When I was a classroom teacher, I spent several years as the Model United Nations coach.  Each year, I would work with an eager group of our IB students who wanted the MUN experience that is common in many international schools around the world.  We took students to conferences in England, Ireland, France, & Greece, and seeing my students compete and interact with students from some of the top schools around the world was always a highlight.  This was before my wife and I had kids of our own, and together we would chaperone the trips.  Once our oldest daughter was born, I only traveled with MUN one more time before turning over the assignment to a different teacher, as it became too difficult for me to justify traveling for a week without my wife and newborn.  

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a meeting with one of our seniors who was there to tell me about the annual Lincoln MUN and their intent to host a virtual conference this year.  Not only were they moving forward with the conference, but it was going to be a special one.  This year marks the 25^th year that Lincoln has sponsored the conference, which was also the first MUN conference in Costa Rica.  Our secretary general asked me to shared some recorded remarks for the opening ceremony, so I eagerly began reviewing the committees and topics and preparing some thoughts for the conference.  I shared with both our students and our longtime MUN advisor, Ms. Hutchcroft, that I had spent several years as the MUN sponsor and was a huge fan of the program.  

For those who aren’t familiar with Model UN, it is very much like a model congress or mock senate, where students assume the identities of real policymakers and practice the parlimentary procedures of these deliberative bodies.  Students are assigned to represent a specific country, and must research selected issues so they can advocate for the interests and positions of their respective country’s when they come to the conference.  The program doesn’t water down the issues either.  Students eagerly debate and craft resolutions to address real-world issues, whether the topic be nuclear proliferation, genocide in Darfur, or the global response to a worldwide pandemic.  It’s as strong a program as I have seen to encourage authentic academic discourse amongst young people, and to give them ownership of the process of learning.  It’s a tremendously powerful way to encourage student leadership.  Students engage in impromptu speeches, draft policy resolutions, and conduct in the moment research.  

Just over a week ago, my now 12 year old daughter informed me that she was getting ready for the Lincoln MUN conference.  I was stunned.  I had no idea she was interested or had signed up to participate.  Honestly, I don’t remember talking much about MUN with our kids, and while I was obviously aware of the upcoming conference, I hadn’t pushed it or even mentioned it to my daughter.  So, imagine my surprise when I found myself helping her write her first position paper last week.  She proudly told me she was the only 6^th grader participating, and had been assigned to represent the United Arab Emirates on the topic of Human Trafficking.  Quite the initial foray into MUN.

Watching my daughter this weekend, at home but dressed in her best, was a little surreal for me as a dad.  My daughter spent hours engaging with young people from all over Central America and the world, talking about what should be done to address the horrors of human trafficking and the sexual exploitation fo women and children.  I heard all the old concepts that I had almost forgotten – preambulatory clauses, operative clauses, mediated caucuses, and the ever important motions to break for lunch.  From all appearances, my daughter enjoyed herself.  She had a couple of moments of true panic when called on to speak or confronted on a topic, but she pushed through and continued to engage, and most importantly, try again.   It was an incredible thing to watch.  

Our long time preschool principal, Ms. Woodbridge, announced last week that she will be leaving at the end of the school year.  It’s a big loss for our school community.  As I met with her and our preschool teachers on Friday morning, I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the things that I have learned from this powerful educator over the past 8 months since I arrived at Lincoln.  Admittedly, I’ve had to learn a lot about preschool just in the past few years.  Yes, I have 6 children of my own, so perhaps my house sometimes feels like a preschool, but there is a big difference between coordinating the safety, development, and learning of hundreds of 3-5 year olds, and having kids of your own.  I taught in the high school classroom, and then served as a high school principal.  While I spent time on the leadership team of a middle school, and have experience tutoring elementary age students, it wasn’t until my last role as the Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning that I was able to really immerse myself in matters of early childhood education.  I learned a lot in that role, and now as the General Director at Lincoln, my education has continued as I’ve learned from Ms. Woodbridge and her dedicated team.  Here are just a few of the major takeaways from our time working together.

Sweat the Small Stuff

So everywhere you look, we are surrounded by reminders not to sweat the small stuff.  Well, that’s a nice idea, but when you are taking care of 3, 4, and 5 year olds, you’ve got to have the small stuff locked in.  How do you ensure the safety of every little person as they make their way from car to classroom?  How do you manage supervision, bathroom breaks, and snack time?  How do you ensure cleanliness and safety when little people tend to have their hands on everything?  As we prepared for coming back to school in hybrid learning mode, it was the preschool that often led out on logistical questions that perhaps we had not entirely considered.  

Trust comes 1 student at a time

Ms. Woodbridge seems to know every little person’s name.  When they get out of the car she is there to greet them by name, walking alongside as each child goes to wash his or her hands.  She engages each student, asking about their day and what they are looking forward to learning about.    She similarly greets parents, saying hello and often asking follow-up questions based on something she knows about each individual student.  The level of personal engagement is remarkable, and it sets the tone for the rest of the school.  Our parents have come to trust Ms. Woodbridge and her team at a deep level, as each day they send their most precious little humans into the school for another day of learning, confident that we are paying attention to the details and considering the unique needs of each student.  That trust has been earned over time, and the preschool has driven a foundation of trust that we draw on until the day our students graduate.    

Developmentally Minded

The level of concern for the development of our youngest learners has been apparent in every conversation with Ms. Woodbridge during the pandemic.  She reminds me constantly that for our preschool students, virtual learning is simply not adequate.  Of course we are proud of the virtual program that our students have had at all grade levels during the physical closure of the school, but Ms. Woodbridge has been a tireless advocate for getting our kids back on campus.  In Costa Rica, we are limited to having 50% of students in our classroom spaces to allow for adequate social distancing.  When we discovered that we would have a small handful of additional spaces on the campus, Ms. Woodbridge was quick to advocate that we fill them with our youngest learners.  She and her team developed a system that divided each preschool and kinder class into two classroom spaces, rotating teachers and assistants in a way that provides continuity of instruction, supervision, and allows all students to be back on campus.  She points out how large and fine motor development, emotional wellness, and holistic development all rely on caring, and often in-person instruction and services.  

Last week, I found myself at the campus of Texas Tech University in Costa Rica, co-facilitating a design session focused on developing an innovation center near the campus.  We had brought people from a variety of organizations in Costa Rica who are focused on building the infrastructure within the country to support and develop innovative and entrepreneurial thinkers.  We had representatives from secondary schools, technical schools, and higher education.  We had key business partners who shared their successes and failures in the recent past working to strengthen the pipeline of talent.  We had non-profit organizations who work to identify and then support students from all socioeconomic backgrounds for careers in STEM.  We had professional designers and full-time makers and tinkerers who have created spaces to share their craft.  

We had a rich conversation about what it takes to design and create an innovation space that builds individual young people’s skills while also successfully networking those young people with organizations addressing real world problems.  With the proliferation of maker spaces, innovation labs, and incubators, it can be easy to get lost in all the options.  Some of those spaces fail to live up to their potential, becoming little more than a beautifully designed space but without the energy of actual innovation and idea development.  At the Lincoln School, we are also in the process of designing and building an innovation center, and so I was eager to engage in the activity to deepen my own understanding and potentially avoid some of the common pitfalls in launching such a space.  Here are a few of the big ideas we were working with:

• The physical space itself is vanity – it’s the content of what happens in the space that matters.
• Don’t over design the space – you need an open, blank space, like a canvas
• What is the design for human attention – what human resources will be available within the space to foster and support idea development and encourage resilience in the face of challenge?
• Who is your target audience for the space, and how can you make the space inclusive and accessible?  Why would people want to spend time there?  
• Provide a mix of private and shared spaces – you need both a place for collaboration and a place to quietly work through ideas and concepts.  
• You will need more than just advanced technology (i.e. computers, 3D printers, etc.).  What about more basic technology essential to the prototyping process (i.e. sewing machines, table saws, etc.)?
• How do you build a full ecosystem to develop ideas and ventures?  How do you bring resources into the space? – i.e. organizations with real problems that need solving, office hours with legal , tax, branding, logistics, and financial experts, etc.

The tricky thing with education organizations is that we aren’t fully exposed to the harsh realities entrepreneurs and social innovators face when moving ideas and innovating outside the protected space of the classroom.  Our vision is to create an innovation space that not only equips students with the problem solving skills to identify problems around them and then design feasible solutions, but to also help them develop the resilience to move through uncertainty towards sustainable innovations that have a measurable impact on the community and world around them.  

Rigor is a word that is often bandied about in education, but which is rarely defined.  There are two aspects of the term that I think are important to consider when thinking about schools and learning.  First, rigor is often associated with high levels of cognitive processing or complexity.  In 1956, Benjamin Bloom published his famous Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, providing the educational world with a widely-used framework for evaluating the level of thinking associated with an instructional task.  Bloom’s original taxonomy has been updates and modified over the years, but the basic precept has stuck that learning tasks can be organized by the amount or complexity of thinking they require from the brain.  In many educator’s minds, rigor refers to this “level of thinking.”

Second, rigor often refers to the level of disciplinary precision associated with a statement of knowledge or demonstration of skill.  If you look up the word “rigor” in the dictionary, for example, you will see definitions such as “strict precision” or “exactness.”  In this context, rigor refers to an intensity of scrutiny in evaluation.  What qualifies as rigor in this sense would be defined by the base of knowledge and skill used to assess the work of professionals within the content discipline.  We would look to historians to outline for us what it means to successfully conduct a rigorous source analysis, or we would look to scientists to define how to carry out a rigorous experimental procedure.  A rigorous assessment, therefore, would be one requiring that the student demonstrate a sophisticated and accurate level of knowledge and expertise on the topic at hand.  

During the early years of the AVID program, rigor was explained to students, among other things, as content that was “provocative and ambiguous.” I love that way of thinking about rigor.  Students have to learn how to navigate and make meaning when it isn’t given to them explicitly.  That can be a very unsettling feeling.  Students are very much accustomed to having the details and context given to them directly, and often panic when they have to navigate difficult questions and ideas on their own.  

These dueling ways of thinking about rigor came to my mind earlier this morning when I was in our IB Studio Art class, watching students create their artwork.  They had been presented with a timely and compelling task – to artistically represent the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic through the medium of a sculptured mask.  In other words, they must use the human face as the canvas for expressing the emotionality and impact of our globally disrupted lives.  Certainly a provocative and ambiguous task.   

But the rigor of this task pushed even deeper.  Students were learning to create and sculpt in a new medium, and the teacher was pressing them hard to master the relevant skills.  I watched as students struggled to form the shapes that they had captured in their design sketches.  In one moment, the teacher took up the clay modeling tools to show a student how best to shape a human eye.  The teacher provided a personalized think-aloud for the student, demonstrating how to utilize the molding tool to capture the appropriate proportions and shape.  Then, after she had done the work, the teacher smoothed over her work, erasing the progress she had made.  The student gasped.  I had to try not to laugh when seeing the obvious disappointment on the student’s face when she realized she would have to do the work herself.  “Now you try” was the directive the teacher gave before moving on to another student.  The teacher had shown what success looked like – with the corresponding precision and skill of an expert – and was asking the student to do the same.  

I overheard another conversation with a student who was struggling to get the design features of the sketch onto the sculptured face.  In this case, the teacher watched patiently, and then declared.  “Listen, you’re not drawing, if you want to draw it then you’re using the wrong medium.  You’re better off with pencil and paper for that.  You’re creating volume and shape, and it’s a different set of tools.”  

Sometimes, we tend to think about arts classrooms as soft or easy.  Elective classes.  We use euphemisms like “the hard sciences” to point out that some subject areas are just more intellectually demanding than others, or so we believe.  

The interesting thing is that in my work as an administrator, I have often found that arts classrooms are the spaces where students are being pushed the hardest to confront ambiguity, develop new skills, and then share the resulting outcomes publicly for scrutiny and feedback and further revision.  It’s some of the most rigorous work happening in schools.