Duh

Last month I attended a national conference with independent school educators from around the country and there was a special pre-conference two-day session for heads of schools. There were two fancy New York Times-selling authors who key-noted, sharing their new findings as to the cutting-edge practices schools should consider implementing on behalf of children and adolescents in 2023, in our post-pandemic context.

I listened eagerly, full-on nerd mode, eager to be pushed in my thinking. I glanced at my canvas tote bag with the hardbound brightly colored book, gifted to us upon entering the giant hall. I love free stuff. Notebook out, my Pilot-Precise-V5 was ready to roll. I was eager to be stretched.

Instead, I found myself creating a column entitled, “Duh.”

“Eagerly listening” turned into “incredulously listening,” as these two experts espoused “new” ideas, not actual new ideas. Their ideas were the ideas that progressive educators well over 100 years ago were researching, testing, and promoting. I remember feeling this exact same way some 20 years ago when the early aughts promoted “21st Century Learning,” which ended up being essentially 20th century progressive education learning.

The speakers would espouse an idea, and I’d add it to my “Duh” Column. I admit there was an arrogance, a know-it-all-ness to their speaking style, so making this list productively channeled my annoyance, I now realize in retrospect. Here’s the list:

●      Social emotional learning / Relationships more central to belonging and purpose
●      Experiential learning
●      Mentorship
●      Partner with organizations in the community
●      Emphasize skills
●      Co-teaching models

As they went on (not once proactively mentioning social justice and equity, a glaring omission), progressive educators in the crowd got cheeky behind the scenes. I received a text from a head in the Bay Area, “What is this, 1989?”

I took intentional breaths. While I try to navigate learning opportunities with the mantra, “Approach with a beginner’s mind,” in this situation, I found myself approaching with a grumpy mind – annoyed by these speakers’ discounting of the history of progressive education and progressive educator forefathers and foremothers who came before.

Not one to stay grumpy long, I moved on, eventually attending excellent workshops on topics ranging from establishing comprehensive Auxiliary Programing to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racist values as a white head of school to understanding the strengths and specific challenges of small schools. My life-long-learning well got all kinds of filled up.

A week following the conference, however, I was unexpectedly brought back to my “Duh” column. The list took on new glorious meaning.

I had the opportunity to gather with 3 Westland alumni in Berkeley, CA – Wendy Hershey from the Class of 1958, Larry Moskowitz from the Class of 1964, and Nancy Dulberg from the Class of 1965. I recorded hours of conversation, posing questions such as, “What makes Westland, Westland?” and “Music! What songs do you love most?” and “What teachers and staff do you remember? What do you remember about them?” This experience was a professional highlight of my 25 years in education.

A renewed initiative Jennine Rodriguez and I are embarking upon is to document Westland history through recording alumni reflections. Such recordings will be housed in our archival program with California State Northridge. It has been satisfying to connect with alumni (and alumni parents) in such a deep, meaningful way, most recently in Berkeley. There was a cozy comfort among us. 

Listening to Larry, Nancy, and Wendy reflect on their transformative Westland education, I quickly realized they were pulling out and unpacking the exact concepts I captured in my “Duh” column. They told stories, analyzed, and peeled back layers and layers of their experience in education from almost 60 years ago with potent detail.

My grouchy “Duh” column melted through their stories and maybe a little alchemy. The list became Westland gold, embodying beauty and brightness of progressive education.

Here is an excerpt of the “Duh” list, anew. I’ve expanded and captured some of the alumni’s insightful take on their childhood and their education:

Social emotional learning / Relationships more central to belonging and purpose:

When asked about what first comes to mind when they think “Westland,” one of them shared “group-centered” – that “everyone is made to feel important.” Yes, we must emphasize relationships, and create space to tend to relationships – peer to peer, teacher to child, and also parents connecting and collaborating within the life of the school. Social emotional learning isn’t a hot, topical “add-on” to check off or get at. It is the currency of everything we do.

Westland’s social-emotional learning has strong citizenship in our mission statement. Teachers think of children’s identity as learners and community members as being inextricably connected to the group experience: “Each child at Westland has a commitment to their group; each group has a commitment to the school, and the school has an important commitment to the world around us.” Nancy, Larry, and Wendy knew this and know this, and they each went into depth about their care for each other within a community of learners.

When schools prioritize social emotional learning, it doesn't mean that children’s experience becomes somehow conflict-free. One of the alumni talked about “being teased mercilessly” by a fellow Group Sixer on the Group Six campout. I was told that the work of repair began after the return to campus, with a teacher following up and checking in with a simple, “Are you doing okay?” because she sensed something was amiss.

One of my cornerstones of parenting is something a mentor once told me – that the healthiest of families get along for about one-third of the time, are in conflict for about one third of the time, and are repairing for about one-third of the time. I wonder what the healthiest ratio of school climates is? I don’t know, but what I am confident about is that there is equilibrium - a lot of it - and there is conflict too, because of the patterns of child development and the boundary pushing that we witness each school year. So there must be repair opportunities, and direct instruction on the tools children need to be in relationships with friends and classmates.

When we prioritize social emotional learning, we prioritize creating time and space to help children do this repair work. Children must learn how to ask, “Are you okay?” when they’ve impacted a friend negatively (intentionally or unintentionally); they must learn how to check in with adults when they are unable to handle a situation on their own; they must internalize the humility to account – “I shouldn’t have done that” or “I shouldn’t have said that” – and figure out what boundaries need to be reestablished moving forward. When children are taught these tools, the equilibrium becomes more frequent and steady, because children learn effective ways to be connected within the social-emotional ecosystem of the group. One of the alumni’s first associative words when hearing Westland was “unity.” I believe this feeling of unity is due to the prioritization of social-emotional learning as a natural current of the learning cycle.

Experiential Learning: Westland’s mission reads “Hands on” and that is what the alumni described in detail. Reading, building, writing plays, and singing – the learning was described as “sensory” and “full body.” I believe that DECADES later, many-a-Westland-adult-alum can describe content and culminations with precise detail because of the sensory, full-body, experiential learning. One alumni brought in work, and together they poured through it: scripts, photographs of an original production and of woodworking projects, literary magazines, song books, research papers, drawings, and photographs of Sings and culminations in action.

One aspect of these graduates’ visceral, experiential learning was a pre-Zinn yearlong “Group E” (5th and 6th grade) study of U.S. History from the perspective of Black Americans, connecting to the Civil Rights Act which was in full action. It was the 1963-1964 school year, and Westland was housed in the basement of Temple Isaiah, on Pico in West L.A.They shared that their beloved teacher Clare Rodney, commuting north, would stop by LAX and pick up newspapers from all across the country, to open up ongoing discussion about bias in the media, perspective taking, and how different geographic regions of our country were responding to the Civil Rights Activist Medgar Evers’ murder. One alumni reflected, “The fact that we learned about the assassination as well as the biases in news reporting is noteworthy, if not sort of staggering (in a very good and important way).”

The young learners were riveted. This class was described as lighting a fire for living out social justice and for beginning to understand fairness and equity. Clare Rodney used to let one of the alumni take home her copy of A Pictorial History of Black Americans (curated by Langston Hughes, Milton Meltzer and C. Eric Lincoln) each night to pour through. They shared that while Westland didn’t teach the children what to think, it did teach them how to think from a progressive, socio-political worldview. Through the songs and projects, through the literature and the writing (research-based and creative), the children learned to center workers and the underrepresented. They learned to ask questions.

Part of experiential learning for these alumni was (and I would say for Westland children today) is immersing themselves in the history or the world of work that they are studying in order to engage with the content. The skills then naturally follow. The children need the skills to communicate and teach their expertise. If children care deeply about their study – Civil Rights, Sustainability, how food gets to their tables, how water becomes more accessible, how we meaningfully connect with our neighbors (and so on), they care deeply about learning and meaning making…for the entirety of their lives. This is why experiential learning is imperative. As one alumni said about Westland’s social studies integrated curriculum: “It’s really learning. Or maybe real learning.”

Mentorship: During my visit in Berkeley, Wendy, Nancy, and Larry quoted their teachers often. I was struck by how they knew their teachers. One teacher came to mind as they sweetly chuckled, remembering how he would stoically remind the group: “Self…Control…” to reestablish calm in the classroom again. One of the graduates said that the crux of it all was the teachers because they were continually “focused on children, and how children learn.” I’ll note here that Nancy’s mother and Wendy’s mother were teachers and eventually directors at Westland, which added to their knowledge base of their understanding of Westland at that time.

While we don’t actively use the word mentorship (nor do we plan to really), mentorship is what is actively happening: providing just enough thoughtful guidance for children to go off on their own exploration of learning pursuits, posing questions to invite children to critically think, inviting children’s questions, direct instructing, stretching, enthusiastically encouraging, and reflecting on the learning so children know to begin it all again.

There is a parallel process happening in our adult community too. Colleagues with colleagues, staff with parents, and parents with parents as well as staff. One of the perplexing holes I notice post pandemic is how we restart the natural and maybe invisible mentorship that happens in parent committees, on hot lunch teams, and even just day to day. Mentorship, we discovered, is an essential component of fully living out the parent experience at Westland. (We’ll get there!)

Again, this kind of learning and collaboration marked by mutuality and reciprocity among a mentor and a learner was embodied by the alumni’s reflections on their teacher Clare, who was noted as having a gentleness, and a knack for “knowing how every child ticked.” Larry said, “Because she knew each individual child so well, she could foster the connectivity and unity of the group.” Larry admitted that even as he encounters the hardest moments in his work as an attorney in Family Law, that it is Clare’s voice he hears all these years later.

They gushed about other teachers as well, even their school director at the time, Alice Powell. One of them said, “She was brilliant.” The alumni could vividly picture their teacher Artie Parks, tears welling in her eyes, reading to them and their Group Two classmates the final moments of Charlotte’s Web. They described in detail one teacher jiggling chalk at the chalkboard, the sign that she was waiting for more ideas and would keep on waiting until the new ideas came.

Emphasize Skills - When asked for the word that comes to mind when hearing “Westland,” another one of the graduates said, “Integration” – how the multiple studies connected and fed each other and multiple disciplines. These connections transformed how they pursued learning. I’ll note here that Nancy became an educator of educators at the university level. Her dissertation recommended integration and focused on perspective-taking and empathy. It was titled: "Perspective-taking and Empathy in History and Social Studies: A study of Fifth Grade Students' Thinking.” A Westland tale.

The alumni could recite passages from their play they co-wrote, The Tide is Risen, for the culmination on that pivotal study mentioned previously. They could talk about their teacher Vita Pavlich and how she taught the “New Math - Greater Cleveland Math Program” at Westland – and how they realized as middle schoolers post-Westland that they understood how a problem works, not just how to solve the problem through a memorized algorithm. They could describe in detail how they “built a harbor” at school as part of their City Study. In some sense, they talked as if these projects occurred yesterday.

As I synthesize our conversation, I realize that Larry, Nancy, and Wendy were describing how they learned how to be learners. And they learned how to be learners as an integral part of a community. Lastly, they learned that the responsibility of learning invites them to share these skills and knowledge in new contexts and new communities beyond Westland.

***

With a month+ under my belt, I’ve simmered down a bit when I think about how annoyed I got in that giant conference room with the NY Times best-selling authors. 

I am inviting myself to think more expansively, to create capaciousness for celebrating the fact that ideals that my Westland colleagues and I have devoted our adult lives to – progressive education – are being touted as the next big thing.

I realize in retrospect that I am letting a competitive streak (“I knew this first!” and “Who do these guys think they are?”) interfere with the fact that maybe I should be pointing out their work. I can be happy that the mainstream is coming around to understand that schools marked by testing, competitive frameworks, passive learning, rote memorization, more-is-more content coverage, extrinsic motivation through grades (and eventual college placement frenzy), and predominantly individual achievement are not serving our children and society as beneficially as schools like Westland are.

How do I open up our practices at Westland to people for whom this thinking is new. “Duh” can be switched to, “Yes! You’re Getting This!” We are excited to share.

I believe it's quality progressive education that all children deserve in elementary school. (I would say beyond too, but that can be for another time.) Children deserve creative spaces full of songs that connect. Ample play for children to build, explore, and repair. Block building. Connection seeking and connection making. Teachers who honor and respect children and childhood. And conversely, teachers who are honored and respected as is their profession. Schools where democratic principles are lived out at the many levels where decisions are being made. Environments that are supportive, happy, non-rushed. Schools where pluralism grows out of the rich soil of dialogue, perspective-taking, and the PH balance of “It’s okay to disagree, it’s not okay to blame or shame.” Schools that are rooted in humanity and goodness and maybe even forgiveness when things don’t go just as planned. Schools like Westland.

Larry said it at the end of hours and hours of dialogue: “Westland is good because it's good, not because it wants to appear to be good.” So maybe let’s all commit to living out this goodness from a deep, intrinsic place. I commit to living out this goodness as a learner, leader, and as a citizen. I commit to social emotional learning, experiential skill-based learning, and mentoring. I commit to more children having access to progressive education practices and ideals. Children deserve this education. Children deserve the Duh List.