Our oldest daughter attended kindergarten at Marshall, one of the smallest elementary schools in San Francisco Unified located in the heart of the Mission District.  We came to adore this small community of barely more than 200 students.  One of my favorite parts of the school happened each morning as parents and students alike gathered on the playground for the morning meeting.  This schoolwide, daily ritual brought everyone together to sing, laugh, give a few brief announcements, and kick off the school day as an entire community.  Marshall is a dual language school, with much of the student population from immigrant families from different countries in Central America.  The schoolwide dual language program attracted a modest number of both white and black families from around the city who wanted their children to learn Spanish.  The scene outside the school each morning was a beautiful one of integration and community building.  

Morning meetings are a somewhat common practice in preschools and elementary schools.  When I moved south to Santa Ana, the practice had moved from a schoolwide experience on many campuses, to a classroom affair.  When I walked onto one of our largest campuses one morning not long into my new job there and came upon a large community morning meeting, I soon learned that the principal was also a recent transplant from San Francisco Unified and was continuing the tradition.  Those types of experiences became rarer and rarer, as we implemented safety protocols that slowed down family and community access to schools amidst reports of estranged relatives attending events and homeless people roaming campuses.  Ensuring the safety of students on campus can make it undertstandably difficult to welcome anyone who wants to walk through the front gates.  

And now the COVID-19 pandemic adds yet another challenge to building community on campus.  At my current school, we don’t allow parents onto campus at all unless they have an appointment.  Around the world, morning meetings, classroom book reading, and other events that bring students, families and staff together, have been even further disrupted.  

Despite the challenges schools face to connect with families and build community, teachers and staff continue to push for strong practices that help students connect each day.  In our classrooms at Lincoln, each preschool and elementary day starts with the morning meeting.  As I walk classrooms in the morning, I get to peek in and spend a few minutes with students as they start the school day together in song and smiles.  Last week I found myself holding a tree pose with 3 year-olds.  I’m still a big fan of the morning meeting, and the opportunity it provides students to connect with each other, center themselves in the classroom, and prepare for the learning of the day.  In fact, it’s a practice that unfortunately is thought of as something for little kids only.  

I think that many adults are part of a morning community that helps them prepare for the day, whether its an early morning yoga group, an agile team stand-up SCRUM , or even a shared family prayer.  These brief moments to remind others that they matter in our lifes and our work can provide a powerful socio-emotional boost to even the most independent of adults.  

There is still a lot of experimentation happening at the middle and high school levels to determine what this type of connective and grounding experience might look like.  Perhaps even something as simple as the morning announcements approximates the idea of a schoolwide pause to share a few moments as a whole community.  I know many schools have been experimenting with schoolwide mindfulness practices to start off the morning to help everyone make their transition into the learning for the day.  Certainly individual teachers at all grade levels incorporate a variety of activities that capture the connecting spirit of the morning meeting to launch the learning day or class period.  This concept was at the heart of our Círculos high school design in Santa Ana, which won a multi-million dollar school design grant.  Círculos means “circles” in Spanish, and the circle discussion brings students and teachers together daily and forms the foundational pedagogy of the school.  

Whatever the grade level, schools have to be places where each student feels welcome, celebrated, and included.  There must be a strong feeling of belonging. Morning meetings, and other deliberately connective activities and pedagogies like them, are a key ingredient of any school that professes to be student-centered.  After all, the foundation of student-centered learning is strong relationships and connective tissue between students, staff, parents, and the community alike.  Morning meetings are a powerful pedagogical tool to move us in the right direction.

Saturday morning I headed out for my weekly long run just after sunrise.  It was one of those mornings when the ground was wet from overnight rain.  There was a cool wind while the sky was overcast with low, gray clouds moving slowly but steadily across the horizon.  In other words, it was perfect weather for an early morning jog.  It’s somewhat common weather near our home in the eastern mountains of the Central Valley of Costa Rica.  I often head towards the main highway just a couple of kilometers from our house to run along the frontage road, one of the very few flat spots near our house (let’s just say I run a lot of hills).   This time, for some reason, I decided to cross the highway and run along the opposite-side frontage road.  In nearly a year living here, I’ve never run down the other frontage road.  I found myself noticing things I simply hadn’t paid any attention to on any of my more than 100 morning jogs along that same stretch of road.  It felt like an entirely new experience.  

As I brought new eyes to the same stretch of road, my thoughts turned to the previous day as I had found myself talking with our new Head of Technology.  He had asked me some interesting questions.  “How is the technology team perceived by the rest of the school?”  “How would you describe the team dynamic?”  “To what would you attribute the turnover of previous department leaders?”   I shared some of my thoughts about our current situation and context.  Then, as is often the case, I started talking about what the future might look like.  I started sharing ideas about how his skills and experiences could help us strengthen aspects of our operations and institutional culture.  At some point, I stopped future-casting, and grounded us with the immediate opportunities and challenges he would face.  He responded that he was eager to join the team and contribute, and ensured me there was plenty of time to dig into the work together.  “After all,” he said, “today is just my first day.  I like to approach every day like it’s my first.”  

That statement caught my attention.  Approach every day like it’s your first day.  For me, when you experience something for the first time you are opening up your senses to a broader set of inputs.  You are paying close attention and listening a lot.  Your first day often brings an extra dose of humility as you recognize that you don’t have all of the answers.  In fact, you’re still trying to figure out what the questions should be.  Your first day is filled with excitement and energy and a hope in what is possible.  Yes, there is a bit more nervousness as you establish new relationships and learn new systems.  But it’s an incredibly productive nervousness.  

Like my well-worn jogging route, our work lives can become so familiar that we limit our senses and intellect from new ideas and possibilities.  We can become overly reliant on our mental hueristics – the shortcuts our brains have developed to protect us from having to think about things too hard too often.  I’m a big fan of Daniel Kahneman’s work, and his conceptualization of the brain as thinking in two modes – fast and slow.  In summary, his Nobel Prize winning research in behavioral economics suggests that our brains create neural networks that allow us to automate and simplify a lot of thinking.  This type of fast of efficient thinking is, frankly put, easier and requires fewer resources (like time and energy).  

When you approach each day like a first day, you are deliberately interrupting effecient thinking and choosing to think more slowly.  What is the benefit of slow thinking?  Well, it’s creating new neural pathways and connections that you didn’t have before.  Put another way, slow thinking is learning.  I often find myself reminding others that while most adults say they like learning, if we’re completely honest it’s simply not true.  We like our thinking as efficient and quick as possible.  We don’t like being burdened with uncertainty or complexity so we dismiss new ideas and new learning out of hand, assuming we already know or have the right answer.  

I like the idea of treating every day like it is your first day.  It’s a reminder that sometimes you’ve got to take a different track down the familiar road, ask more questions, listen more and better, and assume that your perspective might be incomplete.  

I recently listened to an episode of the “Focused” podcast that talked in-depth about the idea of linking our thinking.  It was primarily a dicussion about recently developed apps that can help you build a sort of idea database that is organized by links amongst ideas as opposed to the traditional, top-down organization of folders and files.  It struck me as a sort of relational database.  At one point, the podcast hosts referred to such programs as a “second brain,” and when you think about the structure of a linked set of ideas and information, comparing it to a brain really is a good metaphor.  I particularly liked the part of the discussion that talked about the difference between taking notes, which is a process of collection with little expectation of outputs, and making notes, which assumes some additional thinking to integrate new knowledge into existing frameworks and understanding in a way that will manifest itself in action.  

Yes, this is a nerdy topic, but I love this question about what we should do with all of the information and knowledge we are acquiring.  Last week I wrote about the importance of reading and exposing ourselves to new ideas and concepts.  But the idea of Personal Knowledge Management takes the next step to ask what we are supposed to do with all of that learning.  

I don’t have all of the answers on the topic, but there are definitely a few tools or practices that I use or have used in the past that help me to make meaning of and digest all of the inputs and ideas that come my direction.  Perhaps the most important tool of all is writing.  The foundation of my writing practice has been a weekly reflective and narrative journal entry.  I now have over 20 years of weekly entries, exploring new thoughts and experiences, analyzing challenges and opportunities, and capturing the day to day and week to week experiences that constitute my life.  It’s a place where I can process my spiritual and intellectual identity, and try to make sense out of what is happening.  Another conduit for making meaning has been my blog.  I started the @schoolmadefresh blog when I took my new job with Santa Ana Unified back in 2015, trying to capture some of the big ideas associated with my role as the Executive Director of School Renewal and then as an Assistant Superintendent.  In the past 2 years, I’ve been even more committed to a weekly blog post, as a strategy to process my thinking and sharing it with a wider audience.  I wish I had time to blog and share even more, but I’m not sure I could sustain more than I am doing now.  At least not while in the midst of raising 6 kids and leading educational institutions full time.  For over a year now, I have also gotten in the habit of doing very brief daily jottings.  This is literally 4-5 sentences in my bullet journal that summarizes what is on my mind.  This came about after a weekend getaway with my wife for her birthday, when I came across a young man in the hotel lobby who seemed something of a modern version of Ernest Hemingway.  He had settled in with his breakfast and a notebook, which was full of jottings.  He was fully consumed in his writing, and it was clear to me that this was a regular practice for him.  Perhaps it was the romantic in me that envisioned myself jotting away in my notebook in hotel lobbies or restaurants around the world, but I decided to add long form writing to my own bullet journal (instead of just using it to keep my daily bullet list or habit trackers).  

In addition to these more structured journaling practices, I am a somewhat obsessive notetaker.  I try to capture the main ideas in what I am reading in my bullet journal, and in the case of academic articles, I have a somewhat complicated grid in Excel that I use to capture main ideas, conceptual frameworks, methodologies, conclusions, and strengths and weaknesses of each article.  When it comes to books I read, most of my notes come in the form of annotations in the book itself.  This is the area of my thinking where I am interested in exploring a more deliberate practice to link ideas.  I’m hoping to learn a little more about the application packages designed to facilitate this type of organization: Roam Research, Obsidian, and Craft.  I’m also interested in leveling up my very basic graphic design skills with the hopes of capturing my learning in more visually conceptualized ways.  It should be a fun experiment.

One of the pieces of advice in the Focused podcast episode was the recommendation to start with a specific use case.  Instead of dumping all of my notes into the app and seeing what happens, the idea would be to more carefully curate what I add based on a specific need.  I’ve thought it would interesting to take my Excel documents with academic articles, along with the contents of my Mendeley database, and try to process those into a linked thinking database.  I also do a lot of personal writing and reflection on spiritual topics, and can envision organizing those into a linked note system.  

In any case, I’m excited about the possibilities to develop a system that better captures the thinking that I’m already doing by linking ideas in more organic ways and then seeing what develops in terms of fresh understandings and new frameworks for organizing my intellectual life.  

On my desk at work, I keep one of my most prized possessions.  I call it my “School Leadership Processing Journal.”  It is a notebook that I kept during my year as a master’s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  I’m not really sure how I managed it at the time (my wife reminds me that I stayed up until after midnight every night reading and taking notes for the entire year), but every day after classes I would try to synthesize my learning and digital shorthand into a hand-written notebook.  Looking back now, I realize that it was really the start of what would eventually become a consistent practice of bullet journaling.  Those who have worked with me at some point in the past 5 years know that my notebook and set of markers are never far from hand.  

But this blog post isn’t about journaling (which is certainly one of my consistent rituals), but rather, it’s about the role of reading in my professional and personal journey.  I was reminded today when I was thumbing through my School Leadership Processing Journal, that one of the common entries was a page I would simply call “readings” that included a brief summary of 4 or 5 of the articles or books that I had read.  This was a regular addition in the journal, with “readings” pages showing up every few weeks.  Perhaps more than anything else, what defined my experience as a master’s degree student, and then later when working on my doctorate, was the volume of reading that I was doing.  As a doctorate student working on an Ed.D in Leadership for Educational Equity, I switched to a more digital platform, largely because I had to draw on my references database to do a considerable amount of writing, including and especially my dissertation.  So the readings pages migrated to an Excel spreadsheet and Mendeley database.  

While it will likely come as no surprise that I love school, I’ve come to realize that what I probably love most about school is reading (and the subsequent discussions about what we are reading).  Yes, graduate school was a challenge, but I also tend to miss it, precisely because of the heightened expectations for reading and processing new ideas.  It’s like having a personal trainer for your mind.  

I’ve written previously about how the arrival of a new Superintendent to Santa Ana USD back in January 2020 jump started me on reading again.  I had slowed down to probably no more than a dozen books a year, and then our Superintendent Jerry Almendarez started talking about books – all the time.  I think he might be secretly employed by Corwin Press.  So, I started taking his recommendations and reading more.  Then the pandemic hit.  While the initial adjustments were tough, working from home and the dramatic decrease in other outside obligations (soccer practices ended, church ministry visits came to a temporary halt, etc.) gave me more time to read.  I read 52 books in 2020.  A book a week.  It was something I had wanted to do for the past decade but had never accomplished.  

Now, I’m not pushing for quite that level of reading this year, but I have been enjoying integrating reading more deliberately into my daily routines, both at work and at home.  It’s not graduate school, but it is enough to keep me engaged with new ideas and concepts.  I try to get 15-20 minutes in during lunch at work, and my evening routine almost always includes 30 minutes of reading.  For work, I’ve taken to reading academic articles on educational leadership and instructional pedagogy and even logging in summaries in my excel spreadsheet.  I find myself thinking and talking about the concepts I am learning (or being reminded about) on a much more regular basis with my leadership team.  At home, reading is almost exclusively for curiousity and pleasure.  

Perhaps I’m too much in my head.  That’s a fair critique.  But I can’t help thinking that pushing myself to keep reading and learning, engaging new ideas and challenging old ones, is a healthy way to live and lead.