Responsibility Travels

While traveling over a 2-day period, I witnessed several individuals demonstrating responsibility under various circumstances. I continue to be encouraged when I see others being responsible in their circles of influence.

• A Starbucks barista willingly promoed my two hot beverages since their in-store WiFi was not working and prevented me from accessing my Starbucks card on my phone. The barista indicated that their malfunctioning WiFi should not cause me to use cash since I had a prepaid Starbucks card. She couldn't have been any nicer.

• Eric was the gate representative for our JetBlue flight. The flight was changed to leave from a different gate, delayed since the pilot scheduled for our flight had not yet arrived from his prior destination and the new pilot and co-pilot had not yet arrived to the airport. Eric did everything in his power to clearly communicate to everyone waiting for this flight. He was factual, clear and incorporated a healthy sense of humor. Eric was instrumental is creating a calm atmosphere while this sold out flight was waiting to depart for Tampa prior to pending blizzard conditions in Boston and at Logan International Airport. Eric maintained a level-head, a smile throughout our 3-hour delay and offered assistance to anyone needing it. I commend JetBlue Airways for hiring, training and keeping such a fine representative. 

• While waiting to board our JetBlue flight, I has the pleasure of speaking with Jake. He was an engineering sales rep headed to Tampa with his wife and twin teenage sons. During our 30-minute conversation, he conveyed a great deal of responsibility about coaching his son's team, his alignment with his company's mission and his commitment to his wife and sons. His attitude, respect and communication was uplifting and encouraging. I immediately could see why his wife and sons followed his leadership.

• When the co-pilot for our JetBlue Tampa-bound flight arrived to the gate, everyone applauded his arrival. He was gracious, responded with an award-winning smile and briefly spoke with us with a sense of humor. He assured us he and his pilot would do everything possible to ensure our safe and comfortable flight to Tampa as soon as our pilot arrived. His brief interaction with us added to the calm situation that Eric has previously established. 

• Upon arriving to Tampa International Airport, my driver was immediately helpful, respectful and polite. He, too, incorporated a sense of humor into our conversation. We conversed during our 40-minute ride to my home in Florida about times in our lives where we were grateful for the responsibility demonstrated by others. He even shared with me details of the time he flew on an SST Concorde and the unbelievable thrill that it was!

In closing, I continue to be encouraged by individuals choosing to accept responsibility for their attitude, actions and dealings with others! 

Strategic Confusion

I recently watched an hour long video from Robert Duke about learning and how to create exceptional learning environments. He caused me to reflect on the learning environment that I aim to create daily while facilitating mathematical thinking at the high school in which I teach. Robert has helped me to realize that how I teach has very lttle to do with the learning that our students experience. The learning that is significant is how our students deal will confusion, uncertainty and misunderstanding. Through his talk, I've come to realize that real learning stems from learners knowing how to optiminally navigate confusion. Our students' learning can be much more effective if we learn together how to handle "strategic confusion". The following big ideas I extracted from his talk and I highly encourage you to provide yourself the opportunity to challenge the learning that you offer to your learners.

• Retrieving what we know requires various types of practice.
• We need to practice getting content out.
• If nothing goes wrong during our learning, it's unlikely we're going to learn anything.
• Learning requires much more doing on the part of the learner.
• Teach how to be optinally confused.
• Two central ideas of learning: a) You're a learner, too. b) Learning is error correction.
• Learning is not efficient. Learning is chaotic.
• "Because I'm an excellent teacher, I'm going to wait a few moments while you figure it out for yourself."

After you've experienced the shift in thinking that provides for real learning through strategic confusion, I look forward to sharing thoughts with you. 

Dance of Change Initiation

First, thanks to David Culberhouse for his insightful post on Designing Systems of Change. David offers a consistent and informative flow of thoughts that cause me to ponder and reflect about my learning and teaching. His post influenced me to bring Peter Senge's "The Dance of Change" back into view and I've resumed my reading that I barely started years ago.

Second, the following except in "The Dance of Change" is causing me to consider yet another shift in our learning:

     "Sustaining any profound change process requires a fundamental shift in thinking. We need to understand the nature of growth processes (forces that aid our efforts) and how to catalyze them. But we also need to understand the forces and challenges that impede progress, and to develop workable strategies for dealing with these challenges. We need to appreciate 'the dance of change,' the inevitable interplay between growth processes and limiting processes."

     "This requires us to think of sustaining change more biologically and less mechanistically. It requires patience as well as urgency. It requires a real sense of inquiry, a genuine curiosity about limiting factors. It requires seeing how significant change invariably starts locally, and how it grows over time. And it requires recognizing the diverse array of people who play key roles in sustaining change - people who are -- 'leaders'."

This post marks the begnning of my new journey as I seek to better understand my growth and limiting processes as well as those of our students. As always, I yearn for your feedback.