Whatever it Takes

Dear Patrick Faverty,

1. Ed Valentine is long overdue for this program, he should be a part of year 1.
2. The book he assigned: "Whatever it Takes..." is by far the most practical, useful book we have read in this program.  It should be assigned day one, year one. 
3. Everything you've been teaching is explained with real examples in this book, I have the feeling there is a lack of collaboration going on with our teachers :)

Dear anyone else reading,
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Last week I was rambling about the need for new goals in schools.  This week I have been so sick I can barely move, when I felt a little bettter my wife took me to urgent care and after an hour of having fluids pumped into my arm the delightful doctor prescribed me some meds that made me 10x worse.  Today I've decided that I'd rather be sick than on those meds and I'm recovering slowly.  I've just finished reading the outstanding book: Whatever it Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn and feel more hopeful and inspired about changing schools than I have EVER felt before.  This rollercoaster of psycho-social-physical conglomeration has led me to perhaps the most important thought of my professional career: best practices are only a starting point and goals don't mean much without a plan for how to achieve them.

I think the difference between a dreamer and a hopeful person is the plan, hopeful people develop strategies and dreamers write songs.

There are a million articles in the world that say "this is the best way to do that", and each of them is outdated the minute it goes public.  Practitioners like me cite them in proposals, goal statements, and even arrange priorities to meet their conditions.  People who question what we do demand them and in extreme cases we follow them to the grave with the "because the research said so" mentality.  All the while devoting the least amount of effort towards understanding the questions they are trying to answer.  The questions are what matter, not the findings of what one group of people found to work.  The questions keep the world going and the interventions changing. What works for someone else could totally bomb for me.  Even our heralded meta-analyses are merely for the literature review sections, not for the experiment.
This book is perhaps the closest thing to my philosophies (on education) I have ever found.   Each chapter is almost exactly what I wish I could say about a school.  It makes me so excited to be in a position of leadership that I almost want to get into k-12.  I can see my cohort friends cringing at the thought of it, but I would honestly make every teacher and admin in the school read this book as a starting point.  I would institute internships, motivations, and "flourishing" variables as measures of success.  For sake of repeating the book, I'll just say it's a must read if you are interested in being in education at all!
However, as I embark on a new journey to apply these principles and real examples to my classes and organization a quandary does arise about the goals of higher education.  Are we merely providing the opportunity to learn?  Are we guaranteeing all will learn?  Do we have things in place to meet either of these goals?  This whole book made me question the goals of higher education.  What are we trying to teach our students?  How will we know if they learned?  What will we do if they don't?  Are these even appropriate questions for a system that serves less than 1% of the world's population?  It doesn't make much sense to have everyone striving to be a part of the 1% we'd all agree, but what then?  Maybe I love higher ed so much because I think we are trying to teach our students about different areas of study, so they can choose which matches their intrinsic motivations to become leaders in it?  Maybe I love higher ed so much because we know when they learn because they apply it to their lives?  Maybe I love higher ed so much because I'm a preventionist and interventionist trying to get to them before they're struggling?  Or maybe I love it because these students are just high-achievers all put into one place, all the type to take initiative, and because we're not worried if they don't learn because there's plenty of resources for help?  Maybe the accountability movement is coming to a place that has never been worried about everyone learning because we only see those who have shown they can play the game?