My dad was the oldest of 7.  The Allen family long held the tradition of rotating through Nana & Grandad’s house on Christmas morning for the annual Allen breakfast.  This annual rite of artery stuffing included grandkids bringing their prized toy from Santa to share and show off with cousins, aunts, and uncles.  About 10 years ago, one of the cousins brought a brand new skate board.  My dad decided he wanted to give it a go.  He jumped on, pushed off with one foot, and immediately crashed straight over backward, hitting his head hard on the pavement.  I was genuinely worried he had seriously hurt himself.  We rushed over as he quickly jumped up and insisted he was fine, perhaps more embarrassed than injured.  Needless to say, I never saw him on a skateboard again.  

In his youth, my dad had served in the United State Navy, and for a time was trained as a search and rescue diver.  He reminded his kids that jumping out of helicopters into the boisterous ocean was just part of the job.  No big deal.

I thought about these two extremes of physicality in my dad’s life while listening to a podcast last week about how we have to deliberately fight to keep our mobility, strength, and confidence as we age.  The podcast guest, Vic Verdier, was a former French commando who held records for mixed gas deep water diving, and who insisted that we have to be deliberate in our efforts to keep our bodies primed for explosive movement, flexibility, and endurance.  He warned listeners about the negative consequences of letting ourselves go.  As he described different techniques and strategies for keeping our edge, he mentioned several times that it would require us to do things that people around us might find silly.  Climbing trees.  Crawling across the ground.  Squatting in front of our computers at work.  

Obviously, Vic’s recommendations were focused on maintaining our physical vitality and stamina.  Those are important elements of staying healthy in the face of leadership challenges.  But I couldn’t help think that there are also direct correlaries to our knowledge work as professionals.  Indeed, Stephen Covey’s famous 7 Habits of Highly Successful People suggests that “sharpening the saw” is one of the seven essential traits of leadership.  By sharpening the saw, he encouraged us to pursue constant renewal, in physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual endeavors.  Sometimes, when we get busy, we start to take those elements for granted.  We get comfortable and stop pushing ourselves to learn new things, challenge our thinking, or develop our spirituality.  We assume those things can either wait until later, or perhaps are no longer priorities that require our effort or attention.  When the moment of challenge or adversity comes when we need to draw on our strength, whether it be physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual, we may find that it has faded and we can’t quite seem to power through.  

So, today, I found myself squatting in the garden, or getting up from the floor where I had sat down to do some writing.  Simple things to try to maintain my physical mobility and strength.  Similarly, I’m trying to push my inner development, making sure to always have a good book near my bed, to stay engaged in my spiritual life, or to write in my journal to explore my ever-changing emotional outlook on life.   Keeping our edge is about making time for the little things, no matter how silly we may feel.  

What goes unused slowly fades, whether it be physical strength, emotional connection, or even intellect and memory.  Of course aging is a universal process that nobody can completely escape in the end.  It seems that eventually we will all face a gradual decline in strength and ability.  But, why not fight it as long as you can?  

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.  

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.  

Around the world, schools are all over the place in terms of their modality for learning.  Back in Santa Ana Unified in Southern California, my previous employer and home, schools are largely still in virtual learning mode, with selected campuses open for “learning labs” to serve some of the most impacted students, whether due to lack of connectivity at home or due to the need for in-person special services.  In Arizona, where much of my family lives and my mom and sister work as teachers, most schools are fully back in motion.  100% of students can be on campus.  Each week I attend a regional coordination call with Heads of School from around Central and South America.  The vast majority of the international schools operating in these countries are still in 100% virtual mode.  Here in Costa Rica, we are about a month in to a hybrid plan.  At Lincoln, students are organized into cohorts that rotate one week on, one week off campus, with about 20% of our students remaining virtual full time.  Questions of school openings and the structure for return are certainly a hot topic for political debate around the world.  In places where schools are open, there is pressure to close in the face of fresh waves of COVID.  In places where schools are closed, there is tremendous pressure to get kids back into classrooms.

Perhaps the most intense aspect of our return to campus, in addition to the tremendous amount of planning, preparation, and communication that is required, has been the ongoing attention to managing student health and safety.  Specifically, attending to potential cases, weighing prevention and protocol, and communicating with families, have all been daily, if not hourly, tasks.  We’re a month in to our hybrid return, and our detailed attention to protocol has been paying off.  We haven’t had any known cases of transmission on campus, and for those few situations where we’ve become aware of a potential case due to proximity in the home, or even a child having flu-like symptoms, we’ve been lucky with all negative test results.   Of course the low and trending lower rates of COVID in Costa Rica in general have been a huge help.  

Whenever there is a report of a potential case, either of a student on campus or at home, we convene the  COVID leadership team that brings together members of the administrative team, occupational health, and our school doctor.  I hadn’t completely anticipated how much work this COVID team would be called upon to handle while we navigate hybrid learning.  Every teacher absence or student in the nurse’s office requires a heightened amount of attention.  Every potential case requires an in-depth analysis, interviews to determine anyone who may have been exposed, and plans for communication so staff and families are informed whenever a positive case has been reported.  It’s a detail driven process.  

One of the most challenging aspects of analyzing any given situation is the weighing of prevention versus our written protocols.  In other words, the absolutely safest option is to be 100% virtual.  When you open the school, even with convincing data and research around the world that K-12 schools generally pose lower risks of COVID spread than many other operations, you introduce risk.  When a family decides to send their child to school – and we do provide our families the option to stay at home completely – they are likewise assuming some risk.  When we have a student with symptoms, obviously we send the student home (or have them stay home if not at school).   Students with symptoms either quarantine or can return with a negative test and no symptoms.  But, and here is where it is challenging, we do not quarantine everyone in the child’s class until we have a confirmed case, and even then if students never broke mask and distancing protocols, families can choose to keep their children in school.  We could, for prevention sake, send everyone home to quarantine every time a student has any symptoms.  Yet that is not what the protocol dictates nor does it take into consideration the critical fact that our students are also wearing masks, social distancing, etc.  So we work through each situation and scenario carefully, making sure to do the detailed work of contact tracing while not overreacting.  Our greatest safety has been in a highly disciplined commitment to safety protocols by wearing masks and enforcing social distancing.  

In terms of the design of our hybrid system, there are a few features that have really helped us.  First, the week-on/week-off schedule has built an automatic quarantine into our program.  When students leave us on Thursday afternoon, they don’t return until Monday 10 days later.  We’ve had a couple of potential cases where this has helped us tremendously, as students were essentially put into quarantine before we could confirm a positive case.  Second, we have been doing virtual Fridays.  Originally, our rationale was to separate the cohorts and have a space for extra cleaning.  In practice, virtual Fridays has been even more helpful as a strategy for supporting teachers with a day where they are not simulcasting instruction, and have a planning block to be able to prepare for the coming week of both in-person and virtual learning.  Our board of directors has been very concerned about how we are supporting our staff during hybrid learning, and virtual Fridays I think go a long way to help classroom teachers manage the demands of daily teaching.  Third and finally, we adopted a shortened day schedule.  Students are on campus until 12:15 and then head home for virtual closing meetings and afternoon tutoring sessions.  This is partially a reflection of the nationwide protocol in public schools in Costa Rica to limit hybrid instruction to 4 hours daily.  Private schools have more flexibility, and indeed, our school day is slightly longer.  But it has helped to break up the day.  We allow our teachers to go home if they desire for the pm virtual sessions, that way if they have kids of their own at home they can be there too.  We also made the strategic decision to hire additional full-time substitutes who we have trained in both virtual and in-person settings.  Of course we had to weigh potential costs against the projected need for substitutes, but having a handful of trained staff to step in as needed has been a huge help when we have faced last-minute absences.  We also benefit greatly from having full time assistants in all of our Pre-K through 2^nd grade classrooms.  Schools have rightly pointed out that operating schools in hybrid fashion can cost even more than under typical circumstances, and building some flexibility into the number of staff on hand for in-person learning certainly has required additional investments.   

Of course we are still learning and making adjustments.  Hybrid learning has challenged us to find balance between the learning needs of students, the operational challenges of the school, the sustainability of staff, and the expectations of our parents and community.  It’s an ongoing process that requires tremendous commitment from staff and a lot of communication and dialogue with families and other key stakeholders.