Principles vs rules

 

from Burn Your Rule Book and Unlock the Power of Principles

I've long advocated for principles over rules; for guidelines over directives; for asking students to think about their actions and behaviors over simply following directions.

I have found that library users need three behavioral guidelines (Beating the Study Hall Syndrome, 1995):

•  be doing something productive
•  be doing it in a way that allows others to be productive
•  be respectful of other people and their property.

Technology users need to follow three ethical guidelines: 

• Privacy - I will protect my privacy and respect the privacy of others.
• Property - I will protect my property and respect the property of others.
• a(P)propriate Use - I will use technology in constructive ways and in ways which do not break the rules of my family, church, school, or government. 

 I have three commandments for a successful library program:

• Thou shall develop shared ownership of the library and all it contains.
• Thou shall have written annual objectives tied directly to school and curriculum goals and bend all thy efforts toward achieving them.
• Thou shall take thy light out from under thy damn bushel and share with others all the wonders thou doest perform.

To maintain a "radical center of education" philosophy, I have ten guidelines:

1. Adopt an “and” not “or” mindset.
2. Look for truth and value in all beliefs and practices.
3. Respect the perspective of the individual. 
4. Recognize one size does not fit all (kids or teachers).
5. Attend to attitudes.
6. Understand that the elephant can only be eaten one bite at a time.
7. Make sure everyone is moving forward, not just the early adopters.
8. Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.”
9. Believe measurement is good, but that not everything can be measured.
10. Know and keep your core values.

The primary difference between rules and principles, of course, is that those following principles must actually think about their actions. They must interpret both the guideline and their own behaviors. 

Like all interpretations, there can be disagreement. In the first set of principles, what one student or teacher might consider "productive" might not be considered productive by the librarian or principal. I have found that simply asking why an activity could be considered productive helps clarify the situation and resolved any conflict that the ambiguity might create.

A world in which we all consider our behaviors and actions rather than simply follow rules allows for thoughtfulness, empathy, equity, and creativity. Let's give all our students the gift of good decision-making by stressing principles rather than rules.

An Advent of Gratitude (belated)

 

Each time I experience a family gathering, I am reminded of how fortunate I am. We are a drama-free group who all genuinely seem to not just love, but actually like each other, which is, I believe, more rare.

A Facebook posting a few weeks ago also reminded me of my fortunate station in life. While belated for this season, it may be worth reading now - and bookmarking for next year. It's a good reminder to me and perhaps it will be for you as well of the many, many things old, white, middle class guys like myself simply take for granted.

An Advent of Gratitude

 Most Advent Calendars present us with a gift each day leading up to Christmas. The purpose of this Advent of Gratitude is to remind us of the gifts we already have, what we often take for granted, what we can and should be grateful for. Each daily reminder includes a suggestion for payment, a small monetary gift that in 24 days will grow into a donation, payable to a charity of your choice. At the end of this challenge, please donate to a charity, preferably somewhere local, that serves those less fortunate than you.

Day 1- Pay .25 for each woman in your family who graduated from high school.

Day 2- If you rode in a car today, pay $1. Pay $2 if you drove the car.

Day 3- Count the light switches in your house. Pay .25 for each one.

Day 4- How many pairs of shoes and/or boots do you own? Pay .10 per pair.

Day 5-If you have never experienced having your electricity or heat shut off due to inability to pay the bill, pay $5.

Day 6-If you have traveled outside of the United States, pay $2. Pay an extra $2 if you have traveled within the past 6 months.

Day 7- Pay $2 if you’ve bought a gourmet coffee in the past month.

Day 8-If you went to work today and earned an income, pay $2.

Day 9- Pay $1 for every refrigerator/freezer in your home.

Day 10- Count every cell phone in your home. Pay $1 per phone.

Day 11- If you graduated from college, pay $1 per degree.

Day 12- How many televisions do you have? Pay $1 per TV. Pay $1 extra if you subscribe to Netflix.

Day 13- Open your pantry. If there is more food than you can consume in 2 days, pay $2.

Day 14- Pay $2 if you have more than one bank account. Pay an extra $2 if you have investments that earn income.

Day 15- If you slept in a warm bed last night, pay $2.

Day 16- If you have visited your doctor this past year, for something relatively minor, pay $2.

Day 17- Count the faucets in your home. Pay .50 per faucet.

Day 18- If you’ve bought gifts for others this season, pay $1. If you added ‘a little something’ for yourself, pay an extra $1.

Day 19- If your home has more than 25 books, pay $1. If more than 50, $2.

Day 20- If your parents had a high school education, pay $1. If one attended college or university, pay $2. $3 if both attended.

Day 21- If you are traveling more than 65 miles for Christmas festivities, pay $1. Pay $2 if you are confident your vehicle will get you there.

Day 22- Count the coats in your closet. Pay .25 per coat or jacket.

Day 23-Pay $2 if you can name more than 5 people who love you.

Day 24- If you have a pet, pay $2. Pay an additional $2 if you have more than one.

Donation time!

There is an old saying about people who believe their lives have been home runs, when in reality they have been born on third base. I would guess most of the people reading this post have been born, if not on third base, first or second base. 

So I should anti-up, not just at holiday time, but every day of the year. And be simply grateful.

Our local top 10 tech trends for 2017

After a 2016-17 year of major changes in our district, including building grade-realignment, HS 1:1 Chromebook rollout, building 27 new HS classrooms, and significant curricular reorganizations, we have had a chance this year to take a breath and work purposely on some technology initiatives that will have a long term positive impact on our students, families, and staff. A couple are reactive, but most are proactive. I see these as trends that will continue...

A short review:

1. Increased scrutiny of data security and data privacy. Two serious data breaches in neighboring districts, a serious Internet outage last winter, and lot of press on data privacy have resulted in our district paying a good deal more attention to these issues. One major effort is a comprehensive network audit this fall and winter. We've also done formal training for clerical and administrative staff. (We trusting Minnesotans are especially susceptible to phishing scams.)
2. Increased ease of access to resources. As we provide an increasing number of digital resources to our students (Schoology, MyOn Reader, SeeSaw, Discover Education, etc), we are working to provide the automation of an expanded single sign on process and a tile-based launch tool. Giving the little ones the ability to login via a QR Code seems to be working.
3. Increased access to e-resources with our public libraries. Thanks to the enthusiasm and cooperation of our local public libraries, we have given all our high school students fine-free library cards and aggressively promoted their great offerings - especially those that can be accessed digitally. The plan is to extend the digital library card program to all our middle school students this winter. The other schools in our county are now working on this as well!
4. Increased emphasis on cultural literacy and digital equity. A greatly expanded hotspot checkout program for our secondary students thanks to an award from TMobile is helping assure that all our students can get to the educational resources they need at home. We are increasing our efforts to make sure communications about technology opportunities goes home in both Somali and Spanish not just English. Our library book selection is done with an eye on finding books more in keeping with our schools' diverse populations.
5. Increased communication with the home. Parent technology nights, Family Coding Night, messages via our Communications Department, and events/tables/agenda items at open houses and back-to-school nights have grown this year. We need parents to be our partners! We also offered three "Digital Parenting" classes for parents wanting to learn more about safe and ethical Internet use. Parents will support good technology use providing they understand what good technology use is.
6. Reenvisioning our library spaces and offerings. New furnishings, the elimination of computer labs, serious weeding, and the rollout of makerspaces are transforming our media centers K-12. The increased amount of technology and the resources it provides within the classroom is asking us to re-think our library program roles - how to we remain integral to the goals of our buildings. We are also attempting to escape the scarcity mentality by increasing the number of materials that can be checked out by elementary kids.
7. Increased recognition that kids need creativity and autonomy. The "stuff" in the makerspaces is being successfully deployed by our librarians, media EAs, and digital learning specialists (all in collaboration with classroom teachers.) It's impossible not to be excited yourself when seeing the excitement of our students working with a wide-variety of cool tools that emphasize coding, systems thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.
8. Increased need for interpersonal skills by technicians. Thanks to the encouragement of a district-wide initiative to make all staff more culturally proficient, our tech meetings include more than discussions about technology. Empathy, good communications, and team work our critical to our success as much as good technical skills.
9. Review and clarification of filtering and permissions on student devices. With the rollout of 1:1 Chromebooks for each of our 6-8 students, we are working to establish a balanced approach to permissions and allowed resources, especially during the school day. We are looking harder at our use agreements with providers of online tools that are asking for parental permissions for deployment. Do kids need access to the Chrome task manager and should they be able to download extensions and apps to their Chromebooks? All up for discussion.
10. Acknowledgement of "standard work. I don't that we have had a single training session on the GSutie products, our SIS Gradebook, or LMS fundamentals at the HS level. Happily tech PD is now mostly cohort based at the secondary level and embedded in the elementary with our digital learning specialists working 1 on 1 with teachers. It is interesting to see more of our staff training (tech and standard curriculum) move online through video conferencing and the use of the LMS (Schoology).

As Calvin reflects in the opening quote, we don't often take the time to enjoy "where we are." For me, this past year has been rewarding because much of our department's work has had a real and direct benefit to our students, our staff, and our families - mostly due to the dedication and smarts of my wonderful staff.

Too often I get caught up in the petty annoyances of the day (the cell phone bill is wrong again!), concern about the future (our Internet provider may be closing shop), and organizational challenges (who will do the complex data integration work we desperately need.) I sometimes lose focus that our infrastucture and administrative programs are critical to providing a foundation on which our student work can be built. 

You'd think that after doing this work for over 25 years, I'd be a hell of a lot better at it!

What were the trends you saw in your district this year? Please share.