Feedback

According to Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, authors of Thanks for the Feedback: the science and art of receiving feedback well (even when it is off base, unfair, poorly delivered, and, frankly, when you're not in the mood), the word "feed-back" finds its origin in the 1860s during the Industrial Revolution when it was used to describe the way that outputs of energy, momentum, or signals are returned to their point of origin in a mechanical system.

I give feedback all the time. I get it less.

A few years ago a trusted friend and colleague admitted that they felt I was more secure in myself than I was when we first met.

"When we first met, I noticed you really liked to make sure everyone knew you were smart. You talked a lot and seemed like you had something to prove. Now, though, I've noticed that you listen more;you are reading the room, reading people, and using what you observe to dictate where you need to go."

Now this was the same colleague who used to begin a piece of criticism with, "Can I give you a piece of feedback I would want to receive if I were in your shoes?"

I loved getting feedback from this person because I always knew it was valuable, honest, and transparent. I also trust them implicitly. Like most people, though, I have a hard time with negative feedback. Yet the more I get it, the more I am able to look at my actions and essence through more evaluative eyes. And I've learned that seeking out feedback ("Can I get some honest feedback?") by asking a really specific questions allows my response to be more appropriate and easily integrated into my life.

As a teacher, on the other hand, the feedback I give tends to be grouped into three categories:

appreciation (thanks)

coaching (here's a better way to do it)

evaluation (here's where you stand)

In my students, I really try to provide all three forms of feedback. In myself, however, I don't usually take the time to reflect deeply and provide feedback to myself. I under appreciate my own accomplishments, I charge forward without reflecting on how to better do something next time, and I don't pause to see where I stand.

But it's that last one that I've focused on in this season of life. I've always cared about how I am perceived (probably to an unhealthy level), but recently I have shifted my self-evaluation to ask,

"What am I missing?"
"Where are my blind spots?"

Now, I've written about these things before, but it's really transformed my own understanding of myself and my students.

In the life of a school, everyone puts out energy, rides varying waves of momentum, and signals are sent and received by the thousand.

Yet when we allow for reflection and take all that energy, momentum, and those signals and invite them to return to their point of origin in the mechanical system that is our brain/hearts (I never can figure out how to distinguish between the two), we enable real growth.

This week I am trying to hold more space for my students. To allow their feedback to dictate the assignments I create, the discussion we have, and the ways I am evaluating and coaching them.

Today we created wild and complicated equations for leadership.

One group believed...

Success as a leader = (GOOD ideas + execution)(confidence/fear)

and execution was

(resources x persuasion) motivation + commitment

It was really fun.

They liked it.

But the reality was, I'd had something else planned. I'd wanted to delve into the writings of some great historical leaders and use their primary sources as a foundation...

but the feedback I was getting from my students was clear:

They were still thinking about the math test they'd just taken and incorporating the element of equations into leadership was what they needed. The energy and momentum would have come to a jolting stop if I hadn't listened to the signals...

Mr. McDonough, here's where we stand.


Here's to listening to the feedback of the world around us.

Loss and Gain

In Old English, the word los meant "destruction."

In Old Norse, it referred to the breaking up of the ranks of an army.

Today, my heart feels destroyed, disorder and confusion muddying the commands from my brain to my body...like an army whose ranks have broken.

Loss is so deep and so raw in my soul as the sun rises today. My friend Tim died yesterday. He's the one who once told me that schools are fragile things. It feels that way today.

Arundhati Roy once wrote a book called The God of Small Things. It deals with maintaining humanity amidst competing familial, societal, political, and cultural forces.

In response to the book, one of my favorite bands, Darlingside, wrote a song entitled "god of loss."

In the song, the quartet croons,

"Yes, we will leave here without a trace

Take a new name and an old shape

I'll be no outlaw, no renegade

Just your faithful god of loss

So meet me by the river

On a boat-shaped piece of earth

We press our bones together

And the spider does its work

With flakes of garlic

And petals from a rose

If it's small enough to carry

You and I can call it home."

 For me, this concept of loss, humanity, and rebuilding in a new way is indistinguishable from the character and impact of my friend and mentor.

The earth lost Tim yesterday just as I was teaching my students the difference between true leadership and false leadership during our study of Lord of the Flies

Strong leaders empower, we all agreed.
Weak leaders only influence.

Influencers cause people to act in a specific way, 
but they don't inspire them to be better. 
That's the work of empowerment.

And this is why, as I wake today, as I navigate the spaces that are tied so irrevocably to my memories of Tim, I feel empowered. He was too great a man to ever be gone and, while all leaders influence, leaders like Tim empower those around them to transform and lead in their own ways. He will forever be in us, not as a memory, but in our every action.

He's right here,

his daily impact bearing a new name,
but harnessing an old shape,
small enough to carry,
you and I can call it home.

This hasn't just been a loss. 
While the loss is incomprehensible, knowing you has been the greatest gain.
Thanks for everything, Tim. 

You are the best of teachers, the best of men.

Right on Time

Buck O'Neil is one of my heroes. I never met the man, but were I to assemble a dinner party of human beings I admire and with whom I would want to spend an evening, Buck would be at the head of the table.

Buck played professional baseball in the negro leagues during the 1930s and 40s. He never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues because he was black. Nevertheless, when Buck was asked about whether he wished he'd been born a little later, or wished that baseball had been desegregated earlier, he responded,

"Waste no tears for me. I didn't come along too early. I was right on time."

I thought of this quote this week as I interacted with my students. We were discussing what defines a good invention as we finished up our study of India.

We spent a day exploring families of the world by using the Gapminder website, Dollar Street.

The website allows people (my students, myself, YOU!) to explore the circumstances of families of the world.* I asked students to brainstorm what they thought these families needed. 

We discussed the importance of asking good questions, of avoiding assumptions that are based upon our own ethnocentric experiences--our own needs.

After the students had conversed amongst themselves about what they perceived families' needs to be, we looked at some of the short passages about each family. There, we discovered, for example, that the Chandmoni Bibi family who lives in Calcutta is actually more concerned with the dangerous traffic outside their home than they are with their level of food insecurity or the $31 dollars per month the father, Abdul Khaled, makes as a day laborer. One student exclaimed, 

"Maybe...I mean, what if...what they actually just need a fence?"

a classmate chimed in,

"But will a fence make them happy?"

Then, a third classmate said, barely audible

"I don't know. What if they don't want to be happy the way we want to be happy...what if they just want to be safe?"

This moment did two things for me. One, it made me incredibly proud of my students. They were dwelling in the "WHAT IFs" of the world. These are the difference-making questions, the ones that transform what is possible, and the ones that raise the ceilings of our collective capabilities, and the ones that innovate and imagine and transform. 

But more importantly, this conversation reminded me of Buck O'Neil. 

The news today has the ability to make us feel unsafe. Especially so for those of us who are parents or educators--the people who spend their lives working with young people and supporting them as they learn to navigate the world. Isn't that all of our wish? For our children to be safe?

But as I listen to my students, as I watch in awe at the marriage between their hopefulness, their insights, and their brimming curiosity, I am reminded that they didn't come along too late or too early...the world needs their ideas and their hope and their unabashed willingness to believe the best and to desire to learn.

They are right on time.

*Given the reality that circumstances are different from culture, it's valuable to recognize how little we actually know about a family's traditions, values, beliefs, or way of life as a result of the stuff they possess, or the places they inhabit. This continues to be a necessary element to the World Cultures curriculum at my school--ensuring we don't misinterpret a group of people's daily life and circumstances as the definitive story of their culture.

Teachers as artists

There's a quotation I've often heard attributed to Pablo Picasso.

"Good artists copy; great artists steal."

I fully believe that great teachers teachers are artists; skilled professionals and performers who are tortured and driven to put themselves--the very essence of who they are--into their craft each day. And, of course, to create beauty in doing it. As such, I borrow and steal from colleagues and friends, from those who inspire me, and from the teachers I had when I was young. I do this all the time. Every day. I once wrote a blog post about my own Mount Rushmore of teachers, but the reality is that I have stolen elements of curriculum, instruction, inspiration, vernacular, engagement, and management from every single teacher, professor, and mentor I've had.

One example slid to the forefront of my life this week.

When I was in third grade, my mother opened a school. This was a somewhat complicated endeavor because we lived in a one-room schoolhouse (built in 1840!) and had to make room for the 12 students (k-8) who inhabited the huge room (that housed the fireplace). We lived in the three bedrooms upstairs and the bathroom and kitchen became the property of the school.

There are innumerable stories about Magical Youth School (M.Y. School for short), but there isn't space in these thirty minutes to go into any of them. The connection I made to my three year experience there came from a recent writing assignment my students completed.

At MY School we had two school publications each week. The "Moose News" and "Yellow Schoolhouse News." The latter of these two periodicals contained any articles, creative writing, artwork students had created that week, while the former was always centered around a topic ("the earth," "dishes," to name a few...).

It was the topical connection that always drew me in. I loved reading about how students (and teachers and parents!) interpreted and experienced topics differently, and how my own vision and perspective linked in (or didn't) with those of others.

The resounding memory, though, was that writing for the "Moose News" each week gave me a voice and an opportunity to develop my own positionality as a writer, a storyteller, but also as a human being.

I returned to this idea of topical writing this week with my eighth graders. I read them some excerpts from The Sun, a literary magazine with a section entitled "Readers Write" that invites readers of the magazine to submit writing on a common theme.

I provided my students with seven different topics from which to choose and asked them to select a story from their own life. I had them draw maps of their neighborhoods and we considered where the most important stories had taken place. We discussed the idea of in media res and considered how closely to the end of the story we could begin. We "exploded the moment" by focusing our writing in on the finest details of the story.

Now, nothing I did was novel or particularly innovative. But it did something for my students. It granted them permission to use their creativity to think about how differently we all think and write and experience the world. It gave them permission to be authors their own understanding...something we need today more than ever as the reality of consuming someone else's narrative threatens our democracy each day.

Whether they were writing about fights, shoes, "the last word," or any of the other themes provided them, my students placed their own lens into the world squarely at the center of their lives for the 45 minutes they were in my classroom.

My hope for my students is that they don't stop with these topics, but rather that they develop a sense of their own experiences and their own wisdom and perspective as being vital to the future of the world. Yes, we can steal like artists, but we also shape the art we make out of our own ideas...something never before seen by anyone anywhere.

One of my students couldn't contain themselves as they wrote.

"Ohmygosh, I love this so much."

That's one of the amazing things about having my classroom be my canvas...there's no need to wait for critics to assign value to my product, because the process speaks for itself.