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 in this work at North Seattle College have taken this into their practice and, as far as I understand, agree 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.
Reflective Research
This approach to trusting the people who do the work to pursue even better work is not based on the scientific method of the social sciences nor discovered in what is published, including this site. It is reflection upon living relationships in an ethic of care.
David Kolb offered this schematic of 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.
No one other than the educators themselves can determine what events mean, draw tentative conclusions that find agreement, and invent what to do. No Artificial Intelligence or book can plan what can be done nor implement it. Only the people who have the relationships with the children, have the history of past agreements, and have the opportunity implement intentions and document the results.
Reflection and learning improves practice in events of daily life, where change matters to people and the agents of change build it themselves. Why isn’t education built this way? Excellence emerges through reflection and learning from the wisdom of the group, which gets better and more sophisticated over time. It’s growing.
shared views of reality
For example, we have a stack of blocks and an image presenting academic research in education—abstract 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.
Higher education has stayed disconnected from the practice of education in schools for children for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. The children and their teachers lose their spark, and the world suffers as a result.
It Works
On this site I share what I have learned over years of continuous action research with children and adult educators. I have the agreement of others who co-constructed these ways of being that these ideas work for learners, educators, and children.
That something ‘works’ means (1) what the children do is congruent with my values, and (2) I am aware that I am authentically present in the moment finding the community of learners enthusiastic, participatory, and thriving.
That something ‘works’ comes with constant reminders that we can get better. The provision of educational spaces is a journey towards an aesthetic, through research and uncertainty, moving towards a never-obtained ideal.
We are “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
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