Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘Habits of Mind’ Category

Habits of Mind: Remaining Open to Continuous Learning

This post is part of a series on sixteen “Habits of Mind” put forth by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick as being “necessary for success in school, work, and life” (Costa & Kallick, 2010, p. 212).

Remaining Open to Continuous Learning: Learn from experiences!  Having humility and pride when admitting we don’t know; resisting complacency.

…I guess it’s a loose interpretation of the word “series” since I haven’t written a Habits of Mind post in over three years, but better late than never, right?

Of all the Habits of Mind, I think this one is probably the most important, as well as the most difficult, for educators to exercise.  I say this because it requires us to remain humble, teachable, and open to new learning despite enormous pressure from multiple sources to appear as “experts”, either in a given content area or in the field of education in general.

That’s certainly not to say we do not achieve respectable levels of expertise throughout our careers.  As I begin my 18th year, I certainly know more than I did in my first, tenth, or even my seventeenth, and I hope to continue that trend well into the foreseeable future.

The rub comes when we start to believe our own hype.  It takes a special degree of self-awareness to balance the knowledge of what one knows with the understanding that there is much yet to learn.  I did not start to achieve that balance until at least several years into my career, having spent the first few keeping up appearances in order to maintain the trust of my students, their families, and my colleagues – at least, that’s what I thought I had to do.

Call it maturity, experience, or something else, but I’m much more comfortable saying “I don’t know” at this stage in the game than I was as a 23-year-old rookie.  I chalk some of that up to the fact that when I don’t know something, my background is deep enough that I usually know where I can go or who I can consult to find the information I need.  The rest of it, I suppose, is that I’m finally over the need to feel I need to prove my knowledge or value in a given moment because I prove my knowledge and value every day in my job.

I’ve had a few “do-overs” in my career so far, starting as a teacher, then moving to a school psychologist, and most recently to an instructional supervisor.  The first year in each position was the roughest, but I took those opportunities to ask a lot of questions, do a lot of listening, and keep my eyes wide open, observing everything I could.  Starting those positions in a place of humility, rather than aggressively trying to prove how much I knew or throw my authority around, was not necessarily easy, but it was worthwhile, as doing so helped me to continue my learning and move forward as more confident and, ultimately, more beneficial to my students and colleagues than if I had just tried to bulldoze my way forward from the word go.

Reference

Costa, A.L. & Kallick, B.  (2010).   It takes some getting used to: rethinking curriculum for the 21st century.  In H. H. Jacobs (Ed.), Curriculum 21: essential education for a changing world (pp. 210-226).  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Habits of Mind: Questioning & Prior Knowledge

This post is part of a series on sixteen “Habits of Mind” put forth by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick as being “necessary for success in school, work, and life” (Costa & Kallick, 2010, p. 212).

Questioning and problem posing: How do you know?  Having a questioning attitude; knowing what data are needed and developing questioning strategies to generate information.

I said it several times during the interview process for my new job (I start Monday!), and I stand by it: I will be asking a lot of questions this year.  Not only in terms of getting acquainted with a new professional role, but also (and perhaps more importantly) in working with teachers to solve problems and improve practice (mine as well as theirs).  Having one person who knows all the answers is great, but sometimes knowing what you don’t know and knowing the right questions to ask can be even more beneficial to the learning of everyone involved in the problem-solving process.

Some of the best discussions I’ve ever had with my supervisors did not involve them telling me information, but rather, them asking questions to get me thinking about my professional practice: the choices I make in the classroom or as a psychologist/case manager.  These, more than any other interactions, helped me to grow, or at least become a more reflective practitioner, so I hope to do the same for the teachers with whom I will be working this year.  Conducting interviews for the qualitative research component of my dissertation research helped me to hone the questioning skills I developed as a high school English teacher all those years ago, so I think I have a good base upon which to build.  And speaking of building upon previous practice…

Applying past knowledge to prior situations: Use what you learn!  Accessing prior knowledge; transferring knowledge beyond the situation in which it was learned.

You know what they say about those who don’t study history?  The same applies to those who don’t learn from their own experiences, both positive and negative.  Just like I will be drawing upon a very specific skill set as I described above, I will surely also be able to apply many of the organizational, managerial, and leadership skills I learned as a school psychologist to my new role.  The precise wording escapes me, but I remember learning as a fledgling school psychology grad student that the ability to isolate and identify patterns or commonalities across diverse settings is indicative of advanced problem-solving skills, if not overall intelligence, and that has stuck with me through the years.

Being able to look at situations and say, “Hey, this is kinda like that one time I/we/they…” aids in your ability to act (reactively or proactively) and, when necessary, solve problems more efficiently and, presumably, more effectively.  I’ve never been an administrator before, but I have acted in leadership positions and taught adult learners in both formal and informal settings, so I think I have a nice “toolbox” from which to draw as I look forward to this new chapter in my career.

Reference

Costa, A.L. & Kallick, B.  (2010).   It takes some getting used to: rethinking curriculum for the 21st century.  In H. H. Jacobs (Ed.), Curriculum 21: essential education for a changing world (pp. 210-226).  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Habits of Mind: Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision

Quick programming note: I am on the cusp of finishing the coursework in my doctoral program, which means that from here on out, my dissertation is the last thing between me and a funny hat and three more letters after my name.  That project will be taking up the majority of my free time for the foreseeable future, so I will likely only be blogging once per month (as opposed to my regular twice) for a while.  

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This post is part of a series on sixteen “Habits of Mind” put forth by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick as being “necessary for success in school, work, and life” (Costa & Kallick, 2010, p. 212).

Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision: Be clear!  Striving for accurate communication in both written and oral form; avoiding overgeneralizations, distortions, and deletions.

I think anyone who works in the special education field long enough develops fluency in a second language comprised entirely of acronyms.  Between IEP, FAPE, PLAAFP, LRE, ICS, SLD, ADHD, ODD, BIP, FBA, CBA, WISC, BASC, and countless others, I’m convinced I could hold a conversation in public with another special educator that would absolutely confound eavesdroppers.

I’m a longtime reader (and big fan) of Jim Gerl’s Special Education Law Blog, and last year he posted a footnote from a court decision that read, in part:

One suspects that regulators and bureaucrats love such jargon because it makes even simple matters cognizable only to the cognoscenti and thus enhances their power at the expense of people who only know English. Nevertheless, acronyms have so invaded IDEA practice that this judge, like others before him, is pretty much stuck with having to use them.

Jim then posed the question of whether the use (or overuse) of acronyms is an ethical issue in special education.  I absolutely believe it is, and I am absolutely guilty of being on the wrong side of it at times.

Every profession has jargon; it’s a shorthand that people who know the ecosystem use with others “in the know”.  I don’t ask my behavior specialist to conduct a functional behavior analysis; I ask her for an FBA, and it’s fine because we both know exactly what we mean when we use that term.  But that use of jargon can also be exclusionary, and while I believe it’s OK to use in that professional shorthand capacity, we must be doubly aware of our language choices when working with folks who do not live in “our bubble” in order to create an inclusive, welcoming environment.

Like I said, I’m hardly innocent.  I’ve become so accustomed to using that shorthand that I may use it when speaking with parents in IEP meetings, for example, when referring to ICS (In-Class Support) vs. OCR (Out-of-Class Replacement) classes.  I’ve been stopped and asked to clarify or explain myself, and while I’m happy to, I am disappointed in myself that I had to put someone in a position where I was so unclear they needed to stop me and ask for an explanation.  I’m sure it makes them feel excluded to some degree, which is never my intention, but is nevertheless the result.

Language should facilitate communication, not hinder it.  Jargon is OK to use when we are communicating with people who know the language.  When we are not, however, it is imperative that we shift linguistic gears and stop using acronyms unless we are 100% sure that everybody in the conversation knows what they mean.  If we can’t be sure, use plain English.  I try to be a self-aware, reflective professional, and this is an area I can improve upon.  At the very least, “forthright explanation of services” is an explicitly stated part of NASP’s professional ethics code for school psychologists, but you don’t need to see it in a formal document to know that you can’t have inclusive, team-oriented interactions unless everybody is speaking the same language.

Reference

Costa, A.L. & Kallick, B.  (2010).   It takes some getting used to: rethinking curriculum for the 21st century.  In H. H. Jacobs (Ed.), Curriculum 21: essential education for a changing world (pp. 210-226).  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Habits of Mind: Metacognition & Precision

This post is part of a series on sixteen “Habits of Mind” put forth by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick as being “necessary for success in school, work, and life” (Costa & Kallick, 2010, p. 212).

Thinking about your thinking (metacognition): Know your knowing!  Being aware of one’s own thoughts, strategies, feelings, and actions and their effects on others.

This was one of the primary reasons I started blogging – I wanted a space to reflect on my practice, share what worked and what didn’t, and welcome critique and conversation from my contemporaries around the world.  More recently, choosing to blog about the sixteen habits of mind was a way for me to further focus my self-reflection on the degree to which I engage these strategies in my personal and professional life.  Now, in this paragraph, I appear to be blogging about what I’m blogging about when I blog – is that meta-meta-meta-cognition or just navel-gazing?

At any rate, one way in which I would like to improve in this arena is to formalize time for my CST colleagues and I to debrief and reflect upon our practice and discuss areas for improvement.  I tend to do this more in isolation, but I think that’s at my own peril.  It’s one thing for me to go home and spout off on my blog about whatever, but I think collaborative reflection may hold us all a little more accountable.  It’s something we’ll have to fight to carve time out for, though – the rush of the daily workflow, as well as the little fires that need putting out here and there, conspires against us in this regard.

Striving for accuracy and precision: Check it again!  A desire for exactness, fidelity, craftsmanship, and truthfulness.

In my undergraduate teacher training program, I recall one of my student teaching seminar teachers telling us to proofread, proofread, proofread every last item we created, and to scrap it and start over if we found even a single error.  Thankfully, that isn’t quite as necessary in the computer age, but his point is well-taken – even though we’re all human, nothing ruins an educator’s credibility faster than typos or inaccurate information, especially in writing (and we English teachers are perhaps held to a higher standard than others in that regard!).

It’s a habit that, fortunately, my parents instilled in me long before I got to the end of my college career, almost to a fault.  When it comes to perfectionism, there’s a fine line between the good and bad flavors, and I admit to straying to the wrong side of the perfectionist tracks at times.  In my rapidly advancing age mid-thirties, however, I think that finding that balance is starting to come easier to me, simply through life experience and trial-and-error.

The case manager dimension to my job (which is unique to school psychologists in New Jersey, I believe; feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong) demands attention to detail and precision in order to demonstrate compliance with state and federal law, as well as to provide the best degree of service to students that I can.  This is usually documented in formal paperwork but also through case notes, conversation with colleagues about coordination of services, my administration of psychological and behavioral assessments, formal and informal data collection, and my face time with my students.  My almost-but-not-quite-except-for-sometimes neurotic perfectionism has served me well in this regard, even though I must admit, from time to time – much to my chagrin – to being only human.

References

Costa, A.L. & Kallick, B.  (2010).  It takes some getting used to: rethinking curriculum for the 21st century.  In H. H. Jacobs (Ed.), Curriculum 21: essential education for a changing world (pp. 210-226).  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Habits of Mind: Flexibility

This post is part of a series on sixteen “Habits of Mind” put forth by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick as being “necessary for success in school, work, and life” (Costa & Kallick, 2010, p. 212).

Thinking flexibly: Look at it another way!  Being able to change perspectives, generate alternatives, consider options.

Nothing quite drove home the necessity of flexibility to me quite like becoming a parent for the first time.  When my wife, camped out at her parents’ house in order to avoid catching my flu, called me to tell me her water broke, I was zonked out on medicine, halfway through Shaun of the Dead, and really looking forward to dozing off on the couch as the movie played.  From that point on, no matter what bright idea, schedule, or plans I came up with, the baby usually had his own agenda, which overrode everything else.  This was, of course, confounding to my wife and me, being the Type-A planaholics we are, but luckily we were able to adapt to this new way of thinking and become a little more “go with the flow” or at least I was I LOVE YOU HONEY.

This flexibility serves me well in my professional life as well as personal.  I believe I save myself a lot of angst and aggravation by accepting there are some things I just have zero control over.  So I scheduled two IEP meetings for this afternoon?  The blizzard that arrived in the middle of the night says otherwise.  What do you mean, he’s absent?  Doesn’t he know I have to finish this testing?!  Inconvenient, sure, but I find that skipping the “getting upset” part and going straight to the “let’s figure out an alternative solution” part is a more productive use of my energy and talents.

Flexibility also comes in handy in the case management portion of my job, in which I need to consider the needs, desires, and concerns of multiple stakeholders.  I can’t always make everyone perfectly happy all the time, but what I can do is ask questions and listen to all the responses to try to develop a solution that is at least acceptable to everyone.  What’s more, I’ve learned that sometimes asking the right questions is more important than having all the answers, as those questions will often spark something in others that I hadn’t considered, and that may lead us all to a better solution.

For me, a large part of becoming more flexible, in both my personal and professional lives, was becoming aware of my ego and how it influenced my actions.  In other words, I might have to ask myself, “Am I fighting for this solution because it’s the best one, or simply because it’s the one I came up with?”  Difficult to do, especially for a young man who knew everything.  It’s not always easy to remove yourself from a tense or heated situation and view it objectively, especially when you feel you’ve got a horse in that race.  It takes practice, or at least it did for me, but it’s worthwhile because as an educator, while I am an important part of the equation in any given situation, I am not the only one, nor should I be the focus of the outcome or implementation: that’s always the kids.

I still maintain some of my Type-A traits.  I am extremely anal-retentive organized and anal-retentive detail-oriented, and, at least at work, I am punctual (to the extent that the job allows me to be, anyway).  Losing some of my rigidity, however, has made me a more effective educator and a less stressed, if not better, parent.

References

Costa, A.L. & Kallick, B.  (2010).  It takes some getting used to: rethinking curriculum for the 21st century.  In H. H. Jacobs (Ed.), Curriculum 21: essential education for a changing world (pp. 210-226).  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.