desk calendar in my future. Bring on the markers!!

Add Another "R"

In this compelling piece in the Portland Press Herald, North Yarmouth Academy Head of School Brad Choyt redesigns the three Rs. He suggests that relationships, respect, and resilience need to be taught, too, in order for our students to be successful. I couldn't agree more, though I will add one more R: responsibility.

Teaching responsibility has become harder and harder to do. And it may seem, at times, to be counter-intuitive to the creation and implementation of interventions, those strategies we use with our struggling students to help them achieve. We shouldn't view the two concepts - responsibility and intervention - as diametrically opposed, however; nor do we have to abandon the former for the latter.

I know, because I've seen the two work together. Last year, our team wrote several interventions (and each of us, individually, implemented our own strategies, too) for a student who just wasn't getting that doing schoolwork is a building block for later academic success, a stepping stone toward college, a job in itself that has its own reward. None of us backed down on our expectations of responsibility, but all of us cut the kid some slack as life had dealt some crappy blows and figuring it all out was clearly a daunting task. We were consistent but not rigid. We reiterated our deadlines and repeated our requirements and recapped over and over again our care and concern for the student. And, eventually, the kid got it, pretty much. We've seen a different student this year.

What that student learned, hopefully, is that being responsible, in addition to strong relationships with one's teachers, shared respect, and resilience, results in success. And we, modeling all of these important R's, are rewarded with the knowledge that what we did worked. And just might work again.