The Floor and The Ceiling

I was working with some brilliant people this week from The Highlander Institute who really challenged my thinking (which I totally love!). We were discussing standards and the way that teachers approach the standards and I was expressing that I felt that we were not pushing our higher students enough to really achieve at high levels. The response was eye opening. Are we looking at the standards as a floor or a ceiling? Wow! That was it! That summed up what I have been thinking about our approach to our higher students. When we look at the standards as a ceiling, our high students reach that ceiling and we, as practitioners, do not know necessarily what to do next or if we will have permission to do something that is outside of the standards, so we don't push too hard. If we shift our thinking and those standards become the floor - the baseline that we reach from - the possibilities are endless for us in terms of the ways we extend our students in their thinking and understanding.

What does it take for me as a practitioner to shift from the ceiling to the floor approach? I have to be able to go much deeper in my understanding of the standards and what they represent. I also have to have the autonomy (and the courage) to be able to pull away from "the script" and become more creative in my approach to the competencies in the standards. So, it goes back to having autonomy, mastery, and purpose in my work in order to feel confident enough to come "out of the box" and meet the needs of all of my students - including my higher students (Thanks, Daniel Pink!).

I am challenging myself and my teachers to re-think the way that we educate for the future. We are looking into blended approaches and more digital entry points for our students. It is scary to think about teaching reaching to children in a different way than we are used to. Blended classrooms do not look like traditional classrooms. But if we are standing on the floor and reaching up, rather than always hitting the ceiling, we have to take the risk. Our students have unlimited access to technology outside of school and the options are changing daily. When we think about the skills that our students will need in their futures - collaboration skills, the ability to access information quickly, being able to adapt to change, and communication skills - these are all embedded in a blended learning approach. Are we actually holding our students back because we are not comfortable with different approaches as adults?

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As we move forward and change the way we think about what school should look like, we are in brand new territory. This takes courage, vision, and confidence - it may not work on our first attempt. But aren't we trying to teach our children those same things? Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a mind, once stretched by a new idea, can never return to its original dimensions. This is exactly what a turnaround school needs more of.