This and That:

• Here is an email to you with the subject heading: “Buy a Tree. Save a Life.”  Some of our schools were involved last year, but I didn’t want to have each of you called regarding this so I asked that it go through me.  If you would like to be involved this year please feel free to give Crystal a call.

New Information:

• District and BEA leadership has been in conversations and trainings (remember Patrick Dolan speaking to us at the Riverhouse on Oct. 1?) around building a more collaborative approach of guiding our district called “Leading Together.”  This is an example of something being done fairly well, but where growth can still happen.  You will hear more about the broad context of this at our December Leadership, but I did want to let you know that I will begin sharing these weekly email communications with Don Stearns, as well as inviting him to attend our bi-monthly Horizontal meetings.  When we think about “team vs. tribe” I believe we can only get better if we do our work with transparency and honesty with those we work with – whether this is middle school to middle school or management and union.

• A recent NY Times article takes a stand regarding the work you are doing within your building, and we are in the district as a whole, around Student BLP.  This article, entitled: Why What You Learned in Preschool is Critical at Work, posits that social skills are as equally important in today’s work force as academic/technical skills are.  I have attached the entire article for you, but thought I’d get your curiosity engaged with these excerpts:
  • For all the jobs that machines can now do — whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food — they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.
  • Some economists and technologists see this trend as cause for optimism: Even as technology eliminates some jobs, it generally creates others. Yet to prepare students for the change in the way we work, the skills that schools teach may need to change. Social skills are rarely emphasized in traditional education.
  • Preschool classrooms, Mr. Deming (associate professor of education and economics at Harvard Univ.) said, look a lot like the modern work world. Children move from art projects to science experiments to the playground in small groups, and their most important skills are sharing and negotiating with others. But that soon ends, replaced by lecture-style teaching of hard skills, with less peer interaction.
  • James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that noncognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.
  • The extent to which jobs required social skills grew 24 percent between 1980 and 2012, he found, while jobs requiring repetitive tasks, like garbage collecting, and analytical tasks that don’t necessarily involve teamwork, like engineering, declined.

You are all well-deserving of the days ahead.  I truly hope you enjoy them.  As I consider the many things I am thankful for, know that I am definitely blessed to have the opportunity to work with all of you.  Looking forward to reconnecting with you after this break!

Jim