I talk a lot about magic.  That’s what happens when your dad was a magician, and one of his favorite sayings was to remind me that “everyone has a magic show.”  Dad was a strictly strengths-based kind of person.  He usually looked past any potential weaknesses or flaws, choosing to see the best version of the people he worked with.  I talk about him a lot, including at work.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when our Human Resources department took up the magic theme to inspire our staff back to school launch.

Traditionally at Lincoln, we welcome our entire staff back with a breakfast and a morning of team building.  In 2020, in the midst of a job transition and completely virtual school, our welcome back was a series of introductions via a call on Microsoft Teams.  In 2021, my first year to welcome staff in-person, we added back the breakfast and my vision presentation, which I always refer to as the leadership summit.  It is designed to remind staff about our strategic priorities and build a shared vision around improvement for the coming year.  The whole experience lasted less than a full morning, but it was a fun way to kick off the year and remind everyone about the importance of our shared work.  

This year, we were able to put the entire experience back together for our team.  Our team building took the form of a full out magic show, integrated with insights into the power of team work.  At one point, I even had to put on the magicians cape and go on stage to help with one of the acts.  For a magician’s son, I’m quite pathetic at magic.  I have always loved watching magicians, including my dad, but I simply never had much interest in pursuing it myself.  Our magician to launch the school year, who was quite good, was in complete agreement that I had little to offer in the way of stage magic.  But it was still a lot of fun.  My dad always closed his show with the Chinese Linking Rings, so perhaps it was apropos that I was invited onstage to demonstrate my magic abilities with a rif on a metal ring trick.  

The event itself was an example of the very thing we were encouraging – “the magic of team work.”  My management practice is one that seeks to give authority and autonomy to my department leaders so that they can carry the vision and the work forward within their sphere of responsibility and influence.  That’s precisely what our human resources team was demonstrating, designing a morning full of good food, smiles, laughs, introspection, and reflection on the importance of the work we do as a team every day.   

Last month I had the privilege of watching two of our Lincoln staff members present their work at the annual Tri-Association conference in Panama City.  The session was focused on how to develop independent writing in our youngest learners.  Specifically, participants were given an inside look at how one of our first grade teachers, with the support of an early learning coach, was able to support students in elevating their writing and literacy skills.  It was an incredible learning session, and I wanted to share some of my reflections and takeaways.  

The pair explained how many of our favorite fairy tales and childhood stories have countless creative versions all riffing on the same foundational story.  Whether it is The Three Little Pigs, or the Gingerbread Man, it seems that children’s literature authors love to think of new and creative ways to present old favorites.  Why not have students similarly get creative about these familiar stories?  Basically, students built up to publishing their own children’s stories, moving from the short 3-4 sentence writing tasks that are common in many classrooms to writing an entire book with a full story arc.  I had three big takeaways from the session.  

High Expectations 

Our classroom teacher mentioned on several occasions that she just wasn’t sure if students could produce the quality and volume of writing that would be required to produce a full book.  With faith in her students’ capacity and with the encouragement of our early learning coach, she jumped in anyway, and was repeatedly impressed but how much her students were both able and eager to produce.  She realized that sometimes as teachers we might artificially lower our expectations, out of a genuine concern that we will push students too hard.  The flip side of that concern is a committment to ensuring that students are supported to their full potential, even when that sometimes requires that they move through uncertainty and even some productive discomfort.   

Endless Variety

On several occasions, our teacher said, “if students can say it, they can write it.”  Funny enough, students can say a lot, and thus they can produce a lot of writing.  The creative part of the process is in designing lots of different, engaging learning activities to help students with that literacy production.  This was really the heart of the session, and the fun part two.  There were pages of different ideas, and we had the chance to practice several of them.  My favorite was the “retelling bracelet.”  Basically, we used beads of different colors and shapes to represent the key elements of the Three Little Pigs, with the end product being a bracelet that we could use to help us retell our story.  It was brilliant!    

The Power of Coaching

My final takeaway was really just a reminder that when the coach/teacher relationship is really working, magical things can happen.  Of course perhaps the most challenging part of coaching is navigating those relationships with teachers; there is never a guarantee that a genuine professional working relationship will develop.  But when it does it makes a huge difference.  It was really powerful to see our teacher and coach working as a team in their presentation, sharing both of their perspectives about what it takes to create a learning environment that promotes both joy and rigor for all students.  It also reminded me of the importance of mindset – here we had a teacher whose willingness to consider alternate methods and try new things led to some really powerful learning.  And this, mind you, from a very experienced and talented teacher.  

There’s sometimes a lot of hand-wringing amongst ed reformers about the connection between the traditional school year and the agrarian cycle.  The idea is that our Labor Day to Memorial Day school calendar is the remnant of food production cycles, when children and young people were needed during the later summer months to contribute on the family farm.  While that may be the genesis of the school calendar, it hardly seems like its much of a driving force these days.  Just because it started that way, doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve kept it simply out of custom or convenience.

There is, of course, some legitimate concern with what is known as the “summer slide.”  Under conditions of limited resources, it makes sense to look at low cost interventions that might have an outsize positive impact on learning outcomes.  The logic goes that you could simply do some shifting of the calendar with the same number of work days and carve away at the long summer break that is responsible for learning loss.  Many schools and districts have done precisely that, building in a fall break and a longer winter recess to cut back the number of weeks of summer.  Personally, I love our 5 week winter recess at my current school, and that leaves just a 7 week summer break.  

Moving to a shorter summer also allows for the extension of the school year.  This is a more robust intervention, albeit an incredibly pricey one.  Adding 20 days to the school calendar would logically add at least 10% of the entire annual budget.  In one of my former districts where we negotiated an additional two days to the annual calendar, teachers received a 6% salary increase and hourly employees had their daily rate extended.  It was a very pricey intervention. From the moment the agreement was signed, moving from a 180 to a 182 school day calendar, everybody seemed to talk about going back to 180 days.  Unsurprisinginly, teachers weren’t terribly excited about it.  The community seemed a bit indifferent about the whole thing, as families still had to scramble for summer school programs, if they wanted to participate at all, which many of them opted not to.  Eventually, when state budgets got tight (which they always do in the somewhat predictable cycle of school funding), those two days were first turned back into teacher professional development days and then cut out of the calendar altogether.   It was a relatively short-lived experiment.  

It seems that the idea of a summer break away from school has embedded itself into how we think about schooling and childhood.  While it is certainly true that for many families living in poverty, summer might not be a mythical place of family vacations and long lazy afternoons by a pool, it may also be true that families across the socioeconomic spectrum see some value in having a longer break from formal schooling.  Most working adults can tell you that the constancy of the work calendar year after year leaves little space for ideas of transformation and new beginnings.  Life can seem at times to just melt together when you remove the milestones and benchmarks of more periodic cycles.  

I can’t help but wonder if there is some wisdom in the broader cycles of nature that led to the agrarian school calendar in the first place.  The school year gives a clear sense of beginnings and endings that punctuate our childhoods.  There is a real sense of anticipation for the school year, with a chance for reinventing ourselves, starting with a fresh slate, and taking on new independence and responsibility as we move from grade to grade.  Sometimes the cynics in us point to purely mechanistic reasons for the way we structure schools into grades and semesters.  “We’re training you for the industrial complex,” goes the saying.  I tend to see it more as a progressive, upward developmental cycle as our skills build.  In a world that is increasingly individualistic, the common rites of passage of school are some of the few collective experiences we have left.  In our rush to maximize and optimize learning, we might be breaking down the very things that hold us together.  

Yes, perhaps I too get a little too enthusiastic about matters of school calendars.  I can’t help but get excited at the launch of the school year.  It is a time of new possibilities to be sure.  I remember the transition from elementary to junior high, when it seems most of the young women got the message simultaneously to cut their hair short and go for a new look along with starting at a new school.  I took advantage of the transition to high school to shed my thick pair of eyeglasses and go for contact lenses, hoping that I would come back a somewhat reinvented version of myself.  In some ways, it felt like it worked.  I hope we don’t try to amalgamate schools into individualized pathways with no space for collective rites of passage.  Nostalgia aside, I still love that feeling of anticipation and possibility on the eve of a new school year.