Read about the process, challenges, and benefits of the district’s work in All Aboard! published in the April edition of Learning Forward’s Journal of Staff Development (JSD), Co-authored by Deb Hansen, senior policy analyst at West Wind.

At my in-law’s annual reunions of the offspring of Danish immigrants who settled in northern Iowa, one can learn a lot about life by listening to the stories about farming. Last year, I heard a retired farmer reminisce about the time he loaded the grain silo on Thorvold’s farm with chopped hay. Because he waited too long to load his crop into the silo, the hay had become so dry that it molded and caused the whole silo to overheat. He had to unload tons of smoldering ash, one shovel full at a time for hours.  Grueling work! Time lost! Crop lost!

Last week I attended a conference of state education leaders who frequently lamented that they couldn’t break down silos within their agency and among agencies they work with to serve students in their state. Silos! What lessons have been learned about silos that make the metaphor so meaningful for educators?

The silo metaphor typically is a reference to storing one type of grain separate from another, just as parts of an organization are functionally segregated or isolated. Dennis Roming, a business consultant, explains that organizational silos isolate departments and people. He states that organizational silos occur when “department information and knowledge are sealed off from other departments; workers do not talk to people outside their department; the department does not offer to help or share resources with other parts of the organization; and/or the department only focuses on achieving their work goals even at the detriment of other work units and the organization as a whole.”[1] Silo behavior may contribute to insular thinking, inefficiencies, and limited decision-making.

Agencies create work units for a reason. There are efficiencies that occur when divisions, bureaus, work teams, task forces and committees are formed –work needs to be “chunked”, people need support and supervision, and assignments need to be shared.

Thinking about the mishap with Thorvold’s silo, one can make other important connections to educational leadership.

Farming:  Attend to what you put into your silos or risk your crop.

Education:  Be sure you give people in each work unit the information and resources they need to do their work or success will be unlikely.

Farming:   A farmer puts up the hay when the hay is ready, not when the farmer is ready.

Education:  Waiting too long to start engaging staff and stakeholders in work may not be in the best interest of the initiative.  Readiness should be gauged by a variety of variables, not just the comfort levels or readiness of the planners.

Farming:  Leaving the crop in the dark too long may ruin everything.

Education: Leaving team members in the dark about internal and external planning, decisions made, and changing contextual factors may hurt the project.

Farming:  Measure the conditions in your silo often or it may be too late to adjust.

Education:  Attend to formative data frequently. The course of an initiative can change without your realizing it, diminishing the implementation. Make sure all the participating teams and work units share in the analysis of data.

Farming:  A season can start out looking like a great yield is in store, but can end up with the farmer alone in a dark place digging out fertilizer.

Education:  Many projects look like implementation is well underway, but the results disappoint.

Business blogs have suggestions for preventing silos – increase collaboration, adjust top-down hierarchies, build trust, etc.  Another resource that leaders who seek to avoid silos should explore is implementation science. To guide the design and roll-out of programs and initiatives, implementation science can help leaders to:

• Clarify program/initiative vision, goals, and plans for action;
• Build in ways to engage stakeholders to ensure that all responsible parties are on board;
• Consider the cultural factors at play that impact the accomplishment of initative goals;
• Design communication structures that allow for flow of information internally as well as up and down the levels of the various organizations that are scaling up an initiative;
• Intentionally structure opportunities to collaborate; and
• Organize and use data analysis to continuously inform leaders and practitioners about how well the effort is being implemented.

The silo metaphor is used widely in education circles to help explain communication and cultural problems. Maybe a different farm metaphor might help explain another organizational phenomenon.  Perhaps in my next blog I will share the family story about the outcomes of driving Thorvold’s manure spreader in high gear.

At West Wind we honor each cultural heritage month recognized by presidential proclamation. We do so in a couple of ways, one of which is to create a special banner each month for our website. In deciding the design of the banners we always look at a variety of images that could represent the group and deliberate which images to use. We take this seriously and really wrestle with the task. Our discussions invariably include the following points of consternation:

• Are we really okay with choosing one image to represent entire races and ethnicities?
• Is it awful or acceptable to use the symbols of a culture in our banners? (for example, a menorah in our Jewish-American heritage banner)
• Who do we include and who gets left out in our choice of images? (think about it– one image representing billions of people of Asian descent)

In the end, we typically surmise that while no choice is perfect, we want to use our website banner to acknowledge cultural heritage months and that imperfect but informed good intention is better than nothing.

This month was different. This month we decided to not decide. Instead we have used only words on our website banner to invite everyone who sees it to recognize, celebrate, observe, and share their words and images in honor of Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month.

We’ll be using our social media accounts to recognize each group and provoke thoughtful dialogue. Please consider joining in:

• Comment. On this blog or guest write your own (email bonnie@westwinded.com)
• Tweet. @WWEP #oneimagewontdo
• Question. Answer the questions or change the questions we posed on Quora

Please keep in mind that this is about honoring cultural heritage. Only positive energy is welcomed here.

BY DEB HANSEN—I have been thinking lately about my High School German teacher, Frau (Mrs.) Chua. At the time I thought she was very strict, and I was a bit intimidated by her, but now that I am an educator, I realize she used great instructional practices. She provided theory, always demonstrated what she wanted us to learn, gave us daily time to practice, and coached us on our usage. As a teenager, I thought we had a lot of quizzes and assignments, but I suspect she using formative assessment to inform her instruction. Surely, my German teacher is long since retired, but maybe not — when you are 15 everybody over 25 looks old. She would have been pleased to hear me speaking German, as I traveled through Austria last summer. Of course, I was rusty, but a bit of review with audio tapes refreshed my skills enough that I could chat with new friends in Viennese cafés.

BY VALERIE NYBERG— During Teacher Appreciation week, I would like to thank the teachers I had throughout my K-12 experience. As a highly mobile student–I attended 13 different elementary schools, one junior high, and two high schools–I have to thank those teachers who welcomed me warmly into their classrooms and helped me to belong. Through the often chaotic times that comprised my childhood, my teachers created stability and helped me to see school as my home, and education as my way to survive.

Specifically, I would like to thank the following teachers:

• Mr. Hughes (5th grade) who made learning really fun, especially history;
• Mr. Richardson (6th grade) who introduced me to science and space and recognized my talent and skills despite the circumstances;
• Mrs. Sykes-Perkins (7th & 8th) who taught me that “history is nothing more than HIS-story and should be understood as such”; and who taught me the valuable skills needed to write a 5-paragraph essay;
• Mrs. Robison (11th grade) who pushed and pushed and pushed me to show up every day and to be brave enough to try my best;
• Mrs. Starr-Joyle (11th and 12th grade) who encouraged me to write and to think of myself as a writer;
• Mr. Darling (12th grade) who was a great storyteller and opened the world to me in the form of literature and encouraged all of us to make it what we will.

BY MANDI BOZARTH— The teacher I want to thank today is Ruth Ann Swartzendruber, my school librarian and one of the most interesting people I know. I went to a small rural school from Kindergarten to graduation. With fewer than 300 students enrolled we didn’t offer a lot of electives or any AP classes. My wonderful teachers and administrators used all the resources they had to give us opportunities—I took trigonometry, calculus, chemistry I and II, drama, and foreign languages, and participated in extracurricular activities where we traveled all over the country to participate in academic and science contests. Each one of them helped prepare me to enter college eager to learn and equipped with the skills to succeed.

Yet even with all these opportunities many of us found that by our junior or senior year we had taken every course available outside of athletics—which consisted of track, baseball, softball, and basketball only. I was one of these students and so I became Ms. Swartzendruber’s library assistant for about two hours each week. She could have sent me off dusting books and tidying up, something that would have helped her out and kept me out of her hair. And there were times when she did. But there were also plenty of times when she engaged me in what it means to run a school library for kids from age 5 to 19. She engaged me in the library and I came to understand some of the potential between those walls.

From assisting with story time and puppet plays for the youngest students to helping create displays for senior poetry projects, I had the opportunity to learn skills and take responsibility for my and other students’ learning. She talked to me about banned books and her work in several African countries to share some of the great works of literature I came to know as a young adult–1984 at the top of that list.
So thank you Ms. Swartzendruber for engaging me as a partner in my education. Thanks to you my house is full of books and I have tried to maintain my respect for words and stories throughout my education and my career. And I hope my kids someday have a story about the great teacher/librarian that inspired their love of books.

BY BONNIE RIGGAN—I would like to thank Mrs. Maxson, my high school Spanish teacher. She loved her subject matter and imbued that in many of her students. She rarely spoke a word of English in her classroom, even in first-year classes. We learned by listening and watching which gave such permanence to the learning, for me. Pairing the word with the visual was a great way for me to learn. Mrs. Maxson also taught us about the history and culture of many Spanish-speaking places. That had me hooked and for many years my dream was to travel to Spain.
I eventually did travel to Spain with my son (who counts his own high school Spanish teacher among his favorites) and have since traveled to Puerto Rico. This year, I will spend 6 weeks walking across northern Spain. I am able to make these trips comfortably and confidently thanks to the knowledge and skills I learned from Mrs. Maxson. Gracias!

My sons have been involved with a local Boy Scout troop for the last five years.  My eldest joined the scout troop at the beginning of sixth grade and my younger two sons followed suit.  Up to this point, I’ve never felt they were looked at or treated differently based on their race.  Until last Sunday.

Sunday night, a couple of hours after the weekly troop meeting, I received an email from one of the scoutmasters.  He expressed concern about an incident a parent reported to him involving my eldest son.  He also mentioned another incident that happened the week before and referred to “the others that parents have referenced.”  These incidents, as described to me, in one case involved my son pushing another scout and in the other case he was attempting to take an object away from a scout. The scoutmaster did not know any context besides what I describe above, nor did he attempt to ask my son about these incidents before concluding that he, as scoutmaster, needed to “provide a safe environment” for the boy scout troop and asked me “what actions can be taken to ensure these behaviors stop.”

“Safe environment” is what I want to focus on in this blog post.  What does this mean?  Safe for whom?  Safe according to whom?  Without investigating the context of what was happening among these young men,  my son’s behavior was  interpreted  to be dangerous, violent, menacing, and at the very least unwanted.  While I agree he shouldn’t have grabbed and pushed another boy to the ground, I also must ask, where do we cross the line where behaviors are deemed dangerous or violent?  What if violence in the form of bullying prompted my son’s physical response?

Is my son a violent person?  No.  He’s never even been involved in a fight.  He genuinely doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body.  He can’t even watch slasher movies or endure other images of that sort.  Does he get upset?  Certainly.  We all do when other people do things to hurt us, annoy us, or for a variety of other reasons.  Did he handle this situation well?  No.  However, I will also point out, what were his choices?  If he told a scoutmaster that the other boy had bothered him, trying to take his car keys and calling him names, the research about bullying shows us that adults are slow to respond, if they ever respond.  In addition, conventional wisdom teaches kids that, as the older boy, he risks looking foolish and petty if he does turn to an adult for help.  What information or procedures have any of the boys been taught that help them to handle being harassed and annoyed?

What strikes me in this situation is that my son is now being marked as dangerous and/or violent based on one incident.  Now the scoutmaster must protect the other boys from the big, Black boy.  Perhaps this phrase carries the issue a bit far, but what I hear from this is not a question of why my son might have been upset by the other boy, or even a question of what happened and how the entire situation can be prevented.  Instead, all the responsibility is placed on my son.  There is no sense of trying to understand and certainly no measure of doubt in placing the blame on him.  We must remediate this boy, and now.  Why is that?

We live in a society that continues to traffic in the notion that Black men are dangerous and violent.  Like the Trayvon Martin case, when we see a tall Black male, it is acceptable to consider him “up to no good” and/or prone to violence first, then ask questions later.  This is especially true when a Black boy is engaging in any behaviors (whether it’s rough play or neighborhood hide-and-go-seek) with White boys where his behaviors are easily taken out of context and interpreted as warning signs of aggression and/or brutality.  Yet for White boys, those same behaviors are thought of as “boys will be boys” or we talk of “accidents” or find a way to understand, empathize even, with such responses.  This is what I heard when the scoutmaster referred to the need to provide a “safe environment”; he was really saying that my son was not safe; that he poses a danger to the White boys in his troop.

There is a burden that comes with black skin.  It’s the burden of being human inside, which comes with all the emotion and responses that everyone else has, but the super-human responsibility of having to always keep control of the very human emotion and response, less you  be labeled as an aggressive or violent person.

Put another way, in a recent NPR special series called “The Race Card Project: Six-Word Essays” a Black doctor submitted his six-word essay: “55 mph means you Black man.”  Regardless of what his colleagues do, Dr. McGriff must always conduct himself differently; “avoid any kind of behavior” that would bring his presence to attention.  Not unlike another NPR story “A Mom’s Advice to Her Young, Black Sons,” where writer Donna Britts and her two sons Justin and Darrell Britts-Gibson talk about the prejudice they encounter as Black men and  the need for them to be more cautious in their actions.

I used this incident to impress upon my sons the ever-present reality that they must be vigilant in their interactions and behaviors, even among their fellow boy scouts.  In the immediacy, the consequences are losing the opportunity to continue in scouts, but in the real world, the consequences for not properly exercising vigilance can cost them their freedom or their very lives.

As the instructor began he gathered information from each of the 20 learners so he could make sure we had the knowledge and tools we needed to turn his buckets full of twigs into trees that would someday blossom and bear fruit. Some of the things he learned from us were:

• People love their morning coffee! But some people don’t drink coffee. (There was also tea and water).
• Some people were chilled to the bone as we were in a barn on an early spring northern Iowa morning. (There was a very noisy heater but some people preferred hearing the instructor over heat).
• Some people were farmers with many acres of land. Some people lived in condos with room for a pot on their patio. (There was standard and dwarf tree rootstock offered).
• Some people use words as their daily tools; some use mechanical or hand tools, such as grafting knives, as their daily tools. (There were hand-outs and bandages for the former.)

I thought to myself, he’s a good teacher. He knows his subject matter well, knows how to communicate the subject matter, and he knows that how cold my toes are will contribute to whether I can remember how to properly care for my apple tree. Yes, he was a good teacher.

Then I thought about what a public K-12 teacher must know and be able to do in order to make sure their students go out in the world full of knowledge. It’s an incredible expectation and challenge—in addition to the content knowledge, there must be thousands of dynamics within a learning setting for a teacher to identify and manage every day and many of those dynamics change daily. My workshop instructor was good but he had the benefits of having an audience who self-selected through their own interest to be there and had all the resources needed to be present and ready to learn. He was set up to succeed.

In our work at West Wind, we talk and hear a lot about how to support teachers so they can know how and be able to attend to the innumerable needs of their students. The apple grafting workshop was, for me, both a fun time of learning and also a reminder of how important it is to keep working toward policy that supports teachers and to not underestimate what we are asking of our K-12 public school teachers.

Can any selection process regardless of its foundation, with any certainty accurately separate the talented from the talentless?  Is there such thing as a person with little or no talent?  The problem, as I see it is how do we identify students’ talents and to what end?  And what qualifies as talent?

Take for example, Nick D’Aloisio, the 17-year-old British-Australian teenager who created and recently sold Summly, a mobile application summarizing online news content, for $30 million dollars to tech giant Yahoo!.  According to reports, he’s been programming since he was 12 and first created Summly when he was 15, but only recently went public with it in November, 2012.  By all accounts, he is a very talented person.  Merely stating that his success stems from his talent emphasizes an individualist view of success, talent, and skill without accounting for a myriad of factors outside of his individual efforts.  As Malcolm Gladwell says in his book, The Outliers (2008):

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves.  But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.  It makes a difference where and when we grew up.  The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine (p. 19).

When I see a story like D’Aloisio, I immediately assume that he had access to computers at a very young age, but also that exposure was ongoing and pervasive AND his parents approved of his access and use of computers.  Speaking of his parents it’s important to also consider that D’Aloisio is the son of two professionals, a lawyer and a global financial services company executive.  As such, the ability to quickly ascertain which information is and is not valuable was not something he only picked up from his own experiences writing a history paper.  It is likely that the need he identified was present in his environment.  Perhaps his parents complained about not having the time to sift through endless amounts of information in order to find exactly what they were looking for.

The very fact that his parents are white-collar workers means that he’s been acculturated into a middle-class environment which strongly emphasizes individualistic merits and individual distinction. Often, we attribute individual merit to success that has actually come from happenstance. Gladwell uses…success that has actually come from happenstance. Gladwell uses the birth months of top-tier Canadian hockey players to illustrate the point that, at those levels, most of the players are born in January, February, or March.  This he says is related to the cut-off dates for the beginning hockey age.

It’s simply that in Canada the eligibility cut-off for age-class hockey is January 1.  A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year—and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity (p. 24).

The point:  What we recognize as talent and skills, which leads to eventual success is related to cultural and societal factors that deem student X more capable than student Y, not really based on “native” or “born” intelligence or ability, but based on “selection, streaming, and differentiated experience” (p. 25).  As Gladwell states,

We make rules that frustrate achievement.  We prematurely write off people as failures.  We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail…We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by ‘we’ I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t (p. 32-33).

Even if we rely on I.Q. tests and other supposedly objective measures, these are still products of a larger society that values certain performances in certain ways over others.  So a student who has been reading and writing since the age of three outperforms a student who didn’t learn how to read until age six.  With “accumulative advantage” (Gladwell, p. 30) once some kids are able to outshine and outperform others, they begin to reap the benefits of their early successes until, eventually in high school and college, there are measureable differences.

And I see that holds up for my youngest son.  Applying what Gladwell says about the ways in which we set up competitions for sports and education, it’s no wonder my youngest son was identified as gifted and talented.  He was born in January, whereas both of my older children were born in August.  Where he gained an entire half-year of maturity, experience, and exposure before he entered kindergarten at five-and-a-half, my two older sons started at age five.  He also had the “accumulative advantage” of being the youngest of three, which in our house means hours spent by both older brothers teaching him advanced math concepts, playing chess with him since he was three, and a whole host of other enrichments (for fun) which pile on his already advantaged position.  Instead of believing, as he wants to, that he is smarter than his brothers, I firmly believe that his talents and skills are more recognizable because he demonstrates more of the skills, dispositions, and aptitude schools reward by virtue of his increased maturity and his quick ability to make meaning.

I believe that we need a system of education that doesn’t allow arbitrary cut-offs and early identification practices that value some skills over others to determine what constitutes talent. We need a system of education that works to develop all students’ talents, giving all students access to enriching activities that promote their continued growth and learning.  I believe this will pay for itself as we create a more equitable income structure and move away from the currently lop-sided structure where the top 1% owns 40% of the global assets and as such wield an indeterminable amount of power, influence, and most importantly, access to differentiated experiences and an expanded world of possibility.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about how our use of online social media is continuously changing the way we work at West Wind.  We often talk about communities of practice with our clients and partners as they try new initiatives and set up communities around specific policy questions or programs.  We always emphasize the fact that these aim to be communities where members come to share, learn, ask questions, and form professional networks. In our work we are all members of several of these communities and engage in each in different ways.

This retreat reinforced for me that we at West Wind are a community of practice – that may sound like a simple statement, but it is more than just a phrase.  The way we work together side-by-side, online, over the phone, or on email creates a space where collaboration can happen continuously.  The time we spend in retreats, thinking about how we work as a team, has offered us the opportunity to build trust and camaraderie with each other.  We can offer constructive criticism to each other without fear because we all know that we are invested in shared work – the work to make strong educational opportunities available to every student.  Retreats do not have to last several days or take place in-person, but the time to hash out how a community works together is worth spending.  To grow as a team, we are working as a team – and that is a key to any community of practice!

Always on the look-out for research on professional learning, I was pleased to discover a study by Carl Dunst and Carol Trivette (2012)[1] that examines the effectiveness of evidence-based adult learning practices. These researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 58 randomized controlled design studies of four adult learning methods – accelerated learning, coaching, guided design, and just-in-time training.

Participants who received instruction/training using the adult learning methods were compared with either participants who were taught using another type of instruction/training or participants who received no intervention. For a complete list of the studies, participant characteristics, adult learning method practices and outcomes for each of the studies see Dunst et.al (2010).

Reviewing the full list, it appears that the complexity of what participants were expected to learn and the settings in which they engaged in this learning were quite varied. While some of the selected studies examined teachers learning instructional strategies in professional development settings, the meta-analysis also considered studies examining the learning of undergraduate college students learning vocabulary, medical students learning effective feedback techniques from physicians, and employees acquiring telephone customer service skills. The lack of randomized control studies in professional development of educators would likely make it difficult to find enough studies to do a comprehensive meta-analysis of education related studies.

The meta-analysis conducted on these adult learning studies showed several important findings about which conditions and adult learning methods had the most benefits to the adult learners.

1. Practices that more actively involved learners in the learning process had larger effects on knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs.
2. A combination of 4 or 5 different practices had optimal effects on learner outcomes.
3. Optimal adult learner benefit was found in learning environments having fewer than 40 participants in applied settings.
4. The largest average effect size was found when instruction/training lasted more than 20 hours where 4 or 5 of the practices were used.

The Dunst and Trivette (2012) study did not consider outcomes beyond reported changes to the adult participants’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs. For example, the effects of adult learning on the achievement of K-12 students were not examined.

In a review of nine studies that did consider the relationship of teacher professional growth to student achievement, Yoon et al.(2007) found that sustained and intensive professional development was related to student learning outcomes. This review also found that time was an important variable – three studies of professional learning opportunities lasting 14 or fewer hours showed no effects on student learning. However, studies of programs that provided more than 14 hours of sustained professional learning showed significant positive effects. The largest effects were found for professional development offerings between 30 and 100 hours distributed over 6-12 months.

When district and school leaders design learning experiences for teachers and administrators, they should consider the research about what is needed for adults to learn and accomplish both the individual and organizational goals of professional development. For professional development to accomplish the intended goal of improving student achievement, it is essential for adult learners to have the time to learn, professional learning experiences that are structured to get results, and learning content that builds capacity in priority areas selected to address the needs of the students.

Research on learning should shape decisions about factors such as establishing a school with built-in professional development time, adequate budget for professional development time and supports, and team structures to enable problem solving and application of new learning. As states make decisions about policies and resources, attention to the research base is critical.

State technical assistance and leadership are needed to help local districts establish policies and practices that result in professional development plans with elements to provide adult learners effective learning experiences. State policy should be reviewed with an eye to what research tells us, to consider how policies either support or add barriers to delivering high quality professional development.

Dunst, C. J., & Trivette, C. M. (2012). Moderators of the effectiveness of adult learning method practices. Journal of Social Sciences, 8, 143-148. Retrieved from http://thescipub.com/abstract/10.3844/jssp.2012.143.148 

Dunst, C. J., Trivette, C. M., and Hamby, D. W (2012). Meta-analysis of the effectiveness of four adult learning methods and strategies: Supplemental tables and references. Orelena Hawks Puckett Institute, North Carolina, USA retrieved from http://moedu-sail.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Meta-Analysis-of-Effectiveness-of-Four-Adult-Learning-Methods.pdf  

Yoon, K. S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W. Y., Scarloss, B., & Shapley, K. (2007). Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement (Issues and Answers Report, REL 2007 No. 033). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest.