tdrummon@me.com
2651 NW 95th Street
Seattle
It is my belief that caring educators of the world, if given chance and opportunity, will naturally work together toward a more evolved perspective of reflective, collaborative educational leadership, in commonly-funded schools, where participants are enabled to construct spaces, open risky dialogue, and be present in a reciprocal relationship with others.
After I retired after 36 years teaching preschool children, educating their teachers, and stimulating discussions of pedagogy among other college teachers, I decided to take resources I developed and pop them online for free.
Since I have been a trusted public employee all my life, my work ought to be in the public domain for others to use, plagiarize, and to build upon. I’ve got WordPress, so why not have it all up?
While at North Seattle College I examined the essentials of learning and teaching with videotape and audio recording to inquire into the events of leadership in a classroom of three to five-year-olds, which always included children referred for learning or behavior concerns. I have always been interested in learning to create opportunities for adults to discover themselves becoming effective educators, to do what I can to improve general professional practice, and to bring democracy to every child and every classroom community.
Living Research
From the beginning I’ve used whatever technology I had available to examine life in the school in order to evolve better opportunities for young children. Even in 1970 I could capture events in black and white with floor cameras and cut-and-splice 1″ tape at the University of Washington. In the twenty years I was leading the laboratory preschool at North Seattle College I used remotely operated closed circuit VHS cameras with ceiling microphones to record my own interactions with children and to capture key moments in the day for our teaching team to examine. Watching Tom on screen was pretty uncomfortable at first; I could empathize with the students when they watched themselves, too.
However stressful those video recordings were, they provided rich, genuine, nuanced information, which we replayed to discover what we missed the first time. Students and instructor were learning at the same time. We forged trust and evolved a team.
Recordings were the centerpiece of daily and weekly meetings, where we contributed our personal perspectives and constructed agreements and cooperative intent—day after day, studying our lived life at the school. After years of discussions and trying improvements, we began to see children better and honor everyone’s strengths. We expected to enjoy being on a quest without a clear destination.
Collaboratively Constructed Evidence
My students and I grew this together, gradually, from the meaning we co-constructed out of our daily experience with hundreds of (often challenging) children, hours of counts using unique observational tools, and multiple videotape replays. I could not have invented any of this alone. What is here has been tested, tweaked, and lived-with long enough to gather what happens to children over time. We have to see children grow in their own fullness in a group of other children doing the same thing.
The participants who did this work at North Seattle College have taken this into their practice and, as far as I understand, agree that what they try in their own way improves the lives of young children. They like who they have become, are respected by adults and children. They live with more laughter and joy.
Reflection Driven
Fundamentally, this approach trusts that the people who do the work and find the work rewarding will want to keep pursuing even better work, and can continue that work if society invests in it. It flows when conditions are provided for that purpose.
The impetus is care for our children. The aspiration is toward health and well-being, not research, academic knowledge or theory. Even when wise words are written, they don’t seem to alter traditional practice. People need to make the choices based upon who they are and guided by what they discover with others.
For example, here is a bit of knowledge we have known for a long time which has been structurally ignored.
David Kolb offered the Reflection and Learning schematic in 1984, which you can see below. It shows a flow of study that begins with the doing; it does not begin by reading or listening to an expert. A reflection examines the documentation from the doing, the experience we care about. Sure, it takes time—paid time—and resources, such as video and TV screens—to support educators to spend together, building trust and comfort in dialogue with others reviewing the experiences they choose to care about in shared uncertainty learning to listen to others.
The takeaway is that the educators themselves can best determine what living events mean, draw tentative conclusions derived from shared meaning, find agreement, and invent what to do. We can depend upon the people who have the relationships with the children, have the history of past agreements with each other, have the opportunity to be supported in playing around with those intentions, and have documentation in order to reflect upon the reality of they see.
Reflection improves practice in events of daily life, where change deeply matters and excellence emerges through reflection, and where learning is co-constructed from the wisdom of the group. Schools get better and more sophisticated over time. Schools grow. Education is experience.
Attending to Our Reality
I compare two images below: a stack of blocks and an image I chose to represent academic knowledge of education—words. When something is wrong with the stacking, the builders see it as they do the stacking. If the tower wobbles, they can examine that reality together, find agreements, and take action. If the journal articles are mistaken or even correct, life is unchanged.
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the academic study of education has largely maintained a distance from the practice of education in schools. The children and their teachers do what they are told and the world suffers. We can fix this when we know we can. We can find what works and get things in balance.
When It Works
We can say something works or is right or is satisfactory when two things are present at the same time.
(1) I see the children acting in ways that I value with my values clearly defined, and
(2) I am aware that I am authentically present in the moment finding the community of learners enthusiastic, participatory, and thriving.
Choosing to be guided by ‘what works‘ comes with constant search for getting better and never ‘arriving.’ The provision of educational spaces is a journey towards an aesthetic, through research and uncertainty, moving towards a never-obtained ideal.
On the way to becoming
That is how Mortimer Adler described the goal of teacher education in The Paideia Proposal: an educational manifesto.
That being so, what is the goal to be aimed at, one that is practical rather than utopian? It is that teachers should be on the way to becoming educated persons. What signs indicate their tending in this direction? One is that they manifest competence as learners. Another is that they show a sufficiently strong interest in their own education and a sufficiently strong motivation to carry on learning while engaged in teaching. (p. 58-59)
Please feel free to send me email: tdrummon@me.com
Email to me
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.